like active digital marketing campaigns. There is a new
expectation from those looking towards management teams
for leadership, for them to be provided with more useful
information, available at the ‘tap-of-a-button’. Members
crave access to data that will allow them to hone and
improve their practices. Clerks desire quick, yet powerful,
graphical analysis of data they can rely upon to help review
individual/chambers performance. Traditional financial
reports, or tallies of cases by source, are all well and good,
but users at all levels want more.
Chambers are therefore, tasked with meeting those needs by
capturing and providing more. The crucial question is what
information to provide and how best to deliver it?
In recent times, The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has
campaigned to increase Chambers awareness of their
regulatory responsibilities relating to Equality & Diversity
and Fair Allocation of Work. In summary, the BSB Equality
Rules Handbook states:
‘Chambers has to record whether the work came into
chambers marked for a particular barrister/pupil, or
whether it was allocated, and if so, who it was allocated to
and who was responsible for allocating the work’.
Whilst these requirements have been in play for quite some
time; recently, the fact that the BSB has (albeit gently),
raised the spectre of being labelled ‘non-compliant’, has
focused Chambers on ensuring the data required to fulfil
the regulatory responsibility is being regularly captured and
made available.
Some management teams in Chambers however, have seized
this opportunity and instructed their clerks to raise the bar
and go one step further. They have shrewdly reacted to the
increased competitiveness of the Bar Market, by harnessing
an additional, vital, stream of information relating to the
fair allocation of work. Information that allows them to view
their business in a completely different light.
Those sets have recognised that gathering data on ‘the reason
why and by whom’ an individual is allocated to a particular
piece of work, really only captures a snap-shot of a much
wider picture. For every successful instruction recorded (the
reporting value of which is not in itself in dispute), there will
undeniably be many more instances where individuals are
offered, but refused.
competitors on the basis of cost or experience.
The statistics pivoting around opportunity related data, can
undoubtedly improve Chambers understanding of the fairness
of how, and to whom, work is allocated. From a practice
management perspective however, the insight achievable
through analysis of this data, is equally as profound.
Identifying and recording lost opportunities, opens up new
methods of detecting weaknesses in Chamber’s armoury.
Yet, despite this data being extremely valuable, under normal
circumstances in most Chambers, it is lost. This is primarily
down to the hurdles that must be overcome for Chambers
wishing to collate such data.
Recording any additional data takes ‘Time’, and the ‘Software’
to do so. Demands on clerks are increasing year-on-year,
and there is an understandable reluctance to take on more
responsibility without careful consideration of the impact
it may have elsewhere. Clerks need functionality at their
fingertips to assist them to record informatio