Something new?

I have a problem when innovation and lawyers are mentioned in the same sentence.

'Innovation' is one of those lazy words employed by lawyers (and their marketers) in the hope that it will make them look smart (another lazy word - forgive me, I spent a long time as a lawyer and then crossed to the dark side of marketing). 

In a recent article in The Lawyer, Clifford Chance’s Visser warns firms: innovate or die, Clifford Chance's head of innovation was quoted “We will see part of the work go to disruptive firms if we don’t take any action. The next generation of lawyers is crucial to achieving innovation and change."

Hmmm.   

So imagine my delight when reading Bruce MacEwen's latest article, Letter from London: Part II, in Adam Smith, Esq. In it, Bruce writes,

“Innovation,” however, represents something else entirely to most people who bring it up.  It’s invoked as a separate and unique category of human inventiveness, and the implied yardstick is that if it’s not “disruptive” it’s not real innovation.  Disruption, in turn, implies non-linear, discontinuous change, with near banishment of the old order: Cars vs. horses, iTunes vs. CDs, smartphones vs. BlackBerrys.

If disruption in this sense is the acid test for innovation, then we think Law Land is nowhere.  We are still doing basically what we’ve always been doing, using people drawn from the same backgrounds, charging clients under the same revenue model, and governing and organizing our firms using the same managerial model.

Perceptive and true.

Variations on a theme

My time and attention has been on family, not work, the past few months. After some 40 years of it being the other way round, this has been both instructive and novel. Whether I had wanted to or not, I have stood back from the day job. Instead my priority has been settling my frail uncle safely in to a nursing home and getting to grips with his affairs - his bank accounts, tax return, subscriptions, bills, receipts, direct debits, standing orders, council tax, community alarm, flat, neighbours, the rest of the family.

And I have found myself standing on the edge of his life and that of my aunt, now dead some 10 years. Going through their papers (my uncle has kept everything) I found a cutting from The Guardian, a short piece, Little boxes of past lives, by Peter Preston - about how the memorabilia stored in our garages and lofts will mean little to those who one day clear them.

My uncle is still alive, but clearing his - their - flat, I have been doing just what Peter Preston and his siblings and step-siblings did when his stepmother died. And as I have gone through my uncle's brown cardboard boxes, files of papers, treasures and bric-a-brac I have travelled the years of their lives, 40 before marriage, 40 married, and my uncle's last lonely 10. And I keep thinking not just about my uncle's prescience in keeping that article, but that his plunge into dementia has robbed me of the opportunity to have the conversations we might otherwise have had - not just to fill the gaps in his life but in those of his wife's. For it is just the bare bones of those two lives in the boxes; the remainder - their real lives and the life they lived together - is now for ever locked up in his head.

So, conversations.

When I set out on 1 August, my aim was to help lawyers and marketers understand each other. To bridge a gap that I experienced first hand in my two years as a Director of Marketing. 

But time with and for my uncle has allowed me space to reflect on the challenges that law firms, law firm leaders, and lawyers have to meet - and the need for honest conversations about them. For sure conversations are held in law firms, but for all those that are, there are as many that aren't. Worse, there are those worthless conversations which convince us we have had them, when we haven't.

And in all of them it is as much about what is not said as what is.

Over the next few weeks this website will change, to reflect a widening of the focus. No longer just conversation about where lawyers and marketing meet, it will be much more about how best to have that much wider range of conversations - and in particular the ones lawyers would prefer to avoid.

Not quite starting again - I already have three projects on the go, each at various stages. Listening to clients, to learn what they are really thinking; a project to find out why law firm leaders and partners avoid discussing what may happen next; and a project to look at why, even now, we don't feel able to talk about mental heath and wellbeing in law firms.

But a change of direction.

Futurology sucks?

To which the answer is yes and no. (And to ensure you don't waste your time, this post is NOT about the Manic Street Preachers).

But you can be sure that the future is not going to be more of the same. Which seems to have escaped a lot of law firm leaders.

I had already started this post when I read, a little late, Reena Sen Gupta's article A self-deceiving return to business as usual in June's Legal Business. She argues that "an improving economic climate is leading top law firms to wrongly assume the ‘new’ normal is the same as the old one." This is very much what I have heard when talking with UK lawyers - and it is having  an impact on the approach law firms are (or aren't) taking to marketing and business development.

The discussion goes as follows,

"We've always done it (whatever "it" is; marketing, business development, client relationship) like this. Why do we now need to change? It's always worked before."

And my reply?

"You may not need to change immediately, but you will need to, sooner rather than later, so wouldn't it be sensible to at least look at how you might?"

For along with the certainty of change happening, is that change doesn't wait for anyone to catch up.

And perhaps one of the most important changes is in the dynamic between law firms and their clients. Once upon a time it was the lawyer who decided how legal services were to be delivered. No longer. Now it is the client who decides whether, how, and what legal services to buy. And who from (and the 'who' may not be a traditional supplier). There are any number of reasons for this: increased competition, new entrants into the legal services market, technological change, changing attitudes to lawyers. But the reasons, interesting as they may be, are not really important. It is happening and there is nothing that law firms can do to reverse this: Clementi, Moore's Law, and the impact of the recession let the genie out.

Instead what is important is how your firm will survive, and prosper, in this buyers' market.

For in terms of their expertise, law firms and lawyers are, by and large, all very much the same. So what is going to make your law firm different? How do you get noticed? And is it going to be enough?

More of the same is not a strategy that should recommend itself to anyone but it appears to be the default position for a lot of law firms. Change for change's sake is also not a strategy - but in a crowded and increasingly competitive legal services market place, there are going to be winners and losers. George Bull writes in Baker Tilly's most recent PPG briefing, Are you going to be one of the fifty survivors? that "of the 200 or so mid-tier law firms, only 50 or so may survive in the short-medium term". And whereas the briefing focuses on those necessary practical steps that law firm leaders should be taking to be in the successful 50 (and the pitfalls they need avoid) - in George Bull's summary, financial fitness, a clear strategy, and real differentiators - I would add getting your marketing and business development right, aligning it properly with that strategy, and ensuring that you communicate the message effectively.