Remote control: How remote working keeps clients and lawyers happy

31 Jul 2014News

Simon Harper explores how law firms and in-house counsel are turning to a remote workforce to help them do more for less

Key takeaway points:

Law isn’t that different…
…but a change of mindset has to occur
Infrastructure is key
A sense of community is still important
Quality is paramount
Remote working attracts new, different talent
Relationships must be prioritised
Technology is critical
Experiment with different models
Customise for the right fit

"In thirty years' time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed." Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group

Few industries are as wedded to physical presenteeism as the legal industry. It's industry folklore that jackets are left on the backs of chairs to give the impression that we lawyers work even longer hours in our offices than we already do. We like to be permanently and visibly available, and assume that our clients feel comforted by that.

Remote work has historically only been allowed when there is a crisis in the form of a burst pipe, infectious disease or dead relative. For many in law, it has been seen as a soft option, where you have one eye on your legal work and the other on the latest boxset.

But there is a remote revolution in progress. There's an increasing realisation that a remote workforce has its advantages. That working free from the distractions of an office can increase rather than decrease productivity. That remote workers don't take up valuable city office space. That much of legal work can in fact be done extremely effectively without face-to-face contact.

Here's the story of how remote working has gone from strength to strength in the legal market and what we've learnt along the way.

In the beginning

When Lawyers on Demand (LOD) was founded by Berwin Leighton Paisner in 2007, the notion of high-quality freelance lawyering was pretty radical.¹ It required a complete change of mindset for our in-house clients, who had solely relied on their law firms for secondees or on recruitment agencies for interim lawyers. Back then, we only offered our freelance lawyers on an on-site secondment basis, as this was a far-reaching enough proposal in itself.

Happily for us, over recent years both in-house counsel and law firms have become increasingly comfortable with, and hungry for, alternative ways of working and of resourcing their teams. Freelance lawyers are now an acceptable and even desirable way to flex legal teams without employee overheads.

The next big thing

However, we aren't over the hump yet. Legal budgets have continued to be squeezed in ongoing tough market conditions and clients still need more for less. So, early last year we began looking at how we could deliver a lower cost, more flexible option for our clients that could help them to achieve their aims.

At that time, we also found that we were being contacted by a host of talented lawyers, who were eager to work with us but who lived outside of the southeast of England, where most of our clients were based. Many had trained and worked in London before moving away, and offered high levels of experience and technical expertise.

We were keen to devise a way to harness the talents of these lawyers who still wanted the quality work that our clients could offer. Also, many of our existing LOD lawyers were also enquiring more about working in different locations or combining their legal work with other pursuits as part of a portfolio career.

Law in the cloud

Research by Stanford University has found that remote workers are 13 per cent more productive, take fewer sick days and enjoy a quieter working environment than their commuting colleagues.²

We decided to explore a remote working service, LOD On Call, where LOD lawyers could work with clients on high quality work, regardless of their location. We took inspiration from the technology and creative industries, where remote working has long been established as a route to access the skills of the brightest and best in a cost effective way.

Unlike our LOD On Site service, where LOD lawyers are hired on a secondment basis, On Call lawyers could be assigned for a few hours a week or month and switched on and off without much notice. As they were working remotely and saving on their commute, we could also offer On Call lawyers at very competitive rates.

It seemed like a win-win situation: the lawyers themselves would get the ultimate flexibility of working when and where they wished, without sacrificing quality of work; and our clients would get flexible yet cost-effective access to legal expertise, without having to keep them continuously busy.

The pilot process

We had a number of forward-thinking clients who had used our On Site lawyers and were keen to trial On Call. We handpicked some experienced lawyers from around the UK who we thought had the right proactive attitudes to make it work.

Pilot assignments ranged from virtual secondments with in-house teams to business-as-usual overflow work to additional capacity for our law firm clients. We were very encouraged by the breadth and depth of work that our remote lawyers were assigned.

The results were conclusive - remote working worked. Lawyers were happy and motivated and clients were embracing remote working in their numbers, telling us that using remote lawyers gave them the lower cost, more flexible option that they needed to cope with unpredictable workloads.

We formally launched the service more widely in June 2013 and have since grown our team of On Call lawyers to nearly 80; around a third of our assignments at any given time are now with remote lawyers.

Remote working myths

As with any service that challenges the norm, we met some scepticism at first from clients for a variety of reasons that we challenged and overcame. Here are some of the myths that we had to bust in our piloting process.

1. Law is different

There is a common (mis)conception that legal work is completely unique. Over the past few years, alternative legal service providers have proven that much of legal work is ripe for disaggregation and that more routine legal work, in particular, can be done in much more cost effective ways. And, let's face it, many of us lawyers aren't exactly extroverts!

That said, sometimes face-to-face contact is deemed necessary, for example in-house teams building relationships with business units. That's why we always encourage our remote lawyers to meet with their clients occasionally, especially at the beginning of the relationship.

