By the people, for the people: Making the strategic HR voice heard

The corporate world has long adopted HR processes as an integral part of business development. Law firms lag behind, however, in part restrained by the individualism of the partnership structure and in part by constructs such as the billable hour, which make practical change difficult. Jill King, director of HR and knowledge management at Lovells, examines the challenges for implementing an HR initiative and explains why she believes that successful HR is all about sustainable partner buy-in.

The British have a reputation when trying to communicate with foreigners of speaking progressively louder in their native English, in a misguided belief that by doing so they will make themselves understood. Finding your voice in a partnership environment is never easy, but speaking your own specialist language louder and louder to partners is similarly doomed to fail. Given the nature of law firms, developing a strategic approach to HR is critical to a firm’s future success. Effectively communicating a strategic approach, however, and influencing the partnership to engage with it, is likely to be a significant challenge.

In a corporate environment, the typical route to senior-level commitment would be to develop an HR strategy that addresses key issues in the business plan, to create a programme of initiatives to support the strategy and get the plan signed off by the operating board. With the authority of this body, and the position the HR function holds by right in a corporate environment, the plan would then be implemented by line managers. To apply such a model of decision making and influence in a law firm is, of course, unthinkable. The challenge is how to engage partners in issues and future plans that are outside their sphere of knowledge and experience when they are stretched on so many professional fronts. This challenge is made even greater as most partners will have little knowledge or experience of strategic HR management or the contribution that can be made by HR professionals outside of a day-to-day, problem-solving service.

Having worked as an HR professional first in a major accountancy firm and latterly an international law firm over the past twelve years, I have learnt a few things – often the hard way – about how to gain co-operation and commitment from fee earners without being met with inaction, indifference or extreme scepticism.

My first tip is not to have an HR strategy as such. This may sound like heresy, but believe me, I have seen partners’ eyes glaze over at the very words. A glossy strategy document or a fancy Powerpoint presentation may achieve a good initial response from partners, but is unlikely, in my experience, to achieve a true sense of ownership. Rather, it is likely to always remain the plan of the HR team. This is not to say, however, that there are not ways of developing and delivering an HR strategy to the firm. To achieve sustainable partner buy-in though, you need to integrate your plans into theirs, and use their language, not HR-speak. Partners often feel deeply uncomfortable about handing anything over to any support function, particularly when it is something as critical as their people. The trick is, therefore, to hand the HR strategy to them.

Constantly ask yourself what keeps partners awake at night. The strategic actions for HR will then become obvious and easier to engage partners in. In a tough market, partner preoccupations centre on delivering services to their clients, meeting their financial targets, building their practice and developing a leveraged team. Profitability measures, particularly relative ones, interest, motivate and scare them. For HR, the strategic connection lies in optimising capacity and building capability. Working with practice-area partners to review, adjust and plan for resources that will serve them well in the future is a natural way in. Helping partners understand the virtuous circle of building a team that leads to a better reputation and helps win better work from which higher profits flow, is all part of connecting your HR strategy to what matters to partners. By doing this, you can move beyond lip service from partners to influencing their behaviours and attitudes that support the strategy. Helping partners assess and change the profile of their teams from a commercial point of view will inevitably lead to discussions on the capabilities and career paths of individual fee earners. From here you can move into issues of succession and expectation management to assist partners in actively shaping and building an effective team that will help them deliver to their clients and meet their individual financial targets.

Assisting the firm in partnership planning is a natural extension of being close to practice areas and working with lead partners to nurture talent for the future. What more strategic decisions are there in the people arena than who to appoint as partners? As firms grow in size and international coverage, the old ways of assessing assistants for partnership potential, which are largely instinctive and based on knowing most of the potential candidates, are no longer sufficient to ensure fairness for individual candidates and the firm’s commercial outcomes. At Lovells, HR has played a strategic role in developing and introducing an assessment day in which all partnership candidates participate. The day comprises a series of observed simulations of situations new partners are likely to face in a firm such as ours. Working with partners to crystallise the key success factors for new partners, and what qualities and behaviours are necessary to carry out their roles, has been a rewarding process. We have been successful in not only in agreeing the thresholds of potential required for new partners, but also enabling partners to learn more analytical ways of assessing and developing people in their teams. Partners who we have trained in techniques for the assessment day have found the approach and skills learnt to be extremely useful in their day-to-day work. The broadening of these skills among partners supports a strategy of equipping them to lead and develop their teams more effectively.

