It has been a challenging 18 months. Pandemics, lockdowns, floods, fires, storming of the Capitol, Brexit, food shortages … an apocalyptic list, almost like an overly inclusive force majeure clause. I don’t wish to sound glib; the human cost of these events, Coronavirus in particular, has been significant, with many lives tragically impacted. As we emerge into a brighter future, it seems that we will need to learn to live with unpredictability, in both our personal and professional lives. The world of business has shifted irrevocably. A survey of chief executives, conducted by KPMG in March 2021, showed that a quarter of respondents think the pandemic has changed their business model forever.
And what about the lawyers? Legal services has traditionally lagged behind other industries in embracing change and new ways of working. Despite many years of talk about ‘legal tech’, ‘reg tech’, ‘innovation’, ‘alternative legal services providers’ and ‘digital transformation’, the legal industry has remained, in the main, stubbornly wedded to the traditional ways of delivery. The pandemic forced a change, of sorts. Lawyers, like most knowledge workers, were sent home, and were compelled to use digital tools to get the job done. And although using Microsoft Teams does not exactly constitute full blown digital transformation, remote working has undoubtedly helped to move the dial and to soften the traditional lawyer resistance to more digital delivery. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, famously said in April 2020 that Microsoft had seen “2 years’ worth of digital transformation in 2 months”. Viewed in this light, the pandemic could be considered an opportunity for the legal services industry to rethink its delivery model for the next decade and beyond.
Digital transformation has a critical role to play in this new model. Now more than ever, digital transformation is not an indulgence, but a necessity. This is about much more than remote working – to evolve to a digital operating model in a volatile and unpredictable world requires a shift in culture. Lawyers, in private practice and in-house, will need to cultivate the kind of culture that innovative and transformative businesses have already developed – a culture that is curious, adaptive, transparent, democratic, and comfortable with change. As businesses become more agile and speed-to-market becomes an even more urgent priority, corporate legal teams and external law firms serving the business need to keep pace – or risk becoming sidelined and irrelevant. Can a corporate legal team effectively support an agile business without adopting agile principles itself? Can an external law firm advise on the legal and regulatory implications of digital transformation without itself leveraging digital tools and approaches? In times of unprecedented volatility, can an analogue approach to client service ever be justified?
During the repeated lockdown periods enforced by the pandemic, I thought a lot about these questions. I have been in legal services for over 25 years, as a lawyer, as a chief legal innovation officer, as a consultant, as a global head of knowledge, and, most recently, as the Executive Director of the Digital Legal Exchange. All these roles (with the exception of the fee-earning lawyer) involved pushing the boundaries and driving change, in an effort to improve service to clients. I have a lot of battle scars! I decided to synthesise my thoughts into a new book to help law firms and legal teams understand more about how to affect and sustain digital transformation. Have a look at Successful Digital Transformation in Law firms: A Question of Culture.
My conclusion (not groundbreaking, no less true for that) is that any leader looking to future-proof a law firm or legal team must learn lessons from the operating model of successful digital businesses.
What is it that unites successful digital companies, either those who are digital ‘natives’ or incumbents who have undergone a successful transformation? There are multiple factors, but they can be neatly distilled down to the following five elements. Successful digital companies:
- focus on customer/client needs and the customer experience above all else;
- take a strategic approach to digital transformation;
- commit to seeing the transformation through;
- hire the best people to make the change happen; and
- create a culture in which transformation can continue to flourish.
Of these five elements, the most important is culture. There can be no successful or sustained digital transformation without the right culture to support it. Many of the cultural attributes required to be a digitally effective organisation are those we might associate with a ‘good’ or healthy corporate culture: attributes like organisational diversity (which fuels innovative thinking); transparency (which unites teams around a shared vision); and agility (which allows organisations to be responsive to change and serve customers better). The challenge, for law firms and for corporate legal teams alike, is how to build this kind of culture in an environment that is often resistant to change.
During my keynote talk at the Legal Innovation and Tech Fest Online, I will be touching on these issues, and sharing some practical and actionable insights into how lawyers can build their digital muscles, embrace change and bring legal closer to the business.
About the Author
Isabel Parker, Executive Director for The Digital Legal Exchange (UK), has spent her career consistently pushing the boundaries and delivering change in the legal industry. She trained as a lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer then moved from fee earning to become Freshfields’ Chief Legal Innovation Officer, shaping the firm’s digital transformation strategy and leading the development of client-facing digital products. She moved in 2020 to become Executive Director of the Digital Legal Exchange, a not-for-profit with a mission to accelerate digital transformation within corporate legal functions. Isabel is passionate about customer experience, technology-focused legal education, and cognitive diversity.