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.
#strategy, career planning, Leadership capacity, professional service firms
Hey partner, do you know where you sit on the career curve?
In Articles, Commentary on 28 June 2021 at 7:59 pmThe full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 10 June 2021.
In nature, a seed is planted, begins to sprout, matures, becomes an adult, and then eventually regenerates. While not as unequivocal as the laws of nature, the careers of partners in premium law firms generally go through five distinct phases.
Proactive conversations about a partner’s desired career curve – shape, angle, timing and gaps of the phases – can be of significant benefit to the individual and the firm.
The shape of the arc
The duration of each phase varies significantly from person to person. It is not simply an average 30-year partner tenure divided by five equal phases.
Many partners would have a career that follows a classic “S” curve, with ordered progression through the five phases. There may be a few “J” curves or hockey-sticks that reflect a flat or declining phase one followed by continued rapid growth.
There are partners who have a career arc that looks like a series of angled “Ws”, going from boom to bust to boom, reflecting an innate ability to reinvent themselves.
In more recent times, there are career arcs that have missing chunks as people take extended time out for other commitments.
The early days
In the past, it was common for phase one and two partners to be left alone to sink or swim. It was assumed that, on promotion, the individual became all-knowing and capable.
But many progressive firms now offer tailored training and coaching support to build resilience and keep them on a positive trajectory. Most firms also recognise that these early days often coincide with major changes in partners’ personal lives, like starting a family and taking on more debt. Work-life integration at these early stages is beset with competing demands.
A missed opportunity
A firm filled with phase three “haymakers” sounds wonderful, but recent Harvard research indicates that there is much more to gain if they instead develop a strong collaborative culture with a healthy cohort of phase four partners. These benefits include more valuable client work at higher margins and greater staff engagement.
But going from phase three to four is easier said than done, especially for those individuals who are hard-wired to work autonomously.
Each firm should clarify what the “widen contribution” phase looks and feels like to them and whether there are any practice-area variances. Alignment of measurement and reward to create more phase fours is a good next step, with measurement used to improve not just prove.
Leaving well
Phase five is quite often dealt with too late or superficially. This may be due to a reluctance of a senior partner to let go, the inability of the next generation to step up, the risk of client defections and/or the financial circumstances of the individuals involved.
Like at all other phases, every partner should be asked, and should ask themselves where are they on the career arc, what to prioritise to succeed in the current phase, where next and how?
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