Optim Legal Stories

Next Generation Thinking

Three Things [Law firms] Can Learn From Apple- (Lessons From Fast Company)


"Can you describe why your law firm is different from other law firms?"

I was asked this question late yesterday afternoon by a journalist. As I sometimes tend to do, I began to answer it by listing the features of the Optim Legal model and how these facilitate benefits for clients.

My approach in that situation came immediately to mind when I read a description in an article in Fast Company this morning. In it, the author Henrik Werdelin embeds a often repeated point in comparing Google and Apple's marketing for their Android and Iphone products:

"People don't feel they need tools; they need solutions to problems in their life. People never lack a screwdriver; they need to hang a painting on the wall. However, if you focus in on an amazing tool you just created, then you will naturally construct a narrative around the tool's features... What Apple has managed to do is to package their products around the user's needs, not around all the features of the tool itself."

The difference is stark when seen in action in the two videos, one from Google another from Apple embedded in the article. It is worth watching the two by clicking on the link above.

Google versus Apple

I have heard before about the "experience economy" and I certainly have many times heard the saying 'nobody buys drills, they buy holes' (in all of its many variations). What Apple does so well is the way that it understands and defines 'experience'. Werdelin acknowledges this advantage when he goes on to say that he believes "the '10s will be focused on innovation in the field of 'Experience'. I think some of the most amazing companies of the coming few years will be businesses that understand how to wrap technology beautifully around human needs so that it matters to people."

So, thinking about all this, I could more clearly describe Optim Legal's 'technology' as driving to design human systems and dynamics which structurally lead to better 'experiences' for lawyers and clients. That seems like a nice way to describe the goal of our model.

Somehow the word 'experience' accounts for all of the substantial things our people want out of a workplace and what clients want out of a legal service provider. The focus on experience, also in the expanded Apple sense, most crucially, allows in the human factor. Their product matters to people because it is fundamentally designed with this in mind. 'The human factor' I would describe as the elephant sitting in the corner of the traditional law firm office. Which is dangerous because a law firm is ultimately in the business of human relationships. A law firm able to innovate by making interactions between a lawyer, their law firm managers, operational colleagues, lawyer colleagues, and clients more mutually beneficial and enjoyable than their competitors, will in the long term win. A law firm that doesn't do this will eventually, over time, lose.

I asked some of our lawyers if they could provide some feedback on the question I had been asked. I received the following replies:

“I’ve been at Optim Legal for over 2 years. I now find it very difficult to imagine working anywhere else. Before coming to Optim Legal, I was concerned that the client wasn’t always receiving optimum value. Optim Legal enables me to identify the optimum point on the value curve and deliver that value to the client. The results have been excellent.”- Sydney Birchall, Senior Lawyer

"The freedom Optim gives to its lawyers is based on a strong relationship of trust. We work with our clients to find pricing solutions that fit each situation best, and do not need to always waste time in conferring with a series of stakeholders (like you must in a partnership structure). Here, the process of establishing alternative billing practices is not in itself a disincentive, and then where we do come up with new and better ways to approach pricing, that is shared and celebrated within the firm at our fortnightly team gathering. Even for our less sophisticated clients who are not inclined to talk about pricing upfront, our baseline offering includes the 20 up or down under the Client Satisfaction Billing Policy. It is a great feeling when the client takes the initiative after the work is all done, and shows their appreciation with a fee uplift - that is the extension of trust from Optim to us and onto the client."- Danny King, Lawyer, Employment Relations

“The Optim Legal model encourages loyalty from clients because the cost of our lawyers who have come from tier-1 law firms is low enough to ensure that our clients do not shop around for each new transaction as they do with the larger law firms. Our clients also appreciate the willingness of our lawyers to be judged by their performance in our billing process. Not all clients like legal services delivered in the same way so our lawyers need to know our clients' businesses and how they prefer their legal services to be delivered to be able to achieve high levels of feedback from clients. This process encourages the development of sound client-lawyer relationships.”- Natasha Goulden, Practice Leader, Real Estate and Commercial

"The OL model allows me to work flexibly and autonomously so that I can provide my clients with efficient and personal service at the highest level". Lucy Meadley, Practice Leader- Trade Marks Lawyer & Trade Marks Attorney.

