The need to correctly administer and manage a law firm arises from its nature of business, we are all aware that today to achieve success and recognition in the labor market it is not enough to be a good professional, in the case of Law tutoring. Lawyers it is not enough to have good lawyers who do a good job, although this is essential, it is necessary to go further, think about the correct organization and administration of the resources that the firm has. If for a factory that produces chocolate the raw material is cocoa, for a law firm its most precious resources are the time and knowledge of each professional. The intangibility of the primary resources with which a law firm or a company that provides professional services works makes their management more complex.
Now, let’s think about how complex the problem can be if we consider that the majority of lawyers have not been trained to manage, everything can become a great chaos. What to do to correctly manage a law firm and not die in the tried?
- Organize collection processes: It is not rocket science if we accept the help of technology to optimize processes, have information at hand and achieve organized finances that allow us to study the indicators and project ourselves. In essence, the firm acquires software that helps organize billing, whether by client, rate, matter or others.
- Standardize: define performance indicators for the professionals who work in the firm and standardize them. By this I do not mean that each professional must meet the same standards or charge the same rates, I mean creating a “catalog” of professionals according to their work, experience, or area of knowledge and assigning each of the categories some items to consider, in the case of lawyers the most common is the time worked on a certain case or client, well, this may be the item to standardize.
- Know and control: as we mentioned previously, the resources with which a lawyer works can be intangible in nature, this only increases the need to control them. Using an application that allows you to record the time that each professional dedicates to their cases and clients is an excellent way to start correctly managing resources.
- Communicate: In the case of law firms, it is common for more than one professional to work on a particular case; it is also common for a single client to have several cases that are handled by different professionals. Well, it is necessary that the professionals who make up the firm have optimal communication mechanisms, tools that allow them to share progress, notes and documents related to each process.
- Evaluate and decide: the phase that corresponds to the heads of a firm, the constant evaluation of the firm’s performance, the processes that are going well and those that must be optimized. A software that has a complete dashboard and a business intelligence module will always be the best ally to be able to have a global vision of the firm’s components, to make the best decisions.