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ALMJ

Q&A: Joanna Oakey – “I like the idea of building a legal firm that's built on systems and not built on needing star players.”

Joanna, you have been running commercial law firm Aspect Legal for more than 15 years. Were you always destined for a career in law?

The truth is that in law school at Macquarie University, I was uninterested during the first few years because of the focus on jurisprudence and that sort of stuff. I was doing another degree at the time in psychology and mass communication, and I was far more interested in those topics. However, I then got into some meaty law subjects relating to contracts and commercial remedies and I started seeing the stories involving law and its impact. From that point I really got into it. I ended up finishing with honours and receiving a university medal.

Have the psychology and communication skills helped with running the firm?

Certainly. Those skills have set the framework for how I set up Aspect Legal and how I practise law. I really love behavioural psychology and understanding what makes people tick. That helps create a positive experience for clients because, in my target market of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the business owners are often wary of lawyers because they’ve had experiences in the past where they haven't felt heard, or didn’t feel understood. So, the way I came into the legal profession has been such a help for me. I received the underpinnings of a good legal education, but I started off with a healthy distance from law and came at it from a different angle because of the other subjects I’d been studying. That’s been extraordinarily helpful.

The Aspect Legal website discusses “breaking the mould” with legal services. What is the firm doing differently and what is working for you?

When a lot of firms talk about doing things differently, they’re focusing on value-based pricing or offering fixed fees, or whatever. For me, breaking the mould is more foundational and fundamental. We’ve always stood back and asked, ‘Okay, how can we break apart legal services and increase the value we’re providing to clients?’ It’s about what our clients really need from us. They need education, they need information. That’s why I started doing two podcasts, Talking Law and The Deal Room, that have been running for more than five years. We’ve done more than 400 podcast episodes which are all about providing free information and education. I also wrote a book, Buy, Grow, Exit, which is more than 90,000 words on how SMEs can better understand the legal environment and succeed. I come from the perspective, and we at Aspect Legal come from the perspective, that fundamentally we are here to provide true value – and providing true value requires our team to work on it constantly.

What does that mean for your team as they go about their work every day, or every week?

In our firm, there’s a lot of positive reinforcement of our team members. We have three main meetings each week. Motivation Monday is really about everyone getting organised and ready for the week. It’s a light and uplifting session. Then, with Wisdom Wednesday, it’s about building knowledge and excellence in the team. Then we have Fire Up Friday, which is our innovation session. These sorts of things – having a vision, communicating the vision and appreciating your team – are the real keys. The other things I constantly ask the team are, ‘What do you want?’ and ‘What do you need?’ and ‘How can I create an environment that you love?’ Because I want them to love coming to work every day, and that also helps them deliver better client results.

Do common themes or lessons emerge from those meetings each week?

There are internal and external themes. Internally, we may discuss ways to resolve any client confusion by providing more education at the beginning of a matter, or along the way. So, for example, could our systems have moved faster? Externally, there are often factors we cannot control, but we focus on ways to work with clients to smooth out the process when dealing not just with them but with counterparties or other stakeholders in a transaction.

We pride ourselves on having strong systems and procedures that contribute to really fast turnaround times with a business sale transaction, for example. However, one consistent issue for Aspect Legal is that our counterparties quite often will just sit there with their lawyers and take things slowly. So, we are always asking, ‘How can we make this work better?’ We have expertise and really strong skills in this area of commercial law, so we make every effort to work with the other side as a team, rather than trying to show them up. We’re not about winning any ego game; we try to partner with other lawyers or our counterparties so we can meet our clients’ objectives. Fundamentally, I think that makes us a bit different in the legal sector.

You mentioned that you produce two podcasts and have written a book, while your firm has also won a string of industry awards. How valuable have these elements been in a marketing and branding sense?

