What is a Tiger Team?
A Tiger Team is a group of people, each an expert in their field, who come together to solve difficult problems and identify others before they happen. The concept was made famous by NASA when their teams worked as one to bring Apollo 13 safely back to earth after a module malfunctioned during the mission.
Why Briefing Tiger Teams?
We already use the Tiger Team concept across Pinnacle. You can see it in how we structure our expert teams and throughout our internal thinking and operations.
Now we’ve joined with Briefing to bring together other legal Tigers and address the biggest challenges law firms face.
Through a range of webinars, roundtables and articles, the brightest minds in law will work in partnership to solve critical legal business problems. We’ll be looking at what is most pressing now, and the challenges that lie ahead.
You can register for future sessions and find all the session recordings, upcoming topics, resources, news and analysis here. You can also keep up to date with the latest from Briefing Tiger Teams on LinkedIn
Past Sessions
Marketing and BD success in a virtual world - January 2021
Briefing magazine’s virtual 5P conference prompted the latest Tiger Team gathering, with the focus on business development performance aligning with one of 5P’s core themes.
As ever with the Tigers it was a hugely insightful discussion into the world of BD from cultural, technical and operational perspectives; the short-term and longer-term pandemic impacts (an effective if extreme way of getting law firms closer to their clients, it transpires]; and the levers available to unlock more progress.
There’s no doubt that driving BD performance is higher up the practice agenda than perhaps ever before – but the ‘will to do better’ clearly needs a success strategy to match. With a number of marketing and experience projects currently in flight, the Pinnacle tigers have the knowhow and the learning to give those strategies some real bite.
Risk in remoteness? - September 2020
How has the operation of law firm risk management changed throughout the crisis – and were there any new or changed priorities around pricing, talent and cybersecurity? In our fourth and final Tiger Team session there was plentiful discussion around the changing dynamics – and associated risks – of operating in a remote environment, for example the challenges around effective supervision, or operating securely and confidentially in a domestic ‘office’ space. And there was confidence too that process and systems – both existing arrangements and future plans such as electronic signatures and powers of attorney – will help underpin compliance and client working.
Other topics touched on included
- Making a success of remote team-working and dynamics, including managing productivity in the longer-term
- Maintaining the client experience and quality with remote supervision
- Responding to the downturn, and matter pricing for profitability
- Returning to the office in the pandemic
- Data protection and the evolving information security threat.
Back to the future? - August 2020
Unable to meet and greet in person, how can law firm marketing and BD professionals find ways to connect with existing and potential clients? How can they identify and create opportunities, and turn this into all-important profitable revenue in the deepest recession since records began?
Watch the Tigers discuss
- Does business development need to return to well-worn principles of the past, or should this be seen as an opportunity to try new things and for tech-enabled delivery to sell itself much more significantly?
- What tools and techniques could marketing take from how value messaging is effectively concocted in other organisations and sectors?
- Do firms really have the fundamental skillsets they need to sell their services remotely, and how could they set about strengthening them?
Thinking differently for a new normal - July 2020
To what extent has the pandemic put pressure on traditional people management and touch-points? Watch the Tigers discuss the top 3 management challenges at top-tier law firms:
- Managing people working remotely
- Improving the client experience
- Developing people remotely
Listen to how these global law firms are successfully navigating these challenges, despite a more dispersed workforce. And how working remotely affects KPIs – and what/why is measured. The Tigers also look at the future of change and how the pandemic has provided firms a ‘burning platform’ – and what that means going forward.
Financial Agility - June 2020
Flattening the impact on top tier legal firms of the pandemic and the ensuing economic slowdown. How can the big law firms pivot their financial operations fast enough to stay ahead of the tsunami of change that’s coming at them now?
Watch now and hear first-hand how law firms adapted to ‘working from home’ on an unprecedented scale and the immediate impact on planned projects and expenditure; how the spotlight has been thrown rapidly on sub-optimal processes and the need to optimise them; and the growing demands not just for data but BI-driven insights and the ability to get them to the right people at the right time.
Articles and Resources
The latest innovation from Pinnacle’s own Tiger Teams is Actionable Insights for Law Firms. Basically it’s the clever leveraging of Microsoft PowerApps to help firms get more out of their line of business system investments.
For example transforming reporting from a purely passive ‘viewing’ activity to a proactive ‘doing’ one. Want to see how it works? Watch here
In the September issue of Briefing editor-in-chief Richard Brent reviews the last of the Tiger Team sessions,’Risk in remoteness.
He highlights the range of challenges law firms are facing from remote people development and resource management to sustainable leadership and maintaining appetite for change.
When lockdown put an end to on-site training and in-person go-live support, the Pinnacle Tigers moved quickly to plug a large and looming hole for a number of clients at the sharp end of their roll-outs.
Yes, assistance and training moved across to Zoom or Teams with virtual classrooms. But we wanted to go much further. To augment the on-boarding (and refresher) process with a whole range of on-demand resources. So we very quickly built out a digital Client Resource Centre (CRC).
In our Briefing Tiger Team Finance session, Kate Bassett, global head of legal project management & process improvement at Ashurst LLP, talked about process being supported by data; educating users to interpret the data and then act upon it.
Christopher Young, Pinnacle’s Head of Risk & BD Practices, expands on how this resonates with Pinnacle’s methodology in which business processes are supported by the 3Cs – Content, Capabilities and Culture.
In our recent Briefing TigerTeam Financial Agility session, Kate Bassett, global head of legal project management & process improvement at Ashurst LLP, talked about change management and the fact that the global firm adopted the change to need to work from home within a few days.
Here, Pinnacle’s head of business transformation, Tony Pullman, asks what can we learn from this recent covid conflagration and why change depends on the right ‘burning platform’.
Law firm members will be familiar with some of the frustrations around KYC and AML in the new business intake process. Email requests to parties for standard due diligence documents such as proof of identity and address can be inefficient, prone to error and more importantly, pose an inherent security and information governance risk that comes with having personal documentation hanging around in email. So the Pinnacle Tigers have come together and developed a Cloud-based client portal for law firms using Intapp’s Intake toolset geared to smoothing and securing the due diligence-cum-registration process.
Like many firms come lockdown we moved our business rapidly from using Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Whilst the Intapp Time Capture Tool monitored Skype activity there wasn’t a Microsoft Teams connector – so we put together a Tiger Team to build one. With our Teams to Time connector meetings and calls made in Teams generate suggested time entries within the Intapp Time captured time window.
As the world slowly starts to re-open for business, governments are set to evaluate a number of measures to stimulate their economies. A time-limited change in the sales tax regime is already being touted as one option for the UK, following on from the German announcement of a temporary change in the rate and sector classification of indirect tax from July to December 2020 – but any change has big ramifications for law firms, so how best to respond?
In these uncertain times we need to work on finding new ways of dealing with an old reality. The ability to manage cash flow, and to forecast accurately, relies on up to date and reliable information and this can be supported through improved process automation and integration.
In the latest edition of Briefing Pinnacle’s Managing Director, Mike Bailey, explains why ‘cash is king’.
In the latest edition of Briefing, editor Richard Brent, summarises the inaugural Tiger Team exercise which brought together a team of law firm operational experts to look at how firms have tackled the process transformations needed to respond to pressure from the global crisis and the rapid adaptation of a remote working world.