Walker Clark Worldview

The people who do the work are in the best position to improve it.

This is the third in a series of posts about the characteristics of successful quality assurance programs in law firms.

Many law firms assume that the installation of an effective quality assurance program will require hiring a platoon of expensive external consultants to set up and administer the system. Actually, this is the wrong way to do it.

Law firms already have the internal quality assurance “experts” that they need — their own people.

Quality assurance requires a firm-wide approach and enthusiastic executive-level leadership. However, the “real work” is done by fee earners and support staff in the practice groups and project teams. Most risks arise from a relatively small number of specific weaknesses in the way that work is performed every day.

The people who do that work every day are usually the ones who can best diagnose the causes of problems in work processes. Therefore, a major component of a successful approach to quality assurance is to provide knowledge, tools, and methods to people working in departments, practice groups, and teams. This empowers them to take responsibility for improving the quality of their work.

Although we recommend firm-wide infrastructure and consistent procedures to manage quality, the intense focus must be at the working level. The key persons in are the lawyers who are managing client matters day to day. This working-level approach is almost always more successful and less expensive than solutions imposed by senior management or outside consultants, who arrogantly believe that they “know the business” better than the people who work in it every day.

When Walker Clark, LLC, assists a law firm with the development of a serious quality assurance program, we contribute tools, methods, measurements, and program management structures. The real improvement comes from the people who do the work.

Norman Clark

Tags: law firms, problem solving, quality

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 14:38 and is filed under profitability, quality, risk management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.