James Markham

When seeking budget approval, don't just present the costs, make sure you present (a) the benefits of the spend and (b) the costs of not approving the spend. 'I need £60,000 to hire someone' is hard to say yes to 'I need £60,000 to hire someone, who will help us launch the new service line we committed to in the strategy' Is better, but better still is adding... 'By not hiring this person we will be unable to launch the service for 6 months and the following projects will suffer from needing to reallocate resources' Great if you can also quantify those benefits, but often just telling the story around the budget request turns that hard yes for additional expenditure into an easy approval.

Yes automation tools are great, but don't automate a bad process. Automated GIGO may be quicker, but it's still garbage. Spend time understanding your existing processes and look to standardise and harmonise the different ways of working. Once you have a process your team is running consistently, then turn your attention to automation to make it more efficient.

Increasingly teams are distributed across multiple locations, or are fully remote. This can make aligning team members more difficult as they aren't working together in one place with all the implicit course correcting, water cooler moments that entails. Instead managers must be (a) more explicit about team objectives - "what" we're trying to achieve, but be (b) less prescriptive on "how" individuals achieve this, trusting that they have the right team members in post. It is typically more effective to check in on alignment around objectives in a regular team call than it is to have multiple 1:1s. You can more quickly identify issues and reallocate work with everyone involved, rather than bouncing back and forth between individuals.

Don't beat yourself up when a project is adrift, and don't kid yourself that it's on track when it's not. With the best will in the world, you'll never perfectly capture everything in the planning stages and you'll have made some assumptions (either explicit or implicit). Work through the iron triangle of cost, scope and timeframes based on where you are right now to identify the trade offs required to get the project back on track. Will spending more money bring the timeframes in? Are there 'nice to have' items in your scope that can be trimmed to deliver savings? Engage your stakeholders in those trade off discussions, evaluate the options, make a decision and move forward.

To stabilise law firm cashflow you need to balance impact, effort to implement and longer term effects. For example, delaying an office fit out, or other large project, is likely better than deferring staff bonuses. Typically, I would look to: - review existing facilities and engage the bank early around shortfalls - delay capital and project expenditure - enforce credit control policies and payment terms. Focus collection efforts on large/old balances - cut temporary headcount before permanent roles. Freeze new hires - negotiate payment plans with key suppliers. Generally, don't act unilaterally (and esp. not with balances owed to HMRC!) Once stable, you can then look to longer term fixes to the cost base and working capital model.

It's important to recognise fee earner contributions towards innovation - they'll typically be needed to identify requirements and to test new ways of working or technology, all of which can be time consuming. This can create tension between a need to complete billable work and a need to contribute to innovation. A simple, but effective way to resolve this tension is to have hours spent on innovation activities count towards billable hours targets, or bonuses.