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Transcript
[00:00:00] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
[00:00:15] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. So we’re going to do something a little bit different on this episode and jump right into the interview section. I know I was a little busy this week with all these side projects that we talked about last week, Marlene. And add to that, I added one more podcast that I’m helping create with my law firm called Jackson Walker Fast Takes. So once again, my day job is getting in the way of the podcast.
[00:00:42] Marlene Gebauer: Well, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. That kind of busy is good busy.
[00:00:46] Greg Lambert: It is good busy.
[00:00:47] Marlene Gebauer: Believe me, I have been pretty busy with my side projects as well. So let’s jump right into it. We have Heidi Gardner from Harvard Law School and Brian Stearns from Workstorm on how to manage the remote working environment from both a technical and a psychological perspective.
[00:01:05] Greg Lambert: So let’s get right into the talk with Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns. Well, Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us on The Geek in Review. It’s great to get you both on the show.
[00:01:21] Heidi Gardner: My pleasure.
[00:01:22] Brian Stearns: Pleasure to be here. Thanks.
[00:01:24] Marlene Gebauer: So before we begin, would you mind just telling me a bit about yourselves and what your focus is now that we’re all in a remote work environment?
[00:01:31] Brian Stearns: Brian, you start.
[00:01:32] Heidi Gardner: Well, I kind of bring a couple of different interesting perspectives to this. Workstorm is a collaboration platform. So designed to help teams connect remotely. In fact, our entire product was developed with a remote development team spread across the US, first using industry available products and then using our own platform to build it. So in some respects, we’ve hit our stride through this process in helping clients adjust to this market. So talk a little bit about the use of technology to support remote working or work from home. I’m not a lawyer, didn’t grow up in the legal market, but I did grow up as a consultant, first at Deloitte and then Boston Consulting Group. So I’ve actually been working fairly remotely since 2002. And so I have some thoughts around just managing dispersed teams and adjustments to moving between the home and the office. So I can share some of those perspectives as well, but I think primarily we’ll be coming at it from the lens of how law firms can utilize technology to not only manage through this situation, the current environment, but also to potentially increase productivity as a result of it.
[00:02:37] Brian Stearns: So I’ll pick up there. This is Heidi Gardner. I’m a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, which is basically what I consider to be my research home at Harvard. And the whole university is now in remote working mode. And it’s actually working quite well for me. I’ve had a number of writing tasks on my plate and I’ve managed to pick those up quite productively while working from my home in the mountains in New Hampshire. I am delighted that my new book, it’s called Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams. Hampshire. I am delighted that my new book, it’s called Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams. It has gone to press as of this week. So I was working on page proofs and things while I was in isolation. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely thrilled. I feel like I’ve accomplished something while here in the mountains. And I’ve been studying this topic of collaboration for nearly two decades at this point. Like Brian, I’m also a former consultant. I was at McKinsey. I don’t hold the BCG thing against you, by the way, Brian. I appreciate that.
[00:03:36] Heidi Gardner: I still carry that chip on my shoulder.
[00:03:38] Brian Stearns: There you go. But having worked in client service teams for half a decade at McKinsey, I then left to do my PhD in London and started studying those very same teams. And over time, transitioned to looking at how highly autonomous, quite powerful people like partners in professional service firms or research scientists like at places like the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute or other kinds of professionals, how they come together and bring their unique expertise and are able to tackle complicated problems by bringing different perspectives together and creating these holistic solutions. And so having looked at collaboration for the past 20 or so years, primarily from an academic and from a consulting standpoint, this environment now is sort of like a little incubator of experimentation. And lots of what I’ve been writing about and studying and thinking about over the past years is now playing out in sort of grand color. years is now playing out in sort of grand color. And it’s fascinating for me to think about what happens in this remote working environment for people who don’t necessarily choose to work this way, or for people who have little experience doing this, and what’s the psychological impact, my PhD is in organizational behavior, and I bring that lens to thinking about all of this.
