Tag Archives: Motivation

Nov 18

Greater Manchester Chamber, Legal Sector – the City card saved me £48.80 on a meal for Four

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One of the many benefits of membership of the Legal Sector is the “Chamber City Card” which gives you and all your staff with a card lots of discounts on all the local services and products listed here. They change from time to time.

Today it includes deals at 26 restaurants and 17 bars and cafes in central Manchester; also 19 restaurants in Manchester suburbs.

I tried it out myself at Hale Kitchen & Bar last Friday night. Using my Chamber City Card meant that I paid £48.80 less than I would otherwise – excellent!   Good for them too as the offer of a discount was enough to get me to try them out, when there are lots of other options in Hale.   I discovered it’s a good place to eat; great food and relaxed atmosphere, so I’ll be back again very soon.

Could this be good for you AND your employees?  If you have a card, are you using it?

Maybe I will see you at Hale Kitchen & Bar?

 Allan Carton

Mar 10

£50,000 Incentive for Innovation – just launched

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Most law firms are looking at new ways of delivering legal services, where innovation will lead to radical change in some areas of operation in forward-looking law firms; internally and client-facing.  The best ideas will come from your people … or your clients if you talk to them enough about ways to improve and modernise your service.

Would you deal your people into this initiaive from Barclays? It might prompt them to dig a bit deeper with clients and colleagues for your benefit?  But you only have until 27th April 2011 to do it – so you need to make a quick decision.  Are you prepared to let them spend time thinking about this?

Barclays Business – Take One Small Step Competition (launched 7th March):

This is a Great Britain-wide business competition with cash prizes worth £50,000 on offer for nine regional businesses that can best demonstrate passion, ambition and a great entrepreneurial idea.  The competition is run through two-stages.  A panel of judges will initially select three finalists per region, but the overall winners will be chosen as a result of a public vote held on the competition’s website.        

Initial entries will be assessed against the following criteria:

  • Originality.
  • Suitability.
  • Likelihood of success.
  • Quality and attention to detail in the application.

The brief for business ideas is open – it could be a lifelong ambition or a recent brainwave. It could be a personal experience or a distant dream. Even a revolutionary concept that changes the world. It is an open invitation, and anyone with a great business idea and the drive to make it happen could win.

Interested applicants must submit an online entry at the competition website. They also have the option of uploading a video to support their entry. These videos must: 

  • Last a maximum of two minutes.
  • Be less than 100MB.
  • Not include illegal content.

Initial entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges, who will come up with a shortlist of three finalists for each of the 10 regions. The overall winners in each region will be decided by a public vote on the competition website. 

Contact us for more information on how to apply if you are interested.

If this doesn’t fit for you, are there other ways you can motivate your people to come up with new ideas to challenge old ways?  Could you run your own internal competition.  You may offer smaller prize for the winner but winnning ideas could be worth a lot to your practice.

Allan Carton

Apr 14

Taking your first steps with social media

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Everywhere you look these days people are talking about “social media” but what’s all the fuss about and why should you bother? 

Focused Networking, Efficient Use of Time, Better Information?

Social media makes business networking much more effective and efficient using the web, which has succeeded in making geography and time irrelevant when developing new opportunities.  Now you can network with anyone anywhere.  You can reach more of the right (and wrong) people faster and you can get to know more relevant information about them than just meeting face-to-face; and you can make sure you meet the right people face-to-face, when you do.

This is as much about developing relationships with existing clients, referrers and business partners (to bring them closer to you) as it is about targeting new prospects. You can constantly drip feed information about you, your organisation, what you could be doing for them and what interests you to people you connect with.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook also enable you to become proactive and interactive with your website and blog.  People who “follow” or “connect to” or get involved in the same groups, or register to attend the same events as you  can be prompted to check you out on their mobile or email any time you add new material by a “tweet” or a status update.

To find out more about our approach go here to download our free advice or contact Allan Carton at acarton@inpractice.co.uk or on +44 (0)7779 653105

Feb 16

Staff engagement moves up the agenda of top firms

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What is engagement? The term can mean different things to different people. Some equate it to job satisfaction or commitment.  Although these are both important elements, they are not necessarily the ones that will have a direct impact on business performance. Your staff may be satisfied and may like working for you but the real test is do staff like it here, do they want to stay and will they go that extra mile. Being able to understand that and measure it is a real differentiator for companies.

