Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
Building a Culture of Quality in Your Organization
Introducing a successful quality assurance system usually requires profound changes in how people think about their work, how they interact with each other and clients, and how they prioritize and deliver legal services.
A culture of quality challenges traditional assumptions about how lawyers and staff contribute to the profitability of the firm and how they add value in their respective roles.
It can be challenging, but it is absolutely necessary for sustainable success in a competitive environment that has very little tolerance for poor service quality.
Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Tool to Improve Service Quality
In today's highly competitive markets for legal service, it is service quality, not technical expertise, that will differentiate your law firm from your equally well-qualified competitors.
Artificial intelligence will never be a substitute for quality management, but it can provide powerful diagnostic tools and methods to build sustainable quality into every aspect of your practice.
Time to Get Really Serious About IT Security
The rapid development of the Dark Web and the adoption of new operational modes in the legal services industry, such as working at home, pose substantial new threats to many law firms that might have previously assumed, correctly or not, that they were "immune" from hacking and ransomware.
There are several basic steps that any law firm, of any size and anywhere, can take to reduce the risks.
Practicing Law in the Dark
Do you really know how profitable your practice is?
Do you know which factors are most important to your profitability?
For a surprising percentage of lawyers and law firms, the honest answer to each of these questions is "not really." They are practicing law in the dark.
It is not surprising that they frequently stumble over obstacles and fall into holes that other law firms easily avoid.
What fuels your partnership: trust or suspicion?
Trust is one of the most prevalent governance challenges facing growing professional services firms today.
This is not just a "feel-good" issue or a matter of preserving an artificial collegiality that might have been more characteristic of small law firms one hundred years ago. The level of trust that exists among partners has a direct and measurable effect on the firm's business performance.
Cornerstones for Strategic Planning in Professional Associations
I was recently asked what I believed to be the “essentials” of strategic planning in a professional association, such as a law firm network or bar association.
There are at least four such characteristics, which I could describe as cornerstones. Without each one, the strategic planning process probably will fail.
