Managing Remote and Hybrid Legal Teams
Tactics to Thrive and Lead in the New World of Work
This article has been published in the PLI Chronicle: Insights and Perspectives for the Legal Community.
Introduction
The pandemic irrevocably changed the way attorneys work. Where remote work before was seen as a rare luxury, firms and organizations have embraced the fact that some level of remote or hybrid work will be the norm going forward, and for good reason: only 23% of lawyers surveyed by the American Bar Association reported that they wish to return to the office 4-5 days per week. For most legal teams, hybrid work will be the new norm.
But hybrid work has not come without its challenges and risks. Studies show that during the pandemic, employees worked an extra 26 hours each month—nearly one additional day per week—increasing the risk of burnout. Women, too, were 46% more likely to say that the pandemic has made it more challenging to keep work and home separate, raising concerns about setbacks for diversity, equity, and inclusion in a legal industry already fighting an uphill battle. Returning to the office 2-3 days per week will not magically reverse these trends.
But many firms misunderstand the root cause of these problems. Until the lockdowns began in March 2020, leaders did not realize how much of their culture and team success they owed to serendipitous interactions around the office. These were the “band-aids” that helped teams stay on track. Not sure how to tackle a new assignment? Tap a colleague on the shoulder. Miscommunication with a senior attorney? Clear it up when you see them later in the day. Trying to build career connections? A happy hour is around the corner.
Serendipity, of course, does not translate well to the hybrid or remote context. Some will see this as proof that the in-office experience is superior, but that thinking misses the point. While it is true that remote work brings challenges, it is often not the remote element of work that creates these challenges. In reality, remote work brings out an organization’s lack of organization. Serendipity can help ameliorate the impact of poor team alignment, unclear expectations, miscommunication, and lack of mentorship, but rather than rely on band-aids to cover up these problems, the solution here is to attack the underlying management gaps themselves.
As I teach in my seminars on building high-performance legal teams, the traits of such teams are practically universal: (i) they hold each other accountable;(ii) they engage in productive conflict; (iii) they take deeper ownership over the project or client; and (iv) they have sufficient trust in one other to take on risks without fear of judgment from the team (this final trait being a reflection of what is known as “psychological safety”). These four traits serve as the backbone of my teaching because they are so fundamental to the process of creating, supporting, and diagnosing problems in elite teams.
Why is this goal more difficult with hybrid and remote work? One of the key challenges in such environments is that team members find it too easy to “silo” themselves, clocking in and clocking out with little interaction. With time, these interactions become less and less personal, and with that depersonalization, the “team” disintegrates into a loose collection of individuals. We want to avoid precisely that breakdown.
In what follows, I expound on the three principal approaches for building efficient, thriving hybrid or remote teams. First, leaders must be intentional about every aspect of how they run their teams and build their culture. Second, teams must ensure clear documentation not just of assignments but also of the team’s internal processes and expectations, allowing team members to work more asynchronously. And finally, leaders must regularly evaluate team health and effectiveness (using surveys and structured discussions) to surface problems and solve them faster, before they fester.
Many attorneys think this is the job of the HR or professional development team. That is a costly mistake. As the saying goes: people don’t quit their jobs; they quit their bosses. Every attorney has a role to play in their team’s rejuvenation, or else they will have an unwitting role in its attrition.
I. Being Intentional
In the absence of serendipitous encounters, remote legal teams must be more intentional about how their teams operate. In my work with hybrid and remote legal teams, I have identified four common areas where teams often falter due to a lack of intentionality.
A. Fostering Individual Growth
In the pre-pandemic days when all attorneys saw each other daily at the office, casual conversations were often the setting for discussing one’s career growth. Not only are these informal conversations less likely to occur “organically” over Zoom, but they can be inherently exclusionary; not all new attorneys may understand these informal pathways to mentorship or feel comfortable initiating these conversations, which can exacerbate the barriers for attorneys from underrepresented groups. Even if firms have established touchpoints for career conversations, they are often reserved for senior associates trying to make partner. This is too limited for our goal, which is to support individual growth for all attorneys on a continuous basis. That is the development attorneys crave, and the lack of such growth will drive many to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
Instead, elite managers should be intentional about establishing a cadence of one-on-one meetings dedicated to supporting each team member’s career, usually 2-4 times per year.
Sample questions include:
What skills are you hoping to improve over the next year?
What are 2-3 examples of past work you found satisfying, and why? What about work that you found unsatisfying?
What would you ideally like to achieve over the next few years? What stands in the way?
Managing attorneys can also foster growth and mentorship by helping make key introductions to others at the firm or organization. Some attorneys find the concept of mentorship daunting. But the best mentors remember this simple maxim: a good mentor does not need to have all the answers; a good mentor asks the right questions and guides a mentee to the right resources.
