SHOULD YOU MAXIMIZE, OPTIMIZE

The word maximize is used rather frequently in law performance and business circles as: maximize your potential, your performance, your profit and everything else.
You get the impression that maximize means to take it to the last drop, to use it till it drops, to go over the field again and again and again till every last sheaf has been harvested.
And that all this is to be encouraged. You are maximizing efficiency. You used up the asset until it dropped dead.
Maximize.
But is this in your own interest? Or any one else's for that matter.
The idea for looking at the goodness or lack thereof of this maximization first occurred to me from Drucker when he admonished the nonsense that was profit maximization be replaced with profit optimization where optimization means attaining a profit on the best possible sustainable terms and maximising means clearing everything regardless of use or need or future prospects.

This idea bears some thinking about has it is a long the lines of sustainable profitability of the clients your law firm has. If you have decided you want a long term repeat business relationship then you begin to see insider the amount of revenue you extract and the emotional capital you use up in doing it.

My current view is do you have to squeeze the last drop of productivity and efficiency from the asset so that when you are done all that is left is for the asset to be consigned to the junk heap? How about profits? Do you seek to get whatever the market can bear and as much as your firm can get away with?

FIRING THE D****D CLIENT

Have you ever seen a dollar of revenue you did not want , ever seen a client that you did not pursue or continue to take crap from? Well then, you need to fire the lady and fast.

The basic idea is this, if a client is costing you more than she is bringing in what do you do? And before you answer this question or as part of the process of answering this question you have to carefully assess the entire business relationship and what you want going forward.

Then you can consider whether you are the problem. Little value, lack of concern and lots of apathy e.t.c Maybe your expectations or ideas of how the relationship should be are skewed or off.

In the final analysis, here are three options:

1. Irrevocably get rid of the client as in fire the lady, her business and her drama.
2. Set up a Client Management system that turns bad clients into good ones.
3. Pick your clients according to a set of criteria.

A lot of tales are abuzz on the grapevine about excellent client service and how you have to make that a part of your law firm's services offering but remember, the client is a major part of this relationship. If she is a permanent anchor, your efforts will be stymied and you will have to summon up your courage to let the relationship go, on as amicable terms as possible.

Just make sure that the client is d****d before you let her go.

GOLDMAN SACHS FOR LAW FIRMS

Goldman is a hard place to be hired, a hard place to be promoted and a hard place to stay
- Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs.

Over here at The IBARU-McKENZIE BLAWG, we offer you insight on generating business for your law firm and other things that help to inform the decisions that you make at your firm. Well, here's one:

Force yourself to hold on to higher standards.

In the opening quote from the Goldman Sachs CEO, we are directing your attention to some of the things that happen at the said investment bank that make it THE bank to be in. Like everyone is fleeing to the bank. From young law school grads to MBA's etc, etc.
So for example, to be hired a vice president went through 150 interviews before he got his position at the bank and every once in a while someone who is a star in the bank is asked to leave. This is a very important part of Mr Paulson's role.

Here is what it kind of boils down to: we understand the days of slavery, monarchies and serfdom's are over and your law firm is not the military but all these institutions had something going for them. For those who were able to rise above the hardships, they were tougher and better for it.
These institutions created environments of such hardship and impoverishment that you had to be kind of super human to become good at what you did and do more than just survive. And even if you were not the mere fact that you survived through the system meant you were tough enough to be useful.

Fast forward to today, to our democratic times with our extra hours and enlightened view of management and business, the hardship seems to be discouraged or papered over. What makes it even worse is that you have dumb bosses who try to go back to slavery but it is not working.
What works is a system that forces you to stretch. If it cannot do this for you and keep you fully engaged then you can build your own platform.

We used the idea of force yourself to hold on to higher standards because this is what you need and we do not refer to some sham meeting or board or pointing at what other shops are doing so you can let yourself off the hook. Yes, we know a few of the tricks.
Instead, think along the lines of Winston Churchill having a secret information group during WWII to give him just the facts, absent of the intrigues of court or FDR having his wife give him direct information from the American people about the things his government was up to absent the intrigues of the civil service through her national tours.
Where you will find the courage for this is up to you but if your system has no bite it will feel shallow and your people will respond accordingly.
There is a reason the Olympic Gold Medal class is for the elite, you cannot smell the area unless you hold on to superhuman standards. We're just saying.

Since you are running a law firm and you need human beings to bring magic to the office check out the Economist article on Goldman Sachs and see if it doesn't give you some ideas on the example you have to set.
Yes you, if you were hoping to pass it off to the boys and continue lounging on your Managing Partner Chair or yelling directions from behind? Forget it.

SUPPORT STAFF

Have you sent out letters by hand before as part of your business development or RFPs before? If you have you are aware of the thought coordination, time and sweat you need to get it done effectively. This is why you have support people to do it for you so that you can have your resources (that big brain + your time) to tackle the higher value fee earning work.
The measure of your support staff therefore is how much of your time they are able to save and not how busy they are. You would be uncomfortable having them lounge but what is their core function? To look busy or to make you most productive?
The difficulty with going with the productivity answer is that it places you directly on the spot for being productive at your firm since then the strategic high level legal work is fairly in front of you and the administrative stuff is out the way. You, my friend are without excuse.

Here's a gem: you always want to have excess capacity of your cheapest resource so your expensive resources do not spend their time doing low-value tasks. Q.E.D.

