Buying new IT isn’t going to give Norton Rose the breakthrough it wants

Peter Martyr is an enthusiast. His drive is formidable.

The Norton Rose boss took a declining City firm into new territories, pioneering the Commonwealth path for expansion – something that Herbert Smith, Ashurst, DLA Piper and Gowling WLG followed, with varying degrees of success. Following the Australian, Canadian and South African combinations Norton Rose finally did the US merger with Fulbright & Jaworski. However, the American deal has not set a fire under the combined firm; as a defensive move it’s pretty smart, but a bold step forward it wasn’t. Despite being one of the few firms to execute a transatlantic merger, Norton Rose Fulbright has plateaued.

Martyr, though, is still itching for the dramatic transformation – only this time he hasn’t got his sights on growth through merger. The next moment of rapture is the purchase of a £100m management system from SAP that will run across its global network. It will capture enormous amounts of information, automate flows and create reports at the flick of a switch. It’s one of the biggest information investments ever made by a law firm, covering everything from time recording and paying expenses to monitoring client relationships. A big sexy IT project that will apparently deliver intelligence and change.

Anyone see the catch here? Let’s put it in the words of a managing partner at an international firm not dissimilar to Norton Rose: “If you’re relying on a piece of tech to revolutionise your business, you’re storing up trouble.” Oddly, at no point in his interview with The Lawyer did Martyr refer to the cultural and organisational change this requires.

I blame Dave Brailsford. A disproportionate number of City partners are MAMILS (middle-aged men in lycra) who fetishise cycling, so it’s hardly surprising that the dogma of marginal gains has acquired a sheen in the legal industry. The brandishing of technology is deemed sufficient unto itself. However, to take one simple counter-example, as any business that has experience of Salesforce knows, you can do a lot with a piece of tech but of itself it’s not a game-changer. You need to develop proper habits, a culture around it. IT investment isn’t just kit, it needs enforcement of organisational behaviour.

So how about this conundrum. There’s one Norton Rose partner in the US who declines to refer matters to London. He isn’t going to change his behaviour because there’s not enough financial incentive, and from his point of view no particular brand or cultural affiliation to the rest
of the network.

If Norton Rose wants a deus ex machina, better not rely on an IT system.

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