Full engagement represents an alignment of maximum job satisfaction (“I like my work and do it well”) with maximum job contribution (“I help achieve the goals of my organisation”). This is a real win-win situation that meets the needs of the organization and staff. It’s the panacea that savvy organizations strive for in order to effect the bottom line. Employers want engaged staff because they deliver improved business performance; a fact demonstrated many times by research.  The independent research organization Gallup found that organizations with engaged staff have lower turnover, higher growth, better productivity and better customer loyalty.

Given the clear association between engagement, job satisfaction, and performance, there is every incentive for management to seek to drive up levels of engagement among their workforce. Employers should consider: allowing people the opportunity to feed their views and opinions upwards as this is seen as the single most important driver of engagement.  In addition keeping employees informed about what is going on in the organisation is also seen as crucial. Different groups of employees are influenced by different combinations of factors, and managers need to consider carefully what is most important to their own staff.

So how do you build an engaged workforce?

The first step is to measure the current level of employee engagement.  This includes staff’s perceptions on a range of dimensions including for example, reward & recognition, communications, personal development, leadership and work/life balance. Without this benchmark organisations will find it impossible to judge what areas they have right and where they need to improve.

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Feb 07

5 Simple Questions: Listening to clients to understand their "Client Experience".

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If Virgin Trains give you a bad experience (ticket office, late train, poor service, toilets broken and non-caring staff) from Liverpool or Manchester to London you feel pretty angry but are likely to use them again as they are the only train service and driving or plane are not for you. As a client or prospect of a law firm you have a choice; you can give the lawyers a bad reputation, which will get passed on – and you can go to another supplier.

It is a simple fact that law firms compete by delivering greater value to clients than their competitors. If you are not able to deliver value, or enable the client to recognise [measure] it, then there is little chance of winning, keeping or growing them for more business. The key therefore to securing the future success of your firm is to identify the sources of client value and understand how clients measure it?

My co-consultant Lee Williams lwilliams@inpractice.co.uk is increasingly bringing his extensive experience in the management of client expectations from a commercial and financial services environment into the legal sector dealing with culture and business processes (lean) to effect major improvements.

“Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, it is an opportunity to form an impression.”  Jan Carlzon (Former CEO, Scandinavian Airlines)

Lee says “Essentially value is equated or measured by clients in terms of a set of positive or negative experiences? We often simplify this to being, a measure of value for money! But it can be much more than this. Value is measured by clients, through their analysis of what it is like doing business with us, the output from interaction or benefits when compared with the sacrifices they make in doing, and choosing to do, business with us.

Ahead of this article a quick straw poll of just a few of my friends about what it is like dealing with law firms brought about the following comments:

“Tell them to answer their phones!”

“I hope you’re not going to talk to them for too long, they charge by the minute”.

“They charge 21st century fees for a 19th century service”.

These ‘moments of truth’ possibly provide an invaluable insight into what it is like ‘doing business’ with your firm – enabling you and your colleagues to respond positively. 

Question 1 – What is it like doing business with us?

You need to start by capturing those moments of truth, both positive and negative, that describe what it is like doing business with you!

Second, you need to map out your clients experiences, their key touchpoints, who they talk to (or not in the case of my friend’s experience), how you compare to other businesses they deal with (including professional service businesses), what process you put them through, what communications you make or don’t, how many people they have to deal with.  This list can be extensive, however when complete you can really describe their experiences (remember all clients are different and so are their expectations and experiences).

Question 2 – Which businesses that you deal with deliver a great customer experience and why?  How do you compare them?

Next you need to understand your sources of value.  These can be your people; “we just love working with John he’s an absolute star” or “the efficient way you handled my case was excellent”.  Interestingly, the core element of your service, i.e. law, won’t often be cited as a source of value.  Often your ability to perform law is simply expected, it’s what all law firms do; it’s not what differentiates you over competitors. 

Question 3 – What is it that you actually value in doing business with us?  Why us, not them?

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Nov 17

Have you considered coaching for key lawyers and managers?

