April 2021

Capital Connection is published monthly for members of the Capital Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators to provide information for the education and benefit of legal administrators, law office managers, managing partners of law firms, and other law related associations. Capital Connection is not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or tax counseling or advice through this publication.  The contents of all articles, letters, and advertisements published in Capital Connection should not be considered endorsements by the Capital Chapter of ALA nor the opinion expressed therein of any products advertised.   Contributing authors are requested and expected to disclose financial and/or professional interests and affiliations that may influence their writing position. Articles and materials accepted for publication are subject to editing by the editorial team and become property of the Capital Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators. Links to Capital Connection may not be shared without permission from the Chapter. 
Editors: Amy Walkowiak; Emmanuel Adedigba
​Contributing Editors: Robert J. Bieber; Heinan Landa; Pedro Campos; Kerry Purcell
Newsletter Designed By: Jessica Davis


In this issue:

President's Message

Robert J. Bieber

New and Returning ALA Capital Chapter Members

Matthew Goldberg
Vice President
Avison Young
2001 K St., N.W.
Suite 200N
Washington, DC 20006
[email protected] 
Megan Friend, SHRM-CP
Human Resources Manager
Groom Law Group
1701 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20006
​​[email protected]

Best of Both Worlds: Mastering Hybrid Work

Heinan Landa
CEO, Optimal Networks
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We know now that working from home works.

One year into a global pandemic, even firms that had been clinging tightly to their physical offices have (more or less) adjusted to remote work. 

And there’s likely no going back—at least not completely. In a 2020 report, fellow Business Partner LOEB Leadership found that 67% of law firm professionals want to stay at least partially remote for the long haul. For employers, 83% felt remote work has been a success, and less than 1 in 5 want to revert back to pre-pandemic routine.

For most firms, the post-vaccine reality will be a hybrid work environment: at any given time, your attorneys and staff will be split between your office and their homes, and the average employee will work from both locations depending on the day. 

With the right technology, planning, and training, transitioning to this hybrid work environment will be seamless and secure—and can even fuel competitive advantages for your firm.

Shifting focus from productivity to impact
A permanent shift to hybrid work has the potential to unlock significant gains for both our businesses and our people.

First, let’s consider what working from home (even part of the time) has to offer on its own:
  • An average $4,000/year in travel savings for employees
  • 11 days of work regained with reduced commute
  • Fewer sick days
  • A talent pool with no geographic limitations
  • 50% retention increase

Of course, this arrangement isn’t without risk. Over the past year you may have encountered challenges with remote work, including:
With the right technology infrastructure in place, however, attorneys and staff who live near the office can enjoy seamless, secure flexibility between their home offices, your headquarters, and everywhere in between—and rebuild that critical connection without sacrificing the benefits of remote work.

And at that point, the entire narrative around where to work becomes much more strategic; rather than focusing on where our team can be productive, we can focus on where our team can have the greatest impact. 

On some days, that impact will come from an in-person appearance in your conference room. On other days, that impact might come from back-to-back Zoom meetings with clients from home. 

In other words, with the right technology and the right approach, we can capitalize on the best aspects of both office work and WFH—productivity, efficiency, security, savings, and engagement—simultaneously.

Plan thoughtfully, and plan soon
If your firm sees value in some WFH post-pandemic, the time to develop hybrid work guidelines is right now. Here are some considerations to help drive your internal conversations:
  • Technology Infrastructure. Will your existing technology infrastructure support a highly mobile workforce? Will it be a headache for them to transition from the office, to home, and back?  
  • Security. When the dust settles, how many locations will your attorneys and staff work from? Will you maintain proper security protocol at each location, or do you need to consider new defenses and policies?
  • Engagement. When part of the team is working remotely and the rest are on-site, how do you cultivate an equitable office dynamic where each person can participate and contribute on an even playing field?
  • Idea Exchange. Informal, spontaneous encounters often enhance working relationships and produce new ideas. Can you replicate this with remote employees? Do certain people need to be scheduled in your office at the same time?
  • Expectations. Are there clear and consistent guidelines for when employees should be at the office, and when they should work from home? Have you communicated them?
  • Evaluation Bias. Is your performance evaluation system biased towards employees who work on-site regularly? If so, can you create new metrics that reward employees for great performance regardless of their physical location?
  • Training. If you have implemented (or will implement) new technology as part of this strategy, have you trained your team on how to use each tool safely and effectively? Do your managers know how to lead a dispersed team well?
  • Measurement. How and how frequently will you measure whether your approach is achieving the intended results? Do you have the right metrics?

