Totum Commercial Finance Event 5 June 2025

Couple of reflections on last week's event with law firm Commercial Finance folk, very kindly hosted by Dee Deol MSc and Totum Partners

1) The importance of this as a peer group

Other, somewhat related, groups are well catered for in this space. 

Networking groups for the broader finance remit, or the adjacent LPM teams are well catered for

But the specific Commercial Finance remit around topics such as practice group P&L performance (rather than client/matter profitability), pricing (be that strategic or tactical) and cross firm financial support on budgets, forecasts and partner promotion/lateral hire business cases can fall through the gaps of those other groups

Huge amount of value in bringing this group together to discuss and learn from one another. 

Genuine value in group therapy, if nothing else 🙂 

2) The importance of commercial skills for lawyers

For me, a return to home turf of sorts coming to this group to discuss commercial skills for lawyers having spent much of the past 12 months discussing it with lawyers and HR/L&D professionals

I think the importance and the difficulties in delivering training in this space is appreciated across those different groups, particularly where "could you just train all of the lawyers" lands casually at the side of the desk of subject matter experts who have full time jobs to do

Where the nuance perhaps came out was an L&D emphasis on behavioural change and the Commercial Finance emphasis on £ impact - be that at a firm, department, client/matter or (and this was a specific point raised) for the individual lawyers concerned

Very much two sides of the same coin - behavioural change leads to £ impact in my eyes - but the importance of linking training through to appraisals, remuneration and bonus decisions is incredibly important to embed that behavioural change and bank that £ impact

All of which is to perhaps highlight the blue arrow at the bottom of the slide in the first picture which says "This is hard!"

I'd like to think that we can help take the heavy lift on the commercial skills training off the desks of those subject matter experts in a way that lets them focus on those related elements - around target setting, monitoring, remuneration and so on

But certainly no silver bullets. This is hard, indeed!