[00:04:58] Greg Lambert: So we brought you both on to discuss how law firms are handling business continuity. Well, I guess we don’t even have to limit it to law firms. The legal environment is handling the business continuity and the collaboration efforts in this new reality that we’re finding ourselves in. And obviously, we’re seeing something that practically no one could have anticipated at the end of last year, especially in the legal industry.
[00:05:23] Marlene Gebauer: Brian, as firms go for weeks in this work from home situation, what are some of the key considerations that they need to address, especially on remote work, collaboration, business continuity planning in the legal industry since COVID-19? hit us.
[00:05:41] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, thank you. It’s a great question. I think, first, for anybody who works in the legal industry, you realize that not all law firms are created equal. There’s big firms who have dedicated IT support and business continuity processes in place. There’s small firms that don’t. There’s lawyers who are litigators or everyday spend their going to courts. Others who in corporate practices may be used to sitting around conference rooms with their teams and clients and sort of that warm environment. maybe IP attorneys who do tend to work in more siloed fashion. So I think all of them are gonna react and respond differently to this. So a little bit of a need to generalize here. But I think first and foremost, firms have to tend to the health of their employees and the psychology, as Heidi mentioned. I’m very interested to hear what she has to say on that. Making sure that they’re, from an infrastructure standpoint, prepared for this and that’s making sure everyone has laptops or the ability to work from home, that infrastructure is there. But once all those sort of foundational things are in place and you start to think about, okay, how do we operate? It’s really about putting tools in place that make it easy to connect with your colleagues and can almost replicate that human experience. Video conferencing solutions are an obvious one that have gotten a lot of attention in this environment. Also, sort of integrated messaging platforms where you can build channels, so to speak, around projects or topics or roles that you play, help you get structure in what’s a relatively unstructured environment. And then in terms of what we hear from customers and prospective customers in terms of response, I’ll put it in kind of two camps. There’s some who are viewing this as very, very temporary and saying, let’s just get through this. We have email, we have a video conferencing solution. Let’s just hunker down, power through it, and then things will get back to normal. And I think it’s a bit short-sighted, honestly, for a few reasons. One, we don’t know how long this is going to take. I’m in Illinois, in Chicago. We went on lockdown two weeks ago with the notion that that was through April 7. Now through the end of April, a lot of statistical models are saying potentially through the end of May. So you don’t know how long this is going to go. So just struggling through is maybe not going to be appropriate. Second thing, and we talked about this in sort of the prelude with Heidi, as it relates to schools, schooling systems, a lot of them are preparing for the fact that e-learning may have to come back again in the fall. It could take 12 to 18 months for the vaccines to be available, and you could see when flu season hits again, the number of cases increasing again. And that might require, we’re back to work in the office for the summer, and then the fall, firms are being asked again to go work from home. So how are you preparing yourself from a technology standpoint, from a training standpoint, from a process standpoint, to move easily between homework and office-based work? And so I think the firms that recognize that and prepare themselves for that are the ones that can perform the best through this. To say we have to live in an environment that’s somewhat either flexible or in a hybrid fashion, and easily move back and forth. And so I think having a longer-term view is very appropriate. And then I really believe that this could change the way lawyers interact with their clients. I think there will be some people in the world who, as soon as the mandates are lifted, are like, I want to get out of the house and get back to life as normal. There may be some who carry that anxiety further and say, do you really need to come visit my corporate office as a guest? Can we just have this conversation or do this negotiation or sign this contract virtually? There’s efficiency gains there. There’s environmental benefits to not traveling a lot. And I think there could be health benefits that people say, let’s not congregate unnecessarily. And so if you’re a corporate lawyer, for example, and you’re used to sitting around a conference room table and being able to put the counterparty on mute while you have a sidebar conversation, how can you replicate that experience in a truly virtual setup? room table and being able to put the counterparty on mute while you have a sidebar conversation, how can you replicate that experience in a truly virtual setup? Or maybe you’re connected through telephone or video conference to your counterparties, but you need to have that separate second conversation with bankers or your client. And so you need to have effectively 2 communication systems running in parallel, maybe video or telephony plus chat. And I think this is a great training ground right now for lawyers and law firms to think about. How do they set themselves up for success long term?