B. Strengthening Social Connections
The social scene at the office may feel like an optional “perk,” but in reality, social connections are critical to high-performance legal teams. Team members with more social connections at the office are more engaged in their jobs, are more productive, stay in their jobs for longer, and require less time off from illness or stress. But as we all experienced during the pandemic, these connections are harder to build when team members spend less time face-to-face.
For teams returning to the office, this burden will become easier. But even hybrid teams will still spend significant time in online meetings, and these encounters should not be devoid of social connection. For starters, even over Zoom, a little small talk goes a long way. During the pandemic, many attorneys cut out the small talk from their virtual interactions and became solely focused on work. This fed a spiral of depersonalization that left team members (and managers) feeling like cogs in a wheel.
Avoid this trap. Even in work calls, get personal. Ask polite questions about their family, their weekend, their pandemic experience, and so on, just as you would around the watercooler. This mentality works in team meetings too; many high-performance teams start their weekly team meetings with a round-robin of “highlights and lowlights,” in which everyone shares one positive and one negative update from their week—usually personal, light-hearted, one-sentence anecdotes. (You may have heard this activity called “roses and thorns.”) Sharing even small, personal tidbits creates a snowball effect as the team gets to know each other better.
For fully remote teams, embrace virtual activities and games, rotating responsibility for who decides and leads the activity. Some virtual activities may initially feel artificial or awkward at first, but they are inevitably more fun than people expect. Ideas for “remote social” activities include joint cooking classes, “show and tell,” a book club (or movie/YouTube club), or a series of round-robin prompts (e.g., “Favorite law movie?” “Last TV show you enjoyed?”). Fully remote teams have to embrace the “remote social” activities as a new necessity. But even hybrid teams might find these activities worthwhile, and they add variety compared with clichéd, alcohol-laden happy hours.
C. Reducing Waste in Meetings
The pandemic also highlighted the pain of spending too much time in virtual meetings. Even as some teams go back to the office, we must not waste this lesson.
The first step is simply to reduce reliance on meetings to solve all our problems. Of course, as attorneys, we will still need meetings to collaborate on complex challenges. But we should also encourage people to collaborate “asynchronously,” i.e., via email or chat when an immediate response is not expected, rather than real-time communication, where possible. To flex this asynchronous muscle, the next time someone suggests a group meeting to decide some important issue, consider asking the requester to offer an initial proposal via email, and only schedule a meeting as a fallback if email fails to get the job done. As attorneys, we will still need meetings, but even eliminating 10-20% of meetings can make a meaningful difference.
Poorly run meetings only make the situation worse. Too often, meetings are scheduled without clear agendas, creating a free-for-all of topics that—while perhaps interesting to the managing attorney—may only affect a subset of the team. Instead, for teams that need to give regular status updates, consider time-boxing these discussions via a weekly or daily “standup.” Standups are short, 10- or 15-minute check-ins to discuss progress and flag issues, usually with a strict time limit per person (e.g., 60 seconds). The key is that the meeting is used to flag issues, not resolve them. If an issue sparks discussion, table that discussion until after the stand-up is over. This model avoids attorneys wasting time as unnecessary spectators to conversations.
Finally, for hybrid meetings, avoid remote participants feeling like second-class citizens. Use a round-robin format (that is, specifically calling on each team member one by one) to solicit viewpoints or questions, ensuring that you have everyone’s full participation. Or consider adopting a “remote-first” mentality by asking if the remote team members have questions before looking to those physically present.
D. Using the Right Tools and Technology
Hybrid and remote legal teams must also be more intentional about the tools they use to optimize collaboration. Leave finicky whiteboards and paper behind and go digital. Try whiteboarding applications, like Miro or MURAL, and project management tools, like Notion, Asana, Monday, or Smartsheet. Rather than emailing internal documents for feedback, share live documents that everyone can review and comment on in real-time with Office 365 or Google Docs. (And yes, client confidentiality can be ethically protected even in digital tools.)
With the combination of all the above recommendations—and by following the edict of eschewing serendipity in favor of intentionality—we can ensure legal teams thrive regardless of what percentage of time they spend in the office.
One final word of caution here. Some organizations with hybrid models will make the mistake of forgoing these recommendations because they believe that 2-3 days in the office together is all that is needed to set their culture on the right path. Not true. First, few organizations can successfully coordinate such that team members are in the office on the same 2-3 days, meaning the majority of meetings will still have a hybrid element, sparking the same communication, productivity, and relationship challenges. (Not to mention that commuting to the office just to get on a Zoom call they could have taken from home can damage morale.) Second, it is simply not realistic to have 2-3 days in the office be “collaborative” days and the rest be “heads down” days; legal work does not align itself to such a schedule. In other words, yes, hybrid teams should take advantage of their in-office time, but they will still need to be more intentional about all aspects of attorney development to be successful in the hybrid environment.
