7-Aug-07 10:00 AM CST

The Role of the Legal Administrator in Creating a Client-Focused Firm

The following article, written by Rafte & Company President Dena Rafte, was published in the July/August issues of Legal Management under the title, "Open and Accessible, The Legal Administrator's Role in Creating a Client-Focused Firm." Download a PDF of the article here.

A legal administrator can play a central role in helping ensure the success of technology initiatives that can keep their firm competitive. Without the understanding, support and active involvement of a strong legal administrator in helping drive change, initiatives designed to make it easy for clients to do business with the firm frequently fail to live up to their potential.

This is critically important today because forward-looking firms have realized that they need to constantly change and innovate in order to satisfy rapidly evolving client demands. Leading firms have made it their business to identify and leverage new ways of working. It’s one way they are differentiating themselves and attracting clients.

Client expectations are at the heart of what’s happening. Corporations are implementing sophisticated technologies to squeeze more value and efficiency out of the global supply chain. To the dismay of many in the legal community, these companies are increasingly treating legal services as just another commodity. As such, they are expecting their law firms to deliver more for less while demanding their firms make it easier to do business with them.

In this era of rapid response and interactivity, a law firm’s survival depends on adopting a more open and accessible approach to client relations.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. Why?

First, most firms still want to do what their peer firms are doing. In most cases, this means that work processes revolve around the whims of the individual attorney.
Second, law firms tend to have great difficulty getting people to work differently due to a perceived conflict between improved efficiency and billable hours.
Third, change typically happens in most organizations when the perceived level of pain gets uncomfortable. In the case of many law firms, until the impact is clearly financial, change is very slow in coming

Leading firms are overcoming these obstacles with the help of their legal administrator. They are moving beyond the attorney-focused mindset that places great value on the individual to the detriment of the team, instituting strict standards for how things get done. In so doing, they are embracing a client-focused mentality that insists on mobilizing all the available resources of the firm to deliver the greatest value to the client.

The first step is to understand the importance of establishing standards.

Standardizing Firm Processes

The need to manage matters and share knowledge are prompting law firms to consider how they can do a better job of efficiently managing critical content. At many firms, the focus is on giving the individual attorneys what they need to practice and stay productive. This can create horrendous inefficiencies with information tucked away in private Outlook folders or other inaccessible data repositories.

For instance, at one firm, the Word Processing staff showed me a giant loose leaf notebook with instructions for how each individual attorney preferred his or her documents. Every attorney had a customized profile. One attorney liked to have indents and a certain font. Another attorney preferred margins a bit wider. As a result of these highly individualized work processes, it was very difficult for work to be shared among the administrative staff.

Establishing standards that everyone has to follow has become increasingly important with the exponential growth of data with the firm. These factors, coupled with client and staff expectations of availability and response time, are forcing law firms to look at how information is shared and how they can provide clients with greater access and a consistent online user experience.

For most firms, there were few standards for electronic data management and even fewer viable user options for electronic data storage. Information that had previously been centralized in the physical folder for all to access was now being partially replicated into individually owned data stores.

What to do? Ultimately, the name of the game is making it easier for clients to do business with your firm. Therefore, it is essential to have a shared database in order to give all users a place to store the firm’s electronic data in a manner that is consistent and predictable. The firm has to provide a means to replicate the structure of the physical files and provide seamless access to the matter folders for all related documents, e-mail correspondence and attachments, financial reports and any scanned content or images.

The idea is to create an environment that takes the focus off of the individual attorney and puts it squarely on the client. All firm-related information is in the case file. Clearly this is not a unique idea in the paper world, but a very challenging one in the electronic environment. The result is to make information securely accessible to internal and external users on an anytime/anyplace basis.

The Buck Stops with the Administrator

While the need for top down support for such a change is essential, the job of building understanding and consensus among attorneys and staff members at all levels typically falls on the shoulders of the legal administrator.

The best legal administrators take this responsibility and run with it, recognizing that a fundamental change is necessary in order for the firm begin to maximize productivity and efficiencies to benefit both the clients and the firm. They actively look for opportunities to improve efficiencies, often finding resistance from attorneys and staff who have deeply entrenched work processes. In firms where legal administrators are empowered to meet resistance head on, organizational change is more likely to succeed.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen that legal administrators are often held accountable for the successful implementation of change without being granted the power to actually insist on compliance.

Moreover, creating an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates collaboration is just the start. The legal administrator also must be a strong advocate for paying close attention to the needs and expectations of every firm’s three key stakeholder groups: the clients, the attorneys and the business of the firm itself. Clients expect a superior work product delivered very quickly at a low cost. The firm’s attorneys expect to have the opportunity to do great work and live a desirable lifestyle. The firm itself expects to retain and strengthen current relationships, establish new relationships and remain profitable.

