By Catherine Jones bio
More than 1100 law office managers from 14 countries attended the Association of Legal Administrators’ annual conference in Toronto, Ontario this year. The four-day conference spanned two floors of the conference centre, giving everyone plenty of room to comfortably explore. And there was a lot to explore.
The ALA’s “Legal Marketplace” featured 200 exhibitors showcasing everything on an administrator’s wish-list, including an elegant and efficient 5,000 square foot “legal office of the future.”
There were also 90 educational sessions to choose from. Each session was worthy of its own feature article to properly summarize the wealth of information presented, but here are some quick tips gleaned from some of the sessions.
- Maybe law firms should be a little more concerned about the competition. According to Ron Friedman (Maintaining Profitability with New Approaches to Legal and Business Support), although consumers have a growing selection of alternative legal providers to choose from, only a third of those in the session admitted to being concerned about losing their market share to new competition.
- It’s time to roll up the sleeves and dig into technology. There’s an abundance of technological assistance for law firms out there, but it seems to be underused. The new law firm model includes fixed fees, low overhead, flexible schedules, and extensive use of technology for efficiency, yet only 5% of attendees in Ron Friedman’s session reported using document assembly technology for efficiency.
- Remember that time you solved the Rubik’s cube? (Me neither.) But according to Debbie Foster of Affinity Consulting Group (8 Things Affecting Efficiency and How to Fix Them), the approach to solving the puzzle is comparable to your efforts to improve efficiencies in the office: The Rubik’s cube can’t be solved if you’re just focusing on one side of the problem.
- Don’t just throw a tool at an efficiency problem. Tools themselves won’t help unless there’s also a process. According to Ms. Foster, “when people in your office are dropping the ball, it’s because they don’t have the right tools and proper support.”
- Lawyers don’t bounce. (Or at least they don’t bounce back.) In Loeb Consulting’s session (Research Behind the Lawyer Personality), attendees learned that on the Caliper profile, 90% of lawyers scored below the 50 percentile on the resilience trait, meaning they have a low ability to rebound and may not respond well to feedback. This trait, according to the presenter, is possibly the greatest hidden source of “personality risk” for lawyers. So if you are trying to pitch an idea to your managing partner, you’d be wise to remember that he or she doesn’t want to be proven wrong.
- “People shape their behavior based upon rewards systems,” says Kristin Stark of Fairfax Associates (Not All Partners Are Created Equal: Developing Effective Compensation Plans). If a firm tells its partners that it values business generation, yet rewards senior partners who do not generate business, there’s going to be dissatisfaction with the compensation systems. When determining your compensation plan, it needs to be clear what behaviors you are going to value. And to maintain faith in the system, you must designate someone who is company-focused to assess how well a partner has aligned his or her behavior with the firm’s values.
- Billing best practices include setting clear expectations. Whether your firm continues to use traditional hourly billings or opts for a variation of a value-based fee arrangement, Ron Seigneur of Seigneur Gustafson (Maintaining Healthy a Client Relationship from Engagement to Collection) recommends that you: (1) educate your client on your billing procedures and expectations in your engagement letter; (2) use the invoice to highlight the progress the firm has made on the matter; and (3) include a payment due date on your invoices.
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