YOU NEED A MENTOR

This business of mentorship from senior lawyers to junior lawyers does raise a question, how do you create great lawyers? Is it like raising kids where you let out the slack a little then crack the whip when the kid gets out of line or is it like military training where you are passed through a terrible ordeal that makes you tougher with a different mind or is it like the ancient Spartan society which had the Igoge which put their own warrior ethos into the young or is it like today's mentorship movement that says you need a mentor, you need a mentor?

Listening to Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, she lays the case as Succeed and you will find a mentor. Perhaps beginning at the beginning with who is a mentor why a mentor what to do with for a mentor e.t.c. will suffice. Let's not forget the difference between mentorship and sponsorship.

What even is the ideal analogy, is it father and son, mother daughter, kind boss and employee, benefactor and orphan?

Then there is the all time favourite: the throw him into the deep end and see if he comes out school.
This essentially is you as a young lawyer struggle on your own mainly and if any injustice comes your way or you are daft enough to whine then you are told that 'We had no such help and we made it why can't you? (and this is a fair point).

In many ways mentorship seems like do it for me make it easier for me give me the benefits of what you have laboured for years for and it is apparent that lots of lawyers are willing to offer this. You just have to earn ticket by your love for the law. This is not a simple as it sounds.

I guess in some ways it boils down to giving. The giver gives what he wants to or what he can or what he is able to and the taker has to receive it with as much grace and with full moral feel good pay to the giver.
And that's all there is to it.

THE MEANING OF WORDS OR RULES OF INTERPRETATION

Your law firm life literally depends on the meaning of the words you use and the meaning you take from the words other people use in conversations with you and in communications meant for you.
This is why the agreed upon definition of a word, phrase or buzzword is so so important. Its meaning is literally what we are talking about.
Words convey meaning and they let you know what can be achieved and what cannot be. They also show you how to navigate from Point A to Point B.

For example, Focus. Should your law firm focus on a few manor clients or industries or should it diversify and spread its risk? You probably have an obvious answer one way or another but that is beside the point. We first have to have a clear and comprehensive meaning of the words focus and diversify that will leave no room for clauses and justifications.
So what is focus? Is it putting 50% on one industry and then what is diversification? Is it about reducing your personal appetite for risk or preempting covering your behind in case there is a reverse up in the future. Then there is the business reality that making bet the company decisions are necessary to living long and great as a business. And all bet the company decisions are totally irrational.

For your law firm, all the above on what meaning you take from words matters very much because your law firm is a business and if you do not accept that it is a business then you will close yourself off from all the beneficial aspects of the business world which will make your firm grow and such.
If you accept that you are a business person, you will hang out a bit more with the pure play business folk, see life as they do and speak their language. This will necessarily help you see why businesses respond to you the way they do and will also carry over into the way you run your law firm.

Or just take the word responsibility. There is no such word, what exists is responsibility + authority so if you have one you have the other and if you imply one then you imply the other. Imagine assuming only one portion of the meaning of this word and all the drama this mismeaning will bring into your affairs, your planning and your putting ideas into play.

But then, it's just the meaning of words. But then again the words express meaning, what you consider possible, what can be done and what cannot be done and how to go about it.

FRESH EYES

A young one was in a game of Truth or Dare with an old one and the young one asked the old one a Truth question 'If you could do anything with me what would you do? The old one replied 'I would take out your eyes and place them in my head and use them to see the world'. The young one replied 'how awful' to which the old one replied 'I would give anything to see the world through your eyes being as young as you are, being able to see the world with fresh eyes.

In a field as solid as law which is filled with knowledgeable, rational, heavy weight types, it has to be said. The limits of what you can do or achieve are defined by your mind.

This is not mindbending or voodoo and neither is it unscientific claptrap. It is reality as validated by human experience and what we see everyday.
For example, the local Nigerian economy is said to be tough and such and such cannot be done yet Chinese and Indian Nationals flood into the country and within few years are living well.
This just underscores the need to bring a fresh pair of eyes to look at your law firm's current reality because you reason and feel and think with your experiences and knowledge and the way you see the world.
Everyone does this so whenever some chap who is outside your field of expertise or knowledge makes a comment or observation, it would be better if you thought it through before shutting it down.
Now do not even pretend that this is not difficult or that you embrace this idea fully. You have your ego to contend with and if you flippantly dismiss that reason, you have your years at the bar under your belt and if you push that to the side in this case then you have your years of success and failures which have been ingrained into your memory.

Now the usual excuses will be how can an outsider tell me about how to move my business forward? Have you ever had the experience of looking for something and found that the harder you searched the more difficult it seemed to locate it and then what do you do? You put in more intense effort and go through everything again. It is at this point that you ought to pause a minute take a step back and just casually look over the entire area and then surprisingly the missing item just comes into your field of vision. Right in front of you, just there.

This is what a fresh pair of eyes offers. It is human nature to celebrate the already successful and point it out as a model to embrace but it is more difficult to point this out when the would be successful is testing and failing forward. Just like the Apple company is celebrated as innovating across music, movies, computers, merchandising etc where it did not belong.
The single thread of connection for Apple is technology and Apple thinks it can do it better. That's all. No lengthy talk about this is my industry or not.

The reason we have mirrors is so we can have a vague idea of what we look like but even this benefit is reduced by looking at the mirror for so long that we see what is in our heads not what is in the mirror. Scientific fact.
So keep this in mind when next you are feeling overly protective of the final authority of legal and what should or should not be done.