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Gatekeepers of The traditionally held view is that the legal profession does not embrace change rapidly, so the emergence of the professional support lawyer over the past 20 years is, by contrast, unusual. Lucy Dillon, director of knowledge management at Berwin Leighton Paisner, reviews this development and charts a road map for the future

Excellence

PSLs –

50 LawBusinessReview.co.uk March 2010

Knowledge management

Professional support

“support” aspect, to a title that more accurately refl ects the pro-active, creative role the team is expected to play.

The new guardThe recession has changed the landscape of legal services delivery. Clients have changed their buying behaviour and fi rms are expected to do more for less and adding value is now a given in any meaningful long-term client relationship. PSLs can have a key role to play in delivering on both these requirements.

Delivering more for lessDelivering high-quality legal services with a smaller budget is a challenge for in-house legal teams and they require their external lawyers to help them achieve this by keeping the legal bill low. Law fi rms should respond positively to this by ensuring that their systems are streamlined and those delivering the service are as effi cient as possible.

PSLs, with their experience of practice, are in an excellent position to help review internal processes to identify areas of ineffi ciency and offer solutions for improving service delivery. Standard forms, document automation, checklists, work fl ow systems, and FAQs are all areas where a PSL’s experience can be invaluable. They can apply their practical experience and their holistic approach to transactional work to “unbundle” the traditional deal model and identify smarter ways of delivering on clients’ objectives. Such solutions are a pre-requisite to

The fi rst professional support lawyers (PSLs) were employed in the early 1990s in response to a realisation that much of the legal work, certainly in the City, was “repeat business”. The role was created to help develop

consistency and quality control over a rising number of similar transactions, as reinventing the wheel on each deal became an increasingly costly approach.

The pioneersA PSL was, and still is, an experienced practitioner. PSLs usually have a minimum of fi ve to seven years PQE. They were originally retained to fulfi l a narrow technical legal role, principally to develop standard form documents and collate and store important transactional know-how to avoid having to start from scratch on each new deal. From this purely backroom role, opportunities for development arose rapidly. Training, responding to technical queries from junior, and not so junior, practitioners and providing legal updates became typical aspects of the function.

From 2000 onwards, the concept of the PSL became more familiar. Recruitment agents specialised in their placement, commercial training providers developed specifi c courses and larger fi rms began to develop career frameworks for their PSL staff. It became recognised as an alternative career path for technically able, experienced lawyers who loved the law, loved the law fi rm environment, but wanted to move away from transactional work.

The role was originally part-time and was particularly attractive to working mothers. However, over the years, other elements have resulted in lawyers becoming PSLs, such as those with books to write, further education to progress, sporting training regimes to undertake and other business interests to pursue. There are others for whom the churn of transactional work has lost its attraction. As time progressed, the part-time element became less of a draw, with more PSLs working full-time, seeing the role as a credible alternative to traditional fee earning.

The role continued to evolve, with PSLs taking a more direct role with clients. A PSL’s understanding of the market made them ideal people to work on client development, both at the pitch stage and as a part of the ongoing client relationship. Indeed some fi rms have combined knowledge management with business development to cement the PSL role within this function.

Over the past fi ve years, Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) has developed its PSL function signifi cantly. We have a full career framework for the team, with the most senior members promoted to associate directors. We have changed the PSL title to “knowledge development lawyer”, moving away from the

An alternative way to consider the value of knowledge management is to look at how much fee-earner time is saved:

● By the PSLs taking on some of the tasks which partners and senior associates would otherwise have to undertake, such as:

● mentoring and training juniors; ● dealing with complex technical legal queries; ● reviewing journals and case reports to identify areas of

interest; ● drafting articles and managing responses to consultation

papers; ● managing to the pitch process; and, ● strengthening client relationships outside transactional

work. ● By the PSLs developing more effi cient practices, such as:

● standard from documentation; ● checklists; ● legal process analysis to streamline procedures; ● document automation; and, ● work fl ows.

