NAVIGATE.LEGAL
A world with no lawyers? Robots might not be the reason...
Author: Dermot Knight 12.02.2019
There may come a day when no one actually wants to be a lawyer!
​
Some of this is anecdotal – in the sense that we notice it in the context of the analytics we do rather than something we are specifically and empirically measuring – but at least this much is certain: Lawyer morale is at a dangerously low level. There is a growing number of lawyers across a wide cross section of legal environments who are leaving not just their current roles – but the industry altogether. Those that are staying are a long way from enthusiastic in their jobs. This is cause for reflection. How have the bright and optimistic graduates who joined the profession in record numbers reached such a disillusioned conclusion about the future of legal?
​
The industry doesn’t talk enough about lawyer morale. The root causes are not well understood and good intentions are not translating into changes quickly enough. We wanted to share some of the contributing factors that are common to most legal environments, and some suggestions on how to solve these, to stimulate meaningful progress on this important issue.
Management’s outdated view on how lawyers should work
In an industry where money was always derived from billing time, long hours and overwork were seen as a badge of honour rather than a sign of trouble. (I once saw a video promoting careers at a law firm that actually celebrated its lawyers having to leave personal dinners to rush back to the office to work all night.) There is still an unwritten rule that long hours are
required. However, morale is one of those issues no one wants to be seen to be against, and so the "message" always has the right words - something to the tune of "this is changing." Yet the lack of “on the ground” improvement betrays a much lower level of priority than all the promotional rhetoric promises.
​
The outdated view of lawyer welfare is based on “how a lawyer must work” rather than “what must be delivered.” “Busy” is the expected default position of the lawyer. Which type of work suits this objective best? Things that require as much manual input as possible and consume as much time as possible. Complexity is then the glue used to bundle the low value in with the high value so that the whole process looks like critical legal work. Traditional law firms have built their success around this model and, for all the talk of change, demonstrate little interest in doing so (even though analytically speaking they would be much better off from both a profitability and a disruption point of view if they did.) Equally some legal departments are comfortable with this approach – big teams working on mystical stuff no one can really quantify is a sure way to protect their budgets and their headcount. “If you touch this it will stop working” has often been enough to scare away any non-lawyers from venturing too far under the hood of a legal process.
​
For the lawyers themselves however, this model means long hours (but without a corresponding increase in reward.) It also means less interesting and inspiring work as time is pursued rather than quality (“de-skilling” “mind numbing” “complication seeking” are some terms we have seen lawyers use to describe their work.) This type of work also demands physical office presence, with flexible working options not nearly as available as they could be. Such a style of working, coupled with what they perceive to be an inflexible and unsympathetic response from management, diminishes their enthusiasm and dials down their engagement.
It’s not the long hours – it’s the pointless hours
Another source of lawyer frustration is the amount of work that is wasted. The all-nighters that could have finished at midnight with proper discipline; the patent applications filed for products that were discontinued; the rework required when people make changes to earlier versions of documents; or the haphazard approach to project management from team leaders “let’s get in a meeting room together and solve this.” There is an expected commitment to the team that stretches beyond working hours.
Fine if it is necessary, frustrating when it could have been avoided – particularly for lawyers with fixed commitments (e.g. child day care times). At a time when we should be working smarter not harder, this a significant source of unnecessary stress.
The pressure for magic
Most legal environments are chasing yesterday’s success. They are trying to deliver today’s requirements by using yesterday’s methodology. The squares aren’t fitting into the circles but the pressure to perform is still there. Blacksmiths are being asked to produce profits from horseshoes when everyone is buying cars. Doubling down and working even harder isn’t going to produce the numbers. If the legal industry is going to insist on changing so slowly, then it must temper its expectations of its people. Senior lawyers are under enormous pressure to deliver yesterday’s market. This is a battle they can’t win (even with their best work) and it is fuelling a negative state of well-being.
Lack of inclusion – lawyers are not valued in strategic planning about their work
Many legal environments begin their planning for the future on assumptions. There is incomplete data about the functioning of their operating environments. Nonetheless ideas are proposed without engaging the most valuable data source: the very people they have spent a fortune on recruitment costs to acquire; invested considerable time getting up to speed about their business, and now possess a knowledge base second to none about the internal functioning of the environment. The preference is to avoid “disrupting” the lawyers by leaving them out of data gathering. Instead “consultations” (surveys) beefed up by “analysis” (magic) compensates for their lack of involvement.
​
Lawyers have the most valuable insight about a legal environment’s functioning. They know where the barriers lie, and how best to solve them. They are at the coalface of the legal supply chain and are closer to the detail than anyone. They also actually want to contribute to an improvement analysis about their workload and the mere act of being heard in a meaningful way can itself improve their morale. Furthermore, lawyers hold the ultimate fate of these initiatives in their hands. The easiest way to make sure there is no return on investment on a transformation initiative is to introduce it cold to the lawyers who must use it. “This won’t work for the type of work I do” has been the beginning of the end for many an innovation in this industry.
