DLA Piper has enacted a bevy of reforms to areas such as partner performance reviews and lawyer utilization targets following a firmwide crowdsourcing exercise.

The initiative, dubbed the 'CEO Challenge', was launched last February, with staff invited to visit an online portal to anonymously share ideas about how to improve the firm.

In the two weeks the portal was open, 2,755 people from across the firm submitted almost 30,000 ideas, comments and votes.

As a result of the exercise, the firm has already introduced a number of changes to areas such as billing targets, as well as launching longer-term projects examining areas like mental health and new technology.

The reforms include changes to the technology used to carry out performance reviews and a new standardized annual billable hours target for lawyers.

The firm's chief of staff Andy Williams said: “With a business our size, there was a lot of focus around bureaucracy-busting. There was a lot of angst around the systems we were using for areas like performance reviews and time recording.”

One of the short-term changes the firm made was to introduce annual billable hours targets to replace previous utilization percentage targets, which had been causing confusion.

DLA's co-CEO Simon Levine said: “Associates and lawyers wanted to more clearly understand what they needed to do to be successful from an hours perspective, as it affects remuneration and bonuses—that's why the change has been made.”

The firm has also launched a client service desk to field any internal questions about the firm's clients.

“The idea is you have a centralized point to go for client information. It could be anything from a rate inquiry; billing protocols; research on the client; what recent activities have been undertaken; whether there are any live matters—the idea is to tap into the collective knowledge behind the scenes,” Williams said.

Longer-term projects include a revamp of the firm's time recording system to improve mobile time recording and also a new portal to allow fee earners to see how many hours they have recorded against their annual targets.

The firm is also working on a project to improve the technology it uses for performance reviews following its move to an objectives-based performance system, which Levine says has been brought in to encourage partners to focus on things that really make a difference.

“We tried to limit the number of objectives so you have to focus on the really important objectives that can move the needle. What the CEO Challenge did was to bring out the fact that our technology was not sufficiently good enough to allow the objectives system to reach its full potential,” he said.

The firm is partnering with a technology company on the new objectives system, with the aim of rolling it out to partners in May before being introduced to the wider firm.

The firm has also set up an international working group to look at mental health after stress was flagged as a concern of staff across the firm.

“What also came out of the CEO Challenge is the stress that people face, at whatever level they work, and the need for us to support our people,” Levine said.

The mental health group is being led by Levine, alongside diversity and inclusion head Mitra Janes and Australian co-managing partner Melinda Upton.

The various projects are being delivered through the firm's new portfolio management office (PMO), which is led by Robert Green, who joined from Close Brothers Asset Finance in September.

Williams said: “We want major projects run through the PMO; for example, the rollout of the next generation of IT—we will operate that through the PMO.”

Separately, DLA has also brought in a new director of operations with the hire of Bank of America Merrill Lynch technology and operations COO Jacqueline King.

King, who spent six years at the bank, will now head up DLA's business development, IT, HR, property and facilities teams.