Timothy B. Corcoran is a keynote speaker, consultant, author, and legal commentator and has more than two decades of experience as a corporate executive. Speaking recently at the ALPMA summit in Sydney, he discussed law firms post-pandemic and how they could potentially be redesigned to grow their bottom line.

The traditional law firm model, Mr Corcoran said, was designed by “old white men” way in the past – and that in 2023, there are now other, more alternative ways of working that should be considered.

“The law firm model that we’ve embraced, the economic model, the operating model, the geographic model, works. No one’s trying to say it doesn’t work. It’s been very lucrative. And sometimes, in great economies, law firms are spectacular businesses. And sometimes, in down economies, law firms are spectacular businesses. In fact, they’re often designed to withstand economic uncertainty,” he said.

“So why would we change? Well, we change for a couple of reasons. If we were designing a law firm today, we might start with, what problems do we need to solve? Because that is going to be what we’re going to build and deliver to our clients. But access to justice, whether at the individual or small business level, or even to the large corporate level, is a fraction of what is needed. Because legal services are priced outside the scope of most people in most businesses. So, if we’re solving for people having access to legal advice, we don’t deliver it as a profession.”

In the legal sphere, law firms traditionally bill “as much time as possible” – but Mr Corcoran said this economic model is “probably the most inefficient way to translate experience into a healthy income”.

“Now, to survive in a law firm, we have to accept that the lawyers will substitute their own preference as good business acumen. And sometimes, they’re really smart and their preference is good business acumen. But very often, it turns out they have some terrible ideas,” he continued.

“But they’re in charge. So, our job collectively is not to grumble, not to whine, not to whinge; it’s to say, how can we inform the conversation so they understand the alternatives better? And they have choices that they can make.”

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One of these pandemic-driven choices was legal technology, which alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) have wholly embraced, as “they wanted to find lower-cost ways to deliver similar services” to law firms, according to Mr Corcoran.

“As globalisation happens, there are going to be more cross-jurisdictional practices. Law firms and practices that need to operate across borders because clients are operating across borders. A lot of [lawyers] have a client base that operates across borders. You don’t want to lose that client to your competitor because they understand how to harmonise the regulatory environment of two different jurisdictions. You want to be able to keep that client and not just be local,” he explained.

“We can take less time, less effort, fewer hours, but generate a healthy fee because the client says, this is the value to me. I don’t care how you make the sausage or how long it takes you. We thought there’d be more of that. And law firms, by and large, have not embraced that. We still treat alternative fee arrangements or non-hourly fees often as a necessary evil. We’ll do it when the clients ask us to, but we think it’s a bad idea.”

However, COVID-19 brought some lessons for law firms – and the world – namely that anyone could work anywhere.

“One of the pieces of feedback that many of us heard in those first few months of COVID was that we communicated more effectively than we ever have before as a business. And yet we were not in the same room ever. Because it was intentional. It was a thought process to say, what information do we think our people need at whatever level, staff, people, senior partners? how do we convey that? In what way do we convey that? And can we get the senior people involved in the communication chain? Turned out we did a really, really good job,” Mr Corcoran continued.

“Not everyone who has a management or leadership title is worth shit in management or leadership. Now, I don’t mean to be critical. What I mean is we’ve often confused governance with having a role in managing, supervising, leading, setting strategy, making operational and financial decisions with having a title for the website so that people will think you’re important. When it came time to make operational decisions under stress, a lot of people wilted. And a lot of people who didn’t have any type of management title at all, stepped right up.

“So, we learned that our organisations often have heroes working for them. But the heroes burn out. And when those fantastic people just get exhausted, whether we’re in some sort of crazy global pandemic or just the pace of the work that we do, they burn out, and they step away. There’s a huge gap, because we say, you know what, we don’t need a system of process. We don’t need a standardisation because we’ve got a hero doing it. And when they step away, it’s much, much harder to replace them than someone else who might be a lesser important cog in the wheel.”

But despite law firms doing remarkably well during the pandemic, many are now having to introduce cost-cutting measures and redundancies in global economic turbulence.

“When law firms have a few record years in a row, they completely forget that that’s not a guarantee. And so, the cost base rises. And so, the partner profits that they take home rise. And that becomes an expectation. And so, what’s the first to happen is cost cutting. So, we see the cost cutting happening everywhere. Not every law firm. But more often than not, we’ve learned that we need to stop treating the people who are economic casualties as if they’re poor performers and harming their ability to gain employment ever again,” Mr Corcoran added.

“Why don’t we just say what it is? We staffed up for a demand level that was not sustainable. But there’s also a lot more law firm leaders who are saying, wait a minute, do you remember what happened the last time we cut too closely? And then we were behind when things picked up because when they picked up, they picked up quickly.”

This, Mr Corcoran said, supports the notion that the traditional law firm system “doesn’t lend itself towards long-term thinking” and that the profession is somewhat “boxed in”.

“So, what can we do differently? How can we embrace client feedback and focus? How can we orient our services in a way that the primary way we’ll measure success is based on the client? Segmented service and pricing means, are we consciously choosing to be in different segments of the market with different offerings?

“What are we doing that’s old-fashioned? And what are we doing that might actually give us a competitive advantage? It might be uncomfortable, but what if it gives us access to talent and whether legal or business professionals, what if it gives us an opportunity to provide flexible work arrangements? What if it gives us opportunities to keep really talented, well-trained people who have a certain phase of their lives where they may not be as productive? And that’s OK because we know they’ll be back. How do we embrace those kinds of models?” he added.

“I’ve spent most of my time in this in the last five, six, seven years after spending a lot of time on pricing and a lot of time on process improvements and a lot of time on business development, finding that you really can’t change anything in a law firm unless the lawyers find it economically feasible to do so or economically risky not to do so. And tying rewards to changing behaviours is the key.”