Quality is a firm-wide issue.
It only takes one hole to sink a ship, not a hole in every compartment. If one practice group — or even one lawyer — has a vulnerability, the same or similar weaknesses probably exist elsewhere in the firm. A firm-wide approach to quality assurance therefore usually produces the best return on the investment of time, resources, and attention.
To carry the maritime analogy forward, we observe two principal types of “leaks” in law firms with poor quality assurance. Like many leaks, each one can go unnoticed for months or years while it does major damage to a law firm’s financial seaworthiness.
Reduced productivity
“We can always find time to fix our mistakes, but we can never find time to prevent them.”
Most law firms rely primarily on after-the-fact inspection to catch and correct mistakes, particularly in documents. Such rework can consume as much as 40% of the time of fee earners and staff. Since most clients are unwilling to pay the law firm to correct its own mistakes, every hour spent in rework represents a revenue-producing opportunity that is lost forever.
Law firms that have introduced serious, systematic quality assurance systems and procedures have found that the resulting improvements in productivity can produce substantially increased fee revenue without proportional increases in staff. This results in dramatic improvements in profitability.
Loss of clients
“We get only once chance to get it right.”
This comment by one of our firm’s clients, a practice group head in a mid-size firm in the United Kingdom, summarizes what law firms everywhere are experiencing. Clients today have decreased tolerance for poor quality. By the time the client actually complains, it might be too late to save the firm’s credibility with the client.
This leak is more subtle than the client who fires the law firm midway through a case or matter. One of the most important diagnostic indicators of a systemic quality assurance problem is the relatively low percentage of clients who return to the firm for subsequent legal services.
Interestingly, there also appears to be a correlation between poor quality assurance and poor recovery. Firms that lack a quality assurance system also tend to be inept at responding promptly to client complaints. At best they tend to placate the unhappy client for the moment, but do little if anything to prevent the problem from arising again.
Norman Clark
Tags: client service, clients, law firms, quality