Creating an innovation movement across the firm | Feature

Global law firm Dechert has a strong and long-standing track record for innovation. We recognised, however, that the traditional law firm organisational paradigms needed to be revisited if we were to truly embed innovation in all that we do every day for the benefit of the firm, our people and clients.

We realised that for fundamental and sustainable change to happen, we needed everyone in the firm to have a mindset, approach, and to live the behaviours that thrive on innovation and continuous improvement.

The question that came next was: in relatively traditional and hierarchical organisations like law firms, how might we make people feel safe to question entrenched practices, challenge the status-quo, to be bold, speak up, dare to experiment, and accept that some failure is inevitable for us to ultimately succeed?

The answer came from Dechert’s innovation team and its idea to promote shifts in mindsets, behaviours, and organisational culture by training people about the methodologies and giving them the tools, techniques and the environment that would allow the Dechert community to see the firm, their work, clients, colleagues and careers differently, come up with ideas to enhance what we do and, importantly, to translate those ideas into actions.

In essence, the objective was to start a transformational movement by empowering people to become creative leaders in charge of pushing the organisation towards reinvention.

This was how Dechert’s Innovation Certificate Programme (ICP) was born. The Innovation Certificate Programme was conceived as a comprehensive learning experience, equally available to lawyers and business services professionals, intended to provide a platform to generate ideas which would ultimately enhance how the firm works for the benefit of its people and clients.

The 34-hour programme, which is delivered by external guest lecturers from world-renown innovation and design company IDEO’s alumni network, is designed to give people the tools and techniques to innovate and is structured to focus on the journey of an idea and covering the key three stages of conception, development and implementation. A key foundational principle of the programme is that all people are equal; hierarchies and seniorities are not relevant, and as such all opinions carry equal value.

Currently 80 people from across our global business are participating – this is double the number of our people involved in the pilot programme, which is a strong indicator that the programme is interesting, useful and effectively engaging our people. These 80 participants include lawyers and business services professionals at all levels within the firm and they come from a wide range of practices and teams and from offices across Europe, Asia and the United States, including 21 people from our London office.

Another positive indicator is the feedback received from attendees of the pilot programme:

• 95% said they would recommend the programme to colleagues.
• 91% said they would like to continue to be involved in innovation efforts moving forward.
• 69% said they were interested in continuing to work on the ideas they proposed after the programme ends.
• 68% were certain they will apply the tools learned during the programme to their work moving forward.

There is already a waiting list for next year’s programme, which is also very encouraging.

The pilot programme generated over 20 different ideas to enhance the firm’s operations and our service to our clients. These ideas covered areas as diverse as client engagement, cross-selling, cross-team collaboration, talent management and recognition as well as technology adoption. All ideas were subsequently pitched to the firm’s senior leadership and 62% of them are currently being progressed or executed on their own or as part of other overarching projects. Our expectation is that the newly launched programme will generate many more ideas and that those who attended the original pilot will continue as agents of change within the business, creating a positive and reinforcing culture of innovation. As Dechert’s CEO, Henry Nassau, has said, the intention is that this learning programme ‘will further develop Dechert as an idea incubator for the benefit of our people, clients and communities.’

As well as being the first of its kind in the legal market and innovative in its own right, the programme is already driving within Dechert a culture of positive change, and of new ideas and behaviours across the business, with each of the programme’s attendees becoming innovation ambassadors and part of a wider, global transformational innovation movement within the firm.

Nicole Bergamesco is director of strategic operations, and Lucia Elizalde-Bulanti is legal innovation manager, at Dechert LLP