I’ve been working for a bank recently, and the change has been refreshing.  Not least, because it’s the first time I’ve worked in Canary Wharf (as opposed to “the city”).  The slightly longer commute actually saves me having to go to the gym as I can run home along the Regent’s Canal.

This recent exposure to life outside law firms has provided a stark contrast as to how things get done, which got me thinking.  My experience and the experience of friends who work in law firms indicates that projects and plans take a long time to execute.  Simply getting a project up and running can take months.

By way of comparison, my current project has only been on the books for a short time.  Internal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis.  The bank has well over 100,000 employees, easily more than the combined sum of the employees of the top 10 UK law firms.

Is that lack of agility a problem?  I’d love to say it is and predict impending doom.  The fact is I don’t know.  Whether legal partnerships will ever compete with a corporate-style firm for complex legal work seems unlikely to me, regardless of regulatory changes.

What I do know is that it’s remarkably more satisfying to work in an environment where one’s own brain is the bottleneck as opposed to the inner machinations of one’s firm, and that means it will continue to be challenging for firms to keep the high-performers within their back-office.

Update: Oct 20

Some further thoughts on why IT projects in banks vs lawfirms (on the back of a blog post from Mark Gould).  The difference in execution has nothing to do with IT and more to do with their respective environments.

For example, in my experience, law firms have a much higher preference towards lengthy consultation processes, and, in an effort to appease everybody, run too many projects.  The unfortunate IT teams are then unable to keep their clients happy as they’re under-resourced.  To their internal clients this feels like poor service, when really, there’s little they can do.

My experience of banks?  Aggressive & narrow focus on one or two projects.  Get them done and move on to the next thing.

I feel the late Peter Drucker puts it best:
“The areas of greatest potential for opportunity and results are to be given the fullest resource support – in quantity and quality – before the next promising area gets anything.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under Law firms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.