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Continuous Improvement
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Continuous Improvement

To remain competitive and profitable in today's legal services market, law firms need to continuously improve how they work.

The fifth of W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points, Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service, calls for a never-ending commitment to enhancing quality and efficiency within an organization. This principle has profound implications for law firms, impacting not only day-to-day internal operations but also bottom-line profitability.

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End the practice of awarding business based on price.
Norman Clark Norman Clark

End the practice of awarding business based on price.

In an increasingly competitive landscape, law firms, like any business, might feel compelled to make decisions based on price alone.

However, the fourth of W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points for better management warned against this practice, arguing that cost should not be the primary consideration in business decisions. Instead, he championed a more holistic approach that weighs quality and long-term value alongside price.

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Cease dependence on inspection.
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Cease dependence on inspection.

"Cease dependence on inspection," W. Edwards Deming's third point for effective management, is perhaps one of the least understood principles in the context of service industries like law firms.

Conventionally, it translates into the notion that quality should not be an afterthought checked through after-the-fact inspections but ingrained in every step of the production process.

For law firms, this means shifting the focus from reactive measures to proactive strategies that enhance the quality of legal services by reducing or eliminating altogether the causes of mistakes and rework.

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Adopt the new philosophy.
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Adopt the new philosophy.

The second challenge in W. Edward Deming's Fourteen Points is Adopt the New Philosophy.  It is particularly relevant in today's legal services industry, especially as many traditional law firms try to build and sustain a collaborative and productive workplace culture.

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Constancy of Purpose
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Constancy of Purpose

This is the second of a series of sixteen articles that will explore the relevance and, for some law firms the existential importance, of W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points, especially for small and midsize law firms.

The first of W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points for effective management calls for organizations to "Create Constancy of Purpose for Improving Products and Services." How can law firms do this in the face of changing client expectations and market dynamics?

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Why Law Firms Need Deming’s Fourteen Points Now More Than Ever
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Why Law Firms Need Deming’s Fourteen Points Now More Than Ever

Quality service, not price, rankings, or size, is what will differentiate successful law from from those that merely survive the 2020s.

Delivering the best quality legal services is a sincere aspiration of almost every law firm. For most of them, however, the word quality is little more than a slogan on their websites.

This is the first of a series of sixteen articles that will explore the relevance and, for some law firms, the existential importance, of W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points.

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Fix the work first...
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Fix the work first...

If you apply technology — even artificial intelligence — to a flawed work process, you will only make mistakes and lose money faster.

Before a law firm applies a technological tool or system to its internal operations, especially at the practice group level, it should first analyze, understand, and implement responses to weaknesses in the internal systems and processes by which it prepares and delivers legal services to clients.

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Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Tool to Improve Service Quality
Norman Clark Norman Clark

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. 

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Quality management could be your law firm’s best investment.
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Quality management could be your law firm’s best investment.

In an increasingly competitive legal market, law firms must constantly adapt and evolve to stay ahead.

While many firms focus on expanding their client base, increasing billable hours, or adopting the latest technology, a crucial factor in determining long-term success lies in the effective quality management of internal work processes. 

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Leadership in a Quality-Driven Law Firm
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Leadership in a Quality-Driven Law Firm

In a quality-driven professional culture, leadership takes on a unique and important role. Quality-driven law firms focus on delivering high-quality products and services to their clients, “the first time and every time," and effective leadership is essential in achieving this goal.

At the heart of quality-driven leadership is the ability to inspire and empower everyone in the firm to strive for excellence in everything they do. Leaders in a quality-driven culture understand that quality is not just a goal, but a way of doing things. They communicate this vision clearly to their teams and and colleagues and set high standards for performance and accountability.

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Eight Things for Indian Law Firms to Think About
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Eight Things for Indian Law Firms to Think About

As part of our ongoing experiment to test the potential value of artificial planning in law firm management, we asked the newest version of our chatbot, openai GPT-4, what Indian law firms should be considering in their planning for the incursion of foreign law firms into the Indian legal market.

The response outlined eight good starting points.

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Is your compensation system being stress-tested in 2023?
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Is your compensation system being stress-tested in 2023?

As the legal services world has emerged from the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to observe an unusually high degree of "churn" in associate and partner movements in legal markets worldwide.

In most instances, compensation has been a significant factor in these departures, although not the only one. Remote working during the pandemic opened new opportunities for discrete lateral recruiting, with the "losing" law firm not finding out about someone's decision to leave until it is too late.

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Will the '“law firm of the future” need fewer lawyers?
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Will the '“law firm of the future” need fewer lawyers?

A report from the American Bar Association suggests that the demand for lawyers, at least in the United States, might have begun to subside. 38,020 students started their first year of law school during the autumn 2022 term, compared to 42,718 in 2021, according to the report. Meanwhile, there has been a significant increase in enrollments in non-J.D. programs.

Although this data is limited to the U.S., Walker Clark LLC has begun to notice what might be the start of a similar trend in some other jurisdictions as well.  What could this mean for your law firm?

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What if our brilliant strategy fails?
Norman Clark Norman Clark

What if our brilliant strategy fails?

Even the best business strategies can be knocked off-course, or sometimes even wrecked, by a crisis that the law firm only vaguely anticipated, if at all.

Some law firms not only survive crises, but actually emerge from them stronger than ever before. Our firm’s observations of the experiences law firms of all sizes, but especially small and midsize firms, worldwide between 2020 and 2022, suggest that you can make your law firm “crisis-resistant.”

You won’t be immunized from the effects of a crisis, but you will be able to resist its most serious effects and recover much more quickly.

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Why am I doing this?
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Why am I doing this?

A lawyer's time is the most valuable asset in any law practice of any size anywhere in the world. Yet, lawyers report an almost continuous sense of frustration that they are not as productive or efficient as they believe that they could be.

Here is a time-tested diagnostic way to look at your work and to find ways to leverage your time to be as productive and profitable as possible. It costs nothing but a little bit of your time and can produce dramatic improvements in your everyday work.

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Yes, diversity really is a priority.
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Yes, diversity really is a priority.

The old excuse, still heard in many law firms around the word, that "diversity is not a priority for our clients or our firm" is not only misinformed, but in some cases could be a formula for long-range failure.

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Law Firms Without Borders: Challenging Trends in Cross-Border Legal Services
Norman Clark Norman Clark

Law Firms Without Borders: Challenging Trends in Cross-Border Legal Services

Although law firms today face a seemingly vast array of strategic, operational, and management challenges arising from the globalization of the legal services industry, there are at least five emerging trends that characterize law firms that are successfully building profitable cross-border and multinational practices, even when based in only one office or country. 

This paper, presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Bar Association International Law Section, on 29 April 2022, describes these five trends, based on observations and research by the author and other Walker Clark consultants in law firms over the past twenty years.

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The  Law Firm of the Future: A Culture of Resilience
Norman Clark Norman Clark

The Law Firm of the Future: A Culture of Resilience

This is the final installment of a series of posts that have described and explored characteristics that will determine which law firms remain successful in the legal services industry of the future, and what law firms can do now to build them into their operations and professional cultures.

The bottom line for all of this can be described in a single word: resilience.

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