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Five ways to improve the effectiveness of your law firm

Category: Blog, Build a Digital-First Culture, Case Management, Guide, Implement Continuous Improvement, Practice Management 27th May 2022

The effectiveness of your law firm relies almost entirely on the daily habits of your team. Every law firm will have a combination of business habits that either help them to run a successful firm aligned with their goals, or habits that are hindering success and damaging performance.

Regardless of your goals, running a successful firm involves mastering the basics and adopting habits that help you stay competitive. Improving the effectiveness of your firm requires breaking down your current processes and identifying areas of improvement that enable you to align with your goals, so that you can build effective habits.

Build better business habits

Your daily habits impact your business reputation and the long-term success of your business. The inefficiencies that build up, the quality of service delivered to clients, or satisfaction of an employees’ day all combine to determine the effectiveness of your firm.

Building good business habits helps you to establish a foundation of seamless and effective processes designed for maximum output. These habits, especially when combined across all individuals in your team, have huge benefits for your firm across compliance, client satisfaction, employee motivation, profitability, and much more.

Long term success

To set your firm up for long-term success you need to create the right environment that enables effective habits to flourish while reducing inefficient ones. To help achieve this, you need four things: aligned goals, accountability, effective tools, and the right mindset.

Aligned goals

Aligned goals help you to focus on what is it you want to achieve. If you know your goals and your purpose, you’ll be able to design the most effective processes for the job, monitor performance, and communicate the plan to your team for firm-wide support.

Accountability

If your firm or team aren’t held accountable for their daily responsibilities, they’ll never be motivated to complete the necessary tasks. It can be easy to slip back into old habits, but with specific targets, individuals or teams are held accountable for adopting new processes to meet the wider goals. Performance can be monitored, and areas of improvement can easily be identified for continued development.

Effective tools

Do you have the right technology, infrastructure, digital tools, and people skills to achieve what you’re aiming for? Can you utilise the resources you already have, or does it require investment for long-term success?

The right mindset

As the saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest member, so ensuring your team has the right mindset for improvement to manage change, and for optimisation, is crucial to building the right environment for success.

How to create the right environment for better business habits

To help improve the effectiveness of your firm, we’ve outlined the five pillars of how to create the right environment so you can start reducing waste and creating efficient operations today.

  1. Improvement by subtraction

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, explores the impact of improvement by subtraction: focusing on doing less of what doesn’t work, rather than concentrating on what does. Clear states, ‘one of the best ways to make big gains is to avoid tiny losses’ that’s why the first step to implementing better habits is reviewing your existing ones to identify areas for improvement. An example of how improvement by subtraction could improve your firm’s profitability: instead of looking to grow your client base and income, focus on not losing money and cut waste

2. Make it easy

The easiest way for habits to form is to make it easy to complete the behaviour. By doing so, your team are more likely to be consistent, and when habits are consistent, they have an impact. Ensure the new behaviour you’d like to adopt is on the path of least resistance and it’s the obvious choice for individuals.

3. Foster the right mindset

Change management can be difficult within any business. To help employees feel motivated by – rather than fearful of – change, it’s important to foster an open-minded, experimentation mindset rather than one simply focused on outcome, which could result in blame. For more information on the four fundamental mindsets all modern law firms need, download our guide on how to master the basics to stay competitive and succeed.

4. Tech adoption

Utilising technology is the simplest way to implement better habits and eradicate inefficient ones. Legal software can reduce the bad habits throughout your firm that cause delays, errors, or poor service. Tech provides digital tools that are innately consistent so your team can be more productive, accurate, and effective, helping you to improve by subtraction.

Digital solutions can also facilitate the implementation of improved and modernised habits that make use of client-centric tools, automation, and integration so you can outperform your competition. Technology also enables you to monitor performance and continue to optimise easily.

Software, such as practice and case management solutions, provides freedom from the day-to-day tasks so individuals can focus on value-added work. Tech can also empower employees to work at their best, enabling businesses to easily adapt to challenges, and providing visibility of performance so areas of weaknesses can be improved.

5. Monitor performance

The new habits you adopt need to deliver the desired outcome. Identify ways you can quantify the results of your new habits and set targets for individuals, teams or firm-wide to ensure each employee is held accountable and is responsible for the performance of the business.

By leaning on technology to digitalise your processes, it’ll become easier to extract and analyse the data you need to monitor performance and set KPIs. Your practice management software will help you keep track of things like client ratings, complaints, and billable hours. If those performance stats aren’t moving in the right direction, then your new business habits aren’t being adopted or still need improvement.

Improve the effectiveness of your law firm

To set your business up for long-term success it’s important to set up the right environment for effective business habits. By adopting the right mindset, efficient tools, and aligning your goals you can be confident the foundations are set for improving the effectiveness of your firm.

For further help and guidance on creating the right environment to foster good business habits, download our guide to improving the effectiveness of your law firm today.