[SOLVED] Grace Whelan, Managing Partner of McPherson

Grace Whelan, Managing Partner of McPherson Charles, welcomed the three solicitors into the meeting room. She outlined the agenda, essentially their thoughts and input into the rolling three-year plan. McPherson Charles, based in Bristol in the West of England, had grown rapidly to be one of the biggest law firms in the region, with 21 partners and around 400 staff. It was an ambitious partnership aiming to maintain its impressive growth record. The firm was managed through 15 teams, each headed by a partner. The meeting was intended to be the first stage in â€˜Plans for the Futureâ€™, a programmed to improve the effectiveness of the firmâ€™s operations. The three partners attending the meeting with Grace were Simon Reece (Family Law), Kate Hutchinson (Property) and Hazel Lewis (Litigation). Grace asked for ideas on what the firm should priorities in order to improve its performance further. Simon Reece kicked things off: â€˜I think the first thing we need to agree on is that, for a professional service firm like ourselves, the quality of our people will always be the most important issue. We need to be absolutely confident that our staff not only have the best possibly understanding of their own branch of the law, but also have the necessary client-relationship skills to consolidate our business position with increasingly demanding clients.â€™ Hazel Lewis was not so sure: â€˜Of course I agree that the quality of our staff is an important issue, but that has always been true. What is new is the help we can get from some serious investment in technology and software. Just getting our systems and processes right would, I am sure, save us a lot of time and effort, and of course, reduce our cost base. â€™I really donâ€™t think spending more money on technology is the answer Hazelâ€™, Simon continued. â€˜We need more time to really understand our clients and being process nd IT focused just doesnâ€™t work for us, we need another way of managing. The key is increasing revenue, not penny pinching about costs, and to do that we need to really concentrate on relationship skills. Family law is like walking through a minefield; you can easily offend clients who are, almost by definition, in a highly emotional state. I think we need to make sure that senior members of staff with experience of managing client relationships pass on their knowledge to those who are less experienced. â€™I disagree, Simon.â€™ It was Kate Hutchinson now. â€˜Our clients really are increasingly cost conscious and if we donâ€™t deliver value for money, word will spread very fast and our business will dry up. Much of the time we over-engineer our services. Why should we use highly Coalified and expensive lawyers for every single task? I am convinced that, with slick systems and enhanced training, non qualified people could do much of our work.â€™ Grace knew that solicitors liked nothing better than disagreeing â€“ it was what they did best â€“ and she knew that this was going to be another long meeting. In very simple terms, these are the types of activities that each team was engaged in. Simon Reece, Family Law â€˜We are called the â€œfamily lawâ€ team but basically what we do is to help people through the trauma of divorce, separation and break up. Our biggest â€œhigh valueâ€ clients come to us because of word-of-mouth recommendation. Last year we had 89 of these â€œhigh valueâ€ clients and they all valued the personal touch that we were able to give them, getting to know them well and spending time with them to understand the, often â€œhiddenâ€ aspects of their case. These interviews cannot be rushed. These clients tend to be wealthy people and we will often have to drop everything and go off half-way round the world to meet and discuss their situation. There are no standard procedures, every client is different, and everyone has to be treated as an individual. So we have a team of individuals who rise to the challenge each time and give great service. Of course, not all our clients are the super-rich. About a third of our annual family law income comes from about 750 relatively routine divorce and counselling cases. This work is a lot less interesting and I try to make sure that all my team have a mix of interesting and routine work over the year. I encourage them to exercise and develop their professional judgement. They are empowered to deal with any issues themselves or call in myself or one of the more senior members of the team for advice if appropriate. It is important to give this kind of responsibility to them so that they see themselves as part of a team. We are also the only part of the firm that has adopted an open-plan office arrangement cent red around our specialist library of family case law.â€™ Hazel Lewis, Litigation â€˜The litigation team provides a key service for our commercial client base. Our primary work consists of handling bulk collections of debt. The group has 17 clients, of which 5 provide 85 per cent of the total volume. We work closely with the accounts departments of the client companies and have developed a semi-automatic approach to debt collection. Staff input data received from their clients into the system; from that point everything progresses through a predefined process, letters are produced, queries responded to and eventually debts collected, ultimately through court proceedings if necessary. Work tends to come in batches from clients and varies according to economic conditions, time of year and client sales activities. #t the moment things are fairly steady; we had 7 new cases last week. The details of each case are sent over by the client; our people input the data onto our screens and set up a standard diary system for sending letters out. Some people respond quickly to the first letter and oftenthe case is closed within a week or so; other people ignore letters and eventually we initiate court proceedings. We know exactly what is required for court dealings and have a pretty good process to make sure all the right documentation is available on the day.â€™ Kate Hutchinson, Property â€˜We are really growing fast and are building up an excellent reputation locally for being fast, friendly and giving value for money. Most of our work is â€œdomesticâ€, acting for individuals buying or selling their home, or their second home. Each client is allocated to a solicitor who becomes their main point of contact. But, given that we can have up to 100 domestic clients a week, most of the work is carried out by the rest of the team behind the scenes. There is a relatively standard process to domestic property sales and purchases and we think that now we are pretty efficient at managing these standard jobs. Our process has four stages: one dealing with land registry searches, one liaising with the banks that are providing the mortgage finance, one that makes sure surveys are completed and one section that finalizes the whole process to completion. We believe that this degree of specialization can help us achieve the efficiencies that are becoming important as the market gets more competitive. Increasingly, we are also getting more complex â€œspecialâ€ jobs. These are things like â€œvolume remortgage arrangements; rather complex poneoffq jobs, where a mortgage lender transfers a complex set of loan assets to another lender. â€œSpecialâ€ jobs are always more complex than the domestic work and sometimes there are times when fast completion is particularly important and that can throw us a bit. The firm has recently formed partnerships with two large speculative builders, so we are getting into special â€œplot salesâ€. All these â€œspecialsâ€ do involve a lot of work and can occupy several members of the team for a time. We are now getting up to 5 of these â€œspecialsâ€ each week, and they can be somewhat different to our normal work but we try to follow roughly the same process with them as the normal domestic jobs.â€™

Are each teamâ€™s processes appropriate? Grace was concerned. The three teams obviously had to cope with very different volumes of work and variety of activities. It was also clear that each team had developed different approaches to managing their processes. The question that she needed to address was whether each teamâ€™s approach was appropriate for the demands placed upon it. Questions 1. What are the individual â€˜servicesâ€™ offered by each of the three teams! 2. Where would you place each service in a scale that goes from relatively low volume/relatively high variety, to relatively high volume/relatively low variety! 3. How would you describe each teamâ€™s process in terms of its layout, the technology (if any) it uses, and the job designs of its staff! 4. Use the above information to draw a â€˜productâ€“process matrixâ€™. What does it indicate!

Question: Grace Whelan, Managing Partner of McPherson