SILOS

Your law firm practices as a single impenetrable unit and in its internal structure it has practice areas which deliver its services and products in an efficient manner. These practice areas and units are headed by practice heads with specific responsibilities. This arrangement works well but there is the issue of the silo effect; each practice unit is organized to do its work efficiently, is accountable for its responsibility and its responsibility is its contribution to the whole law firm. In effect this means that the unit will give priority to its own matters, not the overall issues of the law firm, it will tend to compete for resources with other units and most importantly, the massive benefits of a border less law firm will be absent. Especially if bonuses come from unit performance and the whole law firm performance is a minimal contribution to bonuses, units will not share insights and practices with one another unless a specific role is created to move insights and practices from one unit to the other, acting as translators that transfer intellectual capital and institutional comparative advantages from one part of the firm to another. As Jack Welch has said innovation does not have to be massive, it can be one inch at a time and it is about showing up everyday searching for a better way.
The silo effect forces heads of units to divert attention from high priority strategic concerns such as competitive assessments and client direction to use precious resources solving lower level issues which are usually escalated but could be headed off by a sharing-across-units, way of doing things. Individual lawyers who could be solving such issues take no responsibility for it and say it is not litigation support's problem, it is Merger's plus all we have to do is our job. They see themselves as implementers of decisions made higher up and this can lead to; issues falling through the cracks, lack of initiative, the stifling of ideas and a slow law firm.

For example, using a financial legal platform on the internet that is advertised as a 24hr platform to place a stock market order and the order is acknowledged as received but after three full weeks the order which was meant for immediate execution still has not been executed. What is the problem? Apparently on the 24-hr financial platform orders can only be placed between 12 noon and 2pm. This means that this financial transaction fell through the cracks because the chaps responsible for the different parts of the transaction are not talking to each other.

Back to the law firm.
The silo effect will make certain each law firm practice area pays the priority attention to its own work because that is how it is assessed and how it sees its job but the law firm as a whole will not do as well because connections, transfers and communication of insight from one practice area to the other never happen. This will eventually bring the firm down and you have partners wondering what on earth is wrong with this firm.
You can think of the law firm as the human body with different organs that do their work to keep the body going. The circulatory system moves resources to and from so the human is always healthy but if the circulatory system clogs up? Heart attacks, kidney failures, overweight, bloated skin etc.

The European Union is a mighty economic and political unit, far greater than any of its individual members could have been on its own and it is just getting started. However, some units such as Germany are stronger than others such as Latvia, Lithuania but because Germany is part of the EU it is especially solicitous of the welfare of currently problematic members such as Greece because if Greece continues its economic lassitude it will eventually drag Germany down. All the attention and potential meant for progress and consolidation will be diverted to prop up Greece with what result ? The EU is weaker for it.
In this situation there cannot be a silo effect as is in the law firm practice area because productive efforts will be delayed or even prevented. Imagine Latvia needing a vital transport network and getting the answer, we would've given you but Greece took it all. After a while no one will care. Bye bye EU.
What your law firm needs to do about the silo effect is to pay very close attention to the interactions, communications between practice areas as a Strategic Business Initiative. The bigger and more profitable your law firm gets the more important it is for each unit to get the resources it needs and for it to concern itself with how what is happening in other units informs its own work, contributes to the whole.