TLOMA Today

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We are rounding third and about to slide into home, it is the last month of 2019, hooray!

It is time to reflect on the past year and to look ahead to our goals for the new one. As part of your reflection; what went well, what surprised you, what did you learn, what do you need to leave behind? As you look ahead; where do you need to go, how do you want to grow, what goals would you like to set, who would you like to connect with?

A few easy questions to answer that will help you plan for success.

The board and committees have had a lot of successes; it was an incredibly busy and extremely productive year.

In reflection; we underwent a self-audit of our governance structure and operational efficiencies, met all strategic priorities that were set for the year, implemented a much more effective online learning platform, grew our membership and surveyed the needs of our membership. We look forward to implementing member’s suggestions, feedback and needs into new products and services for next year. We strengthened Business Partner relationships and created new ones, we are creating new format for 2020 Conference and looking to engage more of our membership by providing it in Toronto. We strengthened relationships with other Associations and created new partnership opportunities for our members. Please check out the Executive Director’s Year in Review report for a comprehensive list of our successes.

Looking ahead; we are hosting a Human Resources SIG meeting on Tuesday, January 21, 2020 where we will learn about strategic steps from Dana Hurst of People Corporation and hear about impactful journeys from Marva Bethune (Gowling WLG (Canada) LLP) and Georgia Rennick (Aird & Berlis LLP) two of our TLOMA members. Thank you to People Corporation for sponsoring this event.

On Thursday, April 2, 2020 we are hosting a half day Professional Development event on Advanced Communication and Presentation Skills. Commanding Presence will help us substantially improve our day-to-day business discussions, meeting and presentations. Thank you to Facility Plus for sponsoring this event.

The 2020 Conference Committee is already hard at work planning this event. We are pleased to advise that the Conference will focus on Leadership competencies to appeal to all members. The social and networking event planning is also underway, the Toronto location provides for limitless options for us to connect with our network, grow our network and enjoy the Conference. We are pleased to advise that our Business Partner participation has already exceeded our numbers at this time last year.

There are lots of Special Interest Group meetings in the planning stages, please watch the website and your inbox for more details.

I would like to thank the Nominating Committee and many members for their efforts and interest in filling the 2020 and beyond volunteer roles to serve on the board and committees.  If anyone is thinking about or is interested in volunteering for any initiatives next year please send me a message, I would love to hear from you. pharris@oatleyvigmond.com.

I would like to thank our hard-working Board of Directors, all TLOMA volunteers, and TLOMA staff for their dedication and commitment. Finally, and certainly not least, on behalf of all members thank you to all of our Business Partners, our gratitude and appreciation is immeasurable for without you we would not be able to offer the multitude of member benefits we do.

In closing, I would like to wish you all the happiest of holidays, enjoy time with friends, family and of course take time to recharge and reset for next year. Always be safe.

I wanted to extend my sincere thank you to the TLOMA Community for your warm welcome when I first arrived. It is hard to believe that a year has gone by so very quickly. It has been a privilege getting to know our members and working side by side with an extremely talented group of legal management professionals.

The Board of Directors had a very busy but tremendously productive year.  We worked diligently in meeting TLOMA’s strategic priorities and as a result of all the successes, I’m delighted to report that we are going to keep 2019 prices for all of our member products and services for 2020.

We were able to achieve phenomenal successes this year by undergoing a self-audit of our governance practices, internal processes, and assessing our membership needs. Allow me to share some of the highlights and achievements below.

Governance

New best governance practices were created including an orientation process for incoming board members, Code of Conduct for board members, and a self-evaluation tool for returning board members.  We also improved the survey for exiting board members, updated existing manuals, policies and format for board meetings. The new initiatives were carried out with the intention of providing a positive volunteer experience, meeting best governance practices, increasing engagement among our board members and ensuring that TLOMA is positioned to become a high performing Association.

Operations

From the review of our internal processes, we were able to streamline various practices that not only improved the operations of TLOMA but also enabled us to provide better member services.  We enhanced our Human Resource Management practices where various written personnel policies were created and an improved performance review process implemented. We wanted to establish and align performance metrics with the mission and strategic plan as this will ensure that what is being measured is what is intended to be achieved.

Membership

This year a review was undertaken of the type of membership data and communication TLOMA performs. The purpose for this was to ensure that linkage occurs between our strategy development, the use of standards of services and the impact on and measurement of member satisfaction. As a result, a Membership Task Force was created with the intention of assessing members’ needs.  The Task Force drafted a member value survey that was very well received by our membership.  For a summary of results, kindly refer to the Task Force’s article in this Newsletter issue.

We are continuously looking for opportunities for meeting our members’ needs as well as ways to recognize our incredible pool of volunteers.  This year a membership certificate was created with the intention of increasing awareness of TLOMA and its brand in the legal industry.  All 2020 renewing members will receive electronically the new certificate.  Additionally, we wanted to find appropriate opportunities for recognizing our members and as such created Best of TLOMA Award that will be awarded at the end of 2020 for the best article submission in our newsletter.

