Our firm is often asked to help law firms design and implement client service improvement plans. A key ingredient of such plans involves helping attorneys and staff change their client service behaviors—one behavior at a time—into permanent positive client service habits.
In many law firms attorney and staff reward and recognition practices have been counter-cultural and failed to reinforce (motivate and encourage) positive client-service behaviors. As more law firms move toward improving client service many are looking for new ways to reward and recognize attorneys and staff that demonstrate positive client service behaviors. Exceptional client service goals are being linked to business plans and compensation is linked to achieving these goals.
Everyone has a need to feel good about the work that they do. By regularly rewarding and recognizing your attorneys and staff when they exhibit positive client service behaviors, rather than only noticing and commenting when they do something wrong, you help motivate them to keep up the good work and internalize the behavior. You can let your attorneys and staff know that they have done a good job in two ways:
This is the spontaneous, everyday type of recognition that lets your employees know that you appreciate the job they are doing, and it takes very little time, money, or planning to execute.
This is a pre-planned, firm-wide program for rewarding individuals, departments, practice groups, and teams who achieve outstanding results in client service. In general, they take time, money, and a good deal of planning to implement.
Studies and experience have shown that people thrive when they receive personal recognition for the work they do. While money is important, it will never replace the need for genuine appreciation for the efforts your attorneys and staff put in. While everyone is expected to do their job well, recognition encourages and motivates staff to exceed what is expected of them.
Informal Recognition
Studies have shown that regularly giving informal recognition to an employee is a stronger motivator than providing him or her with formal rewards. Simple praise is remembered long after the event because it tells your employees that you noticed their efforts and took the time and trouble to personally thank them.
Although informal recognition is effective, inexpensive, and convenient, many attorneys don’t give their fellow attorneys or their staff as many pats on the back as they could. Consequently, when they do praise, their inexperience often shows through and is interpreted as a lack of genuine appreciation. Here are a few hints that you can use to complement your compliments.
Always make sure that you have the other person’s full attention before you praise him or her. Don’t try to give your staff a compliment when they (or you) are scurrying down the hall, rushing to a meeting, or trying to meet a deadline. Instead, setup a time and place that is convenient for them. If you are acknowledging a group of people for their efforts, set up a time when you can meet with them all in one place and praise them as a group.
Talk to your staff on their own turf or some place where they will feel comfortable and relaxed such as their desks or the lunch room. Don’t ask your staff to come to your office because they may mistakenly think that something is wrong.
Because people can perceive lack of eye contact to mean insecurity or lying, looking at your employees when you recognize them is critical. On the other hand, your employees are quite likely to look away from you because they probably haven’t had a lot of practice at accepting honest, straightforward praise. Remember, you don’t want to be standing up and looking down on your staff when you praise them. Stay level with them by taking a seat next to them.
In order to have the biggest impact, you should recognize your staff as quickly as possible after the achievement has occurred. Don’t wait until the Christmas party to praise performance that occurred last year. The further away you get from the event, the less impact the acknowledgement has.
Tips For Recognizing Employees
Often we find that once a law firm finally decides to implement a recognition program they want to go whole hog and spend a fortune. However, many other things can be done that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Often the simplest, most spontaneous ideas yield the best results and the most fun. Here a just a few tips:
Tips For Rewarding Employees—Formal Reward Programs
Although they don’t have the same everyday impact as informal recognition, formal rewards are an important part of your strategy for service improvement. Quarterly and yearly award presentations should be highly publicized and send a clear message about what client service values and behaviors your firm holds in high esteem.
Formal reward programs take time and planning as the firm must come up with a simple and practical way to measure who wins. Typically, we use a combination of ongoing client satisfaction surveys and supervisor nomination to identify client service employee of the quarter and year winners.
When designing formal reward programs it is important to:
Here are a few tips:
Insure that the size of the award is appropriate to the achievement. Be careful not to cheapen the value of the award by making it less significant than the achievement calls for.
