Are you happy with your LinkedIn profile?
If not, make sure you’ve covered all areas with a handy, free 15-step checklist to download.
http://eepurl.com/zyYXP
And for more help and advice, visit TheKnowledgeBusiness
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Did you join LinkedIn a while ago, fill in a basic profile, link to some colleagues and friends, join a group and then stop, wondering what to do next?
Do you want to learn
LinkedIn can be a great resource: a place to tap into the expertise of thousands, a place to find your next role and a place to build great relationships with current and potential clients.
Learn to leverage LinkedIn for your personal development on a new one-day course.
Helene Russell, Knowledge Management trainer, and Mark Stonham, social selling trainer, will be offering a day-long training event on LinkedIn for lawyers on 13th June 2013 at Clarke Willmott’s Bristol office.
Learn practical skills in a friendly atmosphere.
Learn how to:
If you are interested, e-mail me helene.russell@theknowledgebusiness.co.uk or DM me on twitter @heleneadby for more information.
Fees – £245 per person, inclusive of VAT, lunch/refreshments and handouts.
*Early bird special* – £195 – 20% discount for bookings received by 5pm 29 May.
*Multiple booking early bird discount* – £295 for two tickets booked by 5pm 29 May by a single firm.
*Double ticket after 29 May* – £395
Book through Eventbrite or directly through Helene and Mark.
(check with Helene and Mark for full details of the terms & conditions of the discounts).
For more personal help and advice, visit TheKnowledgeBusiness.
1. What is process design?
Process design is the activity which shapes the form of the services that a law firm delivers to its clients, in accordance with their strategy, and the process that produces them.
2.What is process mapping?
Process mapping is the pictorial depiction of the process design. It shows the relationships and inter-dependencies between activities in a process, including responsibility for/ownership of activities and potentially also their duration.
3. Why does a lawyer need to know about process mapping?
Process mapping can help all industries meet the needs of their customers in the most appropriate, efficient manner, balancing quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
Process mapping can help lawyers manage their legal matters in the manner which best meets their clients’ needs. It can also help them to manage their internal processes (i.e. billing and anti-money-laundering procedures) in an efficient, cost-effective way.
With considerable pressure on the legal profession at this time, process mapping can provide a useful method by which lawyers can analyse how they deliver legal advice to clients, to ensure that they are giving their clients best value, minimising waste and maximizing efficiency.
Process mapping is not just for “Tesco Law” or “big deals”. It can help all law firms make themselves more attractive to clients, more efficient and more profitable. It can also mitigate for fee earners some of the irritations and frustrations involved in the non-chargeable administration of matters.
4. Where do I start?
A process (such as investigating the evidence to Letter of Claim stage in a civil claim, the administration behind billing clients or anti-money-laundering and file opening procedures) can be broken down into individual activities. There are common symbols which are often used to describe each type of activity (e.g. a diamond for a decision point, a half circle for a delay whilst a part (perhaps an expert’s report) is awaited). These symbols are placed in sequence and can then be more easily analysed for improvements.
5. What do I do then?
Once you have mapped your processes, you should have a clear picture of your matter management. This should make seeing improvements and efficiencies far easier, e.g. why does that bill pass through four people’s hands and get two types of sign-off before it gets sent to the client? Sometimes there are good reasons for double checks, but sometimes an inefficient procedure has just evolved.
Taking time out to ask “How do I do this?” naturally encourages you to ask “How can I do this better?”.
6. But isn’t this time-consuming and expensive?
This does take time. If a process map is to be correct and an improved process is to work with, not against, a firm’s culture, then this mapping and analysis is best done by fee earners (with advice from experts) rather than imposed from on-high. This obviously takes fee earners away from earning fees. However, the benefits are improved risk management, better productivity, enabling “unbundling”, “self-service” and profitable fixed fees, and frees up expensive lawyers to concentrate on advising, using their valuable knowledge for their client’s benefit, rather than unnecessary administration.
7. Do I need to buy special software?
There are plenty of IT solutions available if you have the budget, but if you don’t, or if you are a sole fee earner who simply wishes to improve their own matter management, or a PSL who wants to offer fee earners improved workflows, there is plenty that you can do without it. This business approach relies on taking time to understand what is happening within the existing process and what could be done better, so it could be done with a whiteboard and pen (or a big piece of paper).
