Hello everyone! I’m George Chasse, President of Legal Counsel Consulting based in Colorado. It is an honor to be here today to share my ideas with you and many thanks to Debbie Foster and the Affinity Consulting team for giving me this opportunity.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the fortunate experience of speaking with 1,000’s of law firms, from solo attorneys on up to AmLaw 100 firms. Understanding the things that are important to them in addition to representing their clients but actually being successful in running a law firm varies widely.
I’ve seen a solo attorney who would not spend a dime unless it was authorized by her bookkeeper to a large firm that is so over-extended they could not keep up with paying their bills on time. But, I’ve always understood that the one thing they are best at is practicing the law.
To practice law in the changing marketplace you need to be creating a lean, future-focused, efficient business. Yes, we all could use more time. And, we all could use more money.
But, it basically comes down to the overhead of running an independent business requires spending time and money on planning for your future. That is, striving to build a culture and structure in your law firm that adds value for employees, clients, and your bottom line.
So, maybe ask yourself. What is your corporate mission? What is your corporate culture? Where do you want your firm to be in 5 years?
Is your firm meeting these objectives?
Strategic Planning
A law firm of any size has a limited amount of resources. One way to control your resources is to control your expenses. There are going to be your everyday expenses, the monthly commitments and then the annual or multi-year contracts.
By the way, consider contracts longer than 3 years very carefully. In this technology world, there will be options in the future. If you’re locked in a contract, you could lose your negotiating power.
Where can you find the best opportunity to save the most money? The important thing here is to be prepared for these opportunities. They are only going to come along every two or three years, maybe longer.
Things change each year. Even your vendors may be trying out a different business model. According to Altman Weil Flash Survey, the Legal Trends that are thought to be permanent in 2018 focus on legal work as a commodity, competition, bringing work in-house and lack of demand by law firms.
With this being said, more reason for a designated administrator or manager to develop a clear plan for your firm.
Mission/Vision Strategic Planning for your Firm
So, maybe ask yourself, is your business feeling disjointed and at times out of control? It can be a losing battle to be working to create a positive forward moving business without a strong written mission statement. If any part of this that may be true, get yourself planning. The first step is to write out your mission statement. If your firm already has a mission statement, review it and see if it still is on point.
It is important to understand: What type of clients do you want? What type of employees do you want? What type of business do you want to handle? Get that mission statement about your business in writing and shared with everyone who works for you!
Once you have this piece in order, it’s time to start on the vision statement. A vision statement is a guidepost for the direction of your law firm. For instance, where do you want your firm and the people who work for you to be in 5 years? We will touch on this more in the training future leaders section, but, just imagine if everything stayed perfectly the same in your firm for the next five years.
Sounds ideal right? You keep the same work level, you keep your authority, you keep things going. The employees you have today turn out satisfactory work for the next five years. In 5 years, are they are ready for more of the same, more of the monotony?
Is this the ideal vision of the future? Probably not. This type of vision has No growth and No innovation
This is where your vision statement comes into play. It should be an ambitious vision for your firm’s future. Something that won’t happen at the same work level,
Something that won’t leave your authority unchallenged with the difficulty of working toward the vision. And something that won’t just keep things going.
It will propel your business into the future, enlarging your market share, amplifying your brand, and driving you to innovate to capture what the future changes will bring.
With a vision statement, you captain the ship toward the corporate vision.
Together the mission and vision statements become the touchstones upon which daily decisions are made by your team.
This kind of leadership brings us to the next strategic planning component – that of Culture Creation. This is simply defined by creating a fantastic corporate culture that is the envy of your rivals.
This is not just the stuff of touchy feely corporate gurus.
A great corporate culture can drive innovation, attract high value prospects, entice the best clients, and maintain an eye for the business team. With the right mission and vision in place for your law firm you can create an outstanding corporate culture.
So, what is corporate culture? It’s the set of values and norms set by a business and re-enforced by its employees and stakeholders.
Now every firm has a culture. And new talent is looking for opportunities that will add value to their lives, not detract from them. So, is your law firm embodying a positive culture? A negative culture? Or something toxic?
New law school graduates are looking for livable working hours, intellectually challenging work, early responsibility. With all honesty, you will spend more physical time at work and with the team at your firm than you do with your family and friends.
It is important that your firm is a place that respects the employees. A place that allows employees to develop under your firm’s guidance, so a person’s years are not wasted spent working, but can be a place to create value in their lives.
