I am privileged to be working with the San Diego County Public Law Library as they plan a major renovation of their main library. They launched a campaign this week called Rebuilt. Reinvented. Reinvigorated. The campaign is to raise awareness about their plans to better serve the legal community and the general public.

The changes include conference rooms and technology areas that will make it possible for lawyers to use the library as a satellite law office. They include creating new public spaces that will bring together legal organizations and community groups to better serve the public. They are revisiting their membership program to ensure they are providing value to their patrons. They are even developing a virtual community that will make legal information accessible beyond the physical walls of the library.

Why are they doing this? Because the needs of their patrons and the way legal information is delivered has changed. The San Diego Law Library understands that if they don’t find new ways to add value to their “clients,” they risk extinction.

Law firms should take notice. Instead of clinging to the old ways of doing business, they need to find new ways to add value to their clients and improve the way they deliver their services.

These changes are not easy. Some traditional services may have to go away. The professionals working there have to develop new skill sets. There is a risk that it may not work.

But what is so impressive to me is that the staff and the board are willing to take the chance to make the library a more relevant and vital part of the community. They may not have all the answers, but they recognize that the status quo is not good enough.

I found an old email this morning that references a 2009 McKinsey Executive Insight report about challenges facing corporations coming out of the economic crisis. I no longer have a link to the year-old report, but the excerpt from the email reads:

“Companies need to integrate marketing and sales function into the day-to-day operations of the organization and apply the same rigor to defining commercial processes and systems that they have long applied to manufacturing and other operational processes and systems. This “commercial transformation” can take many forms and involves 1) a concerted, multi-year effort to substantially upgrade the effectiveness of a company’s marketing and sales processes, including aligning top management around a forceful transformation theme; 2) driving performance improvement programs around 2-3 carefully selected commercial levers and striving to lead the industry on these levers; and 3) embedding the change through a comprehensive commercial operating system, comprising not only processes and tools, but also IT systems and performance management.”

If you filter through the jargon and are not put off by words like “commercialization,” “operational processes”and “sales,” there are some salient points from which law firms could benefit, particularly those that have made a heavy investment in marketing but are not sure they are getting the results they want.

First, law firm management and their marketing departments need to be directly aligned. Many firms still fail to give marketing a seat at the executive committee and make the much needed connection between strategic growth and market position.

Second, the old adage, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” remains true. Law firm marketers need benchmarks around which they can measure their success. Real process needs to be put in place to evaluate return on investment.

Finally, IT and marketing can no longer work independently. Technology needs to be an integrated into law firm marketing strategies. There are far too many law firm marketing directors out treat technology like a “project” that can be checked off on a things to do list. Technology is a part of doing business. Combined with the right people and processes, it is a tactic for raising awareness, a tool for developing credibility and the centralized resource for tracking results.

This is not to suggests that law firms need to undergo a “commercial transformation” at the expense of professionalism. But the economy has changed and the drivers for legal services are different today. Firms need to take a disciplined approach to the way the do business in addition to the legal work they provide clients. They cannot afford reactive marketing where there is a constant state of motion and very little measurable progress.

I’m calling last week the week of pain – growing pains. On the same day, I had calls from colleagues at three different clients. All wanted to bend my ear about struggles they were having trying to implement new initiatives.

Strategic direction wasn’t the challenge. All three clients have virtually universal support for their end goals. Budget wasn’t even a problem. Sure, money is always a factor, but in all three of these cases, funding for the projects was available. It wasn’t even a question of timing. Again, in all cases, key stakeholders agreed that it was now or never.

The challenge is change management. It seems no matter how much agreement there is about the need to change people continue to struggle to break the status quo.

This is particularly tough for law firms. If for no other reason than the partnership structure itself, law firms struggle with change more than any other organization I know.

The same week I was having these discussions with clients, I had the privilege of attending the LA Legal Marketing Association Chapter’s annual continuing marketing education program. (My company, Legal Vertical Strategies, was a sponsor).

There, Henry Givray, Chairman and CEO of SmithBucklin, spoke on the topic of leadership and, specifically, the importance of transparency in decision making. The framework he uses to communicate decisions is simple:

1)      I’ve made a decision and this is what it is.

2)      I’m leaning toward a decision but want your input.

3)      This decision is open to debate and I welcome your opinion.

This allows the team to respond accordingly.

1)      Yes, I agree.

2)      I don’t agree, but I can live with it.

3)      I don’t agree, and I cannot live with it.

On its face, decision-making clarity and change management seem distinct topics. Yet adapted, Givray’s framework provides a formula law firm leaders can use to drive change in their organization.

There are decisions that require extensive debate among partnerships. What are our goals? What are the principles we all agree are non-negotiable in achieving those goals? Who do we trust to lead us toward accomplishing those goals?