What is interesting in these answers, is the ways in which the two aspects of our business (serving lawyers and also serving clients) which we tend to separate when we talk about them as 'features' actually become fused when you hear them described in practice as 'experiences'. For example:

A lawyer who is given greater trust and autonomy uses this to devise innovative client engagement methods which better suit the specific needs of the client. 

A lawyer who is personally concerned with clients receiving genuine value finds an environment where this sincerity can be put into practice which leads to greater commitment which leads to excellent results for both the client and the lawyer.

A lawyer who finds that a billing system which makes them accountable to clients encourages them to acquire a more intimate and individual understanding of their client which ultimately leads to a sounder lawyer client relationship.

A lawyer who allowed to work flexibly finds this frees her to perform at her best for her clients. 

The most powerful part of each of these descriptions is about what genuinely matters to each individual and how the organisation enables what matters to them to be expressed. This is the intersection of lawyers' needs with clients' needs and when it happens, it is 'optimal'. Werdelin writes.

"great technology will, by itself, just not be enough; not even if it's designed in a clean and functional way--you will need to architect a great emotional experience for your users and then make it fit their daily flow to be a winner of tomorrow."

If a law firm can get this emotional experience just right, they will be one of those winners of tomorrow.

Lawyers, sustainability and genuine change in Australia's business culture

The New Lawyer logo

A brilliant career?

24 March 2010 | by Nick James Print this article Comments Share this article

What does it mean to be a lawyer in Australia in 2010? Nick James writes

At the centre of a meaningful human life there exists a set of aspirational ideals and values. Our capacity to embody and live up to at least some of these ideals and values is a crucial factor in determining our happiness. Nothing is more vital or satisfying than to live according to one's authentic values. No force has been more powerful in shaping the world, rightly or wrongly, than the pursuit of or conflict over values.

Sitting in an office as a lawyer in Australia in 2010, it can seem almost impossible to see the potential for connection with this dimension of human experience. We live in a time where, apparently, the great human struggles of ideas are behind us. Where we have reached a consensus that our energies are best applied simply towards working to get ahead, to paying our mortgage and struggling to afford a better life for our family. Indeed it can be so challenging and difficult to keep up with the demands of the marketplace that we can be fooled into thinking that, when we have done so successfully, we have achieved all there is to achieve.

That there is a cost to this mistake and that there is a latent desire for authentic purpose in our industry seems to follow from the evidence of widespread dissatisfaction and disengagement among lawyers, particularly in junior ranks. That this desire represents a business opportunity for law firms capable of tapping into and enabling an authentic sense of purpose seems beyond question. Such organisations would be, like the example of Google in the IT industry, potentially capable of harnessing and funnelling the energies of the best minds of their generation.

A sustainable society is a society grounded in the enduring well-being of its individual participants. Ultimately a sustainable law firm must be grounded in the same principle. To be genuinely supportive of the well-being of its participants, a law firm must ultimately connect its lawyers with a sense of purpose in their role as citizens in the outside world. That there is a genuine moral dimension to this challenge is undeniable.

Commercial lawyers in 2010 have a unique, historic opportunity to be useful to society not only by contributing to pro bono or public service work but by contributing to new forms of business. In particular, for example through their participation in two great and very immediate challenges:

1. The process of civilising our workplaces to make them more responsive to our overlooked human needs for balance, purpose and self-determination: And also ensuring that the resulting organisations supplant the previous models because they do a better job of attracting emerging talent and (in a law firm context) servicing clients. New law-firm models can, by demonstrating their success in a hitherto highly conservative industry, begin to lead the way and provide a thriving example to other businesses of the superior effectiveness of new ownership and management structures.

2. The process of nurturing and furthering the interests of other innovative businesses particularly businesses currently struggling to establish the new-energy and low-environmental-impact technologies that are badly needed in order to facilitate an urgent rational societal response to the information presented by the current climate change science. Lawyers have helped make the world safe for large, polluting corporations. Now they need to play an equally important role in paving the way for the next wave of innovative and low-carbon businesses. These new organisations will need their own (vocal) supporters and advisors who are genuinely culturally aligned with their missions.

