Practices will have to embrace remote technologies to give future workers the lives they want, reports Rupert White




Law firms will have to embrace flexible working regimes and be 'softer' towards employees in the future world of work, if research for mobile giant Orange is anything to go by.



Last week the Gazette attended a presentation of market research by Henley Central HeadlightVision (HCHV) as part of Orange's rather grandly titled Future Enterprise Coalition Forum. Though the research is not brand new, it laid out a convincing set of possible futures of how people might work in 2016. Law firms, with their base in information products, may wish to heed them.



According to HCHV's research, which is free to download, the world of work in 2016 will probably be a combination of restrictive and enlightened company practices, enlightened but possibly very insecure employees, ad hoc pseudo-unionisation through online social networks, and possibly very different power relationships between employers and employees.



Allegedly a lot of this will be enabled using next-generation mobile technologies - this is Orange's forum after all, albeit one involving luminaries from government, think-tanks and the world of business. But it is not all IT. Working practices are led by the ability to work from outside the office, and the technology should enable those currently denied a full career path, such as mothers.



Andrew Curry, director of HCHV, told the Gazette that law firms will find themselves pulled into more enlightened attitudes to flexible working and work/life balance for staff as reforms bite and firms seek better ways to attract top-flight lawyers.



'What we've seen in other sectors is, typically, competition for new young talent driven by offering them more flexible arrangements,' said Mr Curry. 'So companies that have retention problems might take a different view of what sort of value they're offering. But if that works, they'll start seeing more productive results and other people are going to say: "My god, we're losing our best clients."'



David Williams, head of employment at City law firm Kemp Little, which hosted the event, said changes were happening right now in response to a sea-change in younger lawyers' attitudes to work.



'We've got a long way to go as an industry,' he said. 'At the moment we're not really dealing with it seriously. The main challenges we face are retention, and to retain staff we're going to have to look at the work/life balance. And to do that we're going to have to look at flexibility in the workplace.'



This flexibility would manifest itself both as flexible conditions and being able to do a lot of legal work remotely using technology, something Mr Curry said the legal world was perfect for as a knowledge industry.



And it would seem Mr Curry's timescale of 2016 would be about right for action, at least in the sluggish world of law, said Mr Williams. He reckons it will five to ten years before law firms look like this.



'Law firms are incredibly slow, but I think it will happen,' he said. 'I think there is a change at the moment - people want to work fewer hours but they want to do interesting work, and they're trying to find places they can do that. But it's a very hard balancing act for law firms.'



LINK: www.orangecoalition.com