Can You Have Two Lawyers for One Case

Collaboration in Constabulary Firms

The new wave of client service

By Heidi K. Gardner

If you ask almost law business firm leaders what their firms' greatest assets are, you are well-nigh likely to get a rather simple answer: "our lawyers." Dig a little deeper and you lot are likely to uncover that what these leaders really mean is their colleagues' specialized expertise—their aptitude to practise world-class legal piece of work in tax, IP, M&A, employment, and the listing goes on. On the 1 hand, this is a comforting answer. It recognizes the unique function lawyers play as technical experts—professionals who are able to diagnose particular legal bug and offer legal solutions (see "Professionalism in the 21st Century"). Indeed, this tendency toward greater specialization has intensified equally the pace of knowledge change has relentlessly sped up.

On the other hand, clients are continuing to globalize and confront more-sophisticated technological, regulatory, economic and environmental demands (to name but a few). As a issue, their bug have go, to infringe a term from business, VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). Most of their issues transcend traditional exercise areas and disciplinary silos, and crisscross geographies and jurisdictions.

Together these 2 trends—increased specialization and a growing complexity in client issues—create a demand for lawyers who are not just technical experts in their own particular domain just as well lawyers who tin can collaborate with others throughout the firm, and oftentimes around the earth, to solve multifaceted problems. The conundrum is, however, that well-nigh firms have lawyers trained as field of study-thing specialists. Because most top-tier police firms sympathise that their clients increasingly expect each of their lawyers to be the foremost expert in a specific domain, firms have fostered expertise specialization by creating narrowly defined practice areas and past rewarding professionals for developing reputations in precise niches. The collective expertise has therefore get distributed across people, places and practice groups. Consequently, tackling customer problems that transcend practice areas and disciplinary silos seriously challenges traditional models of law firm structure and ways of doing business. To continue upwards, police firms and lawyers have to collaborate across their boundaries in order to address clients' nearly complex problems.

Below nosotros look at what collaboration entails for the 21st-century lawyer—what information technology involves, what are its benefits, why it is then hard to achieve and what you lot and your colleagues can do to promote effective collaboration in your house.

The Takeaway

The growing complexity of legal work—work that is increasingly cross-exercise and multijurisdictional in nature—requires lawyers to collaborate across expertise and organizational boundaries. Information shows that when lawyers do work beyond specialties, their firms earn higher margins, clients are more than loyal, and individual lawyers are able to charge more for the work that they do. Past deemphasizing input measures, such every bit billable hours, and focusing more on output variables, similar breadth of service per customer (known in some firms as "proliferation"), firms can lower the barriers to collaboration and land higher-value work.

Collaboration divers

What is collaboration? True multidisciplinary collaboration requires people to combine their perspectives and expertise and tailor them to the clients' needs such that the issue is more than the sum of the participating individuals' knowledge. Collaboration occurs when knowledge workers integrate their individual expertise in social club to deliver high-quality outcomes on complex issues. These relationships typically extend over fourth dimension and across discrete projects equally the participants identify new approaches and initiate further engagements. In improver to offering upwardly their expertise, these professionals also help, advise, stimulate and counterbalance one another. By truly collaborating, a team of lawyers is able to accost problems that none could tackle individually.

True multidisciplinary collaboration is more than than the sum of the participating individuals' knowledge.

In these ways, collaboration, as I define it, is dissimilar from mere assembly, where experts merely contribute "their piece" and someone else pulls inputs together, or from sequential, interdependent piece of work, where a lawyer builds on the prior piece of work of others and easily his or her work over to the next partner. Though these interactions may non be direct or face-to-face, collaboration does require repeated or ongoing interactions—interactions that, over time, allow the generative recombination of unlike people's information, perspectives and expertise. The outcome of collaboration is therefore more than than simply the sum of participating partners' unique knowledge.

In the legal context, it is of import to make clear that the blazon of collaboration discussed here is firmly distinct from what the industry often dubs as "cross-selling." Cross-selling occurs when, for example, Partner A introduces Partner B to his or her own client so that Partner B might provide additional services. Although Partner A may provide a level of general oversight to ensure that his or her client is satisfied with Partner B's piece of work, he or she is unlikely to get deeply involved. Put just, cross-selling is the legal equivalent of "Do you desire fries with that?" Collaboration of the blazon discussed herein involves specialists working together substantively to deliver a projection rather than experts working separately in disciplinary silos. Though this definition of collaboration may seem commonsensical, information technology is also frequently misunderstood given the longstanding barriers to it in the legal profession.

Research pattern

Having been a professor at Harvard Business Schoolhouse before moving to Harvard Law Schoolhouse's Center on the Legal Profession, I'thou ofttimes asked what's it similar working with lawyers all the fourth dimension. My answer is typically, "Lawyers are admittedly a tough crowd—skeptical and argumentative. But the expert news is that they reply to evidence."

With that mindset, my research team at the Heart on the Legal Profession and I have embarked on this project to build a convincing prepare of evidence, consisting of millions of information records from across multiple professional service firms combined with hundreds of interviews with lawyers, law business firm leaders and their clients. The inquiry reported below is based on decades of fourth dimension sheets and other financial and personnel records received from multiple law firms. These records permit me to study collaboration patterns and outcomes in a fine-grained, objective way. The quality, depth and volume of information allow for robust statistical analyses, some of which are presented in this article. The statistical findings are supported by surveys conducted beyond dozens of firms, both in the United states and effectually the world.

