What's your experience of BigHand Resource Management?

I have to say, I was a massive skeptic to begin with. I remember still that first call that I had with the BigHand consultant who was helping us through things. And I was thinking, this is just going to be another process. This is just going to kind of slow us down, add a cumbersome kind of step that I don't need.

I think I also thought that it was going to sort of remove me from the development of my team. I think I take that quite seriously, and I wasn't convinced, maybe. So I have to say that I started from a very kind of low expectation, but it has been absolutely fantastic, and I think some of the results that it has delivered for us are encouraging us to be much more creative in how we use our resources.

I think there's a terrible tendency, certainly in law firms, for us just to go for the person that we see next to us, or we've worked on the last deal. So, I think what we've done is sort of put everything upside down on that and start really challenging ourselves about how we use people when we get new team members in.

I think it's been really helpful onboarding new team members. Sometimes there's that thing when you start in a new firm and you don't know how to get work or who to get work from, and we also, equally, probably don't see them. So, I think it's been particularly good in terms of onboarding new members.

It helps us use our resources across all our offices. We have six offices in the UK, and we now see much more kind of cross working. And I, for one, have loved working. It's made me work with people in Aberdeen, Leeds, Manchester, in a way I'd never have worked before, which has been brilliant for cross collaboration. 

What are the main benefits for your lawyers?

So I think for them, it's nice for them to feel that somebody is looking really carefully at how busy they were last week, what's coming down, what the balance of work is. I think it really helps them feel they have some agency. They have somebody to speak to say, "Well, I've done three of these kind of deals" or "I've worked a lot with that partner. Perhaps you could look at sort of a balance." It allows them an avenue to bring through those kind of requests and give them much better balance of work and experience working with loads of different people.

How would you feel if the technology was removed?

I can't imagine going backwards. I think one of the other big benefits is that speed of resourcing. I think before it was left to us partners, and we are extremely busy touring in lots of different directions. Sometimes you might find that your request had gone to one of our partners and they were extremely busy and you might not get anything back from 24 hours.

So I love that it's much more immediate. It is probably a fairer system as well. I think it delivers great benefits for our team members in terms of giving everybody better access to the big jobs or the more exciting deals.

I think our star performers also love it, because I think there's a tendency for them to feel quite swamped, because everybody wants them on their deals. I think it's actually they love feeling that somebody is looking out and kind of protecting them a little bit, making sure that they're not overloaded. So there's much better distribution of kind of work across the team.

What advice would you give other firms?

I think give it a go. I see great benefits in terms of that improvement in utilization and the team members are happier with it because of the mix of work. It frees us up to go out and kind of do much more client winning, client management stuff.

I would say all those things are extreme positives. You do need to make sure that everybody is on board. I think you have to make sure that everybody's still putting things through the Resource Management system and not going back to the old kind of world. So there's a little bit of work to do there.

There's some other areas we need to probably double down on, some of the team management kind of things, and use the time that we saved through the Resource Management tool - use that really cleverly to then actually work on career development, strategic things for our team as well.