107 - The 3 Mistakes Law Firms Make that Can Destroy Their Business & How to Avoid Them

In this episode Karen takes us through the 3 mistakes that law firms make that can destroy their business, and cause them to lose fees, or cost them income and how to avoid them.

Karen has over 30 years’ experience of defending claims against professionals, primarily solicitors, accountants and tax advisors. She became frustrated by the fact that professional negligence claims caused significant devastation and harm to the 3 ‘stakeholders’- the firm, the staff and the firm’s clients, and that her role as a defence lawyer gave her an insight into the root cause of those claims, but did not enable her to prevent them recurring. In 2020 (but pre-covid) she set up Karen Eckstein Ltd, to focus on the prevention of claims, to use her expertise and experience to help firms have healthier, happier and long lived relationships with their clients, and be more profitable as a result.

Karen Eckstein Ltd has grown, with the recruitment of long time mentee Polly Coram (both Karen and Polly are Cert IRM as well as solicitors) and recently was recognised for its work in this arena at the Yorkshire legal awards.

You can contact Karen to find out about her Risk Insight. A simple and cost effective way of reviewing your firm’s risk – which looks at 10 key risks that could derail your business- and provides you with a one page report with key prioritised recommendations – it only takes 90 minutes of your time.

To find out more click here: https://www.kareneckstein.co.uk/

About Dan:
Dan provides law firm owners with the skills and capital investment to increase their profits while reducing their workload. Over the last five years, Dan’s clients have grown their revenues from 20% to 392% in one year while more than halving their workload.

To find out about Dans availability and programs, click here: https://www.danwarburton.com/

Proudly edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real ✨

Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I am your host, Dan Warburton. If you are a law firm equity member, partner, CEO or MD who wants to increase your profits while reducing your workload, then you are in the right place.

It's the skills that I needed to become a leader. Yeah. I'm so happy that I've met you in my life.

You've spoken about the revenue increase. It went from like 70,000 to nearly half a million. What percentage increase is that? It's over 400% in that range.

Our monetary returns have been insane. And what we have made in extra profit as compared to what we spent on you is incomparable. You've just trebled the firm's profits in one year.

Yeah. Are you getting what I'm saying? After working with Dan for a few months, my income is up. My happiness is up.

This has changed my whole life. Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I'm here with Karen Eckstein, who is the director of the imaginatively named Karen Eckstein Limited.

And she is a solicitor with a specialism in managing risk and increasing opportunities for professional service firms. So over the last 30 years, Karen's gained experience in defending claims against professionals, primary solicitors, accountants and tax advisors. She became frustrated by the fact that professional negligence claims cause significant devastation and harm to three stakeholders as such.

These being the firm, the staff and the firm's clients. And that her role as a defense lawyer gave her an insight into the root cause of those claims, but did not enable her to prevent them from reoccurring. So in 2020, before COVID, she set up Karen Eckstein Limited to focus on the prevention of claims, to use her expertise and experience in helping firms have healthier, happier and long lived relationships with their clients and be more profitable as well.

And so now Karen Eckstein Limited has grown up with a recruitment of longtime mentee Polly Corum. And both Karen and Polly are certified IRM as well as solicitors. And recently they were recognized for their work in the arena at the Yorkshire Legal Awards.

Karen, it's brilliant to have you here. Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

You've got quite a bit of experience in making sure that these professional practice firms don't get into trouble or get out of it once they're in it. Yeah, I'd much rather they didn't get into trouble in the first place. As you mentioned, it's really devastating on the three stakeholders.

When I was defending claims, I saw the devastation. The only word is devastation. You know, if you're a firm and you have a claim, the amount of time and effort you spend dealing with that claim when you could be looking forward proactively at how to run your business, how to develop it, take advantage of opportunities.

And instead of that, you're spending all this time looking at where's the old server, where are the old files, what went wrong, looking negatively, thinking negatively as opposed to positively. The hours, and usually it's really very well-paid, well-renumerated people who charge out at a high rate who are doing all of this work. So the cost to the firm is massive.