We validate and explore these quantitative results through our interviews and workshops with practicing lawyers and their firms' leaders. To ensure the validity of our findings from the client perspective, I am at present embarking on a round of interviews with general counsel and other "consumers" of legal services, such as procurement officers, from organizations across a range of industries, geographies and sizes.

Finally, to assist uncover ways to surmount the barriers to collaboration, I have spoken to more than 4,000 partner-level professionals in the by two years, including participants from executive education courses such as Harvard Law School's Leadership in Law Firms and the Accelerated Leadership Program for equity partners.

Collaborating for gains

My research shows that when firms can go their partners to collaborate beyond practices, offices, jurisdictions or other internal boundaries, the financial gains to the firm are unambiguous. I of the clearest measures of this finding is the link between cantankerous-practice collaboration and revenues. Simply put, the more than practices that are involved in servicing a client, the greater the almanac average revenue that client generates. For example, in ane police force firm we studied, moving from one to two practices serving a client on average tripled the revenues from that client, and the addition of each subsequent practise connected to generate fees. Clearly, if 1+1=3, then the lawyers involved in cross-practice service were doing more than than only referring their colleagues to provide their ain siloed work. Like numbers arise for international firms doing cross-jurisdictional work: customer projects involving offices in several countries are significantly more lucrative than single-office engagements.

What is the rationale behind this? Outset, having more partners involved with a client gives you more information about that arrangement's needs, priorities and preferences—and that allows the firm to better serve the customer, specially when it comes to highly sophisticated needs. As well, having more people involved with a client who are prospecting for piece of work ought to drum up more business. Every bit one police partner said in an interview:

Getting more than of our people in front end of the client more than often created a virtuous cycle because we became the elevation-of-mind advisor beyond their legal department. When a new thing came upward, nosotros were the go-to team. Information technology simplified life for the client who didn't need to brand a conscious decision or wonder if their colleagues were going to question their pick.

It is also not but more work from the client—it is also more sophisticated piece of work. That is in part considering cantankerous-specialty piece of work is probable to be less subject field to toll-based competition. Whereas clients tend to view single-specialty expertise (eastward.g., near a bones revenue enhancement outcome) as commodity work that can be awarded to the everyman bidder, they know that cantankerous-specialty piece of work is circuitous and harder to accomplish.

While increases in acquirement are ane big rationale for greater collaboration, there are other of import impacts. My research also shows that greater collaboration is directly associated with greater client stickiness for 2 reasons. Offset, teams of lawyers—as opposed to private experts—are hard to replace. As ane full general counsel of a Fortune 500 company put information technology,

Despite what they retrieve, well-nigh individual lawyers are actually quite replaceable. I hateful, I could discover a decent revenue enhancement lawyer in most firms. But when that lawyer teamed up with colleagues from IP, regulatory and ultimately litigation, I couldn't find a whole-squad substitute in another firm.

Clients served by multiple practices are far more likely to retain their law firms for longer—even when the client-relationship partner leaves.

Second, the more partners that serve a item client, the more than likely that client will become "institutionalized"—owned by the business firm, not by a particular partner. Think about it: when there are more lawyers serving a client, the risk of whatever single private absconding with the client if he or she leaves the house decreases. All the same, even when multiple professionals serve a client, information technology is no guarantee that they cannot get out en masse and accept the client relationship to their next firm. This phenomenon, known in industry parlance every bit "elevator-out," occurs when a firm hires a high-performance group of colleagues, who are often successful in taking many of their clients with them to the new firm. Lift-outs, notwithstanding, are generally constrained to individuals working inside a single unit. This reasoning suggests that in that location is stronger retention of clients who are served by a team of cross-practice lawyers, equally opposed to those served by either sole partners or groups of partners from inside the same practice unit. Our empirical results confirm that clients served by multiple practices are far more probable to retain their law firms for longer—fifty-fifty when the client-relationship partner leaves.

Of course, there is a fear that by institutionalizing clients, collaboration may ultimately erode margins. The logic goes: because the house is now a bigger item on the general counsel's budget canvass, he or she will have the leverage necessary to negotiate a volume disbelieve and other freebies. Why carp doing more piece of work for less money? Our research suggests that this possibility is real, merely that, on average, clients served with multipractice engagements are more profitable in the long run. Data from some major international law firms shows that the profitability (in percentage terms) holds about steady equally more practices are included in a customer's service mix. Naturally, the numbers shift depending how narrowly y'all ascertain practices, which "magnet practice" anchored the initial relationship and then on, but the results on average bear witness fairly steady margin rates even as the account size grows. Given that the firms are earning about the same percentage on much higher revenues, information technology'southward clear that the overall profits stemming from cross-practice service are meaning.

Further, broadening the range of services in an existing customer (what some firms telephone call "proliferation") is far more efficient than prospecting for new clients. When you factor in the lower toll of sales for these clients, it should outweigh the slightly lower margins from additional work. Indeed, as one partner noted, "The clients are much more generous on fees considering if the bargain'due south so big, it's got to get done, they cannot waste material time negotiating or nitpicking."

