The end of email: Why law firms should embrace social business

It would be logical to suppose that a law firm – as a people and knowledge-based business – would stand to realise substantial benefits from the deployment of social business technology. Yet, in contrast to the corporate world, large US law firms have been notably slow in taking note of the social business revolution now underway.

A range of arguments have been made by lawyers and law firm managers as to why social business is ill suited to the needs and requirements of large firms:

1. our lawyers don’t have time for Twitter or Facebook;
2. social business is designed to for huge corporations with many thousands of employees – our law firm is too small to need something like this;
3. putting our documents up in the cloud will make our information less secure and expose our clients to risk;
4. this is a law firm – we don’t want to run a chat room where anyone has a chance to speak up out of turn;
5. our lawyers will never be inclined or induced to share useful information gratuitously; and
6. let’s be zealous, if not always transparent, in the pursuit of our clients’ interests.

Let’s consider each of these arguments
in turn.

1. Insufficient time

This is perhaps the most frequent complaint by professional staff in large law firms: “Our lawyers are too busy practising law. They don’t have time
to tweet.”

This attitude betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of social business by simply conflating the concept with social media. The vast majority of large law firms are still at a rudimentary stage in their understanding of social business opportunities. Their primary focus is on using social media as a marketing channel instead of seeing social business as a way to reinvent legal practise itself.

The irony, of course, is that social business provides tremendous tools for productivity and enhanced efficiency for practising lawyers. Perhaps more so than any other profession, lawyers in the past 20 years have become slaves to email as their medium for internal and external communication.

The essential feature of a social desktop is the communication stream, where information is shared (and easily retrievable) in a continuous message flow that is accessible to all members of a working group. Access to the message group can be granted or denied based on rules established by the users. New groups can be created on the fly without the involvement of IT administrators.

Whether implemented through Chatter, Yammer or any of the other social applications that have become fixtures of corporate desktops, message streams have quickly supplanted email as the preferred method of corporate communication, proving to be a much more effective and efficient means of sharing information across an organisation.

Perhaps if lawyers could begin to wean themselves off their addiction to email, they would discover that they do have time to tweet – and for many more productive tasks as well.

2. Insufficient scale

Without a doubt, the most visible proponents of social business tend to be large multinational corporations such as IBM and Cisco, with hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide.
In that context, the need for an enterprise-wide social network that provides a common, centralised communication platform connecting employees across geographic and organisational barriers appears most compelling. But, size is not the only factor driving the value equation of social business deployment.

A social business is an organisation that strives to develop a smarter approach to the people-centric aspects of work routine. So, irrespective of size, a law firm stands to benefit from a social approach as much as, if not more than, any other organisation, simply because lawyers are immersed in a people-centric business all day long.

Whether for a few hundred or a few thousand professionals, a social business approach can enable an international law firm to streamline operations and communications so that lawyers around the globe and down the halls can work more effectively together.

3. Insufficient security

Given the sensitive and often highly confidential nature of legal documents, large US law firms typically have a strong preference for maintaining technology services in house and for keeping the use of cloud-based services to a minimum.

As a result of this institutional mindset, there is often a negative reaction to the proposed use of a cloud-based service to host internal law firm communications. This negative reaction is often more of a knee-jerk reaction, rather than a response informed by an understanding of the levels of security offered by a particular cloud-based service provider. Moreover, the fact that a law firm’s clients are actively using cloud-based communication services to conduct their own internal business discussions often does not appear to factor into law firms’ own risk analysis.

While security is of course not a secondary concern, it is time for large
law firms to re-examine their overall policies and approach to technology infrastructure in light of the clear trend in the broader corporate marketplace towards cloud-based computing platforms. After all, this trend includes many heavily-regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, where concern for data security is no less important than it is in the legal industry.

4. Insufficient hierarchy

Law firms are not particularly hierarchical organisations, at least compared to large multinational corporations, in which there can often be a dozen or more levels in the chain of command separating the CEO from an entry-level employee. Yet, there
is something quite strange in the way that some large law firms react to the concept of an enterprise social network (ESN).

An ESN is a technology and communication platform that is designed for the express purpose of cutting across hierarchies; this concept has been key to the success of ESNs in large corporations, where it has helped to break down organisational barriers to information exchange and encouraged innovation and creative problem solving. Yet, reception to the concept in some large law firms has been decidedly unenthusiastic.

So, why would an ESN be received with open arms in a very hierarchical organisation like IBM, yet spurned by a relatively flat organisation like a BigLaw partnership? The value proposition of an ESN is clear and compelling in both environments, with lawyers in an international firm standing to benefit just as much from a platform that enables them to locate knowledge and expertise wherever it happens to reside within
the firm.

However, no matter how flat the organisational chart might be, large law firms are nonetheless often very highly stratified in terms of status ranking. Often, senior partners have little or no interest in hearing mid-level associates speak out
of turn.

In this respect, the concept of a social law firm has significance that goes well beyond the realm of technology. A social law firm that deploys an ESN begins to work more effectively by establishing,
and continually reinforcing, a strong sense of parity among all lawyers in
the firm.

5. Insufficient knowledge-sharing

Hoarding of knowledge is a tendency evident in many professions, but it seems to run rampant in the legal market because lawyers generate documents in enormous volumes and mastery of arcane information is often perceived to be the key to success.

Large law firms devote substantial energy toward counteracting this hoarding instinct through institutional efforts to promote knowledge sharing, including formal on-boarding, in-house training programmes and practice groups.

In the past decade, these firms have also devoted substantial efforts to building knowledge management systems that attempt to catalogue or use natural language search algorithms to make hoarded information more accessible across the firm. But, these efforts have met with only limited success.

A social law firm takes a different approach to tackling the problem of knowledge hoarding. A social law firm does deploy technology, with a suite of tools such as real time message streams and expert locaters, in some respects similar to traditional knowledge management.

But, a social law firm also places an equal, if not greater, emphasis on the human element. The tools and technology used to construct an ESN only succeed to the extent that the organisation itself evidences a strong commitment to encouraging and rewarding collaboration as a fundamental institutional value.

Collaboration is by no means inimical to a large and sophisticated modern-day law firm: it has always been an important part of the traditional ethos underlying any good professional partnership. But, for numerous large US law firms, the notion of collaboration has been deemphasised as part of a culture that has exalted internal competition by pegging financial compensation to the principle of ‘eat
what you kill’.

The problem facing law firms today is that success in a networked world is increasingly becoming a function of collaboration. Information hoarding is a growing obstacle to organisational success. Sharing ideas and information across the network is what enables any organisation to respond promptly and effectively to the ever-accelerating pace
of market change.

Sharing – both internally and externally – has become critical. Internal sharing enables effective teamwork among the far-flung members of the enterprise. External sharing drives market perceptions and establishes a position of thought leadership. Both of these are fundamental attributes of a social law firm.

6. Insufficient client focus

The relationship between lawyer and client is no simple thing. Without a doubt, the largest and most frequent source of friction between law firms and clients relates to fees and billing.

In recent years, there has been a move towards fixed fees and alternative billing methods to provide corporate clients with greater predictability on costs. Numerous large law firms have since stepped up their efforts to provide fixed-fee arrangements and are moving towards a more client-centric way of running their businesses. This reorientation is an essential part of operating as a social law firm.

Guy Alvarez is chief engagement officer and Joe Lamport is chief communication officer at Good2bSocial (https://good2bsocial.com). This article is drawn from the authors’ Managing Partner report Outperform the Competition: Business Strategies for the Social Law Firm, which publishes in June 2014.