Securing a successful futurex
Dave Koschik talks about the Future Proof point of our 2025 Strategy.
Having Future Proof as a compass point of our strategy is essential – we need to ensure that White & Case is well placed for future success, so we can continue to thrive and grow for generations to come.
This is something our clients also care about, because they depend on our stability, strength and sustainability and need to know they can rely on us.
The Future Proof point of our 2025 Strategy compass can be broken down into five areas:
- Our business processes and infrastructure
- Making sure we have the right people in the right places
- Building a culture of trust
- Ensuring the financial stability of the Firm
- Preparing for all types of risk
I’ll touch on some of these priorities in this article.
Right people, right places
When it comes to future proofing the Firm, we need to anticipate where resources will be needed, and make sure we’ve got the right people in the right places. This means adding resources both in terms of skillset and numbers.
For us, investing in the right places has specific relevance to growing in the United States. We believe we must be larger and stronger in the United States to take full advantage of the opportunities in the global market. It plays to our strength as a global firm.
That’s why our goal for 2025 is to have 50% of our lawyers in the United States, building on the progress of our 2020 Strategy, when we grew from 650 lawyers to more than 1,000 in the U.S.
Since then, we’ve added 45 lateral partners and 49 internal partners in the United States, and our goal is to have 1,500 lawyers by the end of 2025.
Growth in the United States won’t mean that we stop investing in the wider Firm, of course, but we remain convinced that we need to be larger and stronger in the world’s biggest legal market.
Another way that we’ll Future Proof the Firm is by having the right people. Having the right people in the right places is about understanding market opportunities and allocating resources strategically. It involves anticipating client needs in all our markets and developing our people accordingly. This may require redefining the skills expected of our lawyers and the business services support they need. Emphasizing internal development allows us to prioritize talent cultivation over lateral hiring.
We live in a very dynamic, competitive market, where the strong are getting stronger. Standing still is not an option.
Financial strength and managing risk
Of course, another important part of becoming Future Proof is continued and sustainable financial strength. To maintain that requires careful management of risk.
All organizations face risk, and ours is no different. But the types and impact of the risks faced by large global law firms like ours have increased significantly over the past few decades, and we have to diligently identify and manage those risks.
In the summer of 2021, we conducted an enterprise risk assessment of the Firm, which ultimately supported our decision to establish a risk management function to help embed, sustain and support a culture of responsible risk-taking in pursuit of opportunity and growth.
We put a number of new risk controls in place, including systematic internal audits. We’ve also taken various steps to be debt free, including by substantially strengthening our partner capital system (first reengineered in 2014 and then supplemented significantly in 2021).
In 2021, we conducted a review of our General Counsel’s office, working closely with general counsels Jennifer Paradise and Gavin McLean to ensure we have a General Counsel function that is state of the art, properly structured and adequately resourced. The review resulted in several changes, some that have already been implemented and others that are in progress.
More recently, we redesigned our new business intake and conflicts system, which we launched in April 2022. This is a critical component of the Firm’s infrastructure, and we will continue to perfect it in the coming months.
Finally, in 2022 we also introduced three new Firm policies:
- A Grievance Policy;
- A Disciplinary Policy;
- And a Drugs and Alcohol Policy
Their purpose is to nurture a culture of trust by supporting and calling out good behavior, and rooting out bad behavior.
Partner Credits
In 2022 we formed a Partner Credits Task Force to review our partner credits system.
Partner credits is a method used by many law firms to measure the financial contributions of individual partners to the firm. Partner credits are often used in determining partner compensation.
The manner in which a firm’s credit system is structured and administered can have a large impact on collaboration, and creation of a culture of trust, among partners.
To this end, we asked the Task Force to review our partner credits system to ensure that it is fit for purpose, fairly recognizes partner contributions and creates the right incentives to advance the Firm.
The Partner Credits Task Force completed its review in early 2023 and delivered its recommendations to the Executive Committee. This work will now be continued by the new Executive Committee.
In conclusion
Future proofing the Firm is essential to make sure we’re in the best possible position to navigate the continuing uncertainty the world is experiencing.
To succeed, we need to take control of what we can control and make sure the Firm has the resources and resilience it needs to thrive, come what may.
