Curse of the Silo: “An Aggregation of Narrow Views.”

If there’s anything that kills customer experience, it’s the territory wars inside organizations.

–Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext, Chicago, Illinois

The creation of “silos” inside the largest Western law firms became an issue a few years ago. For those firms, a “silo”, of course, meant something other than a tall agricultural storage device for grain. It had become instead a metaphor for the following: a part or process of a business that operates in isolation from other parts and processes of that business.

Silo mentality and silo cultures develop in organizations which are growing, multi-specialized and committed to separately managing and promoting each new area of sales. As a result, distinct “feifdoms” arise which seem to compete with or, worse, cavalierly ignore one another. The feifdoms (a) don’t collaborate with each other to serve clients, (b) don’t cross-sell together to acquire new clients or to keep existing ones, (c) do compete with each other internally for shares of the client’s legal spend or (d) have all of the foregoing problems. Both the firm and client/customers it serves are compromised, and in ways that are probably measurable.

About five years ago, Carolyn Elefant, a Washington, D.C. energy lawyer, and then chief writer at Legal Blog Watch, gave us a memorable short-hand description for cultures at larger law firms where silo mentalities inevitably take hold. Elefant had been inspired by an article authored by Rees Morrison, a lawyer and well-known consultant to corporate legal departments. Morrison’s article, “Why Law Departments Should Beware Super-Sized Firms“, appeared in the New York Law Journal in November of 2008. Elefant wrote that large firms with the cultures Morrison had described lack “the ability to offer [clients] a broad perspective”, offering instead “an aggregation of narrow views”.

Morrison and Elefant had a compelling point. To take just one example, and based on my own experiences, I do have the sense that corporate lawyers in smaller firms or boutiques are better issue-spotters than their counterparts at larger firms. They excel at seeing “the big picture”. They may even thrive on working in, or at least identifying, cross-practice issues. They are like quarterbacks and point guards. Kaleidoscopic is another word that comes to mind.