Investing in Professionalism — The PrimeLaw

Commitment

Four PrimeLaw Workshops (between 30 June 2005 and 21 July 2005) were conducted by the Law Society’s PrimeLaw Consultants, Bizibody Technology Pte Ltd. These workshops were half-day hands-on sessions to help law practices prepare for assessment for the Law Society’s PrimeLaw mark.

The first workshop gave law practices an opportunity to meet one of the Law Society’s Certified PrimeLaw Assessors who explained the role of an assessor when he visited a law practice to prepare a report on a practice’s compliance with the standard to be awarded the Mark.

PrimeLaw is the profession’s own practice 
management excellence mark, based but modified from the Law Society of England and Wales’ mark, Lexcel. PrimeLaw sets out work flow processes  that a law practice should have in four areas, business planning, financial management, case management and general management to improve client care, achieve management efficiency, reduce mistakes and increase profitability. A PrimeLaw certified law practice is a law practice committed to consistent quality service to its clients and professionalism in every aspect of the running of its practice.

The motivation of a law practice to work towards the processes to obtain the mark must be a mindset of professionalism, as speaker Ms Corinna Lim of Bizibody Technology Pte Ltd explained at the first workshop.

Certainly, 13 law practices, who were sole propreitorship to, small, medium and large practices, attended the workshops and have taken the first step to begin the journey for PrimeLaw certification. At the workshops, each of these law practices had the standard explained to them; they had the opportunity to reflect if their own law practice processes met the standard requirement by completing a self-assessment checklist, and if it did not, what their law practice needed to do to be PrimeLaw ready.

If you want to know more about PrimeLaw, visit the Law Society’s Homepage at www.lawsociety.org.sg to read and download the PrimeLaw Standard document with useful guidelines; complete your own self-assessment checklist and download or view a sample office manual suitable for a small to medium law practice to start you on the journey to be PrimeLaw certified.

In August, the Law Society embarks on a PrimeLaw Commitment programme to invite law practices to commit to be PrimeLaw ready within a year of commitment and submit themselves for Assessment for the mark.

Yasho Dhoraisingam

The Law Society of Singapore