By now, reams of pages (digital or paper) have been expended addressing the challenges the legal sector faces around adapting operational models to hybrid working. Though unfolding at a slower pace than the initial remote working scramble of 2020, law firms are still adjusting and seeking to make hybrid ‘work’ for them – how people work both in and out of the office needs to become a little more intelligent.
Helpful, then, that there are partners out there who have made it their job to consider such things – Intelligent Office (IO), the very aptly named operational support outsourcing and advisory business, has been focused on addressing the challenges of hybrid working head-on during the past two years, and the core leadership team now sees a chance to help firms adapt and evolve.
In the teeth of remote working, IO’s role began to shift in subtle ways, says Ali Bilgin, chief operating officer at the business. “In the past, we’ve primarily supported ‘first impression’ services like front of house, the Docucentres, big mail reprographics and support on lawyers’ operating floors. In the pandemic, our staff went from working in those areas and improving efficiency to also looking at the risk profile of things like sending mail out to people when you don’t necessarily have a PA in to help check it. It seems simple but hybrid working changes the risk profile of those tasks.”
“Our staff were in firms’ offices receiving and opening mail, but also updating processes and working on business continuity plans – they very much became the ‘glue’ for a lot of law firms in that period.”
Ali Bilgin, chief operating officer, Intelligent Office
Her experience includes a stint as COO at Wiggin and, before that, Osborne Clarke (check out our profile of them this issue, too), with her current role covering both operations and HR responsibilities for the IO staff within its managed services clients. Having joined IO in October 2019, much of her time with the business has been dominated by remote or hybrid working – which has seen plenty of opportunity for change. “Our staff were in firms’ offices receiving and opening mail, but also updating processes and working on business continuity plans – they very much became the ‘glue’ for a lot of law firms in that period.”
Embrace of change
That need to look more thoughtfully at how people work on a practical level is also on the mind of CEO Rachel McCorry, who has been with Intelligent Office since its inception 20 years ago. In fact, the inescapable need to meet operational challenges has, she says, shifted the state of play – many firms had previously considered outsourcing business support, but faltered when it came to the nitty-gritty. “Everyone saw the benefits but couldn’t get past things like partners wanting their secretary sitting next to them all day. That has held back transformation of the administrative function for a long time – you don’t really need to develop processes when you can just turn to someone and say, ‘Oh, could you do this for me’,” she adds.
Losing that physical proximity has forced legal leaders to reassess, adds Jo Styles, director of business development and third core member of IO’s leadership team. In addition to working on new business, all the way from proposal to transitioning staff via a TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings [Protection of Employment] regulation) transfer, she works closely with Bilgin, including on new solutions for clients. Echoing McCorry’s observations, she explains IO has picked up several new deals to provide secretarial services in the last two years. “As the lawyers were at home, away from their secretarial staff, many realised someone else could manage them more effectively. For many, that’s suddenly become a more feasible and attractive prospect as they grapple with managing the productivity of support staff in a hybrid working world.”
But it’s not just the willingness to accept change that has been transformed; McCorry adds that the nature of how support services are provided – how they’re packaged and delivered – is beginning the evolve also. “Before, every task and administrative service was merged into one ‘admin umbrella’ – now it’s being disentangled, or disaggregated, which requires a different type of management. We’ve also seen a real interest in specialised and often centralised support resource picking up client matter inception tasks as well. Helping to refine that new way of working has really pushed the growth we are seeing,” she says.
Capitalising on new ideas
Speaking of growth, the exit path from pandemic lockdowns has seen a reinvention of sorts for IO, McCorry suggests, as the scale and complexity of the changes facing law firms prompted the business to look for new skillsets to support the emerging change opportunities. “We needed to build out the team across several areas: subject matter expertise, professional outsourcing knowhow, and also a visionary perspective – those were the most critical points we wanted to address,” she says.
These roles have gone to Ruth Davison, operations director since May 2021, who brings expertise around secretarial disaggregation and operational knowhow from her roles at Kirkland & Ellis, Simmons & Simmons and Pinsent Masons (pictured above), and Pat Fox, formerly director of business services at Mitie, bringing in the outsourcing expertise (also pictured above). They’re joined by Marcella Rich, onboard since the start of 2022 (also above) who, as their managing director, will help IO’s ISO27001 accredited shared service centres – which deliver flexible document production and legal admin support, and which McCorry says have the potential to quadruple in size in a handful of years – achieve growth.
“Before, every task and administrative service was merged into one ‘admin umbrella’ – now it’s being disentangled, or disaggregated, which requires a different type of management. We’ve also seen a real interest in specialised and often centralised support resource picking up client matter inception tasks as well.”
Rachel McCorry, CEO, Intelligent Office
And last, but by no means least, rounding out both the new hires and the senior leadership team, is Chris Bull, operating as commercial director for IO since June 2021. “Chris has been brilliant at challenging us to think even further ahead, bringing that visionary piece into the business,” says McCorry.