The reason why these challenges are exciting is that they have the potential to be both personally rewarding and also highly profitable: A disruption of the idea that as a lawyer you need to choose between values and a sacrifice in income. Highlighted by examples like Google, Virgin, InterfaceFlor and Semco, emerging changes to our business culture show, that in the new world there are opportunities to merge values and profit in genuinely new and energising ways.

This is what it could mean to be a lawyer in 2010.

via thenewlawyer.com.au

What do you think?

Now we've got momentum!

via anthillonline.com

Here is a video my sister just sent me, described by Anthill Magazine as "The Best 3 minute video on leadership that you will ever see". The video is narrated by Derek Sivers.

As Optim Legal rapidly approaches its own tipping point. It is important to think how far we have come. 

Happily we are still dancing and keeping form- all 13 of us. Working for some of the most cutting edge and inspiring companies in Australia today. Soon there will be many more.

 

Love being a (top tier) lawyer but no longer like working in traditional firms? - Optim Legal Job Ad

  • Offers opportunity, job satisfaction, fairness, flexibility & self-determination
  • "Based on the most innovative management thinking from the non legal world" (AFR)
  • Lawyers genuine about client service who aspire to be the best at what they do
Optim Legal is an entirely new, complete, law firm structure for top tier experienced lawyers. Described as “The new kids redefining the block” by Lawyers Weekly, our model is based on the mission of “thriving through better servicing the genuine interest of lawyers and clients”. 

Optim Legal is based on learning from companies as diverse as Google, Semco, Virgin and Southwest Airlines. The Australian Financial Review wrote of us “Imagine a law firm… based on the most innovative management thinking from the non legal world. Well it’s a reality”. 

If you are a lawyer who:

• is seeking greater levels of opportunity, authentic job satisfaction, fairness, flexibility and self determination;
• is genuine about client service and aspires to be the best at what they do,
• has more than 4 years PQE which includes more than 2 years at a top 8 Australian firm or top-tier overseas firm,

we would welcome the opportunity to meet with you for both of us to learn more about each other.

We are open to meeting:

• senior associates looking to make the next step in their career
• partners interested in a lateral move
• in-house counsel wanting to return to private practice
• entrepreneurial junior lawyers

For any confidential questions (if you meet all of the criteria above) please contact:

Nick James 0413 613 290
Danielle (Danny) King 0418 406 546 

We look forward to being in touch!

----------------------------------------

International Press:

“The entire Optim Legal structure is based on choice, empowerment and satisfaction both for its clients and for its lawyers” NZ Lawyer’s Weekly

“Optim Legal may be small, buts it’s a new kind of law firm that’s designed to better meet the needs of next-generation lawyers and clients. Based on a different kind of business model, the rise of such firms may increasingly beg the question: is the traditional law firm still ‘fit for purpose’"Managing Partner (USA) Special Report on Succession Planning

See our Blog, media room and website via google.

via seek.com.au

Optim Legal has just posted this ad on Seek.

If you are a lawyer or you know someone who may be happier with us. Pass this on!

Google's search for smart power- Story by Giles Parkinson in Business Spectator today

Giles Parkinson

Google's search for smart power

Most people expect there to be a transformation of the energy industry, but what if it turns out to be a total revolution?

Most talk focuses on a possible move to distributed rather than centralised power supplies, the introduction of smart grids and the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy supplies such as wind, solar, marine and geothermal.

In other words, the structure of the industry pretty much remains the same, except for a few whiz-bang technologies that make it greener, more efficient and more available.

But what if it went further than that, and the whole industry was turned upside down? Two developments in the past few days in the US give a hint of what is being envisaged and what might be possible – the entry of Google into the energy utility business and the much-hyped release of the stand-alone fuel cell, the Bloom Box.

Rest of story at businessspectator.com.au

Great story today by Giles Parkinson in the Business Spectator. Useful information about the way sectors of US business are positioning themselves to lead the next energy revolution. These sorts of stories should be instructive encouragement for the development of Australia's emerging renewable energy industry.

