Re-Engineering the Business of Law (dealbook.nytimes- Engineering College Chennai)

True long-term success requires businesses to improve continually and reimagine how they operate in the face of changing competition and market forces. Yet this innovative urge, which drives so much of the rest of the American economy, is largely absent from large law firms.

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Instead, the measures become balancing rate growth versus discounted fees, lawyer productivity measured in tenths of hours, recruiting the partner with a book of business from one firm to another and similar yardsticks.

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These address the traditional measures of law firm profitability. The need of the purchasers of legal services — at least from large law firms — continues to change, however. The pressure on in-house counsel to deliver better services using fewer resources has never been more intense. In order to meet business demands, corporate counsel are increasingly looking for firms that deliver greater value. Looking out on a landscape that includes a wider variety of choices than ever before – regional firms, national firms, global firms, virtual firms, legal outsourcing providers and contract firms, among others — their purchasing decisions continue to evolve.

If the recent recession teaches anything for the legal industry, it is this: The changing demands of our clients require the legal services profession to find different paths to deliver value to those who buy our services. Lawyers today should be asking themselves nontraditional questions: how to apply resources more effectively, to shorten cycle time and lower the cost of their work product and other deliverables, while raising the level of service. In the end, your client will reward you by giving you more work across more areas, and your relationship will deepen.

The ground on which we walk has been altered. Traditionally, large law firms fit into largely homogenous business models. Whether we recognize it or not, that has changed and will continue to shift. As we navigate a different world, our experience presents three core lessons:

Be Prepared to Examine and Reimagine the Business Model.

Our firm has been on its own, unique path for years. Over the past seven years, we’ve used a version of Lean Six Sigma borrowed from the manufacturing sector to redesign core elements of how legal work process is measured and deployed. This has resulted in a variety of tools, analyses and process improvement techniques intended to drive efficiency into the delivery of legal services – at all levels of the practice. More important, it aligns a way of thinking with the needs and requirements of corporate purchasers of legal services.