Feature

posted 13 Oct 2006 in Volume 11 Issue 6

When less is more

As the Legal Services Bill throws up the prospect of increased competition in the marketplace, lawyers will need to find new ways of working more efficiently. Smart use of resources and people would be a good start, argues Gill Steel.

Much has been said about the lack of accessible legal advice for the elderly.1 Knowledgeable advisers
are in short supply and stretched to the limit, needing:

More time;
More people with appropriate skills to help;
A higher profile so they can be found by potential clients;
Less re-designing of the wheel.

Many firms will currently be re-thinking their business strategy in the light of the recently published Legal Services Bill. They will be trying to anticipate what the future for the supply of legal services might hold. Legal services provided by solicitors historically have been tailor made for the individual client, and it is difficult to build a new vision for the future based on the concept of commoditisation of the law.2 However, the Legal Services Bill brings forward the prospect of greater competition in the provision of personal legal services.

The more concerning aspects of the Bill might yet be altered or dropped. But, if not, what might be the impact of greater competition on the provision of services that elderly clients need and which you might wish to achieve? Can any of these issues be addressed by the use of information technology and outsourcing?

Karl Erik Sveiby and Tom Lloyd in their book Managing Knowhow3 identified ten success factors for a professional organisation:

Day to day leadership;
Quality control;
Respect for know-how;
Combination of professional and managerial know-how;
A strong, well-defined culture;
Focus on core know-how;
Know-how preservation;
Developing the people;
Changing key people;
Stable structures.

This is a pretty good checklist for a review of your existing business and its processes as compared with potential new competitors for the elderly client marketplace. Lawyers are up against well-financed and innovative organisations that are adept at utilising technology and marketing to penetrate their market and gain access to potential customers.

More time

To address Sveiby & Lloyd’s ten points adequately, you need the very thing you only have in short supply – time. How would you gain more time in other spheres of your life? By finding someone who can help you on things that can be delegated without too much difficulty, for example, dog walking, cleaning, shopping. All these things are often provided as discrete services either by people whose ‘hourly rate’ is less than yours or who could take less time than you – through familiarity with the task, use of systems and processes, or even use of skills that you do not have – which mean they can offer a more efficient use of the time available.

In office terms, it might be that for a short-term cost of outsourcing some aspects of your work, you could free up some time to focus on reviewing the strategy and implementing it.

Outsourcing

In the Law Society Gazette and other publications, it is now quite common to have adverts for outsourcing – for typing, or perhaps legal work such as dealing with awkward probate files or preparing trust and estate accounts.

The main use of overseas outsourcing has been for back-office functions, such as typing, accounts, telephony and IT development, and other practical points. The financial advantage to outsourcing is the ability to achieve economies in employment and facility costs by the use of lower-paid operatives working in cheaper locations. There is also the prospect of greater efficiency where there is a difference in time zone, allowing a skilled workforce to be working while the main office is asleep. The flip side of the coin for lawyers is the prospect of the lack of confidentiality in client affairs. Clearly, the choice of outsource agent will be governed by the law firm’s need to be satisfied on confidentiality issues and the use of secure internet access for communication, and the client’s agreement to deal with matters in this way, via e-mail without encryption.

As yet, I am not aware of any significant outsourcing of legal work itself to people trained in English law but located in other jurisdictions, but perhaps this is a matter of time. There is a long tradition of outsourcing legal work in this jurisdiction – the outsourcing in that case is often to counsel and increasingly to other specialist solicitors, accountants and probate practitioners.

Digital dictation is helping promote greater use of outsourcing. This technology has really taken off, and, apart from e-mail, must be one of the most popular pieces of equipment in the office. The practitioner dictates his work in much the same way as before, but instead of a secretary having to plough through the tape to get to a particularly urgent letter, the digital dictator can save individual matters as separate files. The transcriber can go straight to the particular file by viewing each dictated file on the computer screen.

TotalSpeech, for example, won the Society for Computers and Law 2003 Award for the most outstanding application of information technology to the law in the UK and Ireland. The company BigHand developed their digital-dictation system specifically for UK lawyers.

If you have a secretary twiddling her thumbs in one office because her boss is on holiday while another is overwhelmed, then the digitally dictated material can be e-mailed to the most suitable person, who can of course e-mail back the finished typing for checking and printing at the local outlet to the dictator. This type of technology is used by companies offering legal typing as an outsourced service. This in itself may help reduce the amount of temporary secretarial help required at busy or holiday times, and for the smaller firm may mean that less staff are needed to support fee earners, so reducing overheads.

So if you can outsource some awkward or time-consuming files, some typing backlog, and borrow a trainee solicitor to help for a few months, perhaps you can find yourself a few hours of peace to address some of the strategic issues.

More people with the appropriate skills

To determine just what you need, put yourself in the elderly clients’ shoes and ask yourself what they need:

Knowing you can help;
Being able to communicate with you easily;
Experiencing understanding and empathy but not patronising behaviour in dealings with the lawyer and anyone in the firm;
Speedy attention to their problems;
Consistency in dealing with the same people over a period of time;
Clarity over fees.

Consider the sort of services you currently offer, which are relevant for the older client and list the sort of skills necessary to provide them (see table one).