I strongly encourage professional firm leaders to undertake similar analyses with their ain data; if you find a unlike pattern, and so it should trigger deeper inspection nearly the mix of practices, nature of your negotiations and so forth. Law house leaders demand to be vigilant in determining—through hard data and rigorous analytics—which clients are assisting for their firm to invest in. Overall, I expect y'all'll find a pattern that illustrates what one Fortune 100 CFO recently told me about the link he has observed between his company's legal advisors' services and their profits: "Margins rise with complexity."

But let's exist clear: these benefits menstruum only if clients are delighted by the value their legal teams provide. Partners oftentimes say to me, "But my customer won't pay for collaboration." It's truthful: one of the first hurdles you need to overcome if y'all're to achieve the benefits outlined in this chapter is gaining your client'southward commitment to performing collaborative work. As Ben Heineman, the former full general counsel of General Electric, has written, "Bigger isn't necessarily better." No general counsel is willing to pay for inefficient advisors handing off work amongst themselves. They expect their professional teams to utilize adequate project direction discipline to control quality and avoid billing for unnecessary piece of work, poor work and rework.

For firms that get it right, cross-practice collaboration not but helps institutionalize clients, it can too foster loyalty from a firm's ain lawyers. First, partners whose work consists mostly of institutionalized clients go less marketable: competitors recognize that it is much harder for them to defect with their clients that are served by multiple practices inside the firm. Moreover, the more a partner works in a squad, the more likely he or she will come to identify with the firm and the less likely he or she will see himself or herself as a "solitary wolf." Stronger organizational identification means that professionals are more probable not only to stay at their firm but also to engage in prosocial, business firm-building activities such as mentoring junior lawyers. These activities, in turn, enhance the desirable retentiveness of high-performing associates.

Integrating lateral hires

The lateral hiring market is once once again hot, but most law firms take come to a sobering decision: accumulating stars is no longer enough. All that expensive talent cannot exist harnessed for turn a profit growth unless they observe a way to integrate the newly joined partners into their house.

Collaborating brings lateral hires upwards to speed with firm practices, allows them to get to know their colleagues and, most chiefly, builds trust betwixt the lateral hires, their colleagues and their new clients.

Our analyses of firms' client and personnel records demonstrate that collaboration is essential for helping to ensure that lateral hires become successful and productive postmove—or else their flying risk is radically higher. For laterally hired partners to be successful at their new firm, the evidence shows that they have to exist sufficiently integrated with incumbent partners and clients within the kickoff 18 months, if not sooner. The exact number varies by firm and practice. But our data confirms that if a partner reaches the yr-plus phase and hasn't convinced at to the lowest degree a couple of the incumbent partners to piece of work on clients he or she brought with him or her, and if the partner hasn't as well been invited to bring together the account team for a couple of the firm's existing clients, in that location'southward a very, very high chance that he or she volition leave within the next year or and then. Collaborating brings lateral hires upward to speed with firm practices, allows them to go to know their colleagues and, near importantly, builds trust between the lateral hires, their colleagues and their new clients.

Individual benefits

It's not but the firms writ big that do good from partner collaboration; individual lawyers likewise reap huge rewards. Our research shows that rainmakers who collaborate—that is, share the work that they originate—end up with significantly bigger books of business than those who tend to hoard work. To illustrate how collaboration enhances a professional'southward ability to generate business, allow'southward compare two nearly identical lawyers using an case that was starting time published in Harvard Business Review a few months agone.

Two partners in the same practice area at the same firm graduated from law school the same yr. They billed about the same number of hours in a given year, simply the diagram conspicuously shows that they spent those hours very differently. Lawyer 1 brought vi other partners into client work he generated, one-half of whom were from exterior his own practice area (equally shown by the gray instead of aqua dots). Lawyer ii involved more than 30 other partners in his customer piece of work, two-thirds of them from outside his practice. Lawyer ii's cross-practice arroyo paid off: total revenue that twelvemonth from his clients was more than iv times higher than the revenue from Lawyer 1's clients. Although this illustration can't tell usa whether collaboration led to the increased acquirement or was a result of it, the link seems worth investigating.

Our research examining outcomes over a decade really shows a clear causal pattern: we discover that rainmakers who systematically involve other partners in their work benefit by significantly growing their books of concern in coming years, even controlling for the size of the rainmaker's book in the starting year. In other words, no matter how much work the partner generates this year, if he or she refers that work to other partners rather than hoarding information technology, then that partner's origination amount will increase significantly the next twelvemonth. This design holds even after controlling for additional factors that are likely to affect private billings, such as 1'due south office, practice group, organizational tenure and gender. We've now replicated these findings using data from multiple law firms that varies in size, geographic scope and compensation organization.

Rainmakers who systematically involve other partners in their piece of work benefit by significantly growing their books of concern in coming years

Farther, past teaming up with colleagues from unlike practice areas, your colleagues empathise what you accept to offer—and that makes them more than likely to refer you for matters downwardly the road. Surveys and interviews with hundreds of practicing lawyers reveal that trust in colleagues is the primal ingredient that enables knowledge sharing and collaboration. When partners collaborate, they form bonds of trust that let them to work together more than efficiently to produce high-quality outcomes. Collaboration gives them the opportunity to observe and sympathize one another's capabilities—and it is these immediate experiences of i another'south piece of work that builds competency trust. And, considering referrals are a more efficient way to generate piece of work than prospecting on your own, they arrive easier to attain revenue targets. Indeed, co-ordinate to data from one large law business firm, a single piece of work referral typically generated about $50,000 of extra revenue for the partner who received it. Of form, throughout all of this, it helps whom you collaborate with; teaming upwardly with a rainmaker or other well-continued colleagues is the nigh powerful way to raise your own reputation.

