Clifford Chance pilots new approach to evaluating lawyer performance

Leading international law firm, Clifford Chance has launched a year-long trial across the firm's offices in the Middle East to understand the impact of removing utilisation* from its assessment of lawyer contribution and performance. The pilot programme, which will include all lawyers (except partners) in the firm's Dubai and Abu Dhabi offices is designed to provide robust data and insights that will help Clifford Chance better understand how shifting the actual and perceived emphasis away from utilisation might deliver better outcomes for its clients, lawyers, and for the firm itself. 

While client work and outstanding client service will remain the core focus for the team, a key hypothesis under evaluation is that more explicitly valuing a wider range of activities will create greater incentives for lawyers to spend time on, for example, engaging with the firm's innovation strategy and deployment of the firm's Best Delivery tools and investing in the firm's clients and client relationships. The trial will also strongly encourage professional development and broadening of skills and capabilities and contributions to the firm's knowledge and thought leadership. The trial will also closely monitor the potential impact on time spent progressing the firm's diversity and inclusion, wellbeing and community programmes. To support the change, compensation and bonuses will be based on a balanced understanding of each individual's contribution, in line with the priorities set by the regional leadership team and each lawyer's objectives, with utilisation thresholds formally removed. 

Mo Al-Shukairy, Regional Managing Partner for Clifford Chance in the Middle East commented, "To achieve our vision of becoming the global law firm of choice, we need to be prepared to do things differently and to challenge the status quo. While we have always encouraged our lawyers to spend time on a broad range of value-adding activities, from business development to Best Delivery, the perceived emphasis has remained on utilisation. With this pilot, we are trying to break the dominance of that single metric and allow our teams to think more broadly about where their time is best spent. This may mean investing in time spent developing and applying process improvements to matters, rather than straightforward matter delivery. Our expectation is that this new way of working will bring material benefits to our clients and that our people will also find that it provides new opportunities to explore their own professional development, while advancing the firm's strategy."

Caroline Firstbrook, Clifford Chance Chief Operating Officer, adds, "While utilisation is widely used as a core metric across the industry, it has a number of broadly acknowledged limitations, most notably that it does not directly incentivise efficiency or contributions to non-billable work that may be invaluable to the firm's overall strategy. By running a pilot on this scale, with a large number of data points, associate input and partner and management feedback, we expect to be in a position to draw informed conclusions on the way ahead for the firm. The Middle East partners and leadership team are taking a bold and exciting step here that will provide insights into these questions that have simply not been available to us before now."

To ensure that evaluation of the pilot is based on robust, comparable data, Middle East lawyers will continue to record their time. All lawyers will have desktop dashboards which will show where their time has been spent across a number of categories, and which will include financial information about matters where they are involved. This data will be updated daily. 

*Total billable hours as a percentage of total hours available to be worked

For more information about Clifford Chance see www.cliffordchance.com.

For further information about this release contact Roshan Khan on +971 4 503 2661 or roshan.khan@cliffordchance.com 

• Clifford Chance is one of the world's pre-eminent law firms with significant depth and range of resources across five continents. As a single, fully integrated, global partnership, we pride ourselves on our approachable, collegiate and team based way of working. We always strive to exceed the expectations of our clients, which include corporates from all the commercial and industrial sectors, governments, regulators, trade bodies and not for profit organisations. We provide them with the highest quality advice and legal insight, which combines the firm's global standards with in-depth local expertise.
• Clifford Chance was ranked 'Band 1' in more cross-border tables than any other firm in the Chambers Global 2018 Directory. This independent analysis focuses on firms' legal ability, professional conduct, client service, and commercial awareness, and these rankings provide outstanding recognition for the firm's breadth of expertise and consistency of quality across global markets.
• Our Middle East office was recently ranked 1^st place by value in the Merger Market 2018 global M&A league tables and was awarded International Law firm of the Year at the IFLR Middle East Awards ceremony. In January, we won 10 awards at the IFN Middle East Deal of the Year Awards noting successes in key categories such as construction finance, infrastructure and projects finance, Islamic finance and securitisation. 

© Press Release 2019