Investing in Your Practice Management?

Ask yourself how much you invest in Practice Management. To answer this, you first have to define just what Practice Management means to you?

Often when a small firm starts out, Practice Management is a bit of a lofty topic! Just surviving month-to-month cash flow is the priority. Once the business starts to settle down though, it starts to become important to define what you can do to enhance the performance of your firm. In essence this is what Practice Management (as a concept) is all about.

The BIG Three
What are the 3 elements that define any business? In our view, these are the three vital elements that, when working correctly and together, define any successful business:

1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology

Getting these three elements working together is what differentiates your firm from any others. The better you are at creating synergy and harmony between these three "elements" the more successful your practice will be.

Let us now examine more specifically at what elements you could/should invest in to help build the synergy you need to achieve this "ultimate" state:

Staff Training
When you hire staff, they will have been trained either at a University; have had previous experience in other legal firms; done their articles etc. The missing component is often the business training necessary to make them effective in dealing with clients; attending to the large amount of administration inherent in servicing those clients and managing their own time and workloads so that they become profitable members of your firm.

Something you should never cease to invest in is training staff on aspects that will enable them to do a better job and to do it faster. You should strive to mould your own "training culture so that your staff know that in your firm, they are enabled to do things a particular way which produces the results you are looking for.

Process Efficiency
Rather than sending staff on general business courses, it is far better to look internally at your own business. Consult with an expert to identify what needs to be changed; altered or indeed, what innovations you can call upon in order to streamline how you and your staff service clients. With the right amount of guidance you will surprise yourself how easy it is to get on the right track and design internal processes that reduce duplication; time-wasting and improve controls.

Systems
As we provide technology to our clients on a daily basis, this is clearly our area of expertise. It is fair to say that by and large we have reached a point in the legal market, where attorneys now accept that systems are vital to running an efficient business. The problem is that the wrong system can "sour" you on the whole experience and cause you to revert to more manual processes. A good system on the other hand, will change your perspective completely and you will wonder how you ever operated without a complete Practice Management system before? Suffice to say that good systems will go hand in hand with better processes and will form part of staff training.

What should I be investing in…to enhance my Practice Management?
It is widely accepted that the components of a modern Practice Management System are:

• Legal Accounting System - This forms the base and is vital to running the business safely (in terms of SARS and Law Society Rules).
  
• Time and Fee Billing System - Getting your staff to record what they do when they do it is the only way to effectively manage fees. Without this you will lose at least 30% of your potential fees.
  
• Document and Email Management - the sheer volume of documents and emails that cross your desks everyday will dictate that you need no convincing of the value of an effective management tool for this essential task.
  
• Document Automation Systems - Your firm's professionalism and expertise is often communicated via complex documents; agreements; precedents. You should be able to organise; distribute and automate these via your systems.
  
• Specialist Systems - to automate and manage complex tasks like Debt Collection and Conveyancing.
  
• Management Reporting - it is no good capturing everything into systems diligently, if you cannot evaluate and analyse the information for management purposes. You cannot make decisions without management information and this is something that is highly under-utilised by most firms.

1. Is the product user friendly? Could you see yourself and your staff using the system everyday, for everything that you do!
   
2. Do all the components integrate in real time? If downloads/uploads are necessary then you are not dealing with a truly integrated system!
   
3. Does the product integrate effectively with the tools my staff use already? Examples are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook.
   
4. Will it be practical for my staff to use the product in everything they do? If the product is not integral to the way your staff work, then they will never use it effectively!
   
5. Is the management reporting real time? In other words, do the reports reflect everything that has been processed on the system up to that minute!
   
6. How is the system implemented and what training/hand-holding is offered? It is no good to just have a couple of training sessions for staff and then be left to "sink or swim". The software provider should have an extensive implementation project plan which should include at least a month of on site hand-holding or consulting after you start using the product! This is crunch time and you will need the vendor to be around if you are to successfully adopt the product in the long term.

1. Whatever you invest in is practical to use and will easily be adopted by your staff.
   
2. You are able to increase your fees - thereby covering the cost of the system.
   
3. You are able to produce more work with the same staff complement - thereby eliminating the substantial cost of additional/unnecessary salaries (with proper systems; processes and people all working together, any growth will be organic. You won't add overheads because of operational inefficiencies).
   
4. Your investment should reduce administration by removing duplication and automating previously manual processes. This translates into more productive time for you and your staff which translates into more time for clients/better service and in the long term much more revenue!