In this edition of the Law Firm Disrupted, we follow up last week's “top-down” talk to look at a hybrid change management approach at an international law firm.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly Law.com briefing on the changing legal services market. Reach me here or sign up to receive this newsletter here.

A Big Firm Makes Time for Behavior Change

Last week, we looked at a “top-down” effort at Thompson Hine to drive change at the Am Law 200 firm by forcing its lawyers to use budgets to predict costs for legal matters. I have written before about the opposite of that approach, a ground-up change management initiative.

For the record: There is a hybrid approach. And a large firm announced it is taking that road last week. Herbert Smith Freehills says it will give all its staff and lawyers 10 days' worth of time to work on approved innovation efforts. It is not a brand new idea. Reed Smith last year said it would provide roughly the same amount of time—50 hours of billable credit—to staff and lawyers working on projects to make the firm more efficient.

The Herbert Smith Freehills initiative, called “Innovation 10,” in effect creates a committee that has the power to rearrange work schedules for employees who propose projects that a group of the firm's higher-level lawyers think are worthwhile.

“What this project is doing is putting more permission and structure around how we do innovation,” said Andrew Pike, HSF's regional managing partner for Australia and a leader of its innovation efforts. “If we have a lawyer or business services person who is very busy but has a great idea, that allows us to say we need to free up this person so they can undertake this work. It's my job and the job of the people who sit above this project to make sure that the client work gets done, but that these projects also work.”

One initiative the firm is encouraging its lawyers to get involved in is being billed as “Hours to Minutes,” as in cutting work that takes hours into work that takes minutes.

One example of what Pike deemed a success on that front came from an associate who helped the firm adopt a software solution to creating post-transaction document books. The firm is in the process of rolling that software out globally, Pike said. (We've talked about that kind of software before, when Chapman & Cutler sold a similar solution to NetDocuments. Pike declined to comment on the software solution the firm used.)

Pike said the initiative is an effort to get the entire firm energized about making changes to its business as its leadership, like at all large law firms, confronts challenges from competitors including alternative service providers, technology firms and the Big Four.

“I don't see this as a situation where there will be a clear sort of outcome where certain people win or lose. I see it as quite dynamic,” Pike said. “And we are quite focused on … [being] one of the firms that continues to thrive. And this is a big part of it—making sure that the entire organization is engaged on the journey and it's not just a side project that's done by a side group of people. It's done by the entire organization.”

Law firms are not used to change. They are still broadly figuring out how to incentivize employees to do things differently, as a recent survey conducted by ALM Intelligence and consultant David Parnell points out. When asked if they have a formal process to recognize and reward innovators at their firms, 64 percent of domestic firms said they do not. Among international firms, roughly one-third do not have a formal process to reward innovation.

Personally, I have spoken with a number of chief innovation officers who say their firms struggle to come up with performance metrics for their work.

It makes sense that firms are trying to cultivate innovation by offering lawyers something in short supply: time. And it is true that busy lawyers and staff need reprieve from partners' work demands in order to tackle new projects. But in the long run, law firms, even the biggest ones, will need to devote more focused energy into developing new, more efficient work practices. And they will need to reward the employees who make those strides with something more than a few days off from their typical work life.

Roy's Reading Corner

On ALSPs: Axiom Global Inc. this week announced its long-expected plans to become a publicly traded company. Axiom's details-light announcement that it had confidentially filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission created an information void that commenters were eager to fill. Why split into three companies? What will the public investment do for Axiom's staffing agency ambitions? Those were all questions I tried to answer in a report for The American Lawyer. The upshot? Sad to say that it's all rather straightforward.

On Legal Market Change: I mentioned above an article at The American Lawyer about a survey done by ALM Intelligence and David Parnell. It asked various levels of law firm lawyers—leadership, partners, associates—about how prone their organization is to disruption from emerging technologies and competitive pressures. The answers are informative, but perhaps not all that surprising. Associates are more likely to believe their firms are “very” or “extremely” at risk. But they were also much more likely to be “not sure” about it all.

On Millennials: Working from home requires discipline. Take it from me. It gets tough when the Chicago Cubs are playing day games in the summer, and ALM's lone Chicago-based reporter is stuck on the phone with lawyers. But that's the job. You've got to be available. Anyway. My colleague Victoria Hudgins at LegalTech News writes about how law firm associates—millennials!—often feel like they never get to turn off despite working from home. It's a difficult problem. Partners who grew up working in the same grind-it-out business model—and spent all their time in an office—may not give today's associates the most sympathetic ear.

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.