Managing Partners and 'Gamification'

Many managing partners tell us they are struggling to get their arms around new tools and techniques for driving more efficiency and cost-effectiveness into legal service delivery. Firms are seeing more and more RFPs in which clients make increasingly draconian demands for better management and control of legal work. AFAs (alternative fee arrangements) are reshaping not just pricing and profitability, but the whole way in which matters are staffed and billed.

LPM (legal project management) and LPI (legal process improvement) map out prescriptive approaches for scoping, budgeting, performing and monitoring engagements. And, in a threat to traditional law firm turf, LPOs (legal process outsourcers) and other alternative forms of service delivery threaten to take over huge amounts of commodity tasks that were historically handled by law firms.

Game On

Now another neologism has popped up to bedevil law firm leaders: “Gamification.” In plain English, this describes approaching work as if one were playing a videogame. Gamification is not the same as game theory, which describes the study of strategic decision-making using mathematical models. Gamification, which first took hold in Silicon Valley and has since gone viral, involves translating the features that motivate players in video games into non-game settings ' settings like litigation, transactional work, business development and other high-stakes legal activities.

When applied to law, gamification is not about making legal service delivery into a game, or even about having fun. It's about knowing the score. A fundamental axiom of legal project management is that “if it can't be measured, it can't be managed,” and let's be clear: Today's legal services need to be driven by effective performance metrics. The bottom line to all this measuring, of course, is the goal of providing clear, consistent, and cost-effective value to the client. Unfortunately, however, most law firms have an abysmal record for adopting even the most basic metrics and tools.

But all is not lost, because we know one thing for certain: in any setting, and particularly in law firms, employees do what is measured, incented and celebrated. So what do law firms do? They measure billable hours, they incent billable hours, and they celebrate (that is, give bonuses for) billable hours. So, guess what clients get? You got it ' billable hours, lots and lots of them (and as we've often said, there is no direct correlation between the number of billable hours and the amount of value conferred).

Conversely, what do law firms fail to do? They fail to measure, incent or celebrate the types of behaviors that clients value ' like efficiency, creative ways of resolving matters faster, cost predictability, adhering to realistic budgets, and effective monitoring of legal activity and legal spend in order to avoid surprises.

Getting Lawyers into The Game

So here's where gamification comes in. As Frank Strong, communications director with the Business of Law Software Solutions division of LexisNexis puts it, “gamification is a novel idea, and while the label itself may not endear itself to the nature of law, the concept is spot on: using the concept of games to drive user engagement and solve problems”

If and when it evolves more broadly within law firms, gamification will engender a work environment where ' just like videogames:

• Every action is meticulously tracked and scored;
• Everyone aspires to progress upward through discrete levels of achievement;
• Points and awards are given; and
• Work processes are structured to keep performers engaged and focused on producing the highest level of performance.

Can Law Firms Do It?

Theoretically, gamification incentives can be engineered either to spark greater individual initiative or to foster better collaboration among disparate team roles and functions. In either case, the idea is to drive a powerful sense of engagement into tasks that performers find inherently tedious or repetitive.

Can law firms, accustomed to seeing all matters and all lawyers as unique, motivate project task teams to collaborate better by turning to gamification?

“Some firms really get it,” says Ray Bayley, CEO of Novus Law, a global legal services firm, speaking of law firm responses to escalating client demands for cost control and efficiency. “But for most firms it's still a stretch to be metrics-driven. They just aren't ready to rethink how to keep their lawyers consistently engaged, and they aren't yet ready to retool.”

As the legal profession as a whole becomes increasingly metrics-driven, the successor generation of lawyers and other types of legal service providers all will grow up in an environment where various forms of points and scorecards are the norm, from “competency-based performance evaluation” to partnership decisions made exclusively on the basis of quantitative measures.

Pamela Woldow is a Certified Master Coach with experience in individual lawyer coaching and in designing law department leadership development programs. Reach her at [email protected].

