GCWN Studio EP01, Andrew Masraf. On Sustainable Performance and the Changing Culture of Law

Steven MacGregor (00:08)

Hello and welcome to GCWN Studio in association with the Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast. My name is Steven MacGregor. We will sit down with senior figures in this show shaping the future of law. And together we explore the big questions around wellbeing, sustainable performance and the culture shifts redefining modern legal leadership. I'm delighted today to be joined by Andrew Masraf who is the global senior partner of Pinsent Masons, chairs the firm's board and has ultimate responsibility for the leadership of the firm. The vision he has shaped is for Pinsent Masons to achieve global reach through unmatched sector and skill set capabilities. Prior to becoming senior partner, Andrew held senior leadership roles as head of the corporate team and head of the transactional services group. He is a private equity specialist with extensive experience in advising clients across a range of sectors.

Andrew was brought up in Plymouth, lives in London and is a fan of Liverpool Football Club. Andrew, very welcome today.

Andrew Masraf (01:13)

Thank you, Steven. Great to see you. And thank you for the introduction as well. Sounds all right, doesn't it?

Steven MacGregor (01:19)

Yeah, it does! You know, I just want to say thank you. This is of course is Episode One of this new show and not only has it been critical to have the support of Pinsent Masons this year to build the network, but also your personal involvement has been fantastic. You've jumped in with both feet. You just haven't been observing in the workshops that we've had so far this year with GC members, but you've participated fully. That's been such a key factor in creating the necessary energy that we want in the room and to really have that vulnerability but that impact with the GC members. So thank you for that.

Andrew Masraf (02:01)

A pleasure and thank you. It's been fantastic to be involved and participating actually has been a fantastic personal experience and I'm sure we'll touch on that but yeah thank you, I loved being part of it.

Steven MacGregor (02:15)

So we've got a number of questions here, short conversation. And I think this builds on conversations that we've had already this year that haven't been recorded. But maybe straight into a couple of the big ones. And maybe this first one on the culture of law, because we've had a number of discussions. And I think also with some of my experiences in management consulting, but we've talked about the toughness of culture within the legal profession. And that could include the Friday night document dumps that you highlighted to me way back in our first meeting in April, the all-nighters, even the sense of exhaustion that can be a badge of honour. We need to work and we need to work hard. So I think there's a balancing act that we need to strike there. But from your perspective, how much of that culture is still necessary and how much do we need to leave behind?

Andrew Masraf (03:04)

There will always be a pressure around professional services, including law firms, to deliver complex matters within a tight timetable. And they're multifaceted, they're multi-dimensional in terms of the skill sets, the interaction with clients. There are parties often these days covering a variety of jurisdictions and time zones. And bringing that complexity to the delivery of an outcome for a client brings with it an element of stress and an element of at some point you have to deliver the outcome and that might well lead to an all-nighter or the delivery against a difficult timetable. And there is an inevitability that however much you might want to deliver things within a 9-5 Monday to Friday environment, the work that we do, the complex work that we do, brings with it this requirement to work to tight timetables and against the backdrop of exhaustion and working all nighters or all weekends.

The question for me is whether that is sustainable longer term and whether there are elements of that work delivery that can be delivered in more effective, efficient ways that don't require all of the impact on people personally. And I think the fact that we stop and even think about this is one of the biggest changes I've seen over my own career. I started the firm as a trainee and ended up as its senior partner. So it's an amazing privilege, but it gives you that oversight of when I think back to 32 years ago, the badge of honour was watching the sunrise over the East End of London, probably with a bit of cold pizza and thinking I've just done my first all-nighter. I'm now one of the gang. It doesn't sound quite so cool now. There is still a buzz about it, you might never replace that, but thinking over that 32 years, that's a lot of all-nighters. That's a lot of working to tight timetables and a lot of delivery in a pressured environment. We have to assume that that is not sustainable on a human level.

Steven MacGregor (05:22)

Yeah, I'm a big believer in that sustainability. And even if I think back when I started in the wellbeing space, it was that aspect of performance, but sustainable performance and what is the best means and you touch on things there like productivity and efficiency. And I think the business case is there in terms of how we deliver these complex asks for our clients is that if we just break ourselves and we grind too hard, then that's not going to get the results either. It's that balancing act. I often say that wellbeing, work and hardworking and getting work done is a big part of our own wellbeing and our fulfillment and links to issues of purpose in our lives, right? So it's a hard balancing act.

You touched on that career path over 30 years in the firm. Maybe we'll get to some more examples there, but any things that have really changed in helping you achieve that sustainability and how that's affected the culture?

Andrew Masraf (06:24)

For me personally, the awareness that my career, the work I do is important, but it's not everything. And that sense of perspective that there is a life outside of work, a life which isn't necessarily, I'm going to say, it's all about the weekend, that actually something that gives you that balance as best you can through the week and whether that is sport or leisure, whether that's time with friends or whether that's time sitting reading a book in front of the television, that sense of sustainability I think is something that's definitely grown on me.

