The professional support lawyer: Jack of all trades?

In recent times, the case for professional support lawyers has been hotly debated, with some even suggesting their days are numbered. But with clients increasingly demanding value-added services, the PSL role may only just be coming into its own. BY CAROLINE POYNTON

In recent years, it seems that professional support lawyers (PSLs) have borne the brunt of mixed reviews. For some, the PSL has seemed little more than an expensive paralegal: firms pay for a qualified lawyer to provide expertise in the know-how division, but there’s an underlying concern over the costs and even perhaps suspicion over the motivation of a lawyer who has chosen a PSL role to gain a better work-life balance. There have also been firms that have actively avoided PSL recruitment, believing that such functions merely support a ‘silo’ mentality, reinforcing an illusion among fee earners that they need not engage in knowledge-sharing activities.

Such attitudes, however, have not prevented the evolution of the PSL role. Indeed, across many UK firms, the number of PSLs has doubled or even trebled in recent years. Not only that, but the role’s remit has also broadened to become far more client-facing with direct links to a firm’s business-development and client-relationship-management activities. “We consider the priorities [of the PSL role] to be writing and updating practice notes and precedents, delivering training to fee earners, acting as a sounding board for fee earners’ questions and offering appropriate know-how support to our clients,” says Fiona Evans, head of know-how at Norton Rose. “Individual practice areas, offices and teams will require differing combinations of these core elements, but all know-how lawyers are expected to turn their hand to all of them.”

Ruth Pedley, professional support lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna LLP, also thinks the PSL role is experiencing a period of change. “It is becoming more client-facing as firms realise that PSLs are a client asset. In particular, it is valuable for a client to spend a bit of time with a PSL in the early stages of a relationship. The PSL can adapt existing tools of the trade to help the client. The client may also benefit by learning something of value to them in their daily legal work or perhaps by getting a few practical tips on KM for their department. It’s all part of the value-added service that most firms claim to offer nowadays. And, with a bit of imagination, each firm’s offering could be different,” she says.

Such added responsibilities for, and involvement in, client-facing activities may be a welcome development for law firms and PSLs, who are highly capable lawyers who may well relish new challenges. Increasingly moving to a front-office position, however, has its potential difficulties. For a start, it will require far more interaction with other support divisions. IT has long been related to KM activities – social software proving a particularly successful addition to the know-how stable – but client-facing work will also bring PSLs into far more contact with business development. Nurturing these relationships while making the most of the differing skills of IT, business-development professionals and PSLs may prove challenging. For instance, with inter-departmental integration, the lines may increasingly blur as to who is responsible for what. As David Jabbari asks in this issue’s ‘Last word’ (page 30): “Could it be that all routine KM work will be absorbed by IT departments – utilizing technology tools such as enterprise search – and that high-end knowledge production and research will flow into business-development departments?” Indeed, in the growing remit of the PSL role, could PSLs actually find themselves marginalised by other support divisions?

The cash question
For some firms, the idea of absorbing the PSL role into IT and business development may be attractive. After all, PSLs are an expensive resource, with salaries of only a little less than a fee earner of equivalent qualification. As law firms have moved towards more efficient and effective operations, attention has focused on the relatively high levels of PSL remuneration; some firms have held the numbers of PSLs down and even made redundancies in a quest to save expenditure. However, for an increasing majority of firms, the benefits of having qualified lawyers dedicated to knowledge work have outweighed the costs; PSL recruitment has in fact increased exponentially.

The key, however, to balancing such costs has been to ensure that PSLs can use their experience and knowledge to conduct high-end work, leaving more routine matters to know-how support staff. “We are in the process of reviewing the way in which we use our know-how staff,” says Evans. “We are fortunate to have such an experienced team of know-how lawyers and it is important to make effective use of their considerable legal and practical knowledge. We enjoy excellent support from our paralegals, our library and information team, our training administrators and many others, so know-how lawyers are able to concentrate on the intellectual core of the job.”

