James Boxell speaks to Clifford Chance's Oliver Campbell about the scientific approach he favours to improving efficiency in business

Oliver Campbell's education and training may explain his unusual career path. The grandly titled global head of business transformation at Clifford Chance (CC) is a qualified doctor who spent one day a week working in A&E while studying for his legal qualifications.

His aim was to become a medical lawyer, but after a few years working as a CC associate he decided instead to devote himself to knocking his own organisation into shape by leading its ground-breaking programme of 'continuous process improvement'.

While the unglamorous name of the project carries echoes of the dead hand of the management consultant, it is in fact a fairly radical attempt to force people to work far more efficiently in the notoriously ego-driven and individualistic culture of a law firm partnership. 'Permanent revolution' would be a livelier way to describe what is being attempted, but would probably frighten the partners.

The inspiration for the continuous improvement programme originally comes from the manufacturing industry – taking the lean production principle developed by Toyota and the 'six sigma' approach of Motorola and General Electric (GE) and trying to marry them to a global law firm.

But Campbell stresses there are also "lots of parallels between healthcare and law", helping to explain his own keen interest. "My background – albeit at the biological end – is in science and experimentation, so this did seem a logical way to try to improve the way you work," he says. "It's about fixing the root causes, not symptoms."

Master blackbelts

CC's use of so-called 'master blackbelts', efficiency experts common in the manufacturing industry since Jack Welch employed them at GE in the 1990s to enforce a rigorous adherence to six sigma, may raise questions about how these gurus can be suited to a people-based business such as law. But Campbell insists that they work well at his firm, pointing to examples of the success of the approach and the lean principle. He highlights a 40% cut in the time taken to complete transactions with one particular client.

"A lot of people hear 'process improvement' and think 'hang on, that doesn't really fit in with law'," he explains. "People understand the fit at the more commoditised end where you can see repeatable steps and you can analyse the process. At the other end, where CC operates, the process is less obvious. But we can look at a high level and see the steps involved in doing a real estate transaction, M&A, an IPO or a loan transaction are often quite repeatable. The end product may be highly customised, but the steps involved are quite standard."

Five stages of six sigma

Somewhat counter-intuitively, six sigma consists of five stages: defining the problem in a business process in view of what your customer actually wants; measuring how much the process costs, how much time it takes or its effectiveness; analysing the root causes of the problem; improving the situation or fixing the problem; and finally, making the changes to the process stick.

"This could be described simply as the scientific approach to management and work," Campbell says. "It's logic, rather than bright ideas. Some of the best innovations come from bright ideas, but some of the best, most practical and efficient improvements come from deep analysis."

In the real world, what it means at CC is bringing together the partners and associates involved in a particular process or project and shutting them in a room together to get them to thrash out how things could be done better. 

"We're very fond of brown paper and Post-it notes, which is a totally different approach to what lawyers are used to," explains Campbell. "So we get them to use the Post-it notes to say what happens next in a process and to move things around, colour them based on their relative worth and do analysis on where things go wrong. The feedback is that this is new, cathartic, educational and empowering. Plus there is an intellectual interest, which, if captured, means people will be happy taking charge [of looking after the new process]."

Campbell's team, which includes two master blackbelts with a background in management consulting and the telecoms industry, as well as two internally trained CC consultants, acknowledge that there are difficulties in applying the six sigma process to some practice areas but say it hasn't stopped them from trying.science-web

"Asking the average cost of an M&A deal is like asking how long is a piece of string," says Campbell. He provides one example of an area where the huge variety of deals makes it difficult to establish a common model for a typical transaction. "Although law firms have a lot of time recording data, sometimes getting that baseline can be challenging. It would be easier if we were just doing residential conveyancing and you would have 1,000 transactions to look at. The answer is to get more data, but when these are massive deals it can take a long time to even get to 30 matters."

However, he says that even in M&A "there are common elements". These include scoping the deal, due diligence, drafting of documents, negotiating documents, closing and post-closing. "You can break things down, but there is still a big difference between buying a multinational, where each step may be 10 times more involved than buying something in the UK. So it is difficult to predict that the next deal will cost 'x' or take 'x' amount of time, unless you have a dataset. But, for example, the proportional distribution of cost and time for each part of a deal should be similar," he points out.

