Here are a few sound bites from my international experience:

"We always sign off letters this way – it is the custom here."

"You cannot do that – the date has a four in it."

"We need to have side by side documents where the right is in English and the left in any other language and the paragraphs need to line up."

"The letterhead design should be complete by close of business tomorrow – which gives you all the next day to deal with the templates (using a different character set and keyboard!)."

I could go on with quotes illustrating the anomalies of international offices and their working practices, but I think this is sufficient to give a flavour. It is not straightforward – but establishing a flexible global standard is our collective aim.

Accepting the word 'flexible' is the start of the concerns. You simply cannot impose a global absolute and ignore local requirements – but at the same time, you need to guarantee the same working experience for the client as well as your firm's travelling and semi-resident lawyers. It is a dilemma which requires tact and endless quantities of patience.

So why is this a conundrum – and what do you learn along the way? It starts by being relatively easy – a new office in a different geographic timezone with employees who possibly speak a different language and even potentially use a different keyboard and character set. All of these are factual differences and so are easy to manage – albeit potentially time consuming to support. Where it becomes more difficult is when the local differences of practice cut across your global technology standards.

Who gets caught in the middle? It's quite often the local technology team if the office is large enough to have one. They are responsible for implementing the corporate IT standards and yet on a daily basis face their local user population potentially pulling in a different direction. This situation can be exacerbated by local regulatory requirements and the differences they impose.

Getting everyone to understand each other becomes essential – it should never look as though HQ IT imposes some thoughtless rule – like encrypted memory sticks, for instance. It is important that all our offices globally work together as a seamless team towards a common goal. This comes about through understanding and collaboration.

Achieving that puts a great strain on communication – not just because of language differences but often because timezones can make communication tricky. Trying to explain why you want someone to change their practices at the end of their long working day when you are right at the beginning of your day and without coffee can definitely test the patience of all involved. Yet those explanations, and getting buy-in and understanding for these requirements, are the key to getting it right.

Should technology teams worry about global standards, or should a localised free for all (effectively a go native) just be completely sufficient? The short and firm answer is that standards are essential. It is not just about the user and client experience, it is at its heart about conforming to the regulatory needs of a global legal practice. It is about ensuring, hand on heart, that client data is safe and that only exceptionally bad luck will impact on that.

But what of the local IT team – quite often recruited locally without exposure to the way things are done at HQ? For them, this is a really difficult and troubled path – although it can and should end in complete understanding and greater satisfaction from being part of a global enterprise, rather than a local idiosyncratic silo.

The trick is to achieve buy-in at all levels. Buy-in means that the local team sees themselves not as imposing a handed-over standard, but as a part of the standard – with complete comprehension about the why and, therefore, the ability to robustly defend these standards. It also means there needs to be an understanding of the pressure of the local office as well.

janet-day-blpWhen a lawyer stands in a smaller office, with limited IT support, and is trying to get a complex document out in a constrained timeframe, all desire to conform to anything other than delivery needs disappears. So the systems must flexibly help that delivery and learn what areas need adjustment.

But it is not just the production of documents which is affected. Local financial information needs to conform to tax regimes, while still feeding back into the master data sets, contributing to the overall profitability of the firm. The same is true for the myriad of other data and services that make up the 21st century law firm. Each of these areas needs to be reviewed, with both the necessary local focus and the needs of HQ in mind.

Berwin Leighton Paisner's global footprint has increased over the last couple of years as the firm has developed a presence in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Berlin and Dubai. As we continue to stick to our strategy regarding international expansion, additional offices may be added, which will of course need to be factored into our plans as we move forward.

We now regularly hold international technology conference calls – where each regional office can review local issues, pressures, concerns and changes with the management team and share best-practice advice. In this way, our Asia head knows what is creating concern in Frankfurt and Moscow can share stories with London in an open forum. This open communication has improved not just the working relationships between members of the IT teams, but also between the lawyers and others in those offices.

It is an evolving cycle of change management – as each of us involved in the establishment of the global footprint and the pressures that brings learn to work differently. As Parisians might say, "vive la difference".

Janet Day (pictured) is the IT director at Berwin Leighton Paisner.