I have a talk on the hidden costs of claims and it's about £100,000 for anything other than a very, very quick claim that you cost. Flipping heck. In today's episode, what we're covering here, the three mistakes that law firms make that can destroy their business and cause them to lose fees or cost them income and how to avoid them.

So I'm interested to hear these because as somebody that's moving into buying my first law firm, I'm going to learn a lot from you today. Well, yeah, I mean there are more than three mistakes but obviously in the time we've got, we can only really talk about three. But I could talk for hours.

The first one is scope creep. So I call this my magic trick. I call it turning a high-risk, unprofitable client into a low-risk, profitable one.

And it's a really easy fix. So, and what is this? This is where you act for a client and you're instructed to do A and you start doing B, C, and D. Yeah. And I see this happening all the time.

And there's a really easy fix, and it involves contractual, procedural, and also a bit of IT. So there's sort of three elements to it. But I think that firms are losing, even if they're losing, say, 10 grand a year per fee earner, extrapolate that across the firm, there's a huge amount of money that's being lost, not by working harder.

I sort of describe it as a leaky bucket. You're trying to increase your turnover. Actually, it's all dropping out the bottom.

And in some firms, it can be 150 grand a year per fee earner that they're losing if they're getting this badly wrong. And from all the law firm owners and partners I've worked with, one of the traits that I recognize in them is this needing to please all the time. And they're terrible with setting and communicating boundaries.

So when their client then says, jump, they just say, how high? And as you say, they end up doing all sorts of things that wasn't agreed for in the initial quotation for the work. And the thing is that it's easier to get more work out of an existing client, and we want to cross sell, and we want to develop good relationships with our clients. So part of that pleasing the client is good, because we do want to develop more, and we want to become the trusted advisor.

So it's right that the client should turn to us. We want them to turn to us. But when the client asks the quick question, we answer the quick question.

But the problem is, so it's risk as well as opportunity. And people think of risk management as being a negative, but hopefully if there's one thing that comes across today, hopefully it's that risk management is an opportunity. It's a way of being more profitable.

It's not just getting rid of the negative. So if you're engaged to do A, and the client asks you a quick question about something, that isn't covered by your engagement letter. So all the protections, and I love drafting engagement letters.

It's my favorite thing to do. And I'm really sad. I know I'm sad.

I know I'm sad. I accept it. It's your game of chess.

It's what life is about. Yeah, good on you. I love it.

I love it. But there are loads of protections in the engagement letter. But if you're doing work that's not in the engagement letter, then those protections don't apply.

And there are legal, regulatory, and commercial reasons why you want the work to be covered by the engagement letter. So if you're doing B, C, and D, they're not covered by the engagement letter. So all those protections don't apply.

So it's not just can you bill for it, although that's really important, but all those protections aren't there. So you've got ambiguity for the client. You've got risk for the firm.

And then how do you bill for that work? So especially if you're doing something on a fixed fee, because then the client forgets that the fixed fee only applies to A, and then you've got B, C, and D. So in other words, if a law firm goes and ends up doing B, C, and D, and then ends up making mistakes or doesn't do something well, and then that comes to light, they're not covered by their PI insurance. Well, they might be covered by their PI insurance, but they're causing a claim that might not have happened otherwise because it's not clear whether or not what they were doing, why they were doing it, who they were doing it for. So it's the ambiguity that's the issue.

And you've also got issues as to whether third parties can rely on that advice. You've got all these questions. What are you doing? Who are you doing it for? Why are you doing it? Don't get me started because we'll take up the whole podcast, discussing those issues.

But by following the very easy process that I've got, which is one clause in the engagement letter saying we can do additional work if we agree to do it, and we confirm that in writing. And then you've got a policy and a process, which is very easy to follow. And then you've got a chargeable code, time recording code, so that you do the extra work under that time recording code.

