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Chapter 3 Operations strategy 71
Worked example
‘It is about four years now since we specialized in the small-to-medium firms market. Before
that we also used to provide legal services for anyone who walked in the door. So now we have
built up our legal skills in many areas of corporate and business law. However, within the firm,
I think we could focus our activities even more. There seem to be two types of assignment that
we are given. About forty per cent of our work is relatively routine. Typically these assignments
are to do with things like property purchase and debt collection. Both these activities involve
a relatively standard set of steps which can be automated or carried out by staff without full
legal qualifications. Of course, a fully qualified lawyer is needed to make some decisions; however,
most work is fairly routine. Customers expect us to be relatively inexpensive and fast in
delivering the service. Nor do they expect us to make simple errors in our documentation, in fact
if we did this too often we would lose business. Fortunately our customers know that they are
buying a standard service and don’t expect it to be customized in any way. The problem here
is that specialist agencies have been emerging over the last few years and they are starting to
undercut us on price. Yet I still feel that we can operate profitably in this market and anyway,
we still need these capabilities to serve our other clients. The other sixty per cent of our work
is for clients who require far more specialist services, such as assignments involving company
merger deals or major company restructuring. These assignments are complex, large, take longer,
and require significant legal skill and judgement. It is vital that clients respect and trust the advice
we give them across a wide range of legal specialisms. Of course they assume that we will not
be slow or unreliable in preparing advice, but mainly it’s trust in our legal judgement which
is important to the client. This is popular work with our lawyers. It is both interesting and very
profitable. But should I create two separate parts to our business, one to deal with routine
services and the other to deal with specialist services? And, what aspects of operations performance
should each part be aiming to excel at?’ (Managing Partner, Branton Legal Services)
Analysis
Table 3.2 has used the information supplied above to identify the order winners, qualifiers
and less important competitive factors for the two categories of service. As the Managing
Partner suspects, the two types of service are very different. Routine services must be
relatively inexpensive and fast, whereas the clients for specialist services must trust the
quality of advice and range of legal skills available in the firm. The customers for routine
services do not expect errors and those for specialist services assume a basic level of
dependability and speed. These are the qualifiers for the two categories of service. Note that
qualifiers are not ‘unimportant’. On the contrary, failure to be ‘up to standard’ at them can
lose the firm business. However, it is the order winner that attracts new business. Most
significantly, the performance objectives which each operations partner should stress are
very different. Therefore there does seem to be a case for separating the sets of resources
(e.g. lawyers and other staff ) and processes (information systems and procedures) that
produce each type of service.
Table 3.2 Competitive factors and performance objectives for the legal firm
Service category Routine services Specialist services
Examples Property purchase Company merger deals
Debt collection
Company restructuring
Order winner Price Quality of service
Speed
Range of skills
Qualifiers Quality (conformance) Dependability
Speed
Less important Customization Price
Operations partners Cost Quality of relationship
should stress Speed Legal skills
Quality
Flexibility