In a tough economy, it’s tempting to see staff as fat to be cut from the firm’s payroll. But with proper training and motivation, staff members can become key players in building your firm’s future.
The successful legal practice truly requires a team – even if that team is just the lawyer and an assistant who shares in the work and the life of the firm. The team dynamic is a powerful weapon for serving existing clients and marketing the practice to potential new ones. Inclusiveness will produce better results for all, increasing the productivity and therefore the profitability of the firm.
No firm or lawyer should ever think of staff in terms of “them,” as opposed to the lawyers’ “we.” When it comes to a firm’s survival in today’s business environment, the only group that matters is “all of us.”
Clients, Not Ego
Achieving such an inclusive mindset toward staff can be difficult. Lawyers primarily focus on the task at hand and getting results, leaving little room for camaraderie and support. Studies have shown that lawyers tend to be more skeptical, impatient and intense, and less interactive and able to take criticism, than people in general – all traits that are at variance with inclusive management.
Yet lawyers, like managers everywhere, are most effective when they connect with and rely upon their staff. When that connection and reliance are real and reinforced, it creates a shared work ethic, values structure and belief that what is done for clients is worthwhile. Failure to do so will cause inefficiencies, create disharmony within the firm and result ultimately in the firm’s failure.
This is true even for sole practitioners who have but one secretary or paralegal working with them. Every team member should be included in all promotional and client service activities. Clients should be able to connect directly with the folks of a law office who may have an impact on their matter or who might be able to provide clients with the answer to one of their questions.
Remember that the client who walks away with an answer, even if not from the mouth of the lawyer, is generally far more satisfied, and less agitated, than he or she would have been with merely having to leave a message for a later return phone call. The happy client with an answer is more likely to sing the firm’s praises and provide new business referrals. Clients, not ego, are most important.
Service, Not Legal Practice
Note that what we are discussing here is client service – most emphatically not the practice of law. Rule XVII of the CBA’s Code of Professional Conduct clearly spells that out, stating in a commentary that “a legal assistant may perform any task delegated and supervised by a lawyer so long as the lawyer maintains a direct relationship with the client and assumes full professional responsibility for the work. Legal assistants shall not perform any of the duties that lawyers only may perform or do things that lawyers themselves may not do.”
However, the commentaries also add that “it is in the interests of the profession and the public for the delivery of more efficient, comprehensive and better quality legal services that the training and employment of legal assistants be encouraged.” And here is where staff capabilities can be leveraged.
Education and personal growth are essential for everyone in a law office. In the larger picture, building a team is inseparable from giving everyone in the office – including staff – the opportunity to learn skills that enhance performance and provide better service to clients.
Everyone in the office should take hours of client service education programs each year. Education and training are not and should not be just a function of professional development courses for lawyers.
Giving staff the right training and support will give any lawyer enhanced confidence in the law office team. Training on business realities may be had at a local community college or in a nearby city. The worth of the program always has to be assessed, but if staff and administrators are expected to do more with less, the value of training becomes all the more important.
The ultimate expression of such a shared work dynamic is to provide staff members with an opportunity to participate in the financial rewards of the firm. When extra financial rewards for performance are on the table, measurements for success must be clearly defined so every person understands the criteria by which the firm will make its evaluation. It must be clear which contributions to extra efforts are considered to be within staff control, and which ones are not. The staff person must be told specifically what he or she must do, and how performance of those responsibilities will be evaluated to qualify for a bonus.
When approached in this light, such extra compensation gives staff the opportunity for reward that clients increasingly offer to lawyers – having “skin in the game,” and making the extra effort that justifies that participation.
Having a comprehensive job description for every staff position in the law office is a prerequisite to an objective and efficient bonus program. The absence of such descriptions promotes inconsistency and threatens objectivity.
Descriptions should include the specific, significant tasks of each position and the performance standards by which the accomplishment of these tasks is judged. Staff can make an extra effort beyond their job descriptions to justify extra reward – from volunteering to make collection phone calls on overdue accounts to using personal time to read up on law firm management and suggesting ways to implement the lessons learned.
Teams, Not Individuals
Lawyers come and go, but staff, and especially senior staff members, serve as the foundation on which the firm builds for the future. Yes, there have been staff layoffs and administrator terminations, but no law firm can successfully meet the challenges of recession and a changing profession without the help of staff leaders who embody the multidisciplinary skills that the new professional dynamics of law firms demand.
Momentous change is under way in the law firm universe, change that will create opportunities for those staff members who understand it and respond effectively. Staff and administrators can refocus the firm’s direction to cope with ongoing change in many ways.
They can, for example, identify technology for cost savings, take client service education classes and bring the lessons learned back to the office, or play a role in client service teams that make the practice more efficient and more effective. The result can be increased revenue from happier clients, decreased costs of operation, a firm better able to deal with today’s problems and tomorrow’s opportunities.
Client service teams deserve special mention. A successful law office or law firm should be a team that creates quality service and work product for the benefit of clients. That is inseparable from the importance of creating a team spirit in the law firm, one that embraces lawyers and staff with shared perspectives and objectives. Without that sharing, there will be less than a satisfactory result for the clients and less personal satisfaction for all concerned.
Clients and prospects want to do business with firms that will serve them with effective cross-office and cross-disciplinary teams. However, the low trust among lawyers in too many firms undercuts this. The staff professional – whether responsible for firm administration or the marketing function – can take a strategic position as the impartial facilitator who has only the success of the firm at heart.
This administrative role in boosting the use of cross-selling will not, if properly communicated, take billable hours from anyone. The staff person has no axe to grind, is only interested in what’s best for the entire firm, and has a unique capability, especially at the senior level, to be the resource, the go-to person, the guide. To be successful in that role requires an official commitment by firm leadership to the staff person and organizational criteria for lawyer participation (for example, making partnership draws contingent on team membership).
Strategic Counselor, Not “Fat”
Documented standards defining what the lead staff person and the lawyers must do in order to reach the necessary measurements for team success are essential. A team mentality does not just “happen.” It is built on a solid foundation of performance metrics for success.
The true definition of success comes when lawyers and staff understand and focus on their respective areas of responsibility, which must be spelled out clearly right from the start. For the staff person, “success” is defined as being seen as a strategic counselor who helps the firm survive and grow – rather than being considered “fat” to cut when times get tough.
The legal world is changing; so too must law firm staff. That means training to improve job skills and being aware of and involved in the financial and organizational life of the firm to become active team members in shaping the future.
It’s no longer a matter of responding to what the partners tell staff to do – it’s a process of understanding what ought to be done. Staff and administrators who do this can enhance the value they provide to the firm, and better reflect it in their performance. They are prepared in a real sense to become owners of the firm. And with such owners the firm is better prepared to withstand any financial or economic shock.
Edward Poll (edpoll@lawbiz.com) is a certified management consultant and coach in Los Angeles who coaches attorneys and law firms on how to deliver their services more profitably. He is the author of Attorney and Law Firm Guide to the Business of Law: Planning and Operating for Survival and Growth, 2nd ed. (ABA, 2002), Collecting Your Fee: Getting Paid from Intake to Invoice (ABA, 2003) and, most recently, Selling Your Law Practice: The Profitable Exit Strategy (LawBiz, 2005).