And all this centers around positive culture creation. A positive culture acknowledges those that work with you have voice and choice. So, all employee prospects that have an internal core set of values, finding employees that match your firm’s values, and moving away from those that don’t is the first step to positive culture creation.
Practice teaching your value lessons for all to see the business side and how it interacts with clients.
Ask: “What if we acted on our values in this situation?” “Are we following our values?” “Are we speaking and doing according to our core beliefs and following our mission statement?”
Some firms devote time for employees to get together and discuss the issues of the day and how those issues were handled in concordance with the firm’s values and mission. This way, team members are able to learn clear ways to fit daily issues into the firm’s values.
When you began with a team that has values matched to your business values then you can ensure that employees will feel that their voice can be heard. Also, this allows for you as a firm to remain consistent in the eyes of clients.
So, clearly state your firm’s values in your mission statement. Perhaps include an ethical mission statement alongside your traditional mission statement. And re-enforce, and re-enforce, and then do it again.
Create your culture, choose your team, then keep that engine moving forward. You will find, your approach to work, your young associates approach to work, your partners’ approach to work, and even your support staff will all be presenting a consistent cultural front for your business.
Again, what is the point? One, it’s to drive innovation finding an entirely new way to conduct processes to save your firm time and money. Two, to attract high value prospects to keep turnover costs low, develop leaders from within, and save your time by having team members that you can trust to speak correctly for your business. And three, entice the best clients, high-value clients that pay their bills, require less handholding, and refer other high-value clients. And, lastly, maintain an eye for the business team.
These items are the elements that bring us back to your goals as business law firm leaders.
Technological Innovation
AS a leader, it’s important to push for Technological Innovation. The practice of law is a cutting-edge field. Only the most up-to-date information can keep your firm winning for your clients. Law firms need access to legal research services to be successful in their legal arena. But the legal research field is changing.
Gone are the days of pouring over law books on the shelf, gone are the days when research software was downloaded onto company machines, and fading are the days of the duopoly held by the two top legal research providers. Their hold on 78% of the legal research market share won’t last forever.
This is an exciting time to be practicing law. The traditional day-to-day of lawyering can be outsourced or automated. Your new work can focus on creative and forward focused methods that embrace the changes in the field.
When looking at new technology, do your due diligence and understand what you are getting into. Is this a long-term investment, where if you don’t like it, it will cost you thousands of dollars to change? Or is it a simpler technological version of the way you are doing things now and you can switch vendors if your needs are not being met. Always know the terms of each agreement and what the exit strategy would look like if you were to switch or cancel.
Cyber Security is becoming a huge part of practicing law. Is your staff well trained on protocol? Do you have a contingency plan in place? Who is the first person to contact when you feel you’ve been hacked?
New specialty titles may emerge in the legal field under the CIO or CTO as technology changes the landscape.
Perhaps “Legal Knowledge Engineer”, “Legal Cyber Technologist”, “Legal Process Analyst”.
Clinging to the traditional technology will leave you behind your peers.
So, are you riding the technological wave or stuck clinging to the past?
You may want to consider: How your law firm can match the pace of technology without over paying? Is your law firm using the most up-to-date methods for legal research? Are there newer, more innovative options in the field your firm is missing? Are you using the most cost-effective options available?
Only a willingness to embrace the technological innovation will bring profitability and growth to your business.
Holding onto the ways of operating a firm in the past will only cause stagnation and decline for your firm’s bottom line.
How confident are you that your firm is prepared to keep pace with the challenges of the new legal marketplace? And what about the shareholders’ awareness? If you are over 65% confident, you might consider your self in the majority. If you are less than that, you may want to start some discussions.
Process Optimization
What I’ve learned about attorneys is that they love practicing the law. Most would prefer not to go out looking for tools to make their job easier, they’d prefer to have it placed right in their lap. If it’s something they can benefit from, they will use it, if not, they will keep using their same methods.
This is the difference between innovation and strategy. How do you optimize new processes?
Companies in the world that have successfully used innovation to improve processes are shining examples of using new ideas to create results that bring profit.
Progressive Insurance changed the entire process it used for completing insurance claims. They did not revamp the process. They did not redesign the process. They created a new way of doing the business of insurance. The results? They are currently the only domestic insurance company that generates a profit from insurance. The others all make money on cash flow operations, but lose revenue in the field of selling policies, processing claims, and paying out for losses.
Toyota boasts a similar story. The auto production industry was dominated by large, clumsy production methods utilized by American companies. Toyota came into the market with the Toyota production system. An innovation that changed car manufacturing from all process points in the auto factories. Their innovation caused the rise of their company to stellar success levels, while the American giants stagnated, decayed, and lost profit share in the market.