Plus, of course, we continue to offer our LOD On Site service. By being canny about deciding the best way to handle specific projects and using remote working where it is suitable, you can increase your profitability and efficiency.

2. Only lower quality lawyers work remotely

The demographic of lawyers choosing to work remotely has changed dramatically over the past few years. Our remote lawyers are City trained, experienced lawyers looking to access high-quality legal work in more flexible ways. These are lawyers who can take on complex work and carry it out at a very high level.

There are many and varied benefits of remote working to lawyers - from the obvious cutting out of the commute and making time for other interests to being free from office distractions and politics. The freedom of remote working can be a compelling attraction to talent; we find that our LOD lawyers who work remotely are very motivated by the fact that they have control over where they work.

3. How will I know if they are working?

The joy of remote working is that output can be judged on actual work done rather than by hours spent in the office. Lawyers that are best suited to remote working are those who are motivated self-starters in the first place, who are good communicators and who can work autonomously.

When we interview our remote lawyers, we ensure that they have all of these traits so that our clients can trust their lawyers to get on with the job at hand.

4. Only an office is secure

This is a question of getting the right technology in place. There is no reason why working remotely should be any less secure - you just need to make sure that you are properly and professionally set up (see box: Investing in remote working)

Investing in remote working

Making remote working work to its full potential requires some real investment – investment which we’ve taken on so that our clients don’t have to. These are some of the areas we’ve worked hard to build:

Technology. We’ve had to invest heavily in supporting our remote lawyers with the right cloud technology platform and software to help us to interact with them virtually.
Infrastructure. We’ve added in additional layers of support to ensure that remote working has no effect on response times and service levels when multiple lawyers are involved on a particular project.
Talent attraction and retention. Traditional recruitment methods are mainly geared towards more traditional ways of working. We’ve had to think creatively to access those lawyers who are interested in working differently. We’ve also had to spend time structuring a fair remuneration system for lawyers who are geographically dispersed.
Community. We’ve found that, whilst many of our lawyers work remotely, they still want to feel part of a community. We work hard to engage with them on a regular basis, both virtually and, where possible, in person, to make them feel a valued part of the LOD team, regardless of their location.

Remote transaction teams

With LOD On Call proving to be a success and the challenges overcome, we examined the feedback from our clients. It seemed that there was a new need, particularly from our law firm clients, for teams of remote lawyers to carry out the more routine work on complex transactions.

So, we put together dedicated teams across a few practice areas, beginning with real estate. With multiple lawyers involved, we also added in the option of an LOD engagement manager to work with clients to design an efficient process and help to manage delivery of the project.

One of the first users of the transaction teams was a leading international law firm. It was in need of additional support on a £200m+ real estate transaction it was working on but could not resource internally. The firm had used LOD's On Site and On Call lawyers for previous assignments and now needed a team of skilled real estate lawyers to work as part of a large due diligence team acting for an institutional investor on the purchase of a portfolio of industrial properties.

We quickly resourced a team of seven experienced real estate lawyers. They worked remotely over a two-month period on tasks including reviewing and reporting on a range of occupational leases, ensuring that any material issues were highlighted with the on-site law firm team as soon as possible.

The transaction team was also responsible for raising enquiries with the seller's solicitor and summarising the key aspects of each property in the client's preferred form of report. The deal was completed within a short timeframe, with the bulk of the due diligence being done over the Christmas period. The international law firm is now using the LOD transactions team for a number of deals.

Making remote working work

Agree specific working hours upfront. Full-time, part-time or ad-hoc, remote working can be configured in a number of flexible ways. It’s critical, however, to make sure that expectations are agreed upon as to when and how often the remote lawyers will be working.
Ensure you have the right technology in place. Make sure the lawyers working remotely have the right technology to work as seamlessly as if they were in the office. They must invest in their own quality hardware, but also be supported by efficient systems. Use Skype instead of conference calls to ease communication.
Keep in touch. Make sure remote workers are not ‘out of sight, out of mind’ – it’s up to both remote workers and their managers to keep lines of communication open and to make a daily effort to keep each other and team members up to date.

The future

Our experience is that remote working has gained real traction in the legal industry, faster than even we had anticipated. We hope that this is set to continue as legal teams look to alternative ways of working to make their budgets stretch further.

We expect that there will soon be a new tranche of higher value, more complex legal work that will become widely accepted as ideal for handling remotely and that it will be carried out by a growing army of talented, experienced lawyers dispersed around the country and the world.

Simon Harper is co-founder of Berwin Leighton Paisner's alternative legal services provider Lawyers On Demand (www.lod.co.uk)

Endnotes

1. See 'Flexible service', Simon Harper, Managing Partner, Vol.14 Issue 4, Dec 2011/Jan 2012

2. 'Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment', Nicholas Bloom et al, Stanford University and Beijing University, February 2013