Briefing Tiger Team: Launch episode – Cash is king, but process is queen

In this, our first Briefing Tiger Team session, we have the chief operating officer at Hogan Lovells (Darren Mitchell), head of legal project management and process improvement at Ashurst (Kate Bassett), finance director at Fieldfisher (Mike Giles), and director of BI and finance and practice management systems at Herbert Smith Freehills (Allison Scanlan). Also on hand to address the challenge was Mike Bailey from our partner, the leading technology consultancy Pinnacle, and in the chair’s seat, Briefing’s content director Rupert Collins-White.

The scenario this month could hardly be more critical to the overall operation – what has a law firm needed to do from a financial management and process perspective to help it eventually come out of lockdown and into whatever awaits us in the best shape possible?

Two of the most pivotal words seem to be acceleration and information. Some projects have needed to be reprioritised for others to be rolled out at relative super speed. Processes that were previously allowed to mature in a fairly organic way suddenly needed largely assumed responsibilities formalising. And indicators of progress or problems have required pushing to the right people in new ways to reassure or incentivise action, while avoiding the pitfall of information overload obscuring the data that really matters most.

Fortunately a few business-improvement investments had come to some fruition in recent years, helping make firms a little more agile, less reliant on passing some pieces of paper back and forth, and willing to adapt how they work suddenly when it was most needed. If a transformation like our mass move to working from home had been required three years ago, would the mission’s success have been quite as assured?

Watch the video on YouTube here.