An Australian firm has launched an international internship program aimed at improving its business.
Seeking to reinvent the way the firm is run, Adelaide based Kain C+C Lawyers has opened its doors to innovative ideas from overseas.
A different student from Michigan State University’s ReInvent Law program will visit the firm each year to identify and then implement a project to improve the firm’s business.
After meeting Dan Katz, the founder of the Reinvent Law Laboratory at a conference in London in 2012, Kain C+C managing director John Kain is taking on an ‘innovation intern’ to bring fresh ways of working to the firm.
“We believe that coupled with the right systems and processes, this internship can help us to more effectively run our business and in turn, will deliver better results for our clients,” said Kain.
“The intension is to spend about a week in the business, getting to know how the business operates, and then spending a couple of weeks implementing the project and then a week reviewing and checking it,” he said. “The project that he’ll be working on will be developing and implementing across the business certain decision tree analytics and tools which we don’t currently use in a formal sense.”
Intern and Michigan State University master’s student Daniel Elliott will join the firm for a month in August.
“I'll be looking at the cost structures of the firm and using analytical tools to help Kain C+C better understand itself and its clients. This way the client will have an agreed-upon price to achieve an agreed-upon objective at an agreed-upon time,” said Elliott. “I would say the thing that predominantly needs to be changed is the way in which lawyers work and the mindset that goes with the way in which they do work now.”
For Kain, the internship isn’t just about improving the business in the short term but also exposing the firm to new and interesting ways of working. He said it is important for firms to be always looking for ways to improve, and predicted that introducing a new perspective to the firm would also help in that regard.
“Part of this internship is about bringing the world to us… exposing our team to people who have got very different experiences,” he said.
