When roads are to be built and houses, bridges are to follow then whatever they are designed to be by the architect is what the engineers will put on the ground. The good news is that your law practice is a living being that is subject to continuous improvement the same way reconstructions and extensions can be made to bridges, houses.
Deliberately trying to improve the organisational performance of your law firm is a type of innovation where you are making the most of what you have, you are taking what already exists and working to use it to add more value to your clients and the profile of your law firm's practice areas. Some of the things you will be involved in achieving will invariably include; understanding your organization in excruciating detail, improving the quality of your services & products, understanding what the reasons for your reversals are, putting a plan into play to address your unique needs.
Redesigning your law firm's processes, the way you work is a first step to improving performance.
There is a certain way your law firm works and does things; from recruiting to solution selling, which has led it to where it is right now and during reviews you come upon debacles and near misses you would like to correct and with the passage of time you've gained insight from so you can change direction and restructure your firm. And this redesign is not always difficult as it is not a question of more effort but one of a change in gears and once the gears have been changed the progress you make is a reward for your efforts to change. For example, a Principal Partner is working hard on his Masters degree and half way through he gets the epiphany that the law is really a business so he quits his Masters and crosses the road to start his MBA. He is using mainly the same effort and an MBA doesn't require a new brain. Change of heart, change of gear, change of direction but not more effort or money or thought.
However, some redesigns will be a bit more difficult to initiate even if their effects will be lasting but if you study the entire process the difficulty will most usually be in making the mental transition, making that gear change from one accepted way of doing things to another.
The core of the design process is that it should be a solution that addresses the core of the challenge. It should not be a band-aid to paper over the challenge; what is the fundamental problem, what is the fundamental solution. Setting up a law firm marketing plan with funding and incentives which will be in play year in, year out is a solution; exhorting the troops with rah-rah motivational speeches and cracking the whip if targets are not being met while making noises about winners going to Barbados will not work. And it will bring you back to the same spot in a while.
When you succeed in integrating the marketing plan into your firm, year in year out, setting specific tasks that everyone in the law firm has a stake in executing and backing up it up with resources and rewards, you have a permanent solution. And when employees move on they can say that at your store everybody learns to bring in business and you have built a marketing system that keeps on working.
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