Legally on the Move: Professional Training – James Jorgensen – E03

Transcript

Welcome to Legally on the Move: Professional Training, a brand new mini series from the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio. I’m Rob Hanna. And in this exciting new series, we’re coming to you live from BMA House in London, where senior leaders from across the legal profession are gathering to explore a critical question. What really makes high performing teams in law? From leadership and communication to resilience, trust and psychological safety,

We’ll be speaking to experts and industry voices about what it takes to build teams that perform at their best in today’s legal world. So let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast, your name, title and organisation. I’m James Jorgensen. I’m the head of professional liability and I work at HDI Global. You absolutely do. And you did a tremendous job of opening today. Actually, we are recording live here for the professional training conference, thoroughly enjoying it. Great energy, as I’m sure you’ll agree. But we must talk about high performance. It’s often measured in revenue and utilisation. But in your own view, what is the most misunderstood driver?

of performance in teams? It’s an amazing question and because we don’t work for law firms but we work with many law firms, I think the challenge that we have as underwriters of law firms is trying to understand how law firms do all the same things but differently. So the drivers that you get for success, which were always going to be revenues, growth and net profit, etc.

They’re all important factors for finding out what a success of an organisation looks like, but they’re never quite what we want to see as just this is how we’re doing. figures get massaged, not in a negative way, we’ll show a different view of what’s actually going on behind the organisation. That’s why we’re so keen on making sure that good lawyers are coming into the business and good clients are coming into the business and how we draw that link between the two.

And I loved in your opening talk as well, the, graphic you had on there as well, are out sort of good clients, bad clients, the image. ⁓ it just landed so, so well for me that if people can make those decisions, cause there’s choices, aren’t there? Lawyers and law firms make, you know, there, there is an element of risk before they even come to you from those choices that you were describing and currently it’s nicely to the hybrid world that we’re now living in. ⁓ what leadership behaviors most strengthen collaboration and what

quietly weakens it in your opinion? Well, I mean, I think this is the whole session for today, actually, and then one of the reasons why the session’s been so strong. I think law firms are struggling as they’ve changed over the 20 years I’ve been ensuring them. They’re trying to find what that identity is and who they are within a changing world, within a changing workplace, with a changing demographic. ⁓ I always put this sort of back a little bit to my parents.

Lawyers are fundamental entrepreneurs. My parents were entrepreneurs, my parents were photographers. And the thing that set them apart was their technical expertise, of course, as photographers, but then they were dealing with stuff in the form of film rather than digital photography. Whereas technically strong lawyers, and there’s AI going to come and take over some of those challenges. the world is changing.

And what does performance look like? I don’t know. I think that’s probably what we’re trying to assess when we’re looking at firms that we want to take on to ensure. But I would say, in strongly, you’ve got good lawyers, good clients, and a culture which sets the tone at the top, which drags people up from a suboptimal performance and maybe a zero tolerance approach to a bad client.

Yes. And again, to that graphic that you shared earlier, it’s just visualising and imprinted in my mind. Even me coming from more of a legal recruiting services for law firms, I think it’s relevant for all businesses. And talking of culture, I want to go to talk about now psychological safety, which is very important in today’s world. What does it genuinely look like inside high pressure legal environments and what you’ve seen? I think psychological safety is going to be the differentiator for law firms as we go through a very challenging period, whether it be

I’m going take it back a step. There’s the great phrase by Donald Rumsfeld of known knowns and unknown unknowns and the unknown knowns. And we talk to our clients a lot about that at the moment. The known knowns are sort of what we expect from everybody to be doing, conflicts of interest, every, ⁓ we’re billing on time, getting paid on time in those kinds of ways. The unknown unknowns, there’s just so many more people are dealing with so many more sophisticated and complex problems.

that you need to set the tone from the top to help people with the psychological safety with the unknown unknown. And sometimes it’s an unknown unknown. I realise what I’m doing here. But I think that is a real challenge. one of the points I made in the keynote was ⁓ we bring ourselves from work to home, but we bring our home to work as well. Yes.

And psychological safety doesn’t just end at the workplace or end at home, they are both intermingle. And those challenges and how we get our arms around people to make sure that they feel safe, and psychologically safe, is really one of the key challenges. And I think the way we do that, and I’m not sure necessarily people are going to find it popular, is data. I think there are behavioral trends, things ⁓ that happen, which will identify behaviors where somebody needs to have a quiet arm put around them.

not a telling off. Yeah, because we are human, you know, we’re not robots. We will have different days and different feelings and things come down there. Yeah. And data absolutely is a great way of tracking things. You can make better decisions, but I think when you have these psychologically safe environments and creativity goes up, know, amazing things happen because people feel they can be themselves. They feel seen, they feel heard, they feel valued, and actually they can express themselves more. And that is your, your asset, particularly as law firm, your asset is the people. Yes. I think if you can get them safe, that’s a win all around.

