As legal salaries jump again, firms need to adapt to a changed workforce
If you whisked the lawyers, accountants and consultants of five years ago to the present day, they would be pretty surprised by the way we do business.
Unprecedented flexibility about working from home and an intense focus on retaining talent are standard across our industry, and our businesses are better for it.
Look five years ahead, and we could see another transformation – we’ll need one. The UK’s professional services firms that are vital to the UK economy, and its exports, will have to make significant changes to the way they do business to keep their place as global leaders.
The way we retain people, deploy technology and think about our impact on the wider world are all set to shift.
The change to home working didn’t just alter how we did our jobs, it changed the relationship between law firms, their clients and their people. The industry trusted those who work within it to do a high-quality job without constant oversight.
The challenge of hiring and holding onto the best talent will demand even greater levels of trust between firms and employees – or those workers will simply look elsewhere.
For a start, we need greater support for the many talented people who work in law firms but are not lawyers. Our technologists and business services teams are set to become even more important as we offer clients a broader set of services. The people in these roles do not always get the same welcome, attention and professional development as lawyers.
We need fairer pay, narrowing the gap between those who work in London and those doing the same quality of work in offices around the country. We should do more to embrace apprenticeships, creating new routes into our businesses, and to recruit even more actively in all communities across the UK.
When we offer jobs to trainees, we should be frank about the deal on offer and give a very clear idea of the hours that they will be expected to work so they can make truly informed decisions. Greater transparency is vital.
But pay and hours are only part of the story. For many colleagues, purpose is just as important. The greatest talent seeks out cultures at work that align to their own values. Engendering a sense of belonging is becoming increasingly important for businesses.
People want to work for firms where a commitment to addressing the climate crisis is evidenced not only by actions to credibly de-carbonise its operations, but also by equipping its lawyers to build climate considerations into its advice and therefore in the work that it does for clients. This means law firms must work to better understand the extent of their advised emissions.
Law firms such as DLA Piper are helping to put the Paris Rulebook, which sets out how the Paris climate agreement will be implemented, into action. The Net Zero Lawyers Alliance is working to develop commercial law so it can turn green pledges into reality. Global leaders have set out a vision for a cleaner climate, but they need to be realised in clients’ boardrooms as well. Ambitious employees want to be part of that.
Finally, both the people whom we hire and the clients that we serve crave innovation. Technology is already central to what we do; the use of artificial intelligence to analyse documents is standard practice. Technology in law firms is no longer just making our existing work more efficient. It is opening up entirely new services. Our firm, for example, is working with a digital asset creation engine called TOKO to produce tradeable fixed income tokens and advising clients how to enter new digital markets.
This question of adaptation goes far beyond either working remotely or in the office. The people who we want to hire and retain do demand flexibility – alongside fairer pay, career progression and work which refuses to ignore the challenges we face in the future.
In an intensely competitive market for talent, the UK’s professional services sector will have to keep up the pace of change of the last few years if it is to meet their expectations, and those of our clients around the globe.