Return to the outsourced office
With such momentous change having been foisted on organisations in the last year, it’s unsurprising that many businesses are preparing now for the next big change management challenges headed their way – and, unlike in 2020, it’s possible to predict what those will be.
“Successfully managing remote workers in a hybrid environment – where some people are in the office and others elsewhere, on a changing basis – is the challenge firms are facing next,” says Clare Hart, CEO at Williams Lea. Remote working will have to be operationalised in a sustainable way, she adds, meaning firms will need to be able to keep a close eye on utilisation and the ratio of lawyers to business support staff.
That may be more of a challenge to businesses than the blanket order to remain at home was, she adds. “Even the seemingly trivial matter of scheduling who is in the office when – and who manages that – is a question that needs an answer.” Although most law firms have indeed fleshed out post-pandemic flexible-working arrangements, Hart says there’s still much complexity and practical nuance that’s yet to be proved in practice for the long term. “Legal leaders need to decide how they’ll arrange flexible working for different roles – perhaps some should be permanently remote, and others need more time on-premises. Whatever the policy, that’s going to require some sort of rigour around calendarising office presence.”
Best of both?
There will be benefits, of course, to a hybrid model. Compared with legal, Hart says, other professional services firms, including the Big Four, have long had more agile operations and training. That has left them better prepared to rely less on paper, in-person training and expensive offices. “Law firms’ offices are in some of the most expensive cities in the world – London, New York, San Francisco. The commercial benefit of more distributed working is the ability to cut those costs, especially if you’re outsourcing roles to other geographies nationally or internationally.”
Hart adds that many firms have voiced concern around how to maintain the apprentice-style education legal trainees receive in a more remote environment: “Trainees work closely with partners and become better lawyers as a result – that’s still got to happen, and it won’t happen incidentally, walking down the corridor and crossing paths. It has to be intentionally facilitated, whether that’s a breakfast meeting and a speaker, or a cocktail reception with networking – there has to be a purpose.”
Hart says Williams Lea has adopted ‘community managers’ to enable these kinds of activities, both internally and for its client businesses. “That’s what Williams Lea does. Outsourcing those administrative tasks to a business like ours means firms can set aside the management of remote workers: it’s no longer their problem, it is our problem.”
That’s another reason Hart feels firms have been increasingly looking at outsourcing their business support functions: “Our client firms are saying their lawyers want to practice law, not manage the administration of the business.”
To facilitate that need, she adds that Williams Lea has built centres of excellence around document processing, administrative resourcing, financial support services, and marketing and sales, additionally ensuring quality and the ability to scale. “One UK legal chief operating officer recently said to me ‘quality of service is more important to us than saving a few pounds here and there’. It’s not about the money – it’s about the overheads around technology and training people on it. That lets us provide a better service than is possible internally.”
Reporting back
As part of its service offering, and predating the pandemic, Williams Lea developed ENGAGE, a combined workflow tool, data warehouse, reporting dashboard and technology platform to answer firms’ needs. Within it, fee earners can email a document to be proofread, for instance, to a Williams Lea support professional and then rate the quality of the output. But ENGAGE also meets a critical reporting need: Hart explains: “A lot can be left to interpretation when you generate reports manually through Excel. A dashboard articulates what’s really happening in terms of utilisation much more clearly – and it gives you more detail, such as who’s submitting the most jobs, in which offices, and at what times.”
Having such detail at leaders’ fingertips can also benefit HR and talent management, she adds. “That data can indicate poor workload management, or even potential firm departures – which is really important in the world of managing diversity, equality and inclusion.”
And she points to the increasingly intense war for talent – and how business leaders within firms can also benefit from an outsourcing model. “HR leaders can focus more on winning the client-facing talent they need if the administrative aspects for support roles – background checks, onboarding, training – have been outsourced to teams dedicated to that purpose.” When it comes to the next big challenge, law firms can hopefully now see the road ahead, and it seems support is also close at hand.
