Surviving the Black Swan

Disaster Management for a large-scale national law firm:

Companies do not always get it right.  That can be said for millions of global businesses when faced with the ultimate Black Swan event, like Covid-19.

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With the ensuing lockdowns, this target company made tough decisions to reduce their workforce headcount by 70%, in order to protect its going concern.  When the economic impact was intervened by Government aid, this company found itself in a 'storming' cycle with more business than they could reasonably service. This presented a huge insurance risk, that threatened to garner professional indemnity claims which would have led to an inevitable collapse of hte firm. 

We were placed within this natioanlly acclaimed multi-office law firm to work with senior management to not only install a new (and urgent) hiring process, but to pivot with the fast-paced changes to a 'new normal' of work-from-home.

Sitting within the company as senior management, we also hired the new workforce on a different basis than had previously been seen within the institution, ensuring a top-down delegation of seniority, which differed greatly from the firm's previous operations.

In order to steady the ship, it was not just workflow plans but also drawing up clear and concise messaging for the remaining workforce who were understandably trepidatious about the future and survival of the company.

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Through an 18-month period, we assisted in restoring a functional team of expert lawyers, together with new management systems with a focus on efficiency and effectiveness and a complete redesign of compensation packages for that workforce to cultivate a culture of productivity, employee buy-in, and future safeguarding.

Data metrics was key in this assignment, as we looked at tracking staff's productivity, as well as matching this data with key target metrics to work as incentivization.