Keynote at Managing Partners Forum: Creating the Future of Professional Services
Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the Managing Partners Forum at Byron Bay, on the topic of Creating the Future of Professional Services, focusing on how to create differentiation in a highly competitive globalized market. The event brought together a small and exclusive group of the Managing Partners of a wide variety of major law firms. The two presentations following my keynote were from Gavin Bell, the Managing Partner of Freehills, Australia’s largest law firm, and David Childs, the Managing Partner of Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world. The organizers, Chilli, told me they’d turned away many registrations, keeping the attendee level exclusively at top executive level.
Unfortunately I was only able to stay for these first three sessions, however the themes of the presentations and the subsequent free-wheeling discussion between attending managing partners underlined some of the major issues for law firms today:
* Effectively developing and implementing strategy in a partnership, and the degree to which the strategy process is centralized.
* Strategic choices in geographical expansion (e.g. into China) in a world of law firm globalization.
* Defining the role and ability to enforce policies of the Managing Partner in a broad-based partnership.
* Choices between lock-step (seniority-based) and performance-based compensation, taking into account propensity to collaborate and retaining senior partners.
* Whether and how to outsource both back-office functions and legal support to low-cost countries.
* New capital structures, including public listing.
* Managing cultural change in firmly established organizational structures.
* The ability to attract and retain talented staff as the ultimate driver of firm success, in the face of global competition for talent.
Recently a number of people have commented that I seem to be prominent in the legal sector, with among various speaking engagements in the sector, also recent appearances in Legal Week UK on Strategy in a Networked World and Legal Week Australia on Web 2.0. I am not a lawyer, and to a large degree my work with large legal firms is an accident. My first book, out in 2000, was subtitled ‘The Future of Professional Services’. As it turned out, the legal sector was ripe for the messages, recognizing they needed to change, and helped to drive the success of the book. In the course of speaking to and working with a number of major law firms I learned some of the factors that made them distinct. I certainly don’t pretend to be a deep expert in the legal industry, but as classic professional services firms that are highly impacted by technological change, much of my work is very relevant to the sector.
It will be very interesting to see if the good times of the last decade for legal firms will continue moving forward, or whether new challenges will force real change. Certainly I see there is great scope for improvement in organizational performance across the sector, and those that can gain even incremental improvements will be in an excellent position.
