Navigating change can be complex and, at times, challenging, so how can law firms ensure a strategic and successful process? The answer is change management. Change management helps to guide organizations through these transitions and transformations to ensure your people feel prepared, supported, and equipped.

At Litify, we believe that success comes when great technology, people, and process collide. Change management is about managing the “people side” of change, alongside the technical and procedural aspects.

We sat down with Jessica Lockhart, Business Intelligence Director at The Jeffcoat Firm, and Tyler Burrell, Chief Operating Officer at McOmber McOmber & Luber, to hear their strategies, best practices, and lessons learned for adapting to change.

Change management: Adapting to the evolving legal landscape

Why are we talking about change management? What makes it especially relevant in today’s landscape?

Jessica Lockhart: There are three big trends that are driving the importance of this topic.

• Revolutionary change in technology is happening. Your firm needs to be ready for the dramatic shift that will occur in the next few years.
• The workforce is already shifting. A new generation is gaining employment, and at the same time, we’ve already seen different demands on working from home and work-life balance.
• New client expectations. Everyone wants an immediate update on their case. Just like the Domino’s pizza tracker, people want to know the second the pizza’s going to be at their door — they also want to know the moment anything changes in their case.

All of this is forcing us to rethink how we deliver our legal services, and it’s the reason we all need to think about change management: so much change is coming.

Tyler Burrell: I think Jessica already hit the nail on the head. But I will add that this is all especially important because the legal industry tends to be behind in change. We need to shift our mindset and really invest in innovation so that we can stay ahead of the curve and provide better services and outcomes to our clients. It’s very easy to put this on autopilot, but we all need to keep up and keep pushing the envelope, or somebody else will.

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Where do you start? How do you evaluate the need and opportunities for change?

Lockhart: We started something called an “interview practice.” I have three people in my technology department, and I give them a list of questions to bring to each staff member. And we just ask them, “What are your pain points? What are you spending a lot of time on? Is there anything, not even technology-based, that we can do better to support you?”

That’s where you start. Let your people guide what you focus on, and that’s also how you get their buy-in, too, because they feel heard. They’re invested because you’re putting a product or solution in place that they actually care about.

How often are you soliciting feedback?

Burrell: The more often, the better. We keep open lines of communication at the firm, where people can just email me. We did start doing something recently, though, that I think has been working pretty well to bring the feedback up.

We rolled out a monthly meeting with our paralegal team where we’ll talk to everyone about our PTO policy and more of the “fun stuff” that goes into working at or running a firm. But we’ve also been asking them, “What are the pinch points you’re having in Litify? What suggestions do you have?” So we’re prompting them in the meeting, and we’re having lunch or coffee, and it’s been working.

Lockhart: For us, it depends on where we are in the change process. For a platform like Litify that we’ve had in place for a while, we have a ticketing system that people can use to submit problems or suggestions. We also have a monthly office hour that people can join with our Business Intelligence Manager. They can share problems, troubleshoot them together, and our manager can take notes on all their feedback. And we’ve gotten really great ideas from our end users in that process.

If we’re in the early stages of the change process, though, we try to have at least one thirty-minute call per week. This is for everyone in the testing group, our champions, myself, and our developers to join and really hash out the problems they’re having.

It’s more of that white-glove service at the beginning of an implementation, but we want to keep those lines of communication open, so in the later stages, we’ll have the office hours over Zoom.

How do you assess the feedback and decide where you’ll make changes?

Burrell: This may be a bit of a contradiction in that I believe we all need to innovate, but I also believe that this innovation and change need to be surgical and deliberate. You can’t just keep rolling out new tools and processes for the sake of it.

I’m also an Associate at the firm, so I may have a different perspective. But from that user side, it can feel like the IT and Operations folks don’t fully understand the practice of law or the demands on lawyers and staff and the deadlines are mounting, but all of a sudden, it’s like, “here are these fields that are going to make your job better.” So it’s important to account for the day-to-day experience when change is rolling out, and it’s important for that change to be strategic — not just to check a box.

One last thing I will say is to bring your team into the “why” behind the change. So it’s not just saying, “Here are these new fields.” It’s explaining what’s changing, how it works, the purpose, and why it makes their lives better. We had some objections when we first started with Litify from people who felt like they were just entering data all day. But when we explained the importance of all the fields and that inputting the data today meant triggering a reminder or event three months from now, they started seeing the benefits.

