Collaborative culture: The in-house perspective on collaboration in law firms

Corporate counsel expect law firms to demonstrate internal knowledge sharing and collaborative behaviours, says Susan Hackett 

Collaboration is a hot topic for in-house legal departments working to drive change.
A growing number of corporate counsel believe that improved collaboration returns better results, especially as departments focus greater attention on deploying value-based initiatives. Effective collaboration hinges on the organisation's ability to leverage the combined power of a team,
not just the siloed talents or partial attributes of each individual who works there - and that's true for the in-house
and outside counsel serving the client.

Collaboration is not a skill set that's easily taught in the legal workplace:
it requires lawyers to change the way that they work so as to advance the larger group's success. Lawyers who are asked to collaborate with others must decide that their success will not be based on how smart or successful they are (working alone), but whether they can use their smarts to multiply the value of everyone's efforts and lead other talented people to not only solve problems but also accelerate success.

What most in-house leaders will tell you is that lawyers are unfortunately trained to think about and solve problems entirely on their own - they often distrust processes that force them to rely on the judgement and work product of others or on skill sets or disciplines that they aren't familiar with. Lawyers have a million reasons why they don't want to change to accommodate the shared processes and workflows of delivering work product as a team.

But complex problems faced by today's corporate clients require multidisciplinary solutions and creative thinking. As a result, legal counsel (both in-house and external) will need to reach beyond their well of competent legal analysis and employ collaborative teaming to deliver savvier business solutions.

Key impediments

So, what should law firms do with lawyers who like the ideas behind new ways of practicing, but are wary of the processes they have to adopt or the changes they will need to make in order to implement these ideas? They will need to break down, assess and address the four key impediments to collaborative work,
as highlighted by corporate counsel.

1. Complexify everything

Many lawyers are never happier than when they succeed in making a simple process into a complicated 19-stage ordeal, complete with a list of caveats and conditions, and the need for an interpreter.

Jeff Carr, general counsel at FMC Technologies in Houston (and one of the legal value movement's leading proponents) puts it like this: "Lawyers make money from 'complexification'.
So it's really hard for them to focus
on process simplification and how to boil
legal issues down to yes-or-no solutions that directly address a client's problem."

"That's why I think the biggest challenge is not figuring out the best tools to promote collaboration: it's the discipline required of each person on the team to think differently, work differently and produce results by simplifying and streamlining the way that they work in a manner that rewards them for collaborating with others who are performing complimentary roles," he concludes.

Carr's team works to ensure individual lawyers contribute the pieces that they are best positioned to provide as members of the team, while Carr carries the corresponding responsibility to be relentless in mandating and rewarding collaborative behaviour (or punishing those who don't collaborate). The result is a better team,
a more efficient process and continuously-improving solutions for the client.

It is critical for teams implementing value-based practices to boil down work process into simple stages or tasks. After that, the team needs to assess who does what best, or what training or resources
are needed to improve performance.
The idea is to capture what is the same in every matter, to perfect it in its simplest form and then to assign that work so as to minimise replication of effort and maximise application of experience and talent.
This allows lawyers to focus on what truly requires their attention - that which is
not routine.

Law firms should (over-)communicate targets and establish metrics to measure lawyers' results and drive continuous improvement. It's critical for leadership
in the firm and the law department to use such metrics to evaluate performance (such as costs control, cycle time, results achieved and service excellence) based on each person's success in conforming to the client's requirements and the improved results delivered.

2. Lone wolf syndrome

Many lawyers like to work alone or in small homogenous groups of similarly-minded colleagues. This makes it easier for them to come to decisions they like and harder for people to question the resulting legal advice. In a company like Google, which highly values both collaboration and independent thinking, legal team managers pay a lot of attention to ensuring their lawyers drive collaborative results, especially when working in highly creative but siloed
work environments.