Surveys or team meetings to “get buy in” don’t cut it. They do not provide the lawyers an opportunity to contribute on issues important to them – rather it is an opportunity to contribute on issues preselected by management. There is nothing more demoralising as a lawyer when the leadership team say “we’d like your opinion,” you get ready to give it and then some kind of survey is sent around that by its design and focus prevents you from communicating what is important to you. These exercises are almost always “push surveys” with questions following a predetermined theme. As such, in addition to being of little analytical value, the ability to improve lawyer morale will be limited. In fact the results can actually further diminish morale, particularly when they are used as statistics to explain away issues that are of concern to lawyers.
Failing to engage lawyers in improvement exercises shows them that whatever the core values say, their input is not considered valuable when it comes to the big stuff. It also sends them the message that their issues are not important – particularly when they see budget spent on other initiatives that then fail to deliver meaningful impact.
The way lawyers are measured is unfair
Many legal environments do not have sophisticated metrics to measure their lawyers (in large part because legal work has always been notoriously difficult to assess.) Without the right metrics, silly ones inevitably take their place.
​
Presenteeism is a typical one. “He is here all the time! He is one of our stars!” He might be, or he might just be on Facebook or just unable to properly prioritise his work. Lawyers are then judged by how much time they spend in the office not by the value they contribute. This has a huge effect on morale because it can invert how true performance is rewarded. It is easier for lower performing lawyers to succeed and harder for higher
performing lawyers to demonstrate their value. It also reduces the incentive to perform – what’s the point if extra effort will measure the same as limited effort?
How can we start the change?
Ask your lawyers
The lawyers know more about how and why their work gets longer and harder than anyone else. They are also best placed to provide the data needed to answer questions like “which tech will actually work in our environment?” and “which work could we stop?” This is a way to increase the depth and accuracy of your analytics at the same time as demonstrating to lawyers their input is genuinely needed in mapping out the future of their legal environment.
​
Find some work to stop
With cost pressure and workloads ever increasing it is more important than ever to understand which work is valuable and which work is not useful. We find too many legal environments have unnecessarily high workloads due in part to excessive amounts of duplication or work that is non-legal. Analysing the biggest drivers for these types of work can result in eliminating certain types of work altogether, or finding more efficient ways to deliver them (alternate sourcing; self help tools etc.)
​
Reduce manual inputs
A lawyer’s value shouldn’t be the ability to stay awake and execute repetitive functions. Employing targeted adjustments to your internal legal supply chain can drastically reduce the manual work lawyers do. The exciting thing about the current legal environment is that there is more potential than ever before to achieve this – there are some very useful tech options out there. For this to be useful, however, "what the tech does" must correlate directly with "how your team work." A good starting point is to measure the types of manual work that occupy the most amount of legal time and design a proof of concept to test with potential tech solutions.
​
Support and encourage prioritisation
Lawyers feel the need to work on everything as if it were a constitution to be handed down to future generations. It isn’t enough to have stated principles on what to prioritise. Lawyers need to be able to identify which work can be delayed or rejected, and they need to know they have management support when doing so (particularly when it is a pet project of someone important.) This is more of a cultural shift than a new strategy and requires consistent demonstration by senior team members.
​
Focus on improving morale rather than efficiency
Efficiency exercises tend to be badly received in legal departments particularly where there is already a feeling of injustice at the level of work they are expected to deliver. A much better approach is to undergo a morale improvement program. Very often root causes of inefficiency are also root causes of low morale, but a focus on the morale demonstrates a commitment to your people rather than the insinuation that the inefficiency has something to do with the way the lawyers are working.
​
Develop real metrics
Metrics play a crucial role in how lawyers respond to their work environment. The way a lawyer is measured needs to emanate from what is valuable in a legal process. Judge your lawyers on what matters, eliminate work unconnected with this and remove as much subjectivity from the process as possible.
How you do this is worthy of an article of its own, but the goal should be to measure the right things and ensure that the lawyers have a clear understanding of what these are. It must go beyond labelling – the metrics must be detailed enough so that they both encourage a certain standard and allow you to measure performance against this. Analysis of your workload and an objective method of evaluating what is useful will allow you to develop initial metrics. The key point here is that this is an evolving process – and to avoid subjectivity creeping back in, it is important the metrics are regularly reviewed to ensure they are still driving the right behaviours.
​
Concluding point
As an industry we need to make greater effort to understand the well being of our people. As cost pressure and rising workloads continue to dominate legal environments, we face a decision about what kind of industry legal will become. Do we want an industry where difficulty is the default setting, where super effort is needed 7 days out of 5, with low motivation, high attrition and a constant battle to justify its worth? Or do we want an industry that values its people and this is felt in actions not just words; that benefits from higher levels of engagement and enthusiasm and as a result can deliver more efficient and valuable work while extracting full potential from its transformational opportunities?
​
The future is only bright if we take this seriously. If we carry on and don’t deal with this issue then we fail our people. And if we do that, it really doesn’t matter what else we succeed at, our industry is lost.
​
We can do something about this and we should.
Dermot Knight is a long time legal transformation advocate and a Director at the legal analytics consultancy, NAVIGATE LEGAL