Dec 07 Trish Carroll Article

 

ALPMA Legal Management Summit 2007 - It's a Wrap

Trish Carroll - Event MC and Director, Galt Advisory

The 7^th Annual ALPMA Conference was huge in every sense. The audience came from all over Australia and New Zealand. It was the largest audience yet.  None went home disappointed. It was a manic and marvelous two days crammed with quality speakers, audience participation, fantastic prizes from generous sponsors and exhibitors, gossip, glamour and friendships made and renewed.

Melbourne is a city that’s hard to beat – even with a bit of rain. For non-Melbournians the chance to visit the holy ground that is the Melbourne Cricket Ground was a thrill.   Just being that close to the MCG was a distraction for some but a distraction that didn’t last once the Conference got underway.

It is impossible to cover all the highlights of the Conference so a few highlights will have to do.

Overarching themes from the 2007 Conference included:

Communication – nothing beats it, you can’t over communicate

Creativity– the signs of things to come are clear, facing up to them and thinking creatively to adapt or change is the challenge we must conquer

Connecting – with clients, with staff and with our inner six year old

Credibility – nothing replaces it, we need to earn our right to be heard by first being credible

Kicking off the program was Professor Stephen Mayson speaking about practice management. If there was anyone in any doubt that practice management is optional they came away from Professor Mayson’s session with a changed perspective.

What goes into managing a practice is complicated – and Mayson made the point that the nature of lawyers often makes it more complicated. The audience related to this point!   All agreed that those super intelligent humans (lawyers) often have a low tolerance level for things that do not interest them. And for some lawyers top of the list of zones of disinterest is ‘management’. 

Recognising this disinterest is an opportunity and a challenge.  Mayson gave great insights into both sides. His outline of the role and responsibility of a professional practice manager made plain that many hats are worn and in smaller firms you need to be a ‘specialist generalist’ to coin an expression of Harry Rosenberg’s, a Nexia ASR partner who spoke at one of the breakout sessions.

Being a specialist generalist is a tough call. It is made even tougher if your firm has a complex business strategy or has no clear strategy; ‘anything goes’ is the worst of all strategies for the professional practice manager.

Professor Mayson’s framework to help determine what sort of firm yours is was beautiful in its simplicity and powerful in its logic. The Convenience, Complementary, Combination framework is a great one. In a nutshell:

Convenience	Individual personal practices, independent model, no role for business strategy or management.
Complementary	Levels of inter-dependence, business strategy may be difficult to agree, management provides the support infrastructure
Combination	True partnership, integrated business, inter-dependence essential, business strategy necessary to provide framework for action, management provides leadership and direction.

The audience was urged to understand at what point in the C spectrum their firm sits. Professor Mayson’s wise counsel about no one right way evoked a sigh of relief from the audience. As Mayson said ‘you can’t create the perfect law firm – you have to deal with what you’ve got – not get too far ahead but far enough to see the bigger picture.’

Living with the status quo, even in a convenience firm, is not going to be sufficient. Standing still is not an option unless oblivion is your strategic goal.

If all of this seems out of whack then that’s as it should be according to Anders Sorman-Nilsson, a former lawyer, and founder of Thinque.   It is hard to recall exactly what Anders entertaining presentation was all about but one thing(ue!) remains clear – Maslow’s theory is on its head and knowing it’s out of whack and won’t return to its former whack requires us to think and act differently.

Looking at the statistics provided by John Cain, Victorian Government Solicitor, about the future made it frighteningly plain that thinking differently about our people constrained future is essential for business survival.   John spoke passionately about the need to think outside the square in order to attract, retain and re-attract talent. Connecting with people was a big theme, taking the time to mentor, to coach, to be genuinely interested in the success of your people. And Harry Rosenberg from Nexia was equally passionate about why this is important and the value it delivers – in business growth, in happy staff and in happy clients.

These themes came through from our panel of dynamic duos from Maddocks, Swaab Attorneys and Andersons. The panel conveyed powerful messages about trust, credibility, respect and friendship – management by culture came through as a common element in each firm represented on the panel.

