Having been in the legal industry for over 20 years, I’ve seen disruption more than once. I started my career at law firm Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman) and later became Director of Transformation at LexisNexis UK. Now, I’m CEO of Flex Legal, a SME dedicated to championing diversity across the legal sector. In pushing for change, I’ve realised that while disruption is out of our control, how we respond to it isn’t.
Strength doesn’t necessarily come from size. With smaller teams, SMEs have a chance at proactive response and can usually sense change before it’s too late.
How does this work in practice?
Scale versus speed
There’s no denying the value of large firms. With their depth of expertise, capacity and infrastructure, bigger teams can stay calm in high-stake environments. They have wide resources, institutional resilience, and long-established processes and frameworks.
But what happens when these frameworks need to change? We know they work and that they’re a core driver of stability. But this stability can also be a hindrance. Change brings uncertainty, and the potential for disruption could feel riskier to some stakeholders more than others. With systems already firmly in place, change could be met with resistance. Even small tweaks could take months to reach a consensus.
By then, they may have already missed the boat. 
Culture over process
In smaller teams, you’re expected to wear different hats. Roles and responsibilities are often more flexible. When done wrong, this can lack clarity, but for fast-moving SMEs, this creates agility. In my experience, SMEs naturally attract people with an entrepreneurial mindset, who aren’t afraid to experiment and – crucially – to fail.
Flexible roles often drive inherent cross-functional collaboration and opportunities for upskilling. Understanding the strengths of each employee allows you to transfer skills across departments, to the benefit of multiple teams. It can be a real advantage to pay attention to peoples’ strengths and then ensure their role allows them to play to them.
A good culture is marked by success being determined by more than numbers on a page. Cultural frameworks and employee connections should be as meaningful as financial targets. When disruption is felt, the teams that react best are the ones that are aligned and equipped. Smaller groups, set-up well, can develop trust more quickly, build a stronger culture, and get the best out of people. Truly knowing the people in your team, and how their strengths contribute, is so important for long term success.
Adaptability with AI
The need for agility is particularly true with AI. As an SME, using AI for augmentation and automation has been extremely efficient with a smaller team. We use a tech-driven matching platform, which includes candidate profiling, client requirement mapping and algorithmic matching.
In our initial experiments with AI, we found data quality was an underlying issue. When our matching tool pulled a shortlist of candidates, a member of the team spotted something outside the edges. Because we’re a small team, our people know both parties inside out. So, when AI initially rated a candidate a perfect match, our team could say “not quite – and here’s the reason why”.
Because of this considered human response, our agentic AI can now provide eight high quality matches out of 10, in a fraction of the time. Having a small team means having people who know all aspects of the business, including our candidates. Adding that extra information and human touch has helped us move quicker and get through more with the same headcount.
With any application of AI, human guard rails are essential. But with SMEs, having that experimentation framework can turn blind spots into break throughs.
Having transitioned from a major company to an SME, I know there are different measures of success. At a time when there is so much change across the board, those who move quickly ultimately move further. There is value in staying nimble, and adaptability helps us serve a different purpose to the big corporations. Quick decisions, shifting priorities and cultural frameworks are just some of the ways small teams can tackle big disruption.
Kate Gaskell CEO of Flex Legal