Bonding exercises such as taking part in charity events help to weld the different departments of a law firm together. Good relations between staff will inevitably generate more business, says Stephen Ward


Leamington Spa’s fire-fighters were bemused as lawyers and staff from the law firm offices next door began line dancing in their car-park one lunchtime. For once, this was not a marketing or fund-raising event, but one of Wright Hassall’s regular ‘development awareness’ meetings, which have included in recent times a lecture on the healing effect of aloe vera, a talk on the state of the pensions industry, and a demonstration of chair massage.



But like the works outing to a brewery, and the visit to the ten-pin bowling alley, it had a purpose beyond rest and recreation for the hard-working 80 lawyers and 110 support staff. ‘Yes, it is very good for morale,’ Richard New, chairman of the firm’s social committee, says. ‘But when your offices are spread across four floors and five buildings in a Regency terrace, integration is not automatic between departments.’ The outings and talks bring them together.



On a bigger scale, global giant Clifford Chance with a headcount of 8,000 around the world – and 2,700 in London – has a clearly thought-out management strategy for embracing the ‘We are What We Do’ charity drive (see [2004] Gazette, 7 October, 10). Based on the book Change the World for a Fiver, schools and other organisations around the world try to think of ways to improve the world, and the firm is working on producing its own book on ways of doing this by Christmas.



As Tony King, head of human resources development at Clifford Chance, says: ‘It is important for any organisation to be an effective community. We’re trying to make sure a series of actions big or small encourage people to work better and make this an ever more enjoyable place to work. It could mean bringing in home-baked produce. I have an allotment – it could mean bringing in vegetables I have grown and giving them to people. That’s something that in many offices doesn’t happen any more, like having cakes on somebody’s birthday.’



It may be easy to dismiss as window dressing, but Clifford Chance would not be spending thousands of pounds on free copies of the book for all its people, and hours of their collective time, if it did not see a positive business payback. The firm has even worked out where the programme fits into its core values – ‘Community’ is just one of these. The other three are ‘ambition’, ‘quality’ and ‘commitment’.



Several law firms make the point that people who work together all the time will be a team; the harder task is to bond together the people who meet less often.



Wright Hassall has a social committee of 12 representing all sections of the firm, which meets monthly – in work time – to discuss ideas that will be effective in team building as well as being popular.



Bernard George, head of training at City-based law firm Dechert, says corporate bonding outside the immediate teams within practice areas is particularly important for law firms. In areas like corporate, intellectual property, employment work, all the different solicitors have to come together on deals for a client. ‘You want them to work together well,’ he says.



Mr George continues: ‘If the corporate department is asking the tax department for an opinion, and they’ve never met and don’t know what the other person is like, they’re never going to communicate quite so well, never pick up the phone quite so readily. You’re actually not going to cross sell, to refer clients on to somebody you’ve never got to know. You’re not going to take that risk.



‘If you actually know somebody you’re going to say to the client: "I’ve got a really good colleague in tax who could help you with that, can I transfer the call [to that person]." It all happens much more naturally.’



Different firms have different structural obstacles to being an integrated community. Dechert sends its trainees from London each year to Philadelphia for a week to meet their US counterparts. The exercise also bonds the cohort of London trainees to one another, so that last year they used to meet unofficially for tea every afternoon.



Mike Gore, practice manager at Cheshire firm Forster Dean, says he and the principal of the firm, Peter Forster Dean, visit the practice’s 12 offices regularly. He says the positive effect is noticeable after one of their team-building trips. ‘They make people more motivated, and they show more interest in the business coming in,’ he says. Mr Gore maintains that the vast majority of the 87 staff is loyal and cares for the firm. Even on a much smaller scale than Clifford Chance, or Dechert, with so many sites within the firm, it also helps people put a name to a face, and they can work together across offices better in the intervening months. ‘It makes working lives a lot easier,’ he says.



The big event is an annual walk, which was supported this year by 72 of the staff. One year it was from Runcorn to Liverpool, another to the top of Snowdon and back. ‘They raise money for charity but they are a team-building exercise,’ says Mr Gore. In a sign of the value the firm places on the exercise, those who gain sponsorship are rewarded with two days’ holiday in lieu for the Saturday walk.



Social events are only one way to bond different parts of a firm, particularly a large one. The key is to keep bonding in mind at all times.



Mr King says: ‘We run various cross-border legal technical training programmes which bring together a group of lawyers from a particular type of transaction, such as real estate, finance, corporate or tax; or business skills training programmes focusing on a competency, bringing together French and German lawyers or whatever it is. These are partly to raise awareness of thinking in different jurisdictions, but the purpose is also to bring the different lawyers together.’



The firm also holds meetings not only of all partners worldwide, but on another date all the senior professional managers meet. At these meetings there is a business agenda, to discuss and decide strategy and policy, but there is also a clear secondary agenda of team building.



Similarly, pro bono ventures are supported as ends in themselves, but also with an eye on their team-building value, cutting across all levels of the firm laterally and vertically as they do.



Dechert, with offices on both sides of the Atlantic, has a similar eye on the team-building value of activities that ostensibly have another purpose. ‘You sometimes wonder if you can justify the sheer amount of air travel flying to a retreat here or meetings here and there,’ Mr George says. ‘But if people don’t actually know that partner in Philadelphia, they’re not going to work with him well. It’s not enough to exchange e-mails.’



He continues: ‘The meetings are usually for a purpose, but the purpose is often an invented one. The partners’ retreat is really an invented purpose.’



Where law firms remain to be convinced is in relation to the value of formal outside consultants who offer corporate-bonding events – for example, building rafts together or surviving on limpets on outward-bound courses, or even corporate wine-tasting contests to help them meld across departments.



Mr King says: ‘They can be very effective, but it’s not something we’ve decided to do. I’ve heard good – and less good – things about them.’ Mr Gore says his firm too receives literature offering the courses, but so far the firm has not accepted an offer. ‘If we were left on a deserted moor to find our way home, we’d probably lose a few people,’ he says, with a concern appropriate to a firm of personal injury experts.



Stephen Ward is a freelance journalist