Year End

The Board worked diligently on accomplishing 2019 Strategic Priorities and I am delighted to report that they were all completed.  As a result, TLOMA was able to grow its membership by 9% this year, increase social media presence, strike various partnerships with other associations in the legal industry, improve membership services, provide a new learning platform for our Special Interest Group events, offer various training opportunities from other providers at a discounted rate,  secure a new Compensation Survey provider, increase member engagement and communication, and strengthen our Business Partner relationships.

TLOMA’s commitment remains to its members. Its focus in the upcoming years will be on identifying and meeting membership needs and continuously improve.

I wanted to thank our very hard-working Board of Directors, Special Interest Group Leaders, Committee Members, all other volunteers, TLOMA team, and our Business Partners, all of whom went beyond and above in ensuring that we have a very successful year.

On a personal note, I wanted to let everyone know that I have some unexpected but exciting news. I will be leaving on parental leave early next year, but I do look forward to seeing everyone at various TLOMA events in 2020.  During my leave, if you have any questions pertaining to invoices please contact Liz Barrington and for any other inquiries please connect with Karen Gerhardt. Kindly also note that TLOMA’s office will be closed starting December 20th and will reopen January 2nd.

I hope to report back next year on different successes with one main strategic priority - mastering the art of sleep training!

I wanted to wish everyone a very Happy and Safe Holiday Season!  May the New Year bring lots of health and happiness!

Sincerely,

Rose Yanco
Executive Director

The Membership Task Force would like to thank everyone that participated in the member value survey.  As this is a member driven organization, we need to hear from you as to our progress, your member needs and structure our long-term goals accordingly.  It was clear from the number of responses that this type of initiative is appreciated by the membership and that we should continue with it for years to come. 

The Task Force was created with the intention of assessing members’ needs and providing to the board appropriate and timely strategic direction.  A new member value survey went out to our membership and we are proud to report that we had 36% of members take the time to respond.  This is above industry standards and we are grateful to be able to receive such high rate of responses.  The survey was strategically timed to ensure that the Membership Task Force had sufficient time to review results and provide appropriate recommendations to the Board prior to our strategic planning session.

What we learned:

• Members appreciate as part of their membership the Professional Development, access to resources, key updates in legal industry, social networking and TLOMA’s annual Conference
• The new webcast learning platform this year received very positive feedback and majority are very interested in future online programming
• Our members are very satisfied with their current member benefits
• Members are divided as to whether our membership criteria should be changed to include student, organizational, web-only or other memberships. Possibilities will be further explored in 2020
• The long-standing members that have been in volunteer positions value their experiences and expressed desire to continue to support TLOMA

Areas for improvement:

• We have significantly increased our social media efforts this year, but it is clear from the survey that we are still not capturing many of our members online
• TLOMA’s career board is widely used but we can do better in advertising it on social media
• Our out of town members are looking for events outside of Toronto
• More communication from the Board regarding its work and what is taking place at Board meetings would be appreciated by some of our members
• TLOMA’s Compensation Surveys are well received but we should look for further participation opportunities (note: it appears that not all of our members are aware that you can participate without purchasing the survey)
• Many of our members are looking for further online links to resources

Thank you again to everyone who participated. The Board of Directors will ensure that 2020 Strategic Priorities not only support the 2018-2020 Strategic Plan but will also directly address the expressed member needs from this survey.

Your Membership Task Force,
Dawn Millar, Leah Halpenny, Joanne Gibson-Davis and Rose Yanco

Do you want to gain new clients and keep the ones you have? Then you can’t overestimate the importance of respect. It’s a commodity which can get you “over the line” in a myriad of personal and business situations.

Of course it’s easy to talk about respect, but harder to build it. It can’t be forced, but there are several building blocks. One of the foundation stones is making people feel valued and important. In a professional context, one way this can be done is by making clients feel you’re listening to them, so if they’ve told you something which matters to them, you should remember it. You can also make clients feel important by showing you know them; where they work and what they work on are good places to start.

It’s also key to acknowledge feedback and realise when things haven’t gone as well as they could have. If for whatever reason you have delivered less than excellent service, it goes a long way if you make a conspicuous effort to make it up to clients.

When you demonstrate respect for the client it shows them that they’re a contact who matters to the law firm. Respect can be demonstrated in a number of ways and by different areas of the firm. For example, marketing can show respect by understanding the contact, what they're interested in, not sending irrelevant mailers or event invitations, and ensuring preferences and special requirements are remembered.

Meanwhile lawyers can show clients respect by setting time aside to meet with them when possible and by understanding their wider context when having conversations. While formally arranged meetings are key, the informal “I saw you were attending our seminar and thought I’d pop down” can be even more powerful.

There’s no question that showing a contact that they matter to the firm, when done well, engenders a positive attitude in a client or potential client. However, in reality, in the midst of busy lives, it’s easier said than done. This is why it’s wise to let client relationship technology do some of the work. The goal is simply to use technology in such a way that each contact feels respected by, and important to, the firm.

