will provide a better capability for law firms to plan, guide, manage, and price the matters that they work on. Over time, Panoramic will capture data on who in the firm really is working on particular tasks within a matter, building a better profile of people’s skills and expertise within the firm. It should also provide more insight into the capacity fee earners have at any one time. Capturing and assessing this data when assembling teams to work on matters, and then working in a better-planned environment, may help to manage some of the challenges that lawyers talk about in terms of work-life balance and creating a more inclusive range of skills and people working on a transaction. Certainly, there was a view when I was practising that lawyers were at the disposal of their clients, including working through many nights on the trot, if necessary. When I look back on those days, I’m not sure I could, hand on heart, say that all that late-night working was absolutely necessary. With most transactions, there’s usually a high-level timetable that everyone is working towards from the outset; and there’s usually enough time to work through what needs to be done. However, all too often, things drift in the early stages— perhaps through complacency, but often the early tasks in a project will be dependent on information forthcoming and people giving instructions on strategy etc, and then ramp up when the parties realise time is running out, forcing everyone to focus—hence the last-minute rush to finalise everything. This challenge can be minimised through improved project management. Our Panoramic tool aims to give everyone on a team visibility on every aspect of the transaction workflow, to see where you are on a project and determine if things are slipping. This should enable ongoing conversations with a client to better manage dependency risks, and to avoid the need to drop everything at the last minute to catch-up for delays introduced earlier in the project. Gaining much needed control on legal projects, and planning ahead for when there may be particular peaks in workload should also help those who have caring commitments and who find it hard to drop things for work at the last minute. Breaking down projects as we have done in Panoramic should also give firms more ability to right-source tasks on projects, and to ensure that those who have a need to work flexibly or those who need to plan for alternative care arrangements have an improved chance of gaining experience that might otherwise not be available.
16 | Thomson Reuters Supplement
These challenges are often cited as a barrier to career progression, in particular for women. I am optimistic that Thomson Reuters Panoramic may help address and solve some of these problems, enabling an improvement in gender diversity and inclusion in legal services, amongst other things.
solving problems for clients. Speaking from my experience both working in law firms and as an in-house counsel, clients pay premium rates and expect a range of solutions from their advisers. For any firm it’s got to be a no brainer to ensure they have the most diverse teams working on client matters.
MLM: What are those challenges?
MLM: How might the workflow in some firms limit opportunities for women, for example?
JL: Preliminary findings of research being conducted by Acritas, in conjunction with Thomson Reuters, highlights some pretty shocking statistics in terms of women in the legal sector. For example, out of 22 firms interviewed so far, 62% of those joining the firms as junior lawyers are female—a legal career clearly has at least an equal, if not more attraction to women than men. As women then progress through the system to senior associate level, the diversity drops slightly to 57%. But, when you look at the partner levels, the number drops to almost half of the initial intake, as 35% of partners in the firms surveyed are female. The sector has to ask itself, why does it have more women than men entering the profession, but as they progress, the diversity starts to drop off in favour of men—especially in the period when lawyers are looking to progress their careers from senior associate to partner levels. The final research aims to explain the levers that law firms can pull to improve things, and early findings indicate one of the important levers than can improve diversity is flexible working. Creating a better, more accessible work-life, creating clear and transparent career paths and job descriptions, having more diverse representation on client pitches, for example, are but a few.
MLM: Can a diverse law firm really benefit clients? JL: I believe other research—such as that from Harvard Business Review—explains why diverse businesses are smarter. A group of people with very different experiences will offer a richer set of solutions and perspectives on how to solve a problem. For the most part in the legal world, lawyers are being asked to solve problems for their clients. Often, I think, due to the training needed to become a lawyer, those entering the profession tend to follow a well-trodden path reducing the diversity of career experiences and backgrounds. If this challenge is then compounded with limited gender and/or ethnic diversity, you end up with a mono-perspective on
JL: If promotions depend, in part, on billing targets and/or the depth of work experiences that a lawyer has achieved— and the firm is not set up to enable flexible working on matters—it stands to reason that lawyers who work part-time, or who are restricted in the work they can take on because of caring commitments, for instance, are disadvantaged compared to their peers who may work full-time, or who are able to work 24/7 without consequences. The system is stacked against you, and a lack of diversity is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The interim findings of the Acritas research suggests that law firms need to get their heads around more flexible working and improve the mechanisms they have for getting work done. To ensure you’re authentically inclusive, you need to enable anyone with the rights skills and talent to be able to support a project. To do that, you need a mechanism for identifying all the people who have those right skills and talent; better still you need to be able to identify the best people for a job based on the rights skills and talent, and the available capacity to get the work done. Looking at time recorded has limited
When I look back on those days, I’m not sure I could, hand on heart, say that all that late-night working was absolutely necessary.