As technology continues to push the frontiers of possibility and business goes global, the face of the legal profession is changing. In this environment, legal support staff have taken on new roles, working in tandem with technology to bring new value to firms.

New tricks

The spectre of tech automation hangs over most professional roles, and legal support is not exempt. Doom and gloom predictions warn that a number of roles in the legal sector will be phased out over coming decades, from the high-level analytical work done by lawyers to routine processing.

In a 2015 report from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), almost five million Australian jobs were identified as replaceable by technology.

Yet one side effect of the technological revolution has been highlighting the value a living, breathing human brings to the legal process.

Australian Legal Practice Management Association vice-president Susan Comerford believes longstanding skills for legal support staff remain in high demand.

“The traditional functions of the legal secretary are critically important,” Ms Comerford says.

“We still need people who have a really good typing speed, who will score well in the tests for spelling and grammar and who can file, do billing and manage diaries. But how much time a secretary will spend on those types of functions is what has changed.”

Ms Comerford, who also works as the people practice and development manager at Adelaide firm Cowell Clarke, sees the contribution of legal support evolving, rather than diminishing, in the new environment.

“As firms move to offices that are paperless or paperlite, filing becomes different. Time is not consumed with e-filing and scanning. Technology has driven those changes to the role,” she says.

Indeed, Ms Comerford believes the cost and time efficiencies that technologies have delivered to legal processes have changed the role of support staff for the better.

“This flexibility means that legal secretaries have a range of new opportunities available to them. There are more opportunities to manage projects.

“There is now a very different way of practising legal services and we are able to offer secretaries opportunities to project manage some of those online services, or to work at a paralegal level in relation to some of their roles. I think it’s really exciting for a legal secretary to have these opportunities that in the traditional role they would not have had.”

The influence of technology is being felt at firms of all sizes, but mid-tiers in particular have been cognisant of the need to stay competitive and relevant in an ever-changing world.

Queensland-based commercial law firm Mullins Lawyers has been around for 36 years. Managing partner Curt Schatz and chief financial and operating officer Stephen van Dorp say the firm has made a point of strategically investing in technology to produce efficiencies in legal support work flows.

“We’re constantly on the lookout to better ourselves, just as everybody else is,” Mr Schatz says.

“We wanted to become a firm that was focused on giving good customer service, and part of that meant that we needed to actively promote and look for ways to become more efficient and deliver a greater service to the client in that way,” Mr van Dorp adds.

As part of the firm’s new approach, Mullins has turned to a voice-to-text recognition service that has alleviated the workload shouldered by their legal secretarial staff by 15-20 per cent.

The time saving has allowed the ranks of frontline support staff to work more realistic hours and reinvest their time cultivating key client relationships, according to Mr van Dorp.

“Now that we have speech-to-text recognition, taking file notes is about a third of the time that it used to take, so there have been a lot of efficiencies and extra time given back to the secretaries just because of the innovations that we’ve put in place,” he says.

Mullins is the first firm in the Asia-Pacific region to adopt the voice-to-text software BigHand SmartNote, which has also been deployed by law firms in the UK. However, Mr Schatz expects other big firms to soon follow Mullins’ lead.

“Firms bigger than ours have spoken about whether [BigHand] has worked for us, and we’ve been able to explain the benefits in improvement and efficiency that it has brought.”

Systems like this allow lawyers to dictate file notes into mobile phones, which directly translates the audio into an electronic document via speech-to-text recognition. The system then automatically files the note.

“Where information technology or IT systems lend themselves to providing services that are more efficient, we realise that we had to be ahead of the game,” Mr Schatz says.

Deepening relationships

As legal staff free up time from routine filing and other administrative tasks, more time can be invested into other activities. At Mullins, technology efforts have been geared towards putting legal staff front and centre in their client relationships.

“In our view, one of the things that our secretaries need to be good at is enhancing the whole relationship for our client base,” Mr Schatz says.

“[They need] to understand what our firm’s about and to interact with our clients and/or referrers when an opportunity presents itself with some knowledge about that.”

As a result, Mr Schatz values staff who are able to communicate with major stakeholders and portray the firm’s ethos.

“One of the things that allows Mullins to provide great service is that our secretaries and personal assistants are able to speak with our big clients and referrers in a way that they understand their business,” he says.

Relationships with firm clients and among staff have always been a strong feature of good legal business. If industry disruptions have changed anything, they haven’t affected the importance of fostering steadfast relationships within firms.

Work-life balance has become another hot topic in the legal profession, and Mr van Dorp believes time-saving technologies can help staff maintain a better lifestyle.

“We don’t like staff and secretaries working long, long hours – that’s just not the way that we do things here,” Mr van Dorp says.

At a successful firm, he believes there is always going to be more work for a legal assistant to do, meaning efficiency programs play a vital role in keeping support staff ’s workloads in check.

“In a business that’s going well and is generating a lot of work, it’s very difficult for secretaries to get through everything they need to do in an efficient, timely manner. So we needed to find [new] ways to enable [our staff] to get everything done in their day, within an ordinary working day.”

Personality plus

Being able to show frontline expertise in clients and their unique business needs can help cultivate business relationships that matter. To a large extent, this is reflected in what the industry looks for in potential hires.

According to legal recruiting consultant Laine McKenzie from Legal People, firms are increasingly looking for staff with specific skill sets or experience in legal areas.

