Legal Counsel
515
consider other options. Regardless of the path you ultimately pursue, both you and the lawyer will likely be glad you recognized this disconnect up front instead of discovering an unwelcome surprise once the work was finished.
Monitoring the Work
Your relationship management activities should not end when your lawyer begins work. Even if you have done well in selecting a lawyer and defining the scope of the lawyer ’s work, you should benefit from diligently monitoring the work. In this section, we touch on a few ideas you may want to consider to help keep your legal matters on the right track.
First, try to understand your lawyer ’s knowledge and capabilities. Different lawyers have different strengths and areas for improvement. To know how to advance a given relationship and how to assign legal projects, you will be well served to understand what your lawyer is capable of.
Second, try to understand what your lawyer is doing. This may sound obvious, but it is not as easy as it seems without diligent monitoring. Some legal projects are large and complex, and often may involve issues unfamiliar to the firm management. You may want to spend some time understanding what your lawyer is doing to complete a project. It is inevitable that from time to time a lawyer or law firm may begin to drift off course (hence, the “choice of law” example earlier). If you understand what your lawyer is doing, you will probably be more capable of providing value-added suggestions or steering a drifting lawyer back onto the right track.
Another issue that can arise, especially when working with a large law firm, is that you may not know who is doing the work until you receive a memo or phone call from someone you do not know or, probably worse, see an unfamiliar name on your bill. There are at least two situations where this seems to come up: (1) matters requiring an attorney with expertise in a highly specialized area (e.g., an ERISA attorney) and (2) matters where junior attorneys are working on a less complex matter—something that can be concerning if you perceive that the junior lawyer is “learning on your dime.”
You can avoid this sort of thing by requesting to be notified as to who will be working on a given matter and what he or she will be doing.
Finally, review each bill carefully. By doing so, you improve the chance of catching any problematic trends early. You should be comfortable speaking with your attorney if the work description is insufficient to provide you with an acceptable understanding of what is going on.
Summary
Good legal advice is a must have for the professional services firm. From firm inception to daily operations, legal requirements affect the organization, employees, clients, and management of the professional services firm.
516
The Back Office: Efficient Firm Operations
The identification and retention of an attorney for the firm is one of the first orders of business and should be done prior to an emergency need. The ongoing relationship of the firm with its legal advisor(s) requires effort from both parties but will yield results in the form of reduced risks, exposure to lawsuits, and positive outcomes for the firm, its employees and clients.
RESOURCES
IRS publication 1779 about contractor and employee relationships is available from http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1779.pdf.
The HR Esquire web site has information on employment law and a specific section on Federal and State minimum wage information and is available from http://www.hresquire.com.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark office provides a variety of online resources, including search capabilities available from http://www.uspto.gov.
The copyright office of the Library of Congress provides information and frequently asked questions about registration for copyrighted works and is available from http://www.copyright.gov.
Martindale-Hubbell provides extensive search capabilities on individual attorneys and firms and is available from http://www.martindale.com.
NOTES
1. U.S. Internal Revenue Services (IRS) available from http://www.irs.gov/govt /fslg
/article/0,id=110344,00.html.
2. US Internal Revenue Services (IRS) available from http://www.irs.gov
/businesses/small /article/0,id=99921,00.html.
3. HR Esquire available from http://www.hresquire.com/minimum-wage-laws.htm.
20
Office Management
JOHN BASCHAB AND JON PIOT
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
—Iris Murdoch, British novelist
This chapter discusses the key attributes of running an efficient and organized office. Your office(s) first and foremost needs to be a productive work environment for your staff. When hiring a new employee is the space, phone extension, and computer ready for them on the day he or she arrives—or are you scrambling to get these things set up during their first couple of weeks on the job?
Further, the professional services firm office is your face to clients and prospective and existing staff. It ref lects either organization or disorganization, confidentiality, or lack thereof or it ref lects simplicity or complexity.
What catches your client’s attention when entering your office space? What first impression does your office and staff leave?
Office management includes support services such as managing and maintaining the facility; organizing and managing the administrative staff; ensuring proper services are provided such as phones, offices, and document reproduction centers. Office management may also include some of the softer aspects of running the firm including fostering the firm’s culture and captur-ing and maintaining the history of the firm. For smaller firms, office management duties are typically combined with other functions (e.g., book-keeping) that can be carried out by one person. In larger firms, office management may actually be the function of a dedicated full-time employee or a department of employees. In this chapter, we discuss many of the basic services provided by the office management function and the growth points in the life of the firm when transitioning from part-time staff to full-time staff and other organizational actions are appropriate.
517
518
The Back Office: Efficient Firm Operations
Why Is This Topic Important?
This topic doesn’t receive the attention it deserves because it is a support function. The bulk of professional services firm management attention, investment and discussions will appropriately focus on billable activity and business development. However, business development will suffer if one walks into a poorly run professional services office and notices immediately that no one is attending to the reception area, the phones are not answered consistently, and the space looks cluttered and unorganized. A disorganized office begs the question: If the firm is willing to treat its own offices this poorly, how well can it possibly service client accounts? Conventional thinking would suggest that running a simple function such as answering the phone or maintaining an impressive reception area should be an easy act for a professional services firm. Doing the work of the firm, selling, and working with clients is complicated; managing the office is not. Or is it?
Rarely does the “plant” run as smoothly as one wishes. Many important duties can get complicated due to inattention, time demands or office politics, for example:
• Assigning offices
• Optimizing administrative staff assignments
• Prioritizing duplication services
• Executing common tasks, such as new employee onboarding or recruiting events
• Filing confidential client or employee information
What can appear to be a simple office change for one attorney or consultant can cascade into a mess of negotiations and disgruntled workers who don’t want to be moved or don’t like their office assignment.
A well-run office management function is important for four key reasons: 1. It helps keep your billable staff from focusing on unproductive office and administrative matters.
2. The reception area and workspace are transparent to the client and re-f lect on the firm.
3. The organization of the workspace can increase staff productivity or hinder it.
4. The function can be (and most often is) a central force in promoting a culture.
A professional service firm maximizes profits by ensuring the professionals are as billable as possible. Their time is not well spent on office or facility issues. So the a critical objective for the office manager is to keep the
Office Management
519
professionals from having to spend precious time on nonbillable office management issues. Additionally, the office manager ’s goal is to provide services that make the job easier, or to facilitate doing components the job using a less expensive resource (i.e., graphics specialist, research analyst, typist).
This chapter provides an overview of the office management function. We discuss the typical support services provided, facility management best practices, and the hiring of office managers.
What Is Office Management?
Office management consists of three primary functions. First, office managers typically provide support services to the rest of the employees. These services include administrative support, scheduling, print and document reproduction services, design/graphics support, telecom, mail, and so on. Second, the office manager maintains the physical facility and manages the landlord and building services. Maintaining the facility encompasses space planning, maintenance, office moves, security, storage, vending and coffee service, break rooms, and so on. Finally, the office manager in some cases may be responsible for other duties such as coordinating local office social activities, celebrating major firm events, publishing firm newsletters, maintaining a history of the firm, and providing meeting space outside the building, to name just a few of the other miscellaneous duties.