Applying marginal gains to business
After reading about the concept of marginal gains and considering it in my personal life for exercise, nutrition and wellbeing, I began to wonder what would happen if we also applied this in our working lives.
Speaking to leaders across the sector, improving business performance is always near the top of their wish list. Growth is also up there, but what if growth in profitability and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) could come from improved performance within what you already have, without the need to look for acquisitions, mergers or the next recruit?
Having worked in law firm leadership for many years, I have come to think that it is never just one big idea that has the biggest impact. You can move to a new office, get a new case management system, launch a marketing campaign, and they will have an impact on the business – but they usually come at great expense. What if we moved the dial on all of the day-to-day activities by a small amount at less expense? What kind of impact could that have?
A great place to start is with the visibility of your data. We have huge amounts of data within our businesses, but the key is to pull it together in a way that enables you to have more meaningful conversations and make informed business decisions. It also gives you the baseline to understand where you’re currently at and to measure the impact of the changes that you make.
What if you could increase utilisation by a small amount? What if write-offs were reduced by just 5%? What if every department improved lock-up by five days? What kind of an impact would that have on business performance? Sometimes it is easy to focus on the bills delivered and cash received, when actually, if we tweak the numbers behind those figures, that is where the marginal gains happen and overall business performance improves.
Reducing lock-up by five days might not sound like much, but across the whole business it can improve cashflow dramatically. Marginal gains do not just apply to finance; you can also apply them to client services, developing employees and leadership. A better one-to-one system, improving accountability, being clearer on expectations over time – all create marginal gains and, in turn, better business performance.
When we consider improving business performance and profitability, we always think about getting more from our lawyers through performance management and improving and streamlining processes. It is important to also look at this from different angles. How much could your business performance improve if you reviewed all of your commercial contracts, looked for better deals, and removed or replaced things that no longer work or add any value to your business?
Once you have visibility and set out strategies to create those marginal gains, then repetition is a must. Keep revisiting the numbers, keep reviewing them, and they will become habit.
Business performance rarely changes overnight; it improves because you consistently apply small changes and maintain them over a period of time.
Lydia Pycroft
Managing director, Ringrose Law, Boston, Linc
Juniors and AI can reshape the profession
Garfield AI’s successful small-claims trial is a landmark (Gazette, 23 June). But not because it signals the replacement of lawyers. The case demonstrated an AI-driven firm handling pre-trial work – drafting, document assembly, procedural matters – before instructing a junior barrister for advocacy. That pre-trial work is precisely what apprentices, paralegals, trainees and associates spend much of their time on inside conventional firms, and while Garfield is a narrow case, the capability it demonstrates is general. It points to a more consequential question for law firms: will they regard junior lawyers as roles to be automated away, or as people best placed to help redesign how legal work gets done?
Being digitally native does not confer the legal judgement or practical experience which clients rely on. But it can bring a different baseline: greater comfort interrogating unfamiliar technology; fewer inherited assumptions about which tasks must be done in which order; and less tolerance for manual handovers, fragmented information and opaque processes. These are exactly the qualities needed to lead the kind of redesign Garfield points toward, not just to survive it.
That capability must be deliberately developed, not simply hoped for. At Ulster University, StructureFlow is working with the Centre for Legal Technology to help students model complex relationships, break down legislation, test arguments and see how a change in one part of a legal or regulatory structure affects the wider picture. The point is not tool proficiency for its own sake. It is to develop lawyers who can understand, challenge and improve the structures in which legal work happens.
Firms that view junior lawyers solely through the prism of utilisation and unit cost risk overlooking an important source of transformation. New recruits should be given structured opportunities to identify pain points, test better ways of working under supervision and question processes that have become normal simply because they are familiar.
The objective is not to hand transformation to lawyers at an early stage in their careers. It is to make them an active innovation layer, working alongside domain experts and operational leaders who bring judgement, governance and client context.
Technology alone will not modernise law firms. The firms that pull ahead will be those that give the next generation the capability, permission and platform to help reshape the profession from within.
Tim Follett
CEO and founder, StructureFlow, London W1
Trump irony
There is one irony to note regarding the suspension, seemingly following the intervention of Donald Trump, of the penalty consequent upon the red card issued to Folarin Balogun (Sports governance, Gazette, 17 July).
Balogun is only qualified to play for the US team by virtue of birthright citizenship – his heavily pregnant mother having given birth in America because she was unable to return to London. Birthright citizenship is, of course, a right which president Trump has been seeking to abolish.
Ian Kinloch
Stockport
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