Workplace strategy represents the single greatest opportunity for traditional firms to remain competitive and consume the forecasted global market growth. There’s been plenty of conversation about how the legal market is poised for transformation, without the identified drivers delivering the environment to force tangible transformation — until now. 

Transformation in any market is fundamentally delivered by changes in clients’ buying behaviour. While competition and technology are clear catalysts, they can only enable change. How clients consume the outputs of the market are the true driving force — and my belief is that time has now arrived. 

People are and always will be the lifeblood of the legal market. Our belief, however, is that workplace strategy in business services offers traditional firms the greatest opportunity for future success. The right strategy is key to enabling the flexibility, scalability and value that clients demand from fee-earners and firms. 

Largely due to the impact of macroeconomic and geopolitical forces in recent years, the role of the general counsel has evolved into a truly strategic executive function. The requirement that internal counsels support the business to assess, redesign and deploy new commercial and operational models, is now paramount to any corporate business’s success in volatile market conditions. This mandate has led to greater budgets and influence, increasing investment to in-house teams and the technologies. 

Ultimately, any increases in budget allocation drives scrutiny and accountability for the spend. More than ever, this is now being reflected in engagements with their external legal partners — and the requirement to flex and scale the services consumed through those partnerships. 

Our belief is that the insights, value justification and flexibility to scale legal services to meet this unpredictable demand falls to the business services functions. No longer are the disproportionate business services to fee earning FTE ratios — which ultimately are limited in valuable insights due to inefficient manual process — fit for purpose for the evolving demands of clients in this transforming market.

The collaboration, accountability and technology enablement afforded between the partnership, executive leadership and their business services colleagues represents the greatest opportunity (and risk) that all firms need to address to remain relevant and successful in this client-driven market reality. 

Identifying opportunities to restructure, enabling people, processes, and technology to deliver a value-based business services workforce strategy will furnish the firm with the insight and information required to deliver service agility and value into their client base. 

This ultimately needs to be driven by executive leadership and embraced by the firm’s partnership. The ability to recognise where the knowledge to drive this change and the leaders who will embrace and deliver this change is a difficult yet critical challenge in any business. 

Our belief is that firms should look internally and embrace the ideas, skills and knowledge that exists at all levels of their business services functions. But they should also look to enrich this with experts from other industries who have successfully leveraged that change to drive opportunity and competitive advantage.