They have been very valuable. First, they are an excellent way for me and my team to really get a deep understanding not just of the legal side of what we do, but the commercial side. The Deal Room is all about buying and selling businesses. Because I’ve been running the podcast for five years now and I’ve met almost every type of person in the industry, it really gives us deep knowledge so that we can build our legal services in a way that’s more holistic. The second part is that the podcasts and the book are fantastic marketing tools, not so much in terms of delivering leads, but because they help establish credibility and authority. Anyone who is looking to get clients will know that one of the critical things is establishing that you have credibility. For us, awards, the book and the podcasts all speak for themselves. With initial  calls, we generally have three or four new potential clients coming in each day. Every call is limited to 15 minutes and we don’t “sell” on the calls; we just ask questions and get information. That’s what good marketing does – the lawyers don’t have to sell.

Other firms are also producing or thinking about podcasts. What tips can you give them for doing successful podcasts?

For a start, I like short podcasts. Who has the time to sit and listen to a one or two-hour podcast? Keep them short and to the point. Second, our listeners love stories that allow them to see what’s happening in the market, rather than just getting dry information such as legislation. The content that often works best for us is when I just ad lib on a topic. For example, one I did that still gets a crazy amount of hits is when I talked about the differences in terminology for term sheets if you’re selling a business. It explains what the terminology actually means. I used to think that everyone knew that sort of stuff, but it turns out that what we think is obvious to us as lawyers isn’t necessarily obvious to clients. That podcast took me about 10 minutes to do and it’s one of our most-listened-to episodes.

Also, if you're going to get into podcasts, you need a solid tech system behind you. I have a system whereby my podcast production only takes me the recording time because I want turnaround a day after I've recorded it. You need to have every single step of the way systemised so that it's not a resource drain.

In this edition of ALMJ, we have a theme of pricing and profitability. What observations do you have for other law firm leaders in this respect?

Pricing is one of the hardest things I have grappled with in the business. We do a lot of transactions in business sales and acquisitions for smaller deals, and it’s much easier to fix fees because you can have some confidence about having a clear scope. With larger matters, I find it’s a lot more complicated.  It’s something that quite often is driven by the fact that your client doesn't want to take the easy route in negotiation. They want to push various legal points. So, pricing in this context can be difficult.

There are two ways to respond. You can do high-end work, which requires expensive staff or expensive production, but then that makes you very vulnerable to the staff or to whatever that expensive item is. Or you can go lower cost, high volume, and that means that you must be very systems-based. I'm a systems person. I like the idea of building a legal firm that's built on systems and not built on needing star players because I don't want to be the one doing all the work at the end of the day.

Is a systems-based approach the way of the future for law firms?

It is for Aspect Legal. I read US business author Michael Gerber’s book – The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – right at the beginning of my career and I thought, ‘This is epic!’. But then I was in legal firms where I was thinking about how this relates to me.

How does a legal firm create the systems that drive the whole process? That means the founder, the person with all that knowledge, is elevated to not having to be the practitioner on the tools all the time. But that’s not how big legal firms work. That's not how the legal industry generally works. And it's an interesting problem for the legal industry as a whole.      

All my work is about helping businesses grow and ultimately exit. This is a significant problem for lawyers and advisors in general. How do you build a business that has value at exit? Well, you can't do that if you're running a traditional model of legal practice because the traditional firm is all based on the owner being the one who is the heaviest biller, rather than being the person who sits at the top and helps make the business run.

Can artificial intelligence make a difference?

Yes, but I’m still grappling with it. I see a huge opportunity with AI and I'm spending a lot of time to get really deep into its opportunities. So, at Aspect Legal we have an innovation committee where various people in the firm are looking at how we can implement AI, but I'm also spending a lot of time educating myself.

I don't have all the answers right now. What I can tell you is that we will be, for the next 12 months, trialling a whole heap of AI-based tech. For now, the easiest thing is to use AI for crafting communication and marketing. AI has revolutionised how we do our podcasts and how we do a lot of our marketing. The trickier bit, and the bit with the most opportunity, is how we are going to use the opportunities in AI to revolutionise the way we produce our legal services and create more value for our clients. That’s the next challenge for me.

www.aspectlegal.com.au

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