NIGERIA’S BEST KEPT LEGAL SECRETS SERIES – SECRET ONE PT 3

Successful Law Firms Are Y-Shaped

In the first two installments of this series, a lot of the thoughts I shared focused on you the professional; what your state of mind should be and how you can go beyond being an ordinary-joe lawyer by making specific decisions and changes where relevant. The next secret is a bit different. It focuses more on building systems and structures. Ultimately, building something that is more than yourself – with the goal of making more impact.

It was five years into my legal practice when Yvonne and Mohammed came with this idea. ‘Let’s start our own law firm’, they said. It was a ludicrous idea to me. Not because the thought lacked merit, nor was my reluctance based on a lack of competence or incapacity on our part. In fact, Yvonne was well on her way to making partner, her foreign graduate studies giving her an edge besides the fact that she was extremely hardworking. I was always the second option to the best and toughest Partner on Criminal Litigation in the firm where I worked at the time. On his part, Mohammed was basically a German-German lawyer based in Gombe state but who didn’t mind holding briefs in every court across the country for anyone willing to pay.

We all met at the law school. It wasn’t until two years after we first discussed the idea that we started the firm and
two years after, the whole thing had packed up. I won’t bore you with the whys and why-nots. I will only focus on the important things that successful law firms do which set them apart. I will share that against this background story as I welcome you to Secret Two of the series – Successful Law Firms Are Y-Shaped.

What makes a successful law firm? It is a combination of three masteries – People, Process and Tools. This is what I refer to as the Y shape. At the heart of successful practices across the world is a clear understanding and mastery of their teams, partners and clients (PEOPLE); carefully thought out and utilized processes (PROCESS) and a masterful use of a combination of technology and resources (TOOLS).

People

Clifford Chance, one of the biggest law firms in the world recently launched their Tech Academy for lawyers. Commenting at the launching, a Partner at the firm shared a profound insight into why ‘People’ is important to them, he said: “Our clients’ market environment is undergoing a paradigm shift with technology pervasive across all sectors and deeply affecting our clients’ businesses. As a firm we want to develop our people fully with a balanced set of both technical and business skills for today and the future, focused on what our clients need and with a strong grasp of business trends in our clients’ industries.

To remain as trusted advisers, our clients expect us to be conversant with not only the key technology themes that are driving their transactions, fundraisings and new digital business models, but also today’s legal and regulatory risks or compliance challenges with managing ever-increasing data across borders or swiftly introducing new technologies alone or with support from other businesses.”

I took the liberty of underlining the parts that should strike a chord. When my friends and I had the firm, we were always about the bottom line: making money, keeping the briefs coming and keeping the office open. To achieve any meaningful success in your legal practice, your people should be at the core and top of mind – this is beyond making sure you pay them salaries after they make you money. Here are some important questions for you.

Is your legal team unencumbered?
Keeping up an appearance of a busy law firm doesn’t necessarily mean that all the man-hours are being effectively utilized. Simply put, it doesn’t mean that people are meaningfully busy. Your people may just be encumbered enough to get to the finish line (closing the brief). Are your associates tied up with hunting down document
templates and drafts, manually inputting new information and (hopefully) saving them into the correct case files? Every time? Are they out there tracking clients or sitting it out in Police Stations for most of the day?

Or, are they in the office rummaging through piles of case files, law reports and computer lists looking for tidbits of everything they need to put together a case? If your answer is yes to some or all of these questions, then a lot of time is being wasted in your firm – yours and that of your clients. But how much time are we really talking about here? Think of it this way – there are law firms who don’t deal with these problems. At all. And they’re using those saved hours to sign more clients and move more cases.

Your firm’s case management system should not be a passive receptacle where you store your work. Rather, it should be an active partner in co-creation with your firm as a whole and with each individual associate. This is especially true with document generation and brief-building. A remarkable error my friends and I made with our law firm was to see our work as a set of lists and keep it that way. We kept lists and huge binders. Your Case Management System should be able to ease the work of your lawyers while supplying them with the necessary materials they need to build briefs
faster, more efficiently and error-free. It should be able to handle the complexities of case building because it is one backed by a strong data bank of legal resources.

One such system is Case Manager Assured. Built by lawyers for lawyers, the system is backed by over six decades of legal data – including Nigeria-specific data. Therefore, it works as an active part of your team, covering areas such as
management of remote work because it is a virtual platform. It also supplies the legal resources that your team needs to build all kinds of briefs, regardless of the subject matter.

How does the solution do this? Case Manager, specially designed by LawPavilion, firstly brings your entire firm online – allowing them to be able to work remotely while maintaining the hierarchy you have in place in your physical firm. Next, it has a brief building platform that is integrated with Google Drive, Email platforms like Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, as well as LawPavilion’s extensive data libraries, legal research and analytics tools: Prime, SAT and the AI Legal Research Assistant TIMI.

This helps you keep communications and documents handy and easy to access. The solution then takes it to the next level for your team by managing your firm’s calendar. In our firm at the time, one of the tiniest causes of the biggest headaches were calendars. CaseManager helps your team to create events classifiable as reminders, court appearances or tasks to keep them readily informed about activities while giving you the Practice Manager or Senior Partner a holistic view of the whole firm. The calendar toggles between month, week and day views.

Another very important solution that the CaseManager provides is an ability to manage your time with a business-like approach. This is achieved through a ubiquitous always-accessible timer which ensures that you can begin timing an activity anywhere on the platform and subsequently attach that time entry (specifiable to a task) to a matter.

Ultimately, what we sell as lawyers is time and access. Do you know your clients?

Already you must have answered yes but I would like to shake that table you are on a bit. Like Yvonne, Mohammed and I, many of us lawyers set up shop with the general idea of ‘trouble na my work, business go come’. This mindset is the underlining reason why we struggle. Successful law firms DO NOT make this mistake. They do the following as way of defining their clients and ensuring that the business grows and expands:
a. They define their services from the customer’s point of view. Recall how the partner at Clifford Chance started the statement I shared earlier? Deliberately ask yourself and your team: What needs of our clients do our services meet? How do our services improve the lives of our customers or their work?
b. They don’t have the charge-and-bail-lawyer mindset. Successful law firms define the ideal customer for their services. They ask themselves, ‘What is his or her age?’ ‘What is the ideal client’s financial situation?’ and so on.
c. They determine, ‘What will our ideal client buy from us rather that from someone else?
d. They decipher exactly when their ideal client will buy their service. How? You ask? They take time to analyse and understand what has to happen in the life or work/business of their clients for them to buy their services. E.g, is the client’s company due to file specific papers? Is the client compliant on a new law that has just come into existence?

There are many more such important questions to ask. Building your clientele should be a deliberate action geared towards achieving specific financial and business expansion goals. Who says you cannot become tomorrow’s Clifford Chance?

In the next part of the series, I will be focusing on the other 2 parts that make up the
Y – Processes and Tools.

READ PART 1 OF THE SERIES HERE