Edge International is on the Ground in India
0 Comments - Posted By Rob Millard In Mega-Trends , Strategic People Issues , Tools for Strategists , , , , , , , , , , , - Permalink -
Ms. Juhi Garg
Edge International is delighted to announce the addition of Ms. Juhi Garg. Juhi holds a Masters in Business Law from India's foremost law school, the National Law School of India in Bangalore and is also a graduate in media from Delhi University. With Juhi on our team, Edge International will offer our full traditional range of consulting services to Indian law firms. In addition, we will be focusing on assisting Indian law firms with their strategies to develop business in the western hemisphere and to assist western firms wishing to take advantage of the burgeoning Indian legal services market.
India is a legal services market that is attracting global attention, for good reason. It produces more law school graduates annually than any other country. Its impact with outsourced legal services in western markets has been significant and this is set to grow exponentially as western clients seek to cut legal costs in the face of the current economic recession. Also, upcoming legislation is expected to significantly relax restrictions on foreign firms and lawyers practicing in India. Several international firms have already entered into arrangements with Indian law firms in anticipation of this change.
See Juhi's biography by clicking here.
PUNCHLINE: If you are a firm based in Australia, New Zealand Canada the US or UK (or anywhere else) and are interested in exploring an arrangement with an Indian law firm and you would like counsel on the selection and vetting processes, please allow me, Juhi Garg or Gerry Riskin to explore helping you.
Surviving the Slide
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It's not often that no fewer than three of my friends are simultaneously featured in the leading article of a journal, but that is the case with Gerry Riskin, Karen MacKay and Merrilyn Astin Tarlton in the current edition of LawPro, which is a Canadian journal that features "information and updates on the Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company malpractice liability insurance program and policy; the risk management and claims prevention resources from practicePRO; and TitlePLUS and title insurance."
Gerry, Karen and Merrilyn together with Ed Flitton collaborated in a round table that resulted in an article titled:
Surviving the Slide: What firms should and shouldn't do to ride out the economic storm.
Hat tip to Dan Pinnington at Slaw for the heads-up.
Post Mortems
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Post mortems are never pleasant to read but if they specify the maladies that caused death in sufficient detail then sometimes they can be useful for others wishing to avoid the same fate.
Here's a good one from law.com titled "Why Heller Died." Unsurprisingly, it suggests that although the final cause of death was "mass partner defections," the root causes were more complex. To wit:
Putting "avoiding hurting peoples' feelings" ahead of good strategy. (In 2004, when they decided not to change the terms of their partnership agreement to allow managing partners to serve a third term and so removed an excellent leader [Barry Levin] from the head of the firm.)
Botching its downsizing. (What should ALWAYS be a quick, objective and clinical exercise dragged on for months as partners jockeyed to try to prevent "favorites" from being fired. The result was severe trauma as people waited to see who would get the axe and in the end, the cut was compromised and not deep enough to restore profitability.)
Failing to communicate when it changed direction. (In 2006, the firm developed an aggressive new strategy to grow its way to profitability, aiming to expand to 1500 lawyers worldwide. Offices were opened in Shanghai and London, the US operations took on laterals. But how the expansion strategy was actually going to work was never articulated by the firm's leadership. So partners starting voting with their feet.)
Fundamental basics!
Putting collegiality ahead of business sense, botching a downsizing exercise and failing to communicate a compelling vision of how a radical strategic change is going to work. I could name several more firms that I know that have fallen or could easily fall prey to the same foibles. Is yours one of them? If so, then what are you going to DO about it? Now .... before it's too late.
Steam, Electricity and Law Firm Management
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At 3 PM on September 4 1882, Lower Manhattan was transformed as Thomas Edison’s spectacular, cutting edge electric illuminating system went into operation. The American public was astounded at this revolutionary new energy supply. Clearly, it was only a matter of time before it would take over as the primary energy source in industry too.
So it did, of course, but four decades later, only half of America’s factories were fully electrified. Why did it take so long for a clearly superior technology to establish itself?
The reason is simple: The very best, state-of-the-art factories at the time (the product of a century of refinement and innovation through the course of the industrial revolution,) were designed in such a way that electricity provided little advantage. Unlike today’s factories, where every piece of machinery has it own electric motor, factories at the end of the 19th Century were designed around central energy sources. Machines were powered by elaborate systems of pulleys and shafts called “group drives” that transferred energy from the central source (typically a water turbine or steam engine) throughout the factory. The most efficient way of doing this was to minimize the length of the drives. Factories, as a result, were multi-storey buildings with one or more shafts per floor, each driving a group of machines. The entire factory, in effect, was designed around the limitations of the power supply.
So what use was this newfangled electrical energy? Initially, it was used to provide lighting and steam/water turbines were replaced with central electrical motors. Electricity only came into its own when a new generation of factory buildings started being built, where machinery could be arranged and rearranged to optimize production line efficiency. These were typically sprawling, single storey plants. Small, efficient electrical motors powered each machine independently. Electrical wires replaced the cumbersome group drives. There were no more awkward steps and elevators to navigate between floors.