Australia needs a business culture which embraces this challenge and takes advantage of the opportunities it presents. We could be the at the dawn of one of the most exciting phases of business evolution ever seen in this country or Australia could simply be left behind. The question is simple- do we want to gear ourselves to become an economy exporting cutting edge technology for an industry projected to grow exponentially in the future or simply sit back and export coal until the accumulated environmental cost eventually shuts down that industry for good? See this extract from an Atlantic Monthly article published in August 09 describing the shift in attitude towards the industry in Silicon Valley for an example of what we are missing out on

"The boundless optimism in Silicon Valley recalls the early days of the Internet boom. “Think of the smartest guy you’ve ever met and then imagine 50,000 more just like him innovating all at once,” Mike Danaher, a partner and cleantech specialist at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. [...] Last year, cleantech was the third-largest recipient of venture funding, after IT and biotechnology, with investments of $5.8 billion. But that statistic doesn’t begin to convey its psychic significance. It’s all anyone wants to talk about. Exhilaration over clean energy has so thoroughly swept Silicon Valley that it has transformed the local culture.” 

Google has consistently demonstrated that long term success in the new world can involve merging genuine volition and imagination with profit. I hope they, like other more conventional companies like GE and Walmart, are able to show the way. It would be great if in the future Australia was able to look back on this era and say we were proud of the contribution we made to the transition to a sustainable energy system. And not only that but that we profited by positioning our economy for long term success in a way which enhanced and preserved quality of life for future generations. I look forward to more stories like this.

Update

See this Guardian article on 25 February with the following quote. 

 

"Does the Bloom Box represent a substantial technical advance over Ceramic Fuel Cells? On the information provided so far, I could see no obvious technical innovation that puts Bloom ahead of the Ceramic Fuel Cells machines. But Ceramic Fuel Cells works from Melbourne, not Silicon Valley, and can't get the California Governor and Colin Powell to come to its product launches. We'll soon see whether the unflashy Australians have just lost their market to Bloom or whether Ceramic Fuel Cells long and painful development has just been validated by Bloom's hyperbolic endorsement of the potential of the SOFC."

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/25/bloom-box-innovation

 

 

The current large law firm model is vulnerable to new and better ways to organise lawyers

Here is a link to my latest article in the New Lawyer with the article reproduced below:

"The nature of the top tier law firm has fundamentally shifted in the last three decades, writes Nick James, so isn’t it natural that those most adversely affected would begin to cast around for new alternatives?

OBSERVERS of the legal industry have for a while been describing a new set of behaviours and attitudes displayed by emerging lawyers. Generation Y in particular is described as a challenge and sometimes a problem for the existing law firm model.

The new generations, we are told, are less interested in doing the work required to become a partner and are more interested in:

  • profit share at an earlier age
  •  flexibility
  • being given greater responsibility and client access
  • experiencing an individual connection with their personal values and the subject matter of their work.

While both Gen Y and X are different from the generations before them, it is important to note that many of the ‘changes’ in attitude ascribed to them are in fact natural responses and adjustment to dramatic changes in the large law firm environments they are inheriting.

Today’s mega law firm juggernaut is a relatively recent phenomenon. The very largest law firms in Australia in 1980 had only just exceeded 30 partners. They also operated under a very different set of conditions. In 1979 an article comprehensively surveying the phenomenon of the emergence of the “corporate” law firm in Australia, noted that “one firm has gone so far as to … specify weekly minimum billing targets for its partners and employee solicitors”. The article continued “other law firms have clung longer to a sense of individual autonomy in the partners”.

As law firms have grown since then, in only a few decades, what once was a system of a community of partners bounded by either personal friendship or acquaintance evolved into a highly impersonal/competitive/corporatised and semi-political structure. Its decision making model: Requiring the consensus of a large group of partner-owners who have a window in their career to collect profits before retirement; has (arguably inevitably) driven management decisions which have over time tended to serve the short-term profit interests of the equity partner-owners at the expense of other important interests, including those of the emerging lawyers and even of the firms’ clients.

The fall-out has been a large factor in the crisis in our legal profession of unhappy lawyers (even in partnership ranks) and dissatisfied clients, not to mention a decline in the general level of community respect for the profession. Increasingly higher fees; higher hours worked by lawyers; behavior driven by billing targets; the overheating of the leverage model; the creation of salaried partner/special counsel roles; and the increasing delay of promotion both to and beyond senior associate; are all a result of the intense focus on profits-per-equity-partner as the fundamental goal sitting at the centre of the top tier firm.

