Consultants are Needed to Dispel Prejudices and not to Solve Problems

Alexander V. Moskovkin

We like to discuss the role of consultants on strategies, PR, or legal marketing. There has been hardly a single legal conference lately without presentations or workshops on the topic of how to promote legal practices, law firms or lawyers, how to develop an appropriate strategy, or how to effectively communicate with the media. All this is interesting and important, but I believe it is not of the paramount importance in modern Russian and Ukrainian realities. My experience shows that many partners and managing partners of law firms do not need external consultants to solve the challenges their businesses face. They need them for an entirely different purpose — to debunk their own prejudices and misconceptions as to how to conduct and develop their businesses.

The Russian (and I think Ukrainian) legal business is conducted by emotional people, who are easily carried away and are extremely versatile. Anybody in this field has multiple interests, hobbies, and passions. Paradoxically, such versatility is reflected in their work. Partners of law firms like to experiment. There is nothing bad in experiments, because our countries need to quickly go along the road that took the West many decades. But our fellow citizens pitch in too zealously. They introduce fashionable techniques, assess and reassess their personnel; they are carried away by mergers, acquisitions and alliances with other companies, strategies, outsourcing, out-staffing, CRM, ERP, obtaining LLM, and a lot of other things. Typically, these hobbies console self-esteem of managing partners and they do not necessarily benefit the business, and more often than not they fail to yield the desired increase in turnover and profits.

And that is the moment when managers often come to a different decision — to engage a strategy consultant. Then the situation may develop in various ways.

If the choice of a consultant is not very successful, such a person is able to harm the company even more offering to try a bunch of newly coined techniques, while spurring the client’s passion for experiments. An experienced consultant works in a different way. He would not begin his job with a proposal “to develop a map of strategic objectives, in order to understand competitive advantages of the firm, its strengths and weaknesses, and to identify the strategic niche market”.

It is not a joke. I came across this phrase in a report by a strategy consultant. Instead, he tries to understand what exactly made the firm’s owner or management seek his services.

Very often, the answer becomes obvious immediately. There is nothing bad about the “market niche”, clients or anything else. It is the owner himself who should be blamed. It turns out that his experiments, inconsistency, and the desire to follow newly-coined methods are ruining the business, introduce confusion in employees and alienate potential clients. Personally, I happened to meet managing partners who instead of pursuing their direct responsibility of managing their firms tried to develop their own media, to totally retrain their employees. They were always traveling all over the world in search of the meaning of life. While they were doing that, their firms were dying or quietly stagnating at best.

If a consultant is engaged by such a company, his objective is not to offer a fashionable solution to problems, but to quickly understand that the problems have been caused by the partner or managing partner not doing what he/she is supposed to do.

It is then followed by long discussions in order to convince him or her to return to the firm and to abandon those ideas and passions that destroy the business. According to my observations, this problem practically does not occur in Europe or America. Rather, it is a disease of the Russian market.

Modern leaders got their dominant positions too rapidly, they burned out too quickly or, on the contrary, they burn with enthusiasm about fashionable trends, ideas, and strategies that have come from the West. In such circumstances, the consultant’s task is not to teach something new to their clients. Instead, they need to persuade them that for the sake of growth and prosperity of their businesses they don’t need to experiment incessantly and to keep their employees in a state of permanent stress.

A good consultant becomes a psychologist, a personal assistant, and sometimes just a friend, who needs to protect his client first. And, oddly enough, to protect him from himself.

Alexander V. Moskovkin is a deputy CEO at Lexpro, Moscow