Do you know what happened at Southwest Airlines over the holidays? If you haven’t heard, I’m surprised and you should probably look it up. Over the holidays of 2022 Southwest was forced to cancel 15,000 flights! With such a beloved and cost efficient airline company, how did such a disaster occur, leaving thousands of people stranded while everyone else on other airlines were comfortably in the air?
SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS. That word starts to look funny the more you say it…
Yes, Southwest attributes much of this disaster to outdated scheduling software. Whether that’s entirely true or not, couple this with crew shortages and bad weather, you have yourself a perfect storm.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking…Southwest is an airline, not a law firm. Well I’m sorry to say that the same thing can easily happen in a law firm.
Whether your systems and processes are made up of a single software or 10, all it takes is one automation failure, losing an employee, or a software update to send a cascading ripple effect through your firm leading to clients falling through the cracks and wondering what is happening with their retainer….or flat fee, if you roll that way. Next, you’re the one stuck with damage control and playing catch up to ensure your client remains just happy enough to not leave you a bad review on Google.
This is why it is important to ensure that you are regularly auditing your processes. I personally recommend on a quarterly basis, at a minimum. This audit can include the following:
- Do you have SOPs in place that would allow you to easily hire someone in the event a person decided to leave your firm?
- Are your SOPs up to date with your current process?
- Conduct random checks on client matters to ensure that automations are triggering like they should be or that your people are doing what they are supposed to be doing within those files?
- Create test matters that you can regularly run through your entire process to ensure things are operating properly.
- Check on software updates for new and innovative ways to more efficiently service your clients.
- This is a big one, because if you’re not staying up to date with new technology, I guarantee you someone else is. Technology today has created a market that gauged on how quickly you can retain leads and bring Matters to a close.
I’m not saying that this is a catchall that will totally prevent you from ever experiencing heartache in your processes, but these will certainly help manage and reduce the risks greatly! The painful part is that this is not something easy to hold yourself accountable to doing. That is why it is important to find someone that can learn your systems as well as you do to ensure things remain up-to-date regularly….and that’s my sales pitch!