[00:10:02] Greg Lambert: Yeah, well, there’s a lot going on. And like I said, at the beginning of the year, very few people would have imagined something like this. And so there’s a human toll on things. So Heidi, what are you seeing as the immediate effects on the legal industry from the Coronavirus? And especially when it comes to how we as humans are reacting to it?
[00:10:25] Brian Stearns: Yeah, absolutely. I think toll is the right word. And let me start by saying that I think we’re going to see a shift here. And it’s quite a somber thought. And I’ll come back to what some of the implications are. But right now, most of what I hear people talking about is inconvenience, you know, and that ranges from the inconvenience of the privileged, who, you know, have, you know, are worried about maybe their home office not looking great on a webinar, to, you know, to people who are, you know, really jammed into, you know, small settings, people who are trying their very best to make do and stay productive, despite all kinds of chaos happening at home. But right now, there’s a lot of talk about the inconvenience and the struggles associated with multitasking and sharing work responsibilities with family responsibilities and things. The somber note, though, is when you think about what the projections are for how this is going to play out through the healthcare system in our population, we’re going to be dealing with people who are not only grappling with inconvenience, but with grief. And as sobering as that is, I think we should recognize that that is coming. And that that’s going to have a very different psychological toll on people than what we’re facing right now. So you know, let me take those kind of stepwise. Right now, I think there are some clear implications that everyone’s talking about in terms of what it means to work in, you know, in a remote environment where you’re multitasking and so forth. And some of those distractions can be hard to handle and so forth. But one of the angles that I’d like to raise to people is the unexpected, unintended consequences that this kind of anxiety has on our group working and our group dynamics. And what I mean by that is, you know, there’s a lot of research out there that shows that when we’re stressed, you know, for all kinds of reasons, we tend to revert to what psychologists call their central tendencies, things that come naturally and, and sort of without thinking, almost, you know, subconsciously or unconsciously. And we know that human nature is such that one of those tendencies is that we prefer to interact with and we prefer to, to engage with and we tend to trust people who we think of as similar to us. And oftentimes, that similarity is socioeconomic, it is, you know, background, it is demographics. And when you play this out and think, okay, so now we’re all completely atomized, we can’t, you know, see each other, maybe we do through video, but we’re not constantly bumping into one another, who’s most likely to suffer from that? And, you know, the research tells us that people who are most likely to be forgotten in this kind of working environment, are those who are on the periphery, those who are not like the leaders and the powerful people that are the partners in the law firm. And it concerns me a lot, the effects that this remote working environment will have on, say, diversity efforts, unless we are incredibly diligent about even in times of stress, not going with our gut reaction about who’s the associate to pull on to the team, or which partner should I pick up the phone and, you know, check in on, or whose advice do I want to seek?
[00:14:18] Greg Lambert: Because if we, if we go with our gut, in times of stress, we will probably overlook some of the people who are, you know, more different from us. And that’s something I’d like to call out to people and make sure that they’re mindful of how they’re allocating work, how they’re allocating their attention and things so that we’re not subconsciously favoring people.
[00:14:21] Brian Stearns: So we might just go back to old habits.
[00:14:27] Marlene Gebauer: Old habits, yeah, old habits and, you know, and unthinking ways of working as well. Because you’re in crisis mode, right? You know, you’re trying to get something done quickly and get a turnaround quickly, and you don’t have time to be thoughtful and mindful in the way you might be able to at another time.
