Effective law firm policies & precedents – 5 key reasons to have them
Policies and precedents are key to ensuring a firm can meet its regulatory obligations and strategic objectives; without them there will be a lack of direction and a risk of non-compliance.
Do you struggle with drafting policies and precedents, or are unsure what to put in them or how to get started? Are you short on time and concerned how you will keep everything up to date?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Our market research tells us that those working in small to medium sized law firms find it especially difficult to balance their day-to-day roles with their governance responsibilities
Below we highlight 5 key reasons why having access to a comprehensive bank of policies and precedents is good for your business:
- Efficiency - Let compliance experts do the hard work for you in terms of creating the documents and ensuring they set out practical processes and procedures for your employees to help ensure full compliance with relevant regulations and legislation.
- Expertise - Take advantage of having leading compliance experts by your side. Our team is made up of a legal compliance heavyweight and 2 solicitors, with in excess of 40 years combined experience working in the legal profession, many of these working at the coalface within law firms. In addition to our expertise, we also have the passion to help our clients ensure they get things right!
- Awareness - You need experts who keep up to date with what is happening in the legal compliance landscape, including regulatory and legislative changes and ensure these are reflected in the documents you use, releasing updated content as appropriate. We have our finger on the pulse in relation to the key challenges that the profession is facing and how we can help to reduce the pain points and regularly release new content with these in mind - our upcoming Mental Health and Wellbeing and Flexible, Remote and Hybrid Working policies are cases in point.
- Current - Policies and precedents must remain fit for purpose at all times but this can be difficult for firms when their main focus is on clients. With experts by your side, you don’t need to worry about documents going stale or sitting at the back of the cupboard going out of date. We ensure they are reviewed at regular intervals and are always looking at ways to enhance our content and provide high-quality documents that give real value to our clients. This includes creating checklists and supporting documents wherever possible to really go that extra mile for our clients.
- Adaptable Your policies and precedents must fit your firm’s specific needs; a ‘one size fits all' approach is a risky one as this will be identified should the regulator call in your documents for inspection. We assist firms in adapting and tailoring the templates we provide to them by providing prompts and pointers throughout the documents as to which aspects a firm may wish to focus on.
Our current clients really value the peace of mind and time-saving benefits that subscribing to our bank of policies and precedents gives to them, leaving them free to get on with the important task of running their businesses and looking after their clients.
Created by our team of legal experts, the aim of our templates is to provide a foundation for many, if not all, of your policy and precedent needs, whether you intend to adopt most of them on a ‘one-stop shop’ basis or pick and choose the ones that fill a void within your own suite of documents. We pride ourselves on providing quality content that is flexible and dependable and which makes your life that little bit easier.
Having a comprehensive bank of policies and precedents is one thing, but you must ensure that staff are given training on them, so they become embedded within your firm’s operations; another aspect to consider is whether the policies and precedents are being complied with, so ongoing supervision is really important.
If any of the above resonates with you and you would like to find out more about how to subscribe to our ‘must have’ product, or how to maximise its full potential, our team would be happy to discuss any queries with you. Download our brochure and we'll get in touch to discuss them with you.
