The FT is out with its second annual "Innovative Lawyers" Survey and much has changed since I reported on the original survey a year ago. Primarily, the survey is far more ambitious in scope this year:
"The 2006 report covered only UK lawyers working in private practice. This year the scope has been broadened to cover mainland European law firms, in-house lawyers working in European companies, lawyers in the UK’s public sector, the UK Bar, US law firms operating in Europe and individual legal innovators. In addition, we looked at the UK judiciary to see if there are any judges changing the mould or standing out for their innovative work."
Here’s the entire list; the top 5 firms are:
- Allen & Overy
- Clifford Chance
- Linklaters
- Eversheds
- Wragge & Co.
Among US-rooted firms, the only ones represented are:
- DLA Piper (#6)
- Latham (#10)
- Baker & McKenzie (#20)
- White & Case (#24)
- Dechert (#42)
- Skadden (#43), and
- Greenberg Traurig (#48)s
The top-line findings are hard to argue with, but worth summarizing since it is, after all, the Authority of the FT now underscoring what many of us already believed:
"The UK legal profession is more advanced than its mainland European counterparts: law firms are moving from being professional organisations to legal businesses. This sometimes controversial shift has been going on for more than a decade in the UK, but it is still in its infancy in mainland Europe. […]
"The research for the FT Innovative Lawyers report also showed the cultural differences between US and UK law firms. In general, US law firms tend to be more lightly managed than their UK counterparts. Typically they are more akin to traditional models of law firm partnership, and they are largely organised as a group of individual partners running their own practices. Along with UK firms such as Slaughter and May, these US firms tend to focus their energies more on legal innovation than on the way in which they do business. […]
"Another facet of the legal world that still shows no sign of radical change [besides the ongoing struggle for diversity] is the way in which law firms bill their clients. As in last year’s report, Billing & Fees was the least subscribed category. The hegemony of the hourly rate remains – although there were some notable exceptions of firms willing to share risk with their clients, or – as in the case of Norton Rose – to introduce third party funding to foot litigation bills.
"Lawyers in every branch of the profession are beginning to look forward and outward. Even the UK Bar, often described as “Dickensian”, is showing signs of a willingness to change traditional ways of working. Commonplace now are transparent bills, marketing and an ethos of client service."
So. to the awards: What did these firms actually do to garner awards?
The sheer variety is what’s most impressive to my eye. Linklaters came up with a way of helping finance vaccination programs overseen by the World Health Organisation and Unicef, among others, under which $1-billion of bonds have been issued and another $3-billion are expected to be issued over the next few years. (The World Bank acts as treasury manager for the issues.) Clifford Chance took on climate change by attempting to do for carbon and emissions trading what Michael Milken and Drexel did for junk bonds: Standardize the disclosure and documentation to make the market more liquid. CC also claims to have invented the world’s first convertible Islamic bond, consistent with Sharia law.
As for individuals, we have some truly impressive souls. Mahnaz Malik, age all of 28, graduated in law from Cambridge in 1998 and is now tri-qualified to practice in England & Wales, New York, and Pakistan. While at Simmons & Simmons—which she left 18 months ago to serve as a full-time advisor to governments on their relations with NGO’s—she set up a program to provide legal representation to children "detained in appalling conditions" in Pakistani jails; it now represents 92% of the children in Lahore jails. Oh, and did I mention that she’s published two novels and made a film?
Then we have Jim Rice, a securitization partner at Linklaters, who spear-headed the global vaccination initiative noted above, and has a track record of inspiring teams of young lawyers pursuing ambitious pro bono projects.
Or Chris Perrin, the general counsel of Clifford Chance, who is a thought leader in the ever-more-important area of conflicts, now chair of a working committee to draft new conflicts rules for England and Wales.
Lastly, one of my perennial favorites, Tony Angel, managing partner of Linklaters since 1998, who the FT calls "a visionary and strategist in a sector that is not known for sophisticated management. He was one of the first law firm managers to take the job seriously," and rebuffs criticism that he has turned the firm into a corporation: Rather, he insists, the partnership ethos is alive and well within a smoothly functioning and profitable environment.
Speaking of management, there’s a separate category of awards for that, as well as for IT, HR, and client service.
Management
Regular readers know that I think benchmarking is a merely the starting line at best and a tar-pit of assured mediocrity for the vision-impaired at worst. So I thoroughly endorse the piece on management:
"“Are we normal?” Law firms are always asking me this question. When I assure them that their organisational and interpersonal challenges are fairly typical of firms in their sector, they seem relieved. But they are missing the point. Being “normal” is not enough. To achieve competitive advantage these firms must aspire to being abnormal – in a good way.
"Very few of the submissions in the management category this year could be described as genuinely innovative (click here for rankings). Most clients would be unimpressed if they ever read their law firms’ submissions in this category. What feels radical and innovative to a law firm may seem like standard management practice to their corporate clients."