Business benefits of the PSL role
This core intellectual value may differ from firm to firm, but by better allocation of day-to-day activities, it seems that many firms are succeeding in moving their PSLs to a far more front-office position, not only in supporting fee-earner activities with in-house training, for example, but also in meeting with clients to support pitches or provide seminars and so on. “The ability of any law firm to provide an excellent service to its clients depends on (among other things) understanding what the clients want and having the know-how to provide it. I see the process as a ‘virtuous circle’. The more client-facing we [know-how lawyers/PSLs] are, the more we know about our clients’ interests and needs, and the better we can target our know-how – both to the fee earners and to the clients directly,” says Evans. For example, her know-how team recently provided a seminar to a client on legal issues in syndicated lending transactions, including loan transfers. As non-lawyers, Evans says the clients were able to bring a fresh perspective to the topic, which will better inform Norton Rose’s fee-earner internal training. That internal training will, in turn, enable the fee earners to better understand their clients concerns next time they negotiate the transfer provisions of a loan agreement.

Pedley also sees PSLs adding value to a firm’s client relationships, particularly if combined with a its business-development activities. “PSLs should continue to be viewed as lawyers and as knowledge managers; without billing constraints we are able to get a ‘helicopter view’ of the work of our practice group,” she says. “Given the work we do ultimately depends on our clients, though, it would be silly not to spend a bit of time working with business development to see what could be done to work with clients. Maybe all it takes to get started is to sit down with your business-development manager/director around the time of your annual appraisal to work out a plan of who to target and how.”

For Norton Rose, this client-facing activity has reinforced the firm’s overall view of the know-how/PSL function. “We don’t see know-how as a back-office function. We encourage know-how lawyers to declare their presence to the outside world, be it by delivering seminars, writing articles, or providing ‘hotline’ support to the in-house legal team, to name a few examples,” says Evans. “We find that clients appreciate having access to the know-how team and very little persuasion is required to get know-how lawyers to embrace the opportunity.”

Finding the time
Giving know-how lawyers/PSLs client-facing responsibilities makes sense given their significant legal expertise and increasing calls from clients for ‘added value services’. With many other internal duties pressing upon know-how lawyers, however, firms may seriously have to address the extent to which their know-how teams have time for client activities. This is particularly the case where the PSL role has already evolved beyond basic know-how support.

For instance, Ann Donakey, former head of know-how at Linklaters, perfectly described the sophisticated role of the PSL in an article she wrote for KM Legal’s sister magazine Managing Partner back in early 2006 (volume 7, issue 9). Apart from the familiar tasks of writing practice notes and precedents, she also pointed to the essential part PSLs should play in fostering innovation. This, she described as stemming from the creation and firm-wide sharing of ideas, with PSLs needing to:

Capture good ideas – PSLs should focus on scavenging constantly for promising ideas and see old ideas as their primary raw material;
Keep ideas alive – to remain useful, ideas must be passed around and considered. Effective PSLs can keep ideas alive by spreading information on ideas and who knows what in the firm;
Imagine new uses for old ideas – PSLs can innovate by plugging in old ideas that have been captured into new contexts;
Put promising concepts to the test – to see if a promising innovation has commercial potential. Valuable lessons can also be learnt where an idea is a complete flop and PSLs can capture and disseminate this learning too.

This is all well and good, but with additional duties in client-facing work, responsibilities for innovation and a fundamental role in precedent writing etc, PSLs might be forgiven for thinking their work-life balance seriously jeopardised. “A decision has to be taken by the partners as to the overall strategy of the [know-how] group,” says Pedley. “Do they want to move their PSL to more client-facing work without employing more PSL time? If no further resources are allocated by the practice group then something has to give. Is the PSL doing tasks that should be delegated?” Pedley suggests that firms might employ an administration assistant to help with the repetitive, necessary tasks. In addition, she thinks firms should take a “long hard look” at the current activities of the PSL and ditch the unprofitable activities – for example, she says, how many people actually benefit from the activity? “It is notoriously difficult to measure return on investment in KM contexts, but are people really reading your painstaking bulletins? Are those beautiful draft contracts in 30 different permutations actually being used? Take the example of training activity,” she says. “You can evaluate how many people attend what type of training, whether more time is spent on the administration of training than the delivery, whether people actually use what they learn in the training, in practice.”

Thankfully, PSLs might also be able to manage new responsibilities and challenges because of rapid advances in technology. As Pedley says: “At the moment we have a variety of social media tools that can be adapted to legal knowledge capture and dissemination such as aggregators with RSS, blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking tools; there is so much new and exciting technology that it is likely over the next few years we will have products combining these functions as yet undreamt of.” As with so many legal disciplines, technology is far from being the be all and end all of effective knowledge management, but it can be an enabler, giving people in all support divisions the ability to work together more effectively and giving support staff the chance to take on new roles, without diminishing the firm’s capabilities to manage basic requirements.