Personally I would regard myself probably as quite a lazy athlete, as I've got older actually saying you can't take that for granted. So deliberately building into my week time at the gym or time at Pilates, being much more conscious of that need to balance the buzz and the adrenaline and the fulfilment of work, but recognising that that is not everything and looking back over a lifetime, what will you be remembered for? Elements of your work, but there's a lot more to life than that. I think keeping that sense of perspective has perhaps been the thing that I've held on to almost from day one.

Steven MacGregor (07:47)

Brilliant to hear. Thank you for sharing that. It's not quite the elephant in the room, but it is one of those things that is the big factor in law in terms of the billable hour. And of course, under disruption at the moment with the changes with technology and AI in particular. The billable hour has shaped how law firms operate and how indeed lawyers measure value for decades. How do you see that evolving and especially with AI mixing that up. I know that you've been running some experiments in the firm, any views on that?

Andrew Masraf (08:19)

It is interesting that almost every technological development over the last 30 years, there's always been a question, is this the end of the billable hour for whatever reason? And it's hanging in there even now, possibly because it's asked to do quite a few things. It tells us, albeit perhaps in quite a primitive way, about how busy people are, their utilisation, because looking at their time entries and whatever that might be gives you a view, and I put it only in those terms, a view, of how busy people are and what they're doing and therefore their capacity to do other things. And so it has that function. It has a function of attributing value to the work they're doing, which ultimately becomes part of the conversation with the client about the bill. So the billable hour actually has quite an important element as a resourcing tool, but also as a potentially billing tool.

Now, when you look at growth in our sector over the last 15 to 20 years, look at data from Thomson Reuters, for example, they'd say a huge proportion of the growth in our sector has been through rate rises. So passing on the cost of that billable hour to clients. The question becomes if you're looking at productivity gains, potentially driven by technology and AI, at some point the billable hour has to become what value have I just delivered and what's the price associated with that? And that gets really complicated because if a document that might have taken me a couple of weeks with other colleagues to draft can, with the help of AI, be produced in a matter of minutes using the pressing of a button, that doesn't sustain Big Law.

But what that would ignore is, in our case, the 300 years worth of history that has all the knowledge, the technical and commercial knowledge that has allowed us to build a product that allows us to generate a document in a matter of minutes. How do you value that accumulated knowledge and history and put an appropriate value on it? It is one of the challenges I would say for law at this moment in time. Probably for the first time there is a technology that is genuinely challenging productivity by taking away elements of what we do from a time and materials basis to ‘this can be produced as a commodity’. Pricing that commodity and then the value of the human interaction, does the value of the human interaction, is it actually elevated because there's a technology that delivers a product? Are clients actually really buying the personal human knowledge and experience that you add on the top of that? How do you price that? Is that elevated actually relative to the commodity?

Steven MacGregor (11:29)

It's a fascinating time and how this shakes out, this disruption, will be great to watch. But I think that human experiences that you touched on is something that is interesting to look at. I always remember the case of NCR, the Dundee based company that first came out with automatic tellers. And there was all of talk at the time, I think this was maybe the 1970s, it's quite a famous innovation case, this is going to be disastrous for banking and branches on the high street. But what it did is that it freed up the time of the people in the branch to focus on relationships. And it upped their value-add in terms of what they were doing. They weren't just doing the transactional things that now an automatic teller could do, an ATM machine. And so maybe there's something in that historical case that's going to transpire here.

Andrew Masraf (12:19)

I really agree and I'd hope that allows for a more engaging, fulfilling human activity because if I look back to some of the work I did as a more junior lawyer and it was at that point described as part of your training and learning. The reality is you didn't really learn anything when you're paginating a thousand page bundle of documents. Your ability to punch numbers sequentially isn't that challenging.

Utopia allows you to say, ‘my mind is now free to think about other things’, maybe including a future that utilises all this new technology in a whole load of new and exciting ways. I do worry that from a wellbeing perspective that all this actually does though is draw us back towards our screen and the sense that the answer is somewhere in our screen because there's an AI tool or there's a standard document or a bit of knowledge that a machine will give me.

And I do worry that our interpersonal skills perhaps take another battering here. Again, it's the backdrop of a pandemic that took us away from human interaction, mobile phones and other communication devices that mean we communicate virtually. And then suddenly you bring AI and all the work related tools. There are all sorts of excuses not actually to meet in person. And there's a whole area there for me I worry about from a health and wellbeing perspective.

Steven MacGregor (13:52)

Yeah and I think, and I hope, that the GC Wellbeing Network is going to be something that is there for busy lawyers and senior in-house counsel to come together and to maintain that human interaction. You've ran some interesting experiments in Pinsent Masons on tracking for early warning triggers. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrew Masraf (14:10)

It's really part of this, the importance of making sure the individual is monitoring their wellbeing, but that the firm is also trying to build in some elements to support that. So these early warnings, and they are simply early warnings, and they're definitely not a single solution, and they're definitely not the one thing you would rely on, is to say, you can track from our data how long hours people are working. You can see because they're recording time on a file on a daily basis. And so over periods of time, you can see if people are working for extended periods. And what it should allow is, at an operational level to look across teams and say, I can see someone there is putting in some long hours. Let me at least have the conversation. Understand what are they doing.

