CASE STUDIES

BRIEF
A major international firm had struggled to get fee earners to fully record time for over 100 years and appreciated the impact that this was having on profitability.

WHAT WE DID
A training programme was rolled out across the firm to help fee earners understand why they were failing to record all time and to show them best practice to help them to improve their skills. At the end of the training a revised time recording policy was issued which reflected best practice and the culture of the firm. Support was provided after the training to ensure that the firm took ownership  of  the project  to achieve  a long  term  increase in hours recorded.

TANGIBLE RESULT

The result of the intervention was a 16% increase in recorded time with just a 1% fall in the recovery rate for the three months after the training.

BRIEF
A large National firm wanted to improve the financial skills of its senior fee earners so that they could better understand the financial health of their clients and develop stronger relationships to develop new business.

WHAT WE DID

Two half day training sessions were provided with a gap of 2 weeks between the sessions. The first session focused on how to quickly review the accounts of a client and involved delegates looking at the accounts of one of their major clients. After the session delegates were tasked with talking to that client about their business more generally. The second session explained how large businesses run themselves so that participants could talk more confidently with clients about the current performance of the company and their upcoming issues.

TANGIBLE RESULT

It was impossible to measure quickly the impact of the training but the immediate benefit was that fee earners said they were now having broader conversations with clients than had previously been the case.

BRIEF
As part of the PSC, trainees in a large global firm were given this training to try and give them more control over their working life. Trainees are often thrown work by a variety of people late in the day and trainees often lack confidence to deal with this pressure effectively.

WHAT WE DID
A half day of training was provided during their second seat that challenged the trainees over their current working practices and covered areas such as managing others, keeping control of all outstanding issues, making an impact by being effective, using secretaries more routinely and still having time for balance in their lives.

TANGIBLE RESULT

The feedback from the trainees was that the training gave them confidence to challenge the status quo with positive suggestions for improvement and that the training was certainly more useful once they had experienced 6 months of work as trainees in the firm.

BRIEF
Having worked for over 25 years with firms it is interesting to see how increasingly sophisticated the better firms have become. It started with helping firms to become more profitable. This moved on to helping individual practice areas to increase profitability as it became obvious that different types of work need to be run in different ways. Now the demand is to help fee earners to manage individual matters better as the result for the year is obviously the sum of all matters. The Finance Director of an 80 partner firm had intervened when a partner had incurred £360,000 of costs on a file where the only estimate to the client was £8,000 and thought that some training for partners and senior fee earners was essential.

TANGIBLE RESULTS

The training provided delegates with practical checklists that could be used at the start of matters to control cost and be more creative over the pricing arrangements. Input was given to the design of spreadsheet models to better predict the cost and profit of matters at the outset. The goal was to provide the firm with a competitive advantage in that they could demonstrate to clients greater efficiency and control of costs than their competitors.

BRIEF
An 8 partner firm had a long history of sharing profits with fixed profit shares for the equity partners. It was recognised that this was no longer working as it did not fairly reward the differing contributions of the partners. It was also felt important to introduce a bonus scheme for fee earners that would effectively motivate them financially to perform at the margins.

WHAT WE DID
Advice was provided on ways of measuring performance at both partner and fee earner level and suggestions were made as to how the performance related element could be phased in over time to allow people to improve their performance before the new systems influenced remuneration levels.

TANGIBLE RESULTS

The end result was a profit sharing system where 70% was lockstep and 30% linked to performance.

BRIEF
A mid tier accounting firm acted for a large number of law firms.  The firm had procedures in place but was very aware of the risk attached to such assignments and the potential for misinterpreting the requirements of the Rules.

WHAT WE DID
The firm’s procedures benefited from a full external review. They were compared to best practice amongst other accounting firms doing this work. The review highlighted a number of weaknesses, inefficiencies in carrying out the work and potential risks. One example of this was where breaches were encountered but the interpretation of trivial that was being used by a number of the reporting partners was almost akin to the audit concept of materiality. This meant that there were numerous occasions where the firm had not reported breaches when it should have done – a high risk strategy!

The review resulted in changes to the standard systems and a tailored training programmes for all staff involved with solicitors practices.

TANGIBLE RESULTS

The firm reported increased efficiency on a number of assignments following the review together with an overall improvement in the quality of the work and, it was felt, a reduction in the firm’s exposure on these risky assignments. With the move to a risk based approach to this work from 1 November 2015 these issues become even more important for reporting accountants.

BRIEF
A large city firm was presented with multiple qualifications in its accountant’s report.  Many of the problems arose due to a lack of communication between the fee earners and the accounts staff leading to overdrawn matters and payments being made without appropriate authorisation.

WHAT WE DID
Two very distinct training sessions were devised to ensure far better compliance by the firm: a detailed session for the accounts team, linked into the firm’s own procedures, to improve their competence and confidence; and for the ‘time pressured’ partners, a much shorter session tailored to the specific problems and procedure changes,  while still reinforcing the key rules.

TANGIBLE RESULTS

The firms’ incidence of breaches reduced significantly in the following period.

BRIEF

The Real Estate department of a large City firm had experienced high staff turnover and exit interviews suggested that there was evidence of poor people management by senior fee earners and partners.

WHAT WE DID
A half day training programme was organised to remind participants of basic people management skills and to provide some fresh input on alternative ways of developing and motivating teams. It was interesting to hear delegates talk about how they were going through the process of managing other people but never felt comfortable with what they were doing or whether the results of their actions were effective.

TANGIBLE RESULT

The programme was well received with a waiting list of people wanting to go through the training and it was subsequently rolled out across the entire firm.

BRIEF
A 20 partner regional firm had experienced three years without growth in profits and while the firm was performing satisfactorily compared with other firms in the area, there was disappointment that the results were not better.

WHAT WE DID
At the annual partners’ weekend, input was provided on profitability to more effectively benchmark the performance of the firm to achieve buy in across the firm as to which were the easiest ways for the firm to improve results. In smaller groups the partners then discussed possible strategies for dealing with the identified issues before a group discussion agreed on the main courses of action.

TANGIBLE RESULTS

The main issue that arose was that there was too much management information made available to the partners and it was agreed that less would be distributed but which was more likely to lead to a change in behaviour of the partners.