LEADERSHIP
The best-run legal organizations embody a positive, growth-oriented culture. Leadership entails fostering your organization’s most valuable asset’s your people. A good leader need not be born. A good leader can be created. Grow yourself into a leader to benefit yourself, your team, and your entire organization.
Process Mapping
Assuming you’re not straight out of law school, you don’t start any engagement de novo. You have a general framework in mind for creating an estate plan, incorporating a new business, or other matters. What would the ideal “flow of a matter” look like? Who in the organization does what and when? This is what process mapping exists for. It’s not solely the province of large organizations or ultra-sophisticated practices.
Every activity has a process, whether you’re aware of it or not. Just like a cooking recipe, you follow steps in a matter from client retainment to closing letter. Documenting these processes improves client service, makes on-boarding new hires easier, and ultimately redounds positively to your organization’s bottom line.
COMPARISON CHARTS
Organizations, like individuals, do things out of habit. It worked well enough once, so we kept doing it that way. But it’s worth examining and recording your workplace processes. It’s the simplest way to find spots to improve. And, even if your processes are perfect, documenting them protects you against loss of a crucial employee. Use this Spreadsheet to map out the stages and tasks of key processes.