What is Practice Excellence®?
- Practice Excellence® is an ongoing effort by everyone in our firm to constantly increase our capacity to provide excellent service, professional quality and outstanding value to our clients.
- Quality work: emphasizing continuous improvement based upon Lean processes.
- Knowledge: commitment to proactively understanding our clients’ businesses/industries, and sharing our knowledge and experience.
- Client service: offering accessible, efficient solutions.
How we define Accessible Efficient Solutions for our clients:
- Using Lean techniques and tools to improve legal processes
- Mapping processes to eliminate waste and improve responsiveness to clients
- Producing consistent work product through use of checklists, work plans and other tools
- Providing pricing information and estimates based on our Lean processes
- Continuously evaluating new areas and methods to serve clients
- Annual training for all firm members in Lean concepts
- Implementing best ideas gathered from all levels of the firm
- Adhering to our Client Service Principles
Our Practice Excellence Champions® group is comprised of attorneys and administrative leadership across the firm dedicated to the lean process and quality improvement mission. This initiative has been well-received by clients and has attracted national attention. While larger firms have more recently started to pay attention to process improvement, we started our program in January 2008. If you are interested in learning more about our Practice Excellence® initiative, please contact our Practice Excellence® Chair Dave Confer.
Examples of Practice Excellence® applications:
- A large client with operations in multiple states needed a process to streamline and provide legal advice to mid-level managers. We analyzed the need and implemented a technology solution enabling managers to directly access lawyers who are knowledgeable of the client’s business and available to provide a prompt response – allowing the client to save time and provide quick service to its customers. Upper management of the client is able to review matters to identify training needs or troubleshoot issues. The system was also designed to cut down on repeat questions by creating a searchable knowledge base for the client.
- Merger & acquisition deals require a high level of sophistication under tight time constraints. Our M&A team utilizes comprehensive work plans, customized by transaction parameters which they use to not only organize the deal but, more importantly, to educate and help identify decision points for clients and their advisors who are considering or about to embark upon a transaction.
- Large scale contract review projects can be risky, cumbersome and expensive. We partner with clients to analyze their needs and provide customized solutions that fit their business, reduce risk and provide fee certainty. Because we have delineated the basics by process mapping, our strategic thinking lawyers are empowered to offer prompt viable solutions that satisfy both time and fee concerns.
- More than 10 years ago, our Intellectual Property Practice Group became our first paperless practice area.
- 95% of litigation cases settle. Our Litigation Practice Group analyzed the work required after a settlement decision with the goal of streamlining the process to reduce legal spend during this phase.