A single work referral typically generated about $50,000 of actress revenue for the partner who received it.

Working with colleagues from dissimilar practise areas typically goes manus in paw with working on more-sophisticated work. And that has real economic benefits for the individual lawyers involved. Across firms nosotros studied, we found that the more cross-subject area projects partners worked on, and the more complex each 1 was, the more their hourly rates increased in post-obit years. Again, these analyses all statistically controlled for alternative predictors of rates such as a partner's practice, office, seniority, gender and other variables. We yet discover that cross-practice collaboration experience is a very robust determinant of a partner's ability to raise rates faster than his or her peers in the same firm who do more siloed work. To put this concretely, according to statistics in the American Lawyer's November 2014 outcome, the average big-firm lawyer who billed $500 in 2008 would bill almost $600 now. If that same lawyer had performed meaning, complex cross-do work in the interim, his or her rates would now be well over $750, my analysis shows. Clients recognize your ability to provide strategic direction, non only technical expertise. They're willing to reward you for that counsel and for your prowess at running big matters or deals that deliver the about value on their nearly sophisticated issues.

The boilerplate big-house lawyer who billed $500 in 2008 would bill about $600 at present. Co-ordinate to my analysis, if that aforementioned lawyer had performed significant, circuitous cantankerous-practice piece of work in the interim, his or her rates would now be well over $750.

Finally, collaboration can help insulate lawyers from economic downturns. According to my data, even professionals who were moderately connected to others in their firms—that is, they had worked each year with simply 10 other partners in the three years prior to the 2008 recession—preserved their revenue during the financial crisis. The revenue of the more than isolated professionals dropped significantly. Moreover, the acquirement of the more collaborative partners climbed much more than quickly during recovery. The logic is threefold. First, those who had teamed up earlier the downturn were more likely to go on sharing their customer piece of work even when the total corporeality was greatly reduced. As one partner said, "When the food got scarce, nosotros took care of our own"—and noted that he considered his tribe a subset of colleagues rather than the whole partnership. 2d, collaborative partners were living the financial principle of portfolio theory: they spread their exposure across clients such that they benefited when some of those clients survived better than others during a crunch. Tertiary, by working on multipractice projects in skillful times, the professionals became more adaptive: they had learned how to handle a broader set up of topics to draw on in bacteria times.

Teaching teamwork

In recent years Harvard Law School has stressed pedagogical styles meant to supplement traditional, instructor-centered courses. For example, all 1L'south are required take the January term's Problem Solving Workshop, or PSW. Unlike instructor-centered courses, PSW is principally team-oriented and set up to teach practical skills (see "Preparing Lawyers for Practice"). Students piece of work in preassigned, five-person teams on all their assignments during the mandatory iii-week form. Harvard Law Schoolhouse Professor David B. Wilkins, who has taught a section of PSW since its inception in 2010, uses a series of team-building and feedback exercises that provide easily-on team-procedure coaching. Wilkins says, "PSW is all most educational activity constabulary students how practicing lawyers work on existent-world bug. And that, more often than not, requires them to piece of work in teams."

Other courses in the law curriculum also contain team-based learning. For example, Professor Scott Westfahl has designed a team-based seminar, Innovation in Legal Didactics and Exercise, where pocket-sized teams create business proposals and "pitch" presentations to outside panels of experts. Students learn and exercise teamwork and group presentation skills while besides deepening their understanding of how disruptive forces are affecting today's legal do. Similarly, students in Professor John Coates's M&A grade work in preassigned, self-organized teams throughout the semester to deliver group-based practical exercises on preliminary deal negotiations, design of a sales procedure and deal financing. Teams are encouraged to split tasks, work collaboratively to draw on dissimilar skill sets and discuss current and future work projects. Their final projects are also team-based.

The white whale of collaboration

If collaboration provides and so many benefits for and so many people, why is it and so difficult to get partners to interact? Beneath we review some of the major obstacles to effective law house collaboration.

Long-term return on investment. The benefits of collaboration—for the private lawyers and the law firm—tend to accumulate slowly, whereas the investment costs are borne upward front end. For instance, figuring out what services the firm offers, how those would specifically benefit your own customer at the right time and whom to turn to for a specific type of expertise requires a significant time delivery. The boosted revenues might striking the books only in the adjacent year, merely your nonbillables take crept upwards this year. Risk-adverse lawyers are often loathe to take this "leap of faith" and therefore opt to become it alone.

Lack of Trust. We take all heard horror stories about a decades-long customer relationship jeopardized by ane mistake: "I spent decades building a deep client relationship, but the starting time time I took Joe forth, he screwed up, and we were kicked out for good." The risks of involving a new partner with 1's own client are real, and taking the spring of faith to involve others requires trust, both relational and competency-based.

The risks of involving a new partner with one'south own client are real, and taking the bound of faith to involve others requires trust.

Relational trust is the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to another person, such every bit the partner with whom i begins a new collaboration. It arises from the emotional bonds that connect co-workers and develops through shared experiences, reciprocal disclosure and demonstrations that the individuals will not take reward of one another. This trust gives professionals confidence that they can innovate colleagues into their about valued client relationships without business that the collaborator will introduce friction, "steal" their client or undermine the client relationship in some way. Every bit 1 lawyer said, "I've always won on my own: my higher grades and LSAT scores got me into constabulary school, my constabulary school grades got me hired here, my associate review score got me to partner. I haven't played on a squad since high school lacrosse. Why would I be a team player at present?"