Another area where it is difficult to transfer the more standardised and systematised approach of manufacturing to a law firm setting is in finding an associate or partner who will take responsibility for the process once it has been revised or improved. "This isn't a manufacturing process where you can write a new standard operating procedure," Campbell says. "They have ways of making it stick, people are more used to following instructions and you can incentivise them. At a law firm, we have to think very carefully about how we get people to do this." He adds that CC has been setting up groups of lawyers to "own the process" to solve this problem.

Instant credibility

Campbell's team of blackbelts and consultants also face the age-old problems of any non-fee earners in a professional partnership: credibility and the danger of being seen as time wasters. "To work with lawyers, who are busy people, you need to have instant credibility," he admits. "The people in my team have great credibility from a process improvement sense, but if the lawyer says 'well, I don't work in a process, thank you very much, and I've already explained to you the 53 steps involved in doing whatever type of legal transaction', then that may not mesh well."

As a result, he says he took on a 'middle man' role in the early days of the programme, to "translate" between the two sides, although he stresses the exchange is "a bit smoother now".

This brings us around neatly to how well this revolution is being embraced by the CC partnership. The work of Campbell's team is sometimes hard to quantify, including as it does a brief to impose a new and permanent 'philosophy' of efficiency on CC's fee earners. But there is evidence of a reduction in costs of 15% or more on some client transactions, and a 50% cut in the time taken on some processes. The work is sponsored by David Childs, the firm's outgoing managing partner, Amanda Burton, CC's chief operating officer, and the global practice heads.

Campbell insists: "The resistance is decreasing. In the early days, if you had someone saying 'hello, I'm a process improvement expert; I'm here to help you do your job better', and you were a very experienced legal practitioner, you would say 'well, what can this person from the telecoms industry tell me about what I do?'"

Doubters of process

Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there are still hold-outs among more traditionally minded lawyers and a particular kind of personal advice that doesn't lend itself well to becoming a process. "There will always be some people who doubt its application and there are some areas of practice that are more difficult to map. These are areas where you just want a phone call to a senior partner who will give you an instant answer or judgement call on a pressing problem. This could be something in the regulatory space: the sort of thing where someone just wants your opinion and it is of high value to them just for you to say yes or no."

But even here, Campbell believes that there is a limit to what should remain in the domain of personal advice and what becomes fair game for his efficiency experts and blackbelts. "On many of the largest matters, there's a recognition that at least one element could be analysed as a process, because the truly bespoke 'give me a phone call' advice can only reach a certain size before you have to instruct colleagues elsewhere. Plus, we need to remember the focus is on the client and how well we plug into their processes."

To overcome any lingering resistance, Campbell's team focuses on how it can make sure that it wins the support of key clients or partners, who can extol the virtues of the brave new world of the efficient process. "Lawyers don't necessarily relish being told here is a new way of doing things, so they need to be part of the journey. Not all of them can be, so how are we going to sell it to them?" he asks. "Almost certainly, it is not me or my team saying we have now devised the best way for doing what you do every day. It is about getting the client to say 'this worked really well', or the partner to say 'it's really important and this is how it is going to help you'."

Philosophy of efficiency

Indeed, an ever-tightening embrace of clients seems to be the next logical step in the revolution, alongside the enshrining of the efficiency 'philosophy' in day-to-day operations at CC. 

Clients are now being encouraged to take part in those brown paper and Post-it sessions to make sure a legal process is understood from its very beginning and to try to eliminate the inefficiencies that come from the dividing walls between a law firm and its corporate customer. "We're in discussions with several clients to bring them into the room as well," says Campbell. "When you get people in the same room, you discover both sides are doing the same thing, or the output is not tailored properly to the needs of the other. This is where the project side of things will go."

And it is clear from talking to Campbell that his efficiency mantra goes to the heart of what it means to be a lawyer, going back to the very beginning to raise questions about how people are trained and how their thinking should be reshaped to match the evolving demands of corporate clients. 

Once again noting the parallels between law and medicine, he draws a conclusion about both professions that illuminates what he believes is a flaw in the apprenticeship model. "When training, you learn the content at university, but you learn practice from your mentor. So you learn their way of doing things, which [for a lawyer] is probably based on the firm's way of doing things, but someone three doors down may be learning a slightly different approach. One of those is probably better than the other. But once you've learnt something, you're often unwilling to be challenged, so I think the professional apprenticeship model is quite fixed. Our approach challenges this to say 'hang on, is there a best practice here?'"

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