denotes premium content | Feb 8 2012 Feature
posted 25 Aug 2010 in Volume 4 Issue 6
Passing the baton
Duncan Ogilvy explains his approach to succession planning at Mills & Reeve, based on creativity without bureaucracy
Before becoming KM partner at Mills & Reeve, Duncan Ogilvy spent a period as managing partner of the firm. Perhaps it is this dual experience that gives him a high-level strategic outlook that makes it easier for him to translate KM activities to broader business concerns such as succession planning. Although some might view succession planning as sitting outside of the box of traditional KM, Ogilvy not only views it as an essential business consideration, but one in which KM can offer some solutions. “Succession planning is a very serious consideration although I suspect that it often gets overlooked in all firms,” he says. “My particular responsibility is knowledge management and there are aspects of that experience that can be brought to the smooth running of a law firm – for example, in ways of avoiding reinventing the wheel or helping to make internal connections.”
He agrees that the legal profession is facing a demographic challenge, saying that he is part of the baby-boomer generation that is coming up to retirement. But as a real-estate partner, he also sees some particular challenges for specific practice areas. “There are not many real-estate lawyers in their 40s. It was probably just a timing thing; there was a period of partner promotions where other practices were of more interest. Demographically, however, that means that there is a potential gap in this field now,” he says.
Ogilvy also thinks that the recession has played a part in potentially intensifying succession-planning issues. He explains that as firms grew, for example, promotions could easily flow through the business enabling succession to support itself. In times of recession, however, there is less movement – there are fewer promotions throughout the firm, as well as an added pressure on older partners to retire earlier. In many firms, there have also been redundancies. So where there could once have been a fairly leisurely and planned succession of departing lawyers, Ogilvy thinks that firms of late may have faced a more accelerated process with far less time for proper handovers. Many firms seem now to be growing again, but are unlikely to enjoy the flow of new joiners that eases succession planning.
Getting fee earners to pass on knowledge
A unique but more long-term problem for succession planning in the legal profession is the lawyers themselves. “The role of the full-time fee earner is hugely weighted to fee earning. It can be difficult to get the fee earner to devote any material time to anything else,” says Ogilvy. “There’s a lot to be gained from freeing a person who has a lot to contribute to the firm from their fee-earning duties and dedicating them to something else.” He particularly thinks this can work when partners are approaching retirement, as this is an ideal time to get someone who has been an excellent fee earner to spend more time contributing legal know-how or other softer skills related to their experience of working at the firm. “This can be a really good use of a firm’s resource and very satisfying for the lawyer,” he adds. In fact, he says that this freeing up of time may be even more essential today where people tend to spend far less time in face-to-face meetings. “Knowledge doesn’t pass on by osmosis anymore,” he says. On reflection, in easier times firms might have overmanned assignments with the obvious benefit of exposing staff to senior colleagues, clients and types of work. Clients rightly now demand “more for less” leaving even less scope for succession management just happening with no conscious effort on the part of the firm.
At Mills & Reeve, two partners coming up to retirement agreed to become consultants to the firm for a couple of years, with Ogilvy agreeing with them what kind of tasks they would take on in their consultancy. “It was tempting to keep them on as fee earners as they were so good,” says Ogilvy. “But I’m quite proud that we forced ourselves away from that position, which would have just left us with another couple of years’ contribution, before being left in exactly the same position. Instead we’ve moved to a much more structured handover role where knowledge is passed on to other lawyers.” Another bonus is that such a plan opens up opportunities for younger lawyers who can enjoy taking part in a clear succession process rather than suffering seemingly ongoing obstacles preventing advancement. With one of the two retiring partners at Mills & Reeve, this has translated to the consultant sharing a room with the lawyer taking on a lot of their responsibilities, providing an ideal learning environment for them, as well as clear signs of the firm’s supportive culture for others coming up through the ranks. In the other case time was devoted to creation of complex precedents (after detailed discussion with senior fee earners) and subsequent training around the resulting documents.
In many senses the consultant role is a move towards a kind of mentoring role – an idea that the firm is exploring in a broader sense with more junior lawyers. For example, in one department, those recently qualified have the support of a mentor, which Ogilvy says has proved both very productive and not terribly time-consuming for either mentor or mentee. Although the firm has never called it ‘mentoring’ as such, the process is very similar and one that might be further developed in future. Ogilvy agrees, however, that a certain caution is needed in developing a systematic ‘mentoring’ programme – as soon as something becomes a firm-wide process and, therefore, obligatory, there is the risk that internal resistance to it will also rise and so diminish the value of the mentoring partnership, which should be relatively natural and organic. This will likely remain a challenge for firms as they increasingly look at implementing firm-wide mentoring programmes.