[00:14:38] Brian Stearns: Yeah, evolutionary psychologists tell us this is a really good thing. Because when predecessors were out, you know, hunting the beast, and we had to make some, you know, primal decisions about whom do we trust, we would trust our tribe. And some of that hasn’t apparently left our psyche. So when we’re under a great deal of stress, whom do we trust? Well, we trust the people who are most likely to be our tribe. And that, you know, that’s not gonna have great effects on diversity in the long run.
[00:15:02] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I think it’s, I hope, hopefully, Greg and Marlene don’t mind me asking a question. But it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, just generally, and also leading up this conversation is, in any sort of shift, there’s people who really benefit and people who really suffer as a result of it. And if a long-term impact of this is, you know, changing the way people think about corporate offices, and, you know, law firms not having big corporate offices, maybe just smaller hoteling environments, what are the secondary implications on office security and maintenance and other workers who their livelihood depended on that? But Heidi, I’m also kind of curious, do you see groups that are maybe going to rise up and thrive this and really stand out? You know, there’s been research going back 10 years about video conferencing solutions, and how taking it out of the formal boardroom or conference room into a virtual conversation actually allows people who are less confident or more introverts to actually be more vocal, and bigger contributors, because that pressure of sitting around a table with your colleagues caused them to be a little bit more silent and internal.
[00:16:07] Brian Stearns: Yeah, and for sure, that research is playing out now. I’ve been on the phone with, you know, dozens and dozens of people trying to understand the effects it’s having on them and their teams. And quite a number of lawyers in particular are telling me exactly that is happening much to their surprise, because they weren’t aware of that research. That they’re hearing from people who weren’t the most participative in prior settings, and they’re actually, you know, managing to engage them. They’re also understanding that people, you know, have similar handicaps, if you will, when they are operating remotely. It’s a bit of a leveler in some ways. And so we can pay more attention to people’s faces, for example, if everyone is showing up on the screen. Whereas, you know, some people are a little bit more in the background, literally in the background in a group setting, depending how the conference room is shaped and so forth. And it allows us to be more diligent in paying attention to those things if we’re mindful about it. So I do think that there are people who can benefit from this. I think, you know, the other kind of person, if this is a type, you know, someone who is willing to take some experiments is really going to thrive in this sort of environment, because we need people right now to be conducting little organizational experiments all the time, whether that’s, you know, how we schedule the meetings, whether it’s, you know, what kind of reaction we have when a dog is barking in the background, right? Do we, you know, do we, you know, do we see the humor in that? Do we allow this kind of setting to humanize us? And I think it’s going to be fascinating to see across the board that different kinds of people will, I hope, use the opportunity to experiment and a little bit step outside their own comfort zone.
[00:17:58] Greg Lambert: Let me follow up a little bit on that. You mentioned something about people being in the background. One of the things that I’ve noticed on conference calls, or the Zoom meetings, or whatever you’re using, is there’s the people who had the video on and are interacting. And there’s those that had the video off. I’m just curious, do the ones who had the video off, are they harming themselves by doing that?
[00:18:27] Marlene Gebauer: That’s a bad hair, no makeup day. I’m sorry. That’s why they’re not on video.
[00:18:34] Brian Stearns: Yeah, I think, you know, I do think, you know, it’s speaking of the great leveler, this is going to be a really interesting experiment to see who actually keeps the video on, you know, a month from now when their Botox is wearing out and their gray hair is showing. So, you know, let’s see.
[00:18:50] Greg Lambert: Too late for me, too late for me.
[00:18:54] Brian Stearns: You know, I think that, I think that, in general, giving other people rich opportunity to see your expression is a good thing. You know, even if, even if your expression is one of concern, or anger, or some other sort of negative emotion, generally, or boredom. Letting people know and being a bit transparent about that is actually helpful for group dynamics. dynamics, provided that two things happen. One is that the other group members are attentive to that, and two, that they have trust in each other to be able to work through some of that negativity. And, you know, and I think one of the possible benefits of having functionality like video is that we are able to pause and in some ways have license to say, wait a minute, you know, what’s that face? Or, you know, and in ways that we may not do if we were literally sitting across from one another, and I hope people take advantage of that.