Lockhart: We tend to look at how common this feedback is and how much it can improve our efficiency. If it’s a change that we can make in a week and it’s going to result in 20% faster case movement or an improved client experience, then it’s going to the top of the list. If it’s a “nice to have” and it’s not going to speed anything up or really benefit us in any way, it’s probably going toward the bottom.

How are you measuring the success of these changes?

Lockhart: First, we need to look at what we’re trying to accomplish with the change. For example, we wanted to provide a better client experience, and part of that was going to be calling our clients more. Then we saw that we weren’t really measuring how often we were calling them to begin with, so we built out a process for tracking that, and we started using this as a key performance indicator. Now we’re able to measure and see that we went from 50% to 90% of our clients being called every 30 days.

For a change like this, it’s also now just a standard KPI that we give to every new hire, and that’s how we sustain it over time. But to Tyler’s earlier point, you should tie what you’re changing back to that “why.” Ours was that we’re here to serve our clients, and we’re going to measure that by the number of times we call them. As long as folks continue to provide that high level of service, we’ll continue to see that 90% of our clients receive a phone call every 30 days, and we know that the change worked.

How do you ensure that you’re not moving forward too quickly and overwhelming your users?

Burrell: There’s been a lot of conversation around needing to crawl, walk, and then run —  and I would say that we’re still in the crawling phase. We have a lot built out in Litify that we haven’t quite gotten to yet because we need to get people focused on the important pieces first. So we’ve really slowed down to give everyone time to get used to the change and to buy into it.

Office hours have been great for us, too, but sometimes people aren’t available to join. So I’ve also started creating short screen recordings for a quick training video. It takes about a minute to put it together, and then we just send it out via email, which allows people to watch on their own time. I think giving them the bits of information in all different formats — the office hours, emails, videos — all helps to not feel overwhelmed.

Lockhart: We’ve actually moved to a quarterly release cycle that coincides with the Litify releases. Our end users get a whole week where we have office hours every day, and we cover the release notes for our internal release and the notes for the Litify release. Everyone is expected to attend at least one office hour to review the changes with us, but they can join as many as they want, so they feel prepared. We’ll also try to focus on one department for each release and have a team lead test everything out and become a champion for us, too.

Even though there can be multiple changes, this schedule has been much easier for our people than trying to digest a change every single week.

What is leadership’s role in getting the full firm to buy into a change?

Burrell: With leadership, you really need to have support from the top down. When we rolled out Litify, it was very important that we all knew it was going to be a big change, but all of us needed to believe in it. It’s the top-down support and reinforcement that will get other folks on board.

Our golden rule has now been, “If it’s not in Litify, then it didn’t happen,” and our leadership has also really reinforced that perspective. People can still keep their separate notepad if they’d like, but it’s just creating more work for themselves, because we’ve all agreed as a team, and as leadership, that everything needs to be in Litify.

Lockhart: We also connect everything to our mission statement, which comes from our CEO. As long as he can stand up and tie the changes we’re making back to achieving that mission, it really sets the tone for the organization. Our team gets excited about the change because we have a team of people who are excited about our mission. So I think any time you’re able to get top-level individuals excited and involved as your champions, it helps to drive that buy-in from the full firm.

Burrell: While this question was about leadership’s role, I will also say that having staff and attorneys involved can also be really impactful. They feel like they’ve built this, they have skin in the game, and then the adoption is much better when they’ve been part of the process all along.

How are you making effective changes in a remote-friendly environment?

Burrell: You have to give people a reason to come into the office, if that’s your goal. What’s bringing them in? Are you hosting lunches? Is the culture there? It needs to make sense for them to be in the office. If we’re honest, the times of five days a week in the office are probably going to go away, but all of this still applies for getting people into the office a few days each week.

Lockhart: Our office is over 50% remote employees. We’ve just realized that we can find great talent who is truly the epitome of our culture, and they may live three states over. So I would say that some of it is being willing to hire outside your market to find the right people who will make your firm successful through changes, and then work on building moments of unity.

For example, we do a morning huddle, just 10-15 minutes, every single day as an entire firm. It’s nothing too serious or in-depth, but just a way to start our day with something positive. Our CEO gives us the quote of the day, which is meant to inspire, or we’ll read a Google review, and those usually get everyone excited, too.

Finally, for anyone concerned about this, we have not seen any significant difference between our in-office, remote, or hybrid employees when it comes to working remotely or not. Part of that is based on recruiting, but as long as you’re hiring the right people, their productivity is going to be great because they’re great.

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