Systems, Procedures and Quality in Legal Services

This article looks at the concept of Practice Management in the legal profession.

In 1992, the Law Society started looking at the concept of ‘Professional Practice’. A Professional Practice Committee was formed as a standing committee of the Society and held its first meeting on 19 March 1992.

Nine years on, the Committee is now called the Practice Management Committee (‘the Committee’) and is firmly focused on educating the profession on practice and management. In the last seven years, the Committee has organised an annual seminar highlighting the trends in law firm management and risk management for the Bar.

To many lawyers, Practice Management is an elusive concept. Quite rightly so, I should add, as it covers a wide spectrum.

In essence, practice management is intended to achieve two objectives, quality service for the client and increased profitability for the law practice.

Practice Management is achieved in many ways: (a) having law office strategy, structure and systems; (b) studying areas like marketing, managing people and leadership; and (c) creating culture, value, a system and philosophy of the practice to increase efficiency and improve client care.

In the past two years, at the Law Society’s Secretariat, I have worked with the Committee to look at means to improve delivery of legal services. The Law Society looked at quality management standards that have been adopted in countries like Australia and England. In each of these countries, generic standards for business excellence were identified as a framework to help law practices deliver services to their clients in the most efficient manner. It is also intended to motivate providers of the service and to win the loyalty and support of clients.

Case management, file management, forward planning, financial and risk management and people management are key elements in any quality management system for a law practice, however small or large.

I had the opportunity to travel to London with the support of the Law Society’s Brokers, Alexander Forbes, last September, to study the standards created by the Law Society of England and Wales as a business excellence mark for their legal industry called Lexcel. I visited practices both large and small in London, which understood that quality in legal services was the way forward.

In this article I would like to briefly describe aspects of this English standard as the Law Society of Singapore sees a similar model which it is building for our legal profession as a voluntary standard as the way ahead to meet clients’ expectations and succeed.

I would also in this article describe why notions of practice management are not ‘challenges’ for a law practice but necessary tools to standardise business operations and help deliver quality in legal service.

The President of the Law Society,  Mr Palakrishnan, SC, at his Opening of Legal Year address, announced the Law Society’s initiative on practice standards as follows:

Third is the issue of practice standards and quality control. The Law Society has been examining the introduction of voluntary standards of practice so as to enhance the quality of services offered to clients, improve the management of the law practice and the morale and motivation of its staff.

Lexcel Practice Management Standard

The Lexcel standards do not prescribe procedures and systems. Instead, they identify ‘key disciplines’ in which procedures and systems are required and against which a law practice can measure them.¹

A solicitor’s firm in England gets independently assessed if it meets the standards set by Lexcel. The quality mark is awarded to the firm by the Law Society of England and is valid for three years.

The solicitor’s practice is, however, monitored on an annual basis. In order to achieve Lexcel, practices comply with the six core Practice Management Standards that cover the following areas:

1. Management structure — Practices will have a written description of their management structure that designates the responsibilities of individuals and lines of accountability.
2. Services and forward planning — Practices outline key objectives for the next 12 months and also outline a strategy for a further two years against which the practice may review its performance and make decisions about its future. The plans must identify resources and skills necessary to deliver the strategy, with a finance plan and budget, client groups to be served, how services are to be provided and how the services will meet the needs of the clients and describe an approach to marketing.
3. Financial management — Document responsibility for financial affairs of the practice. An annual budget, annual profit and loss account, annual balance sheet and cash flow forecast are a must.
4. Managing people — Job descriptions shall be identified, recruitment policies, induction processes for new post holders, performance appraisals, supervision arrangements and training must be in place to foster communication within the practice.
5. Office administration — An office manual to collate office practice, maintenance and support services and legal reference material.
6. Case management — Systems to index matter, identify conflict of interest, ensure risk management procedures are in place, ensure proper monitoring of undertakings given, compliance with the rules of adequate professional services, documented procedure for taking instructions from clients, keeping clients informed on progress of a matter, providing information on costs, proper storage of clients’ documents, procedure for using experts, file management and file review.
   