Ultimately these sorts of observations don’t mean much in a business sense unless they necessarily lead to two conclusions:

a) Factors inherent in the current large law firm model actually make the model bad at what it must do in the long term in order to remain sustainable and successful; which is to keep its workforce and its clients happy. 

And therefore:

b) The current large law firm model is vulnerable to new structures that can do a better job of giving lawyers a better place to work and clients better service and value while being able to accommodate the scale of needs of modern globalised corporations.

The structure which will win in the long term will need more than the simple advantages of incumbency which make the modern top tier law firms appear invincible at this point in time. Any new structure must, to be successful, rebalance the needs of lawyers for conditions which were once an embedded part of their working life as well as provide a dynamic engine capable of driving the growth of the business. How this is to be done is the task for the next generation of lawyers; those who have inherited a large law firm model which they can now plainly see is flawed and requires rethinking. The urgency of this task is heightened as they increasingly realise they themselves are among the primary victims of its basic dynamic and the cost to their lives as well as their professional enjoyment is too great to continue working within the existing model.

It is important to remember, that emerging alternative visions for the future for top tier practice, like the aspirations of the new generation of lawyers, are not a radical departure from the history of the legal profession. It is instead the overheated, current big firm model which is the aberration. It seems arguable that ‘new’ visions for the practice of law in fact represent a continuation of the sorts of things we have always wanted from our workplaces and which are only resurfacing now because they have been left behind for a while too long."

 

 

Why our lawyers support Cleantech & Renewable Energy

Cleantech & Renewable Energy

Optim Cleantech & Renewable Energy offers ‘cradle-to-success’ legal services for clean technology, energy efficiency and renewable energy business. Our lawyers have decades of legal experience in the fields of project finance, venture capital finance, intellectual property, mergers and acquisitions, technology transactions, property and environmental law.

via optimlegal.com.au

One of the driving ideas behind Optim Legal is the idea of providing access to the best lawyers under dramatically better conditions for clean tech and renewable energy companies. 

Cleantech and renewable energy clients receive further 10% discount from our already highly efficient rates. Optim has worked hard in the sector to increase its network and knowledge of the cleantech industry. We act for leading carbon management, biomass, solar and sustainability companies as well as for companies who are leading their sectors in the movement towards sustainability.

We play a large role in assisting our clients in making further connections within the industry and with investing parties.

Our mission is to make a material difference in the development of the industry in Australia and to be a beacon for legal talent passionate about working for companies they truly want to see succeed. 

Optim Legal Article in The New Lawyer

Here is the link for an article I wrote for The New Lawyer with the text below...

New year, time to thrive

22 January 2010 | by Nick James

Surely lawyers would thrive if they worked in an environment that animated them with a genuine sense of purpose, which puts their needs as professionals at the centre of its vision, writes Nick James from Optim Legal.

Holiday season is over and lawyers are returning to their workplaces. Holidays are a time of reflection, of still moments, a time when, even if for a short while, we take stock and look over the past year. We think about how our lives are progressing and how we would like this next year to be different from the last.

For many lawyers, if statistics and anecdotes are to be believed, the return to their places of work will not be a happy one. Unhappy lawyers, in a search for alternatives, will begin to look at other law firms, or to an in-house role and many will even explore the idea of leaving the profession altogether.

Lawyers, as a rule, are a group of people stubbornly and tenaciously driven by a sense of excellence and achievement. It is this drive that sits at the centre of the current management system of our leading top tier firms: the partnership model. It is the drive to rise to a certain standard of professional competence and then to achieve the recognition of one day being made Partner.

Because lawyers want to be the best at what they do, they have a tendency to be good at weathering adversity and to also make the best of the situation they are in. In order to do this they will often be prepared to sublimate almost all other concerns or aspirations. When this no longer becomes a comfortable activity, a person is left with a gnawing, persistent feeling of dissatisfaction.

What is it that we, as lawyers, have left behind in order to achieve our goals in our current workplaces?

Is it a sense of self-determination, of being genuinely in control of the direction of our day-to-day lives? Is it the desire to be evaluated and rewarded according to our results rather than politics and the opinions of other senior individuals? Is it being forced to give up too many hours of our time to achieve what we want to achieve? Or is it even the fact of being evaluated primarily according to our hours billed rather than how effectively we have served our clients’ interests?