8. I’m a fee earner, how will this affect my job?
Process mapping, along with legal project management and, to a lesser extent KM, has a poor reputation with some lawyers, who fear that it is about dumbing their job down and perhaps offshoring it. In fact, most lawyers would admit that there are administrative processes that irritate them and stop them focussing on billable work and their project management isn’t always perfect. Most lawyers naturally do a certain amount of process design, but in an ad hoc manner with little formal training in the field.
Process mapping is about enabling fee earners to concentrate their time and effort on giving valuable advice and help to their client, rather than wasting that precious time on juggling matters inefficiently.
9. What can I do now? Where can I learn more?
Things to read –
Training events –
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The next Knowledge Network West meeting will be a LinkedIn Masterclass, looking at using LinkedIn for knowledge-sharing – connecting with experts in your field of expertise, collaborating and sharing knowledge with them – and using it to build your personal brand as a subject matter expert.
When: Tuesday 5 March 12.30-2.30pm
Who for: this session is suitable for Heads of Knowledge, PSLs, information professionals, Solicitors/Partners, anyone looking to improve their personal brand as a subject matter expert and looking to use LinkedIn as a means to connect and collaborate with others in their field.
How: presentation and discussion
How much: this session is free to KNW members and £25 for non-members
Where: CWC, Bristol – this event is kindly hosted by Janis Law at CWC
Booking: Please e-mail me at helenerussell@theknowledgebusiness.co.uk
As usual, please bring your own lunch. This helps to keep these sessions free to members and low cost to everyone else.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since 2013 began. Are you still keeping your resolutions? If not, why do you think they have fallen by the wayside? I’m not going to jinx my resolutions by discussing them here, but this stage of the year has reminded me that one of the reasons so many people fail at their resolutions is that they concentrate on the big changes, which in turn reminded me of an approach to improving business processes called “Kaizen”.
Personally, I first saw Kaizen in action on a tour of the Jaguar factory in Birmingham (I wasn’t buying a car, I was studying their business processes, honest), but it originated in Japan in 1980s. Although it is often used in manufacturing industries, I think it has a lot to teach us in the legal sector.
The important elements of Kaizen are that
It’s not about dividing big changes into baby steps, but all employees being on a continual journey of small improvements in their own work practices.
What does this have to do with your law firm and how can it help KMers?
What small tweaks can you make to your own work processes to improve them, to cut out wasted time and streamline and focus your efforts?
Similarly, can you help your fee earners to take time to reflect upon their work practices with a strategic eye and look dispassionately at their workflows, in order to think up some simple changes to improve them? Your fee earners understand their work best, but they often are too busy with their chargeable work to take time to think about processes. Often all they need is for someone to help them to take a step back and to be a little creative in their thinking.
What small change could you make right now?
Do you want an occasional (approx monthly) email with updates about my latest blog post and open training events? Sign up here.
I also talk about quality management & process improvement as part of KM in my popular “KM: The Works” training session. The next one is on 28th January 2016. Find out more here.
A review of my KM Handbook for the Law Society, is now available here.
“Down-to-earth advice”
“Readable, easy to follow and practical”
“This title has real repeat visit value”
“Golden nuggets of advice”
Learn more about “Knowledge Management Handbook” here and buy a copy here.
Visit TheKnowledgeBusiness for personal advice and help.
After Action Learning (AAL) is a great way of learning, but many law firms struggle to implement these systems, which often degenerate into a form-filling/box-ticking exercise, with little reflection or learning and even less high level analysis and dissemination.
There are many reasons why this happens: the chargeable hours problem; hierarchical structures; a reluctance by lawyers to put their heads above the parapet; lack of time; a culture which blames rather than learns; and many more.
This is a short post to suggest that instead of continuing to struggle with AAL systems which aren’t taking off in your law firm, you think about piloting a personal AAL system or system of reflective learning diaries.
A personal system like this may not give your firm obvious opportunities to share lessons learned widely or retain learning easily, but the reflective learning by your practising lawyers will be worthwhile and much of their learning will hopefully be passed on indirectly through conversations, supervision and training sessions.
