If you don’t have time to watch the video now, here are some highlights from our discussion.
Graham Moore: Law firms often have a reputation, particularly amongst software vendors, of being very poor at the change–management process. What are some of the key things that law firms often miss?
Mark Clark: Continuous improvement is at its heart about engaging people to understand the need to improve because if you don‘t improve, you’re not plateauing; you’re going backwards. Therefore, when you have that mentality within an organisation, and law firms don’t have this mentality at the moment generally, then when you do throw a change in there like a big practice–management system, or a smaller system, they’re not ready for it. They don‘t know how to engage with it and often it’s like starting from a blank sheet of paper. Especially if they then recruit this very clever third party coming in, whether it be one of the big four or big, clever consultants like us, the fear factor comes in that it’s being done to them, not working with them, so the challenge in law is that they’re not as engaging as the corporate world.
Alex Young: They need to invest their time. Not just the stakeholders and the board, but I’m a great fan of the practice–reference groups, the front-office reference groups. Getting them in a room, even if it’s a lunch sandwich, where we talk to them about change management, or the solution, or the system. The more we can do of that the better, but, of course, the partners don‘t have time, and the associates don‘t necessarily want to do it because they want to be earning chargeable time, of course. I think the sooner that we set up, or the programme’s set up, a formal channel between not just, as I say, the stakeholders but from… Almost a peer–to–peer relationship between a reference group and the people who are designing the solution/building the solution to come forward and show what the solution looks like. Understand what the change impact is. Have a conversation about training before training happens. Have a conversation about ways of working changes before they’re imposed. I think that’s absolutely key. Finding the time of the partnership, the wider partnership, the associates, is absolutely key,
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