Competency trust is the belief that another individual is competent, reliable, professional, well prepared and dedicated to his or her piece of work. When professionals develop mutual competency trust, they are more probable to rely on and apply i another's knowledge. The closer someone else'south expertise is to one's ain, the more easily and accurately competence can exist judged and trust established. When lawyers from different practices work together, they may have to bridge dissimilar "thought worlds"—for example, new jargon, differing assumptions or unfamiliar approaches. Bridging these gaps can be difficult, specially for individuals who are often at the tiptop of their own game.

Changes in the legal sector—including firms' rapid growth and internationalization, along with heightened private mobility—have made it challenging for lawyers to develop trust, even inside the same firm. For example, when firms grow through lateral hiring or mergers, information technology becomes difficult for partners to know, let alone trust, their colleagues. To the extent that new entrants come from firms with unlike norms and cultures, trust may be even harder to found. Enquiry also shows that the more than tightly intertwined a group of lawyers were in their legacy firm or practice—as measured by the amount of business concern they referred to one another—the less integrated they are probable to become in a merged firm.

Internationalization also raises cross-cultural bug that pose challenges to collaboration and building trust. For example, legal training differs significantly across jurisdictions, and lawyers develop different competencies based on their exposure to customer work of varying sophistication. If a partner is unable to predict the capabilities of lawyers in another country, he or she will probable hesitate to bring them into his or her client work. Although partner-level capabilities may fifty-fifty out considerably as careers progress, other divisions based on dissimilar cultural norms can remain.

Ignorance of the firm's offerings. To offer their clients sophisticated service, professionals need to know what expertise exists across their ain house, how it maps onto their clients' needs and when it's meliorate to refer piece of work to an outsider. Simply equally firms grow, staying electric current on credible inside offerings becomes increasingly hard. In our surveys across many professional firms, this lack of noesis was one of the about oftentimes cited barriers to collaborating. We ran a quiz at one partner retreat: questions focused on the services and exercise groups offered by the firm, and all answers could have been found on the firm's public website. It turns out that most partners failed.

Inefficiency and politics. Even after knowing what the business firm tin can offer, collaboration requires finding the correct private expert who has both complementary knowledge and a willingness to appoint in joint working, both of which become harder to find in firms that expand speedily. Every bit one partner in an international firm recounted:

I used to know enough well-nigh my partners' work that it would take me only one or perhaps two phone calls to locate even the most esoteric expertise I needed. At present [after a series of mergers], the firm has a lot more than experts available, merely finding them is exponentially trickier. Plus, people no longer experience the same personal accountability to each other that makes them interrupt their own agenda to help on another partner'south client. I experience like I need to negotiate or incentivize, whereas earlier people would just do the right thing for each other.

Information technology becomes fifty-fifty more difficult in one case the parties have committed to working together. Traditional teams formed to tackle a specific thing typically have articulate goals, a defined leader and a relatively clear hierarchy. In contrast, collaboration in law firms increasingly happens among peers, who are experts in their own domains and have their own sources of power and prestige.

Even when the partner who "owns" the client is nominally "in charge," collaborators demand to mutually establish task resource allotment and decision-making norms. Moreover, these arrangements must exist continually negotiated, every bit partners who pb one appointment may demand to defer to some other on the adjacent. Reordering the status hierarchy may be simple in principle, but it is a difficult, politically charged act. Lastly, integrating highly specialized expertise is cognitively complex and can generate competition and conflict when lawyers accept even slightly misaligned objectives.

"Star-based" talent. The legal profession is filled with "star lawyers"—lawyers who have cultivated a distinguished reputation for their legal wisdom and client-treatment prowess. Every bit ane partner put it, many firms value "rock stars, not the whole band." The problem is that this individual hero is often at odds with a collaborative approach. Lawyers as well tend to consider themselves a breed autonomously. Wilkins, the director of the Center on the Legal Profession, quips, "Lawyers are the only people who define the world into 2 camps: lawyers and nonlawyers."

Individual preferences are malleable: as people gain the experience of interdependence, they grow more accepting of it and even come to adopt it to solo working.

Moreover, classic training for lawyers reinforces this mindset. Law schools are notoriously bad at helping J.D.'s develop skills to work in teams. Although HLS has recently built teamwork into a couple of the courses (run into the sidebar "Teaching teamwork"), about of the lawyers I come across have had far more feel working in competitive, individualistic settings than working in teams. In ane lawyer'south words, "Throughout my grooming and inferior years, practicing police was a domestic dog-eat-domestic dog earth. After I fabricated partner, people expected me to rear pups and hunt in packs. What's that expression about one-time dogs and new tricks?"

These characteristics—both natural and socialized—propose that collaboration may not come naturally to the average lawyer. Research shows that people who have strong autonomy preferences may avert working collaboratively and concentrate on aspects of the task that permit them to work solitary, free of the obligations and constraints that come from working with others. Because they tend to avoid collaboration, they fail to build skills and knowledge that enable smooth cantankerous-do working and thus continue to perceive the costs of collaboration as high.