Business Planning

Law firms/law corporations are business entities and organisations. We need to strategise for our business, we need to organise our business and, most of all, we need to motivate the people who work for us. This is a given thing, whether we are proprietors, partners or directors of a law firm or corporation. The days when we could say that we are here to merely interpret, apply and present the law on behalf of our clients while the business takes care of itself are long gone.

Every practice must adopt the core standard of forward planning. There is a need to focus each year on the type of service you provide. Analyze the service you provide, identify who your clients are or can be, and what your markets are. This will need to be reviewed in the course of the year.

You assess your strengths and weaknesses in the current and possible future market place, assess your resources and what will work best for your practice.

Forward planning is a must for any lawyer who intends to start a practice. Professor Stephen Mayson in his book Making Sense of Law Firms² under the chapter ‘The Strategy Process’ writes:

Lawyers who are starting a new practice are faced with many challenges. They may be confronted with a range of administrative issues such as choosing office space, arranging insurance and buying equipment as well as the strategic business issues facing any start up. It is perhaps not surprising that a significant number of start-up businesses fail within five years. But it is not usually the administrative overload that causes the unsuccessful firms to fold. It is their failure to address some of the most fundamental issues and philosophies, which will guide the practice’s operations.

This is true of many of our practices that start up. The difficult questions that are never asked are:

• Are we compatible partners?
• Are our business and work philosophies similar?
• What is the business plan for our intended firm?
• Where do we want this partnership to be in two or three years’ time?
• Why did we choose to form a partnership as opposed to a law corporation or be part of a group law practice?
  

Systems and Procedures

The reality today in our competitive marketplace is that there is a need to have a business plan, controls and systems. Yes, law practices are ‘know-how’ businesses. We sell our know-how to our clients. However, there is much in a law practice that we provide that is standard in its workflow for which we must develop workflow systems to ensure efficiency and quality. There is much we do in file and case management that lends itself easily to a process, a workflow which, when documented, will reduce professional risk.

Just stop to think about the process that we follow when we open a file. It will always involve obtaining personal particulars of the client, particulars of the matter and billing information. We do this to be able to contact the client, carry out a conflict search and track what the client has paid the firm.

Think of the processes again that we follow at our first meeting with our clients. The information we give on costs as required by our Professional Conduct Rules and the information we give on billing practices of the firm. Do these processes not lend themselves to being reduced in writing and then taught and followed automatically by lawyers and support staff to ensure that in each new matter, the file is correctly opened and the client contractually retained?

Quality in Legal Services

I can do no better in my conclusion about quality in legal services than to re-state the observations of Professor Stephen Mayson, the first consultant the Law Society of Singapore invited to teach Practice Management to our members.

With reference to his book again, in the chapter ‘Productivity and Control’, under the heading ‘An approach to quality in legal services’, he observed that embarking to achieve a quality standard mark will help a law practice achieve quality in service, but a quality mark is not the end all. Quality, as Professor Stephen Mayson observed, is ‘principally about people’, understanding clients of the practice and what they want and for the lawyers and staff of the practice to create an environment so that they can give their best.

Professor Stephen Mayson identified five factors that represent the core values clients desire in the provision of legal services:

1. lawyers who understand their clients’ personal circumstances, industry or their business;
2. lawyers who are accessible and responsive;
3. lawyers who give concise and well-expressed advice;
4. lawyers who meet deadlines; and
5. lawyers who charge fairly in relation to the value of the work delivered.³
   

He observed that for quality to be a reality in any law practice, there must be recognition that:

1. the client judges quality;
2. partners/directors of a practice must demonstrate clear quality values and ensure it is part of the firm’s way of working;
3. quality requires well-designed and well-executed processes for delivery of legal services;
4. looking for new and better ways of providing services must be part of the firm’s philosophy;
5. supervision and quality assurance are important elements of effective quality in legal services;
6. decisions must be based on facts rather than the unsubstantiated assertions of partners, professional managers or consultants; and
7. all lawyers and support staff must be trained not only on technical matters but also on standards on which clients will evaluate service quality.
   

In conclusion, I hope if nothing else, that the observations I have repeated about quality in legal services make you stop and think a little about your practice and how your clients are treated and whether the people who work with you are motivated.

Yasho Dhoraisingam
Law Society of Singapore

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