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Big ideas for small firms: to manage your firm well, you need to build a team that shares your firm's core values. Do you have the employees and resources you need to serve your clients the way you want to?

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The challenges facing small plaintiff personal injury firms in today's legal marketplace have never been more daunting. A host of factors continues to radically affect the practice of personal injury law, including the effects of tort "reform," increased competition, and ever more demanding and cost-conscious clients.

These trends will surely continue in the future. The importance of managerial excellence in a small plaintiff firm has never been greater.

Whether you consider your firm to be small depends on your individual point of view. It is not at all uncommon for law firms with 50 to 100 lawyers--which handle complex corporate and transactional matters for Fortune 500 companies--to describe themselves as small or "boutique" firms. But in the province of Ontario, where I practice, for example, there are only a few plaintiff personal injury firms with more than 30 lawyers. I define a "small" plaintiff personal injury firm as one with 10 or fewer lawyers.

Not that it makes that much difference. Why not? Because the rules and principles governing the growth and management of a small law firm apply, to a great extent, to firms of every size. Whether your firm is large, small, or somewhere in between, the key challenges remain the same.

Successful firms are differentiated not by their different goals, clever strategies, or special managerial tactics (these are remarkably similar worldwide). Successful firms are clearly differentiated by a strict adherence to values--more specifically, the value of professionalism.

Whether you are just starting out or are already many years into the life of your firm, the successful sustenance and growth of your practice and firm will be greatly enhanced by your commitment to a set of core values that will, to some degree, reflect the following basic ideas:

* All professionals in your firm agree to be coached and managed to strictly enforced, agreed-on standards.

* Teamwork is mandatory.

* You continually invest in getting better at generating better business (not just more business), lowering the firm's cost of performing selected professional tasks, becoming more valuable to your existing clients, and disseminating your skills throughout the firm.

* Excellence in client satisfaction is an enforced standard.

* You set a certain non-negotiable minimum standard of personal professional growth.

* You do not tolerate the failure to pursue excellence (including being prepared to terminate the employment of any lawyer or support staff who does not consistently send the message that while everyone is allowed to fail, no one is allowed not to try). (1)

David Maister, a leading consultant to professional services firms, presented a study that assembled data on the factors that drive the financial success of these firms. Surveying 139 offices of 29 firms in 15 countries and 15 different professions, he put to the firms' employees and members a series of propositions. The results pointed to nine key...

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