[00:19:55] Marlene Gebauer: What are issues arising from the coronavirus for the legal industry? That are sort of unique to the legal industry? You know, they’re not being talked about, you know, elsewhere. Are you observing anything sort of special about legal that doesn’t exist elsewhere?
[00:20:11] Brian Stearns: Heidi, do you want to start? Yeah, I could just think of one thing, which is it’s the legal leaders, the managing partners and the chief talent officers and others who are more worried than in any other kind of organization I’m in contact with about the gap between people who are accustomed versus unaccustomed to working at home. You know, I think legal is interesting to me in that so many law firm partners
[00:20:41] Heidi Gardner: hadn’t chosen to work from home, perhaps ever, and indeed held pretty strong negative views about their colleagues who did.
[00:20:51] Brian Stearns: And, you know, Brian, you were saying that, you know, in consulting, we were remote all the time, whether that was at the client or just on the road or you name it. in the other professional arenas where that’s true, this is less of a culture shock than it seems to be in law firms. At least that’s my observation.
[00:21:08] Heidi Gardner: I would agree with that, just in having conversations with various folks, it’s been a little bit more jarring for some, not everyone, but even within a law firm, especially a big corporate firm that has many different practice groups, different people in different groups will respond to it differently, but then you have 60% of most large law firms are kind of office-based staff who were never given the option to work from home. who were never given the option to work from home. Their job was in the office, and they were kind of tethered to workstations and desktops. And now how are they changing as a result of this? You know, there’s sort of HR implications too, especially when you think about non-exempt workers and how to deal with that. But some of the ones that are a little bit maybe lighterhearted, too, is this reliance on paper that I’ve heard about and seen. That’s been sort of–.
[00:21:55] Marlene Gebauer: What is this paper that you talk of?
[00:21:58] Heidi Gardner: Do they have printing stations at home? What are secure scanning solutions that I can buy from my home office? These are types of things that I think, you know, most companies that have embraced digital work for a much longer period of time aren’t even thinking about that. I think, you know, some lawyers are now facing in somewhat of a sort of humorous way, but all the different.
[00:22:16] Marlene Gebauer: in somewhat of a, you know, in a sort of humorous way, but all the different, you know,
[00:22:21] Heidi Gardner: back office support and administrative support and technology support that you had in the office you don’t have anymore? And how much is that slowing down the ability to work?
[00:22:31] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the security issue. I mean, you know, we’re already hearing about like, oh, with Zoom meetings, you know, someone might kind of jump in on your Zoom meetings. So I was before this, I was telling Greg, it’s like, are we locked down? I think so. definitely they’re thinking in terms of security that way. I’ll throw something out there for consideration too. Just the whole idea of client support. So it isn’t just sort of doing work, but it’s doing your work, but also supporting but it’s doing your work, but also supporting the client and being able to interact with a client, which, you know, may be experiencing, you know, maybe experiencing a work slowdown or other challenges. So that I think is one of the key things that firms are struggling with. I think about the courts, you know, everything being closed and everything being kind of postponed and, you know, how do you manage that? You know, that’s like a total third party. How do you manage that with your client? Yeah.
[00:23:32] Greg Lambert: There’s nothing you can do if the court’s closed, right? Right. And then you, I think I’ve talked to some lawyers now.
[00:23:38] Marlene Gebauer: You can settle actually.
[00:23:39] Greg Lambert: I guess that’s an option. But there’s so much attorneys now whose practices have picked up quite a bit.
