Having an innovation manager has become fashionable. This is even the case in the legal sector, although at law firms the particular idiosyncrasies of the profession are perhaps not taken into account when appointments are made
The brand new innovation directors, whether they come from other industries or from other jobs and functions in the firm itself, will have to overcome various obstacles if they are to achieve their purpose.
Firstly, there is the sector’s traditional resistance to change and the fact that lawyers, who in most cases account for 80% of the workforce at law firms, are the ones who do all the production work for the service, and their salaries are directly linked to that production. This is a substantial difference compared to what might be the case in the industries where these new managers come from, and it often makes their work more difficult.
By contrast, innovation managers from the sector know the situation better than anyone, but they also face the challenge of providing their new job with content without any kind of previous experience, with few examples to follow and with little specific sector-based training. They exist in a vacuum surrounded by a sea of doubts.
Implementing innovation culture
Few law firms are fortunate enough to have a visionary like Steve Jobs, capable of imagining the future and successfully getting ahead of client needs. How can they innovate, then? Innovation does not happen overnight. It requires practice and for that a method is needed.
Practice takes time – one of the most valuable and limited assets at any firm – and it also requires the dedication of the partnership’s professionals: its main asset. The combination is highly complex because nowadays what most firms sell is the time their professionals devote to advising their clients. It is like asking Microsoft to sell fewer Windows licenses because it needs to innovate.
Whatever business we are in, the short-term view of falling sales – in our case billable hours – does not help the innovation manager to lead with the already difficult exercise of convincing lawyers to do new things, or at least to do things in a different way.
The first question a managing partner of a law firm that wants to innovate must ask is whether the partnership is prepared to invest time in the process. Here, the word invest is used with its full meaning because it means the time spent by the firm’s professionals innovating will help it to improve as a business. It can invest this time in seeking innovative ways of relating to and communicating with its clients; in making changes so that it works more efficiently; in thinking up new ways of finding and retaining talent; or in dealing with the task of digital transformation. These actions correspond to real concerns passed on to us by our clients.
The innovation cell
When a firm makes a decision to invest time and some money in innovation, the most important thing is to maximize the investment by finding the right methodology to speed up the process of generating ideas and putting them into practice. Agile methodologies are particularly suitable for this. As consultants, we have helped teams of lawyers put forward various solutions for specific challenges, and even create prototypes, in a single morning.
One of the key aspects of getting innovation methodologies to work is the selection of the people who are going to take part in the project – what we call the “innovation cell”.
The innovation manager must first detect the profiles within the firm who show a more open attitude to change, who are more creative or curious or who simply like the idea of forming part of the process of transforming the firm. This should be an open process that any professional from the firm can join in with, regardless of their level of seniority, experience or even the operational area they belong to.
If the working teams cut across departments and can include, for example, a partner and a junior lawyer, they will offer different views, needs, realities and a wide variety of ideas on a single aspect. If you limit this cross-departmental aspect so that only partners or associates take part in the process, you will not make it easier to subsequently implement innovation among professionals who might feel excluded and whose voices have not been listened to, despite the fact that, in the pyramid system of law firms, they form the largest group in the organization.
One of the ways, for example, of approaching the process of selecting professionals is by organizing talks to be attended voluntarily about innovation and digital transformation at the firm. The opinions of professionals about the challenges facing the center can also be collected and questions can be asked openly about their interest in forming part of an “innovation cell” – the seed for innovation culture at the firm.
A sense of urgency
Putting across to the firm’s professionals the challenges facing clients and lawyers themselves, and the changes happening in their environment, and explaining what other firms are doing, and what clients expect and demand of their advisers, will help create the sense of urgency you need.
That sense of urgency will arouse firms from the lethargy in which they have sunk, create the need to change and stimulate the imagination needed to cope successfully with the creative and conception phase of the innovation process that comes next.
When the incipient innovation team is urged into action by the need for change, it will have to be given tools for the job that ensure the best possible results in short periods of time. The agile methodologies we have already mentioned are the most appropriate for this.
Having reached this point, the innovation team will be ready to face its first challenges during a dynamic and motivating but relaxed and cheerful day of hard work. Having professionals experienced in applying agile methodologies leading these sessions and helping the teams move forward in the right direction can be decisive in achieving the best performance from these innovation workshops.
Conclusion
At a time when talking about innovation is in fashion, it is perhaps necessary to stop for a few moments to analyze what it means and how to approach a process that helps innovation managers overcome not only the obstacles common to all industries but also those specific to the legal sector to ensure a successful path to change.
Innovation requires time and resources. The firm’s management must be in no doubt about this if they really want to promote innovation. Innovation managers will have to identify and select the most representatively cross-departmental team they can. Making it cross-departmental will improve acceptance of changes and speed up their implementation within the organization.
The results will come earlier if a feeling of urgency has been generated around the need and if agile methodologies are followed, such as design thinking for the conceptual stage, orientated towards achieving solutions to very specific problems or situations. The solutions devised are put into practice using the lean start-up technique, another agile methodology designed to construct products and services in very short development cycles, allowing constant feedback on the project and great capacity for variation and adaptation to market responses.