Managing a Legal office - How to Start Running a Law office/firm

Managing a Legal Office

How to start running a law office/firm

1. Sole Proprietorship

• Set up a firm with small investment, because one could work from home or with small overheads.
• It would grant you relative freedom, having to answer to no one but yourself and your clients.
• Going solo meant you would have to handle everything yourself and once your business got going, you would always have to be there for your clients, sometimes at the expense of your personal life and family obligations.

1. Partnership

• Partnership is an association of individuals coming together with the aim of working together to their mutual advantage.
• A partner could be made liable for the acts or omissions of their partner and suffer greatly for it.
• Profits are shared and all business decisions within the firm are made by the partners together or in accordance with the written partnership agreement.

• In deciding between these two, it depends a lot on your personality and character.
• E.g: Are you a team player?
• Are you more of an individualist and prefer doing things in your own way?
• Are you capable of making compromises?
• Are you a natural leader?

Preferred Areas of Work

• Conveyancing, Corporate, Civil Litigation, Criminal Litigation, Intellectual Property, Family law, etc?
• As a good lawyer and a professional, you should plan your work and normally choose the work that you are happy to do.
•  Should also consider the remuneration aspect.
• As a person, we know our strength and weaknesses, so we must be careful in dealing with something that we are not expert into.
• Your preferred areas of work and personal expertise may dictate that your law practice is of a certain size.
• E.g: Certain areas of legal work require many staff and other resources.
• Certain areas of legal work, needs some specific expertise in it.

Conveyancing

• 6 important ‘S’ – SRO, Searches, Staff, Stamp duty, Suits as well as Some Pointers.
• In setting up a conveyancing practice, the firm must ensure a proper system is in place to prevent severe effects to one’s firm and clients.
• Sometimes one needs to be bold enough, by practicing discerning tactics to detect fraud by a member or staff.

Civil Litigation

• To prevent being outfoxed by one’s opponents, it is essential to keep updated on legal cases and how a law firm must have quick and clear access to a library of law reports.
• To set up this civil litigation practices, the lawyer should also be the one who know his or her judge, to win them over, not by illicit means but by making arguments intellectually appealing to his frame of mind.

Time Management

• Time management is very important as we only have 24 hours in a day and no matter how hard we work and we try to work, we can’t increase the time.
• Lawyers who properly manage their time, clients, cases, technology and law firm are bound to have more fulfilling lives and careers.
• Being able to prioritise work is a major challenge for most people.

Importance of Time Management

• Time Management allow you to effectively manage your time and know how to make the most of it.
• Lawyers who are organized and manage their time well are likely to find information more quickly, think more clearly, work more productively, utilize their legal skills more effectively and make a better impression on clients and colleagues.
• A lawyer shall monitor the status of multiple projects and keep a client informed about the status of a matter and promptly comply with reasonable request for information – Failure of this, will affect the firm’s reputation.
• A lawyer’s work load must be controlled so that each matter can be handled competently – To keep up with the deadline so that the lawyers can estimate the time required for adequate completion of all the various components of the lawyer’s workload.
• If lawyers can managed their time well, they can accept more cases to handle - which will then increase their income.

Time Theft Factors

1. Long Lunches and Extended Breaks

• This is mostly happen when lawyers go for shopping after lunch, gossiping over meals and also picking up their kids from school during lunch hours.
• 1 hour lunch can easily turn into 1 hour and 15 minutes lunch. Extending a few minutes during each break can add up to a full day’s work very quickly.
• One way to solve this problem is by installing Biometric Time and Attendance System in which the lawyers and staffs are required to clock out for their lunch breaks.

2. Using Company Time to operate another business

• Lawyers will often carry work from another job or their personal business to work.
• Therefore, they will utilize the company’s time and resources to complete multiple tasks.

3. Internet Time Theft

• Use technology for non-work related purposes such as checking personal email, online shopping and spending time on social networking sites or texting during work hours.
• To avoid this, the firm should consider installing software that blocks unproductive sites.

4. Over-confident/ Lack of confident

• Lack of confident: Requires more time to think about it.
• Over-Confident: Some lawyers think that they are correct and refused to take the opinion of others or refused to do some research about it, but actually they were wrong. Therefore, they have to do it all over again which is clearly a waste of time.

5. Goofing Off in the Office

• Socializing or chatting for a long period of time is a serious form of time theft.
• This is because it involves 2 workers, which doubles the amount of time lost.
• The issue becomes worse when groups start to form and loud conversations distract other people in the area.

6. Laziness and Procrastination

• Last minutes works will often leads to careless mistakes.

File Management

Opening File

• When client walks in for consultation, this often leads to a warrant to act/ contract of retainer.
• Warrant to act is a document which not only evidences the authority of a law firm to act for client, but also evidences compliance of rules of practice and sets out important terms and conditions of engagement as follows;

• Scope of work – states the scope of legal services of the firm.
• The team – States the name of the lawyers who will be principally responsible for providing the legal services/ lawyers in charge of that particular file and case.
• Firm’s Commitment – To maintain a good relationship with the client for the sake of the firm’s reputation.
• Legal Fees – States the proposed and estimated legal fees. No discounts for such fees as state under Solicitors’ Remuneration Order. (If no discount, then the reputation of one’s firm can be maintained. This is because, people will always choose a firm that has discounts).
• Billings – States the initial payment or initial disbursement for the expenses incurred such as for conducting company searches, transport/travelling costs.
• Withdrawal and Termination – States the mode of termination by the firm and also the mode of termination by the client.

• Individual client – retainer to be signed in your presence.
• Corporate client – resolution of the Board of Directors.

