Briefing Tiger Team: Second episode – Thinking differently for a new normal
Briefing July 2020 Tiger Team: Thinking differently is a firm-wide focus, looking at the strategic approach to managing people brought out by a new working environment. Supported by our friends at Pinnacle, Briefing editor-in-chief Richard Brent is joined by Karen Jacks, chief technology officer, Bird&Bird; Sid Welham, chief operations officer, HFW; Brian Dunlop, global director of strategic pricing, White & Case; and Tony Pullman, head of business transformation and chief operations officer, Pinnacle.
The tigers discuss the top three management challenges at top-tier law firms:
Managing people working remotely
Improving the client experience
Developing people remotely
We hear how top-tier, global law firms are successfully navigating these challenges, despite a more dispersed workforce. Naturally, some sectors have become busier than others during this time – so firms have needed to have a better grip on resource management and work allocation. Also, the tigers discuss how working remotely affects key performance indicators – and what/why is measured. Is your firm changing the way you look at performance and how you approach appraisals? See what the tigers have to say on the matter.
No doubt, the conversation is moving on from looking at how things were rolled out when the lockdown came into force and toward looking at what learnings can be taken from that time. The tigers look at the future of change and how the pandemic has provided firms a burning platform – and what that means going forward. Do firms want to embed this new change mindset and do they need to change in other ways to progress as they want to in a new strategic future? What does that future even look like?
Watch the video on YouTube here.
What is Tiger Team?
The Tiger Team is a problem-solving approach used by NASA to investigate, and hopefully solve, highly critical and complex issues. Most famously, it was adopted to bring the astronauts safely back to Earth when a module malfunctioned during the Apollo 13 mission. Experts in a range of areas, such as engineers and scientists, are brought together from different centres as required by a specific work project or programme.
Briefing decided to try the concept out on law firm strategy. Could the perspectives of multiple functions operating in different firms perhaps make greater sense of a given business management challenge?
