McPherson Charles Solicitors

McPherson Charles Solicitors1
Grace Whelan, Managing Partner of McPherson Charles,

welcomed the three solicitors into the meeting room. She
outlined the agenda, essentially their thoughts and input
into the rolling three-year plan. McPherson Charles, based
in Bristol in the West of England, had grown rapidly to be
one of the biggest law firms in the region, with 21 partners
and around 400 staff; it was an ambitious partnership
aiming to maintain its impressive growth record. The firm
was managed through 15 teams, each headed by a
partner. The meeting was intended to be the first stage in ‘Plans for the Future’, a programme to improve
the effectiveness of the firm’s operations. The three partners attending the meeting with Grace were
Simon Reece (Family law), Kate Hutchinson (Property) and Hazel Lewis (Litigation). Grace asked for
ideas on what the firm should prioritise in order to improve its performance further.
[Insert UNFigure near here]
Simon Reece kicked things off, ‘I think the first thing we need to agree on is that, for a professional
service firm like ourselves, the quality of our people will always be the most important issue. We need
to be absolutely confident that our staff not only have the best possible understanding of their own
branch of the law, but also have the necessary client-relationship skills to consolidate our business
position with increasingly demanding clients.’ Hazel was not so sure. ‘Of course, I agree that the quality
of our staff is an important issue, but that has always been true. What is new is the help we can get
from some serious investment in technology and software. Just getting our systems and processes right
would, I am sure, save us a lot of time and effort, and of course, reduce our cost base.’
‘I really don’t think spending more money on technology is the answer, Hazel.’ Simon continued, ‘We
need more time to really understand our clients and being process and IT focused just doesn’t work for
us, we need another way of managing. The key is increasing revenue, not penny pinching about costs,
and to do that we need to really concentrate on relationship skills. Family law is like walking through a
minefield; you can easily offend clients who are, almost by definition, in a highly emotional state. I think
we need to make sure that senior members of staff with experience of managing client relationships
pass on their knowledge to those who are less experienced.’
‘I disagree, Simon.’ It was Kate now, ‘Our clients really are increasingly cost conscious and if we don’t
deliver value for money, word will spread very fast and our business will dry up. Much of the time we
over-engineer our services. Why should we use highly qualified and expensive lawyers for every single
task? I am convinced that, with slick systems and enhanced training, non-qualified people could do
much of our work.’
1 Extract from Slack N and Brandon-Jones A (2021) Operations and Process Management, 6th Edition, Pearson
Grace knew that solicitors liked nothing better than disagreeing – it was what they did best – and she
knew that this was going to be another long meeting.
In very simple terms, these are the type of activities that each team was engaged in.
Simon Reece, Family law

‘We are called the “family law” team but basically what we do is to help people through the trauma of
divorce, separation and break up. Our biggest “high value“ clients come to us because of word-of-mouth
recommendation. Last year we had 89 of these “high value“ clients and they all valued the personal
touch that we were able to give them, getting to know them well and spending time with them to
understand the, often “hidden“ aspects of their case. These interviews cannot be rushed. These clients
tend to be wealthy people and we will often have to drop everything and go off half way round the world
to meet and discuss their situation. There are no standard procedures, every client is different, and
everyone has to be treated as an individual. So we have a team of individuals who rise to the challenge
each time and give great service. Of course, not all our clients are the super-rich. About a third of our
annual family law income comes from about 750 relatively routine divorce and counselling cases. This
work is a lot less interesting and I try to make sure that all my team have a mix of interesting and routine
work over the year. I encourage them to exercise and develop their professional judgement. They are
empowered to deal with any issues themselves or call in myself or one of the more senior members of
the team for advice if appropriate. It is important to give this kind of responsibility to them so that they
see themselves as part of a team. We are also the only part of the firm that has adopted an open-plan
office arrangement centred around our specialist library of family case law.’
Hazel Lewis, Litigation

’The litigation team provides a key service for our commercial client base. Our primary work consists of
handling bulk collections of debt. The group has 17 clients, of which 5 provide 85 per cent of the total
volume. We work closely with the accounts departments of the client companies and have developed
a semi-automatic approach to debt collection. Staff input data received from their clients into the system;
from that point everything progresses through a pre-defined process, letters are produced, queries
responded to and eventually debts collected, ultimately through court proceedings if necessary. Work
tends to come in batches from clients and varies according to economic conditions, time of year and
client sales activities. At the moment things are fairly steady; we had 872 new cases last week. The
details of each case are sent over by the client; our people input the data onto our screens and set up
a standard diary system for sending letters out. Some people respond quickly to the first letter and often
the case is closed within a week or so; other people ignore letters and eventually we initiate court
proceedings. We know exactly what is required for court dealings and have a pretty good process to
make sure all the right documentation is available on the day.’
Kate Hutchinson, Property
‘We are really growing fast and are building up an excellent reputation locally for being fast, friendly and
giving value for money. Most of our work is “domestic”, acting for individuals buying or selling their
home, or their second home. Each client is allocated to a solicitor who becomes their main point of
contact. But, given that we can have up to a hundred domestic clients a week, most of the work is
carried out by the rest of the team behind the scenes. There is a relatively standard process to domestic
property sales and purchases and we think that now we are pretty efficient at managing these standard
jobs. Our process has four stages: one dealing with land registry searches, one liaising with banks who
are providing the mortgage finance, one who make sure surveys are completed and one section that
finalises the whole process to completion. We believe that this degree of specialisation can help us
achieve the efficiencies that are becoming important as the market gets more competitive. Increasingly,
we are also getting more complex ”special” jobs. These are things like “volume re-mortgage”
arrangements; rather complex “one-off” jobs, where a mortgage lender transfers a complex set of loan
assets to another lender. “Special” jobs are always more complex than the domestic work and
sometimes there are times when fast completion is particularly important and that can throw us a bit.
The firm has recently formed partnerships with two large speculative builders, so we are getting into
special “plot sales”. All these “specials” do involve a lot of work and can occupy several members of the
team for a time. We are now getting up to 25 of these “specials” each week, and they can be somewhat
different to our normal work but we try to follow roughly the same process with them as the normal
domestic jobs.’
Are each team’s processes appropriate?

Grace was concerned. The three teams obviously had to cope with very different volumes of work and
variety of activities. It was also clear that each team had developed different approaches to managing
their processes. The question that she needed to address was, whether each team’s approach was
appropriate for the demands placed upon it.
Questions
1 What are the individual ‘services’ offered by each of the three teams?
2 Where would you place each service in a scale that goes from relatively low volume, relatively
high variety, to relatively high volume, relatively low variety?
3 How would you describe each team’s process in terms of its layout, the technology (if any) it
uses, and the jobs of its staff?
4 Use the above information to draw a ‘product’– process matrix. What does it indicate?

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McPherson Charles Solicitors1

Grace Whelan, Managing Partner of McPherson Charles,

Simon Reece, Family law

Hazel Lewis, Litigation

Are each team’s processes appropriate?

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