The last 18 months have seen unprecedented change for businesses everywhere. A recent Allen & Overy Business of Law Seminar attempted to understand what this might mean for law firms.

Research shows that culture plays a major role in where people want to work. Asked to describe culture, definitions range from it being “the smell of the place”, to the collective personality of an organisation which influences how it treats people.

In its negative form, culture is merely an artificial set of visions and values designed to appeal to clients.

It is not reflected in the actions or experiences of people who come into contact with the business. But in its strongest form, culture comes from both the bottom and top of an organisation; exemplified by the leaders of a business and built up through every person and area of an organisation.

According to research from the London Business School, strong cultures are about “unarticulated reciprocity” – the sense of teamwork that shows things are working well.

In periods of change, some believe that the culture of a business can be the thing that decides whether, when the alarm goes off in the morning, you jump out of bed ready to attack the day, or you crawl back under the covers afraid of what might lie ahead.

Changing traditional beliefs?

The speed and scale of change across the world has been so great that every business needs to ask itself what it must do to adapt. It is too early to understand fully what impact the events of the past year will have on law firms, but there are certainly some key areas for debate.

Most of the major issues relate to the two most important stakeholders for law firms: clients and people. One change brought about by the global recession is the expectation of “cradle-to-grave” careers being undermined by the unprecedented restructurings seen in the legal sector over the past year. What will that mean for graduates considering a career in law?

Equally, while those starting work now might have different expectations from those who joined a law firm 20 years ago, there are still enduring questions around work/life balance and how sustainable the long hours’ culture and heavy workloads are.

And how do you balance the needs of younger lawyers or people who are starting families with the demand for 24/7 legal services? This issue has been around for longer than the financial crisis, but recent events have provided a catalyst for debate.

There is also the much-debated topic of outsourcing “commodity” level work. If it were to become the norm in law firms, what would that mean for junior lawyers? Law firms are themselves outsourced services for clients, so the concept of outsourcing work should not be alien to lawyers. And arguably things have already changed – clients will no longer pay for lots of junior lawyers to do routine work in an expensive city office location.

Nor should clients have to look to places like India for cheaper options when buying legal services – they should be able to trust that their law firm understands how to staff its client work in the most cost-effective manner.

That clearly presents a challenge for law firms, however, in how to train the next generation of lawyers.

What role would junior lawyers play if there are no longer the “rights of passage” experiences of, for example, exhaustive document reviews – experiences that provide the “war stories” to learn from and pass on to the next generation of trainees and junior lawyers?

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