[00:23:45] Heidi Gardner: and they’re busier than ever. And then there’s, you know, we’ve seen the headlines that there’s a lot of firms who are furloughing employees or reducing partner pay in order to not do that. reducing support team pay in all an effort to not have to lay folks off and install it into the pain together, which is difficult. But as a professional services organization, a law firm or consulting firm, your business cycle is tied to your customers. And so I think, you know, that’s a very interesting dynamic now where you want to be reaching out to your clients to offer help through this. And your clients may or may not be able to hear that or have the time or the attention to listen to what you have to say. And so I think there’s additional stresses on an attorney right now to just think about how do I be empathetic towards my customers and be available to be helpful without being a burden.
[00:24:33] Brian Stearns: How do I be empathetic towards my customers? And be available to be helpful without being a burden. Sorry to jump in, but I have a kind of positive story on that. One of the partners who is attending the Accelerated Leadership Program, which may go down in history as the last ever in-person executive education program at Harvard Law School, at least for this academic year. I was chairing that earlier in March. And we had a check-in with all of the participants last week. And one of those partners in a U.S. law firm was giving a great example. He said, I’d always been told never to do a meeting on the phone if I could do it in person. He said, and so there’s this whole list of clients that I have stored somewhere that I think, okay, so when I get to Chicago, I’m going to see these three people. When I get to San Diego, I’ll see these three people. He said, now I don’t know if or when. I’m going to get to Chicago or San Diego at all this year. So I just started picking up the phone and calling them, he said, and it’s fantastic. He said, you know, now I’m just, you know, checking in with them. I have closer client relationships with quite a lot of people because of this than I had previously. And it makes me wonder how many of those other kind of pent-up calls or points of contact might get cleared off the list. Because now we say, well, you know, I’m not going to wait until I’m in their building to pop in for coffee. Why don’t I just, you know, ping them and, you know, see how they’re doing and so forth? And I think if people think about this as an opportunity to do the best we can right now, it might give us the leeway or the license to do what would other times be considered slightly suboptimal.
[00:26:15] Heidi Gardner: What would other times be considered slightly suboptimal,
[00:26:18] Brian Stearns: but at this point in time, it’s the best we can do. Let’s just crack on.
[00:26:22] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, good is the enemy of great or whatever.
[00:26:24] Brian Stearns: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:26:26] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I think, you know, lawyers tend to be perfectionists and want work quality to be perfect before it’s put out there. And that kind of triggered a thought to me, which is lawyers have been, I guess, legal clients, so the corporate customers have been asking law firms to be more collaborative. I think this is a trend that’s been going on for a while. And, you know, there tends to be a lot of silence in between, you know, the kicking off of a new matter and when the deliverable, whether it’s a contract or a deal or, you know, a settlement or whatever comes about. And now you have this license to, I think, communicate more effectively and even offer a service to customers. So I always take a technology lens to this, but there’s a lot of tools out there, including our own, which firms can offer to their customers as a service. And that may be even opportunity to drive more stickiness in the relationships to say, it’s not just an email-based or an in-person-based relationship, but we have these other tools available to us where we can share knowledge and insights and have real-time dialogue. And, you know, that may be a way to even sort of strengthen relationships through this process.
[00:27:29] Greg Lambert: Yeah, well, and I know there’s a lot of us that have tried to say, we’ve got to find a different communication other than email to use. And, you know, email has probably been one of the biggest transformation tools in the legal industry ever. It’s hard to make them give that up and try something.
[00:27:49] Marlene Gebauer: People love their email.
[00:27:50] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:27:51] Marlene Gebauer: So I want to try and sort of wrap this up for all of us and ask you, what’s next for remote work? And I know we touched on this a little bit earlier. Do you believe the current crisis is going to have a more permanent effect on how work gets done in the legal industry? And do you have, you know, a couple of concrete lessons that firms can take from the current environment and apply it to the processes moving forward?