The future for PSLs
Evans agrees with many industry commentators who see the PSL role evolving far beyond merely a support function. “I see the role developing further away from the back office and towards a consultant-type position, making the most of the know-how lawyer’s practical and legal expertise,” she says. “It need not mean sacrificing the flexibility we have negotiated in our work-life balance, but it should enable our fee-earning colleagues to capitalise on our hard-won experience and, ultimately, offer us a more satisfying career.”

Firms may find they need to review the PSL role, evaluating what fee earners and clients now need from their know-how lawyers and redistributing responsibilities accordingly. To be cost-effective, firms may opt to recruit more paralegals and administrative support staff to take on the more routine PSL duties. This will allow the know-how lawyers to become more involved in high-value client-facing work, in collaboration with the firm’s other support functions, such as business development and IT. Such delegation will also better reflect the high remuneration PSLs now command.

Whatever way firms choose to develop their know-how lawyers, it is unlikely that the role is going to disappear anytime soon. Indeed, it seems that quite the opposite is more likely, as know-how lawyers/PSLs become key knowledge brokers, helping a firm to win work, keeping fee earners in the know, and ensuring a firm maintains competitive advantage through the innovative use of its expertise.

A day in the life…
Fiona Evans, head of know-how, Norton Rose
My role is very hands-on, in that I still spend a fair proportion of my time doing what we expect all our know-how lawyers throughout the firm to do. I am a banking lawyer (and latterly a banking know-how lawyer) by background and I sit among the banking know-how team.

We are in the process of reviewing the way in which we use our know-how staff. We are fortunate to have such an experienced team of know-how lawyers and it is important to make effective use of their considerable legal and practical knowledge. We enjoy excellent support from our paralegals, our library and information team, our training administrators and many others, so know-how lawyers are able to concentrate on the intellectual core of the job. We consider the priorities to be writing and updating practice notes and precedents, delivering training to fee-earners, acting as a sounding board for fee eaners’ questions and offering appropriate know-how support to our clients. Individual practice areas, offices and teams will require differing combinations of these core elements, but all know-how lawyers are expected to turn their hand to all of them.

The know-how remit extends to all offices in the Norton Rose Group. I spend a lot of my management time ensuring that we know what support is required, that we have the people and systems we need and that we plan effectively to deliver that support. One of the greatest challenges is providing adequate support to offices where we do not have know-how staff. However, I work closely with Richard Calnan, our know-how partner, and we spend a considerable amount of our time visiting offices throughout the Group discussing requirements and solutions. Wherever possible, we manage know-how on a regional basis, so that offices that do not have embedded know-how support can nevertheless benefit from know-how lawyers who understand local issues and are in a similar time zone.

Inevitably the demands of management limit the time available to be involved in the core know-how activites, but I expect to spend over half of an average week engaged in providing training (both internal and client-facing) and discussing legal and practical questions with fee earners. Precedents and practice notes tend to require a longer period of uninterrupted effort so it is more difficult to devote time to them, but the rest of the banking know-how team more than makes up for my deficiency in this regard.

A day in the life…
Ruth Pedley, professional support lawyer, CMS Cameron McKenna LLP
My day-to-day role is mostly about talking to people: people in my large practice group and in the wider firm, and to clients. If I can understand what work people are doing and what’s on client’s minds, there are a number of ways I can spread that knowledge around. I might do it by word of mouth at know-how sessions with the group, or by capturing it on our database of know-how. It has been huge fun in helping to design the front end of this from the user’s perspective to make it navigable. I have to keep an eye on what is going on out in the world of legal developments in my speciality (banking and insolvency law), and I share that around the group in a mixture of ways (navigable e-mails, a blog (the only Bank Law Blog in the UK), presenting current awareness and technical sessions, and so on.

In terms of difficulties I face in the role… well, what challenges can one possibly have in a world where people freely share knowledge without extra encouragement, realise the value of their knowledge to their peers, turn up to provide or attend training without delay? Well… sometimes! The tension is one that every PSL will recognise: you are gathering, sharing, distributing knowledge in a working environment where the creators and the beneficiaries of knowledge are under intense pressure to achieve billing targets. Know-how falls to the bottom of the list of priorities when you are a fee earner that has spent the last three nights leaving the office at 2am and there is no prospect of the tangled transaction you are working on ever finishing.