If partnership planning is a natural conduit for embedding HR strategy, business planning is another. For some lawyers, this may still seem anathema, but most firms of any significant size do recognise the need for an overall business plan. The development of this plan is an ideal process to have input into, and influence over, the people aspects of a firm’s strategy. The HR input should not be a separate section, but rather integrated into the issues and actions, from winning challenging work to developing an international network. To achieve any of a firm’s over-arching business aims there will need to be an aligned HR strategy that develops the right behaviours and motivations, which supports and reinforces the goals, and against which the success of the plan can be measured. Discussing the business issues and embedding the HR strategy in the business plan as a whole gives an authority and business rationale to the HR aspects within it. At Lovells, I have worked with a group of partners to articulate not only the key themes of the firm’s strategy over the coming years, but also, and just as importantly, identifying some real actions that can be taken to make the plan become a reality. The people themes and actions are woven into the fabric of the firm’s business goals, with a clear set of actions required by partners and HR working collaboratively together. The HR strategy is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This integrated approach also helps to sustain partner buy-in, rather than losing interest in HR interventions as soon as they have been initiated.

As well as integrating an HR strategy into partnership and business planning, it is also worth thinking about the scope of the contribution that HR can make outside of its traditional territory. Many HR professionals have clear ideas about where HR stops and starts in a business. In a law firm however, most partners have little knowledge or experience of professional support and how it can really contribute to their practice.

This gives scope to blur the boundaries beyond normal functional lines. The training team and I have, for example, been working closely with practice areas and business-development colleagues to use training and development as a tool for cementing client relationships and winning work. Extending support from developing and delivering training courses to the internal audience, to making a clear contribution to the firm’s marketing efforts, maximises the skills and experience found within the HR/training team and demonstrates a commercial contribution to the needs and goals of the practice. Building a strong axis with the finance team is another excellent way of supporting and reinforcing the profitability ambitions of the firm by providing HR advice and interventions at a firm-wide and individual partner level. Partners are working under increasing financial and client pressures; the HR strategy must find new ways of doing things that help them achieve their targets. Using key HR processes such as partner review and staff appraisal is clearly also critical in recognising and rewarding behaviour that supports the firm’s strategy and motivates lawyers in the right directions.

Involvement in key-planning processes is critical at senior levels in HR and training to influence and embed strategy. To move beyond the more operational aspects of HR and training, all HR professionals need to think carefully about how to position themselves, not only to give valued advice when asked, but also to get to a point where their professional input is actively sought out by partners. To achieve this, HR professionals need to create and continuously develop spheres of influence in a law firm. These networks need to be kept wide and regularly changed – not just working with the same partners, or particular practice areas, but seeking out key influencers and using them as sounding boards, supporters and early adopters for new ideas. Lateral-hire partners are a very useful group to stay close to in this context as they can draw on other experiences, often have a new and fresh perspective on the firm, and can help influence other partners.

Finally we come back to the issue of communication. Understanding what is important to partners and responding by integrating HR thinking and strategy into practice management and business planning will only go part of the way. It is just as important to speak the partners’ language. On one hand, this means learning the language of utilisation, leverage, realisation and billings. On the other, it is about influencing partners with arguments that are intellectually robust but presented in a vanilla wrapper. HR-speak will be all too quickly dismissed as superficial by such a discerning audience. Lawyers are taught to construct and articulate high-quality arguments, and this is what will impress them from HR. The language needs to be simple, and without spin, even if the issues are complex. The logic of the argument also needs to be thought through thoroughly. Ask yourself, what challenge can I expect to this argument? Then be prepared to provide evidence which, when tested, supports your argument and demonstrates a genuine understanding of the practice.

Without this style of communication, trying to persuade partners of the merits of a different approach, in a language and context that they do not recognise, will result in many excellent ideas being rejected at an early stage with little hope of resurrecting them. Do not speak louder, speak the right language.

Jill King is director of HR and knowledge management at Lovells. She joined the firm five years ago from KPMG where she was HR director for London for eight years. She can be contacted at: jill.king@lovells.com.