The key to achieving a balance among the interests of these groups is having a shared firm-wide perspective that the interests of the client must come first. The challenge for most law firms is that they attempt to implement this type of client focused change without first establishing the necessary infrastructure – the standards, workflow and procedures – for the organization to work as a team to serve the client.

What Clients Want

Clients don’t want the status quo. A study from BTI Consulting Group revealed an unprecedented drop in client satisfaction with law firms with just 30.7 percent of large and Fortune 1000 companies recommending their primary law firms. They no longer want an advisor who keeps a safe distance and offers off-the-shelf advice. They want someone with skin in the game and expect their law firm to be a business partner who truly understands their current and future challenges.

Clients expect their law firm to deliver maximum value. They are being forced to improve efficiencies and they want their service providers to do the same. They increasingly value flexible billing arrangements and creative solutions that make it possible to control costs.

Clients are increasingly doing business around the clock and want a law firm that offers flexibility and accessibility. They want to quickly and easily be able to access their files and documents at any time from wherever they happen to be in the world.

And clients expect it to be easy to do business with their law firm. They don’t need added complications, they want solutions. So the fact that the burden of organizing documents typically falls on them – in the form of voluminous e-mails and attachments – is an aggravation they would rather avoid.

What Attorneys Want

Attorneys expect the opportunity to create a desirable lifestyle. They want to dictate more of the terms of their employment – to free them from the billable hour ball and chain. Studies have found that this desire is not unique to Generation X. Mid-career women and partners nearing retirement also are attracted to work environments with greater flexibility.

Attorneys want simple and dependable remote access to the firm’s information so they can be productive wherever they are. They want to be able to collaborate with the firm’s staff and with their clients. Increasingly, they expect immediacy.

Additionally, many younger attorneys expect their employer to help them build their resume. This mindset is unfamiliar to their Boomer bosses who continue to structure compensation and advancement with an eye toward an associate’s long-term potential within the firm.

What the Firm Wants

The firm is expecting business development, talented attorneys and continued profitability. Reputation is key.

It is no secret that most firms shower their greatest rewards on those who bring in the most business. But many firms aren’t seeing the writing on the wall. A confluence of market dynamics is changing the business development process to devalue relationships and make procurement of legal services more objective and cost-based. If traditional business development was like a courtship, today’s approach that often requires firms to respond to a request for proposal is like an arranged marriage.

The way firms operate needs to change in order for them to remain competitive.

For example, I worked with a firm a few years ago in which the leadership was concerned that they were not attracting the type of talent they wanted. Unfortunately, their “solution” was simply to raise salaries. The firm didn’t consider changing the business development process to involve more attorneys or consider offering additional support to enable more attorneys to be successful in winning business. Nor did they provide additional training. And from a technology standpoint, they had not considered deploying a mobile device infrastructure, allowing for easier communication while away from the office.

They missed a great opportunity because the leadership of the firm had not been paying attention. To attract and retain talented attorneys, firms need to provide access to knowledge. They need the technology infrastructure that will help them to relate to their peers in the client community. This will be particularly important as their peers come into power 10 years from now.

Migration to a Client Centric Environment

Faced with billing rate pressure and rising costs, the law firms that stand out must continually identify and capitalize on ways to deliver more value to clients more efficiently.

The name of the game is changing the firm’s delivery system. Successful businesses every few years have to recreate themselves. Even if they are great at what they do, they must change to accommodate the client’s changing lifestyle and expectations. Here’s how to create client centric work processes:

Listen to your client – try and anticipate their future needs
Consider both your current automated and non-automated work flow processes
Create standards for the firm/practice/work group not the individual.
Create centralized electronic data repositories for case information
Increase staff leverage by providing training at all staff levels in support of these new processes
Create a collaborative environment by providing secure access to case data inside and outside the firm
Look for opportunities to refine the process in support of the client, the attorney and the firm.

Conclusion

Legal administrators who promote a shared firm-wide perspective, create an environment that facilitates collaboration and keeps the focus on the interests and needs of the firm’s clients tend to have a major positive impact on assuring their firm has the opportunity to advance in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape.

On the flip side, legal administrators who do not proactively look for opportunities or step forward as leaders risk seeing their firms fall out of favor. It can happen so gradually and over such a long period of time that the firm leaders don’t realize what’s happening until it is too late. Clients become disenchanted and associates grow frustrated, dropping off one by one.

With clients demanding that all their partners – including their law firms – do what they do better, faster and cheaper – it is essential to proactively take a 360-degree view of the firm and its work processes in order to capitalize on opportunities that can help differentiate the firm.

Dena Rafte is president of Rafte & Company (www.rafte.com), a strategic technology systems integrator and business solutions provider for law firms. Call 800.396.9390.