Legally on the Move: Professional Training - James Jorgensen - E03

0:00Welcome to Legally on the Move, professional training, a brand new mini-series from the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio. I'm Rob Hanna and in this exciting new series we're coming to you live from BMA House in London, where senior leaders from across the legal profession are gathering to explore a critical question. What really makes high-performing teams in law? From leadership and communication to resilience, trust and psychological safety, we'll be speaking to experts and industry voices about what it takes to build teams that perform at their best in today's legal world. So let's get into it.

0:39Welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast, your name, title and organisation. I'm James Jensen. I'm the head of professional liability and I work at HDI Global. You absolutely do. And you did a tremendous job of opening today. actually we are recording live here for the professional training conference uh thoroughly enjoying it great energy as i'm sure you'll agree but we must talk about high performance it's often measured in revenue and utilization but in your own view what is the most misunderstood driver of performance in teams it's an amazing question and because we don't work for law firm

1:14James Jorgensen:but we work with many law firms yes i think the challenge that we have as underwriters of law firms is trying to understand how law firms do all the same things, but differently. Yes. So the drivers that you get for success, which were always going to be revenues, growth and net profit, et cetera, et cetera, they're all important factors for finding out what a success of an organization looks like, but they're never quite what we want to see as just this is how we're doing the figures get massaged not not in a negative way but in a but we'll show a different view of what's actually going on behind the organization that's why we're so keen on making sure that good lawyers are coming into the business and good clients coming into the business and how we draw that link between the two and i loved in your opening talk as well the the graphic you had on there as well about sort of good clients bad clients the image it just landed so well for me that if people can make those decisions, because there's choices, aren't there, that lawyers and law firms make, there is an element of risk before they even come to you from those choices that you were describing.

2:24And it probably leads nicely to the hybrid world that we're now living in. What leadership behaviours most strengthen collaboration and what quietly weakens it, in your opinion?

2:36James Jorgensen:Well, I mean, I think this is the whole session for today, actually, and one of the reasons why the session's been so strong. I think law firms are struggling as they've changed over the 20 years I've been insuring them. They're trying to find what that identity is and who they are within a changing world, within a changing workplace, with a changing demographic. I always put this sort of back a little bit to my parents. Lawyers are fundamentally entrepreneurs. My parents were entrepreneurs. My parents were photographers. and the thing that set them apart was their technical expertise of course as photographers but then they were dealing with stuff in the form of film rather than digital photography whereas you need technically strong lawyers and there's AI going to come and take over some of those challenges so the world is changing what does performance look like I don't know I think that's probably what we're trying to assess when we're looking at funds that we want to take on to insure.

3:34James Jorgensen:But I would say, ensuring that you've got good lawyers, good clients, and a culture which sets the tone at the top, which drags people up from a suboptimal performance, and maybe a zero tolerance approach to a bad client. Yes. And again, to that graphic that you shared earlier, it's just visualised and imprinted in my mind, even me coming from more of a legal recruiting services for law firms, I think it's relevant for all businesses. And talking of culture, I want to go to talk about now psychological safety, which is very important in today's world. What does it genuinely look like inside high-pressure legal environments from what you've seen?

4:09James Jorgensen:I think psychological safety is going to be the differentiator for law firms as we go through a very challenging period, whether it be, I'm going to take it back a step. There's the great phrase by Donald Rumsfeld of known knowns and unknown unknowns and the unknown knowns. And we talk to our clients a lot about that at the moment. The known knowns are sort of what we expect for everybody to be doing, conflicts of interest, keeping billing on time, getting paid on time in those kinds of ways. The unknown unknowns, there's just so many more. People are dealing with so many more sophisticated and complex problems that you need to set the tone from the top to help people with the psychological safety with the unknown unknown.

4:55James Jorgensen:And sometimes it's a known unknown. I realize what I'm doing here but I think that is a real challenge and one of the points I made in the keynote was we bring ourselves from work to home but we bring our home to work as well and psychological safety doesn't just end at the workplace or end at home they are both into mingle and those challenges and how we get our arms around people to make sure that they feel safe and psychologically safe is really one of the key challenges. And I think the way we do that, and I'm not sure necessarily people are going to find it popular, is data. I think there are behavioral trends, things that happen, which will identify behaviors where somebody needs to have a quiet arm put around them, not a telling off.

5:46Yeah, because we are human. We're not robots. We will have different days and different feelings and things come down there. Yeah, and data absolutely is a great way of tracking things so you can make better decisions. But I think when you have these psychologically safe environments, creativity goes up. Amazing things happen because people feel they can be themselves, they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel valued, and actually they can express themselves more. And that is your asset, particularly as a law firm, your asset is the people. I think if you can get them safe, that's a win all round.

6:15And sticking with culture then, let's talk about the difference between a culture of accountability and a culture of fear, which again you were touching on a little bit in your talk.

6:22James Jorgensen:Yeah, nobody wants a culture of fear. I think the problem is, and this is where insurance is so, you always live in fear of a potential claim coming. But that for us is relatively standard. But I think one of the things that we see within law firms and within lawyers is if I make a mistake, what does this mean? And how do we make mistakes safely? And how do we provide that support and network? And I think networking is fundamental to this. how do we get sort of get around people who are under a huge amount of pressure to bill yeah to work potentially to skip training yeah to um to keep things ticking over to make sure that work at but pardon me work is satisfied and home is satisfied at the same time and i love that simon sinnet quote that i sort of put in the thing which is i do the behaviors if you put a bad person a good person into a bad environment they'll act in a bad way accountability is hugely important feedback is important a great book on this is the five dysfunctions of a team and i always focus on the first two dysfunctions which is um a lack of trust and the fear of conflict we need to be able to have the conflict we need to be able to have the accountability and we need to be able to trust each other that we can have that and i think that's where emma came out so positively yeah Yeah, and Emma Wiggs, MBE, an incredible keynote has to be said.