What are you doing in your law firm to ensure you are not left out of the innovation loop?
We’ve already discussed the tech innovation happening in the legal research field.
This is a great area to dig deep-in to innovate your legal research processes, and save yourself time and money. But are there more areas you should be exploring?
Definitely! Examine your business. Find your processes and then open your law firm to the future by turning old legal business processes upside down. Innovate and capture that next big movement that is surely coming to the legal field.
If your firm changed the strategic approach to be more efficient, how much increase in profits per equity partner would you see?
Training Future Leaders
Let’s take this a step further with your Existing Talent Pool.
Is your business adding value by training leaders or are you simply working with ever-lasting followers?
As we discussed in the strategic planning section, having employees who never grow and never challenge your direction is not the ideal situation it appears to be at first glance.
Are you teaching your people the value of an ethical business focus? Are you teaching your team to lead? Are you adding value to their lives or just handing them a paycheck?
Without value creation in the employee realm, you will lose talent. What is your turnover rate? 10%, 20% 30%?
The turnover rate in the law field varies by size of firm, practice area and location.
But, according to DailyPay, in the top performing businesses in the general business field, the average turnover rate is 10%. Why accept this costly and old-fashioned model for practicing law? Create something better in your firm.
Teaching to lead
Many large and mid-size firms today have a shared responsibility structure even at the top levels. Sometimes they have a chairperson in addition to a managing partner or some firms utilize a Chief Operating Officer. This is all an effort to step away from the controlling leadership prevalent at the law firms of the past.
The goal is to create a business with shared responsibility and shared leadership that mirrors corporate leadership structures in the modern business field.
This shared leadership and shared responsibility can be carried to all levels of your firm. This management strategy will allow you to build leaders from within.
The first step to building business leaders is participation. Open up discussions with those junior law partners. At first it’s very unlikely that their comments will be of a high quality.
The likely scenario is, in the beginning, their offerings to the business of the law firm will be OK or worse. But the act of participation is the educational process.
They will learn the business side by participating, It’s like teaching children how to make their bed. At first, it isn’t how it looks, it’s the effort they put into it at their level of development. Over time they are just going to get better. And, this perhaps is more important, they will learn how to be a good participant.
Teach them to add to discussions in a way that is thorough but flexible. This process of involving young law graduates and young business managers in your law firm’s business will add value and worth to them as employees.
If your firm had to name a new Managing Partner/President/CEO today, are there one or more qualified candidates available who could take on the role?
Adding Value
You are creating an employee better than the one you hired. One with an intricate and intimate knowledge of your corporate mission and vision. And they will be able to, after time, connect those trajectories to day-to-day business dealings that enhance your law firm’s position and propel you forward.
This is employee value creation. You make it happen. It’s not easy and it certainly does not happen quickly. But, over time, implementation of your corporate culture, your mission and your vision into the lives of your employees creates a real value that is found in your employees.
Instead of you working to move your company forward, You now have employees that are stakeholders in your company. They will be ready, willing and able to drive that forward momentum everyday themselves. And that will defiantly add value to your profit margins.
To Summarize: Employee Ethical Business Focus
This is the part where you, as a business owner or business manager, are able to use everything discussed thus far to create a real impact in your employees’ lives.
You have created your mission statement. You took it one step further and created a complementary ethical mission statement. You crafted your vision statement.
You created a fantastic corporate culture in your law firm. Then you opened your business up for technological innovation and process optimization. This was all directed by you as your employees watched closely your ethical, precise and directed leadership in your firm. They watched with anticipation. You opened up the field and involved them in your business. You trained your employees to follow your mission and vision for your law firm. Then you trained them to be leaders and decision makers in your business. You added value to your human capital. You positioned yourself for the future and for growth.
Now you hone that focus and open your well-trained, value-heavy employees to have the freedom to make ethical business decisions at work. This may involve being selective with clients you take on. You will allow your employees to voice their ethics about business decisions. It will create a culture that will emanate from beyond your walls. You will be known. You will be envied as a firm with impeccable values, and unwavering direction. You will be known for a team that works together in concert to pull the whole thing off with an air of ease.
Will it be easy? A big “NO” is the answer. But it will bring value and direction to your law firm that you will proudly direct. You will practice law in the changing marketplace with an effortlessness appearance. Your product will no longer be simple legal services, but will be legal services with a lean, future-focused, efficient, and adaptable business. A model for others in the field to envy.