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Time and time again, Managing Partners, CEO’s and Practice Directors talk to us about their frustration with partners who say all the right things about improving the way they run their part of the business, but don’t actually do it!  The partners themselves get frustrated because they want to do it (whatever “it” is) but don’t know enough about what they need to do or how to change to put it into practice.  That includes many managing partners who have taken on the job without being fully equipped, but really want to get it right for the benefit of the firm and for themselves.

Personal coaching is probably the most effective solution in these circumstances; a type of initiative that law firms have only taken on board seriously in the past few years, where the value and impact and willingness of lawyers and managers to get involved has traditionally been grossly under-estimated.  These valuable people need and want more support, knowledge and understanding of the role they should play in their practice, given their personal traits and characteristics and the environment in which they work. 

Coaching can be for for just one key person in the firm, or individually to teams – both for managers and for lawyers and can produce radical improvements in the ability of lawyers to make the changes they want and changes that are being asked of them by others. For each person involved, you can expect successful coaching to: Build understanding and skills on business leadership; delegation, team effectiveness, empower/engagement; Develop key behaviours needed to deliver on business objectives; Provide managers with the essential space they need to reflect; Build self awareness; Motivate, inspire and support them to be their best in order to deliver superior performance; Develop emotional intelligence; e.g. emotional resilience, motivational leadership, intuitiveness etc; Build confidence and creativity; Help them to manage the complexities and challenges of change within their organisation; Help them stay focused on tasks whilst building team cohesion; Helps managers to learn rather than teaches them and Equip them to become the coach to their staff, ensuring a coaching style of management throughout the organisation.

Anybody interested should call me please on 0161 929 8355 or email me at rmaguire@inpractice.co.uk This is one of the areas we explore in our introductory in-house Performance Management workshops.

How do you feel about this? Is this a good thing for lawyers to get involved with?

Oct 04

Have you considered coaching for key lawyers and managers?

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Time and time again, Managing Partners, CEO’s and Practice Directors talk to us about their frustration with partners who say all the right things about improving the way they run their part of the business, but don’t actually do it!  The partners themselves get frustrated because they want to do it (whatever “it” is) but don’t know enough about what they need to do or how to change to put it into practice.  That includes many managing partners who have taken on the job without being fully equipped, but really want to get it right for the benefit of the firm and for themselves.

Personal coaching is probably the most effective solution in these circumstances; a type of initiative that law firms have only taken on board seriously in the past few years, where the value and impact and willingness of lawyers and managers to get involved has traditionally been grossly under-estimated.  These valuable people need and want more support, knowledge and understanding of the role they should play in their practice, given their personal traits and characteristics and the environment in which they work. 

Coaching can be for just one key person in the firm, or individually to teams – both for managers and for lawyers and can produce radical improvements in the ability of lawyers to make the changes they want and changes that are being asked of them by others. For each person involved, you can expect successful coaching to:

  • Build understanding and skills on business leadership; delegation, team effectiveness, empower/engagement;
  • Develop key behaviours needed to deliver on business objectives;
  • Provide managers with the essential space they need to reflect;
  • Build self awareness;
  • Motivate, inspire and support them to be their best in order to deliver superior performance;
  • Develop emotional intelligence; e.g. emotional resilience, motivational leadership, intuitiveness etc;
  • Build confidence and creativity;
  • Help them to manage the complexities and challenges of change within their organisation;
  • Help them stay focused on tasks whilst building team cohesion;
  • Helps managers to learn rather than teaches them;
  • Equip them to become the coach to their staff, ensuring a coaching style of management throughout the organisation

Anybody interested should call me please on 0161 929 8355 or email me at rmaguire@inpractice.co.uk This is one of the areas we explore in our introductory in-house Performance Management workshops.

How do you feel about this? Is this a good thing for lawyers to get involved with?

Jun 12

Lawyers doing a Cucina?

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Rupert White wrote an interesting piece on the Law Society’s InBusiness blog earlier in the week demonstrating what lawyers can learn from Pizze Cucina. It just goes to show how developing advocates for your service, referrals and recommendations works. His piece was enough to get me to go find the Pizze Cucina website and check them out – so a bit of free advertising for them here for any of you in the area! I agree with Rupert – Lawyers do need to think more laterally about how they develop and manage their relationship with clients. Most of it doesn’t cost any money at all.

