When a group of lawyers practise together, they form a human system. This is true whether they are partners in a law firm, barristers in a chambers or an in-house legal team.
Although each human system of lawyers is unique, there are some common characteristics in terms of how the participants interact with each other.
When lawyers initially start practising together, they tend to operate in a formative, “founders’ phase”. !e group develops habitual ways of doing things, approaching problem solving, interacting with each other and so forth. This is a relatively informal and fluid phase.
After a while (typically five or more years of practice together), a law firm human system becomes more formalised and segues into an “institutional phase”. !e transition sometimes happens quite seamlessly, but often involves some growing pains. For example, in the case of a typical law firm, the institutional phase is accompanied by financial growth, newcomers joining the firm, norms and expectations solidifying and everyone being somewhat less reflective about what they are doing and how they do it. Much more becomes accepted as “the way we do things around here”.
Although moving into the institutional phase is all well, good and predictable, it can result in a lack of group critical thinking. !e lawyers begin to take each other and themselves for granted and have relatively little accurate insight about the extent to which their habits and behaviours are functional or dysfunctional individually and collectively.
They can become more resistant to change and less accurate in their perceptions. I call it “ossified individual and group thinking”.