Culture shock – does your firm need to dish up some changes?

As law firms seek to redefine their culture to deal with the digital era, they must first undertake an honest assessment of their current cultural status and then be prepared to put in place interventions to bring about real change, writes Mark Andrews.

You may remember school science lessons and doing experiments with petri dishes – those shallow, cylindrical dishes that biologists use to culture cells.

Fast-forward to the modern legal sector and the notion that culture within firms is akin to what grows in the petri dish is not too far from the truth. Historically, cultures within law firms have formed based on the various personalities and practice areas within the business. While some legal practices have made conscious choices about trying to define their culture, less attention has typically been paid to culture – and the branding of culture – than in the corporate sector or other professional services firms.

Culture change has been gradual and evolving within law firms, and the sector has yet to face the large-scale disruption confronting many other industries. This is clearly changing, but there remains a danger of firms being blindsided as a result of ignoring what has grown in the petri dish and not understanding if all the micro-cultures are playing well together.

In considering how to evolve a culture, firms must first take an honest look in the petri dish and be prepared to confront what they see. The ability to articulate the firm’s culture – being honest about ‘the way we do things around here’ – is a critical first step on the path to any sort of intervention. By its very nature, this articulation will be a generalised one and may not capture all the nuances and micro-cultures within the business, but it should at least stand up to the test of being reasonably representative of the firm.

Quantifying the digital disruption that law firms may face is still somewhat difficult, but denying its possible impact is perilous. Likewise, identifying where your firm wants to be in response to disruption is also complicated without knowing exactly how such disruption will play out, but it is not so difficult to become more culturally ready.

Law firms must start asking questions about their failure tolerance and the core IT competence of their lawyers, along with issues such as their client focus, collaborative behaviour, market awareness, commercial pragmatism and openness to change. Some of these questions need to be asked at an individual level so as to map out where different parts of the firm sit on these cultural dimensions. What is the variability across the partner group? How does culture differ across groups, levels, functions and any other organisational dimensions?

Using a traffic-light system like the one below can be quite helpful in producing a cultural heat map.

Once the heat map, or current culture assessment, is complete, firms can then consider what interventions are necessary.

Four interventions to evolve your firm’s culture

There are a number of interventions that can be considered as firms try to drive digital readiness from a cultural perspective. Here are some of the key ones and the challenges they seek to overcome.

1. Refresh your strategy

When was the last time your firm refreshed its strategy to bring a sharper focus to what needs to change from a cultural perspective? Clear, consistent and regular articulation of strategy when it is backed up by client drivers can be a powerful force for cultural change. The client drivers need to be broad and representative to overcome the challenge of things ‘not being the case for my client’.

I have seen this done effectively through the use of vodcasts (the video version of podcasting) and live town hall-style meetings where senior leaders in the firm engage directly with all members of the firm in a way that is practical and targeted. The messaging needs to resonate for lawyers and the business professionals who support them.

A strategy refresh can be more powerful than a strategy rewrite as it acknowledges that much of the direction in the past has been right, but that some further refinement is necessary. Strategy refreshes provide momentum and apply corrective pressure, rather than trying to completely reset the firm’s course.

Having your strategy well understood across the firm makes it easier to identify potential disruptions and adjust course. If you do not have a sense of where your firm is heading, you are unlikely to know when your course is being disrupted.

2. Consider generational change and the role of millennials

Some argue that firms need to implement generational change. It is true that this can have an impact, but it is important to remember that the next set of leaders of the firm are likely to have been working in the existing culture for a while and may have absorbed the ‘way we do things round here’.

Others argue that firms need to have a targeted recruitment program for millennials and create particular opportunities for them in a way that may not have been considered previously. In truth, I think firms need to get better at identifying and leveraging those who are prepared to experiment and change. They can come from any generation and any part of the firm.

The key challenge in doing this is removing some of the natural roadblocks to change that are typically encountered. From an IT perspective, it is often the case that the operational and support expectations are so high that very few resources are left to assist those who want to embrace digital disruption and change. It is no good encouraging change without the ability to support it, so it may be necessary to have some dedicated rapid-response-type teams in IT to support ideas.

Hackathons – events allowing people from across different departments to come together to collaborate on projects and design innovative solutions – are a great example of a way to rapidly change the conversation and make cultures more ready for digital disruption. One of their real strengths is that they change the nature of the conversation about IT. As long as IT is considered to be a support function, firms will not achieve the cultural shift necessary to navigate the various disruptive forces. These hackathons connect the business needs and IT capabilities and provide the IT team with an opportunity to showcase how it can enable rather than just support.

3. Assess IT capability

Not all IT teams in firms have the necessary capability to support culture change and guide the business as it tries to become more resilient to disruption. If teams are populated primarily by long-serving technically focused individuals, then supplementing this skill with external, business-focussed team members is highly advisable.

A good way to do this is to look at bringing external talent in to provide coaching and support, with the idea that existing internal IT people may then gravitate to more business-facing roles. There is no guarantee this will happen, but being able to develop existing talent is always a positive approach.

The other idea is to supplement existing IT teams with people from other industries and backgrounds. This can again be in the form of shorter-term consulting-style arrangements or longer-term hiring. However, do not underestimate the existing IT team’s capability. While it may need to up the ante, quite often the issue is that IT has never been given the opportunity to do more than provide support.

4. Recalibrate mindsets

Seeing IT as a support or enabler is very much about a firm’s mindset and there is much to be said for mindset change. As valuable as it is to understand the current culture heat map and make use of some interventions, a powerful force of change is the choice individuals make about their mindset.

For the lawyers reading this article, which of these statements fits your mindset?

1. “My area of law will not be impacted by digital disruption”

2. “Digital disruption will impact my firm, but not me”

3. “Artificial intelligence sounds interesting, but it could never replace the work of lawyers as the level of judgement and skill is too great”

4. All of my work is bespoke and I really don’t do any process-based work”

5. “Digital disruption will impact me even though I don’t know how”

6. “Digital disruption will impact me and I am investing time to think about how”

Adopting mindset 5 or 6 is a powerful way to break down some cultural change barriers. You do not even need to be totally convinced to adopt these mindsets – it is really about being open and inquisitive.

Covering such a broad topic in a short article means not all strategies to deal with culture change can be outlined. However, consideration of some of these ideas should allow your firm to look into the petri dish and envision and act on changes that can help improve your culture.

Mark Andrews is director – global IT service delivery at Baker McKenzie. He has a varied background, including time in the public and private sectors, along with considerable professional services experience. He has held roles ranging from HR to management consulting and has previously been a guest lecturer as part of University of Technology, Sydney’s Executive MBA program.