So you can actually, when you've got the bill, you've got original work under the time recording code for the original work, and you've got the additional work under the new code. So it's very clear what work was done under what code. And then when you bill it, you can bill it under that new code.

And then you can see you've got your management information as well. So you can see what extra, what scope creep work you've done. But obviously it's under the engagement letter, so you've got the protections.

But you've also got to make sure that you've got good processes in place, so that you don't do everything under that. That's only for little questions, not work that should be done under a new engagement letter. But it's a very easy process.

You've got to do some training, but it's a very, very easy process to follow. And it plugs those holes that I was talking about in that leaky bucket. Yeah, and instantly I can see it's basically upselling more services and making the most out of that relationship, generating the most business.

But also we all know that when you're not being paid for something that you've agreed to do, you only do it half-heartedly. Whereas when you're doing work that you've agreed to do, you're much more committed to doing it properly. Yeah, well, it's also clarifying, as I say, making you think, who am I doing this work for? What am I doing? Why am I doing? Purpose is really important.

This case law makes it very clear that why you're doing something is very important in determining what loss you are responsible for. So this process does make that clear. So the process that I've devised makes it very clear that you clarify when you confirm with the client that you can do this work, that you clarify what they've asked you to do, why you're doing it, and then give the answer.

But yes, and then the client values it. So it's a positive. So whenever I put processes in place, I'm very practical.

There's no point having a process if it's not easy to follow because then people find workarounds. So it's a very easy process, but it's a very positive process. So the client asks you a question, and the process is, well, that's not in the engagement letter, but we can do it under clause four, are you happy? So you're telling the client in a very positive way that you can help them, and then the client's happy because you're saying we can help you, but you're also saying this is additional work.

And then the client values what you're doing. Nobody values something if you give it to them for free. Yeah, absolutely.

So you are upselling, but you are telling the client you are helping them, but you're telling them it's additional, and then they expect to pay for it. Otherwise, you do all this extra work. If you try and bill for it, but you haven't told them, then you've actually got contractual issues, but you've also got a relationship issue.

There's a lot of claims arise from billing the client more than they're expecting. Yeah, absolutely. You hear that all the time.

Absolutely. Yeah, brilliant. Cool. 

Yeah, that's nice insights here. So what would you say is the second risk that you've seen? Well, so that leads into the second one, which is billing and bad debt issues. So, you know, when I'm talking to firms about sort of the 10 key risks that can derail a business, and we're only looking at three today, but I see so many bad debts in firms because they have poor processes.

Yeah. One of them is, and it's a massive subject, but a lot of it is down to bad process. So it's taking on the wrong client.

So people get flattered when they get a new client. They don't think, why has that client come to me? Has that client come to you because they fall out with every advisor? So don't be flattered because you've suddenly taken on Marks and Spencers as a client when you're normally, you know, the corner shop firm. Yeah.

Think about, why has that client come to me? You know, think about it. And then another issue is, have you quoted correctly? So too many firms are shy about putting their information, the billing information, in the engagement letter. Too many firms don't put it in.

They say, oh, we covered it in an email before, and it's not in the engagement letter. They just don't like putting it in. They don't like putting their rates in.

They don't like putting what they're going to charge in the engagement letter. Which is like, it's sneaky, isn't it? It's sneaky in trying to win one over when it comes to sending out the invoice, which then only causes all sorts of disputes. I say, would you take your car to the garage and leave it there without having any idea of what you're going to be charged? You wouldn't.

You would want clarity before you let them loose on your car. Put yourself in the client's shoes. Or they bill more than the client expects, as we were talking about with Scopecrate.

They don't have proper billing processes. One area that I really find shocking that still happens, some firms still reward partners on bills raised, not bills paid. You're laughing, but it still happens.

Well, because I see it. Well, I see it too. My clients, they've got massive amounts of money that they're owed, and they jump up and down about how profitable they are on paper, yet they've got so much unrealized debt.