7:48I think the content overall has been hugely rich, hugely positive, great energy across the room. Another important factor, of course, is collaboration and cross-functional collaboration between lawyers and business services can be quite complex at times. So what have you seen work when aligning different incentives and priorities?

8:04James Jorgensen:I know that collaboration within a large corporate organisation like HDI is fundamental to what we're trying to do and fundamental to making sure that we get improved outcomes in what is becoming an increasingly more global environment. This is why we're struggling with geopolitics. This is why we're struggling. So collaboration is important to get a different, diverse perspective of what's going on somewhere else and then being able to make better decisions based on somebody else's opinion on stuff. And I always like that sort of the recognition of the biases that we all have and how do we deal with that?

8:41James Jorgensen:So those are the key things. No, I'm a big fan of collaboration. We is always greater than me. And a key theme of today is resilience. Yes. It's been talked about a lot. At what point does resilience become unhealthy, endurance, and how should leaders recognize that line? I think resilience is hugely important. I think of resilience within what we're trying to do at HDI as being credible in what we're trying to do and sustainable as well. So credible means that we need to be market relevant and understanding of what is going on in the market. this is why an event such as professional training is so important to us.

9:16James Jorgensen:Sustainable means that we're charging the right premiums to be able to pay for claims, not knowing what the next 10 years is going to look like over that period. Yes. And I think then if you have that as a partner, and we call it a partner in transformation at HDI, that's really important. And I think that really aligns well with law firms who have a partnership matter. Yes. And the transformation bit, I've sort of, I always wonder if that makes the necessary, it can be a bit of a tagline, but actually I think it's a really important one for professional service firms. Partnership is what we're trying to achieve.

9:50James Jorgensen:Transformation into what does the future look like and how do we help you navigate through it and how do we do that partnership over that period? I love that. I love how you frame it. I get a member, a mentor said to me very early on in my career, you know, it's grow as you go. And I think, you know, partnerships do, don't they, if you get it right, as you continue growing and going, the great things foster and nurture over time. You were touching on it there, but why did you choose to attend and indeed speak today, and what's been a standout moment for you thus far of the conference? Well, just on the morning, I think Emma Wiggs' amazing keynote.

10:24James Jorgensen:I'm sure I've learned more for myself than I have for my clients, and I think we'll be applying both. we were very lucky to be the headline sponsor in year one and the key appeal to it was I'll give you a brief story I remember getting into a taxi in Chicago and just quickly looking at LinkedIn and seeing Nadine Stanton coming up and I thought this is what we need this is how we need to do it because there's lots of conferences for lawyers dealing with law and there's lots of conferences but there was nothing that sort of necessarily brought in the training aspect of what we were trying to do.

11:07James Jorgensen:And the idea, we were sort of running around with an idea, Nadine and I, as we got to know each other over LinkedIn, which was, how does training help prevent us from paying claims? That was the basic presumption. And if you've got high-performing teams, and if you've got the right training, how does that reduce risk exposure? In theory, how does that keep premiums stable? And we never quite worked on that. And then she said, I'm going to do a conference. And I said, I said, we have to be part of that. And I think this is what we, the part of being part of the community, insurance is never the, never the most enjoyable purchases for people.

11:42James Jorgensen:But how do you provide risk? How do you be that backstop? How do you be that partner? That's what we want to be. And that's why we want to be part of this. Oh, I love that story. Thanks for sharing it. And thank you, because as a result of that, it's been a, it's been a cracking day thus far. I'm looking forward to the rest of it. Before i let you go if you could implement one practical change in your organizations tomorrow to improve team performance what would it be and why um it's something that we're actually doing now is a huge and it came out today and i was really it's very self-affirming listening to emma talk where we talked about vision mission and strategy you have a vision of what this could be what this could be at hdi and now we're really working hard at making sure that goals are set and that people are aligned with those goals and believe in those goals and i i don't believe that leadership has anything to do with about telling people what to do that's management yeah it's the amount of discretion the discretionary effort we get from our team to go over and above to make sure that credible and sustainable, that the clients that we bring onto our portfolio are worthy of our other clients that we've already got on our portfolio is huge.

12:54James Jorgensen:And that's what makes me so proud of what we're trying to achieve. So it has to be goal setting, it has to be discretionary effort, and it has to be aligned to that sort of broader vision of how do we partner in this community and i love how you so beautifully put that and it's a core reason behind us at the show and partnering with clio who has a clear mission to transform the legal experience for all we're trying to inspire legal minds and transform legal futures and when people can see their direct impact and value to that mission that they believe in that intrinsic value that they get is something super powerful james it's been a wonderful conversation if people would like to know more about hdi and what you're getting up to where can they go feel free to share any social media handles any websites and we'll also share them as episode for you too yeah thank you i would just go to google i'd search hdi global um and uh we we have all of the different offerings we don't just do professional services we've got a whole line of specialty classes there's hundreds of things that hdi global do and it's a it's a great organization to work for so we're thrilled with it absolutely well thank you so much for joining me thank you for sponsoring today's event it's been an absolute blast recording you live here from uh bma house in london but from now for all of us on the the League of Speaking Podcast, over and out.

14:04Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world-leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There's a link to join our community there. Over and out.