Checklists and questionnaires can be useful to help your firm assess issues and start a dialogue to build a commitment to change how you do things.
There’s an art to designing questionnaires. There are advantages in using quantitative scoring systems – you can rank factors and quickly assess priorities. And there are advantages in allowing qualitative comments – in that you can get some examples and understand better why people think what they do.
Here are some questionnaires which allow both. They have proved helpful to firms:
Quality
All firms have weak spots in terms of delivering outstanding quality service to clients every time. If you are unsure where the key areas are, ask your team members what they think. Here’s a checklist to help you diagnose where attention needs to be given so clients get the best service, every time.
Leadership
It’s tough leading a firm or practice group and most leaders would appreciate receiving some feedback. What are they doing well? What would partners and associates and business support teams want to do more of, or less of? This checklist allows teams to collect anonymous reactions so the leader can get even better.
Profitability
This checklist will help a practice group agree which levers to pull to improve profitability. My suggested approach is to ask partners to rank a series of measures (such as, delegate to more junior lawyers, better use of IT, manage matters more rigorously, offer fee negotiation training etc). How easy are they to implement? What scale of impact might these measures have? After the ranking process, a discussion about the results can lead to a programme of change addressing the priorities.
Client Satisfaction
This checklist allows firms to find out what’s important to clients and how well you’re scoring against the critical factors. The review might be best carried out by someone other than the lead relationship partners to help the client open up fully. I have uncovered many important issues using this questionnaire.
Please get in touch if you’d like any thoughts about using any of these checklists and please let me know what results you get.
CHECKLISTS:
Tony Reiss 