Yes, but it's not real. So I see firms that reward partners on bills raised, and you'll see at the end of the month, all these bills are raised, and then they reward the partner on it. And then that partner sometimes cancels the bill or just never chases it, never sends it to the client.

So you've actually got to look at your culture. These things are all combined. So you've got to look at how do you actually reward.

So should it be on bills raised? No, it should never be on bills raised. It should be on bills paid. So you've got an onboarding issue.

Think about why the clients come to you and think about how good that client is for the money. Think about actually how you reward partners because I think any firm that, I don't mind being controversial, any firm that rewards partners on bills raised rather than paid is asking for trouble because you're rewarding, you're encouraging potentially bad behavior. Yeah.

And then they, you know, do you actually check when you've got a bad debt, why you've got a bad debt? Quite often firms send the bad debts to credit control, whether that's internal or external, without checking why that bill hasn't been paid. Then there's a disconnect. And you have this problem because quite often you create a client dispute where there wasn't one.

In what way? So quite often the client's only reaction to a bill then is to get hostile and defensive and litigious. Whereas if you, before you chase the bill, you get the client partner to speak to the client and say, you know, the bill's not been paid. Can I just talk to you about it? And the client might say, I never had the bill.

Or actually I was expecting it to be X and it's Y. Yeah. Or actually it's got the wrong reference on it. I can't pay it because you've got the wrong information on it.

Yeah. I see all of this. Or there's an issue.

Or I wasn't happy with the service. So quite often there is an issue that hasn't been resolved and the client's only defense is to not pay the bill. Yeah.

One of the things that I recommend to firms is that they put a fee alert, a WIP alert, on their files at 75% of the quote, whether it's a quote or an estimate. And they review the file at that point. And are you where you think you should be? Yeah.

And if you're not, have a deep dive at that point because is it that you've got scope creep, in which case you can fix it? Is it that the client, you told the client, based on you thought you'd get 10 documents and you've had 100, in which case that is scope creep but in a different form. You can talk to the client. Yeah.

Is it that the client's being really difficult and is that because the client expected you to communicate and you've not been communicating so you can fix that before the end of the job? The client's feelings at the end of the job are going to determine how it goes forward. So if you have let the relationship deteriorate during the job, you can mend it before the end of the job. Yes.

Or is it that you've got a fee earner that's gone down a wrong path and dumped a lot of time or spent too long on something, you can fix it before it's gone badly wrong? So a feeler at 75% can maybe make you more money because you've identified there's scope creep or it can prevent the relationship going badly wrong before you get to the billing stage. Yeah, I absolutely love this. With one of my clients in the USA, they found their clients were, yeah, delaying paying and they were shocked at the fees.

And so what we implemented was regular reporting with the client as to what the fee stood at, what had been done so far and re-estimating what it was going to be at. And as they did that continuously, quite often the work would end up becoming so much more than initially thought because they had constant communication all the way through the project. In the end, the clients were paying fine.

Yeah. Well, that brings me on to another part of this billing issue, which is too many people fail to take advantage of leverage so they bill after completion of the job. Yeah, right.

Well, I would say take a payment up front and then take bill during the job and don't wait till you've lost all your leverage because once you've completed the job, the client's got no incentive to pay you. So too many people just bill after they've completed. Well, if you bill during, the client doesn't have that massive bill.

They know they can budget. So the clients usually prefer to be billed in installments. But also then they've got no incentive to pay because they've had the value.

And that takes you back to onboarding. So we're circling back round. When I talk to my clients about, I do this as part of my, I call it close the circle, but it's my engagement letter process.

Talk to the client at the start about how they want to be communicated with, how often, and also about billing because it's not down to us. Some clients say, I want to be billed in the third week of the month because our process is we pay our bills in the fourth week of the month. So if you bill them in the fourth week, you've got to wait four weeks.

