The legal profession, like most other advisory spheres, has significantly transformed thanks to rapid globalisation and digitalisation. This evolution continues to be ubiquitous and disruptive all the same, and increasingly pushes lawyers to realign and recalibrate the virtues of client servicing. As in most parts of the world, India’s legal industry has moved away from being pre-dominantly a “demand-pull” one, to one being overly driven by “supply-push” compulsions.
The standard of knowledge, training, and skills has steadily improved with every new generation of lawyers. With increased access to quality work both in India and abroad, the traditional counsel model of the past is gradually making way for an increasingly client-centric and solution-oriented value proposition.
Most large corporates invest in in-house legal teams for support on standard day-to-day legal and regulatory matters. They typically look out for external counsel only on matters that may be voluminous and require a large engagement team or those warranting specialist skills and experience. A good, nuanced understanding of the industry, business and client dynamics therefore becomes important in differentiating lawyer quality. Visionary firms are encouraging lawyers to invest in niche areas like block chain, digital payments, fintech, artificial intelligence, meta etc. to keep in step with complex, discerning client needs. Client centricity demands a proactive approach, staying abreast with client business, plans, strategy, pre-emptively appreciating potential issues, and recommending solutions to appropriately mitigate or remedy them.
The traditional need for lawyers in the Indian context may have been largely driven around resolution of disputes and litigation, but that framework has clearly evolved over time, straddling a larger advisory role in commercial contracts, operational regulations and transaction support. The growing incidence of infractions in laws concerning anti-trust, intellectual property, white collar crime, data privacy, employment, taxation and trade has further accentuated the push in lawyers to build some serious domain knowledge, skills and experience in a variety of such and other diverse spheres. The development of sector-focused teams at law firms is a manifestation of the sustained pursuit among lawyers to render top- quality value along most aspects of the industry value chain.
Clients today expect lawyers to not just cite the applicable law, but arguably come up with practical yet innovative solutions to a variety of complex problems and challenges. The regulations governing banking, insurance, asset management, telecoms, real estate, infrastructure are much heavier and intense when compared to other sectors and may warrant the expertise of lawyers for comprehensive support across every imaginable facet of applicable laws and regulations. While the importance of super-specialisation in a particular practice can never be undermined, present day business demands lawyers servicing client needs to smartly engage in a manner that enables critical information flow on clients’ varied needs, and inclusively share that knowledge with appropriate colleagues to deliver optimal value.
It is interesting to note that client centricity is not only limited to independent lawyers or law firms, but also apparent among in-house legal teams. In-house counsel are being increasingly moved out of the customary support role (cost-function) to closely morph and work in step with independent business teams (profit-centres), not only to provide remedy on contingent events, but rather pro-actively and pre-emptively render legal and regulatory support on innovative business ideas.
An ideal relationship rests on a ‘win-win’ arrangement, where the client appreciates the lawyer’s grasp and understanding of his/her business, and the lawyer is a trusted advisor who is sensitive to the nuances of the business and sector. This trusted advisor is then able to deliver unfettered value more as a partner with ‘skin-in-the-game’, rather than a vendor. Clients can often easily sense a transactional approach among lawyers and may prefer to gauge the willingness to invest in a solid relationship, before trusting them with quality work.
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