Ep: 58 Deborah Read | Managing Partner of Thompson Hine | Innovating the Legal Service Delivery Model | Behavioral Change | Leaving the Herd
Chris Batz
Corp Law Firm Consultant | Exec Search Firm Owner | Podcast Host | LinkedIn Influencer | Investor | Columbia MBA Candidate
I had a wonderful conversation with Deborah Read, the Managing Partner of Thompson Hine. We discussed several topics such as:
Here are some highlights of my interview with Debbie Read:
We decided we were going to change the way we delivered services to align with what clients are looking for.
As I've said to others, you can have the best software program around, but if you don't teach yourself how to use it, it's really just a piece of software that sits on the shelf.
We were completely changing our behavior as lawyers and lawyers do not like change. We were telling our lawyers that they needed to understand what a client wanted before they started doing it.
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Setting the Stage for Real Change
Chris: Would you share about the exciting things Thompson Hine is doing with innovation?
Debbie: As I began to prepare for this job and read what clients were saying about how they were purchasing legal services and how law firms were delivering those services, there was a real gap between what clients were asking for and what law firms were delivering. I remember, very vividly, an Altman Weil survey that I came across as I was doing my analysis, and it asked, “In your opinion, in the current legal market, how serious are law firms about changing their legal service delivery model to provide greater value to you?” Your answer could range from zero to 10 with 10 being doing everything they can and zero not doing anything. Altman Weil ran this survey for a number of years and the median score was a three and the average score was going down. I looked at this and I said, “Wow, these are customers talking about their service providers, and they've been ranking them at a three for about five years.” In what industry would that happen? Not many. I thought about how this was a big opportunity for the firm. The firm agreed with me, and we decided we were going to tackle this. We decided we were going to change the way we delivered services to align with what clients are looking for and that set us on our way.
Changing Behavior is Hard
Chris: Share with my listeners about that behavior change.
Debbie: It was a tremendous behavior change. Honestly, the way we got there was by starting to require budgets. I give credit to the head of our business litigation practice group. He was the first to start to require budgets. What I mean by that is that if you had a matter and you didn't have a budget in place by the requisite period of time set by the practice group, your matter shut down the billing time. As a lawyer, you could not enter your time for a given matter if you didn't have a budget in place. If you know anything about lawyers, they're measured in part on the time that they bill, and not being able to bill time is a pretty big thing to a lawyer. It really forced people to embrace budgeting. They had to. They had no choice. And like Malcolm Gladwell says, “You do something enough, you get pretty good at it.” Our lawyers are pretty good at it now.