Yeah, right. So identify when they're billing runners, bill them before it. People don't think about it.

And it's such a simple thing to implement in the onboarding process to have them answer those questions. Yeah. Yeah, brilliant.

So if the client wants a weekly update and you update them monthly, they're going to be annoyed with you. Yeah, right. But if they want a monthly update and you update them weekly, they're going to be annoyed.

They're annoyed with you. So make that part of your onboarding processes. That's part of what we do.

We help people set up. That's part of the advice that we give so that you start the relationship on the right way. And if the client wants bullet point reports and you send them four page reports, they're going to be annoyed with you.

Identify how they want to be communicated with and why. And then that all feeds into it because then you embed with the client and you're going to have a much longer relationship because you speak their language and you are part of their team. But that's sort of billing them bad debt.

I mean, just as an example, I did this for one firm. They had about 450 grand of bad debt. And in three months, I got that under 50 grand.

I wrote off 30 grand. I brought in the rest. Wow.

Just by sorting out the process. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

And I guess that's everything you covered there is more the tail end of the process, right? Yeah. What have you seen has worked well in regards to or breakdowns or risk you've seen in time recording versus then what the client is billed and so on? Yeah. Part of that is the third risk, which we'll talk about in a minute.

So part of that is narratives. Review your narratives before you bill. So review it.

Don't just go, oh, there's 10 grand on the clock, I'll bill 10. You've actually got to read the narratives. It's their duplication.

Have people put down narratives. So people need to be trained in time recording. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

And you've got to look at it because some people will actually say, do not bill. And it's like, well, why have you said that? So you've actually got to know your fee earners. So some people will think, well, I've spent too long on this.

So I think it's quite useful to have two boxes for time recording. The one that's going on the bill and then an off-bill comment. Oh, interesting.

I think that's really useful. So what you were doing and then if you did think you spent too long, that's the second box. That doesn't go on the bill.

Okay. So comment for manager, if you like. So to have two boxes is really useful.

Yeah. Because otherwise they do not bill, goes on the bill. Yeah, right.

Yeah. But by having that comment, it encourages the fee earner to record the time as chargeable because otherwise you find that they may not record it as chargeable. Yeah, absolutely.

But then, you know, surely if a firm, like the magic number for me, you know, for firms to have is a hundred hours billable recorded per fee earner per month, which is 25 per week, five a day. You know, surely to have team members hitting good levels of performance, you need to set targets and then manage them constantly to meet them. So there needs to be decent time recording in place to make sure they're hitting those targets.

Yeah. Well, that brings me on to my third risk very neatly. So thank you very much.

So my third risk is targets, cash flow and capacity. So we'll start with targets there. So when I started, because obviously I'm very, very old, the annual target, chargeable target for solicitors was 1240 annual.

And now in some of the big firms, you see targets of 2000. Yeah. They haven't suddenly created more hours in a week or days in a week and weeks in a year.

So the pressure on the earners in some of those big firms is immense. And so to any junior lawyers out there listening to this, if you are seduced by the large salaries, I would ask what the targets are, because I agree with you. I think 100 chargeable hours a month is a realistic target.

More than that. And you haven't got time to be off sick. You haven't got time for research.

You haven't got time for just checking in with your colleagues. Or the general admin that goes with it. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. And so what I see is then you see fee earners put under incredible pressure.

So they'll time dump, which is spent an hour and they go, oh, I'll put two down or I'll put an hour and a half down. Yeah. Well, that is theft.

That is a criminal offence. And we have seen disciplinaries across the professions where there's been time dumping. And that's the end of your career.

That is a criminal offence. Don't think, oh, it won't matter. It is theft.

It is a criminal offence. But also, you know, it's a little bit here, a little bit there. It mounts up.

So that's one thing. Then the bills are higher, but also the quality of your work goes down. So if you are regularly working obscene amount of hours and you're not taking time off when you're sick, the quality of your work deteriorates.