“Our clients are becoming a lot more selective in their recruitment process,” Ms McKenzie says.

“They’re not willing to compromise [on criteria] as much as they once might have done. In terms of recruiting legal assistants and legal secretaries, as an example, our clients often want demonstrated experience in specific areas of law and they might also require that the candidate has worked at partner level.”

However, special knowledge of one particular practice area is only part of what firms look for in today’s legal support staff. Being able to cultivate good client relations also requires possessing wider people skills.

As many legal processing tasks have become automated and are commoditised, the human attributes of new recruits matter more. This is especially the case where firms are relying less on temporary staffing pools and investing in personnel to fill positions more permanently.

According to Fiona Ruggieri from Kaleidoscope Legal Recruitment, firms are increasingly referring to ‘cultural fit’ in their hiring briefs.

“[Firms] aren’t just looking for people who have a typing speed of 60 words per minute or strong technical skills with a particular program – they are looking across the board, from an organisational point of view,” she says.

As a result, personal characteristics are a major factor in hiring decisions.

“We reflect on the personality traits to ensure that we get the right candidate,” she says.

“Cultural fit is crucial for firms who want to focus on whether this is the type of person they think could work well in this role, that matches the personality of the fee earner.

“They are looking for people who are resilient and outgoing, who are happy to communicate and aren’t scared to push back on their fee earners and say ‘you’ve got a deadline coming up, let’s get this done’.”

However, this desire for a perfect match goes both ways. According to Ms Ruggieri, cultural considerations are just as important for job seekers.

“Quite often when we interview candidates and ask them what they are looking for in their next role, one of the first things they say is ‘I want to work in a supportive and collaborative team’ – so for them cultural fit is very important as well.”

When Mr van Dorp looks at bringing in a new team member, he and his team put an emphasis on attitude towards work and enthusiasm for the role.

“We’re looking for people who want to get into the office, people who want to work, who want to have a fulfilling career but who also realise that coming to work is about performing a task that is important, particularly in the legal space.”

Indeed, Mullins invests in IT as part of a deliberate strategy to support and retain quality staff.

“We understand the real link between younger generations of lawyers and support staff who want and expect best-practice systems and technologies. That understanding is also commercially driven at the partnership level,” Mr Schatz says.

“We want to make sure that we do everything in our power to retain our good staff, as lawyers and non-lawyers, for the future of the firm and we understand that in their minds, IT, support systems and efficiency are very important.”

Global model

Firms of all sizes are looking for efficiencies in their office administration. But global firms have a much larger pool of resources to draw upon, giving them more flexibility in how they organise their support services.

An increasing trend in the global sector is towards in-house outsourcing. Firms establish service centres for legal processes or business administration in cost-effective jurisdictions. Offices around the world are able to feed work into these centralised offices.

The latest firm to join this trend is Norton Rose Fulbright, which opened a business services centre in Manila in late May. Under the new model, 170 business support roles will be moved to a servicing centre in the Philippines for roles including marketing and business development, HR, learning development document production, IT, finance, compliance and knowledge management work.

Global COO Mark Whitley says the move was part of the firm’s global efficiency drive.

“The decision to open a global service centre comes after a thorough review of the delivery of our worldwide business services model and is a key part of our overall 2020 business transformation strategy,” he says.

Norton Rose Fulbright is treading familiar ground for many globals. Baker & McKenzie has operated a business services processing in Manila for more than 15 years and launched a legal processing facility in Belfast last year.

DLA Piper, meanwhile, opened a European service centre in Warsaw in November last year and transferred over several administrative, finance, marketing HR and IT processes. This adds to its existing US offering in Tampa and UK centre in Leeds.

Other firms have ventured into legal process servicing, with both paralegals and lawyers undertaking high-volume legal work like document review or comparative analyses from centralised locations.

Alongside Bakers’ Belfast office, Northern Ireland is also host to Herbert Smith Freehills’ 250-person legal processing centre. Ashurst, meanwhile, set itself up across the Irish Sea in Glasgow, an operation which supports 14 different offices internationally.

The Herbert Smith Freehills’ Belfast operation is headed up by Libby Jackson, the firm’s head of alternative legal services and co-chair of the firm’s innovation and efficiency steering group.

“[This new model] was an opportunity to offer clients the cost efficiency that came with conducting these exercises and a wrap team of service,” she says.

“We did that because, not only could the client access the right balance of quality and pricing, they also got seamlessness of not having to instruct that work out of the firm.”

The HSF team has now grown to 250 legal staff who work in the Northern Ireland legal support hub dedicated to high-volume legal processing. Belfast services two kinds of clients – HSF’s clients and every fee earner in its offices around the world.

“The key, thematically, to the work we do is that it is work which can, within the legal framework, be subject to a defined process using technology to enable a better efficiency,” Ms Jackson says.

“The defining characteristic is that those can be delivered using best processes.”

Whether the support person is in a traditional legal assistant role, taking on new challenges with clients or sitting within an in-house service centre, the emphasis is on maximising the value of the human element. In a tech-heavy market, skills such as analysis, relationship-building and judgement are increasingly sought after.

Ultimately, Mr van Dorp says, the efficiencies and conveniences of innovation cannot replace the human value of staff at work.

“We’re not about having robots here who just type at a thousand words a minute and pump out documents like a machine. We’re about getting people who can fit and can add something to the firm in a cultural way as well.”