These are important questions. Once the debate is closed and those decisions have been made, however, firm leadership needs to be able to move on and make decisions on behalf of the firm without debating every step.

Firm leaders need to be clear about how they are making their decisions. Some decisions will be open to debate. Others will not. So long as there is clarity about what type of decision it is, the partners will retain their individual right to agree or not.

Individual partners can then make their own decisions. Can they agree and, if not, can they live with it? If they cannot live with it, the individual partner needs to have an honest conversation with himself or herself as to whether they are in the right place.

Law firm leaders can and should try to help partners who disagree and don’t feel they can live with the decision. You don’t want to lose good partners because they are struggling with change. Good leaders need to provide the guidance and will support. But that is a conversation distinct from decision making.

“That’s not how we do things around here.”

So begins a recent Forbes.com article, Kill the Status Quo Police, (Thanks to @sapreston for sharing it on Twitter).

The article is about how some organizations are so tied to how things were done in the past that they end up deterring innovation. The author points to a number of compelling examples, including Microsoft , Dell, Motorola and others.

“Such destructive norms couldn’t be sustained if there weren’t people anointed to enforce rigid adherence to them. Those are the Status Quo police. Their job, first and foremost, is to make sure that historical ways of doing business are not altered. It is not to focus on positive business results. To the contrary, it is to make sure the organization stays with the tried and true regardless of results. The police simply assume that results will be good if the status quo continues,” writes Adam Hartung.

Although this article focuses on technology companies, I would argue that nowhere are the Status Quo Police more prevalent than inside law firms and in-house legal departments.

Heavy investment in infrastructure keeps firms from adopting faster, less-expensive technology. Firms cling to the billable hour in fear of having the tough conversations about how to value the services they provide. Lawyers are afraid of collaborating on business development for fear of having to share clients. Many would rather keep a small piece of business with one client than take a chance to expanding the relationship by introducing to new talent — even when that talent is their own partners.

When the legal market hit the skids in late 2007, I thought for the first time in a long time that law firms would be forced to embrace change and realize the status quo was no longer an option. Nearly three years later, little has changed. Budgets have been slashed and firms have cutback to the barebones, but the status quo remains largely intact. There is close to what I would call a genuine fear of trying something different.

I’m with Hartung. It’s time to kill the status quo.

If, as Cicero said, man is his own worst enemy, then partners are posing the biggest risk to the sustainability of large law firms. From my vantage point, individual attorney, practice group and other internal silos are preventing most firms from making needed change in the way they do business.

With the latest Hildebrant Baker Robbins Peer Monitor (Q2 2010) reporting that the outlook for the legal industry as flat, law firms can no longer expect economic improvement will solve their profitability challenges.

The report concludes:

“The challenge to firms will be in their willingess to innovate, experiment and change long-standing firm traditions in order to find new avenues of growth and profitability.”

The time is now for firms to address their proverbial enemy head on.

An article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review suggests one of the best ways to force a change in thinking is to reorganize.

In “Change for Change’s Sake,” authors Freek Vermeulen, Phanish Puranam and Ranjay Gulati argue that by periodically reorienting organizations around different criterian, “the firm gets the best of both worlds.”

In one case, Cisco System changed its business unit structure (a.k.a. practice groups in the law firm world) into a centralized structure organized by function (e.g. marketing, sales, R&D).
The reorganization created new teams who were able to work together and exchange ideas with peers across the company. Because each member of the new team still maintained ties with their old networks, the knowledge base of each new team expanded as each team member had a set of trusted advisors they could call upon to validate ideas.

As a result, communication and collaboration increased across the company.

The authors argue:

“When a firm reorganizes in this way, the old networks and culture do not suddenly vanish; employees often maintain their old patterns of interaction for quite a while… so at least for the near term, employees cooperate along both informal and formal networks. As a consequence, the firm gets the best of both worlds.”

For law firms, new client development structures offer a way to reorganize attorneys to break existing silos and encourage the development of new relationships.

If attorneys are organized around practice groups, this may be the time to create industry or client teams. If a robust client team program is in place, consider creating new teams but comprised in a new way.

Law firms can no longer take a “wait and see” approach to profitability. Change is needed — if for no other reason that for the sake of it.

It is a buyer’s market out there.

Over the last two years, more than 5,700 lawyers have lost their jobs. The demand for many types of legal services is down. Competition for high-demand legal services has never been greater.

Being a good lawyer is no longer good enough. How you demonstrate value is equally important.

Law firms who understand their business processes — how they lawyer — and use that knowledge to streamline the way they work have a powerful advantage over those who don’t.

When I refer to business process, I’m talking about looking at the discreet services lawyers provide and understanding what steps go in to providing that service and for what cost. While there may be no “one size fits all” process, there are certain steps that happen every time and there are variables — most of which are known but not always predictable.