Importantly, enquiry also shows that individual preferences are malleable: equally people gain the experience of interdependence, they grow more accepting of it and fifty-fifty come up to prefer it to solo working. In office, these preferences shift as people learn how to interact: it becomes less time-consuming or daunting, and they begin to understand the benefits outlined above, such every bit the ability to do more-sophisticated client work.

Operation pressure. In today'south hypercompetitive marketplace, law firms and their leaders face unprecedented pressure to deliver superior results. All lawyers would like to believe that they utilize the challenges of a loftier-stakes client situation to shine, showing off their ain and the firm'south best talents. Paradoxically, the pressure level to perform drives people toward lower-gamble options, with suboptimal outcomes. Performance force per unit area occurs when someone must deliver uncommonly high-quality performance. Because their projects are so important, those facing performance pressure by and large take the time and resource needed to complete the work; the problem is that they stop using these resources effectively. Loftier stakes breed anxiety among squad members, their clients and their bosses. Consequently, functioning pressure leads people to become chance-averse.

Rather than condign more innovative and pursuing all-time solutions for their client, teams under force per unit area outset thinking of their matter as something that cannot fail. This failure-prevention mindset puts them at take chances of using proven approaches that are focused on narrowly divers performance objectives. By definition, these outputs are less innovative because novel solutions seem risky. In add-on, individuals facing functioning pressure level seek control, which lowers their desire to collaborate. It feels safer to complete the work themselves. Overall, functioning force per unit area can greatly undermine the collaborative process.

Promotion and compensation. Despite leaders' insistence that they want collaboration, many firms proceed to utilize processes and systems that cater to "stars" rather than team players. Promotion systems that foster individualism, and even rivalry, interfere with attempts to promote collaborative practices. Law firms' classic upwards-or-out model—rightly described as a "tournament system"—pits associates against one another for promotion and makes it hard for them to come across any value in sharing cognition or helping colleagues. Moreover, as these competitive values become ingrained, it is hardly surprising that the winners notice it counterintuitive to collaborate as partners. As one lawyer said, "I've always won on my ain: my college grades and LSAT scores got me into law school, my law school grades got me hired hither, my associate review score got me to partner. Then two years later on I brand partner, someone asks why I'm not a better team player?! Why should I be?"

The compensation system in some firms is perceived equally a barrier to collaboration (see the sidebar "Compensation explored"). Also oft, a business firm espouses the desire for partners to collaborate, only then carries on remunerating people for private results. Even the near altruistic partner is unlikely to cede potential financial rewards indefinitely. In a recent console I chastened at Bloomberg's Big Law Business Summit, Faith Gay, co-chair of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan'due south National Trial Practice, publicly called for the abolitionism of origination credits in order to ameliorate align the interests of private attorneys and the way their house needs them to conduct. She said that origination credits "tend to split up people; they also tend to never be administered the way people want them to be—they are a distractor 80 percent of the time or more."

In our research across professional sectors, we discover that even when firms endeavour to tinker with the allocation of origination credits, they tin still exist poisonous. For example, 1 lawyer recently described the reaction to his house's mandate that at least ii partners nourish all new-client pitches and that they split the credits: "Nosotros all followed the rules and brought a colleague along to the pitch. But nosotros drove separately so that afterwards the meeting concluded, we literally ran to our ain motorcar and raced to the office to exist the first one to enter the matter in the system. Even though we technically split the credit, everyone still wanted their name equally the lead partner." In other firms, partners report spending more time upward front negotiating the credit split than actually preparing for the pitch.

"I thought I'd done exactly what the CEO wanted by mentoring those rookies and splitting credit with them. But information technology was the only year I wasn't chosen up onstage at our almanac meeting, and I'll never practise it once more."

Fifty-fifty a lockstep organization, which is meant to eliminate the focus on individuals, can produce counterproductive behaviors. For instance, one lockstep firm I've worked with measures office-level P&L'south. So even though the figures don't affect their pay, partners still hoard work at the local level to boost their function profitability. Why? They want "bragging rights" at the yr-cease retreat when the numbers are reported. This is an outcome that economists might doubt, but psychologists could predict. Clearly, firms demand to be realistic virtually how much they can engineer partners' beliefs purely through compensation, and well-intentioned policies tin can backfire if they're non supported by the right performance metrics and culture.

Farther, firms need to carefully consider the incentives they create through nonfinancial rewards. Consider a firm that celebrated individual sales performance past inducting them into a "1000000 Dollar Club" at its annual feast. One partner described applauding his colleagues all the while gritting his teeth that he missed the target because he had shared almost of his client origination credits with junior colleagues who were struggling to build their own rosters. "I thought I'd done exactly what the CEO wanted by mentoring those rookies and splitting credit with them. But it was the only year I wasn't called up onstage at our annual meeting, and I'll never do it again."

Bounty explored

My enquiry has explored collaboration in a range of professional person service firms where compensation systems span from highly individualistic "eat what yous impale" approaches, to those with more-balanced weighting for origination and execution credits, to modified lockstep systems. Nosotros find that every firm has a wide array of collaboration: in each firm, some partners spend nigh all their time on collaborative, cross-do matters, whereas others work nearly exclusively alone. Clearly then, a house's compensation organization plays a large part in shaping partners' behavior, merely a great number of other variables thing, also.

While beyond the scope of this commodity to explore in detail, a few principles are essential to keep in mind in thinking nearly a compensation organization in general.

