Watch Ed Stead, Partner at Pinsent Masons, discuss BigHand Resource Management, the shift toward centralized work allocation, and how better visibility helps firms deploy the right people to meet growing client expectations.

Transcript

I’m Ed Stead, Corporate Partner and Head of the Corporate Team in the UK at Pinsent Masons.

That means I’m responsible for 140 or so corporate lawyers across all of our UK operations.

Q: What has your journey with BigHand looked like?

We started out with a Resource Management pilot, working with the BigHand team just over three years ago.

That was to try and implement a more centralized, coherent means of organizing our resource across our locations.

After a pilot phase, we went into full-scale adoption and hired a full-time Resource Manager who could use the BigHand system, software and data to help us manage the allocation of work.

We wanted to make sure that was done fairly, taking into account the balance of fee-earner interests and development areas, and trying, at the Holy Grail level, to improve the spread of work across our business.

Q: What has been the impact of BigHand Resource Management?

If I asked our partner group, they would very much want to continue with the model we’ve adopted.

I don’t think they’d want to go back to the model where they have to do the ring-round. They have to go down the corridor and have discussions about whether lawyer A or lawyer B can work on a project.

We’re trying to do things seamlessly across our locations and often on cross-border projects, where clients don’t care whether the lawyer is in Belfast, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds or London.

They want to know that the overall team in our UK Corporate Group can deliver.

Knowing that we’ve got a resource system that allows us to pick people with the right skill set and the right availability makes a difference.

Q: What concerns did your team have before implementing Resource Management?

One of the things that might have made partners nervous as we were doing this was that they would lose any influence over resourcing decisions.

If you asked my wider partner group now, you would get a pretty balanced answer that says they’re not taken out of the picture entirely.

They do get to say when a client need might mean that a particular lawyer should work with that client because they’ve got a good history with them and they’re well liked.

We try and honor that in the way we use it. It’s not like a lawyer is imposed against partner and client will.

Q: How have changing client expectations impacted resourcing decisions?

Clients recognize that we have people working in many different places, whether that’s hybrid at home or in our other locations. They don’t mind that.

The frequency of actual physical meetings has dramatically reduced over time. The grand completion meetings we’d have had in corporate, where everyone comes together, just don’t happen that frequently.

It’s much more electronic and automated.

Client expectation is about delivery and delivery at pace. They’re less bothered about the who and the where from.

I think they have probably become more demanding on delivery speed because we’re in an environment where there are significant global uncertainties that make deal-doing really quite hard.

If you’ve got something that’s in process and has momentum, the demand to get stuff done is probably higher than ever at the moment.

Q: How will leading firms continue to improve resourcing over the next five years?

I think it’s an increasing mixture of data.

When we’re in discussion with our clients about billing, we’re really in a world where hourly rates and hourly-based billing are dwindling in frequency.

It’s much more about the value that we deliver and how we deliver it.

When we then turn back to managing our team, how do we deploy people to do that, and what data points can we use to make sure people are using the technology we’ve invested in?

We’ve got stats on how AI is used and how the technology stack that we’ve invested in is deployed.

Layer that against the busyness of our teams and it starts to shape: have we got the right people in the right places, working in the right way?

That will become something we focus on even more over the coming years.