Eversheds takes first place for introducing "a sea change" in how partner compensation is calculated:
"Eversheds has abandoned lockstep altogether but has done so in a particularly creative way. It has used the new method of partner remuneration as an opportunity to define and embed the most valuable elements of the firm’s strategy and the partnership’s ethos. In other performance- related pay schemes, an individual partner’s profit share is based entirely on retrospective performance. Eversheds’ scheme also takes account of expected future performance, recognising and rewarding an individual’s commitment to modify or fundamentally change behaviours in support of five defined criteria (of which only one is profit)."
To my mind, nothing, absolutely nothing, is more important to enlisting "hearts and minds" support for different behaviors than to embed rewards for the desired behaviors, and penalties for the same-old-same-old behaviors, into the compensation system.
IT
Many of the entries here were of the to-be-expected variety. For example, DLA Piper allows clients to post advertising material for clearance by their lawyers; Baker & McKenzie has an IP database repository with, they claim, more than a quarter of a million trademark records under management; Mills & Reeve offers a free online healthcare law resource; Linklaters created a leveraged term sheet generator to cut production time from eight hours to 30 minutes; Simmons & Simmons offers an online age discrimination training guide; and Clifford Chance has a reasonably mature suite of online services now being used by over 20,000 people in 270+ organizations in 50 countries and eight languages.
But then we had the truly innovative. Number one here is the creation of Derek Southall, a partner and head of strategic development at Wragge & Co., who has come up with a partly automated and partly human (with four IT specialists) system to advise clients on their own internal IT infrastructure needs. One reason it wins? This client quote says it all:
"Ian Leedham, senior counsel for the National Grid and an enthusiastic supporter of the Wragge & Co initiative, agrees. He points out that Mr Southall’s strength is that he was a lawyer before he became an IT expert: “This means that he really understands what the business needs.”"
90% of lawyer/IT miscommunication could be eliminated, I’ve often felt, if you can find one key person who truly understands what both sides of the table are talking about. There’s no substitute, here, for having a former or current practicing lawyer who’s at least reasonably, if not intimately, conversant with IT.
Human Resources
The adage that "people are our most valuable asset" is, as we know, honored too often in the breach. This observation sums up the disconnect: "“In a lot of firms, there is a reticence on the part of partners to engage staff in discussions in early stages of their careers,” says [David Miles, a partner at BDO Stoy Hayward, an accounting firm]. “For firms that do start engaging associates at an earlier stage, it actually forces them to identify what they are looking for in terms of making partner. But firms are only just waking up to the fact that they need to do that.”
Ashurst and Allen & Overy, among others, have taken the remarkably common-sensical step of compensating associates not based on years post-graduation, but on actual competence, skills, personal attributes, and behavior. Cobbetts has established a "leadership development center" focused on a two-day off-site program in which partners explore different business-focused activities designed to identify their relative strengths and weaknesses.
Latham, characteristically, has come up with one of the more "differentiating" programs of all—and one, of course, which is blindingly obvious in hindsight. Rather than relying on the ad hoc approach, often dependent on chance hallway encounters, of finding associates on their way out posts in-house, Latham has formalized it to include partners, departing associates, and firm alumni, all run through the firm’s intranet. Why on earth wouldn’t your firm do that? We all know that happy alumni can become your best clients.
While you’re at it, don’t ignore staff. If your firm is roughly typical, you have at least as many staff as you do fee-earning lawyers; to ignore them could be crippling and is certainly morale-sapping. This doesn’t have to be expensive; the most popular benefit is career development programs—which, need I remind you, actually make them more valuable employees?
Client Relations
I’ve saved one of my favorites for last. Impeccable legal expertise is now taken for granted; but clients want more. The trend, roughly, is from detached advisor to business partner. Critically, this has to go beyond online tools such as client relationship management systems, or KM systems with expertise-finding capability embedded. The goal is to fundamentally change the way lawyers think about clients before, during, and after engagements.
For example? At Addleshaw Goddard, 40 or so client relationship partners and their client relationship team members are being trained in business analysis tools at Cranfield School of Management—with a view towards enlightening them as to how the client might actually be thinking about their businesses.
Wragge & Co. did something more innovative: It offers free counsel to companies struggling to consolidate and downsize their "panels." Or, as they slyly put it, "we became poacher turned gamekeeper." The advice covers the waterfront, from whether a panel is advisable in the first place to what criteria should be applied, how to handle firms’ tenders, and how to get panel members to obey the ground rules.
But Linklaters wins for "the shift in approach with potentially the farthest-reaching consequences for the legal industry." They fielded a pitch team for a global corporation’s work outside the US that was made up of two lawyers—and one client relationship manager and one IT specialist. We can end with no more apt tale than this:
"The firm says: “The client relationship manager and the managing relationship partner in charge of the team were something of a double act, which was unconventional by industry standards, yet highly effective. There were some conversations which Linde needed to have with a lawyer and other conversations which were easier with a senior person outside the legal team.”
"Should this become standard practice, and be taken up by other firms, it would truly be an innovation that could revolutionise the way law firms deal with their clients. It might also be part of a wider trend towards senior non-lawyers having greater power, and more exposure to clients, within law firms. And that is uncharted water for the legal world."
Trusting non-lawyers, indeed!? Now that is true innovation.
