Support departments: An essential component of the firm’s success or a drain on the drawings?

Lawyers, respected professionals of an earlier, more deferential age, now have to work harder than ever to see off aggressive competitors and meet the expectations of clients. In the search for competitive advantage, Damian Greiff, head of business development at Berrymans Lace Mawer, argues that lawyers could do worse than look at the expertise within their own support departments. They are the ones that can release lawyers from time-consuming work and enable the firm to deliver a more efficient service.

Recent reports from the Nobel Prize judging committee suggested a scarecrow was a strong contender for “being out there on his own in his field”. I wonder how many senior partners would identify with the isolation within the sentiment? Becoming an excellent practitioner in a chosen area of law and primus inter pares within the firm is no longer enough. Now he, and increasingly she, is looked up to by the whole firm for guidance on issues covering finance, business development, marketing, information technology, people management and career development. Once these issues have been sorted out and the needs of clients taken care of, then there may just be some time left for fee-earning.

Law firms are still getting to grips with the realisation that they are commercial enterprises offering legal services. Lest any believe that commercial realities do not apply to them then a recent story doing the rounds should disabuse them. A partner blithely overestimating the importance of his work to the client’s organisation learnt that more was spent on carpets than on legal services. You only have to look at the number of organisations and publications – Managing Partner among them – serving the needs of senior lawyers who, having been told by their firms to manage the business, are looking around for help. In many cases, this can come from those in the firm’s own support departments.

You do not have to be alone

Just how useful support departments are to the firm depends on how they are regarded by its partners. At one end of the spectrum is the view that support departments exist only to do what they are told by the partnership. This perpetuates the myth of omniscient partners who, regardless of their areas of practice, know more about IT than any IT director, more about finance than any finance director and so on. In difficult times, under such a regime, departmental budgets would be the first to be cut to prevent a drain on the drawings. By being purely reactive, the belief that support departments add no value is reinforced.

At the other end of the spectrum is the firm that knows it has to provide more than legal expertise and understands the role support departments can play in supplying this wider service. If a client’s interests are to be truly looked after, why should support departments not have input to the client team? After all, they have experience of working for all the firm’s clients, and may well offer a wider perspective from previous experience outside the legal sector.

Each firm will have its own position along a continuum, at one end support departments operate under conditions of near-feudal servility and at the other, are fully empowered “trusted advisors”, which is, of course, the position the firm wants to achieve with its clients. To spot check where your firm might be on the continuum, try answering the questions below. They represent some typical scenarios.

Where do you fit on the support department continuum?

Do you:

1a) Send a document to the marketing department at lunchtime the day before a pitch and ask for it to be made to look pretty? or
1b) Inform your business development team the moment you hear of an opportunity to pitch for work?

2a) Assume that the client is happy with standard billing procedures? or
2b) Invite someone from the finance department to discuss with the client their preferred billing procedures?

3a) Rely on what your client tells you for your knowledge of their organisation? or
3b) Have information services (library) alert you when your client (or any of their major competitors) is reported in the media?

4a) Instruct human resources (training) that you/one of your team needs presentation skills training for a talk to be given in a few days' time? or
4b) Devise with HR training and development plans focused on the individual's level of client interaction and involvement in promoting the firm?

5a) Tell the IT department to produce a programme that will “talk” to the client's systems? or
5b) Invite the client's IT people to liaise with your IT staff to develop jointly the best procedures for exchanging data?

If your answer is “b” to most questions then you already appreciate how to get value from your support departments. You are alert to the opportunities for support departments to add value to the work you are doing for the firm and its clients by making strong links beyond legal services that clients would find difficult to replicate with another firm.

If your answers are mainly “a” then you are missing opportunities to provide clients with the breadth of service that will mark out your firm as being truly focused on their needs.

Peanuts and monkeys

If you suspect that your support departments are not servicing the firm in the way that they should, it could be because staff have been employed at modest salaries to do a basic job largely unappreciated by the partnership. Once there is general acceptance that support departments should add value, the natural reaction is to beef up these departments through the recruitment of more senior people and higher-calibre staff. This in itself raises some important questions:

Do you engage someone who brings complementary (and possibly new) skills and experience from the commercial world that will benefit the firm?
Are you comfortable that, in certain aspects of their job, these people will know more and be more capable than even the most senior partners within the firm?
Are you prepared to recognise the professionalism of the heads of your support departments? (I, for example, have to complete 35 CPD hours every year to retain my chartered marketer status.)
Do you expect the heads of your support departments, however formally or informally, to train and develop the skills of senior partners and partners with management responsibility?
Do you encourage well argued and well presented alternative views that could benefit the firm, yet challenge the traditional way of doing things?

Many firms are looking beyond the limited pool of those already working in professional services to recruit staff of the right calibre for their support departments. Having attracted high-calibre recruits, there is the question of how to integrate them into the management structures of the firm. Lawyers have a clear path, from training contract to partnership, but no such path exists for ambitious professionals in support departments.

Although partnership for non-lawyers is now possible in England and Wales, as far as I am aware, only one firm has offered partnership on this basis to its head of knowledge management. Partnership is not necessarily an aspirational goal for those in support departments, so firms will have to look carefully at ways to retain those who add value. The simple answer is to offer more money and overlook the fact that many senior people in support departments care about the success of the firm to a far greater degree than some partners might ever imagine of a mere employee.

