It was a bit of a different set-up this Comms Counsel – we were standing, milling around, chatting, all whilst sipping drinks and helping ourselves to all sorts of finger food.  

However, with our boots on the ground, we still managed to pick up a few themes that topped the charts across the different conversations.  

AI

Questions: who’s using it? How are you using it? And what have you fixed with it? We heard word of some useful applications such as specifically for communicators, creating bots to bring you the latest new on law, or also for self-development – pinpointing areas where your AI assistant analyses the way you are working, and helps to make you more efficient and effective. 

There were concerns about comms, and voice and personality of companies in the age of AI. How do you keep your personal touch? Will a boring AI voice mean disengaged employees? Will they even care?  

We also heard of AI bots being used to help with directory entries (all important for law firms).  But there’s also the danger of AI bringing up old or irrelevant content; so it’s dependent on disciplined tagging of content or excluding old content.    

Intranet

AI melted into the intranet question – with the discussion of ‘HR bots’. Putting an AI bot onto the intranet looks to be an interesting thing beginning to be implemented across various sectors. However, the practicalities of this are still being debated. It will require strict governance over content across the whole intranet, to make sure everything is correct – this could really take a long time to implement!  

Some others were struggling with poor and/or no intranets. The intranet is an essential place to find information – both for colleagues’ work, but also about their pay, pension etc., and if you want to push the social side, it can be a great place to post employee stories, recognition and events. This will be worth investing in.  

Managing stakeholders

The Partnership is something we all must navigate – so unlike other commercial enterprises, you don’t have one boss, but potentially hundreds of them – all who expect to be consulted on the big decisions.   

We talked together and in our groups about how to manage this effectively, from socialising ideas to helping to gain consensus without constantly having to go round to everyone again and again.    

It is one of the skills of the Internal Comms team in any law firm! 

Mergers

We’ve seen a number of mergers in recent times – A&O Shearman, Winston Tayor, Ashurst Perkins Coie, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader – and we will surely see more in the coming years. 

So what’s the trick of surviving and thriving through a merger?  We heard about the late nights and sense of urgency as a merger is announced – and then as merger moves from being proposed to being completed, the challenge of creating one intranet, one email, one culture and one way of doing comms… 

It feels like a rite of passage for Comms folk!  See you on the other side…