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How to Fail at Collaboration

By Pamela Woldow
December 01, 2016

We all know that many law firms send mixed messages to their lawyers (and often to their clients, too). They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk, particularly when it comes to the informal norms and values that define “the way we do things around here.” This opens them up to charges of hypocrisy — or at least insensitivity to the human factors that define law firm success in today's market.

Consider, as a timely example, the legal profession's continuing cry for better collaboration — both between law firm and client, and among firm lawyers in a practice group or on a client team. Also, consider clients that have converged their roster of outside firms to just a few in number, and who now want their firms to collaborate with each other — for the benefit of the client.

For firms or teams with historically non-collaborative cultures (and that describes 99.9% of them), this “whole collaboration thing” has become a huge annoyance, an attempted interference with “how we've always practiced law.” For these folks, the challenge is thorny: Convince everyone that their culture is changing with the times while continuing to conduct business as usual. When they fail, there is often a huge — and demoralizing — gap between the cup and the lip.

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