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Monday 12th October 01:37 (UK)
Friday, May 9th, 2014
Alastair Ross will be speaking on law firm differentiation at a LexisNexis webinar on 6th June 2014 from 12.30-1.30pm. He will be discussing the use of innovation and re-engineering approaches to enable firms to develop new offerings and price competitiveness. For more information and to register, go to:
Monday, May 13th, 2013
Process mapping has been around for many years – indeed it has been part of Work Study activities in industrial businesses for a good 50 years. The emergence of Lean thinking in the West in the mid 1980s created a resurgence of interest with the focus on ‘Value Stream Mapping’ to identify and eliminate waste activities as part of a Lean transformation. The ability of process mapping to draw a clear picture of how a complex series of tasks (such as the process from receipt of an order through manufacturing to delivery of a product) is performed has proven to be very powerful. Process mapping achieves the following:
Mapping professional services
But process mapping had little use or impact in Professional Service firms until comparatively recently. Why is this? Simply because process thinking is not applied in most professional service firms. The culture in professional service firms is practitioner-focused and typically does not see the service provided as ‘a process’. However this is changing due to increasing competitive pressures over the last 5 years. Firms are under increasing financial pressures driven by price-focused clients and alternative providers (some enabled by deregulation as in the UK legal market; some by the internet and others by globalisation). They are having to improve their efficiency – ‘doing more with less’.
‘Doing more with less’ has often been a synonym for redundancies rather than any systematic approach to improve efficiency. Indeed an unstructured approach to redundancies in a service organization can backfire with service quality being impacted and professional morale lowered.
Process mapping makes the invisible, visible
A first powerful step to improving efficiency is looking at how work is performed today and to determine what improvements in efficiency could be made. This is the so-called ‘AS-IS’ phase of a re-engineering programme. In our re-engineering work with major UK professional service firms, the process mapping stage is a key element in giving a shared view of how things are done today. This is especially important in a professional service environment as the process (be it a client service or a back-office activity such as client inception or billing) is not immediately visible. In a factory a process can be viewed by simply walking across the shop-floor. However a tour through a law, accounting or consulting firm’s offices will not unearth much evidence of processes among the employees, desks, computers and (usually) lots of paper. Process mapping makes the ‘invisible’ processes in professional service firms visible. Once processes are visible they can be analysed and improved. So mapping is a key foundation for improvement.
Keep it simple
Effective process mapping is performed collaboratively using paper and pen – rather than computer – as this enables easy collaboration. Effective mapping requires the involvement of representatives of those personnel who perform the process/service being mapped. The objective of the ‘AS-IS’ mapping is to capture the process as it is actually performed today. In a service environment it is important to identify key tasks, who performs them and the amount of chargeable and elapsed time consumed. It is also important to include those routinely performed activities which represent waste – such as delays, reviews, corrections, duplication and different methods used by teams and offices. Once the paper-based model has been completed, it can be captured by digital photo or better still converted into a software-based model using a tool such as Microsoft Visio – this enables easier modification, distribution, review and archive.
Realising the value from your process maps
Process maps have little value unless they are put to work to support improvement activities – such as a Re-engineering or Lean programme. Ways of using process maps in your improvement activities include:
Mapping brings real benefits
We have used process mapping with a number of professional service firms covering processes such as: Bid to Bill, Client Inception, Matter Management, Probate, Commercial Property Purchase, Insurance Claims, Inquests, Employment Tribunals and Commercial Due Diligence. This mapping has been a key foundation for a re-engineering or Lean programme. These programmes have delivered the following benefits:
Process mapping is a powerful tool for business improvement and professional service firms need to add it to their improvement capabilities.
For further information on how you could use process mapping or re-engineering within your firm contact us at www.codexx.com
Monday, March 11th, 2013
These are challenging times for all businesses – but the UK legal sector is facing major changes, driven by de-regulation, the internet and the tough economy. Firms are having to look at how they improve their efficiency and value to clients.
A recent article by Alastair Ross in ‘Private Client Adviser’ outlines how re-engineering has been applied to Private Client departments, to drive major cost savings – whilst maintaining service quality.
Re-engineering Private Client legal services – February 2013
The attached pdf article was first published in Private Client Adviser in February 2013 and is reproduced by kind permission.
Friday, January 4th, 2013
Goodbye 2012. Hello 2013.
