Learnings from The Lab #1
Learnings from The Lab is a specialised digest giving you reflections and insights on the latest projects being worked on at FutureLab.Legal
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Transforming Legal Services into the Future of Law
This Session had us focusing on an exercise generated by Quddus as one attempt at “Re-framing the Law firm”. This decision was in response to feedback from the previous session where we found throughout our “collecting the ingredients” exercise that our notes would double up across various management functions and comments about using some of the themes captured in notes using a different context.
To explore “Re-framing the Law firm” we used a bespoke Concentric Circles template where the most important element is in the center and then progressively surrounded by other elements in order of importance.
First we discussed whether the proposed circles and their themes were agreeable:
Initially we had: Client, Our People, then Technology.
We then refined it to: Client, Our People, (Our Processes), then Technology and Innovation.
We then took our notes from the first session about the needs for change in the Legal Industry, (including our top 5 marked in blue) and proceeded to fill the circles, with the Client at the center.
Key Findings:
Significant amount of these changes sat on the line between circles, denoting important involvement of both Client and Our People.
The significant relationship between Client and the workforce (Our People) in a firm we found severely lacking, citing often that the “how” of serving the client traditionally only rests with the Partner and only the “what” trickles down to the rest of the structure for carrying out.
Acknowledged that a business development unit may be in place in more sophisticated instances, but also recognized that there may be severe disconnects once the “lead” is handed to the lawyers to service the client.
Key Takeaway: We came to the conclusion that the interaction between the Client and Our People should be a loop, rather than a “handover”. Feedback, interaction, collaboration and co-creation are necessary elements of putting the client at the center.
We saw that some of our notes could be placed in every circle and mean different things in each one. For example, “access to law” was something we quickly discovered needed to sit across all circles, but what it means to the Client is vastly different to what it means to Our People, and when Technology and Innovation are concerned.
“Access to Law” was a perfect example of this. In fact, we recognized “Access to Law” should permeate the entire purpose of the firm and would heavily inform the CX journey from the moment the Client “walks through the door”. It was amusing that we had never heard the motto “providing access to law” being used by any law firm. Perhaps a testament to the protective nature and aversion to seeing access as a value proposition outside of the traditional gatekeeping.
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Q.