II. Documentation
Why do we make our teams figure everything out the hard way? From a manager’s idiosyncrasies to expectations for weekend availability, legal teams are too often left to “pick things up” over time, yet another inefficiency that gets exacerbated when teams are not in the same physical space.
Instead, we should be providing our legal teams with resources to easily answer these and other operational questions from the start. Ideally, this documentation—which I collectively think of as your “hybrid team handbook”—should cover four components: (a) an onboarding guide; (b) team expectations; (c) team biographies; and (d) a resource “hub” for other project information not found elsewhere. Done right, this handbook will easily become the most prized possession of high-performance teams.
Before explaining these components in more detail, a warning for those who feel daunted by this task: the Roman handbook was not built in a day. Instead of tackling the entire handbook at once, focus on the sections that would be most beneficial to your team and build those first. Then over time, add more content as you discover inefficiencies that could have been avoided with better documentation.
First, the onboarding guide. This section should provide important information about project execution. For example:
Project Context: Objectives for this case/deal and how this fits both into the client’s long-term goals and the firm or practice group strategy
Project Timelines: Key milestones and deadlines, both internally and externally
Team Tools: What software we use, how we store and share files, and other technology or systems the team should know about
Team Communication: Expectations for email response time, weekend availability, PTO planning, how the group prefers to use phone/email/chat, and more
The manager need not put together all this documentation singlehandedly. Create a first draft, even if bare-bones, and then have new team members review and add to this guide when they reach Day 30 with the team, reflecting on what they wish had been included when they started. After a few team members have cycled through, the onboarding guide will become robust.
Second, the “team expectations” section should delve into team values, commitments, and policies. For instance, “What are the traits that make this team special?” “What do we value in our teammates (e.g., proactivity, humility, curiosity)?” For managing attorneys struggling to set consistent standards across the team, this section is your tool for recalibration.
Third, the “team biographies” section should provide more than just names and email addresses. Explain each person’s responsibilities (especially for support personnel like paralegals), and list other relevant contacts, like IT. For more thoughtful teams, include “Working with Me” slides for members to document their working styles. Such slides answer questions like: “What are my typical working hours?” “Do I prefer questions by email, chat, phone, or live—and are pop-ins ok?” “How do I like to receive feedback?” These slides provide a fantastic cheat sheet to get to know team members and managers much faster.
The fourth and final component for a successful team handbook is the resource hub. This is your one-stop-shop for all other material your team would find useful, such as client contacts, links to client logos, a folder of approved templates, and a style guide for client documents.
Collectively, these resources are game changers for fast-moving teams. By starting small and adding content over time, this seemingly herculean task will instead feel like an organic process the team itself owns and, over time, cannot live without.
III. Regular Evaluation
As the saying goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. So too will our efforts for supporting hybrid teams, so we must have processes in place to identify problems early and make course corrections. Otherwise, seemingly small issues will slowly unravel a team, eroding its foundation of accountability, productive conflict, ownership, and trust.
First, consider running regular, short surveys with questions specifically relevant to key areas of concern for your team. For example, the survey could ask if people have meaningful personal connections, if they have sustainable work-life balance, or if they feel that remote and non-remote team members have equal opportunities to succeed. Use the scores from these surveys to help you prioritize what areas require more investigation with your team.
Second, try conducting “retrospectives” after each big milestone such as closing a deal or a major court filing. Too often, teams finish one push and just move on to the next one, forgoing the opportunity to learn from the most recent experience. In a 30-60-minute meeting, a team can reflect on their communication, efficiency, quality, collaboration, and more. Many of the firms I work with have found these “retros” so valuable that they created discussion templates to ensure these conversations are robust.
The goal here is simple: continuous improvement. Our work as managers is never done, so we must establish processes that can help identify blind spots as swiftly as possible.
Conclusion
During the pandemic, many legal teams faced a difficult revelation: that remote work exposed their organization’s lack of organization. But by being more intentional, by providing more thoughtful documentation, and by regularly evaluating and refining our approaches, we can build high-performance legal teams that thrive regardless of where they work.
For some organizations, these challenges may be too daunting, and they will instead choose to focus on the in-office experience as their saving grace. These firms will face difficult challenges with attrition in the coming years as competitors learn how to adapt—and excel—with hybrid and remote work. To those in leadership who feel overwhelmed by this new paradigm, keep in mind that very few law firms have perfected this process—yet. By starting now, and by improving those management approaches a little bit at a time, leaders can ensure their teams stay on the right side of the curve.