A New Year represents renewal and the chance for a fresh start. Many of us will take the opportunity to make resolutions of personal improvement – to become fitter, get thinner and be better in some aspect of our lives. Some of us will even deliver on those resolutions too…
So what resolutions might you make in your own business? New Year resolutions for business? And why not? The start of a new year offers the opportunity to look at your business afresh, to start new initiatives and to retire old ones. All seems possible with the whole year ahead. In this spirit I offer three ‘2013 Business Resolutions’ that you could make that would stimulate and challenge you in the grey days of early January and if followed through would make major improvements in your business – with little investment other than time (and the courage to make change):
1. I will encourage more ‘crazy ideas’ within our business.
Crazy ideas? At a time of austerity do we really have time for such things, you might ask. Shouldn’t we be focusing on more grounded matters such as efficiency improvements and cost reduction – not on fuzzy, nebulous stuff like this? The simple answer is that you need to do both (more on efficiency later). ‘More of the same’ can only go so far. As Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking said, “You can’t dig a new well by digging the same hole deeper.” Truly getting ahead means doing something different.
To increase your differentiation from your rivals you need to create radical ‘do different’ products, services or ways of working. Only by allowing time and space for your employees to ‘think outside of the box’ are you likely to get some ideas that are truly revolutionary. Create the right conditions for this with space and time for innovation, clear management support and direction-setting together with a recognition and reward structure. Google’s well known ‘20% of time available for personal projects’ for its engineers has been a key element of its success in innovation. Separate out ‘ideation’ from implementation. Allowing space for ‘crazy’ ideas without the immediate application of rigid evaluation criteria allows opportunity for ‘crazy’ ideas to evolve into radical but nonetheless feasible business ideas. ‘Get crazy, get real’ is the approach to follow. Establish a simple process with some seed funding to enable controlled experimentation and prototyping of ideas. Then take the most promising ideas forward.
By the way, this doesn’t mean that ‘do better’ innovation such as incremental improvement is any less important to your business. This is the core of business innovation, accounting for 99%+ of improvements and needs to continue and indeed accelerate in these challenging times. But a business that is effective at innovation will operate a balanced portfolio of innovation activity including some radical/risky/’crazy’ projects as well as the more ‘sure’ projects.
“To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”
Thomas Edison
2. I will pick three key customers and go and give them a good listening to.
You might think you do this already – but are you simply telling them about your products/service offerings and listening to them within the confines of your existing offerings? To truly listen to them, try and stand in their shoes and understand their key business issues. Work to truly appreciate their underlying challenges which may be so accepted by them that they are not questioned and may not even be recognised. You can then determine their root cause limitations to their business. Then you can investigate how you could potentially reconceive the service you provide to them (or at least greatly improve it) to help them address their limitations and thus increase the value you provide to them.
In my work with professional service clients, I have found that the all-pervading ‘client satisfaction’ survey is almost a barrier to true client improvement. These surveys offer little insight on real client problems and give little value to clients. This is because they do not seek to understand the client’s business, but only the client’s view of the effectiveness of your service transaction. I have found it much more useful for Partners and Executives to meet with clients and talk specifics – about their business. Clients will always be pleased to talk about their business – if they know you are truly listening.
At the very least you will improve your working relationship with your client in working this way. You will also stand apart from your rivals who are stuck in the traditional ‘broadcast selling’ mode of doing business….
“All the innovations that have powered the company’s success have come from listening
to its customers and watching how their lives are changing.”
Terry Leahy, ex-CEO Tesco
3. I will identify opportunities for dramatically improving efficiency in one of our key services.
And by ‘dramatic’ I don’t mean five or ten percent improvement. I mean twenty five to fifty percent improvement. This is the level of cost reduction that can be achieved by radical re-engineering (I have seen this myself with many clients) – where you take a clinical look at your processes and services to dramatically reduce waste and increase value. From my experience over the last 20 years working with clients in service and industrial sectors, most businesses operate with inefficient processes for delivering services to clients or for supporting employees. In good times such waste is tolerated and then simply accepted.
There is a vast amount of waste in today’s businesses – despite all the investment in IT and other technology. Waste exists in unnecessary process steps, in time spent in inspection, checking and rework, in delays, in unnecessary variation, in ineffective technology systems and in performing work with over-skilled employees.
