Stretching for Solutions - Why Clarkslegal has established Forbury People Ltd

There are so many excellent professional firms offering well rehearsed and highly specialised services, why would anybody see a need to change the service model that has served clients and providers so evidently well?

There are several compelling reasons to change what is normally offered today by service providers.

Firstly, and most significantly, there are numerous situations in which expectations and needs of organisations are themselves changing at a dramatic rate, compelling them to face new challenges, new circumstances or even crises that threaten their existence. Their need is often for solutions going beyond any conventional service offering, with the added challenge of co-ordinating diverse and quite possibly conflicting professional services. Sophisticated organisations, with no significant cost constraint, will gather the relevant service providers and manage the collective service delivery to achieve the desired objectives. However, even at this sophisticated purchasing level the old adage applies that you don’t know what you don’t know. Even highly regarded service providers tend to be so specialised that they may be unable to identify a service need falling outside their own expertise. Experience is a good teacher, and it is probable that highly experienced professionals encountering a familiar situation will be alive to the type of services that will be needed beyond their own. This is less likely when the situation is unfamiliar, or takes a sudden turn in an unexpected direction. As organisations increasingly do things they have never done before, it would be surprising if the professionals they normally rely upon did not encounter new and virgin territory.

A second reason for change is that more sophisticated purchasing will recognise packaged services along traditional lines for what they are. They are often specialist, but in truth commoditised, services designed for replication as often as possible by trained professionals, whose own abilities have been shaped by years of focused and specific training towards ever more narrow expertise. A professional training is, of its nature, so often a process of education into the application of tried and tested methods to solve yesterday’s problems. A solicitor is, for example, taught academically and in practical training, to perform his or her services in line with precedent and established procedures. Those precedents and procedures themselves reflect what has been right in the past but not necessarily what is right today, let alone what will be right for the future.

The training of a professional will in the future need to stimulate rather than deter innovative thought and society as a whole will benefit from its professional services steadily changing to meet its needs, through having professionals who see those needs, and have the personal capability to address them as part of a holistic solutions-based service provision. This is what the sophisticated purchaser will expect.

Thirdly, it is sadly the case that existing service provision largely favours the interests of the service providers over those of the purchaser of the services. A mark of professionalism is the willingness of the professional to advise his/her client to do something contrary to the economic interests of that professional. It is to be hoped that this occurs regularly, and that the trust of clients is not abused, but there may be failings which occur as much through ignorance as any intent to profit from the course of action recommended. This ignorance may simply be the failure to recognise alternative and better solutions, or it may be ignorance of the client’s needs in a broader context beyond the remit of the adviser, or it may be lack of experience of the likely course of events that the client will encounter if guided down a particular route. It should also be assumed that on many occasions the professional urgency for business will focus only on the course of action most favourable to that professional economically. It is partly to address this potential shortcoming that it has become more normal to find sophisticated purchasers seeking out “trusted advisers” whose own interests will be best served by a long term straightforward relationship with their client that depends on absolute professional integrity and awareness of traps into which the client may fall.

Fourthly, the impact of organisational, technical and sometimes political change is complicating the traditional patterns of procurement. It is still frequently found that services are procured in accordance with past practice rather than anticipated needs. It is challenging for an organisation to have to fully analyse the services it needs to procure at the outset, and it may indeed be difficult to know what it is looking for when its own vision of its needs remains to be developed. Thus, the long term problems for so many organisations of not knowing what they need to do are compounded by purchasing services of experts whose own expertise reinforces the existing patterns of behaviour and decision making. It’s no one’s fault, but nothing gets better, and, indeed, following normal principles, things can be expected to get worse.

The level of skill now taught to leading managers may begin to transform their expectations of what should be possible in changing and growing the organisations they inhabit. This does not mean that they will find their expectations matched by complementary professional expertise, as the training of professionals will not generally reflect the challenges of rapid or controversial business change.

The next steps for professionals of all disciplines supporting business leaders is to align with their ways of thinking, and to begin to stretch the services provision model to encompass wider solutions-based expertise, either from within multi-disciplinary service providers or from consortia/collaborations designed to achieve comparable effectiveness.

The burden of project managing a multi-disciplinary solution cannot in such circumstances be placed exclusively upon the client organisation. They will have a whole range of issues to consider above and beyond the service delivery in which the external professionals are engaged. The skills of project management are not shared widely among traditional firms beyond their proven (in most cases) ability to manage the particular services they have traditionally provided. The management of a range of disciplines working to a specific common goal is still something beyond the expertise of traditional professions and they might understandably fight shy of engaging in activities beyond those for which they have proven competence and, not least, professional indemnity insurance. Nonetheless, if the requirements of innovative service provision are to be met, professionals in overlapping disciplines need to talk to and understand one another. They need to invent the new paradigm of solution services, geared to stretching professions beyond their comfort zones and creating a reservoir of experience and expertise to match the requirement of the most sophisticated users.

Hence, for solutions to be genuine and to be as safe for clients as possible, there will need to be services from a single well managed source or, at least, from multiple sources co-ordinated by a lead provider.

With many projects occurring within short timescales and demanding rapid co-operation between professional service providers, it follows that it is seldom possible to envisage satisfactory outcomes unless there is control from a single source provider, or at the very least, excellent collaboration among different providers who are likely to be known to and accustomed to working with each other.

There is therefore much to be said for the development and successful management of multi-disciplinary collaborations which may, but do not have to, lead to the amalgamation of such services into one multi-disciplinary provider.

It is important that organisations’ concerns about the potential weaknesses of collaborations are met in a straightforward way, and successful implementation of multi-disciplinary strategies will create a raised expectation of the value of such collaborations, making them a method of choice in addressing more complex situations.

It was to carry forward our vision of developing multi-disciplinary strategies and services that in 2007 Clarkslegal launched a new subsidiary company, Forbury People Limited (FPL), to sit alongside another subsidiary, Forbury Environmental Limited, which was already established in the field of environmental technical consultancy. FPL is a holistic HR consultancy model which, allied with Clarkslegal, presents solutions in the hugely overlapping area of Human Resources and Employment Law.

The future shape of professional services is already there to see with such developments stretching traditional professional services, and it is our conviction that FPL and similar service growth points in the next few years will lead to both broader strategic thinking in service providers and heightened expectations among their clients.

MICHAEL SIPPITT 
Director, Forbury People Ltd 
Managing Partner, Clarkslegal LLP