Most law firms stress the importance of building specialized legal teams with technical expertise in niche practice areas. The reason for this is that clients are confronting increasingly sophisticated technical, regulatory, environmental, and economic demands as they expand their companies globally. Today’s companies require legal professionals with focused expertise in areas such as cybersecurity, intellectual property, environmental law, and labor law. Building a reputation for specialized proficiency in niche legal areas has been a key strategy of legal professionals for quite a while now.
When legal professionals are expected to be the foremost experts in their precise legal niche, law firms often find that the issues their clients face require cross-disciplinary and collaborative legal solutions.
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Overview
Cross-disciplinary collaboration occurs in the legal profession when lawyers combine their individual skill sets to meet a client’s unique legal needs. Collaboration allows each lawyer to add their specialized skills to the legal team’s collective expertise. This allows the team to tackle complex legal issues as a group that they would not be able to solve alone. Cross-disciplinary collaboration in legal teams is typically a repeated or ongoing interaction because of the high-quality outcomes it provides for the firm’s clients.
The Benefits of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Cross-disciplinary collaboration has exciting impacts on law firm revenue. Legal firms that engage multiple practices in the service of a client see greater annual revenues from that relationship than if only one legal discipline was involved. In fact, in most cases, for every two legal practices involved in a client’s service, the revenue from that client triples. Cross-jurisdictional work, where international firms have offices in multiple countries providing service to a single client, also generates significantly higher revenue than single-practice legal engagements.
In addition to the immediate boost in revenue, providing cross-disciplinary legal services to clients results in better legal outcomes, elevates the law firm’s reputation, encourages repeat business, and draws in new clients. Clients who receive services from multiple legal specialists within a firm are also more likely to assign their loyalty to the firm than to an individual attorney.
Another benefit of cross-disciplinary collaboration is that it is less likely to be impacted by price-based competition. Clients are aware that cross-specialty work is complex and challenging to do, but they tend to perceive single-specialty expertise (such as knowledge of a fundamental tax issue) as commodity work that can be granted to the lowest bidder.
Barriers to Cross-Disciplinary Legal Collaboration
Gaining your client’s commitment to performing collaborative work is one of the first challenges you must overcome if you want to reap the benefits of cross-discipline collaboration. No legal client is ready to pay for ineffective advisors that pass the buck amongst one another. Expert legal teams are expected to exercise sufficient project management discipline to maintain quality control and prevent invoicing for extraneous labor and subpar work. It’s up to firms to lessen the barriers to collaboration and secure higher-value work by putting less emphasis on input metrics like billable hours and more emphasis on output metrics like the breadth of service available to their clients.
Lawyers who work together across organizational and disciplinary barriers are better equipped to create solutions for the cross-practice and multijurisdictional issues that Caribbean companies face today.