• Strategic Planning
• Assessment of current law firm positioning through market research and interviews with key stakeholders including clients, owners and employees
• Coach leadership through development of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Work with client to develop short- and long-term goals and assist in identifying tactics by which to achieve these goals
• Work with client to outline implementation plan and timeline for check ins and milestones; provide on-going coaching to aid client in establishing systems to track accomplishments and to measure accountability
• Identify alternative business lines and opportunities to capitalize upon firm resources

 

• Partnership admission process
• Restructuring Firm Compensation Systems with KPIs around promoting teamwork and metrics tracked by corporate counsel
• Practice and industry team structures and support
• Partnership Agreement review for best practices

• Lead review of existing systems to identify technology and process improvements and to assist in projects to upgrade, replace or implement various financial systems
• Development of profitability models
• Review of dashboard products
• Integration of time capture systems
• Design of cash management tools and systems
• Aid in development of workflows, processes, etc. to improve billing and collections processes
• Consulting around financial best practices in a small financial department, particularly including handling of client escrow accounts. Auditing of processes and procedures.
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Metrics development and analysis

• Assist with vetting of lateral partner candidates including development of lateral partner questionnaire, interviewing,
• In-depth review of historical financial performance
• Vetting of client portability
• Background and reference checking
• Assistance in development of compensation arrangements
• Development of lateral partner integration plans driven by firm’s strategic plans and partner’s personal business plan

Human Resources Management

• Planning to equip for the changes in technology and proficiency assessment systems
• Improving staffing ratios; benchmarking
• Use of PM for streamlining onboarding, orientation, integration of personnel

Knowledge Management
(Link to Alternative Staffing, Value-Based (Alternative) Pricing, Knowledge Management page)

Legal Project Management

• Assist clients in educating the various facets of the organization on what LPM is and how it can be used to streamline work on legal matters and improve the quality, timeliness and costs of legal services.
• Assess existing programs
• Help identify tools and other resources useful to LPM

Records Management Systems

• Identify products and processes needed for today’s records management systems including integration of document management applications with records management applications. Aid with development of plan for transitioning of paper-based environment to imaged medium
• Developing records retention policies and procedures

• Develop costing modules for both direct and indirect costs to inform firm’s ability to value-price legal services at a client/matter level;
• Guide development of profitability assessment system;
• Aid firm management in understanding how to affect client/matter profitability
• Identify various sources of alternative staffing giving consideration to secondments, off shoring, LPOs, etc.
• Consulting regarding creation of knowledge management systems

• Vetting of attorney/law firm expertise and experience as part of the procurement process for outside legal services; assistance in development of RFPs for legal services, review and analysis of responses and guidance on awarding engagement, assistance in scoping and pricing negotiations
• Law Firm Audits – assess firms’ abilities to meet corporate legal service needs including technological efficiency, staffing efficiency, data security systems and procedures, legal project management abilities including budgeting and pricing, use of standards, knowledge management, litigation support; work with law firms to maximize performance in these areas. Possibly develop ranking system to be used.

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• (Link to Alternative Staffing, Value-Based (Alternative) Pricing, Knowledge Management page)

• • SALI (Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry)
    Learn about the efforts that are underway to help develop standards for the legal management industry. The initial efforts are focused on developing matter management categories.
  • UTBMS Codes and Development of Other Industry Standards

The Association of Legal Administrators is a partner in a newly formed entity that is working to develop a full and complete set of Matter Management Codes. When the ABA consortium developed the UTBMS code sets back in the 1990’s, the primary focus was on developing codes for tracking in the litigation practice. Although the ABA consortium has recently created a code set for M&A transactions, there is still a number of practice areas that do not have codes sets to help collect more data about the nature of matters and the work performed on them. Our industry is crippled by our inability to parse and fully use the data generated every day in law firms (i.e., daily time records) due to the lack of standards utilized across the industry in capturing this data. It is anticipated that firms which intend to maximize their competitiveness and efficiency will eagerly adopt these standards. The capture of this data is a key next step toward the ability of law firms to develop pricing of services that is truly data driven, allowing much greater accuracy in pricing and also providing a better data set from which to improve efficiencies in our processes.

As a recent member of the ALA Executive Committee, Walker has led and been involved in the decisions made by the ALA to invest in and affiliate with this group and has helped to drive the Association’s involvement in this initiative. We have first-hand knowledge of some of the players involved in putting this together and access to information about what is being done and the plans of the new entity.

• • UPBMS Codes

In this same vein, the ALA has developed a set of codes to be used by the legal industry. The UPBMS codes (Uniform Process-Based Management System) was rolled out in early 2017. Through the ALA Board, Walker has been involved in the development of this code set. The purpose of the UPBMS codes is to allow the capture of data from administrative systems at all levels. This will allow a better understanding where efficiencies can be driven in the utilization of personnel and resources.