Is it a question of purpose and values? The ultimate meaning and goal behind all of the effort we expend in our career. Whether what we actually stand for is expressed through our career choices and whether our organisation allows us to work in directions which reflect and bring us closer to our values?

Is it being stuck in an environment where we are too closely tied to and constricted by the collective? Where we as individuals simply aren’t able to change the things we don’t agree with and which have a direct, day-to-day impact on the quality of our working experience?

Surely we could all be even better lawyers if the conditions we worked under connected us with our colleagues in ways that better served what we are actually looking for in a workplace. Surely we lawyers would thrive if we worked in an environment which animated us with a genuine sense of purpose: Which put our needs as people and professionals at the centre of its vision.

Then we could be the best at what we do and work towards a meaningful life at the same time.

New blood!

The idea that business is an opportunity to create change is obviously a fraught one. Most businesses work on a fairly simple and effective set of human drivers. It is not easy to establish different patterns where there are so many already established and out there ostensibly working and grinding away. It actually takes a critical mass of people to see the same thing before anything like a coordinated movement can properly take hold. The basis of a meaningful and genuine change in business, is I think the collected and accumulating weight of experience of people who have not found in their previous careers any satisfaction or genuine sense of purpose and are looking for something else. There seem to be more and more of these people out there. That’s a lot of untapped energy.

When business values begin to dominate and then overtake a society’s values, business must in turn, eventually be held to account and civilised. For all of the things which it provides for society, the many things business doesn’t provide, eventually re-emerge as factors which people seek to have addressed in their lives, their workplace and careers. People in a market have a choice. Responding to new demands is essentially what a market is here to do. A business that can listen closely, respond to and enable the expression of this nascent energy in new forms of organisational design, can I believe, become eventually very powerful.

This month Optim Legal had two new recruits, attracted to us, I think for the genuine reasons for which we were established- Lucy Meadley and Danny King, from Mallesons and Freehills respectively. This has given us a renewed sense of vigour. It is one of those things along the way that makes us remember why we are doing what we are doing and why it is important to continue on.

I found this article in Fast Company- and have extracted a nice quote from John Mackey, the founder of Wholefoods. The article also then contains a useful analysis of what happens when intentions reach the real world.

“"You see, Conscious Capitalism is a fairly new idea, but it's going to have a huge impact," he begins, describing the philosophy he developed as he built his tiny natural-foods store into an $8 billion retail beast. "I do believe it will become the dominant paradigm of business in the 21st century." Conscious Capitalism, Mackey insists, moves corporations to refocus on purpose instead of profit. In theory, it underscores the importance of all of a company's interdependent "stakeholders": employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, community, and the environment. When all of those constituencies' interests are factored into the company's decisions and aligned, his thinking goes, all -- including, not incidentally, the bottom line -- will flourish.”

Onwards and upwards!

     
Click here to download:
New_blood.zip (69 KB)

Optim Legal's Mission

(download)


Over half of Australia’s lawyers are unhappy in their current job.

Some of this seems to be inherent in the structure of the average law firm.

Our mission is set out above. It is basically to construct a full service law firm which outperforms traditional firms by working with people and clients in a very different way. 

This involves giving our lawyers control over their lives, working with their energy to create what they want for themselves and channelling that energy into better outcomes for clients.  

It also involves allowing for aims other than the extraction of profit to enter into the way people relate to each other in business. We believe that business relationships that go beyond this simple motive will actually lead to a more effective and sustainable organization.  

This is not an idealistic movement. It is a reflection of the fact that a system of human organisation that doesn't allow people to thrive will not survive in the long term. 

This for us is about change. The corporation becoming a tool of civilization rather than the other way round. From an organisational perspective, this involves replacing hierarchy, single-minded pursuit of profit, consolidation of ownership and micro management with self-determination, transparent reward for outcomes, profit sharing, community and collegiality. In an overall sense, to create an environment that encourages the expression and nurturing of individual vocation and values.

Some of these ideas have been demonstrated in companies like SouthWest Airlines and Semco... 

What better place to take them than the law firm?