Technology support
While the above strategies are largely behavioural or cultural, as KM partner, Ogilvy also has insights into how the firm’s KM systems might support succession planning. “We have an excellent know-how database supported by a search engine, which enables collaborative working in a surprising way,” he says. “For example, it enables us to have a directory of expertise. By searching what you’re working on and how you’re recording time, it works out who the experts in the firm are in various areas. That then enables lawyers to know who they should be collaborating with.” He thinks that this kind of tool could prove essential to growing law firms where lawyers are distributed across numerous offices and where it can be increasingly difficult to find the right person to talk to or learn from. In terms of succession planning, this could also reinforce the organic approach to knowledge sharing and retention, enabling lawyers to do what they once would have done naturally in a smaller business – i.e., talk.
With this in mind, it seems obvious to raise the question of social media and how it might further enable internal collaboration and, therefore, knowledge retention. But Ogilvy is a little more reserved in this respect. “Social media should help but there is a counter argument: that these tools are largely used by the younger generations,” he says. “So there’s lots of collaboration among those in their 20s and 30s, but others don’t really get a look in. That could have a negative impact on succession planning.”
Training and succession planning
Whether firms have engaged in mentoring programmes or used technology to encourage greater collaboration, there is little doubt that most firms would consider training essential to effective succession-planning efforts. However, often training budgets are cut in the midst of recession leaving firms potentially exposed to succession problems as younger lawyers do not have the requisite skills to take on the required responsibility of more senior roles. For Ogilvy, a particular training challenge is getting lawyers to spend time out of the office for hours or even days. In a recession where resources have been tight, such activities might have increasingly been viewed as time-wasting. Ogilvy’s response to such a challenge has been to think more creatively about specific training needs. “When you don’t plan the training carefully and just bring together a room full of people to look at the same product for the same hour or two, it’s doomed to failure,” he says. “It’s either going to go over the heads of the juniors or will be seen as completely unnecessary for the more experienced lawyers.”
The firm has responded to these challenges by involving PSLs in the training programmes – for example, in providing a pre-training session rehearsal for juniors where they can ask any question that they might be too embarrassed to ask in the real thing. In addition, PSLs approach the senior lawyer participants in advance of the training to ensure that they feel valued for attending, and to ensure that they have an active, worthwhile role to play in the proceedings. “Somehow you have to create a climate in this critical period when everyone is together whereby the juniors understand what is going on and the senior people feel that it is a really good use of their time. And that’s essential because of the time pressures that fee-earners face,” he says.
A particularly successful development for the firm has been a form of training via post-transaction storytelling. Although such a strategy might sometimes be known as a post-deal review or debrief, Ogilvy is keen to get away from this term, as he thinks it can have a negative connotation as being some kind of ‘static download’ or a means to pick fault rather than find positive learning points for going forwards. Even the title of the sessions, ‘Bringing real estate alive’, conveys a forward-thinking message that may help prevent people assuming it’s a time-wasting discussion of a deal that has already passed.
The idea of the ‘Bringing real estate alive’ session was to get a transaction team – including the juniors – to tell the story of a recently completed transaction. “The audience was very happy and interested,” says Ogilvy. “It didn’t require much prep from the senior lawyers because they had only just finished the deal. And it was quite motivational for them seeing how much interest they got from the audience. The juniors were also keen to come along and hear these war stories.” Ogilvy thinks that this kind of storytelling activity is an ideal way to combine legal know-how training with softer skills that are unlikely to be picked up in formal technical training programmes. It also proves that time-pressured lawyers can still be engaged by creative thinking and a presentation style that is just a little bit different.
Ogilvy will continue to assess the opportunities for better succession planning in the future, although he thinks the firm has already got better at dealing with issues of retirement, including mitigating the damage that can flow from that. At the same time, however, he intends to keep the process as organic as possible because “no one size fits all”. Indeed, this outlook seems to stem from his own KM learning. “I once used to really care about having everything written down. I used to be very concerned about getting excellent notes for every meeting and then getting those notes onto the database. But I’m now much more relaxed about the fact that the knowledge market is fluid. You can’t pin everyone and everything down. You can get far too bureaucratic about it,” he says.
And perhaps that is the key challenge with succession planning. Firms can impose as many processes and systems as they like to improve succession planning, but if the lawyers themselves are not interested in passing on their knowledge or prefer a culture in which knowledge is jealously guarded, then all the processes in the world are unlikely to help. In this respect, Ogilvy surely has the right outlook – that knowledge sharing and succession planning are about creating the right culture. That means building an environment in which people want to pass on their expertise and share knowledge in the spirit of both learning and innovation. Get that right and succession planning will more easily follow.
This article is adapted from an excerpt of
