Adopting to new pressures of practice

by David J Bilinsky

I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder
Writer and vocalist, Leonard Cohen

Law is a business. If there ever was any doubt of the direction in which we have been moving, the last few years have clearly proven the truth of this statement. Yes, we are members of a long and honourable profession. Yes, we serve the public interest. Yes, we are officers of the court and enjoy rights and obligations shared by no other group in society. Yes, we have respect for the institutions on which our society rests – perhaps more so than any other societal group – for we know that without the Rule of Law, anarchy rules. Yet we also owe our lives and our livings to the delivery of legal services in a manner that is economically justified and serves the needs of our clients. Accordingly, this column looks to the future impact of law as a business and seeks to forecast the changes that we can expect as a result.

Technology
If there is one area that will continue to change – rapidly – it will be technology as applied to the practice of law. The twin needs of efficiency and effectiveness have driven lawyers to embrace technology, whether they desired it or not.

Looking ahead, the biggest short-term impact of technology should be the increasing integration of different systems on the lawyer’s desktop into one application. Financial and trust accounting, time and billing, calendaring, limitation and BF dates, appointments, To-Do’s, e-mail integration, conflict checks, file lists, contacts, calls, messages, document generation, document management, desktop searching – all will be increasingly found under one roof. We are already seeing the start of this with the integration of practice management software with accounting software resulting in such products as ProLaw, LawStream, PCLaw, Time Matters and others. These increasingly integrated products will eliminate the need for separate applications; they will seek to become the “nerve centre” of your practice, and they will seek to provide greater and greater functionality to the practising lawyer. As they grow in depth and breadth, they will also seek to be indispensable… and irreplaceable….

Finance and Management
We are witnessing the next big wave of change within law firms in the area of finance and management. While technological change is being thrust onto law firms, financial and management change has largely arisen from within firms. The need to embrace modern management techniques has driven the increased interest in finance as a discipline that must be mastered in order to address the increasingly business-like nature of law firms. Firms traditionally were concerned about cash flow and revenues – while that has not disappeared, firms are now drilling much deeper and starting to determine the profitability of files, clients, lawyers and practice groups. Increasingly, metrics are being developed that serve to align performance with firm-wide (business) strategic goals. Law firms have profitability indicators, which approximate the firm’s (or lawyer’s) hourly cost of production. Given these profitability measures (and the hours worked on a file and the revenues resulting therefrom), management can quickly determine if a file, client, lawyer or department is meeting its targets. And of course, compensation and promotion within a firm is being tied to meeting explicit financial and strategic goals.

Marketing
Once viewed as simply advertising, marketing has come to reflect the “action” part of the firm’s strategic goals. In many ways, legal marketing, once restricted to yellow pages and print advertising, has come alive via the Internet. Electronic newsletters were the first incarnations, quickly followed by web sites, web-search optimizations, group marketing and now blogs. Lawyers and law firms pay for the privilege of popping up in Google ads (“Adwords”). Lawyer web pages are optimized to appear at the top of Google searches. Lawyers now join online directory listings. Law firms now purchase and develop CRM (Contact Relationship Management) software. Law firms recognize that the development of clients is an exercise in personal relationships – and they build extranets to allow an electronic bridge to be built between clients and their files within a law firm. Blackberries have provided clients with 24/7 access to their trusted legal advisor, thereby increasing the bond between lawyer and client. Remote access via laptops and other technologies allows lawyers to work from home, from the Whistler cabin or from a different continent – thereby allowing the firm to develop the relationship between lawyer and client – notwithstanding barriers of time and distance. Furthermore, by combining marketing, the Internet and strategic planning, law firms have achieved a geographic reach and focus unheard of in the past. With the needs of clients becoming global in nature, it can only be expected that law firms will also become increasingly global in outlook. This will require that law firms transcend jurisdictional and geographic boundaries and start to view the need to be able to reach out to many of the markets shared by their clients. Baker & McKenzie already calls itself “the world’s leading global law firm.”

Life and Balance
The major impact of these three areas – technology, finance and management, and marketing – will be the degradation of the lawyer’s individual life. Work and life balance, already stressed by technology, will be under pressure from the need to meet the increasing wishes of clients. Law firms – particularly the largest ones – will find it difficult to retain lawyers under the unrelenting pressures and needs of clients. Even smaller firms will suffer from the divergence between younger lawyers who desire balance in their lives (particularly the X, Y and ‘Net generations) and the need of the firm for associates and partners who are willing to work the hours required in the new economic reality. Accordingly, law firms will face a new requirement: helping younger lawyers balance long hours and increasing work intensity. Personal relationships, already difficult in a stressful professional life, will be under new pressures. As a result, law firms will be seeking consultants who can assist in helping to increase morale, motivation, commitment, and engagement in their professional staff. The need for diversity, recruitment, and retention of staff will be increasingly important inside law firms. Recognition as an “employer of choice” will be a distinction of note, as the competition for quality staff increases. Furthermore, law firms will recognize that increasing productivity and competitiveness will depend on keeping and motivating their work force, for all levels of staff, including professionals.

The challenges awaiting law firms are unlike any faced in the past. They are formidable. However, lawyers have shown in the past that they have considerable assets to bring to the table and they draw upon a long history of adapting to change. I have every confidence that having reference to the principles of their profession that have stood the test of time lawyers will be able to avoid being casualties of the future.

David J. Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor at the Law Society of B.C. E-mail: daveb@lsbc.org. The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the author’s employer, the Law Society of B.C.

This article originally appeared in the April 2006 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.