The most successful reward programs are simple to administer. They give everyone a change to win—those who serve either internal or external clients—and have simple, easy-to-understand rules and goals that everyone considers attainable.
Make it fun.
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John W. Olmstead, Jr., MBA, Ph.D., CMC, is a Certified Management Consultant and the president of Olmstead & Associates, Legal Management Consultants, based in St. Louis, Missouri. The firm provides practice management, marketing, and technology consulting services to law and other professional service firms to help change and reinvent their practices. The firm helps law firms implement client service improvement programs consisting of client satisfaction surveys, program development, and training and coaching programs. Their coaching program provides attorneys and staff with one-on-one coaching to help them get “unstuck” and move forward, reinventing both themselves and their law practices. Founded in 1984, Olmstead & Associates serves clients across the United States ranging in size from 100 professionals to firms with solo practitioners. Dr. Olmstead is the Editor-in-Chief of “The Lawyers Competitive Edge: The Journal of Law Office Economics and Management,” published by West Group. He also serves as a member of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Research Committee. Dr. Olmstead may be contacted via e-mail at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com. Additional articles and information is available at the firm’s Web site: www.olmsteadassoc.com.
© Olmstead & Associates, 2005. All rights reserved.
Lawyers and law firms are in the business of selling services. Their product is their intellectual capital, which is the professional talent, skills and capabilities of the entire service team—lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Then why don’t lawyers embrace client service and realize that exceptional client service may be the most effective way of differentiating themselves from other lawyers and maintaining a competitive advantage.
In our visits to law firm clients of all sizes across the country we typically observe the following:
Delivering great client service is extremely important in today’s legal marketplace. More and more lawyers and law firms are competing for fewer clients while client loyalty continues to drop. It is no longer sufficient to simply be competent or even expert in today’s competitive legal environment—law firms must distinguish themselves by the service they provide. Lawyers and law firms must strive for 100 percent client satisfaction. Service is how many clients can tell one lawyer or law firm from another.
In a survey of 600 corporate counsels, 69.7 percent state that they have hired a new credible, major law firm in the past year and in 2003, only 26.5 percent said that their firm is the “best.” When asked what client focus means to them, the following responses (ranked in order of importance) illustrate the client service gap.
Individual clients are advising of similar service gaps:
According to Jay Foonberg, 67 percent of clients who stop using a particular lawyer do so because they feel they were treated poorly or indifferently and 27 percent changed lawyers because their previous lawyers weren’t available.
Clearly, from what law firms’ clients are telling us, lawyers and law firms need to improve client service by integrating a client-first service focus into everyday practice and getting feedback.
Most clients can’t evaluate the quality of your legal work. What they can and do is evaluate the experience of working with you.
Lets face it—customer and client expectations have changed across all industries. It is a buyers market and they know it. Today clients want it all - better, faster and cheaper.
If you can’t provide it they will go somewhere else.
Tips For Implementing A Client-Focused Culture In Your Firm
√ A client service improvement plan
√ Client service standards
√ A kickoff meeting (or series) for all employees sharing with them the results of the client satisfaction survey, the firm’s dedication to exceptional client service, and client service improvement plan.
√ An ongoing abbreviated random client satisfaction telephone interview program. (Permanent program)
√ A series of client service training workshops for all attorneys and staff.
√ Incentives, bonuses, and special rewards for employees that have provided exceptional client service. (Permanent program)
√ Linkage of customer satisfaction to employee performance evaluations. (Permanent program)
√ Incorporation of client-first in all internal and external communications.
√ Design of internal scripts, graphic, and other support vehicles designed to remind employees of the firm’s commitment to exceptional client service.
√ Review of results and level of improvement in client satisfaction at the conclusion of the campaign.
√ Phone calls will be returned within two hours.
√ Be client friendly. Treat clients like you would like to be treated. Eliminate arrogance in manner and tone.
√ Answer phone calls by the third ring.
√ Provide status updates monthly.
√ Send out billing statements monthly.
√ Send clients copies of all documents created or received on his or her behalf.
√ Ask clients how you are doing.
√ Smile—whether on the phone or in person.
√ Ask a client their name and always use it.
√ Thank clients for their business.
√ Go out of your way to make it easy for clients to do business with the firm.
√ Do what you promise and when you promised.
√ Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
Keep up the good work.
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John W. Olmstead, Jr., MBA, Ph.D., CMC, is a Certified Management Consultant and the president of Olmstead & Associates, Legal Management Consultants, based in St. Louis, Missouri. The firm provides practice management, marketing, and technology consulting services to law and other professional service firms to help change and reinvent their practices. The firm helps law firms implement client service improvement programs consisting of client satisfaction surveys, program development, and training and coaching programs. Their coaching program provides attorneys and staff with one-on-one coaching to help them get “unstuck” and move forward, reinventing both themselves and their law practices. Founded in 1984, Olmstead & Associates serves clients across the United States ranging in size from 100 professionals to firms with solo practitioners. Dr. Olmstead is the Editor-in-Chief of “The Lawyers Competitive Edge: The Journal of Law Office Economics and Management,” published by West Group. He also serves as a member of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Research Committee. Dr. Olmstead may be contacted via e-mail at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com. Additional articles and information is available at the firm’s Web site: www.olmsteadassoc.com.
© Olmstead & Associates, 2005. All rights reserved.
Did you ever take the time in your practice day to think about just exactly how much time you spend looking for those very elusive BUT important e-mails? Most, if not all of us, spend far too much time doing just that and know that it’s not time well spent. Yet, when you organize your e-mail reference system into a useful folder hierarchy, it’s easy to file messages for later reference.
Setting up e-mail reference folders
The key to keeping e-mails organized is to create an effective e-mail folder hierarchy. When you create this hierarchy in advance and base it on your meaningful objectives and supporting projects, then and only then, can you more easily discern what is worth keeping and what should be discarded!
When working in Outlook you do so by pointing your mouse to New in the File menu, and then clicking on Folder. Now in the Create New Folder dialog box, in the Name box, type your name for the folder, i.e., Divorce Law Issues. Always keep in mind what your objectives are for these folders and/or subfolders.
Now in the Create New Folder dialog box in the Folder Contains box, click the type of folder that you want to create, i.e., for storing e-mail items, then just click on Mail and Post Items. Now in the Select Where to Place folder list, select a location for the folder and then click OK.
Moving your e-mail messages
Now, you should know when your e-mail messages arrive they go directly into your Inbox. So in order for you to organize the messages that you wish to retain in your newly created e-mail reference system, you need to move them to the folders that you have just created.
To do so you simply click on the message you want to move and drag it over to the folder you have developed for it. Likewise, if you desire to move a range of messages merely click the first message and hold down your shift key and then click to the last message in the range. If the messages are nonadjacent just hold down the CTRL key and click each message. If you desire your e-mails to go directly into your created folders, you simply create a rule for those specific e-mails. After the rule has been created, messages with those specific criteria will automatically appear in your specified folders.
Rule creation is a simple matter of clicking on Actions and then Create Rule after you have the e-mail open. You can then specify the criteria for the e-mail such as the header of it or the subject of it. You can create a lot of conditions to allow only certain items into certain folders.
Many times e-mails have attachments and in those cases you may decide that you need the entire e-mail for its context or only the document, which can stand alone. If the e-mail is of no importance, simply save the document in your my Documents folder and delete the e-mail message. If you need the information of the e-mail then save it to your Outlook folder reference systems folders. However, if the document and the e-mail need each other so as to be meaningful to you, I suggest that you save both items in your e-mail reference system.
As an added tip I recommend that you store your documents on your hard drive whenever possible. First off, you have more storage space there and, more importantly, the search function in your e-mail reference system searches only through e-mail items and not any of the documents attached to them, while in the My Documents folders search function does a search through documents!
Conclusion
Keep in mind that an effective e-mail system of reference will help you to find critical data much more easily and it will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend trying to manage all of your e-mails. Most statistics show that, if used properly, an organized e-mail system such as this can save you up to 50 minutes or more each day, and that comes to approximately three weeks a year! Just think—now you have three more weeks every year of billable hours. But frankly, you should just spend it relaxing and knowing that your e-mails are taking care of themselves.
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© Copyright 2005-Alan Pearlman -”The Electronic Lawyer” ™ All Rights Reserved
All law firms have their own way to measure productivity, profitability and performance. As a matter of fact, these numbers are calculated and interpreted many different ways, in various firms and types of practices. This article is intended to break down some of the variables to help you better understand and evaluate lawyers contribution to a firm’s success.
As a consultant who works extensively with time and billing, I am constantly being asked to run reports on “how much each attorney billed in a month.” Even though that sounds like a straight forward request, it initiates a series of questions. What does “billed” mean to you? Here are some examples of interpretation:
Firm A considers billed time to be all time spent and billed to a client during the month. Billable and non-billable (no charge) time are both included in the “billed time per month” value. Administrative and overhead time are not included.
Firm B looks at all billable time recorded in their billing system during a month. Write-downs, because they are done at the time of billing, do not reduce billable time recorded. Time that is entered as “No Charge” is broken out as non-billable time. This type of report would show billable, unbillable and total time spent. Value of the time may or may not be included in the totals.
In addition to the above scenarios, firms evaluate performance and contribution using other criteria. Two most common basis for reporting are “originating attorney” and “working attorney.” A third element is often “responsible attorney.” Here are definitions for these terms:
Originating, working and supervising attorneys are usually evaluated based on collections, not on work performed. They will be credited for dollars collected and may even be compensated on a percentage basis. This might seem a bit unfair at times because the attorney performing the work is often an associate who has no control over whether or not fees are collected. Fair or not, some firms still choose to use this as one of their criteria for raises and for paying bonuses.
A note about flat fees: Typically, flat fee values are much different than the value of the time spent. For example, if an attorney bills a flat fee matter at $10,000 and he spends 20 hours on matter, his hourly rate would calculate at $500. So even though this attorney’s standard hourly rate is $250, the value of the time on this case would be $500 per hour. Flat fees can greatly increase or decrease productivity. Straight hourly rate is irrelevant and the total value of the matter is not able to be determined until after a final bill is sent. This too, needs to be taken into consideration when evaluating how much an individual is contributing to a firm!
All billing packages today include various types of quantitive reports. However, before you use these reports to evaluate performance, it is critical that you understand exactly what the numbers mean. And even more important, that you decide what types of numbers will help you best evaluate your firm’s progress, performance and profitability.
In conclusion, my experience with hundreds of law firms throughout the Chicago area has taught me that every firm has a different idea of how to evaluate performance.
1. My first question is: Are you looking at how much time was actually billed, or how much time was worked?
2. From there we determine whether the firm is looking at time spent, time billed or value of the time.
3. After all of the billings are addressed, I continue to probe to see if managing partners are interested in tracking collections … by originating, working and/or supervising attorneys.
As you can see, there are many ways to answer “How much did each attorney bill last month?” Hopefully this article provides tools for you to formulate your question accurately, and better evaluate staff performance, productivity and profitability.
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Terry Rosenthal is president of TSR Consulting Services Inc. (www.tsrconsult.com), a software consulting firm specializing in law office applications. Terry has been working with small and medium sized Chicago area law firms since 1996. She is a Certified Consultant for Timeslips, Amicus Attorney and Worldox, as well as a QuickBooks Professional Advisor. TSR Consulting Services is located in the Chicago area and can be reached at 847 256-7536 or by e-mail at
support@tsrconsult.com.