Replacing the factory buildings was a slow and expensive process, however. One does not simply through out such capital investment and the know-how built up over a century or more.
This little case study provides a valuable lesson in how innovation progresses in law firms too. Many of the great ideas out there today provide little advantage to law firms as they are currently constituted.
The Chairman of a very prominent national US law firm mentioned in a conversation that we were having recently that except for the computers, there is little difference in a law office today, to what existed 50 years ago. The arrangement of offices, structural hierarchies and suchlike are still “just as they always have been.” Other practices like hourly billing and aversion to alternative work arrangements would fall into the same category. This is more than just generational differences in perception between Baby Boomers / Gen Xs / Gen Ys. The changes that people talk about today are challenging the very foundation of the way in which legal services are being provided to clients.
The good news is that just as electricity was around for 40+ years before it was fully adopted, so many of the solutions to the problems facing law firms today are also out there, in plain sight, in the market. The challenge is not so much in finding the solution, as in overcoming the corporate inertia of the firm’s business model, to get those solutions implemented.
Billing by the hour a problem? Fine … replace it with value pricing or risk sharing models. But how does one actually do that with the same ease as filling in time sheets? (My view on the billable hour is that it is an excellent example of something that will eventually go the way of the dodo, but first the "factories need to be reinvented.")
“Generation Y’s” want flexible work arrangements and a work/lifestyle balance? Fine … let them work from home and other remote locations. But how does one actually do that while maintaining teamwork and service quality?
You want to be able to harness the combined intellect of your firm whenever necessary, to craft strategy, to develop virtual client teams, to share knowledge? Fine … create an online collaborative system using one of the emerging Web 2.0 internet based tools (see here and here.) But how does one actually do that in an environment where there is deep suspicion about such tools?
Performance levels differ widely amongst individual lawyers and sometimes, truth be told, some (ever more expensive) junior associates do better work and are more valuable to the firm than some of their senior colleagues. Fine … develop a system that easily measures performance and links it to reward in a way that is seen to be transparent and fair. But, how does one actually do that where the hierarchy of partners and associates/assistants developed over a century is heavily entrenched, true performance is difficult to measure and compensation discussions are often a source of considerable stress?
Some firms are quicker than others in developing ways to implement solutions. Market changing revolutions that effectively deconstruct the environmental parameters of a profession, like those that will follow final enactment of the Legal Services Bill in England and Wales will catalyse a whole slew of innovations and firms elsewhere would do well to watch those in England carefully. Likewise developments in Australia. Sometimes, there may be some “first mover advantage” for firms that adopt new practices quicker. More often that not, though, it is the “second mover” that gains the real advantage. Innovations are typically adopted sequentially. First: by small, fringe firms with entrepreneurial leaders and less corporate inertia. Second: by market leader firms that can afford to “try” something new without the change (or possible failure) being threatening. Last: by the mainstream in the middle, who are driven (rightly, in most cases) by precedents.
If you are a leader in a mainstream firm, the key is therefore to constantly be a thoughtful observer of what your competitors are doing and what your people are saying. Then, to have the courage to shamelessly “steal” the best ideas that others come up with and build them into your firm.
Hat tip to Alan Greenspan, who wrote of Edison and the adoption of electricity in industrial America in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
, on page 474-475.Jerks in the Workplace
0 Comments - Posted By Rob Millard In Strategic People Issues , , , , - Permalink -
The latest McKinsey Quarterly (a journal of strategy and management published by McKinsey & Company) has an excerpt titled Building the Civilized Workplace, from a book by Stanford Professor Robert Sutton.
Jerks and bullies in the workplace are a widespread problem. All too often, those exhibiting the behavior do so because they feel secure in their seniority or fee-earning credentials. (Which is not to say that high-performers are always jerks. Usually, quite the opposite is the case. Not tolerating poor performance, for instance, is not the same as being a jerk.) Research shows that jerks and bullies not only hinder recruiting and retention but also raise levels of client churn and damage reputations.
Firms that harbor jerks may also suffer from reduced levels of creativity and innovation, as well as impaired or dysfunctional cooperation, within and outside the organization. That is no small matter in an increasingly networked world. Continue Reading
Harnessing the Phoenix
0 Comments - Posted By Rob Millard In "Off the Wall" Insights , Competitive Intelligence , Culture , Innovation , Inter-Generational Issues , Leadership , Strategy 101 , Tools for Strategists , , , , , , , - Permalink -
Surely the most dramatic mythological example of rebirth and renewal, is the Phoenix (or "Firebird.") It is found in ancient Egyptian mythology, various myths derived from it and, most recently, in Professor Albus Dumbledore's study in Harry Potter.
Said to live for 500, 1461 or for 12594 years (depending on the source), the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible.
Imagine, for a moment, that you were able to regenerate your firm in this way. Miraculously, you were able to instantly transform it into an organization of the highest performance with, what's more, that performance being sustained.
Continue Reading