Resource management efforts seek to match lawyers' skills with legal matters and divide work more equitably, while treating career development as a crucial DEI element.

As featured on Legal Dive.

Dive Brief:

• Companies and law firms are trying to progress on their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals beyond just hiring: Daily work allocation and career development are critical components, according to a report by BigHand, a legal software company.
• Many legal executives are turning to legal resource management staff and tools designed to parcel work more efficiently, assess individual lawyer’s skills and career goals and free senior managers from some administrative tasks, resource managers with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer said Tuesday on a webinar BigHand sponsored.
• The global pandemic and work-from-home mandates caused many firms to realize they had minimal visibility into lawyers’ workloads, and needed to reform their assigning process, said Michelle Battley, global head of legal resource management for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London. “We’re just trying to make staffing as transparent as possible so that everyone thinks they’re getting fair opportunities and career advancement,” she said.

Dive Insight:

Across the legal landscape, large firms and legal departments struggle to retain and use their attorneys effectively, trying to balance overwork and burnout for some with low productivity or underutilization among others. Most Big Law firms have little insight into their associates’ particular skills or workloads on any given week, a lack of information that can lead to stress, burnout and retention problems. 

“Firms are seeing a lot more internal focus on making sure the right work is going to the right levels,” said Dave Cook, global director of resource management at BigHand, a London-based legal technology maker that sells resource-management software and other legal tools. “Firms are thinking a bit more creatively on how they’re utilizing lawyers.”

During the pandemic, Freshfields had “no ability to forecast capacity” as government lockdowns and shelter-at-home mandates kept the firm’s 2,800 lawyers away from their 30 offices globally, Battley said.

That lack of information about workloads prompted a pilot effort in the firm’s London office in late 2022 to formalize legal resource management, she said. The effort meant that a formal staff member would handle assigning work to individuals and teams with a view toward wielding a holistic oversight of what associates had on their work plates and where they could best contribute to a legal matter.

“We want to reduce the disparity between the highest and lowest-utilized associates,” said Battley, a former litigator.

About one quarter of law firms have employed a dedicated business professional, such as a resource manager, to identify better ways of working, according to BigHand’s survey of 852 global law firm executives.

Such workload-management efforts come as law firms are facing new financial pressures, both from their clients and higher compensation costs to recruit attorneys. According to the recent BigHand survey, 74% said that clients want their matter handled in the most cost-effective manner.

Moreover, nearly two-thirds (62%) of the legal executives said their firms are giving clients greater financial transparency, while 63% said their firm is providing clients more visibility on who is working on their legal matters.

Internally, resource management programs allow law firms to learn more about their associates, as 62% of respondents said they had no data on associates’ career progression and 59% reported zero or only partial data on associates’ skill sets.

Freshfields’ program has associates “feeling like they have someone looking out for them, helping them, looking out for their careers,” said Monika Crawford, head of practice management at the firm’s U.S. dispute resolution practice in New York. “It gives us a chance to pass along feedback. And we can share that in a low-stakes setting and closer in time than the annual performance review setting.”

Partners have come to generally appreciate the management program because it frees their time from work assignment tasks, allowing them more hours to focus on client matters, Battley said.

And when a client comes with an urgent problem, resource managers can also help partners respond more quickly as a lawyer or team is identifiable and can move faster on the matter, said Crawford, a former trial lawyer.

“That has been an incredible benefit … and frees them up to be there for their clients,” she said.

Watch the "Legal Resourcing for Optimal Utilization, Retention & Profit" webinar on-demand at Law.com now!