I must start with my usual proviso to the effect that generalisations which are critical of groups do not exclude the possibility that those groups contain many people who would shine anywhere, and vice versa. Whilst I am instinctively for private enterprise and against the big state, there are plenty of good people providing essential services in the public sector and rather too many crooks and incompetents in the private sector.

There, that’s got the balance out of the way. You have probably gathered that I am no great admirer of UK local authorities or, indeed, of any public body which has power to govern our lives and spend our money without any concomitant grasp of the commercial principles which govern private enterprises and, too often, without much thought or intelligence.  The conventional riposte is that the public service is “different” and not susceptible to the ways of private enterprise, which many public servants despise with a ferocity which matches the contempt felt for them. I am certainly ready to accept that the public services must necessarily be different in many ways, but I cannot see that incompetence and inefficiency must be amongst the inevitable distinguishing features. Local authorities operate right under our noses; we pay them very large sums (over £2,600 pa in my case) on one day and watch them pissing it up against the wall on the next.

Geoff Wild, Director of Governance & Law at Kent County Council addressed these views head-on at LawTech Camp London, effectively accepting that the common view from outside was not always unjustified. Local authorities have the reputation, he accepted, of being wasteful, slow and unresponsive, bogged down in red tape, bureaucracy and process. Councillors are “white, middle-class and with an average age of 68″ – what hope here for change and entrepreneurship? The sense of self-importance and exclusivity is preserved by expressions like “gateway review” and “stakeholder agreement” which were designed to keep others out. You begin to see the parallels with lawyers at once.

Bids for large amounts of budget money were generally backed by anodyne and meaningless phrases, none of them indicating a saving, an improvement or any other benefit for the council or its “customers”. Geoff Wild showed us an example.

His ambition when he started, he said, was to make his department more like private practice. What he meant, it became clear, was an idealised version of private practice which relatively few private practices actually aspire to in any meaningful way. By the time he had finished, it was clear that the resulting team bore no relation at all to most private law firms, but was dynamic, forceful, innovative and profitable. Yes, he had turned a cost centre into a profit centre and Kent County Council now provides legal services for 330 other public bodies.

Darwin pointed to adaptability as the secret of successful species, he said, and the county council had adapted, at least in this respect. It was not a coincidence that Geoff Wild’s first focus was on the people and on training them. When he inherited it, his department was poorly-staffed and under-resourced. It was “de-lawyered” and expanded to have an “hour-glass figure” – a few people at the top, many paralegals at the bottom and few in between. I did not detect any great reliance on expensive technology, though technology had clearly played its part. Attention was paid to value rather than change for its own sake. The changes were, he said “all about improving communication” and, whilst he did not spell this out, one pictured more than the one-way pseudo-communication which characterises most public authorities – like my own city council, for example, which is forever boasting of Councillor Grunt’s achievements whilst outsourcing the handling of inbound calls to the far end of the country – so its only gesture towards cutting costs (apart from just closing down services) is one which makes it more remote from its “customers”.

Amongst Geoff Wild’s many well-chosen slides was one of an old Law Society poster (“One of the few good things which came out of Chancery Lane”) in which a client described her solicitor as a friend when one was needed. That a public service lawyer could even think in these terms was an eye-opener.

People, training, value, communication. If a local authority legal Department, starting from so far back, can subvert the norm so cleverly, then there may be hope yet for private practice lawyers. If Kent can do this for its “customers” who have no choice about paying for the council’s services, then what lessons are there for law firms whose continued profitability, its existence indeed, depends on keeping its clients close to it and offering them a service which accords with their needs?

Geoff Wild describes himself as “disruptive”, that once-derogatory term which has come to imply positive and assertive challenges to accepted norms and to established ways of doing things. Anyone who can disrupt a local authority and turn one of its sagging back-office cost centres into a profitable contributor to public funds deserves attention in any industry – and even in the so-called learned professions.

Perhaps the best part, alluded to above, was the fact that Geoff Wild turned up at a conference with “Lawtech” in its name and concentrated almost exclusively on people. Modernisation lies in more than buying some expensive kit. That, however, will almost certainly be part of the modernisation programme once the people are in place.

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