Watch Michelle Battley, Head of Legal Resource Management at Freshfields, discuss BigHand Resource Management, the shift away from partner-led work allocation, and how better forecasting can support fairer opportunities, stronger talent development, and more informed resourcing decisions.

Transcript

I’m Michelle Battley. I am an ex-lawyer. I qualified at Freshfields about 25 years ago now, so I have quite a lot of experience with being on both sides of the resource management journey.

I had work allocated to me as a junior lawyer at Freshfields, and I came back to the firm about nine years ago to set up resource management for them.

We’ve grown the team, and now we have resource management across all of the London practice groups and, to a greater or lesser extent, across various other jurisdictions as well.

Q: Why do you think firms are questioning the partner-led allocation model?

I think it’s about fairness. I really do. I think it’s about transparency and scalability.

When I think about my own experience as a lawyer, work was given out by partners who were very much driven by their own agenda: “This is the work I want done. This is how I need to do it, and this is who I want to do it in an ideal world.”

They would come in at nine o’clock at night, dump an A4 folder on your desk and say, “If you could just have that back tomorrow morning.” That’s how we learned, and that required some long hours at times.

Obviously, that is completely relationship-driven. It doesn’t mean that work is necessarily being allocated fairly across the team or in terms of opportunities. Some people are incredibly overutilized while others are underutilized.

I think now we’re seeing much more of a drive away from partner-led resourcing.

Q: What is the impact of transparency and fairness on associate retention and development?

I think it’s a really important strategic lever.

Resource management is key in making sure that we keep people as happy and engaged as we can and that we’re helping them develop within their own careers.

Not everyone wants to be a partner. A lot of people want to get great experience in a Magic Circle law firm and then move on.

For me, one of the big drivers behind resourcing is making sure that anybody who is perhaps not as comfortable going to partners and saying, “We like the same cricket team,” or, “I saw the same sports match at the weekend,” still has access to opportunities.

It’s about having conversations with those associates and then being able to go to partners and say, “Have you thought about X down the corridor rather than Y, who sits next to you and supports the same football team?”

It’s about making opportunities so much more open. When we talk particularly about associates who identify with any dimension of difference, it’s about social mobility. It’s about diversity and inclusion, and it’s about making sure that we’re giving everyone a really good crack of the whip.

Q: How does BigHand Resource Management help you solve these challenges?

The way in which we’re using the forecasting is to get the associates to have a little bit more autonomy and think about their own careers more.

We ask them to fill in the skills matrix so that we can see what they want to do, what they can do and what they have done.

We’ve also used it for them to identify particular product lines and groups they want to be part of.

We use all of that information. We put it into the BigHand tool and say, “We know this person is particularly interested in ESG, and we know this person is interested in modern slavery.”

Then we can look at that and overlay that data with what they’ve got coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks and months. We can make some really considered decisions about their development and who is the best person to do this kind of work.

Q: What does the modern resourcing model look like?

You’ve got to have some partner input.

I think most associates would be very much in favor of having a separate resource management function. But there is always the desire to ensure that partners know how the associates are getting on, what they’re doing, and have that kind of oversight.

So I think probably a hybrid model, if I’m completely honest.

The partners know their clients. They know the team dynamics. They know which clients are going to work well with which associates. Resource managers are not necessarily going to know that.

I feel very much that it’s a collaborative input to say: who’s going to do the right work, and where are we going to put that work?

We’ve got a global firm. It can go to teams anywhere.

It would be easy to say resource management can be completely centralized and we can just move people around like jigsaw puzzles. We can’t.

You need to have the relationship and the context. A hybrid model between the resource management function and having those collaborative conversations with partners is the way to make it successful.

Q: What's the risk of managing resources on instinct, rather than evidence?

Bias. Straight away.

The difference between a partner allocating work, where we know that there’s bias, and resource management allocating work is that resource management has the data.

Everyone has biases. All resource managers have biases. We’re all individual humans.

The difference is having the data. We’re looking at the bigger picture and having oversight of a much wider commercial field than perhaps the partner is.

We know what associates want to do. We know which partners they work well with. Therefore, we reduce the bias as much as possible.

Resource managers also don’t have skin in the game in the way that partners do. I don’t need a particular associate to do a particular piece of work. I’m looking at what is the most efficient and the best for that person’s talent development.

Partners want particular individuals because it makes their life easier.

Q: What stands out to you about BigHand?

What stands out to me about BigHand is having oversight of what’s coming down the pipeline, as opposed to looking at historic data.

When I went back to Freshfields a number of years ago, all we had was historic data. The amount of conversations that one has to have with associates to try and find out what’s coming down the pipeline takes an immense amount of time.

While that’s brilliant for relationship-building, it’s so much more efficient for the resource management function to be able to say, “This person tells me they’re going to be doing 40 hours on this this week.”

I can see there’s no point in ringing that person because they’re in a trial for the next six weeks. Or I can see they’re going on annual leave.

Having annual leave brought into the forecasting has been a game changer. Just being able to say, “There’s no point ringing them. They’re off the table.”