Behavior is strongly influenced by people's beliefs about the distribution of rewards. Ultimately, collaboration depends most of all on trust. If firms espouse the value of team-based customer service and collaboration, partners expect to be rewarded for demonstrating this behavior.
The way that a firm implements any given compensation organization volition affect people's perceptions of fairness, in turn shaping their willingness to collaborate. Lawyers must understand what actions are rewarded and how they are measured. And they must believe that their firms have reliable ways of capturing the operation metrics on which compensation is based.
Bounty takes on exaggerated importance in people's minds when information technology is their main way of figuring out how much the firm values them. Therefore, provide abundant psychosocial rewards, such as recognition for first-class client piece of work or firm-building initiatives. Compensation still matters, but people pay far less attention to it than in places where "the number" is their only signal of their worth.
A well-designed compensation system can aid to foster articulation working merely when it is paired with other collaboration-enhancing approaches and a broader reward system that emphasizes interdependence rather than competition.
Firms should resist irresolute systems as a direct means of fostering collaboration. In both my research and experience teaching hundreds of law firm leaders, any organisation that directly rewards specific input actions, such equally the number of multipractice pitches, is subject to being gamed.
It is better to reward the outcomes of constructive collaboration—such as increased levels of client satisfaction and retention, growth in revenue and profits from existing accounts or the acquisition of new clients in target areas—that input metrics. For case, the annual compensation procedure at Duane Morris involved a "matter contrition assay," which calculates profitability for individual lawyers by comparison the revenue received (not just billed) on an attorney's cases with the attorney'southward costs (including salary and overhead). Learn more here.

Strategies for fostering collaboration

Having looked at the benefits and the challenges of fostering collaboration, one arrives at a classic conundrum: the benefits of collaboration—for the firm and the private—are clear and unambiguous, but the steep barriers to collaboration engrained into lawyers and law firms frequently create suboptimal outcomes. What should the legal profession do? Below we review some strategies for edifice collaboration in constabulary firms and among lawyers.

Promote relational trust. The single nearly of import factor in fostering collaboration is fostering trust, both relational and competency-based, amidst all those in the firm. Face-to-face meetings and events, such as partner retreats and exercise group offsites, allow people to develop interpersonal connections. Many firms find that events that include families or spouses help lawyers develop stronger bonds considering people have the alter to glimpse the nonwork aspects of their colleagues' personalities. Ancillary bonds, such as friendships between spouses, also aid foster trust equally those webs of relationships make people deport better toward one another. Wherever possible, encourage associates to course strong bonds—among one some other and with partners—not only because their relationships can be important accelerators for an efficient team, but also considering that trust volition propel their business development efforts as they advance in the firm. Effective steps include a budget for colleague lunches (or fifty-fifty just vouchers for coffee) and invitations for senior associates to present at practice grouping meetings.

Build competency trust. The all-time way for a lawyer to empathize another's adequacy is to work direct together, so practice group and sector leaders should actively seek and innovate those opportunities. They should be seen as an "honest broker" who tin connect professionals with credible experts and give a balanced view of how and why those experts might fit the client's needs. All partners should feel responsible for promoting their junior colleagues' reputation and experience, acting every bit the agent who helps to identify these individuals on increasingly circuitous client work so that others can develop immediate trust in their capabilities.

A robust, firmwide talent management organization builds a reliable basis to help partners know what to expect from lawyers at all levels. Lawyers are therefore better able to judge the competencies of their colleagues, which in turn removes some of the potential uncertainties with respect to competency trust. Informal professional person development through on-the-job learning is also an important way for junior lawyers to develop their capabilities and demonstrate their competencies to senior lawyers. A partner who invests time in coaching and giving real-fourth dimension feedback volition not just enhance the technical skills of the recipient but also foster the junior lawyer'due south power and willingness to provide further feedback to those with whom he or she works.

All partners should feel responsible for promoting their junior colleagues' reputation and experience.

Secondment programs between offices, particularly of senior associates and junior partners, likewise help build bridges of competency trust too equally expose lawyers to all the talents the firm has to offer. For instance, one global firm saw cantankerous-jurisdiction referrals increase threefold in participating offices in the first year post-obit the implementation of a secondment program for associates.

Increase familiarity with the firm'southward offerings. Lawyers need to know not only what their colleagues practise, but also enough about those services to understand how that expertise might do good their own clients. Assist partners develop this "T-shaped noesis"—that is, wide familiarity with a range of areas to complement their ain deep expertise in a specific domain—by exposing them to one another'due south client piece of work. Some firms, for case, devote part of their almanac partners' retreat to a series of 15-minute presentations, where partners highlight the work that they do and explicitly focus on potential growth opportunities for lawyers in other practices. To ensure follow-upwards, the best firms follow these sessions with facilitated workshops, grouped by "sector verticals"—that is, manufacture groups of their major clients like life energy, hospitality or insurance. Past the finish of the workshop, partners are required to identify at least one concrete, cantankerous-practice opportunity and a clear program of action that they'll pursue with at least one colleague. Firms equip either practice group leaders or highly respected business organization development staff to hold partners accountable for delivering on their intentions. This arroyo helps to kicking-start collaboration past making it part of a lawyer's day-to-twenty-four hour period job, rather than feeling like a cumbersome add-on. Reinforce the momentum by sending brusque, internal newsletters featuring contempo collaborative success stories and then that professionals empathize how others in the firm have combined expertise to solve client issues.

