Knowledge is power
If you really want to ensure your chambers operates effectively as a business, and one that grows in line with its people, it’s essential to align individual professional skills and technical expertise to the strategic objectives that chambers has adopted.
We can help you to create this alignment, enabling individual barristers, clerks and chamber’s support staff, who may otherwise find these concepts alien, to engage with them and realise the opportunities they present. We will encourage your people to understand how your chambers model can work in the new commercial and regulatory environment when chambers, teams and individuals have clear business objectives.
Harnessing understanding and creating alignment creates a virtuous, self-sustaining circle of buy-in, communication, motivation and enthusiasm.
Tailored Training
Our flexible, individual approach means that we can develop and structure training workshops that are truly bespoke to the needs of your Chambers.
We’d be happy to discuss how we can resolve your specific issues and help achieve your ambitions.
Contact us today to discuss how we can help you.
Sample workshops – just a few of the ways in which we can help you to transform your chambers:
Commercial awareness and understanding the professional market
It’s essential that all members of chambers, clerks and support staff members fully understand the effects of commercial pressures on your current chambers model.
These workshops, having proven especially effective and popular in the current economic and regulatory climate and can include:
- An overview of the external market; the economic environment and learning from other professions and industries.
- What are the constituent parts, size and make-up of the UK legal industry and where does the barrister’s profession fit into that picture?
- The changing financial and economic environment with the inexorable downward pressure on fees – emphasising the need for work to be more efficiently organised.
- Understanding changing client needs, the irresistible impact of the internet and the need to deliver services differently to meet these needs.
- The real impact of the Legal Services Act 2007 – with the creation of new and different business models. What will those models mean for chambers?
- Changing the emphasis from fees billed to profitability, what this means for the way we work and the move to value pricing models.
Strategic Leadership
This course will be specifically designed to underpin and support your strategic objectives for chambers by developing leadership and organisational skills wherever needed.
Key questions to be answered include:
- What is competitive advantage; how do we attain it and how do we keep it?
- What do we mean by strategy, the strategic planning process and why do we need to plan?
- What is meant by leadership, the levels of leadership and how can leadership models help?
The Workshop will also identify:
- The steps needed to develop a strategic business plan – whether for chambers, a team or individual barristers.
- How to understand and align team structures to support the strategic business plan.
Risk & Regulatory Management
The Legal Services Act 2007 and the BSB Handbook 2014 mean that all barristers now operate in a more regulated environment. Accordingly, assessing and managing risk in terms of reputation, profession, regulation and finance is essential to the effective and efficient running of chambers.
We answer your key questions:
- What is risk and how should it be interpreted?
- What does the new regulatory environment (post the BSB Handbook 2014) mean for chambers and individual barristers and how they each organise themselves?
We can also help you to understand:
- Key areas within the new Code of Conduct and how it underpins stronger client relationships.
- How to assess the risks of conducting a client matter: identifying the clients’ objectives, potential vulnerability and then scoping and pricing the matter properly.
- The importance of consistently good communication and record-keeping.
Enabling excellent client care
Good customer relationship management (CRM) brings benefits to every aspect of chambers. Meeting (and ideally exceeding) client’s expectations brings referrals, impresses prospects and encourages professional partners to refer their clients to individual barristers and to chambers as a whole.
We will show you how to:
- Assess what a quality service means to your client base, your chambers and your teams and relate those to regulatory requirements.
- Translate the theory into practical measures that enable excellent client care.
- Develop practical, best-practice ideas as well as integrated systems and processes at every stage.
- Lead by example, think ahead and anticipate potential problems.
- Understand clients’ expectations and frame an appropriate chambers wide response – the cross-sell opportunity.
