Understanding your team’s capacity, capability, expertise, and aspirations should be the starting point of any decision, given how important these are to retaining and maximising staff effectiveness.
At this year’s BigHand Conference, I had a chance to host a panel of three industry experts at different stages of their legal support transformation. They were gracious enough to spend some time with me discussing visibility, change management, and how firms can better organise their support function.
How It Starts
BigHand’s latest research, a survey of over 800 legal leaders in the US and UK, found that 90% of firms have now transitioned to a model with some element of centralised support. More than half of the respondents are planning further changes in the next year.
For Stephen Hepplestall, Business Change Manager at Weightmans, this transformation began with a simple question of his fee earners: “How many support staff do you know that you need?” No one could answer it. His firm didn’t have workflow tools in place to provide clean capacity and utilisation data, meaning any decisions were essentially made blindly.
The other panelists echoed that lack of visibility as a driving factor in their restructuring, along with other related reasons like poor task distribution and difficulty lowering the lawyer-to-support ratio.
Miranda Pammenter, Director of Premises and Operations at Michelmores, called it a ‘plateau.’ There were only so many efficiencies they could find without the granular data that workflow tools present. They needed, as she put it, “something to help take the next step.”
The Importance of Flexibility
For some firms, that means completely transforming the support function and modernising the approach to secretarial assignment. In this year’s research, the number of respondents that reported they’re now operating 100% team-based administrative assistance nearly tripled from 6% to 16%.
But as Tara Layman, Head of PA & Administrative Services at Pinsent Masons explained, not everything has to be so black and white. “There are some processes that are firm-wide and very similar irrespective of the area of business you’re working in. There are others that need to be quite niche and specific. There are benefits in having consistency, but you also need to accept that not everybody is the same.”
That flexible approach has been a key to securing acceptance and engagement for Tara, who now reports almost 100% workflow utilisation for Pinsent Masons’ administrative assistants and document production services team.
These ‘shades of grey’, as she put it, are important to remember as the legal industry continues to grapple with new technologies like AI that could significantly disrupt traditional support structures.
Being agile enough to quickly respond to new best practices keeps firms at the competitive edge and it is only possible with the data to support every decision.
Don’t Set and Forget
If there was one thing that stood out to me other than the focus on visibility, it’s the continuous nature of these changes. Miranda stressed several times that this process isn’t just integrating a workflow tool and celebrating your success. To really futureproof your firm (or any business, really), there needs to be constant investment in the people, not just the processes.
Only one-third (33%) of the respondents to this year’s BigHand Legal Workflow Leadership report confirmed that they had dedicated cross-training or mentorship programs for support staff. A lack of professional development was a major factor in attrition rates, and poor knowledge transfer processes a challenge of replacing retiring staff.
When I asked the panel for a few key takeaways to share with our audience, Stephen reminded the room to “stay focused on the people.” Restructuring efforts and new tools are there to enhance your team’s work and allow them to perform at a higher level. Make them better at what they do, prepare them for what’s next, and arm them with the best data possible.
Final Thoughts
I’ll finish with three quotes that sum up my thoughts on the day:
- “Bring people on the journey.”
- “Continuous improvement, constant evolution.”
It was brilliant to hear from different perspectives, and interesting to see how each of them approached the same problem. There’s change coming in the legal industry. Without the visibility to understand where you are now, there’s no way to make the best decision about where you go next.
