Teamwork and Efficiency – The Backbone of Any Relationship
July 14, 2009
Dealings in today’s business world have become increasingly complex due to a variety of factors: an increasingly hostile competitive environment; increasing globalization of today’s markets; advances in technology as they affect the business; and a complex array of regulatory concerns and litigation risks, among others. These factors have had and will continue to have significant ramifications for the corporate client and the corporate practitioner.
Most notably, this requires a higher level of specialization than in years past, and the skilled corporate lawyer should make every effort to approach complex corporate projects as one team: both the client and the law firm, together with other professionals outside the corporation that need to be involved.
The best approach in staffing a particular corporate project is for the team leader or relationship manager to assess the project with other experienced lawyers from other areas of practice within the firm that will likely be called upon to assist. Together they determine how best to configure the team. The goal is to involve the right mix of people, in terms of expertise and level of experience, to deal with the legal tasks at hand, rather than simply applying a standard lineup to staff the project.
The team approach, properly organized and executed, addresses the three critical components to the client in meeting its goals for outside counsel in a complex business project: quality of service, responsiveness and cost. Allocating the various components of the legal tasks at hand to specialists in those respective task areas enables the client to receive the requisite quality of service at a very high level of responsiveness. Accordingly, more sophisticated projects will typically involve lawyers from various disciplines to address the client’s needs effectively and efficiently. Thus, a major acquisition, for example, would not only involve the corporate practitioner: The transaction will require an appropriate array of attorneys in other disciplines such as tax, environmental, employee and employee benefits, intellectual property, real estate, banking and litigation.
The corporate lawyer, in collaboration with experienced practitioners in the applicable specialty, also assesses the level of experience within each specialty necessary to accomplish the designated task. This will be based upon the level of sophistication involved, the level of expertise required and the background of the practitioners available. By assigning the task to the properly qualified practitioner at the right level of expertise, the task can be completed for the client in the most cost-effective manner.
The heightened complexity of business tasks and the necessity of a teamwork approach to addressing them have additional ramifications for the attorney-client relationship as well as the law firm. The corporate lawyer as team leader or relationship manager takes responsibility for the organization of the law firm’s team to address the complexity of the tasks at hand. That lawyer similarly must accept accountability to the client for the team’s overall performance. The effective team leader communicates "ownership" of this issue to the client at the outset of the engagement. The client can look to the experienced practitioner to exercise oversight of the complex, multi-disciplinary efforts undertaken by the law firm, rather than getting involved in direct supervision over multiple attorney efforts where the client may not have the requisite background, and certainly not the inclination, to judge daily performance. Being accountable, the team leader actively monitors the functions of his or her team members and ensures full and adequate communication between the client and the various team members, as well as among the members of the team to accomplish the tasks at hand.
This team effort also calls for a distinct level of accountability among team members within their firm. There must be a recognition and willingness for firm members to work collaboratively and selflessly to achieve the client’s overall goals. The most effective law firm provides a culture designed to encourage such conduct and provides management and compensation systems relentlessly focused on appropriate rewards for achieving team-oriented goals. Only with such mechanisms to reinforce these goals can the corporate practitioner reasonably assure the level of high-quality consistency required in today’s modern corporate practice.
Today’s complex business projects require a higher level of specialization and input from a greater number of legal, financial and other professionals, as well as a broader array of executives within the client’s organization than ever before. As complexity grows, the risks of miscommunication, non-communication and other potential problems multiply. A transactional context, such as the negotiation of a strategic joint venture or major acquisition, is inherently competitive as each side attempts some level of advantage over the other. As a result, the prospects for conflict and problems of various types are very high. It is best for the corporate lawyer and the client to anticipate that problems will occur and instead focus on processes and mechanisms to promptly identify and address issues as they arise.
Accordingly, all members of the project team, both at the law firm and elsewhere, should be ready to recognize potential problem areas, either in communications or otherwise, in an effort to head off problems before they occur. To the extent problems do occur, team members are expected to take responsibility for identifying such problems as promptly as possible without concern for assessment of blame. In that manner, problems can be quickly addressed and usually resolved without engaging in the counterproductive process of finger pointing. In the midst of getting the project done, it is most important to the client to solve the problem rather than assessing fault. Acting from this perspective produces a significantly better team focus, often facilitates the prevention of various problems from ever arising and results in a more efficient delivery of the desired results to the client.