Lean thinking is highly effective in identifying and reducing such waste – if it is utilised. Business Process Re-engineering can drive dramatic improvements through process redesign. These are not new techniques. The foundations of Lean thinking originated over 60 years ago and re-engineering is nearly 20 years old. These are well proven improvement methods. So why do so many businesses operate with so much inefficiency? What are the barriers that stop these techniques being effectively employed to tackle this mountain of waste?
Lethargy could be one explanation. But really it is Fear.
Fear of change. Most importantly fear of leading change. Someone is needed to stand up and take the lead. To champion change. To challenge existing methods, to encourage others to participate in the programme of change, to apply the tools and then to persist in making the required changes in ways of working. And most importantly to simply start. Pick a business process or a service that is important and clearly needs improvement. Put a team together – with people who know the process, with people who are change-leaders, with users or customers served by the process. Help them apply the core techniques of Lean and re-engineering. And truly persist. For change always takes longer than you expect. Then use the results of improvement to engage others and your now-experienced team and start on other processes. But that is for next year.
But for this year, focus on just one process. And just start.
Read in December 2013:
So, what happened? Did you make your resolutions? Did you work to realise them? Did you successfully engage others in achieving them? Can you see the benefits? Perhaps you did not achieve as much as you would have liked. But did you achieve more than if you had done nothing? You should celebrate successes. But a good motto for leading change is “To be pleased, but not satisfied.” There is always more that can be done. Time to make your resolutions for 2014…..
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tuesday, October 30th, 2012
In our work with major UK law firms since 2005, we have seen a number of major benefits through applying ‘re-engineering’ techniques proven in other business sectors. Re-engineering drives down costs and increases value through a process and client-focused approach. We have successfully applied re-engineering to legal services including Commercial Due Diligence, Insurance, Employment, Inquests, Commercial Property, Probate and Matter Management. From this work we have seen that there are 7 distinct ways in which re-engineering can be used to improve law firm performance:
1. Reducing the chargeable time required to perform a matter by improving the efficiency with which processes are defined and operated – through the application of techniques such as Lean. This results in a reduction in the cost of performing the process. The process can be a service (i.e. a client facing process such as Corporate Acquisition or Probate) or a support process (i.e. an administrative process such as Client Inception or Billing). Law firms need to move to fixed or value pricing arrangements to fully benefit from the increased profitability that this enables.
2. Lowering the cost of performing a matter by reducing the cost of the personnel required to perform the process – what we call ‘right-skilling’. This means using a higher proportion of junior and paralegal personnel. To enable this whilst maintaining required service quality the process needs to be redesigned, standardised and supported with operating procedures, templates and documents – so that it can be effectively operated by lower skilled personnel. This also creates opportunities for reducing the indirect costs of support staff and infrastructure. It should be emphasised that the resulting process will be of higher quality and consistency – even though lower skilled personnel are being used – because it is designed and operated based on the ‘one best way’ process derived from the codified knowledge of the senior experienced personnel. In our work with law firms, reducing chargeable time and right-skilling have yielded direct cost reductions of between 20-40% – with minimal capital investment.
3. Improving the service received by clients through improvement/redesign of the client experience throughout the service cycle. For example by improving responsiveness, reducing errors and improving consistency – focusing on the key ‘moments of truth’ in the client service experience.
4. Raising the value received by clients by improving/innovating the overall service value proposition and the individual elements of the service offer in ways that are valued by the client and so improve client retention and the firm’s competitiveness. The required client-centred approach in our re-engineering work flushes out these opportunities. For example we worked with one firm to develop a new internet-enabled service for inquests, with another we developed a new collaborative improvement approach for insurance claims management and have worked with a number of firms to develop fixed price services.
5. Exploiting the potential of IT and internet-enabled IT as part of re-engineering to improve internal efficiency and client service, including the development of internet-enabled services or service elements. We do this by ensuring that IT is well represented in the re-engineering programme team and so identify opportunities for leveraging IT.
6. Developing opportunities for strategic innovation in the firm covering a change in the value proposition, new business models and organisational change. Re-engineering promotes questioning and analysis of the services provided and how they are delivered, together with improving insights into client requirements. This naturally leads to opportunities for significant changes in the firm’s business model.
7. Catalysing the firm’s approach to innovation – addressing culture, resourcing and management of innovation and ongoing improvement. A re-engineering project establishes an environment for focused and collaborative innovation, together with experience in a systematic improvement approach. The Partners and employees involved can share this knowledge with others and the re-engineering approach can be deployed in other parts of the firm. We assist this in our projects with deliberate and structured skills transfer. In addition, this work creates a new paradigm where questioning and new ideas become welcome.