Instill conviction and capability to dig into clients' real issues. The biggest complaint we hear from full general counsel is that their lawyers fail to understand their business organization—indeed, about GC'south I interview suggest that few of their exterior counsel fifty-fifty ask most the GC'southward pressing concerns outside the narrow domain of the task at mitt. Many professionals admit to beingness like the survey respondent who bluntly wrote, "I won't venture conversations outside my core noesis, which is what information technology takes to collaborate." This hesitation prevents partners from finding ways for their colleagues from other practice groups to add together value; instead they're stuck trying pitch work at unreceptive clients who don't need that type of service, and the clients' bad reaction reinforces their belief that collaboration doesn't piece of work. Professional person development can plow this state of affairs effectually, provided that it is hands-on, equips lawyers with some cadre business and strategy concepts that their own clients utilise, and holds partners answerable for both behavioral change and results. In our enquiry, we've come up across just a few consultants who are able to provide this sophisticated level of pedagogy for law firms.

Become yourself on the radar of partners who can benefit from your expertise.

Cocky-promote. While perhaps sounding counterintuitive to fostering collaboration, showing others your particular skill sets is a vital part of building competency trust. Become yourself on the radar of partners who tin can do good from your expertise. A partner in the New York part of a global firm uses this tactic: from discussions with her colleagues and articles in the press, she gets a sense of how her expertise in information privacy might help an existing client's corporate strategy. She then writes a one-page memo to the customer relationship partner outlining what she can offer to that client and how her expertise will assistance solve a particular problem.

Increase efficiency and minimize politics. To increment collaboration, leaders tin aid professionals acquire about others' expertise, find competent and willing partners to collaborate with and focus on a civilization of reciprocity. Many firms run "speed dating" exercises for this purpose, just the all-time ones focus showtime on helping partners to hone their elevator pitch and, second, have some way to hold partners answerable for following up on at least one idea that was generated during the exercise. It's necessary to have an piece of cake way for partners to look up others' expertise, but in reality, the lack of a brilliant internet is oftentimes but an alibi: colleagues' bios are readily bachelor online. Other firms take developed intranet-based tools for professionals to announce client opportunities, find experts and enquire or answer questions; it is essential to remember, however, that such tools are merely enablers of collaboration rather than a silver bullet. If partners lack trust in one another, their firms' leaders or the reward system, they certainly won't employ a software program to collaborate. What's often missing is clear, concise marketing collateral that a partner tin send as a "teaser" to his or her client as a way to introduce an expert colleague. Leaders need to create the environment where it's normal, even expected, for people to seek and provide inputs on client engagements.

Leaders demand to create the surround where information technology'southward normal, even expected, for people to seek and provide inputs on client engagements.

One critical way for leaders to shift this mindset is to contribute, visibly and proactively, to others' client engagements. Make a betoken of handing off work and supporting others' pitches without expecting personal gain. When someone approaches you with a customer opportunity, call up twice nigh whether there'south a credible alternative, such as a newly elevated partner or lateral rent who really needs the work to build their reputation. Farther, celebrate partners who behave collaboratively. For example, Herbert Smith Freehills, a leading London-based police force house, developed an online tool to help measure and promote collaboration firmwide. The tool allows partners to classify points to others who have contributed to their success, with a focus on "What has someone done to contribute to your success and what'due south been the business organization impact of that?" Leaders use these results to recognize the partners who are most collaborative, and the allocation of the "points" is also used as an input into partner performance management and bounty. In CEO Mark Rigotti'southward words, "The procedure helps to build a praise culture in our house."

Collaboration in constabulary firms

Collaboration is increasingly essential in today's constabulary firms. The complex, international and integrative nature of legal work requires professionals to combine their specialized expertise in order to successfully serve the most attractive clients. Information shows that when lawyers practice work across specialties, their firms earn higher margins, clients are more loyal, and private lawyers are able to charge more for the piece of work that they do. While collaboration undoubtedly entails risks and coordination costs, these challenges tin be mitigated by implementing appropriate measures. Lawyers who develop their own collaboration capabilities and network are likely to reap both intellectual and financial benefits.

Desire to learn more?

I'm currently writing a book that volition expand on my inquiry about professional person collaboration. Information technology will be published in 2022 by Harvard Business Press.

In the meantime, I publish my emerging findings in several places. Ane of them is Bloomberg's Big Law Business site: read Role I, Part II, and Function Three.

In addition, I'one thousand developing a "Board of Contributors" for my forthcoming book. Lath members commit to periodically reviewing some preliminary ideas from the manuscript and provide input, critiques and examples. Active contributors will be sent a re-create of the book as soon as it's published. If you're interested in joining this Lath, please e-mail me, or visit the site and sign upwardly online.

For easy access, many of the manufactures referenced in this piece have been collected on the Centre on the Legal Profession'south website. Our site also hosts a few brief videos of me describing this enquiry.

Finally, my first book, Leadership for Lawyers: Essential Leadership Strategies for Law Firm Success , has recently gone to press with Globe Law and Business. Co-edited with Rebecca Normand-Hochman, the book offers guidance for law firm leaders and partners to enhance their leadership capabilities. The volume will be launched at an event held at the Boston offices of Goodwin Procter on December 2. Electronic mail me for more information.

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Source: https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/collaboration-in-law-firms/