Posted by Barbara Hamilton-Bruce, director of operations at Accident Advice Helpline: I regularly sit down with people from teams across the business to talk about the performance of law firms on our panel and firms that have made enquiries about membership. One of the agenda subjects is ‘quality’. It’s a hard thing to define but generally we are asking ourselves ‘does what we have learnt since the last meeting that may change our view of any of our panel firms, past or present?’. We talk about many things but pay a lot of attention to customer feedback, good and bad.

We’ve certainly waited a long time for the Money Laundering (Amendment) Regulations 2012, but was it worth the wait? We’ve heard rumblings about major changes to the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 since 2009; a formal government review in 2009/10 was followed by a Treasury consultation in 2011/12. The Money Laundering (Amendment) Regulations 2012 finally surfaced on 10 September 2012 and came into force on 1 October 2012. So, do you need to make any changes to your money laundering procedures?

Do you answer your phones with a smile? If not, you can be sure your callers will be able to tell the difference. It pays to give close attention to the little things that make up the overall impression your firm leaves with clients. Because how they feel about you and the service you provide can have a big impact on your business.

When in-house IT experts bang on about data security and the ingenious strategies hackers are deploying to hack into law firm computer systems, most partners groan inwardly and wait for the inevitable request for funds. The question of where to draw the line on IT security spending is a tricky one and there are no easy answers. As a general rule of thumb, a pinch of scepticism seems prudent about whatever spend the IT department deems essential – let us not forget the prolonged hysteria over the Millennium software bug, which was far from the existential threat to law firms the IT geeks claimed it would be.

A recent BDO survey suggested that 60% of all law firms expect to have merger talks in the next three years, 30% of these in the next 12 months, with more than a third actually expect to merge within three years. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising given the state of the economy, clients demanding more for less, increasing competition from new ABS entrants, the fact that the average age of a male partner is reckoned to be 58, and that most law firms have not given serious thought to succession let alone put any detailed succession plans in place.