As law firms face challenging business times, re-engineering is an approach for step-change competitive improvement that we believe should not be overlooked, based on the significant improvements that can be achieved.
Law Firms can request a complimentary copy of our whitepaper: ‘Smarter working in law firms – re-engineering value and cost’ published in March 2012, which covers this subject in detail, by contacting us via the website.
I’d welcome your views and comments on this topic.
Alastair Ross
Director
Codexx Associates Ltd
Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
We have worked with a number of major UK law firms since 2005, in innovation and in particular re-engineering of existing services and business processes – including Commercial Property, Insurance, Inquests, Employment, Probate, Matter Management and Innovation.
During that time I have experienced both the satisfaction of clear and measurable benefits achieved by our clients from this work, but also encountered many common challenges along the way. I thought it would be useful to share a ‘Top Ten’ of the key lessons I have learnt, to provide guidance to change leaders in law firms.
1. Benefits from re-engineering are major
Let’s start by answering the ‘Is it worth it?’ question right away.
A re-engineering programme will be a significant exercise that will require a good amount of time from partners and associates – taking them away from fee earning work. So it is not to be taken lightly. But our work with law firms since 2005 has shown major benefits can be realised. Typically our projects have achieved:20-40% reduction in the direct costs of performing a service (with limited capital investment) and improved competitive differentiation by enhancing and innovating services. In addition, the re-engineering programme provides a platform for ongoing change in a number of ways: A culture of improvement has been started among partners and employees; a template for future re-engineering has been proven (we support this with skills transfer) and measurable benefits help encourage other potential change leaders to take action.
2. Board and partner support is crucial
Making major change in a Partnership is much more difficult than in a Corporate, where the CEO can decree ‘It’s my way or the highway’ and force changes quickly through. Change in a Partnership requires the consensus of the senior personnel and therefore it is critical to have board support in place if major firm-wide change is envisaged. Once support is in place, successful execution depends on the active support of the Partners who manage the teams and the clients affected ‘on the ground’. It is not unusual to have vocal support from a Partner until their fee earners are needed to be involved in the programme—then they will resist their fee earner involvement, citing immediate business needs… Partner Champions must be actively engaged in the programme and be able to commit the time and energy required.
3. Lawyers must be challenged to overcome their innate conservatism
Or as one ex-Managing Partner put it: “Lawyers don’t do radical.” They also don’t naturally think as business people who provide a service, that just happens to have as a core, legal content. Changing the paradigm of lawyer from legal-centric to business-centric and breaking free of existing (often self-imposed) ‘rules’ is key to achieving the potential of re-engineering. This is why leading partners and associates need to be engaged in the re-engineering programme, so that they can change their thinking and share this with their colleagues. This is also why the initial ‘AS-IS’ phase of the programme is key, so that partners and fee earners can remove their rose-tinted glasses and view the business as it truly operates today, riddled with waste and inefficiency – and ripe for major improvement.
4. Clients must be engaged
Client input is key to effective re-engineering, to ensure that services are redesigned with client requirements in mind. However law firms typically do not know their clients’ business at all well. Lawyers can be reluctant to ask clients the open and ‘naïve’ questions needed to better understand their businesses and so enable innovation. This is why our ‘Smarter Working’ approach deliberately engages clients in the re-engineering programme, through meetings and workshops to talk about the business – their business – using structured approaches. This also has the benefit of improving the client relationship and making the firm stand out from others. The Managing Partner of one firm we work with is a strong advocate of the Lean approaches which we are helping him implement in his firm. He communicates Lean enthusiastically in his meetings with clients and incorporated Lean into a recent (and successful) bid. He helps differentiate his firm and also improves empathy with the firm’s industrial clients for whom Lean is a key part of their business improvement activities.
5. Re-engineering needs to be approached in a structured way
Few law firms think about their business processes as an area for examination or improvement. They often consider IT-led improvement activities, as if implementing an extranet, new Blackberry applications or Case Management alone is the answer to their performance challenges. IT implemented in this way has a well defined (and major) cost but undefined (and often little) actual benefit. IT investment should follow process/service improvements, as part of a structured re-engineering approach which is business and client led. In addition, major change requires active ‘Change Management’, which is a skill that few law firms possess. That is why our ‘Smarter Working’ approach uses a structured and phased approach based on 20 years of re-engineering experience.