Some of the activities, such as home visits, are disruptive of daily routines and may not need a legally trained person so much as one able to communicate well who gets the information needed from the visit. For example, if a partner is an attorney or receiver for a person living in a care home and the firm is managing their money, a regular visit, such as quarterly, will enable an assessment to be made of the care being provided, the practical needs of the client and provide an advocate who could address any problems with the staff there and then. This does not need a solicitor. It could be an experienced secretary coming back to work after maternity leave, who wants flexible hours and is willing to effectively work from home and report in at intervals.

Many activities in the private-client department involve the management of money, accounting for money and presenting accounts. These activities could be outsourced to an accountancy firm. Or why not consider employing an accountant or other STEP member with appropriate skills? Accountancy staff may well prove to be cheaper than a solicitor and have better skills in this area.

If you are finding that contentious work is growing, then maybe it would be worth encouraging a member of the firm whose personal injury or legal-aid practice is declining to re-train to deal with probate-related cases. They could also help with the general workload. If you are interested in finding a course to help with their changeover, look at my website, www.lawskills.co.uk.

We all like to deal with people who make it easy to communicate. Those dealing with clients directly need to have awareness of the difficulties of ageing and conditions that make communication difficult. Within the envelope of ‘older people are many different types of people, including:

Those who are, in fact, very active and engaged in the community, just retired from paid employment and still have lots of people they see on a regular basis;
Those who are physically deteriorating but who manage on their own at home, but find getting about difficult so lack much social interaction;
Those who are weak and in need of care support and unable to manage the daily task of everyday life such as getting up unaided or having a bath or shower, never mind doing the shopping;
Those whose mental state is damaged or gradually deteriorating, either through age (for example, dementia) or through illness (for example, motor neurone disease).

It takes experience to know what to look for and how to handle some of these issues of ageing. A person from a medical discipline – for example, a nurse or even junior doctor who cannot get a place – might be looking for re-training. Alternatively, what sort of training could you source for the staff you have that would make it easier to deal with clients who present these problems?

The RNIB offers advice about dealing with the blind and partially sighted, but there are also often surprising resources available to help. My local prison, for example, can produce Braille so your firm’s leaflet about EPAs or wills could be made available in Braille. Try asking your local hospital radio if they have a presenter who would record your leaflet on tape or CD to send to a client. Or, for the more technologically advanced, you could prepare a podcast – a computer-recorded file that can be downloaded to a person’s computer to listen to over their own system or to an MP3 player.

The RNID offers training in dealing with the deaf and hard of hearing, and can provide advice about installing hearing loops in your office. It would also be possible through the charity to learn
sign language.

You will have other ideas once you start thinking about what you need to offer from an older client’s perspective.

A higher profile to attract work

Once you start thinking about what your target market needs, it becomes much easier to develop a marketing plan to meet those needs. When you make enquiries, advertise for different staff, or contact charities that might have guidance to offer, then you begin to raise your profile with the local community and with the charity sector. You should consider:

Offering practical help to relevant local charities, even if it is only monetary support;
Writing or having ghostwritten a weekly column in the local newspaper or relevant magazines that target the older person;
Linking up with other relevant firms (for example, accountants or investment advisers) to make presentations to target groups such as organisations for the retired (for example, Probus or local charity groups such as the Parkinson’s Disease Society).

There are plenty of marketing initiatives that can be found in books and courses, but initiatives are all they will remain unless you act on them. You must be able to capture contacts made, or follow up potential customers and ensure salient information learnt is retained and shared when needed for use in the firm.

Less re-designing of the wheel

Managing information successfully means getting the right information, in the right form, to the right person at the right time to add value. That includes not just legal information on processes and facts, but data gleaned from all those marketing initiatives.

The use of e-mail and information technology (IT) in the workplace has substantially reduced the turnaround time for communications and this of itself can increase pressure on us all. Clients want the ability to have access 24 hours a day, seven days a week to the progress of their matters. Without harnessing the use of IT how can you realistically do this? Case-management systems accessed via a web-based product and secured by codes and encryption are already well used by some firms, and those who have yet to address these issues and make the investment required are already behind the game.

Some of that hard won management-development time needs to be spent addressing these issues and in training to use equipment and software effectively. If we fail to invest in appropriate IT we will eventually lose clients to those organisations who are prepared to invest and learn.

So to work smarter we need to be able to:

Distinguish between useful information and data;
To sort, order and display information in the most communicative way;
To identify innovative ways of using information to add value.

Hugh Garai in his book Managing Information (1997, Gower) identifies four principles of information management that he argues can turn worthless data into powerful intelligence, which, when applied,
will generate effective change:

Data + relevance + purpose = information;
Information + insight = understanding;
Understanding + communication = intelligence;
Intelligence + action = effectiveness

Information can therefore be a powerful tool in the development of our business to face the competitive forces about to be unleashed by the Legal Services Bill. We need the time and skill to identify what information is needed; to enhance it by adding our own knowledge from experience and practice; and to ensure it is directed effectively to our target market.

Good luck!

References

Most recently see ‘Putting Care First’ by Jon Robins at p.19 Law Society’s Gazette 25 May 2006
See Richard Susskind, The Future of Law, Oxford University Press, 1996, and
subsequently his Society for Computers and the Law tenth anniversary address in 2006
Karl Erik Sveiby and Tom Lloyd, Managing knowhow: Add value…by Valuing Creativity, Bloomsbury Publishing, new edition, 1989

Gill Steel is the sole principal of the Gill Steel Law Practice and director of LawSkills Ltd. She can be contacted at gill.steel@lawskills.co.uk