Conflict of Interest

Rule 3 of Legal Profession (Practice and Etiquette) Rules 1978

• Lawyers shall not accept a brief if embarrassed

• in which he is in possession of confidential information because having previously advised another person in regard to the same matter.
• Where there is personal relationship between them in the proceedings.

Rule 4

• No Lawyers to accept brief if professional conduct likely to be impugned.

Rule 5

• No Lawyers shall accept brief if difficult for him to maintain his professional independence.

Rule 27

• Lawyers shall not appear in any matter which he is directly pecuniarily interested.

Maintaining a File

• Design of the files and covers – different colours for different department/category of works.
• E.g: Red-Litigation, Blue-Conveyancing, Yellow-Corporate
• Inside the Coloured file (big file) there must be separate sections for Correspondence, Documents, Bills & Vouchers and perhaps another for drafts,
• On opening a file – First must check whether there is conflict of interest or not and then register. Put a registration no/file reference no at the front file. This is important for tracing the files.
• Minutes – Court dates, conversations with clients, opposing solicitors, followed up with mail confirming conversations. These are all important as everything must be black & white.

Organization

1. Organising your Work

1. Ability to Prioritise

1. Do the most unpleasant task first

• Take the worst, most unpleasant, ugliest task you have to do that you don’t want to do, and do it first.
• Stop procrastinating, and just do the one thing you are dreading the most.
• Once it is out of the way, a burden is lifted from your shoulders and you can move more rapidly through the rest of the day’s tasks.
• When the unpleasant task is no longer looming overhead, everything else suddenly becomes much easier.

1. Which case is more important?

• Next, do the most important works first.
• Decide it according to the due date and timeframe of the case. Whichever case that has the earliest due date or the case which is important must be done first so that you are not running out of time later on.
• Organise your work properly according to timeline/timeframe and prepare earlier.

1. Ability to Delegate

• Delegation is an effective law office management technique that reduces stress and enhances the quality of life for everyone.
• Not all legal work must be performed by the lawyer itself, so spread around the workload.
• E.g: Delegate the task to the staffs. Train the staffs to draft letters, but as a lawyer, you must double check it.
• Delegation is a difficult skill to master, because most lawyers have been schooled that he or she is indispensable to every aspect of the process, but this is just not true.
• Learn to delegate and strive to be effective of it.

1. Ability to keep your work area and the file tidy

• It it easier and more comfortable to do the works in an area that is tidy.
• It is essential to keep the file tidy to avoid from missing or losing some important documents.

2. Filing System

a. Filing Cabinets

• It is important to return the file to a proper folder.
• To avoid the documents missing or mixing up with other files.
• In order to keep the file in proper manner, there must be a good referencing system so that the lawyers and staffs can identify the file easily.
• Each department must have their own cabinets. Litigation files, Conveyancing files must be put separately to different cabinets.
• To have a proper filing cabinet – Put a latest file at the bottom and older files at the top of the cabinet. (arranged according to year)

b. Folder

• In each folder, it must be divided into several sections.
• E.g: Correspondence, pleadings, documents, drafts, billing and vouchers, authorities.
• All filing should be done chronologically, in accordance with the date it was sent and the date it was received.
• At the cover page of the file – Must states minutes and notes or current progress of the file.

i. Internal Documents

• Minute sheet
• Note to file
• Telephone memo – Details of the person you called and their statement.
• Memorandum

ii. External Documents

• Letters
• Facsimile – the acknowledgement that the fax has been successfully send.
• Undertakings
• Electronic mails

• All of these docs must be clear, accurate and precise so that anyone reading it will be able to understand it easily.

iii. Opinions

• Short description of your instructions and backgrounds of facts
• Summary of your views
• Reasoning
• Keep analysis short and clear
• Be measured in what you cited.

• Write to inform and NOT to impress.

3. Diary

• 1 diary for each lawyer and 1 main diary for the firm.
• The contents of these diaries must be tally.

Importance of Diary:

• Can keep all appointments and court engagements in a well-managed diary – so that no one missed any appointments.
• Review it each day so that you are not taken by surprise
• Look not only at what the diary has in store for you the following day, but also note what is scheduled for the following week – so you can prepare anything necessary early.

4. KIV system

• Represents work in progress to be reviewed every month
• Should also be entered in the KIV diary and vetted accordingly to avoid ‘sleeping’ on the files.
• E.g: Especially on conveyancing matters where conveyancing has a lot of procedures.

5. Deadlines

• Learn to keep strict deadlines.
• Don’t get into the habit of asking for extensions of time.
• E.g: Must keep up with the timeframe/deadline of procedure of conveyancing procedures.
• E.g: Form 34 – Need to be lodged after 30 days after the date of creation or after property being charged.
• E.g: SPA or Loan Agreement need to be stamped within 30 days of their execution. – If not then penalty.

6. Confidentiality

Rule 35 of LPA (P & E) R 1978

• Lawyers shall refrain from any action whereby for his personal benefit or gain, he abuses or take advantage of the confidence reposed in him by the client.
• Lawyers shall preserve his client’s confidence and this duty outlasts his employment.

Prince Jefri Bolkiah v KPMG (afirm) 1991

Facts:

Prince Jefri, the brother of the Sultan of Brunei, brought a case in the High Court against the accountancy firm, KPMG. The action arose because KPMG was carrying out an investigation for the Brunei Investment Agency (BIA) into its affairs, including investigations into certain dealings in which the Prince may have been involved (the Prince had, at one time, been the head of the BIA). KPMG had previously acted for the Prince in 1996 on a separate matter and the Prince felt that information concerning his personal finances gathered by KPMG in 1996 could leak out to those contemplating action against him in this current case. He sought an injunction to prevent KPMG from continuing work on the BIA investigation.