Lawyers Journal

We rarely talk about how the people in a law firm are organized together to do the work described by the business model and strategy. Yet it is an organization's structural design and processes that can improve or constrain business performance. An organization's structure refers to the different ways in which people are grouped together, i.e., who is interacting with whom and why, and is different from its business plan. A business plan is an explanation of how the law firm expects to generate and collect revenue. It answers very basic questions, such as what the firm intends to sell, to whom, and how it will charge for its work. The marketing plan elaborates on the expected client base and how your law firm will attract and retain their business. Neither explains who will be doing what, who will work with whom and how specific tasks will be done.

The right people need to interact with each other and they need to be engaged in doing the right things at the right time. Organizational structures encourage or discourage the interaction of certain people. Many law firms have separate departments for each of the day-to-day operations: human resources, billing and collections, marketing, leadership and management, and IT. They have different practice groups corresponding to different types of law, key client groups and even industry groups. Each group is a structure. Processes, which affect task completion, encourage or discourage specific behavior within those interactions. This is true regardless of whether it is a solo practice, mega-firm, or something in between.

Consider the following questions, which are tied to organizational structure and process issues:

1. Are you starting a new law firm?
2. Is your firm changing size by more than 10 percent?
3. Are people in leadership positions changing (new people coming in as replacements or to newly created roles)?
4. Are you attracting and keeping the clients you want?
5. Are you hiring, developing and retaining the right people?
6. Do you have any concerns about how the work (services or products) is being produced by your firm?
7. Is your revenue growing or shrinking more or faster than expected?
8. Is information getting to the right people in time?
9. Are people feeling overwhelmed with their leadership or management responsibilities?
10. Do you have the right people with the right competencies available for projects when you need them?

If you responded "yes" to questions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 or 9, or "no" to questions 4, 5, 8 or 10, evaluate your organizational structures and processes.

Formal structures can be tangible like offices, or intangible and serve the purpose of grouping people and organizing them to work together through the assignment of roles and responsibilities. Informal structures, also called networks, arise for different reasons. They may arise because people like each other and become friends or because there is a desire to receive and share information that isn't flowing through formal channels.

Years ago I worked with a law firm that was struggling with leadership. Most lawyers were not interested in leading and also unwilling to allow anyone else to lead. As soon as the partners were able to see the informal network structures that had formed, they realized how those structures were blocking the implementation of a business plan, why one person was overwhelmed with requests for information, and what they needed to do to fix their problems. By restructuring with a coalition-based temporary leadership team, they were able to discuss and reach agreement on the strategy questions that had been blocking progress and reduce the stress and burden on the person who was the bottleneck of information.

More recently, a client, with three service lines and an expectation that associates would contribute to marketing through presentations and publishing articles, was frustrated by a hiring process that had been producing associates with limited qualifications to participate in the firm's projects at an acceptable performance level. The firm's primary structure was along hierarchy and operational division lines with further structuring around service lines. By redesigning the structure around projects as the primary focus and treating the hiring, onboarding, development and performance assessment processes as projects, project teams became better able to self-organize, tackle issues and solve problems. In this instance, the new project team tasked with hiring and onboarding included service line leaders, able to identify different competencies associated with learning agility and a new, earlier, performance evaluation process closely related to the needs of service leaders.

In a final example, leadership in a law firm structured by service line where associates were expected to have the technical competencies to contribute immediately complained about associate performance. Further, associates were evaluated by different service line leaders. This burdened leaders with talent development demands. When the professional development function was pushed down the hierarchy into new temporary mentoring and peer-to-peer coaching structures, the stress was relieved. Junior lawyers with sufficient knowledge and experience became formal mentors to the even-more-junior lawyers. Professional development by action learning and peer-to-peer coaching (working on real challenges, using the knowledge and skills of a small group of people combined with skilled questioning) was encouraged. Development of a continuously updated database of service line specific information was also encouraged to support the new structures and action learning process.

Processes provide direction, telling people what to do, when to act and how to behave. There are formal processes, such as those governing compensation, and informal processes, such as culture. Organizational structures and processes together drive the thinking, emotions and behavior of the individuals and groups who carry out the various tasks that together comprise a functioning law firm.

If the people in your law firm lack the thinking, emotional composure and performance behavior you need for your law firm to perform at its best, consider how your organizational structures and processes are contributing to the situation. Is the right amount of interaction for the right reasons happening to the right people at the right time? If not, it may be time to redesign your structures. What are the people in your organization thinking, feeling and doing? Is it what you want? If not, how are your key processes -- client development and retention, work production, talent engagement and development, and billing and collections -- contributing to your current situation?

All the training in the world will not compensate for structures and processes that are not aligned with your business model. Even an ideal business model and plan can't fix structures and processes that group the wrong people together, do not group the right people together and cause people to do the wrong things.

Susan Letterman White, JD, MS, is a principal in Letterman White Consulting, a consulting practice devoted to improving organization and team performance and training people to think like business leaders. She works with organizations to change their structures and processes to improve business performance. She also runs Lawyers Leaders & Teams, a company devoted to marketing and leadership development training for lawyers. Her advanced training in business strategy and group facilitation from American University and NTL is integrated into all program designs. She designs and delivers performance-improvement programs that include: organization growth strategy, diversity and inclusion, business development and cross-selling, and strategic communication and conflict management. She frequently uses assessments and other tools to help her clients change the way they think and is certified to administer and interpret the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)^®.