In the coming weeks and months, maintaining business continuity is going to be essential to staying in business, preserving jobs, and maintaining the wider economy.

Many businesses still carry out a lot of their core activities in manual, paper-based, ways.  It will be a struggle to maintain business as usual when people are, inevitably, forced to work from home, or are not available to work at all for periods of time.

With that in mind, here are five steps which you could consider taking, almost immediately and at low cost, to help address weaknesses in your business processes.

[Originally posted 9 May 2017. Updated 14 November 2019].

A number of my other blog posts have suggested clients should look at how their lawyers work and ask questions, like what systems do they have? What training do they do to ensure they provide the best levels of service? 

This time I want to look at the related topic of pricing.  I say related topic, because the pricing options a law firm can offer will depend heavily on the systems they have.  A firm that has not invested in good systems is unlikely to be able to offer transparent and certain pricing. 

Perhaps reflecting this lack of investment in systems, many lawyers still use hourly rate billing and loose estimates of cost based on time that will be spent (e.g. $3,000 to $5,000...), which is inherently unsatisfactory for clients as it contains little incentive to be efficient and can often lead to nasty bill shocks (e.g. $7,000) at the end of the matter when the lawyer advises that it took longer than they thought it would.

To try and get good value, clients often focus on discounts to the hourly rate, which does not solve the problem if the number of hours is open ended. The firm could just throw 5 people onto a simple job. 

Pricing in this way can be a complete finger in the air, where not only would different lawyers within a firm be likely to charge different amounts for the same piece of work, but the same lawyer could charge different amounts on a different day.  Isn't that bizarre? 

Firms that can give greater clarity and certainty on pricing - while still giving good outcomes and not taking shortcuts - should be rewarded by clients. But, for that to happen, clients have to look beyond hourly rates and ask the right questions.  

I was interviewed for LawTalk 930 on what LawHawk has been up to, and how we are going. 

You can read the full article here, and below. 

I was interviewed for LawTalk 930 on what impact legal tech is actually having on the New Zealand legal market.  

You can read the full article here, and below. 

The law regarding break allowances for employees has recently changed.

 The Employment Relations Amendment Act 2018 has amended the Employment Relations Act 2000 to state that:

 “an employee is entitled to, and the employee’s employer must provide the employee with, rest breaks and meal breaks”.

Are you up to speed with the new changes and what they require?

Trial periods are no longer available for employers with more than 19 employees

If you are an employer that relies on trial period provisions when employing new employees, you need to be aware that the law has now changed. 

If you have over 19 employees, you can no longer use the 90 day trial period and any attempt to use one will not be effective.  A new approach is needed.

What should you do?

Will the future of law belong to large or small firms?  It’s a debate that is ongoing.  

ILANZ 2018 was another hugely energising and enjoyable event.  Thank you to everyone involved in organising it!

The official theme of this year’s ILANZ was “No 8 wire”, as a nod to our in-house lawyers' ingenuity and ability to innovate with limited resources.  Last year, I used this term in my blog to describe some of the cobbled-together solutions delegates were using – it was a term of endearment.  This year, I'm a little less certain we should be celebrating this. 

I was interviewed for LawTalk 916 on what the future might hold for New Zealand legal services and lawyers. 

The interview also captured the thoughts of Michael Smyth, Claudia King, Simon Tupman and Andrew King. 

You can read the full article here, and the parts of the interview that relate to me are set out below. 

It was great to see our customer Housing New Zealand profiled in LawTalk 917 for their success in working with us on document automation. 

You can read the article on the Law Society website here, and the full text is set out below. 

If you would like to discuss how document automation could provide similar benefits for you, please get in touch!