In order to become and remain a successful and competitive law firm, you must create and continuously improve your Processes. In a nutshell, failure to do so is likely to result in higher costs, lower revenues, less motivated employees and fewer satisfied clients. Let’s look at the five major reasons why your law firm needs Processes and why you should continuously work to improve them.
1. Improves Efficiency: We all know that Time is Money, and when your employees are wasting time through inefficiency, it is costing you money. Taking the time up front to create Processes for each position and all job responsibilities within your firm will help you reduce your overhead and save precious time and money. Without having clear systems and processes for job duties, it is unlikely that all your employees are handling the same type of tasks and objectives in the same way. Some will perform the tasks one way and others another. Some will lag behind, and others perform more efficiently. Some will explain things to your clients one way, and others another. You don’t need this kind of confusion. Successful law firms need streamlined workflow, with all employees working consistently and efficiently. You can’t expect that to happen in your firm without clear guidelines. I suggest you utilize the knowledge of your best employees—the ones that get things done correctly and quickly.
Have them assist you in creating your processes and procedures, so the tasks are spelled out clearly and things are done faster, easier and more efficiently. While other employees may balk initially, all employees work better with clear structure and guidance. The new Touchstone Software PILMMA recently launched will help you put these in place.
2. Supports Knowledge Transfer: You have spent thousands and thousands of dollars either formally or informally, training your staff and lawyers on how to handle cases and how to handle the books and how to handle marketing within your firm. No matter how great you are as an employer, the truth is that no one stays at a job forever. They die, retire, quit, or get fired. A successful law firm needs to prepare for this eventuality. If all your intellectual capital is memorialized in a documented system of processes and procedures, then you are prepared. When you hire and train new employees it is infinitely easier; new hires have their position and job duties all laid out there for them step by step.
Your firm can continue to operate with business as usual, with very little learning curves. You benefit, your staff benefits, and so do your clients.
No more being held hostage: If you have been in business for very long, you have inevitably found yourself working with an employee who has mastered his or her job and figured out how to get things done well but then seems reluctant to train others to do the same. Instead, they resist sharing this intellectual capital, in an attempt to leverage perceived job security. When this happens, it can really put you in a bind. The truth is you paid for that intellectual knowledge and it should be transferred for the benefit of your firm and all other employees. Thankfully, you can avoid this aggravating scenario by putting policies and procedures in place for each position and mandating that all employees participate in the crafting of these systems. If you are currently being held hostage in this way, take affirmative steps immediately. If you aren’t in this unfortunate situation, then take immediate action to make sure it stays that way; no owner should ever be held hostage by their staff or managers.
3. Helps Provide a Framework for Continuous Improvement: With clear processes in place, employees’ work is streamlined, and you should begin to see greater productivity and efficiency. However, a successful law firm is never satisfied with the status quo. There are always opportunities for improvement. As your employees work within these parameters, you will still find that some will come up with even more efficient ways to get the work done. Encourage their input. Even small measures can yield significant results over time. For example, you may have a task broken into 3 steps, but an industrious or creative employee has figured out a way to get the task done in 2 steps, and it saves him or her 5 minutes. Although 5 minutes isn’t that much time when multiplied 20 times per day, and by 340 days per year, that adds up to significant savings for your firm!
Encourage that kind of efficiency.
In my firm, I created an employee suggestion box and encouraged all my staff to be on the lookout for ways to save the firm time or money and to share those ideas by writing them down and placing them in the firm suggestion box. I reviewed the box once a month and rewarded the employees whose ideas were implemented within the firm’s systems. This simple suggestion box encouraged employee job ownership and increased overall firm efficiency. Employees began looking for ways to improve our systems and processes and were genuinely excited when those ideas were implemented across the firm!
4. Helps Scale Your Business: If you really want to grow and expand your practice with multiple offices, the bedrock for doing this is to have your law firm systematized. You must have processes and procedures for everything you do in your law firm. And when I say everything, I really mean everything–from opening new mail to closing a file. When you open new offices, all your employees must be on the same page and doing the tasks the same way. In order to scale your practice, you’ve got to have it running streamlined and organized. Processes and procedures help you do that.
5. Improves Quality Control and Ability to Monitor: Having set processes and procedures for all tasks within the firm also makes it easier to manage your staff and ensure quality control. With clear and spelled out benchmarks you are able to quickly assess employee job performance. You can easily run a variety of reports that show exactly what is happening at all phases of your firm.
Managing your staff is no longer a mystery. With these reports in hand, you can identify who is working efficiently and who is not; you can identify where the bottlenecks are that are clogging up productivity. You can even empower employees to manage themselves, as they are able to run their own reports and see how they are performing and what still needs to be done. By having these critical systems in place, with documented processes and procedures, you can run a much more efficient practice and keep up with your key performance indicators.
Make Time to Save Time: By now, I’m sure you recognize the value of having systems and processes in place. However, the problem for many lawyers is that they just don’t think they have the time to put such a detailed program together. Here’s the deal: like anything else in life, you make time for things that are important. Carving out time to put these processes and procedures together now will save you so much time and money down the road, that is a no-brainer! Of course, the best time to do it would be 20 years ago, and the second-best time to do it is today. I incorporated Touchstone into your PILMMA Membership because I know how invaluable management systematization is to your law firm’s overall success. I urge all of you to take advantage of the Touchstone software and training courses we are providing you as part of your membership.
You can get all the business in the world, but if you can’t handle it efficiently and consistently, then it really doesn’t matter. Honestly, with software like Touchstone at your fingertips, creating this necessary infrastructure has never been easier! I’ve even placed my own law firm systems from my personal injury and social security law practices in the software for you to use. You can implement it as is or use it as a jumping off place for creating your own. And the best part is that it is part of your PILMMA membership!
Don’t be daunted by the task: You can approach systematization as I did with PILMMA: I required all employees to spend 1 hour per week working on their job descriptions and all work tasks and to work in coordination with a person from Touchstone. (ALL PILMMA members receive monthly group training; just watch for the dates and times for these group sessions.) But you can also do what we did and purchase a bundle of individualized one on one Touchstone training hours. If you want more information, just contact Darlene (Darlene@Pilmma.org), our newest team member here at PILMMA and she will get you in contact with the proper person at Touchstone. Suffice to say: Don’t delay! Don’t procrastinate! Do this TODAY, if you want to have a successful and driving law firm in the future.