Well, I am passionate about quality over quantity. Yeah. And if you haven't got time to do training, you haven't got time to listen to podcasts, you haven't got time to read around the subject, the quality of what you do deteriorates.

So that means you're doing poorer quality work. That means you're going to make mistakes or you're not performing at your best. That means the work that the client gets is less.

It means you've got unhappy clients. That means your reputation is affected. Claims follow.

And as I mentioned at the start, this podcast claims are very, very expensive. A staff member who feels under that level of pressure. Yeah.

It's more likely to resign. Yeah. And it's more likely to be the good staff that resign than the bad ones, because the bad ones might think they've got nowhere else to go.

Anecdotally, it costs about £100,000 to replace a member of staff. Because you've got recruitment fee, you've got downtime when they're not earning for you. Then you've got the training time to train up the new number of staff.

So anecdotally, it's going to cost you about £100,000 if they make a claim. It's going to cost you about £100,000 to replace them. So there's quite a lot of cost involved there.

So that's targets. What do you see the solutions to that then? Well, the solution is to have more realistic targets. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.

One of my clients had 150 hours a month. And I said, and how many of your team members are hitting them? It's like, no one? Yeah. And I said, OK, what are they averaging? He said, let me have a look here.

He was like 80 hours. And I said, yeah. I said, how would you feel if you had these really high targets? However hard you worked, whatever you did, you could never meet them.

How would you feel after a month or years of that? You'd be completely demotivated. Yeah. And the good ones would go.

Yeah. And so the first thing, decrease that to 100 hours a month. Yeah.

And then put in real supportive structures for everybody to meet them. And it's made a world of difference. So you fix the scope creep.

You fix the scope creep. Well, there you are. That's a big chunk of it.

There's other things you can fix that we've got. But the other issue is that people then set their budgets against the targets. And I've seen firms go under because of this.

So they think, okay, all our staff are going to hit these targets. So that means we're going to have, and then we're going to bill this much money. And then we're going to get paid this much money based on those bills, which are based on these targets.

And that means we're going to have this much money. So we can afford to spend this much money. We can pay the partners this much.

And we can recruit. We can expand. We can do this.

We can do that. And then, of course, you go back to the basics and the staff are, if you think they're going to do 150 hours and they're doing 100 hours, and then they're making mistakes and you're getting claims, suddenly you're at a half of what you thought. And then you're losing clients because they're making claims.

So the clients aren't staying. So you're losing all of those clients and your reputation's shot in the marketplace. So you've got this downward spiral.

So what you're saying is, is look at the financial health of what you can and can't do in your firm and what's actually realized profits and collections, not on a forecasted projection if everyone hits a certain target. Well, yeah, it's basically you look after the three pillars, really. So you look after your staff, you look after your processes and you look after the clients.

Get them all, be realistic, don't be greedy, be realistic and then make them all healthy. And it's like a wobbly stool. If one's, you know, it just wobbles, but you get all three healthy and then it grows.

Yeah. So, but yes, you know, if the staff are under pressure, they're not going to perform. If the processes don't work, it's not going to perform.

If your clients aren't looked after, you'll lose them. And it's sort of, it's a downward circle cycle. But if you get them all working well, your business will just explode.

It's just going to be unprofitable. I love it. I love everything that you're saying.

And it comes back to my discovery from working with law firms in that, yeah, these three pillars are the ones to focus on, but many of them are just lost doing billable work and are exhausted and burned out and just not available to give their team the one-on-one time they need, you know, to take care of their clients, to overview their systems and processes. And they've got to learn to delegate away their workload so they become free and are able to focus on these three things, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So we try and make it practical and simple. You know, we, you know, risk management is a massive, massive blob of jelly. So we try and take it down into bite-sized pieces.

But we're very, very practical. And, you know, if you nibble away at the edges, the blob gets smaller, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely.