The PSL role was created to help develop consistency and quality control over a rising number of similar transactions, as reinventing the wheel on each deal became an increasingly costly approach

March 2010 LawBusinessReview.co.uk 51

Knowledge management

Professional support

faster turn-around times, while operating in a risk managed environment.

Developing these solutions have brought into play new skills for PSLs. They are now required to deliver beyond the traditional legal technical content and are expected to be project and risk managers as they help their practices adapt to new ways of working. These new skills play a valuable part in extending the PSL function into new management areas, such as risk and transaction management.

At BLP, our knowledge development lawyers are no longer merely supporting the client-facing legal teams, but are instrumental in ensuring that the legal service provided is of a high quality and delivered in an effi cient, cost-effective manner.

Adding value to the client relationshipMany pitches now require law fi rms to outline what they will provide by way of added value services.

As internal know-how systems become more comprehensive and sophisticated, they are part of the wider legal service delivery that in-house lawyers, many of whom have experienced the support offered by PSLs and know-how from previous work in private practice, expect from their external lawyers. They want to tap into their law fi rms’ training, current awareness, market knowledge, standard form documentation and knowledge management expertise so that the in-house legal team can be well-informed and effi cient.

Our team members are working with client relationship partners to deliver these added value services, which help cement a client/lawyer relationship beyond the transactional work.

Developing technologies are providing opportunities to offer these solutions in exciting new ways. The initiatives include client extranets for know-how, podcasts for training and online interactive newsletters for information sharing – all of which are tools that can be used to improve the offering available.

PSLs – a must have?During the recession, this question has been the subject of close scrutiny. There have been job losses within knowledge management across the profession, but, it would seem, no more than in any other business service function and not enough to dent the long-term future of the role.

Return on investment for knowledge management initiatives is hard to quantify as there are no fi rm metrics to use. How do you calculate, in fi scal terms, increased effi ciency, increased quality, lower risk, increased employee and client satisfaction? Even assuming you could, how do you extract a percentage which could be directly attributable to knowledge management, as opposed to business development, HR or IT?

The key is to release the transactional lawyers to focus on deals, delivering on client objectives in a more cost-effective way and to a higher standard. Certainly when times are lean, many know-how activities can be undertaken by the fee earners themselves. However, experience shows that once the fee earning increases, that is, rightly, where the focus of attention returns

and any know-how work becomes a lower priority. It is far better for fee earners with capacity to focus on business development opportunities.

What next?The increasingly external focus for the PSL means that there is less time to devote to the traditional internal PSL support role. There too the needs are changing. Lawyers in private practice have access to very comprehensive commercial online legal research tools (such as Lexis Library, Westlaw and PLC) and, in many cases, to a body of internal material built up over a number of years.

This, of course, requires maintenance, expansion and improvement, but much of the development work has been done.

The focus over the coming years will be fi rmly on communication and collaboration. PSLs will move away from being the principal authors of know-how material and will instead become gatekeepers of excellence and quality of internal online collaboration tools that will allow practitioners to create and debate knowledge in open forum.

The holy grail of all PSLs has always been an environment where lawyers can easily share experiences and “tacit” knowledge – the knowledge in their heads. With Web 2.0 technology, this may be a step closer. We are just beginning to fully understand the potential of this new technology for the development of a fi rm’s intellectual capital and this will change the way PSLs deliver client service both internally and externally over the next 20 years.

The PSL role will evolve in response to the changing requirements of our clients and our business. They will continue to play a pivotal role, combining an understanding of, and expertise in, the legal work product and an increasing change-management expertise.

As one member of my team said recently: “I thought long and hard before making the transition from fee-earning to knowledge management in 2008. I am not sure that I would have made that change had I not been in an environment that so obviously sees the real business value in developing and sharing knowledge both between ourselves and with our clients.”

Lucy Dillon is director of knowledge management, Berwin Leighton Paisner, www.blplaw.com

“PSLs can apply their practical experience and their holistic approach to transactional work to ‘unbundle’ the traditional deal model and identify smarter ways of delivering on clients’ objectives”

Lucy Dillon

Professional support

52 LawBusinessReview.co.uk March 2010

Knowledge management