Some of these considerations are quite complex, and will require collaboration across firm leadership, your IT team, and your HR team. 

But if you begin the discussion now, you’ll be in excellent shape to make a safe, secure, and seamless transition to a successful hybrid work scenario. 

What If Nostradamus Were a Lawyer?

Pedro Campos
Managing Director, Consulting, Elevate Services

Shortly after taking office, President Bush received a foreign policy memo from Donald ‘unknown unknowns’ Rumsfeld. The briefing looked at the strategic situation at the start of each decade between 1900 and 2000. You can read it in full here. In summary, it notes how:
  • In 1900 the Brits were the world’s superpower, and their principal enemy was the French
  • By 1910 the Brits were allied with France against Germany
  • By 1920 the Brits were in a naval arms race against their previous allies, the US and Japan
  • By 1930 the Great Depression had taken hold, and no-one was building a navy. Defence planning predicted ‘no war for ten years’
  • By 1940 WWII had begun
  • By 1950 Britain was no longer the world’s greatest power
  • By 1960 few people had heard of Vietnam
  • By 1970 Vietnam had come and gone. The US was beginning détente with the Soviets and anointing the Shah in Iran
  • By 1980 the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in revolution, and the US was the world’s greatest creditor
  • By 1990 the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, the US was the world’s greatest debtor, and almost no-one had heard of the internet
  • By 2000 Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation

The memo ends, ‘All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly.’ Five months later, a terrorist cell crashed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. 

Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. If that note had been written today, Covid would feature prominently. But even though the future is hard to predict, you need to prepare for it. While specific developments are as hard to track as a drop of rain in a storm, the wider trends are as navigable as a river. 

Here are my thoughts on the top five trends to prepare for over the next few years:

1. Resource Management 
Today’s Millennial workforce wants greater responsibility at an earlier stage. This coincides with tech taking away lots of traditionally repetitive trainee tasks (more on that to follow). All of this means the bottom-heavy ‘pyramid’ model of staffing (i.e., lots of junior staff at the bottom performing simpler, repetitive tasks but decreasing numbers of higher ranking staff as the complexity of the work increases) is on its way out. On its way in is the ‘rocket ship’ resourcing model – narrow at the bottom, bulging in the middle, and narrow again at the top. The use of flexible resources and outsourcing to scale up and down in response to demand keep costs low. 

Another emerging trend is tasking the right resource to the right work. Currently, resourcing on matters tends an afterthought. Centralising resource management is that rarest of things – even though it’s a quadruple-win scenario because it simultaneously benefits partners (it’s one less thing for them to do), clients (who get the best lawyer for the job rather than the last person standing), lawyers (who get more control over their career), and firms (as staffing and budgeting receive increased attention at the start of a matter). That, combined with the multiple additional soft wins (such as blind resourcing assisting diversity, equity, and inclusion), make centralised resource management certain to become the norm in the near future. 
2. Office Space
I’ve had more conversations about the future of the office than any other topic since Coronavirus hit. The pandemic forced the legal industry to move forward by a decade overnight. Lawyers liked what they saw. No more long commutes, no more sleeping in pods, and no drop in productivity. In my view, there’s no going back.
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Yet, the future won’t be wholly remote either. The ‘water cooler’ can never be entirely virtual. My company, Elevate, has always encouraged flexible working and now leads the way in how to run a company with a smaller physical footprint. We have great tools that enable everyone to see what everyone else is doing (shout out to Microsoft Teams and 15Five software), plus dedicated People Engagement Directors whose sole focus is to get the best out of our workforce in an increasingly virtual environment. We have offices that will remain an important component of our culture, but like resource management, these are flexible spaces that we can rapidly scale up and down as demand changes.

3. Subscription Pricing and Products
The race has started on digital products, but there’s still plenty to come (and plenty of time to catch up). To get a sense of the scale of change, consider that Gartner predicts 12% of in-house budgets will be devoted to legal tech by 2025, compared with 3.9% in 2020 and 2.6% in 2017.

