Leading Magic Circle law firms Allen & Overy, Linklaters and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner all offer clients access to flexible, specialist, on-demand legal expertise through their flexible services models. Will this approach to legal services soon become commonplace across the legal sector – and more importantly – should it?
The number of lawyers demanding a better work life balance is on the rise. After a gruelling two years of on-again off-again lockdown, the professional has seen that remote and flexible working is in fact possible and they want more of it.
Demand for a better work life balance is so high that it has outranked financial remuneration. Some 60% of midlevel associates said they would consider moving jobs for a better work-life balance, while only 27% said they would leave for more money, according to
However, traditional law firms are notoriously stringent when it comes to their working from home policies. A number of top law firms, including Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Slaughter and May, have implemented 50% per week remote working policies, but these firms are still in the minority.
This raises an important question: at a time where law firms are so desperate for legal talent that they’re paying upwards of £100,000 as a starting salary for new graduates, why are they so unwilling to loosen the reins to allow for a more relaxed work life balance?
The war for legal talent is imminent. A recent report by stockbroker, Arden Partners, predicted that by the year 2026, a third of all lawyers in the UK will be working as legal consultants. And a key driver for this change is flexible working.
Another alternative route many lawyers are choosing to go down is working for a flexible resourcing law firm, which we'll explore in more detail.
In the last decade or so we’ve seen a number of top law firms launch standalone flexible resourcing businesses where lawyers are effectively hired on a job-by-job basis, either seconded with clients or supporting the firm in-house.
Firms such as Allen & Overy, Eversheds Sutherland and Linklaters all have flexible resourcing units that provide freelance lawyers to clients on a project basis, with those lawyers typically paid on a day rate.
In a new UUֱ report, Rise of the legal consultants, Mark Smith, Director of Strategic Markets for UUֱ UK, pointed out that many top law firms want access to specialist lawyers on a case by case basis.
“There’s a whole bunch of work whereby it doesn’t make sense for in-house teams to pay for those skillsets internally—they typically don’t have enough volume on a consistent basis to warrant hiring someone to do it full time, so they typically need someone on a project basis and the flexible lawyer model can help solve those resourcing issues.”
“As the model has grown, we’ve seen more and more big firms put these defensive plays in place where they’ve effectively taken that model and are operating it themselves.”
Another common reason to invest in flexible legal talent is to support permanent legal teams during peak times. Magic Circle firm, Allen & Overy, launched its Peerpoint platform in 2013 in the wake of the financial crisis to help meet the needs of A&O and its clients, with the latter not having enough internal staff to sustainably manage their workloads.
“That meant we were getting a lot of requests for secondments, but doing that from our permanent headcount was an expensive way of doing it,” said Carolyn Aldous, Managing Director of Peerpoint. “At the same time we had talent that the firm was training but the percentage that actually make it to partner from training contract is very low, so we wanted to give them a different way to build their career and stay with Allen & Overy, so those things led to the development of Peerpoint.”
Pinsent Masons is another example of a well-known firm wanting to benefit from an on-demand legal workforce. The leading law firm launched its Vario platform in 2013 and now has over 1,000 third-party lawyers who can be deployed for specific client projects as and when required.
David Halliwell, partner at Vario, said its flexible workforce enables permanently employed lawyers at Pinsent Masons to focus on higher value client work, and that comes with the additional benefit of having an army of specialist lawyers when the need arises.
“The growth of our flexible lawyer business has gone from strength to strength through the pandemic,” said Halliwell.
The biggest challenge in-house legal services are up against right now is firefighting, says Nigel Rea, Service Development Director at Lawyers on Demand (LOD), the flexible resourcing unit of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.
“Your average in-house legal team has a huge number of fires that urgently need putting out. At the same time, there's a massive push towards digital transformation, which will require doing things differently.”
“The main challenge for in-house leaders is how on earth do I balance my team and my capacity between all the fires that I need to keep putting out and all of the strategic stuff that no one has time to do.”
That's where flexible resourcing units come in, says Rea. “That's what we're constructed to do – take that pain off the legal department’s desks.”
Alongside a highly skilled legal workforce is a growing need for digital expertise, which is now a key market differentiator for the leading flexible legal service providers.
“Right now you've got lots of law firms spinning up innovation centres and I think all of that is brilliant for the industry, but the reality is not every law firm is capable of driving a really successful innovation programme.”
“So, it would be nice to see some more collaborative partnerships where everyone can focus on what they're really good at, while the service provided to the client is top notch.”
Technology investment is also a crucial element for Vario's service offering, says Halliwell.
“One of the key things is the way we use technology to make ourselves more efficient in our own delivery of services and the starting point for us on that front is document automation," he says. "The other area in which we've been really successful is using technology to do large scale document review.”
More information about flexible legal services is available in our new report: Rise of the legal consultants.
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