How would this work?
As the AAL system is personal to each lawyer, it can suit each lawyer’s particular learning style: notes could be kept as paper documents, learning diaries, online documents, auditory files, video clips, mindmaps, photographs, diagrams or infographics, whatever suits the individual. The lawyer just needs to be confident that their system allows them to create notes easily, that they are meaningful to them, that they are able to store and curate them easily and then find them later. Because these are personalised systems, there is no need to ensure that content is easily discoverable by others or that the system integrates well. The main concern when helping the individuals to design their systems, is to ensure security and confidentiality, so that the lawyers can be open with their thoughts in confidence.
Where to begin
Are you a lawyer who has used reflective learning for a while now? It’d be really interesting to know how it works for you.
Do you want an occasional (approx monthly) email with updates about my latest blog post and open training events? Sign up here.
I also talk about reflective learning in my popular “KM: The Works” training session. The next one is on 25th May 2016. Find out more here.
More about reflective learning and AAL in “Knowledge Management Handbook” and “Practical Projects” and read more in Managing Partner magazine.
For personal advice and help, visit TheKnowledgeBusiness.
Bespoke knowledge-based marketing, where a client gets personally tailored updates rather than a mass newsletter mailing, seems to be topic-du-jour at the moment.
I think it would be really interesting to know more about the levels of increased sales, improved customer relationships, improved profitability that can be attributed to this and whether the increased cost is justified.
I’m hoping to study this for my MBA dissertation and so I am looking for some law firms who are also interested in knowing more. The research methodology will depend on the number of firms that are interested in being involved, so there is no commitment required yet.
Get in touch if you are vaguely interested and we can chat some more about it.
Firms’ concerns about privacy/confidentiality can usually be accommodated. The most important thing is that you are able to get involved soon, as the data must be collected and analysed around Easter.
When I started my knowledge-sharing group in 2008, one of the first topics members wanted to discuss was “top tips for improving knowledge-sharing”. After the discussion had been going for a while, one of the members said how interesting it was to hear our discussion: she’d worked in know-how a while ago, gone back to fee earning for a couple of years, and, now she had come back to know-how, everyone was still discussing the same problems.
At first I wondered why the problem was intractable. Later I realised how natural it is that “knowledge-sharing” hasn’t been perfected/fixed/ticked off yet. Firms, people and culture continuously change.
Firms strive to improve their businesses: to head off new competitors, to be more profitable, to secure the firm in the long-term. People change: they change firms and individually they adapt and change through their working lives. Work practices change and the Law changes. Demands on fee earners’ time are varied and targets generally get tougher. Those working in know-how will always want more time to be spent on Knowledge work, than the time that is available.
The purpose of this post, however, is not to make everyone give up now, but to remind people that:
With this in mind, why not just do something, even a little something, to improve things? Do a little something today and a little something else next month.
Do a little something even if you are in the middle of your strategy review or planning a large project. Most people can find 15-30 mins out of the whole of a month. It can’t hurt and it’ll probably help.
If you are struggling with ideas or where to start, why not pick one of these? For each suggestion, remember to keep it small: do something for one person, or try something out once. If it doesn’t work you’ve lost little time. If it does work either do it again or try something else.
What simple ideas do you have to suggest and how do you keep motivated to continuously improve knowledge-sharing?
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For more ideas, try “Practical Projects in Legal KM” from Legal Monitor or “Knowledge Management Handbook” from the Law Society.
Or come along to one of my open training sessions TheKnowledgeBusiness, or arrange your own in-house training sessions. See the latest open events on Eventbrite here.
And thanks to Jamie Lee Wallace for the idea for this post. I enjoyed her “Overwhelmed by marketing?” post enormously.
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I spoke at last Thursday’s Butterworths conference on Knowledge Management on the topic of using social media within knowledge teams in law firms, particularly to enable them to share knowledge on knowledge management and how to do their jobs better.
It was a really interesting and lively discussion and many attendees showed a lot of interest, so here are the slides from Slideshare. http://slidesha.re/VZsMxM
I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who has used a similar system for learning, collaborating and managing their knowledge in their knowledge teams.
(and for personal help and advice visit TheKnowledgeBusiness)
Knowledge for Lawyers 