And sticking with culture, then let’s talk about the difference between a culture of accountability and a culture of fear, which again, you were touching on a little bit in your talk. Yeah. Nobody wants a culture of fear. Yeah. I think the problem is, and this is where insurance is so, ⁓ so you sort of, you always live in fear of a potential claim coming in. But that for us is relatively standard. But I think one of the things that we see within law firms and within lawyers is if I make a mistake, what does this mean? Yeah. And how do we make.

mistakes safely and how do we provide that support and network? ⁓ And I think networking is fundamental to this. How do we get sort of get around people who are under a huge amount of pressure to bill, to work, potentially to skip training, to keep things ticking over and to make sure that work is satisfied and home is satisfied at the same time. And I love that Simon Sinek quote that I sort of put in the thing, which is

and do the behaviors. If you put a good person into a bad environment, they’ll act in a bad way. Accountability is hugely important. Feedback is important. A great book on this is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and I always focus on the first two dysfunctions, which is ⁓ a lack of trust and a fear of conflict. We need to be able to have the conflict. We need to be able to have the accountability, and we need to be able to trust each other.

that we can have that. And I think that’s where Emma came out so positively. Yeah, and Emma ⁓ Wiggs, MBE, an incredible keynote, as to be said. I think the content overall has been hugely rich, hugely positive, great energy across the room. Another important factor, of course, is collaboration and cross-functional collaboration between lawyers and business services can be quite complex at times. So what have you seen work when aligning different incentives and priorities? I know that collaboration within a large

corporate organisation like HDI, it’s fundamental to what we’re trying to do and fundamental to making sure that we get improved outcomes in what is becoming an increasingly more global environment. This is why we’re struggling with geopolitics. is why we’re trying. So collaboration is important to get a different diverse perspective of what’s going on somewhere else. And then being able to make better decisions based on somebody else’s opinion on stuff. And I always like that sort of the

recognition of the biases that we all have and how do we deal with that? So those are the things. no, I’m big fan of collaboration. We is always greater than me. And a key theme of today is resilience. Yes. It’s been talked about a lot. At what point does resilience become unhealthy endurance and how should leaders recognise that line? I think resilience is hugely important. I think of resilience within what we’re trying to do at HDI as being credible in what we’re trying to do and sustainable as well.

So credible means that we need to be market relevant and understanding of what is going on in the market. This is why an event such as professional training is so important to us. Sustainable means that we’re charging the right premiums to be able to pay for claims, not knowing what the next 10 years is going to look like over that period. Yes. And I think then if you have that as a partner, and we call it a partner in transformation at HDI, that’s really important. And I think that really aligns well with law firms who have a partnership matrix.

Yeah. And the transformation bit, I’ve sort of, I always wonder if that makes the, the necessary, it sort of, it can be bit of a tagline, but actually I think it’s a really important one for professional service firms. Partnership is what we’re trying to achieve transformation into what does the future look like and how do we not help you navigate through it and how do we do that partnership over that period? love that. I love how you frame it. get a member of mental said to me very early on to my career, you know, it’s grow as you go.

Yeah. think, you know, partnerships do, don’t they? If you get it right, as you continue growing and going, the great things foster and nurture over time. You were touching on it there, but why did you choose to attend and indeed speak today? And what’s been a standout moment for you thus far of the conference? Well, we just on the morning, I think Emma Wiggs is amazing keynote. I’m sure I’ve learned more for myself than I have for my clients. And I think you’ll be applying both.

We were very lucky to be the headline sponsor in year one. Oh, okay. And the key appeal to it is, I’ll give you a brief story. I remember getting into a taxi in Chicago and just quickly looking at LinkedIn and seeing Nadine Stanton coming up. And I thought, this is what we need. This is how we need to do it. Because there’s lots of conferences for lawyers dealing with law.

And there’s lots of conferences, but there was nothing that sort of necessarily brought in the training aspect of what we were trying to do. Yeah. And the idea, we were sort running around with an idea Nadine and I, as we got to know each other over LinkedIn, which was how does training help prevent us from paying claims? That was the basic presumption. Yes. And if you’ve got high performing teams and if you’ve got the right training, how does that reduce risk exposure? In theory, how does that keep premiums stable? Yes. And we

never quite worked it out and she said I’m going to do a conference and I said we have to be part of that and I think this is what we the part of being part of the community. Assurance is never the most enjoyable purchases for people but how do you provide risk? do you be that backstop? How do you be that parha?

That’s what we want to be. And that’s why we want to be part of this. I love that story. Thanks for sharing it. And thank you because as a result of that, it’s been a, it’s been a cracking day thus far and looking forward to the rest of it. Before I let you go, if you could implement one practical change in your organisations tomorrow to improve team performance, what would it be and why? it’s something that we’re actually doing now is a huge, and it came out today and I was really, it’s very self-affirming listening to Emma talk where we talked about vision, mission and strategy.

We have a vision of what this could be, what this could be at HDI. And now we’re really working hard at making sure that goals are set and that people are aligned with those goals and believe in those goals. And I don’t believe that leadership has anything to do with about telling people what to do. That’s management. It’s the amount of discretion, the discretionary effort we get from our team to go over and above to make sure that we are credible and sustainable.

that are, the clients that we bring onto our portfolio are worthy of our other clients that we’ve already got on our portfolio is huge and that’s what makes me so proud of what we’re trying to achieve. So it has to be goal setting, it has to be discretionary effort and it has ⁓ to be aligned to that sort of broader vision of how do we partner in this community.

And I love how you so beautifully put that. And it’s a core reason behind us at the show and partnering with Clio who has a clear mission to transform the legal experience for all. We’re trying to inspire legal minds and transform legal futures. And when people can see their direct impact and value to that mission that they believe in, that intrinsic value that they get is something super powerful. It’s been a wonderful conversation. If people would like to know more about HDI and what you’re getting up to, where can they go? Feel free to share any social media handles, any websites, and we’ll also share them as episode for you too.

Yeah, thank you. ⁓ I would just go to Google, I’d search HDI Global ⁓ and we have all of the different offerings. We don’t just do professional services. We’ve got a whole line, especially the classes. There’s hundreds of things that HDI Global do and it’s great organisation to work for. So we’re thrilled with it. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for sponsoring today’s event. It’s been an absolute blast recording you live here from ⁓ BMA House in London. But for now, for all of us on the Leaguer’s Beam podcast, over and out.

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord. Go to our website www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There’s a link to join our community there. Over and out.