[00:28:19] Brian Stearns: I’d like to think that the current working environment in firms that really embrace it is going to increase trust. And we see so many cultures in firms where if I can’t see that you’re working hard at your desk, I don’t trust that you’re actually working. And I thought kind of, you know, presenteeism, FaceTime culture. I would hope that people understand now that the productive work can get done remotely and that people who have, you know, whatever reason for wanting to operate like this, it’s not because they’re slackers, it’s because, you know, they might be more productive working from home or they might have an aging parent or, you know, you name it, all sorts of legitimate reasons. And I’d like to think that this helps us shatter some of those myths about, you know, who it is that works from home and what they can or can’t accomplish. I’d also like to think that it increases trust in a very, very different way, which, you know, the definition of trust, one definition of trust is the willingness to be vulnerable with other people. And, you know, as we were talking about before, this is a human crisis. even more than it’s an economic crisis. And I hope that through this and our ability to support one another and empathize with all sorts of situations that come up and to open up about what some of those challenges are. I hope that one lasting implication of this within firms and between external counsel and clients is that it increases that level of interpersonal trust and that that lasts for quite some time.
[00:30:00] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I hope so too.
[00:30:04] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I agree 100%, it’s hard to say it better than Heidi said it, but that trust piece, I think, is huge. And for technology solutions, we often get asked about presence in our system. And then there’s some people who want to know that the other person’s online and available, and others are like, I don’t want my boss to know when I’m on and offline if I’m running an errand and they’re thinking I’m not working. And so there is that fear that if they’re not in the office, they’re not available. And I experienced this shift in my own career where when I was in my 20s and I was single and without kids, I would work in the office until I was done. That could be six o’clock. That could be midnight. And then I’d go home. And then as I built my home life, I had to start to build different expectations around leaving at a certain time so I could have dinner with my family, you know, but maybe I have different expectations for how I work on the weekend. I may be doing things on Saturday afternoon because my kids are napping and that’s when I have some quiet time. That doesn’t mean that I expect my team to be working as well. And so it forced me to start to set expectations better and become a better manager of my own time but also my team’s time. And that led me to every time I worked with a new team or onboarded someone new to really be good about setting, you know, expectations around accessibility and communication norms, how I prefer to be communicated. You take those things for granted when you’re on the same office. But when you’re not, I think it’s an opportunity for, you know, teams to be really explicit about expectations, cultural norms, things like that, that ultimately I think will make the team stronger.
[00:31:40] Greg Lambert: I had a recent interview with a consultant who said that law firms, we’re going to have to figure out a way to not manage by the clock. That it’s more that we need to be more project-based and understand that there might be times where it will take a long time to finish a project and sometimes it takes a shorter time to finish a project and you can’t just say, well, you’ve got eight hours, you’ve got to fill it with everything that you can do. I’m just wondering, do you think the legal industry can make that shift eventually?
[00:32:17] Heidi Gardner: Well, I’ll let Heidi answer the longer term question, but the way I’ve always thought about that is management by inputs versus management by outputs. And when you’re not in the same room, it’s almost impossible to manage by inputs. So time invested, you have to manage by outputs. And that’s, again, requires really good goal setting. What are our objectives? When do we expect things to be available? What is our review cycle as a team? It’s sort of those management 101 type trainings, but they can be taken for granted, especially when folks are very busy and under lots of pressure. And so I think, I hope to see some portion of the industry moving towards that. I don’t necessarily believe that this is enough of a catalyst to push the industry there quickly. Wow.
[00:33:02] Greg Lambert: What would it take?
[00:33:05] Heidi Gardner: I just, there’s, I think there’s so many, so much difficult, like, how do you do it? Do the firms have the data to do it appropriately? Are they willing to take risks on, you know, new billing structures? I think that data is being built right now. I think I’ve seen a lot of firms putting new systems and new people, so new capabilities in place to help to build that. But I think you actually need some period of time with good data to do it effectively. And I don’t know that firms are going to just jump into it without confidence that’s going to work well.