6. Fee earners must be involved
I was once asked by a Department head in a major UK law firm, “Why do we need to get associates involved [in the re-engineering programme], can’t we just use partners?” It is key that Senior and Junior Lawyers, Paralegals and support staff are involved as they know how work is really done—not just how it is supposed to be done. Getting the best of them released from fee earning work to attend the required re-engineering workshops and work on subsequent change projects is always a challenge – but it must be done to enable practical solutions and help establish a culture of involvement in improvement.
7. Measures and rewards must recognise change agents and new ways of working
In professional service firms, chargeable time is the most valued performance measure for a fee earner – this is as true in a law firm as in an accountancy. Yet if fee earners are to be involved in re-engineering, they must not be penalised for missing utilisation targets, they must be encouraged and rewarded for innovation. And since law firms will be increasing the amount of work performed to fixed or value pricing, rewards based on number of hours performed will be counter to the new behaviours of efficiency and delegation required. New measures and rewards based on profitability, growth, collaboration and innovation will needed instead. Establishing new metrics and rewards needs to be considered as part of the change management element of the re-engineering programme.
8. In-house IT capabilities will be a bottleneck
Information Technology is a critical competency for providing professional services effectively. Indeed its importance will increase with the need for improving collaboration through e-working and the provision of internet-enabled legal services. Yet all too many law firm IT departments operate far behind best practices in other sectors in IT strategy, application development and effective user interfaces. Re-engineering will require IT solutions to support improved services delivery through Case and Document Management and to support new internet-enabled services through internet solutions. In my experience, all too often the IT group will not have sufficient resources or skills to meet the solution design/timescale required by the re-engineering programme. Change leaders need to be prepared to utilise external IT resources for projects where internal IT capacity is inadequate or specialist skills are needed.
9. An integrated strategy for innovation & re-engineering is needed
A key success factor in successful business change is a focused improvement programme. However, too many firms will dilute their efforts with multiple (often conflicting) programmes for IT, innovation & re-engineering. To increase the chance for re-engineering programmes to deliver on time, robust ‘pruning’ of other projects should be performed to postpone some and cancel others to enable resources and management time to be focused on those most critical to the business. Model your change programme on a fast moving stream, where a few projects are run in parallel and complete quickly through focused resources and management – rather than on a wide slow moving river where sediment and detritus cause blockages and delays….
10. Success requires managing a multi-year programme
Re-engineering is more akin to a marathon than a sprint and firms need to have the stamina and resources to stay the course. Whilst analysis and redesign work can be completed in a few months, development, piloting and deployment of new services and new ways of working take many months and indeed years to secure the full benefits. Active programme management is required to monitor progress, manage the required cultural change, and take action where delays occur. In my experience few law firms do this seriously or effectively, resulting in long delays before they can realise the identified benefits in cost reduction and value improvement from their re-engineering projects.
That’s my ten for now (although I can feel another couple coming…). Of course a ‘Top 10’ list is a gross simplification of reality, but hopefully the above points will help guide firms looking to improve their competitiveness through re-engineering activities. For more information in this area a number of articles and ‘New Directions’ newsletters can be found at https://www.codexx.com/knowledge.php
Law Firms can get a complimentary copy of our whitepaper: ‘Smarter working in law firms – re-engineering value and cost’ published in March 2012, which provides further information on this subject – see here: Smarter Working in Law Firms – Re-engineering value and cost – 2012
I’d welcome your views and comments on this topic.
Alastair Ross
Director
Codexx Associates Ltd
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
How can law firms respond to increasingly tough business environment, deregulation and the march of internet-enabled business models?
We advocate the application of ‘Smarter Working’ – an approach that embraces re-engineering and innovation to address both value and cost. Codexx has been applying Smarter Working methods with major UK law firms since 2005.
To help change leaders understand this we have just produced this short video ‘Smarter Working – helping law firms find their mojo’:
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
We are pleased to announce a number of recent client projects:
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, is speaking on ‘Making law firms more innovative’ at the ‘6th International Innovation Lab Conference: Updates from the Frontier of Innovation’ in London on Friday 8th July 2011. The conference is run by the Advanced Institute for Management and hosted by Professor John Bessant of the University of Exeter Business School. For more information go to: http://www.aimresearch.org/calendar/61/232-Updates-from-the-Frontier-of-Innovation-Innovation-Lab-2011
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