"Something that is very special about our corporate culture is our commitment
to the power of individual contributions - it's what makes us 'Googley.' Googley people bring creativity and passion to their work; they communicate openly; they thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment; they roll up their sleeves
and get things done," says Mary O'Carroll, head of law department operations at Google's headquarters in California.

"We expect great results from talented people. But for the leadership of a law department that also values and prioritises collaboration, this creates 'interesting' management, operational and consistency challenges. In order to advance Google's incredibly diverse agenda as a team, we need to drive not only unit or matter solutions, but also better overall law department and corporate results. So we drive active collaboration, we encourage people to be curious about what others are doing and we look for ways to embrace and benefit from our diversity, rather than just 'being smart'."

O'Carroll notes that the challenge for her lawyers isn't in their small practice groups. "Within our teams, we communicate and share really well. I know what everyone in my group is working on: up, down, left and right, and that's mostly because highly collaborative people are the kind of talent Google Legal looks to hire.

"But communicating with the other groups over our small group's wall or in that other building or business unit is where collaboration and communication becomes challenging, requiring mindful efforts - that's when it becomes increasingly important to collaborate to produce higher performance and innovation for the global legal agenda," she says.

As a result, O'Carroll has implemented a variety of different initiatives aimed at improving cross-group and in-house/external counsel collaboration, including:

• internal and external websites and newsletters;

• engaged rotations to allow team members to experiment with and learn the work common to other parts of the company and operations around the world; and

• regular 'hangouts' (Google videoconferencing) so that legal team members meet often and learn more about what others are doing.

"We know that when we work together, we produce better results - in our group silos, and across the company," she adds.

When working on teams, law firms should encourage consensual decision making, replicable and demonstrably-efficient processes, and knowledge sharing to inform each other's practices. This is tough for a lot of law firms to do internally, let alone externally with clients, but it is part of the changing ways that clients are encouraging their lawyers to work.

None of this is facilitated - or even possible - when lawyers work alone (even if they sit in a room full of people). It is not enough to build systems and platforms and hope that people will use them; you have to work hard to exercise the connections (and measure/capture the interactions) that you mandate as required between internal and external team members.

 

3. Distrust of others' way of working

Lawyers aren't trained via a commonly-shared approach to craft legal service delivery or solve legal problems; they usually learn their way of working from the environment and mentors who trained them. Thus, when it's time to collaborate, it's often hard to get lawyers to focus and agree upon a single approach to legal work; many can't even agree upon or define the results they want to drive. This kind of 'I do it my way' thinking inevitably leads to disrespect for how anyone else works, as well as distrust of the value of teamwork.

Cisco's law department knowledge practice leader, Steve Harmon, offers the following when describing his legal team's success in developing commonly-shared processes and knowledge platforms from which all work is done in a consistent and measured fashion: "As more legal departments and firms get away from the idea that all of law is an artistic practice and begin to focus more time on their true value to their client, which is the better enablement of the business they serve,
then we'll all be making progress."

At Cisco, Harmon and his team have focused on process-managing legal services. This means that, after a careful examination of everything that goes into providing some kind of legal service to the client, a replicable and trained process - preferably supported by technology -
is used to drive efficient, consistent and measured results.

Harmon and his general counsel, Mark Chandler, have little tolerance for lawyers who believe that each matter requires the daily reinvention of the wheel or benefits from their own individual brand of getting things done the way they like to do them.

"Of course some of the work that lawyers do requires judgement, novel thinking and even 'art,' but not most of it.
My goal is to free our lawyers to spend time on the good stuff, by using better processes and including other talent who can do much of the job better, faster and cheaper than the lawyers."

For Cisco, there's no question about sacrificing quality; the in-house legal team believes that its collaborative process and talent focus improves its results. Harmon's view is that "legal will finally be viewed as a top contributor to the business once we free up our time to focus on what the business needs us to do (and not just what legal knows it has to get done). Every other group of highly-trained professionals has come to this point in their professional development and passed through. Lawyers need to do the same."

