In the first in a series of 2025 Strategy columns from our Executive Committee, Oliver Brettle explains how the New Ways of Working component of our 2025 Strategy is vital to delivering a differentiated client experience.

You will have heard a lot over the past year about our 2025 Strategy and our vision to create a client experience that sets us apart from our competitors. There are several elements to our 2025 Strategy that will help us achieve this: A Distinctive Client Experience; Compelling Offering; Future Proof and New Ways of Working. We believe that in combination, these four strategic imperatives will create a client experience that no other law firm will be able to match.

What do we mean by New Ways of Working? It has become vital that everyone in the Firm is able deliver a differentiated experience for our clients. To anticipate our clients’ needs and apply the most effective solutions, we need everyone at the Firm to have the right skills and knowledge.

Having the right skills and knowledge is not just technical and legal knowledge, but also industry-specific training and skills to be better client advisors, stronger legal project managers, more effective business communicators and colleagues who build and work in teams. This applies to all of us. Clients care about all the people they work with, not just the partners and not just the lawyers. How they feel about the people they work with is a big factor in their choice of firm.

We also need to ensure we provide everyone in the Firm with equitable opportunities to gain experience and grow, enabling our clients to benefit from diverse teams and our people to achieve their true potential. Clients want associates with a set of skills, among them understanding their business, use of technology, and so on. Clients want to work with diverse teams.

One of the early outputs of our New Ways of Working discussions was to agree three core elements of focus – Future of Work, Equitable Development and Tomorrow’s Lawyers (see panel, below).

Indeed, all of us in the Firm have an important role in delivering New Ways of Working and making it a reality. None of these changes will matter without the support, feedback and buy-in of everyone – whether you’re an associate, counsel, trainee or Business Services professional.

Our vision is for our clients to view us as standing apart from our peers and for their experience with White & Case to be different from, and more valued than, the experience at other global law firms. So please play your part and be open to challenging our assumptions. If you see an area for improvement in how we work, please raise it with your global practice leader, regional section head, office executive partner or Business Services leader.

Associate empowerment central to early progress

Some early wins have been achieved thanks to recommendations from our Associate Empowerment Task Force formed late last year.

The taskforce identified associate training, work allocation and associate involvement in leading the Firm as three areas for initial focus.

These will be prioritized in the following three ways: