Professional help to MANAGING LAW FIRMS
I use to make a metaphorical comparison of the LAW FIRM management with a chess game, (used in the conceiving of my site: www.graciotti.com.br) where the movement of any piece may (and sometimes, it really does) radically change the distribution of forces and options of future´s game movements on a chessboard. In addition to the challenges that any company may have (competitiveness, quality, marketing, support, etc), there are other factors which are inherent to the characteristics of the business of the law firms and mainly to the lawyer’s profession.
A lawyer is a professional who presents a peculiar behavior and it is necessary to understand it in order to be able to analyze and understand the way how several firms are structured and managed.
The first psychological characteristic is the very low tolerance to failures..Due to the profession, the lawyer must not make failures in his/her arguments, presented documents or statements (whether regarding laws, doctrine or jurisprudence) running the risk that his/her arguments may be destroyed by his/her opponents, not to mention the more ordinary failures, but much more serious ones, such as the failure to fulfill deadlines, non-collection of fees, which disqualify the proceeding before the courts, and also without considering the merit of the issue involved.
Another factor we have to consider is the lawyer’s educational degree that collaborates with the repugnance and, I would also dare to say, the ignorance that the majority has in relation to the theories, techniques and the entire know-how that is already developed in the world of the entrepreneurial management.
One must not blame this professional who graduated in schools that emphasize the technical-theoretical improvement, but forget to provide the minimum information in the management area. I am not criticizing the Law Schools, but giving a sign of alert about the importance of a more eclectic education of the professionals. That was one of the biggest difficulties I felt when I graduated from Polytechnic School (which was and still is very important in my technical and personal training) and also when I faced the real world, where other attributes were expected for the personal development of my career, in addition to those ones I had learned at school regarding structures, calculation, foundations, etc.
The management of companies in the highly competitive current scenario and in constant change and now, in recession, demands characteristics from their managers such as creativity, resilience and innovation, which obligatory go though experimentation processes, learning with the failures (and not being recurrent) and constant corrections of the route.
This dynamic process is head on opposed to the behavior to which the lawyer was trained and is used to having in relation to the solution of his/her challenges, which demands the lawyer the education he/she did not gain in college and also constant updating, to which he/she has no time to dedicate.
In this scenario, the importance of hiring a consulting firm increases a lot, which will add to the innate attributes relative to those lawyers who began their businesses, the specific knowledge of the entrepreneurial management areas and also the experience gathered in previous experiences as, using the metaphor of the sailboat and the wind, instead of complaining about the lack of wind (pessimistic) or even hoping the wind will blow again (optimistic), we must be realistic and adjust the sails!
This adjustment will be different for each office and is the consultant’s task to identify the limitation of each one or to help solving those ones already identified by their managers. There are several issues to be improved and I mention the more critical ones, which in my experience of over 27 years working with managers lawyers, I have observed: the adoption of the philosophy of the “management of the know-how, adoption of systems of extraction of statistics of internal information (Business Intelligence is just one of them); creation of controls and appropriation of costs per client/case or area of performance; adoption of a short and mid-term strategic plan, creation and follow-up of the budgets and pricing of services, adoption of talent retention policies and professional motivation; adoption of a career and remuneration plan for the legal and back office team.
It is appropriate to refer to two points to be considered when choosing a consulting firm: first, to ensure that it effectively has practical experience of several years of performance (in order to avoid the purely non-tested theoretical-academic counseling) and, second, to ensure that it has specific experience in the law’s firms market niches which have very distinctive characteristics.
José Paulo Graciotti, is consultant and founding Partner of GRACIOTTI ASSESSORIA EMPRESARIAL, engeneer by Escola Politécnica Universidade de São Paulo, with Financial MBA at FGV and specialized in Knowledge Mnagement by FGV. ILTA Member since 1998 (International Legal Technology Association) with more than 27 years managing Law Firms in Brazil – www.graciotti.com.br