[00:33:36] Brian Stearns: I would love to see a legal arena where we are much more confident in our ability to believe that what lawyers produce adds value and to find some ways to think about how to capture value from the product, you know, commensurate with its actual value and not its inputs. And, you know, again, complete bias having come from McKinsey where we didn’t bill, you know, on the clock. And we tried very hard to link our fee structure to the value we were creating, the client believed that we were creating. And I think that puts a very, very different perspective on what even work looks like. You know, there’s some great research out of Stanford University initially that measured what happens when people have to think about the economic value of their time. What happens when people have to think about the economic value of their time. In other words, if you’re billing by six minute increments, what does that do psychologically to you? And it turns out, they ran a whole bunch of experiments and the upshot is that when people are primed to think about their work strictly as a function of the time they put in, they then tend to look at pretty much the world around them in that same system. And so they start to put opportunity costs on everything. So you end up hearing people say, it just cost me $800 to watch my kid’s soccer game because they could have been billing $800 instead. And that’s a sad state of affairs for, not just for the parent, but for the kid. Let’s face it, a little bit of pressure there, kid. Better play well. And more generally, they know that when people have to think about their time and the constant pressure to essentially commercialize their time, they end up getting less pleasure out of pleasurable activities. And so in these experiments, people who had been primed to think this way and had gone through a series of tests and so forth, they were asked at the end, ostensibly in an unrelated task, what do you think of this piece of music? Or help us pick a piece of art to decorate the waiting room. And compared to people who had been paid just for the outcome of their task, people who’d been paid on a minute-by-minute or so forth basis, they rated everything as less pleasurable. had been paid on a minute by minute or so forth basis, they rated everything as less pleasurable. The music didn’t sound as good. The food didn’t taste as good. And gosh, is that what’s happening to the entire legal industry when they have to bill by the hours? They end up essentially losing a sense of humanism. So that’s sort of a sad state of affairs. And maybe if we could change this around, you’d end up not just with more productive lawyers, but actually happier ones too.
[00:36:26] Greg Lambert: Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap this up. Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.
[00:36:34] Brian Stearns: Oh, thanks so much. It was fun.
[00:36:35] Heidi Gardner: Thank you. I’m a big fan of your work, Marlene and Greg, and also Heidi. So for those listeners, you know, I think follow these groups. There’s lots of good content being put out, especially through this current crisis.
[00:36:47] Marlene Gebauer: Well, thank you very much.
[00:36:49] Heidi Gardner: Thank you.
[00:36:55] Greg Lambert: Marlene, I have to say that I actually feel a lot better about our situation after talking with Heidi and Brian. I know there’s still a lot of struggles to come, but I think as long as we remain empathetic and alert to the needs of those that we’re working with, we can definitely make it through this together. So I really like the fact that Heidi mentioned that this is a great time to be creative and bring new ideas to your firm. I think that’s something that successful people will find out.
[00:37:27] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, well, I mean, as we have said before, never waste a good pandemic. And this is really an opportunity to look at, okay, how were we doing things and how does this situation allow us to experiment in some of these new ways of doing things. Because again, it’s a little easier to make the argument right now, you know, right?
[00:37:57] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:37:58] Marlene Gebauer: ‘Cause it’s a little easier to make the argument for experimentation now when regular systems aren’t working the way they should be.
[00:38:05] Greg Lambert: Yeah, yeah. I would say the worst thing to do right now is just stay the same.
[00:38:11] Marlene Gebauer: Yes.
[00:38:12] Greg Lambert: Well, thanks again to Heidi Gardner from Harvard Law School and Brian Stearns from WorkStorm for coming on and sharing their ideas with us.
[00:38:19] Marlene Gebauer: Before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Read and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at @GayBauerM or @Glambert, or you can call the Geek and Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekandreviewpodcast@gmail.com. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSica. Thanks, Jerry.
[00:38:54] Greg Lambert: Yeah, thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I will talk to you later. Stay safe.
[00:38:58] Marlene Gebauer: Shelter safe, bye. Bye.