Thus, it's very important to Cisco to look at technologies that not only support or enable its current practices, but also at disruptive technologies that allow it to harness the benefits of data, technologies and knowledge practices, shedding work that not only could - but should - be done by others or even automated.

Collaboration is therefore closely linked to creating teams that have been carefully composed to execute defined work. Highly valued lawyers at Cisco spend their time and attention on what the legal team alone can do - making best use of their highly experienced and institutionally-knowledgeable legal brains.

4. Sceptical and risk-averse attitudes

Lawyers are trained to find fault with whatever is presented to them and then
to seek to mitigate or eliminate the risks.
So, when they work as a team, their tendency is to be critical - to tear ideas down, rather than to embrace new ideas or find ways to build a better mousetrap. Indeed, most lawyers really don't like the idea of innovation at all. What they crave
is not recognition for doing something new, but the satisfaction of and recognition of challenging work done well.

When asked about the power of collaboration, the general counsel at a Fortune 500 company (who chose to speak on the condition of anonymity) focused immediately on the personal and interpersonal issues that he believes are core to his department's successes.

"It's not that everyone in the department should love everyone else (although that would be nice!) - it's that lawyers go to work to be challenged and valued for what they do - they crave recognition for their contributions. That could work against collaborative practices if not channelled into more productive ways to work. So, at the end of the day, one of the most important things that I do as general counsel is to model the collaborative behaviour that I expect my team to employ."

As a result, this general counsel:

• travels constantly to many of his company's offices to personally meet with everyone on the legal team (not just the in-house lawyers);

• listens to and shares broadly what he's learned or benchmarked that others inside the company, at firms or in his peer network are doing to get work done better;

• repeatedly underscores how much he appreciates everything that his team contributes to the well-oiled machine providing legal services to the corporate client, and includes both internal staff and external providers; and

• makes it a point to listen to his team members talk about what they're working on and what's going well or could be improved on, so that he can reward those who solve the most difficult problems in a collaborative fashion at evaluation time.

"I try every day to ensure that everyone is looking for the next way that they can work on something really interesting and challenging - something that will earn them more of that recognition and reward. And, in my department, those 'plum' projects are team projects that require cross-department and department-firm collaboration," he says.

Explaining this practice further, the general counsel says that the most challenging legal and business projects require lawyers to rely heavily on the skills and contributions of their colleagues, finding ways to make their teams deliver better and more efficient results, or benchmark best ideas at work in the marketplace. When team members are motivated to collaborate to ensure that all boats rise together, they automatically drive continuous and meaningful improvements in the way that they work.

Improving collaboration

The really innovative developments in the legal market today aren't ideas for new fee structures, staffing options, litigation financing or data analytics; while those practices are important, they're just the latest good practices. Real change is driven by leaders who enable lawyers to recognise the value of changing their behaviours and improving their results by working better with others and learning how to perform their jobs more collaboratively. Accordingly, the challenge is change: motivating and teaming very smart, risk averse and stubborn people (most of whom have made their fortunes doing work the way they have always done it), not just the implementation of a new product or process.

How will you encourage your lawyers - and those they (should) work with -
to be more collaborative in their practices? How will you measure the increased results driven by your team's efforts and find ways to replicate those successes in other parts of your organisation? How will you learn to harness the value that others bring to your work and that you can bring to theirs?

Improved lawyer collaboration (and not just the products or practices that rely on it) is the most significantly transformative and difficult change the profession faces. It requires more than temporary or ad hoc partnership between competitors, adversaries or siloed workers performing legal roles. It requires lawyers to see their future achievements and their clients'
best service as entirely dependent on
their ability to work well with and define their success based on the combined aligned strengths of each member of the team, rather than their individual value. This is no mean trick for lawyers, but is critical to the survival of the profession in the increasingly multidisciplinary, virtual and borderless world of business in which we ply our trade.

Susan Hackett is CEO of Legal Executive Leadership (www.lawexecs.com) and was previously general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel for
22 years