It’s easy to see what’s driving this. Digital technology is creating a larger playing field for the legal industry. Its quality is increasing while its cost is rapidly decreasing. It’s becoming increasingly common for new market entrants and legacy players to leverage technology to create and capture new value. Clients are also developing consumer-grade expectations of ‘any time, anywhere, my way’. All of which means the industry’s competitive dynamics have changed. Digitally activated competitors are cherry-picking profitable segments of the value chain and creating low-friction customer experiences that challenge legacy operating models. No-one in Silicon Valley ever thinks, ‘I’ve achieved enough; I’m going to stop now’. The flow (and the progress) is all one way.

4. Personal Assistants to move up the value chain
In the television show ‘Mad Men’, Peggy Olsen was an outlier – the secretary who advanced to success as a fee earner. In the post-Covid world, she will be the norm. As the need for a traditional office-based secretary fades, high-repetition work will be centralised; what’s left will be dealt with by an upskilled executive assistant who tackles operational requirements (e.g., engagement letters, accountancy rules, fee agreements, invoice formalities, etc.). Clifford Chance and Slaughter & May are the early pace setters, seeking to integrate personal assistants further rather than making redundancies. The outlier is Australian firm Hamilton Locke, which gives equity to their PAs (and all employees) to ensure that everyone feels invested in the firm’s success. 
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5. Shared services
Shared services are common in other professional sectors. Most people now accept that when they call the bank or utility company, they aren’t going to get to speak to someone who lives locally. Yet, in the legal sector, shared service centres are still viewed as cutting edge. This because of:
  • scale (law firms aren’t as big as banks), 
  • reputation (concerns about standards slipping in a shared service centre), and 
  • conservatism (to paraphrase Richard Susskind, it’s hard to persuade a bunch of millionaires that their business model is wrong).

Yet all three of these once formidable barriers are likely to crumble in the post-Covid landscape.  Scale affects how to proceed and whether to build a captive or enter into a partnership, but it doesn’t impact the overall financial attractiveness of getting work done for less. Reputation matters less as more lawyers realise that not everything they do needs to meet a Rolls Royce standard. It’s ok to put some cheaper parts under the bonnet if the outcome is just as good. And conservatism just doesn’t cut it in light of the client demand to deliver more for less. 

Conclusion
Almost every decision we make involves forecasts about how the future will unfold. Unfortunately, without a crystal ball, it’s nearly impossible to predict specifics. The answer isn’t to give up and despair. You need to prepare a road map that factors in future trends while embracing ambiguity and flexibility so that you can respond at pace to new trends. It’s hard to start a journey when you don’t know the exact destination. It’s even harder to be the last person in the room. 

2020 Job Market – Outlook for Employment in 2021

Kerry Purcell
Legal Placements, Inc.

Legal Placements, Inc., appreciated the opportunity to present a staffing agency's view of the 2020 job market at the January ALA-OOMS/IT Meeting.  LPI had a favorable outlook for employment in 2021, and everyone found their insights on contract attorney and temporary legal staffing changes in 2020 beneficial.  It was a great exchange of information with members of the LPI team and the ALA members that participated in the section event.

For a copy of the presentation, please reach out to: Kerry Purcell, [email protected]

Please visit our Linkedin page for the latest on jobs: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legal-placements-inc./mycompany/

In addition, you may also be interested in seeking LPI's annual salary survey.  This is a listing of permanent, salaried placements LPI made in 2020.  You can find the survey by clicking this link:  http://www.legalplacements.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Salary-Survey-2020-Final.pdf

April 2021 Diversity Observances

April is Celebrate Diversity Month, started in 2004 to recognize and honor the diversity surrounding us all. By celebrating differences and similarities during this month, organizers hope that people will get a deeper understanding of each other.

April is Autism Awareness Month, established to raise awareness about the developmental disorder that affects an individual's normal development of social and communication skills.
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April is National Volunteer Month, which was started in 1991 to encourage volunteerism at a young age. By volunteering, people can help save lives and create better environments for us all to live within. Thanking volunteers, such as volunteer fire and ambulance departments, is also an aspect of the celebration.
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April is National Arab American Heritage Month, celebrating the heritage and culture of Arab Americans, as well as honoring contributions from Arab Americans, such as Linda Sarsour, an activist for immigrants, women, Black victims of police violence, and indigenous Americans, and Rashia Tlaib, America's first Muslim Congresswoman.
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Click here to view the full list of April observances

Administrative Committees

Communications and Media Relations
As members of the Newsletter and Media Relations Committee, Chapter members participate in producing the award-winning Capital Connection. Members gather to brainstorm new ideas for editorial themes for upcoming editions. The newsletter reports Chapter business activities such as Community and Committee news and provides information about upcoming educational and other events. It also includes articles of interest to members and other legal management personnel, collected, authored and/or edited by members of the committee. This committee also works with other legal associations and the media to ensure that ALA and the Capital Chapter are represented in the legal industry.