With an understanding of how lawyers in the firm work, it becomes easier to assess costs and evaluate ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness across the firm. And, it sets the foundation for sometimes difficult conversations about timelines, communication expectations and fees.

The ability to communicate the workflow of a case or a transaction helps simplify the management of client expectations. Consider the power of providing a client — at the onset of a matter — with a high level overview of what steps are involved, explaining the absolutes and discussing unknowns. Additionally, you can tee up sometimes challenging conversations about timelines, communication expectations, and fees.

Beyond communication, a more advanced understanding of the business process also provides the foundation for developing value-based billing arrangements. The desire for pricing predictability is well established in 2010. For law firms, the key to responding to this need, is to understand the cost of their own business. Documenting the business process of common matters is the first step.

To learn more about the benefits of client service teams, check out my article, “Client Service Teams: Lessons from the Trenches.”

Until I went to work for an electronic discovery company a few years ago, I never understood the concept of disruptive technology in the legal profession. It never occurred to me that lawyers would perceive as a negative something that has the potential to improve the way they do business.

Coming from a background in law firm client relationship management, I saw—and still see—an opportunity for law firms to adopt electronic discovery on a firmwide (“enterprise”) basis and use their ability to streamline document review as a client service strategy.

For a host of reasons, that didn’t happen. Instead, corporate legal departments saw how discovery technologies could provide them with more control over their documents and help them better manage outside counsel.

That’s not because general counsel are any more innovative than their law firm counterparts. Most GCs, if given a choice, would focus on the legal issues their company faces and ignore operational issues altogether. But corporate counsels don’t have a choice. They receive outside pressure to cut costs from the C-level suite and their boards. Technology is a normalization factor.

Law firm partners don’t have the benefit of that outside party looking in and applying pressure. It’s not that they don’t know the benefits technology has to offer. They just lack sufficient pressure to take the proactive steps. The sense of urgency hasn’t been there. They perceive the technology as disruptive.

Whether it is a document review platform, time-and-billing software or any other piece of technology, law firms need to start viewing technology the way their clients do.

Here are a few suggestions:

Incorporate technology into your client development strategy. When a client announces they are implementing a new piece of technology, find out why. Use the announcement as an opportunity to get client feedback. Ask why they chose the product; why they chose to bring it in house; whether the technology is part of a broader strategy and what that strategy is.

Ask for a seat at the table. If your client has a technology committee, ask if you can participate. It will give you the opportunity to better understand your client and the issues their executive or legal team faces. It will also give you an opportunity to provide value back to your firm.

Stop playing defense. If you think your client is making the wrong decision about their use of technology, play offense. Develop your firm’s technology value proposition and ask for an opportunity to demonstrate how you and your firm can do it better. There is not a GC in the world who wouldn’t listen to that conversation.

To me normalizing disruptive technology is as much about client relationship management as it is about matter management. There are only upsides for law firms in being part of that change.

I’m heading up to Legal Tech West in Los Angeles today. Shows like these always remind me of the importance technology plays in demonstrating value to clients.

Legal technology tradeshows tend to be full of vendors and law firm IT staff. There is a lot of knowledge in these rooms. Too often, however, the crowds are singing to the converted rather than reaching the partners in management positions with decision-making authority. Lawyers who do attend often do so passively, securing their CLE credits and hitting the tradeshow floor to find the latest giveaway to take home to their five-year-old.

My partner Cathy Kenton just finished an article targeted toward our legal vendor clients called, “5 Last Minute Tradeshow Success Tips for Legal Vendors.” The article was focused on how legal vendors can maximize their return on investment when exhibiting at trade shows.

It strikes me that lawyers could use some tips on how to maximize their time at tradeshows as well, so here are three simple approaches I recommend for the lawyers heading to Legal Tech or any other show featuring legal technologies.

1. Have a plan. Know your firm’s business strategy and the types of technologies you use or are considering in order to achieve their goals. Once you know what you are trying to accomplish, you will be in a better position to evaluate what vendors at the show have to offer.
2. Bring a friend who understands the end game. In my experience, there is often a gap in knowledge between what lawyers want to accomplish and what technology does. As a result, the technology ends up frustrating. Walk the tradeshow floor with your CIO or a vendor-agnostic advisor who can help you connect the dots. For example, I like to walk the floor with my clients. I learn from their conversations with the vendors and am often able to help them consider ways to leverage technology that they have not considered before. It’s a win-win for both of us.
3. It’s not all about the next new thing. Most firms have invested significant amounts of money in legal technologies but few know how to leverage all the bells and whistles to get the best value for your money. Visit with vendors whose technology you own. Come armed with specific things you are trying to accomplish and ask them for best practices they’ve learned from their other clients.

Technology tradeshows like Legal Tech give attorney leaders the opportunity to step out of the day-to-day and start considering long-term opportunities to leverage technology to achieve business goals.