Of his own role, Bull says: “I’m really here to connect Intelligent Office with what’s going on in the legal market. That means responding to changes happening around digitalisation and changing business models for law firms, ensuring that our products and services respond to those needs and that we’re anticipating trends” – priorities which will be shaped by his past experience as a COO and finance director, also at Osborne Clarke.
While many law firms may have overcome the most immediate challenges of making hybrid working work, Bull adds that the more nuanced, granular details of implementing this in practice – and making those changes permanent – still elude many organisations. “What can seem like small problems become much trickier when you amplify them across, say, 500 lawyers, owing to the ways people are changing their day-to-day behaviours. And there’s not a lot of focus from the big consultancies on how you make teams gel remotely or, more fundamentally, what the office is for now.”
As an example, the seemingly simple issue of co-ordinating when people are in the office to collaborate is a major point for consideration, adds Bilgin. “I’ve seen many firms consider how they can know when lawyers are in the office and how to support that need. It’s not a one-size-fits-all problem.” Helping solve this and other transformation projects has increasingly become part of IO’s remit: “It’s often through support staff that you really embed new working practices and implement big transformation projects,” she concludes.
To meet that need for transformational support, as well as regular outsourcing of change management, Styles adds IO is currently developing operational “masterclasses” for heads of support functions, dropping in some of its newly recruited experts to lead efforts, as well as extending its range of advisory services. “We’re bringing in experts from the business to lead on these – including Pat Fox as our reprographics, mail and archive-focused expert, and Ruth Davison, who is the secretarial-focused expert. Some masterclasses will cover TUPE, others will cover the more onsite, operational piece, others how to deliver ambitious transformation and reorganisation goals.”
Development time
All the while, businesses of all stripes are finding, through the demand for flexible working, cultural values are rising to the fore – something to which IO is keenly sensitive. “There’s a very distinct balance of priorities emerging for senior management and leadership levels around values and culture. That means considering how we remain a flexible organisation that develops its people and understands what’s important to them – we have a significant focus on environmental sustainability currently and are working towards achieving the Planet Mark accreditation to ensure we’re helping to tackle the climate crisis,” McCorry explains.
Bilgin concurs: “The challenge as an outsource provider is always defining the essence of who and what we are – many of our people come to IO as TUPE staff, who haven’t necessarily chosen to work for IO. Their day-to-day life is with the law firm, so they may identify closely with them. We never want them to lose that, but we also want to preserve IO’s ‘DNA’ and communicate how it can benefit them in terms of training, development and providing a career path.”
One way IO has approached this, Styles chips in, has been to encourage and develop skills through the Academy, IO’s online training programme. “Law firms often have development opportunities for their fee earners but not their support staff. We think that’s part of the reason we achieved our second Investors in People (IIP) Platinum accreditation – something only a tiny percentage of organisations achieve – at the end of September 2021. A year and a half into the pandemic, our staff were still passionate and motivated.”
“There’s a very distinct balance of priorities emerging for senior management and leadership levels around values and culture. That means considering how we remain a flexible organisation that develops its people and understands what’s important to them – we have a significant focus on environmental sustainability currently and are working towards achieving the Planet Mark accreditation.”
Rachel McCorry, CEO, Intelligent Office
McCorry further explains support staff can also become “subject matter experts”, the paragons of standard operating procedures linked to specific practice areas and the business’s Centres of Excellence – responsible for developing and implementing best practice and ensuring operational service excellence – all of which also feeds into the Academy.
And there’s an element of the personal touch involved in that cultural piece: “We pride ourselves on knowing as many of our staff by name as possible. It’s been harder during the pandemic of course, but we’ve still got out and visited staff onsite while also investing in digital engagement,” Bilgin says. “Making people feel connected has never been more important,” McCorry adds.
Track and ace performance
Of course, hybrid working is here to stay, with many challenges yet to be overcome – though a few things are becoming clear, says McCorry. “Very broadly speaking, if you can do it yourself from a keyboard, you might as well work from home. However, collaboration, which is going to take place inside the bricks and mortar of a business, requires a different environment and has a very different purpose.”
It will take time to understand which activities should happen where (and when), she says, and knowing what firms’ admin teams are doing – even harder when not in-person – will be crucial to answering those operational questions. “I don’t think there are many law firms today that would be able to tell you – and track over time – the top-10 tasks their admin function did for private client work, or conveyancing, or any other specific practice area,” McCorry says. To meet that gap in operational intelligence, IO has developed Chronos, a tool for gathering relevant operational data.
Originally designed for a secretarial restructure and getting a snapshot of roles, responsibilities and utilisation, the remit of the system has broadened during the pandemic. “We have a whole range of support staff using the system on a day-to-day basis now, so we can see what they’re doing and we can track how that’s changed over a period of time.”
If any one thing can truly be gleaned for the transformation wrought on the legal business world by the pandemic, it’s that law firms are starting to appreciate the importance of managing and transforming their administrative and operational staff, McCorry adds. Returning to Bilgin’s earlier point about holding law firms together, she says: “I think we’ve always been the ‘glue’, it’s just that no one knew how important that glue was until the pandemic.”