Contact:  Amy Walkowiak (Chair), [email protected]; Emmanuel Adedigba (Co-Chair), [email protected]
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Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
The mission of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee is to advance the concepts of inclusiveness and acceptance in every organization by providing all Chapter members with information so that they can merge these concepts with their firm's policies, procedures, culture, and relationships to be more equitable and inclusive.  We not only strive to raise awareness, but also to increase our sensitivity in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion and more closely reflect the diversity of our community at large. Having a more inclusive and diverse legal community will improve the quality of our organizations’ workforces and respond to our clients’ requirements for diversity. The DEI Committee meets on the first Wednesday of each month and we welcome all members to join us for discussion on how to further our mission in our firms and in our Chapter.  
 
Contact: Denise Verdesoto (Chair), [email protected]; Angela Tyson (Co-Chair), [email protected]
Salary Survey
The Salary Survey Committee is responsible for maintaining, updating and running the local survey each year. They review the positions listed, the job descriptions, and the benefits questions to ensure that the survey remains relevant to the end users. The members of the committee also promote the survey within the Chapter to stimulate participation. 

Contact: Herb Abercrombie Jr. (Chair), [email protected]; Valerie Williamson (Co-Chair), [email protected]



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Member Experience
The Member Experience Committee will establish a welcoming environment for new members to be integrated into the Chapter through a formal Ambassador Program. Ambassadors will provide support and guidance to new members through their first 12 months of membership, ensuring new members realize benefits of membership and become ambassadors of the Chapter. If you would like more information and/or are interested in becoming an Ambassador, please contact the Chair or Co-Chair.

Contact: LaVerne Anenia (Chair), [email protected]; Kim Santaiti-Potter (Co-Chair), [email protected]


Educational Communities

Small Firm and Branch Office Administrators
The Small Firm and Branch Office Administrators Community focuses on a broad range of topics of interest to local administrators who must coordinate with other offices of their firms, as well as to provide administrators of law firms with 35 or fewer attorneys educational opportunities through vendor presentations, idea sharing and open forums specifically designed for those who work in smaller firms.. The Community's monthly luncheon meetings, held on the fourth Tuesday of each month at 12:30 pm, provide a venue for members to discuss issues of common interest, share ideas, and network. Members are encouraged to raise topics and to recommend speakers. 

Contact: Starr Pratt (Chair), [email protected]; Lodora Barnes (Chair), [email protected]
Listserv: [email protected] and [email protected]
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Legal Operations
The members of the Legal Operations Community represent a cross section of legal expertise from functional administrators to branch office managers. The Community meets on the second Thursday of each month at noon. We welcome all members to join the section, especially if you are an administrator in a small law office and you have to wear multiple hats. We can provide you with many best practices to run your operation smoothly.

Contact:  Janelle E. Rynes (Chair), [email protected]; Giovanni DiLuca (Co-Chair), [email protected];
Listserv: [email protected]
Human Resources
The Human Resources Community operates as a venue for educational information on global human resources issues.  While the Community is mostly comprised of HR professionals, any member is invited to participate in the meetings which typically take place on the second or third Wednesday of each month.  The meetings feature industry speakers or roundtable discussions on topics such as recruiting, benefits, strategic planning, performance management, career pathing, retention and other matters of interest.

Contact: Brenda Simoes (Chair), [email protected];  Julie Hooper (Co-Chair), [email protected]
Listserv: [email protected]

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Next Generation Leaders
The mission of the Next Generation Leaders Community is to support our next generation of leaders and close the gap faced by our association and the legal industry as a whole by providing a community for Millennial legal managers and new managers in the legal field with a focus on mentoring, education, and networking. To accomplish this goal, the section hosts monthly meetings, pop-up events, and educational sessions, and provides 2-way mentoring opportunities. 
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Contact: Ana Sobalvarro (Chair), [email protected];  Catalina Mejia (Co-Chair), [email protected]
Listserv: [email protected]