Lessons from Sao Paulo: It´s still about Culture and Leadership
Last week the Law Firm Management Committee of the IBA organized in Sao Paulo the conference titled “Law Firms as Businesses: Option or Necessity?”, where many leaders from Latam law firms, as well as partners from leading international firms, gathered to discuss changes in the law firm environment and what is the meaning of considering law firms as a business in the current markets. Discussions were lively and interesting insights were shared, giving evidence –one more time- that learning is a community endeavor and that the Latam legal market should increase this type of exercises if they want to make substantial progress as organizations.
One of the main attractions of the event was the presentation given by Harvard´s profesor Heidi Gardner about collaboration. The clear link that her research provides between collaboration and a successful business is quite powerful. However, how that link is actually discovered and implemented is a hard task to be pursued by each firm depending on a variety of factors related to its market, strategy and culture. It is clear, though, that if you have a multi-practice firm it will be difficult to benefit from that diversity if collaboration is not an intended way of doing business. It is not primarily, as Heidi explained, a matter of good climate or cohesion –although that is a nice result as well- but more of a business tool to provide more and better service to clients. In a market of increasing complexity and sophistication, this approach will be more of a need than a luxury.
This approach of relating business to collaboration somehow tainted all the conference in a good way, since various panels tackled issues of business development, culture, leadership, governance, strategy and talent with a sense of collective effort.
A strong need of professionalization was also exposed. Lawyers feel happier when rules are flexible and they can adapt them to their preferences and instant needs. This has been the way law firms operated for decades in the region. But that flexibility turns into chaos when a high performance requires sophistication and a strong team-delivery. Inefficiencies in the areas of governance, financial control, practice-area organization, business development, strategy and talent development have an inmediate impact on competitiviness. Many law firms in the region have a long way to go in this regard.
But what stroke me the most was the confirmation of old but powerful truths about our profession. Changes, specially radical ones, often challenge existing paradigms. One of those challenges refer to the question as to whether the global changes that are affecting the legal profession worldwide will change the deep nature of law firms as professional organizations. In other words, will a set of well-defined processes, systems, technologies and strategies used by a competent group of lawyers that intend to operate law as a business be the distinctive element of success in the future? Well, if the Sao Paulo conference could bring any light to this discussion my answer would be no.
It is evident that many law firms in the region need to upgrade the way they operate as business organizations. You can find many inefficiencies in the way they coordinate their efforts to get clients, provide services, develop their brands and talent, and strive to become profitable and competitive. But when you listen to leading law firms such as the ones we had in Sao Paulo –both from the region and elsewhere- you can tell that what makes them different from the rest is not how good their formal organization is in terms of structures and processes, but the quality of their leadership and culture put at the service of the firm´s objectives. Most of them have indeed made significant progress in terms of becoming more efficient, and they continue to do that. But that is the consequence of a very articulated leadership and culture that works for the firm.
Needless to say, you will find different levels of achievement in this road, but the firms who are doing better have identified that in order to become an effective business, you first need to develop a strong and solid culture and leadership that can help very autonomous –and sometimes individualistic- professionals move together towards a common goal. It has no sense trying to put in place the perfect machine if those in charge of operating it will not agree on basic matters. The process of becoming an institution –an entity with life and purpose beyond it´s members- is in the road of those firms who wish to be a successful business, and that is probably one of the biggest lessons that the IBA conference in Sao Paulo left for all of us to think about.
Culture, understood as those set of real values, beliefs and behaviors that guide the members of the firm –as opposed to those written in brochures and hunging in the lobby of some firms-, can work as the basic glue that propels professionals toward a common goal or just be the rules of the game in a warlord model. And that is where leadership works together with culture to achieve success.
Visionary leaders that work for the firm and not their individual success help to create a culture where other professionals understand and are motivated to invest their efforts in a bigger project. This is hard to achieve in the fragmented world of lawyers, but many leading firms are showing that it is the only way to go if you want to become a business type of organization which, from my perspective, is not just an option but a necessity if you intend to be successful in your market.