Winning your spurs, time and time again

While support departments can bring value to law firms and their clients, I recognise that it is incumbent on support departments to demonstrate that value on a regular basis, not only by raising the standard but also by adopting a continuous improvement attitude. To establish itself as a valuable part of the firm, a support department has to achieve two things – trust and time savings.

Just as the success of any partnership depends on the level of trust between its partners, so too does a support department’s effectiveness depends on the trust and confidence it creates among the partnership. If a partnership has to keep a close eye on what support departments are doing beyond normal management reporting then not only will the levels of trust be low but also a resentment will develop because, in addition to fee-earning, some partners will feel they have to do the support departments’ work as well. This is time that partners cannot afford and runs exactly counter to what a support department should do when working effectively.

A well-run support department can benefit individual partners by releasing them from time-consuming work that distracts them from the demands of their clients, managing those client relationships and the general management of the firm. Although some law schools are introducing management topics as part of law degree studies, no one currently in a senior position within their firm entered the legal profession with the ambition or expectation of spending more time managing a business than practising law. Faced with a knotty management issue and chargeable work for clients, the attraction of the latter is obvious.

When partners with management responsibility can trust the heads of support departments, they can confidently delegate much of the day-to-day management of the firm. Knowing that the background work will have been done properly, all that is needed is a gentle hand on the tiller. Consequently, requests for the support department’s input, approval or support in another forum will be looked on more favourably.

While much depends on the individual leading a department and the staff within it, each support department will benefit if it has a champion within the partnership. A champion is one who is convinced of the benefits that an effective department can bring to the firm. Often allocated the role of finance partner, marketing partner or similar, the individual does not necessarily have to be technically proficient but will have an interest and enthusiasm, along with a willingness to learn more.

The champion’s role is that of a facilitator, often addressing concerns within the partnership, lobbying influential partners and advising those within the support department on the best way to present proposals to ensure successful adoption/endorsement by the wider partnership. It would be the most selfless of champions who did not enjoy a little reflected glory from their department delivering higher levels of service.

Success breeds success

For anyone looking to upgrade a support department’s service, either as a new arrival, an incumbent or newly-appointed partner-in-charge/champion, it is essential to achieve a number of “quick wins”. These are not necessarily significant but are highly visible and attract positive comment. The opportunities will vary from one firm to the next so the following examples are highly selective.

Examples of support department ‘quick wins’:

Finance: regular reports produced more quickly, presented more clearly, accompanied by narrative and/or explanatory notes;
Marketing: newsletters/magazines produced more frequently, redesigned to have greater visual appeal, including high-profile external contributors;
HR: improved induction programme, consistent house style for recruitment advertising, preferential fees negotiated with selected recruitment agencies;
IT: development of user-friendly applications that partners see as overcoming system shortfalls, personalised training for notorious technophobes;
Information services: delivery of customised information updates to an individual’s PC, creation of a databank on companies/sectors.

If my experience is anything to go by then successful support departments, once they establish their quick wins, can fall victim to their own success or helpfulness. Once the realisation of what can be done becomes widespread then a latent demand is unlocked. Partners who have good experiences come back for more and those who, for their own reasons, had not made use of a particular department become new users.

This can present two problems. First, the department can subtly move from a position of support to one of substitution, with partners not just delegating but handing over entire responsibility. This can be particularly prevalent in business development and client relationship management where proposals, pitches and presentations cannot be produced to a template.

Second, the consequence of success can be overload, with more expected from the same level of resource. Unless managed, either by controlling the amount of work taken on or by ensuring that staffing matches the work undertaken, any initial gains can be quickly lost as service standards slip and the department’s standing within the partnership falls back to historically low levels. However, these problems are minor in comparison with that of casual indifference.

Working together

Support departments should be natural allies. While there should never be a them-and-us divide, it would be a rare firm indeed where there was never the odd frisson between the lawyers and their professional counterparts in support departments. The latter often have some experience of commercial environments and are used to plann ahead often in one, three and five-year cycles. By working together – particularly when planning resource and equipment requirements – the firm gains from joined-up thinking, which benefits the whole firm not just the practice groups run by the more entrepreneurial lawyers.

Certain departments make more obvious bedfellows. There are many opportunities for inter-departmental co-operation including but not limited to:

Business development and HR: training lawyers in the principles of business development and client- relationship management;
IT and finance: the rapid advance in technology and the high cost of upgrading require close co-operation;
Finance and business development: profitability of current clients/market sectors for targeting new prospects;
Information services and IT: facilitating access to the increasing amount of online information and internal electronic dissemination.

The whole is greater than the sum of the partners

In the course of this article, I have argued that support departments should play an important and proactive part in helping the firm succeed. This they do as non-lawyers and outside the partnership but they must appreciate the professional expertise of the lawyers and the demands on them – particularly time pressure. Similarly, lawyers need to attract high-calibre professionals to run their support departments and recognise and reward expertise in areas beyond most lawyers’ experience. When there is this understanding and respect, the results will go far beyond the old cliché that the purpose of support departments is to make the partners look good. The combination of the firm’s legal excellence and its support departments’ expertise should deliver the total service that makes you the law firm of choice for the type of clients you want to work with.

Damian Greiff is head of business development at Berrymans Lace Mawer. He can be contacted at damian.greiff@blm-law.com