A simple example. Something we do when we are working with law firms on selling the “benefits” of their service, where most will say they are caring, approachable … and all that. It’s always interesting on something like a conveyancing transaction (where the relationship between lawyer and client can easily last 3 months – more these days!) to ask fee earners a few questions to see if they’ve made the effort to try to build up some rapport with the client.  We ask them to take the last 10 completed transactions they’ve handled; then ask them 2 basic questions about each of these clients, to be answered off the top of their head:

  • What kind of job do they do?
  • How many children do they have?

Of course, some people do know, but it’s shocking to see how few can answer these questions – so most are not thinking much about the client? Most are just getting the job in hand done. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not enough to build a business now.

For us, client satisfaction is the best measure of business performance – exceptionally satisfied clients talk about you to friends (as advocates of your service), are more inclined to come back, pay more and are easier to work for when something does go wrong .. for starters; but you have to keep reminding them.

Oct 25

Are you using a 360 degree view to appraise partner or fee earner performance?

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It may not be right for every firm, but getting direct feedback from a variety of people within the practice whose views and opinions are trusted by the person being appraised (perhaps even including clients) can provide powerful feedback to help everyone in a practice understand how best to develop their skills.  This descriptive chart can help people understand what can be learned from going through a 360 degree feedback style exercise as part of the business development process.   Self assessment and feedback on areas that are agreed to be critical to the performance of the business can help fill in (for example) a fee earner’s understanding of where they can improve their own performance and that of other people around them; but this need not just be for fee earners.  Those areas might include aspects of:

  • Team skills
  • People management
  • Communication skills
  • Client orientation
  • Results orientation
  • Professional competence
  • Problem solving and adaptability

© Alan Chapman 2003 and see www.businessballs.com  

To introduce these kinds of evaluations effectively, there are some key steps to take you should take, such as:

  1. Involve the people taking part in assessment in the development of questionnaires;
  2. Get their input on who should provide the feedback to them;
  3. Ensure the core values being evaluated are agreed;
  4. Perhaps use online questionnaires to make taking part and compilation of results easier;
  5. Run a pilot with some of the enthusiasts;
  6. Make sure that results are communicated to the right people;
  7. Agree an approach to confidentiality.

Any other thoughts from firms who have done this or something similar, or are considering doing it?

Jul 05

8,500 law firms set to become 5,500 … soon?

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Stephen Mayson’s prediction – read more below.  For better or worse, I agree with him and this is probably going to happen sooner than most lawyers expect.    I have just completed a round of conferences with Central Law Training aimed at smaller and medium-sized firms, where I was discussing what technologies lawyers should be investing in today.  Just one aspect of the challenges facing lawyers today, but one which will play a significant part in distinguishing successful practices from the rest.  My interest is not in the technical side of technology, but in how a firm should develop their strategy and their people to harness the potential of IT to support a successful, profitable business that can hold its own against potential competitors.     Our big message is to get lawyers using more technology “hands-on” themselves so they don’t have to ask someone else to do it for them.  However, from the show of hands on who has or hasn’t got what on these sessions, it appears that partners in most small and medium sized firms are failing to take the lead to help their lawyers (and other staff); to help them think differently about their work and their relationship with clients and others with whom they work.  They are not helping lawyers in the way they must - as business managers – to give them the understanding, tools and skills needed to focus more on giving clients what they know they want; what they can touch, feel and experience about the legal service they experience.    Lawyers are not alone in this.  At a discussion group I attended recently with a group of accountants, they were questioning why their clients were not using technology more.  We concluded that the accountants weren’t entitled to ask the question.  Virtually all of them were making very limited use of technology themselves.  As with lawyers, this is largely down to professionals feeling that, as “professionals” they shouldn’t be expected to deal with such things.   There is however a difference between UK lawyers and US lawyers.  I have never been convinced that technology available to lawyers in the UK is that far behind what has been available in the US.  We have certainly been well ahead in case management for a long time.  However, we have been miles behind on how willing lawyers have been to use it themselves.  This is so fundamental that we have in the past advised owners of a very successful legal software product in the US, not to bring it over here.  To produce the excellent results their software could produce, lawyers need to touch the keyboards and use the software themselves – in the US they did, in the UK, they wouldn’t.  So our client put their plans on hold.  All the evidence suggests that lawyers’ attitudes on this have not changed much in the UK during the past couple of years.    Instead young, IT-capable lawyers are getting sucked into the habits of their peers so the potential for working smarter often dissolves under the pressure of work.  Regrettably, lawyers with authority (not just the older partners in my experience) in most legal practices are not in a position to create peer pressure within their firm.    When it comes to typing, I am not suggesting that lawyers should ever type more than a line or two for themselves.  They need to be willing to “point and click” more to move documents around and get information.  Being able to exchange a few words in a “chat” online with the clients and contacts who are already comfortable with this way of keeping in contact would be good.  If you want it, you can do this for free.   Lawyers need to work with their IT people (with some input from whoever understands what clients want) to set up systems that allow them to do more, faster by just pointing and clicking.  And yes, more lawyers need to be able to type just a bit better to make this comfortable.  They can then fill in the odd piece of text between “points and clicks” to do it for themselves:

