Intelligent Office: A year of change

As the pandemic continues to restrict law firms’ ability to operate from traditional office settings, one thing is certain – the vast majority of firms’ support teams will continue to work from home for the foreseeable future. But for many, that isn’t as straightforward as it should be.

According to a 2020 report from Sandpiper Partners and another that Intelligent Office carried out with Briefing, published in September 2020:

• Two-thirds of support staff in law firms say productivity is challenging when working from home.
• Nearly 50% of HR directors and COOs report being less equipped to track the productivity of their secretarial and administrative support teams since the start of the pandemic.
• Over three-quarters (77%) of firms reported targets for reducing the costs associated with back- office and administrative functions.

These observations underline a key conclusion. The pandemic has shown the scale of change that can be made to a law firm’s operations. There is a unique window of opportunity for firms to escape from the traditional and longstanding status quo and re-engineer their support services to become more flexible, scalable and cost-effective, with a greater focus on productivity, all underpinned by more efficient digital ways of working.

However, simply reducing support headcount is short-sighted. There’s significant risk to firm profitability if fee earners are responsible for increased levels of non-chargeable work. Law firm management teams need a model that enables their fee earners to pass non-chargeable work to the most cost-effective resources quickly and easily.

“Just as an army marches on its stomach, a law firm performs when its fee earners are confident that essential administrative tasks are in hand,” says Rachel McCorry, CEO at Intelligent Office. “But regardless of size, rarely will all the experience to transform support services reside within the firm’s four walls. If it did, after all, the operational changes needed would already have taken place.”

So how does a firm reinvent it’s operations with a dispersed support team and dispersed fee-earning community without introducing unnecessary risk?

There are two options. Law firms could complete the significant workflow reorganization, communication, ongoing training, embedding of broader management disciplines, and implementation of tools for measuring productivity and output of their support teams, all in-house. Or they can call in specialists like Intelligent Office so they can benefit from proven best practice, a constantly innovative approach and an operational and management infrastructure that has been refined over an extended period of time.

“With our tried-and-tested model, we invest in training, development and continuous improvement so that our people are always at the top of their game. Fee earners receive a service they can trust, and our people benefit from opportunities not often open to them as law firm employees,” says Alison Bilgin, chief operating officer at Intelligent Office.

This commitment to professional development is one of the reasons Intelligent Office has achieved Investors in People Platinum status. Standardized processes and centralized, cross-trained teams deliver multiple benefits. There’s a greater number of staff able to deliver a service consistently well, which means capacity to meet demand, manage peaks, and deliver more support with less resource.

All this is even more critical when managing the delivery of support services in the current new hybrid-working world. Robust management methodologies, workflows, analytics on productivity, output and utilization, and the L&D infrastructure, are all vital for the delivery of best practice in technical and softer skills. Maintaining a focus on engagement and connectivity between support teams at a time of ongoing uncertainty breeds loyalty and dedication to service excellence.

While this is the first time that many firms have had to create tools that can support them to deliver services in a different environment, Intelligent Office has been developing tools and methodologies to support its clients since inception 20 years ago. A few examples of our service delivery toolkit, which have proved particularly beneficial since the onset of the pandemic, include:

• Chronos Our web-enabled support services time-recording tool, which helps us to track productivity and utilization and make sure the right resources are completing the right tasks.
• IO Academy A bespoke learning management system, which acts as the fulcrum for all IO staff’s training and development, and which is accessible wherever team members are physically based.
• Agility Audit A robust assessment of how digital a firm’s workflow is and – critically – how consistently fee earners in each practice team follow it, which enables us to work with our clients to streamline processes.

While the worldwide health crisis is forcing the pace, we know that many law firms have long acknowledged the need for strategic operational evolution. Crisis means change – but change can be good. Law firms that appoint Intelligent Office to provide their support services de-risk change and can benefit from a new operational model faster and more successfully.

This article was taken from Briefing February 2020: Hybrid powers. Read the full magazine here.