Do they have all the right support around them? Are they looking after themselves? Is there a conversation we can have to help them? And it may be the answer to that is they're perfectly happy, leave them alone. It's only intended to be a trigger alongside a lot of other things, which might include really just calling in to see your colleagues. We see them at their desk or we'll see them online if they're working remotely. Just checking in to see people are okay.

And that has definitely become a bit harder with virtual working because you're not actually always seeing people at their desk in the office. And so these triggers are intended to provide some support, but they're definitely not the only answer. Part of this checking in, making sure people are okay, properly supported, properly engaged, and crucially are looking after themselves is part of the philosophy behind it.

Steven MacGregor (16:02)

Yeah, I always talk about ‘checking in without checking up’ and especially when we have that lower visibility and that lower awareness and I think technology we use it so much and especially when we were in that flow zone, we lose track of things even with the best intentions. To look at the journey that we've been on together a little bit this year in terms of the workshops. So we've looked at routines and daily habits. We've looked at leadership humility and also trying to push back on some of the culture that lawyers have of trying to get it right first time. So we have another workshop this evening to round off the year at Pinsent Masons. What's your experience been like with the workshop so far this year and have you changed anything yourself? and how have you seen some of the conversations changing from the in-house counsel who are present?

Andrew Masraf (16:59)

Brilliant, and I've loved the workshops. I had no idea what they were going to look like so it was really a journey of discovery. A number of things have struck me. I've taken your advice about what I do first thing in the morning. Our cats still hate this but rather than feeding them, taking some time to just look at the day, look at the sky and not look at my phone. There's a real discipline there so I wouldn't say I think of you, Steven, every morning, but I think of you every morning as I'm thinking, actually, there's a bit of discipline of don't look at my phone. Actually, the cats will be fed in a minute, but take a moment.

Second, I've never looked at a blueberry quite in the same way, again, from you. I think about it every time actually I'm eating at my desk, which is food can just be fuel and you sit there and eat it and it's done. Be more conscious of what you're doing, what are you eating? If you're working long hours and under stress, actually one of the first things that often goes is diet. So thinking more consciously about food is not just, it is fuel, but it's also a little bit more about that and goes to wellbeing.

And then in the terms of the workshops themselves, what struck me has been the seniority of senior in-house lawyers who are devoting time to this. That I think is a really important statement of how important we all view wellbeing in our teams and our organisations. So that real sense of tone from the top. The second thing within that has been how open and vulnerable those senior people have been prepared to be in front of often a community they don't know very well. You create an incredibly safe space, but you're still opening up in front of people that you don't know so well and the comfort in doing that, I think, is a really powerful statement.

And then the third element related to that really is once you are opening up in this environment how people are sharing their experiences, good and bad. And I think that's what's really struck me has been a lot of sharing of really good things. I can remember our last session people being taught how to grey out your mobile phone. I've never tried that before. People are literally showing you how to do it. Through to these are things that have worked really well for me or things I really struggle with. And that sense of sharing, I think again, is incredibly powerful. This is in an environment where you've got loads of businesses from different sectors. Some may be competitive, some may be completely unconnected. We connect, really connect, over this one thing in a non-competitive way.

Steven MacGregor (19:51)

Thank you. Great to hear. I think just to finish, Andrew, I’ve really enjoyed this brief conversation. Any message for young lawyers, whether they be private practice or in-house, coming through in the way that they enjoy and lead and jump into this profession?

Andrew Masraf (20:13)

I think it's an incredibly fulfilling job. I look at the experience I've had as a lawyer and whether that's the deals I've worked on, whether it's the people I've worked with, whether the experiences this role has taken me into all sorts of areas that I would never have dreamt of. So it's an incredibly fulfilling profession but it is very intense and at that intensity it's addressing that quite consciously, which says, how am I going to work hard to get that balance right? Recognising that the work we do and the salaries people are paid require elements of sacrifice, of time and on occasion sleep. But we've got to work hard to keep that balance and that sustainability in place.

The other bit of advice that is particularly relevant now is this is a profession like many other businesses that's undergoing quite profound change and coming in with an open mindedness, a flexibility, an openness to do and try new things and a profession that is not renowned for changing fast I think is an incredibly powerful quality.

Steven MacGregor (21:38)

Thank you, Andrew. Looking forward to having more conversations and exploring this fascinating time and this open mindset. So thanks once again.

Andrew Masraf (21:47)

Thank you for your time. See you later.

Steven MacGregor (21:50)

So thanks for joining us in GCWN Studio for this first episode, part of our ongoing journey to explore what sustainable performance and human leadership really look like in law. You can find more conversations, reflections and insights on our website at gcwellbeing.org. And if you are a general counsel anywhere in the world, please visit the website and join us on the journey. I'll see you next time. Thank you.