The full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 4 March 2021.
Commercial law firms face constant pressure from clients to do more for less.
They can respond in three ways: say it can’t be done and risk losing out to competitors, drop their prices, or make a step change to improve productivity.
Most are pursuing option 3 and are looking to legal operations to make it happen.

What are legal operations?
Legal operations usually include some or all of these disciplines:
- Business Management – commercial managers focused on improving profitability, increasing revenues and optimising efficiency.
- Service Design – workflow and client experience specialists that evaluate, accelerate and support legal process improvement projects. They also often assist with new product development and act as incubators for new business ideas.
- Legal Project Management – project professionals that make legal work tractable, trackable and transparent, for both lawyers and clients.
- Pricing – pricing experts that help partners to have better client conversations, align price with value, protect margins, and where appropriate, use alternative fee arrangements.
- Alternative Legal Services – a team of paralegals, legal technologist and lawyers focused on high-volume process work including e-discovery, transactional and dispute support, language editing, document review and IP management.
Australian experience
In Australia, some very large national firms have embraced a centralised approach to legal operations. Others have adopted a more decentralised model with each major practice group acquiring the resources specific to their needs.
Over time, I would expect most firms will move to a model of centralised governance to avoid duplication and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and applications. At the same time, operational specialists need to work right at the coalface to find smarter ways to deliver more for less.
Innovation roles will be also subsumed into legal operations. Legal secretaries and assistants will still work directly with local lawyers but will be more connected with and directed by legal operations.
In medium-sized and smaller law firms, a new business service function will likely emerge with the status of HR, marketing and finance. It will often start with outsourcing basic IT services – hardware, software and helpdesk – and the insourcing of specialist tech-savvy resources to help lift productivity and client connection in key practice areas. Once this is established, other roles involved in supporting legal service delivery will enter the legal operations orbit.
New career pathways
This emerging area of legal operations is also creating an alternative – and attractive – career path for lawyers.
They benefit from a deep knowledge of the intrinsic needs within a legal workflow, but also enjoy the respect of the various stakeholders involved in migrating to a new way of working.
MinterEllison offers new lawyers the option of entering its Legal Operations Graduate Program. The program gives candidates exposure to lean six sigma, design thinking, change management and agile methodologies. The firm recently graduated its first cohort and is reported to be delighted with the outcomes so far.
The growth of legal operations is not just confined to law firms.
Stuart Fuller, the global head of KPMG Legal Services, recently predicted that “half of the [in-house] legal team will not be lawyers by 2025”.
Fuller says the use of automated solutions, chatbots and other forms of productised legal services will rise, and these will need support from lawyers as well as a more multidisciplinary workforce with different skill sets. As a result, the proportion of legal work done by paralegals, data analysts, operational experts and other specialists might rise to the point where legal professionals become a minority.
The key message is that the path to improved productivity is not pressuring lawyers to bill more time, but rather working smarter with the evolving disciplines of legal operations.
change management, culture, growth, Legal Leadership, professional service firms, strategy management
Law firms have a big problem, and the answer is inside their offices
In Articles, Commentary on 15 March 2022 at 12:14 pmThe full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 10 March 2022. The article was the #1 most viewed piece in the Companies Section of afr.com on the day of publication.
Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, famously stated that “an organisation is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value”.
“Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game,” he said. “It is the game.”
So, it is with law firms.
Despite many thriving during the pandemic, there is a deep concern that connections people have with the firm and with each other are getting weaker, not stronger.
As one managing partner put it to me recently, “I worry that the logo on our lawyers’ screens becomes the only real difference between working for us and for another firm.”
There are three main reasons underpinning these perceived threats to firm culture:
No quick fix
Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy fix.
Most firms are looking to enhance the work experience of each employee, with the strategies that include:
All these efforts are commendable, but they can inadvertently exacerbate the cultural atrophy problem.
Sub-cultures
In building stronger vertical relationships within practice teams, there is an increased risk of distance and disconnection with other teams. This could lead to less of a one-firm mindset and the emergence of stronger sub-cultures.
Firms need to work both vertically and horizontally to preserve their culture. The latter means amplifying the role, status and skills of “lateral leaders” who work across the firm connecting people from different practices to address a specific opportunity.
These roles typically include client relationship partners, sector leaders, major matter leads, business service heads and strategic pursuit leads.
Lateral leaders
Effective lateral leadership is largely about facilitating deep cross-practice collaboration. From a culture perspective it enhances understanding, widens networks and creates a stronger identity with the firm and its strategy.
If firms are serious about reducing attrition and preserving culture, they need to create the capacity for partners to be more effective in their leadership roles. It takes time to be a mentor, to supervise and to influence without authority.
Otherwise, the only option is to increase the logo size on the screen and hope for the best.
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