  • Get the information they need on their desktop;
  • Share knowledge and experience;
  • Produce whatever documentation they need;
  • Send it wherever they want it to go.

With non-legal organisations like HBOS, The AA and the Co-op all providing legal services now, the pressure is on to get closer to clients, streamline legal processes to both cut costs and improve the service, while paying more attention to communication and presentation as key parts of the legal service.     Although technology (and particularly new, cheaper, more user-friendly tools now available) is critical in all these areas, it is clear from the feedback on these sessions that very few firms have woken up to the reality of what can be done differently and better.  Very few are even exploring the new options becoming available to help lawyers work smarter - never mind putting them into practice.  Without some exploration of what is possible, it is unlikely that lawyers will develop a vision of what is really possible, so there is nothing to aspire to … so little will change.   Our research in early 2006 of nearly 300 law firms found that 22% spent nothing on IT training for their staff and another 22% less than £100 per head.  Little wonder then that lawyers find it easier to get someone else to use if for them.   Examples of these new tools and ways of working with IT include:

  • Online HR management programs,
  • Multi-purpose tools like Microsoft SharePoint that give you secure shared work areas (with documents, tasks, discussion groups, links to more info and much more) for you and your client (or you and your colleagues) on the Web, document management, web content management and much more
  • CRM4Legal – providing full client relationship management tools within Outlook, which most lawyers use every day.
  • Microsoft Live and Messenger which allows you to chat online to clients and colleagues (but not securely, so keep this informal for now)
  • Online newsletters – so you can view who reads what, let them choose if they want your communications, build up a loyal community of contacts
  • Outsourcing management of IT to expert IT management companies who have the skills and resource to keep up to date, letting you focus on helping your lawyers “point and click” more.
  • VoIP – using the Internet for telephone calls to cut costs.

Check out the “related links” section of this blog for more information on these.

Some initiative is needed in most firms to explore how these new options can be made to work for lawyers determined to improve the way they operate and collaborate with other lawyers, clients and introducers.

In summarising his address to these sessions, Stephen Mayson concluded that “the current legal services have been described by some as a ‘wake-up call’ for lawyers.  In fact, the alarm went off at least 4 years ago when David Clementi was appointed to carry out his review.   Some didn’t hear it and are still asleep.  Most, I think, hit the ‘snooze’ button and are still in the twilight zone between congnisance and action.  Not enough have leapt up and breathed in the new dawn’s fresh air.  It’s not difficult to imagine where we might find 3,000 law firms to lose!”   The most inspiring part of the sessions for me was the half hour case studies from firms that are wide awake; examples of firms that have at least begun to address the challenges and new opportunities that are being created.  I don’t think any of them found developing their business easy, but the key features that appear to be common in these firms appear to be:

  • None of them found it easy.
  • Someone was prepared to lead and put their neck on the line.
  • Tenacity.
  • Acceptance of a level of managed risk.
  • All have partners prepared to manage or are prepared to work with others able to manage.
  • Lawyers prepared to listen and learn.
  • Lawyers prepared / determined to change.

Candid case studies were presented by:   Warners, Bishop & Sewell, Bolt Burden, Fidler & Pepper, BPL, Pannone & Partners, Barnetts, Withy King, Raworths, Crombie & Wilkinson, Blackett Hart & Pratt, Follett & Stock, Kester Cunningham John, Woolley & Co.