Many managing partners tell us they are struggling to get their arms around new tools and techniques for driving more efficiency and cost-effectiveness into legal service delivery. Firms are seeing more and more RFPs in which clients make increasingly draconian demands for better management and control of legal work. AFAs (alternative fee arrangements) are reshaping not just pricing and profitability, but the whole way in which matters are staffed and billed.

LPM (legal project management) and LPI (legal process improvement) map out prescriptive approaches for scoping, budgeting, performing and monitoring engagements. And, in a threat to traditional law firm turf, LPOs (legal process outsourcers) and other alternative forms of service delivery threaten to take over huge amounts of commodity tasks that were historically handled by law firms.

Game On

Now another neologism has popped up to bedevil law firm leaders: “Gamification.” In plain English, this describes approaching work as if one were playing a videogame. Gamification is not the same as game theory, which describes the study of strategic decision-making using mathematical models. Gamification, which first took hold in Silicon Valley and has since gone viral, involves translating the features that motivate players in video games into non-game settings ' settings like litigation, transactional work, business development and other high-stakes legal activities.

When applied to law, gamification is not about making legal service delivery into a game, or even about having fun. It's about knowing the score. A fundamental axiom of legal project management is that “if it can't be measured, it can't be managed,” and let's be clear: Today's legal services need to be driven by effective performance metrics. The bottom line to all this measuring, of course, is the goal of providing clear, consistent, and cost-effective value to the client. Unfortunately, however, most law firms have an abysmal record for adopting even the most basic metrics and tools.

But all is not lost, because we know one thing for certain: in any setting, and particularly in law firms, employees do what is measured, incented and celebrated. So what do law firms do? They measure billable hours, they incent billable hours, and they celebrate (that is, give bonuses for) billable hours. So, guess what clients get? You got it ' billable hours, lots and lots of them (and as we've often said, there is no direct correlation between the number of billable hours and the amount of value conferred).

Conversely, what do law firms fail to do? They fail to measure, incent or celebrate the types of behaviors that clients value ' like efficiency, creative ways of resolving matters faster, cost predictability, adhering to realistic budgets, and effective monitoring of legal activity and legal spend in order to avoid surprises.

Getting Lawyers into The Game

So here's where gamification comes in. As Frank Strong, communications director with the Business of Law Software Solutions division of LexisNexis puts it, “gamification is a novel idea, and while the label itself may not endear itself to the nature of law, the concept is spot on: using the concept of games to drive user engagement and solve problems”

If and when it evolves more broadly within law firms, gamification will engender a work environment where ' just like videogames:

• Every action is meticulously tracked and scored;
• Everyone aspires to progress upward through discrete levels of achievement;
• Points and awards are given; and
• Work processes are structured to keep performers engaged and focused on producing the highest level of performance.

Can Law Firms Do It?

Theoretically, gamification incentives can be engineered either to spark greater individual initiative or to foster better collaboration among disparate team roles and functions. In either case, the idea is to drive a powerful sense of engagement into tasks that performers find inherently tedious or repetitive.

Can law firms, accustomed to seeing all matters and all lawyers as unique, motivate project task teams to collaborate better by turning to gamification?

“Some firms really get it,” says Ray Bayley, CEO of Novus Law, a global legal services firm, speaking of law firm responses to escalating client demands for cost control and efficiency. “But for most firms it's still a stretch to be metrics-driven. They just aren't ready to rethink how to keep their lawyers consistently engaged, and they aren't yet ready to retool.”

As the legal profession as a whole becomes increasingly metrics-driven, the successor generation of lawyers and other types of legal service providers all will grow up in an environment where various forms of points and scorecards are the norm, from “competency-based performance evaluation” to partnership decisions made exclusively on the basis of quantitative measures.

Pamela Woldow is a Certified Master Coach with experience in individual lawyer coaching and in designing law department leadership development programs. Reach her at [email protected].