Chris Pucci, CEO of Osprey Approach
By Chris Pucci, CEO of Legal Futures Associate Osprey Approach
The effectiveness of your law firm relies almost entirely on the daily habits of your team. Every law firm will have a combination of business habits that either help them to run a successful firm aligned with their goals, or habits that are hindering success and damaging performance.
Regardless of your goals, running a successful firm involves mastering the basics and adopting habits that help you stay competitive. Improving the effectiveness of your firm requires breaking down your current processes and identifying areas of improvement that enable you to align with your goals, so that you can build effective habits.
Build better habits
Your daily habits impact your business reputation and the long-term success of your business. The inefficiencies that build up, the quality of service delivered to clients, or satisfaction of an employees’ day all combine to determine the effectiveness of your firm.
Building good business habits helps you to establish a foundation of seamless and effective processes designed for maximum output. These habits, especially when combined across all individuals in your team, have huge benefits for your firm across compliance, client satisfaction, employee motivation, profitability, and much more.
Long term success
To set your firm up for long-term success you need to create the right environment that enables effective habits to flourish while reducing inefficient ones. To help achieve this, you need four things: aligned goals, accountability, effective tools, and the right mindset.
Aligned goals
Aligned goals help you to focus on what is it you want to achieve. If you know your goals and your purpose, you’ll be able to design the most effective processes for the job, monitor performance, and communicate the plan to your team for firm-wide support.
Accountability
If your firm or team aren’t held accountable for their daily responsibilities, they’ll never be motivated to complete the necessary tasks. It can be easy to slip back into old habits, but with specific targets, individuals or teams are held accountable for adopting new processes to meet the wider goals. Performance can be monitored, and areas of improvement can easily be identified for continued development.
Effective tools
Do you have the right technology, infrastructure, digital tools, and people skills to achieve what you’re aiming for? Can you utilise the resources you already have, or does it require investment for long-term success?
The right mindset
As the saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest member, so ensuring your team has the right mindset for improvement to manage change, and for optimisation, is crucial to building the right environment for success.
How to create the right environment for better business habits
To help improve the effectiveness of your firm, we’ve identified five pillars that will help you set up the right environment – enabling you to reduce waste and start creating efficient operations immediately. These are set out below, but you can download our guide here to find out more.
- Improvement by subtraction – focus on doing less of what doesn’t work, rather than concentrating on what does
- Make it easy – adopt new habits that your team can easily get on board with
- Foster the right mindset – adopt an open-minded, experimentation mindset rather than one focused on outcome
- Tech adoption – give your team easy to adopt digital tools that enable them to be more productive, accurate, and effective
- Monitor performance – Identify ways you can quantify the results of new habits right across the firm.
Improve the effectiveness of your law firm
To set your business up for long-term success it’s important to create the right environment for effective business habits. By adopting the right mindset, efficient tools, and aligning your goals you can be confident the foundations are set for improving the effectiveness of your firm.
For further help and guidance on creating the right environment to foster good business habits, download our guide today.
Chris Pucci is CEO of Osprey Approach, which provides an all-in-one, cloud-based legal accounting, case and practice management solution to law firms of all sizes. With over 30 years’ experience in the legal software sector, Osprey’s products and services are designed to help make running a profitable, compliant, and efficient law firm easier
