Change or be changed: creating a growth mindset in your legal team
An article this week from TravelPerk GC Andrew Cooke made me reflect on how changing team culture is one of the hardest things I’ve needed to do in my career.
First, two quotes from the article:
“In-house lawyers! Accept the need to change. Continuing with Law 1.0 is a sure-fire pathway to irrelevance. Whole-heartedly embrace tech. Resistance is futile.
and:
“In-house teams must get out of the way of solutions. This means stopping thinking about what works best for us, and thinking about what works for our customer. It means ruthless standardisation. It means eliminating bullshit work through self-service.”
In short, Andrew is suggesting nothing less than a wholesale shift in lawyer identity.
Whilst I think he’s right, I did have some warning lights go off in my head. In my experience, changing identity and internal culture is incredibly hard. I think the best we can hope for is taking two steps forward, one step back. Especially in high pressure environments.
And especially for lawyers who happen to have quite a strong historical identity to start with. It’s one of the few professions that still have that old ‘guild’ vibe.
We’re often proud of good legal work for its own sake. It’s rare to meet lawyers who see commercial legal work as nothing more than a means-to-a-business-end. So the notion that this is the mindset that’s required is radical.
I’ve wrestled with this exact challenge for almost 10 years now. At Lexoo we have always hired a lot of lawyers, in both legal positions but also business positions.
To succeed we need to focus on legal outcomes, and using first principles to figure out the most efficient way to achieve them (sometimes manual lawyering, sometimes tech, usually a combo). But the most efficient way is rarely the way things have always been done.
The difficulty with that, is that there is this really strong gravitational pull to the ways we’ve been trained. Not just in the lawyers we hire, but also in my own head.
Here’s another way to think about this problem: Anyone with experience has deep grooves in their brain. Ways of doing things, career identities, what constitutes success etc.
When those grooves are in the right place, great! No training required, this person can contribute immediately. Worth paying for experience, etc.
When those grooves hold us back, experience is very expensive and dangerous. Because it requires a long and arduous path of rewiring.
For the second category, I’ve never been able to solve this 100%, but here are the things that have worked:
Declare everything an experiment: describe every new initiative as an experiment. Lowers the stakes and reduces resistance. Then the results will show us whether it works or not.
Reward systemic improvements: resist the temptation to praise individual heroics that involve 'catching the plate when it falls.' Instead, incentivise and celebrate systemic improvements that make plate-dropping less likely in the first place.
Stumble of the week: weekly agenda item that normalises mistakes as a necessary path to knowing what we need to fix in a rapidly changing company. I wrote a post on it here.
Then give it time. Creating new neural pathways doesn’t happen overnight. So you need a constant drip of these things.
I’d love to hear other examples of ways to create cultural change. Please let me know in the comments!
Thank you for being here,
Daniel
I'd add this to your first solution "experiment" - ask them to try out that new solution, so they see the results themselves. It works quite easily with tech like CLMs or playbooks. Once they try out and see how much time does it save, it will be so much easier to get them on board with changes.