In the legal sector, transformation initiatives often falter not because of poor technology choices, but because organisations mistake deployment for success.
Roger Habib, Chief Transformation Officer at Bartier Perry Lawyers, has witnessed this pattern repeatedly throughout his extensive career leading large-scale change programs across banking, finance, and now legal services.
From helping implement the largest government banking contract in corporate Australia with NSW Treasury to managing mergers, divestments, payments and regulatory initiatives for the major banks, Roger has learned that it’s critical to bring people along the journey and not just ensure the technology goes live.
“I’ve never subscribed to the view that you can implement new technologies without ensuring the people impacted are at the centre and engaged at every step in the process”, Roger explains.
His perspective is informed by hard-won experience, including one multi-year banking project where $350 million was spent implementing an advanced CRM system (for 40,000 employees) that virtually no one used initially – requiring an additional $10 million spend on a human centred customer experience and change management initiative to salvage the investment.
The lesson? Transformation is only successful when organisations generate the benefits they intended to achieve, whether those are hard financial targets or softer outcomes like reduced employee turnover and increased engagement, or both. This is a people centric focus.
The Three Non-Negotiables of Successful Transformation
According to Roger, three elements must be in place before any transformation initiative can succeed. Miss any one of these, and even the most promising technology implementations will struggle to deliver value.
First, transformation strategy must align seamlessly with the organisation’s strategic plan. This isn’t just about having both documents exist – it’s about creating a clear, traceable line from strategic objectives to transformation initiatives. “Once you’ve aligned your transformation program to your strategic objectives, it becomes a much clearer discussion,” Roger notes. This alignment serves a crucial purpose beyond planning: it creates accountability. When leaders understand that their KPIs are directly tied to transformation deliverables, suddenly the project has powerful allies who can articulate why specific changes matter and drive outcomes.
Second, securing genuine buy-in from Board, Executive, and Leadership teams is paramount. This goes beyond getting approval signatures. Transformation inherently pushes boundaries and makes people uncomfortable, so visible, consistent leadership support becomes essential. But that support must be informed – leaders need to understand not just what is changing, but why and how transformation initiatives connect to the outcomes they’re accountable for delivering. “It’s important to help leadership teams see the link to strategic objectives so they know that if they don’t do this particular thing, it’s going to hurt in the hip pocket, which in turn means the strategic objectives we’re trying to deliver as a business will not be delivered,” Roger explains. This understanding helps shift leaders from being passive approvers into active champions.
Third, a robust change management approach must be in place to ensure transformation lands safely. “It’s relatively easy to implement technology changes, but it’s harder to make sure you’re bringing people along the journey,” Roger observes. This approach needs to account for change saturation – the very real phenomenon where people simply cannot absorb any more disruption.
At Bartier Perry, this means carefully sequencing initiatives throughout the year and creating ‘heat maps’ to visualise when different teams will be impacted. The goal is to deliver new technologies and information at the right time, when people can actually use and absorb it, rather than creating information overload and change fatigue.
Why Change Management Needs Equal Focus with Technology
The legal profession presents unique challenges for transformation. Lawyers often work in isolation on complex matters, their attention deeply focused on specific client problems. Billable hours are precious, and scepticism about new tools is common –particularly among practitioners who have built successful careers using traditional methods.
Roger’s approach addresses these realities through multiple channels. Training is chunked into bite-sized pieces to respect time constraints. Champions are embedded within each practice group, creating readily available expertise. Communications are structured and sequenced to avoid overwhelming people. And perhaps most importantly, post-implementation support includes ‘floor walkers’ – experts who literally walk around the office wearing identification that says, “I’m a Thomson Reuters CoCounsel expert, ask me anything.”
“It’s an unusual way of embedding change, but it’s very effective,” Roger admits. “People just grab the expert and say, ‘Hey, I’m working on doing this, can you show me if there’s a better way?'” This approach recognises that everyone has different learning preferences. Some prefer e-learning modules, others want case studies, and still others learn best through quick, contextual conversations when they’re actually trying to accomplish a task.
But the most powerful change mechanism isn’t manufactured at all.
When individual practitioners start voluntarily sharing their experiences, or you hear phrases like “Do not ever take this tool away from me, it’s awesome” or “This saved me three hours of my day”, this authentic enthusiasm creates pull rather than push. “You get this fire that gets ignited and people say, ‘OK, I want that,'” Roger explains. “You can’t manufacture that.”
The Human Element: What Technology Can’t Replace
Throughout his career Roger has maintained one consistent conviction: the human element cannot be overlooked. While tools and technologies assist and streamline work, “nothing is going to replace legal judgment, legal reasoning, human empathy, and being able to contextualise the application of the law to someone’s specific problem.”
This perspective shapes how transformation is framed at Bartier Perry.
Technology isn’t positioned as a replacement for lawyers but as a tool that frees people to focus on higher-order skills: critical thinking, influencing, connecting legal concepts to commercial outcomes. For lawyers who may lack these skills – which often aren’t taught in law schools – the firm is committed to helping bridge that gap through coaching, mentoring, and structured development opportunities.
This human-centered approach also improves any mental health challenges. By implementing technologies that reduce hours, lower stress levels, and decrease isolation, transformation initiatives are directly contributing to lawyer well-being – a soft benefit with very real financial implications when considering burnout, absenteeism, and turnover costs.
Five Actions to Ensure your Transformation Succeeds
Based on Roger’s tested experience, organisations can take specific steps to increase their chances of transformation success:
- Map every transformation initiative directly to a strategic objective. If you can’t draw a clear line from a project to a strategic outcome, question whether it should be prioritised.
- Sequence your changes carefully. Create visibility into when different teams will be impacted and spread initiatives throughout the year to prevent change saturation.
- Invest in change management from day one, not as an afterthought. Budget for champions, floor walkers, multiple training modalities, and extended post-implementation support.
- Define success by benefits realisation, not deployment dates. Establish clear metrics for both hard financial outcomes and softer human impacts, then measure them consistently.
- Amplify authentic practitioner voices. When people voluntarily share positive experiences, capture those stories and share them widely – they’re more persuasive than any corporate communication could be.
Transformation in legal services is about equipping practitioners with tools that let people focus on what humans do best: applying judgment, reasoning, and contextualising outcomes with empathy to complex client problems. Technology alone won’t achieve that vision.
Only by bringing people along the journey – thoughtfully, sequentially, and with genuine support – can organisations make transformation truly stick.