A future with different law firm ownership models was on the table when Legal Services Commissioners Steve Mark and Victoria Marles spoke. With the Slater & Gordon IPO nicely tucked away the possibility of more firms adopting this ownership model is high on many firm’s agenda.     From what the Commissioners said the interest in how far to take this model was more apparent to our US counterparts as their emailed questions about derivatives and hedging reveal than to the Aussies.

Perhaps the US firms’ have been listening to Jason Clark from Minds at Work and his bounded creativity theory.   Bounded creativity means knowing that you have to work within a box but that the box’s boundaries need to be constantly tested and reset.   Slater & Gordon have done this, our US counterparts interest in the model shows they’re thinking about how to reset the box too.

The way to get this journey started is to reconnect with our inner six year old so that we suspend judgment and let the forces of creativity give us the opportunity to come up with ways to be different and better. 

Jason urged us not to be satisfied with the first level of creative ideas that emerge, push it harder and longer as the best ideas take more time.  We proved we know how to be creative, innovative during the session. Whether we fully  re-engaged with our inner six year old was a big ask but the potential was obvious – we just need to build it into how we work and engage.

Jason had the audience reinventing the everyday and seeing a future that is far less constrained. The noise level, the laughter and the astonishment at the creativity that emerged in a short space of time was a ‘had to be there’ experience. 

Clare Shann of beyondblue helped us understand the difference between depression and stress – they are most definitely not the same thing. It seems lawyers are very good at being depressed.   You can only wonder whether this trend would be reversed if more lawyers re-engaged with their inner six year old and spent more time exploring their bounded creativity.

Reality kicked in listening to Ida Abbott. Ida is a pint sized dynamo with down to earth advice about what it takes to transition from a plodder to a powerbroker. Bottom line: to be trusted you have to have credibility. You won’t be trusted if you are not effective. To be effective you need to have skills, insights, ideas – you need to both get things done and help shape how things could be in the future. Ida has written many books on developing talent and mentoring, visit www.idaabbott.com to see her book list.     John Cain’s advice about the importance of mentoring and coaching were reinforced by Ida’s practical lessons on how to bring out the best in yourself and those around you.

The last session of the Conference was well worth waiting for. Some said it was the stand out session. Led by Peter Fisher, a former architect and then actor, no one guessed just how much fun they could have operating completely out of their comfort zone. Drawing on fundamental methodologies of the theatre and taking the mystique out of emotional intelligence the audience was enraptured by Peter’s performance and then totally engaged in applying some new found skills on their colleagues.   It was like Jason Clarke’s innovation session except we were the object of the innovation. 

From Peter’s session we know the importance of showing emotion, people are not motivated by words and facts alone (lawyers’ take note!). Drawing on our emotional source can result in an emotional shift.    We need to be very aware of what we want our audience (whether that be one or 100) to feel emotionally as this will motivate them to the desired call to action.   And let’s face it action is usually what we are seeking in ourselves and in others.

As one speaker said ‘if you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much room’ which I now know to be a Porsche advertising slogan – even so it makes sense.

And if you’re on the edge please be stylish about it because our stylish Russian presenter, Elena Reed, made it very clear that we should all look good no matter what.   Girls, for this season it’s all about wearing red. Boys, get yourself a jaunty little Justin Timberlake style hat and you’ll be sitting pretty on that edge!

As always some new books were referred to during the Conference, here they are:

Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose,

Jagdish N. Sheth, Rajendra S. Sisodia, and David B. Wolfe, available from Amazon

Law Firm Strategy: Competitive Advantage and Valuation, Stephen Mayson, Oxford University Press. Mayson’s latest book brings together his current thinking on strategy, and anticipates the implications of a world of new competition, and of external ownership and investment, heralded by developments in the legal marketplace.

The Lawyer's Guide to Mentoring, Ida Abbott, available from Amazon.   This book takes readers step by step through the benefits and dynamics of a successful mentoring relationship, explaining how to start and maintain a mentoring program – and how an individual lawyer can start and maintain a mentoring friendship.