In this week's Law Firm Disrupted, we look at ways law firms are encouraging lawyers to change their behavior.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly briefing on the changing legal market, and you can encourage me to change my behavior here or sign up for this newsletter here.

The Culture Struggle is Worth Talking About

Greetings from a Starbucks in Boston, where I spent yesterday attending a conference on law firm innovation at Suffolk University Law School.

The conference billed itself as focusing not just on technology, but on the “people and processes” required to make law firms more efficient and better service providers to their increasingly-demanding clients. It lived up to the billing, with a people-focused theme emerging that I wrote about earlier this morning: behavioral change.

At one point, David Parnell, a legal recruiter and legal market analyst who moderated a couple of panels at the event, asked the group of about 125 attendees—mostly law firm staff and professionals—if they were concerned about “culture” when driving change in their organizations. Virtually every hand went up. He later asked if culture was the most pressing issue these people face. Mostly all the hands went up. Parnell expressed some surprise at that, and I have to say I agree.

Culture is a term I try to avoid when possible. It usually needs to be defined more clearly. In this case, I think struggles around “culture” are a short-hand for saying something like, “We can't get our partners to do things differently.” And that's an important topic.

Among the many speakers who addressed the topic, Bill Painter of Baker Donelson stood out. As the firm's chief innovation officer and someone who has been driving change at his firm since around 2009, he should know how hard it is to change behavior at a firm.

To solve his problem, he turned to—go figure—behavioral science.

Painter took a general theory of behavioral change and adopted it for lawyers. You can read the details in my American Lawyer story, but the upshot is rather straightforward: Lawyers are busy, and the biggest constraint on their efforts to change their behavior (in Baker Donelson's case, that means using a budgeting system) is likely time. You should aim to make things simple.

There were other suggestions.

Lawton Penn, who leads Davis Wright Tremaine's efforts to modernize the delivery of legal services, said her legal solutions design team has tracked data to measure the impact the team has had on the firm. She called that effort “one of the hardest things we've ever done.” She said combining data with stories of successful innovation is crucial.

“You're speaking to a lot of different kinds of minds and ears. For some, it's the stories you need. For some it's 'show me the numbers,'” Penn said. “You have to be ready to tell stories in a lot of different ways. Anecdotes. Data. Get clients involved in telling the stories.”

It is an effort Penn will need to master if the firm is to reach what she said is the goal of the firm's legal solutions team, known as DWT De Novo: overcoming the billable hour as the de facto model for serving clients.

“We're hoping that at some point, Davis Wright Tremaine is just called De Novo,” Penn said, adding of the billable hour: “We'll keep [some of] that as some cute little, historical thing.”

One other piece of advice given at the conference came from me. That's right, yours truly. I presented on how law firms can develop data-tracking methods that would allow for a statistical revolution like the one brought about by Major League Baseball's StatCast tracking system.

As for encouraging lawyers to change, I spoke about looking for an attribute in lawyers something the Houston Astros called a “growth mindset.” The idea is described by Ben Reiter, the author of “Astroball,” as: “The elusive but discoverable qualities of persistence and adaptability that got you to the top.”

Growth mindset is what the Astros looked for in players to determine who would be willing to change their approach to the game based on what data was telling them. That will be an important and upcoming challenge for law firms. Because professional baseball management is facing the challenge that a law firm will face after they have all the data: Telling a group of highly successful people that there is a new way to approach their job.

The Astros players were good enough to be professionals without a new data-driven approach to pitch selection that the team brought in with the help of a former McKinsey consultant. But they looked for players like George Springer who were motivated to try new things in an effort to get better. Springer went from a minor-league hitter with a near-record high strikeout rate to the 2017 World Series MVP.

Big Law partners have credentials that they have worked very hard for. They are very good at what they do. And if innovation-focused law firm members don't appreciate that, they will get nowhere. But do you know partners who want to get better? Do you know partners who are competitive? Of course.

I would try to find ways to communicate to them in a way that convinces them this new approach will make them better. And when that happens, when you combine the talent of a Big Law partner with new tools, you might end up with something like George Springer.

Lastly, a thank you to Patrick McKenna and Ark Group for inviting me to Suffolk to speak at the conference.

Roy's Reading Corner

On Encouraging Innovation: Eversheds Sutherland is looking to crowdsource innovative ideas. The firm has released a social media style platform called “Idea Drop” to let lawyers post, rank and comment on new ideas. The firm's entire staff will have access to the platform, my colleague Andrew Messios writes.

“A lot of organizations limit their innovation to a few select people—it feels very top-down. What we wanted to do here is change that dynamic and make it clear that everyone in the organization should be thinking about innovation and improvements,” Eversheds co-CEO Lee Ranson told Legal Week, Law.com's London-based affiliate. “We want to create the feeling that it's everyone's responsibility, and we want it to run through the culture and DNA of our business.”

On Apps: Everybody else uses apps, so why shouldn't law firms? My colleague Dan Packel unpacks the latest efforts law firms have used to put their legal advice in easy-to-access apps.

They include: “An O'Melveny & Myers 'microsite' for nationwide automated vehicle regulations and a sprawling but searchable guide to the ever evolving global tariff landscape from Squire Patton Boggs. Earlier efforts have allowed clients to gauge readiness for the EU's landmark General Data Protection Regulation and Brexit, and to examine timetables for proposed U.S. trade agreements.”

That's it for this week! Thanks again for reading, and please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.