Intelligent Office: Major new survey highlights operational challenge facing today’s law firm leaders

Most firm leaders already recognise that we face much greater complexity, uncertainty and difficulty transitioning out of pandemic, lockdown mode than in the sudden shift into that mode back in 2020. At Intelligent Office (IO), we are seeing a large number of our law firm clients looking to make structural and operational changes as they carefully evaluate their learnings from the last year to formulate their firm strategy for 2022 and beyond.

Whilst there are several studies out there on what law firms should do, I think it’s useful to reflect on the largest ever piece of global research conducted across 900+ senior decision makers in law firms across the UK, North America and APAC, by one of IO’s leading legal-tech partners, BigHand. The survey report acknowledges the very real benefits emerging from greater adoption of hybrid agile models; 37% of UK respondents say that it will make work easier to share and 36% believe it will improve work life balance. It is the articulation of the less positive aspects and unintended consequences of post-pandemic conditions that really catch the eye, however. Taken together, they constitute a working agenda for chief operating officers, managing partners, HR and IT for the next few years. Collectively, we will need to tackle and solve these issues to create a hybrid agile model that really works.

I’ve picked out four of these issues that really resonate with me from the report:

1. Administrative and support tasks shifting from support back to lawyers

Whilst support and secretarial function redesign and reorganisation programmes were already well underway before the pandemic, headcount reductions have accelerated, with 26% of UK firms having made permanent reductions since the pandemic hit. But the business impact of the combination of reduced support resource and new working patterns is not always positive: 52% of firms report that support staff have been utilised less, while 35% are concerned that lawyers are taking on more administrative work.

2. Inefficient management and allocation of support resources

Whilst 67% of UK firms report their clients expect work to be completed at the most cost-effective level, the survey responses reveal underlying doubts about law firms’ ability to measure and manage support utilisation, especially under remote or hybrid working conditions; over one-third of respondents cited the difficulty of ensuring an even distribution of work amongst support staff and 45% reported that they were still monitoring support capacity and workload.

3. Evaporating pool of skilled and experienced legal secretarial resources

The survey gives us a dramatic insight into how the established secretarial and support workforce is suffering not just from redundancy programmes but also from employee-driven retirement and career-change. 64% of UK firms expect to lose between 20 and 40% of their support staff through natural attrition alone over the next five years. That number could well turn out to be an under-estimate if current reported trends of workers unwilling to return to regular city centre office working prove to be accurate. This talent challenge is exacerbated by the difficulty of finding like-for-like skilled replacements; 55% of UK firms rated this difficulty as at least 7 out of 10.

4. Support and secretarial structures in a state of flux

Over 80% of UK and North American firms reported that they had made structural changes to their support services since the pandemic began, on top of the significant numbers who had reported restructuring had begun in previous, pre-pandemic, surveys. Still, over half of these firms now plan to make further structural changes, including centralising and deconstructing support tasks. Large numbers of firms report intending to introduce more junior admin roles, out-of-hours support and hybrid working. Perhaps most strikingly, 79% of UK firms reported that they had either already introduced more outsourcing of support work since the pandemic, or that it is a priority over the next 24 months.

At a time of massive change and at the beginning of a period when law firms everywhere need to find new solutions to how their lawyers and support teams work, such an extensive survey of attitudes and trends in an often-neglected area of law firm management is a very welcome input to designing the hybrid agile future. However, this model varies firm to firm. If, like so many other firms, you are thinking about the future of your support services, IO would be delighted to speak to you to understand your current structure and provide you with the support solution that will complement your people and profitability goals.

Please reach out to me, or Jo Styles, a director in the business for more information.