Everything you've said totally resonates with me. And, you know, I can see a lot of overlap in what we do, but you've just got a real depth and a whole new level of rigor to risk because it's all you do, right? Yeah. Well, it's why I moved into it from when I got so frustrated, as you said at the start, when I was defending the claims, and I could see where they were coming from.

And I was defending claims in a very specialist area. I was doing tax-related claims. And, you know, tax law changes every year.

It changes all the time. And it's highly technical. And 85% of the claims, whenever I looked at my caseload, were caused by getting basics wrong.

Yeah. And you think, now the complex tax law wasn't the problem. It was the basics.

It was an engagement letter not identifying who the client was or it not being clear what you were doing or it was missing a deadline. It wasn't, you know, getting a complex piece of tax legislation wrong. And it was so frustrating.

And it was, I can see where the problems are. And then I see the devastation that's caused by those problems. Devastation to the firm, to the staff, and to the clients.

And we don't go into business to upset our clients. We don't go into business to upset our staff. You know, we don't go into business to upset our own businesses.

And, you know, these little fixes can have a massive impact. So it's so rewarding when I go in and I help a business. And, you know, clients come back to me 10, 15 years later and it's still working.

Yeah. And it's so rewarding. I mean, it's not the most remunerative.

It's much more remunerative to be involved in some litigation. Yeah. But holistically, this is so rewarding.

I so love what I do because I make a difference. Yeah. Nice.

Nice. Have you ever considered maybe raising capital and investing in a firm again yourself? No, because then I'm stuck. I'll get drawn into one firm.

So what I love is being able to help many. Yeah. You know, I mean, I have, you know, I've been there, I've done that, but I much prefer being able to help lots of firms, I think, rather than have my own.

It's fascinating. I'm going the opposite. I've worked with many firms and helped many and now I'm inspired to implement everything I've learned from all the firms I've worked in into one.

Yeah. But I should be able to still offer the, you know, the law firm growth consulting at the same time as being the CEO of a law firm as such. Yeah.

And I think the skills you've got will be so valuable. And I think you'll, you know, the great thing is you'll be able to influence and it's all about culture. So, you know, one of the things is that it's a trite thing to say, but having a no-blame culture is critical.

And so anyone listening to this podcast, please, you know, if someone, please make sure that your staff feel able to tell you when they are uncomfortable. I invented a form which made it very easy for people to just say, don't feel right, don't feel right. They don't need to identify if it's whistleblowing, if it's a complaint, a claim, a circumstance, a GDPR issue, because then they get stuck because they can't work out which process it is.

Yeah. Just make it easy for them to go not happy. Yeah.

Just have a not happy form. Yeah. Yeah.

Brilliant. Brilliant. And of course, you need to ensure that you're able to communicate kindly and compassionately at all times as well, because if you're losing your temper in any way with your team members, they'll shut down and they won't flag up anything they see as a problem.

Yeah. I'd always say if something's gone wrong, it's usually not the person, it's the process. Yeah.

Interesting. I would say, well, the process isn't robust enough, it's not the person, it's the process. Yeah.

Like in the book by Michael Gerber, the e-myth, which is all about systemizing and automating businesses, there is no management without a documented procedure. Yeah. Because otherwise, what are you managing people to adhere to if you have nothing for them to adhere to that you're managing them to adhere to? So, yeah.

Karen, I've absolutely loved having you here today and I can tell me and you will just talk till the cows and donkey come home. I'm absolutely going to be staying in touch with you. I love what you do and I'm sure that when I find myself leading that law firm and I need to go really deep on all the systems and processes, I think you're going to be the one that gets my phone call.

I'm very happy to do your engagement letters because that, I must say, I love doing engagement letters. Brilliant. But yeah, no, thank you for having me and I've really enjoyed chatting.

Yeah, thank you. I'll put the links in the show notes so if anybody wants to contact you, they can find you there. Great.

Thank you very much. Cheers. Bye.

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