More or less

'More for less' may be the mantra echoing through local government but for legal departments, doing less can improve the profile and perceived value of the team, writes Paul Gilbert

What is a lawyer anyway?

What do they do that means all the baggage that goes with the professional title is worth it? …The rules of conduct, the regulator, their independence, the training regime and the fees to practice in the name of the qualification?

Is being a lawyer defined by what one does? What one knows? Or how one works? I must admit to being sometimes at a loss to know for sure.

I qualified in February 1987, a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Judicature in England and Wales, a lawyer…And yet the first things I learned to do well involved filling legal aid application forms and doing local authority searches. In both instances I was shown how to do this by our office receptionist.

Although I was absolutely delighted to have qualified and to have a proper job I often went home in the evening wondering if the six years of exams of various types had properly equipped me to assess eligibility on “Green Forms”. Surely I should be balancing the scales of justice or at least being a highly paid advisor on some mega corporate deal.

The question I sometimes pose today, as law departments, creek at the seams with the sheer weight of activity they try to undertake is what is the role of the lawyer in the midst of all this volume of work…and how much of it has to be done by lawyers?

We can all observe that nearly everything we do as lawyers involves some element of routine process that repeats every time. Nearly everything has predictable patterns that can be observed and managed without us having to understand what happens before or after. Truth be told, a lot of what we call “legal” work if it were called “general admin” would not look very different.

I also remember the look of terror on the senior partner’s face whenever his secretary was on holiday…how on earth would he cope without her when she was the person who actually managed all the property matters. However in the obvious amusement we can take at such a situation there lies a slightly unsettling reality – while all the work we do can be done by us very well, not all of it should be done by us and some of it, probably, should never be done by us.

Not only is it probably more efficient, more cost effective and possibly without greater risk to ensure as much work as possible is not handled directly by lawyers; it is your duty to create the systems and processes to ensure this can happen so that you can therefore focus on what truly matters.

These are five tests that I use to challenge any legal department:

1. What are the ten most regularly occurring, least important activities undertaken by the team? Can you identify them and show their relative worth compared to other things that you must do? Based on analysis of risk, is there then an argument that some of those activities are so unimportant that the consequences of stopping them will hardly be noticed? If that is not the case, is there an argument instead to at least substitute your expensive lawyer time with the time of less expensive employees, suitably trained (obviously) and supported with protocols and process?

2. Also, and fundamentally, what is the irreducible core role for lawyers in your organisation? What is the activity that you undertake that combines your intimate knowledge of your world, with specialist legal expertise in such a way that the resulting activity, service and results are obviously, and acknowledged to be, value adding?

3. How much time does the department collectively devote to codifying knowledge, improving process and training colleagues? It is important to be able to answer the question and to be able to say, honestly, if doing more of these three things would save time, improve efficiency and save money. Crucially teams must at least have an understanding of the cost of their time; this is not about time recording, but about the awareness of time as a resource…If a lawyer spends one hour a week answering essentially similar points from colleagues, that is probably forty-to-fifty hours a year. If it might take even twenty hours to write a training programme that is backed by a Q&A on the intranet and a downloadable precedent; the investment of twenty hours saves time and money.

4. Are the lawyers equipped with the means to understand how they spend their time? Could tools for analysis of one’s activity help guide our use of time, our ability to prioritise and to find efficiency savings? If we had such tools (not, I stress, to record time, but to help us regulate the deployment of our most precious resource) would that not be a very useful tool indeed?

5. And finally, one very predictable consequence for any team that stops doing anything that others have come to rely upon, is that there will be conflict and tensions to manage. So are we equipped with the reporting tools to show trends, savings, costs and value? Do we have a sense of our true value (see 2. above) so that we can articulate worth and specialness? Can we actually handle, at a basic level, human relationships where people need to be influenced, persuaded, presented to and negotiated with? Do you train for soft skills as well as for legal expertise?

These five tests will reveal a great deal about the effectiveness of a legal team; they will also reveal the extent to which it is possible to transfer some activity away from the hands-on control of lawyers and into the capable and plausible control, of other colleagues, supported and aided by an infrastructure that trains well, checks thoroughly and delivers consistently.

The lawyer’s role should be crucial, powerful and empowering; being busy should never be a proper test for effectiveness and value…so, where you can, do less and be valued more.

Paul Gilbert is Chief Executive of LBC Wise Counsel, the UK based specialist management and skills training consultancy for lawyers. www.lbcwisecounsel.com