First principles

Information gathering should begin as soon as contact is made with the firm and of course there needs to be somewhere to store it. In most cases, of course, will be a client relationship management (CRM) system. Now I know I risk about 75 per cent of readers rolling their eyes and clicking away at this point, but whatever your experience to date – and for the most part it isn’t positive – to do any of this without a CRM is hard. The trick is to use automation to take the pain out of CRM and actually make it work.

The first barrier to making client relationship technology work is largely cultural. Despite years of effort, there’s still a lingering feeling that it’s important to keep what you know about a contact to yourself. Everyone needs to be convinced that it’s not “their” data - it’s the firm’s data. Once the “it’s my data” cultural hurdle is cleared, the even bigger hurdle of “it’s too much effort” looms.

What you really need is a CRM systems which shortcut the drudgery and luckily there are tools that can help with this. For instance automatic analysis of normal activity in Outlook can provide a pool of potential new contacts. Having an email address is one thing, expecting a user to add all the required information into a CRM system is quite another. That’s why your system needs to have automated processes which augment the information without requiring the user to do anything except confirm that the contact should be in the CRM.

Some contacts may not originate from a relationship. For example, if the contact fills in a form on the website to get some gated content, their record starts with marketing. Again, it’s important that the record gets into the database, so the form should flow directly into the CRM. Assuming you’re not using something like Hubspot with a built in CRM, tight integration between a website form and the CRM system is required.

Starting the journey

Once a contact has made its way into the CRM system, additional data can be gathered and this can prove incredibly useful when meeting with a contact to provide context and relevance. The types of information it’s possible to gather and record include web pages visited, content downloaded, emails received or opened, links clicked on, invites sent and events that were accepted, attended or not attended.

Typically firms struggle to make use of information at the point where it’s going to matter to the client. Yet if this type of information can be made available to individuals within the firm who are going to speak with the contact, the conversation can become much more productive. “Hello, what brings you here today?” becomes: “Hello, how did you enjoy our seminar on Single Tariff Pricing last week?”

This type of interaction, fostered by marketing level insight, helps with the overall perception of the individual talking to the contact. It allows them to show relevance, immediacy and gives the impression of an efficient firm. The delivery of the information also matters, however. Letting a contact know that they’ve been “stalked” through their digital interactions with the firm doesn’t give a good impression, using the data to inform a conversation does.

Deepening the relationship

Relationships then develop based on personal interaction. The first challenge is to make sure meetings take place. These may be formal or informal, but either way it’s important to be well briefed ahead of time. If a contact is showing increased interest in the firm, and they’ve attended firm events, adding this information into the CRM system is a good first step; particularly if this can be automatically presented to an individual prior to a meeting.

The firm should also proactively notify employees if one of their contacts is coming to an event. The employee can then go to the event with the specific intention of meeting that contact. This requires that the CRM system records relationship information and that there’s a way of identifying related contacts from an event acceptance list. From a contact’s perspective, someone who has taken the opportunity to find out that they are attending an event and made the effort to meet them shows respect.

For a more formal meeting, taking the time to research the relationship between the firm and a contact is essential. It’s particularly important to find out who else has had contact with them recently and what they learned, as this implies that the contact is important enough to come up in conversation between two people at the firm.

Again, the requirement here is that the system “knows” that a meeting is coming up and gathers all of the relevant data from all systems and presents them in an easy to consume digest. The digest would include information from CRM, marketing, PMS etc. as well as public news sources, automatically sending this to anyone from the firm who’s attending the meeting.

The importance of following up

Finally, once a piece of work is done, the temptation is to move on to the next client without as much as a backwards glance. This misses the opportunity to further strengthen a relationship. Gaining feedback is an important part of demonstrating that you care about the experience a client had, especially if something has not gone well. All clients should get the chance to give feedback no matter their position. If a client takes time to complete feedback, engage with them and deal with any issues. If remedial action is needed, promise little and deliver more to convert a detractor into a promoter.

The feedback mechanism needs to be triggered automatically by a key event in the system (e.g. matter closure, final bill etc.). The system needs to alert the relevant person that feedback’s been given and must provide the capability to let them record that it’s been dealt with and how. In cases where feedback has not been dealt with, an appropriate automatic escalation path needs to be followed.

In conclusion, a deep relationship between the firm and its contacts is essential to win and retain clients. Key to this is the client’s perception that the firm is one that respects them and cares about them as an individual. Properly applied and used, client relationship technology can prove very valuable in helping individuals in the firm to build and support that perception.

For more information on the subject join Tikit for a webinar on December 12th, 2019, click here.

Imagine you’ve just attended an event where you met several people who would be great additions to your professional network. People whose company you enjoyed and with whom you felt aligned. You reflect on how nice it would be to have an opportunity to continue the conversations with them. Now imagine feeling empowered and excited to follow up, instead of feeling awkward and uncertain about it.

We’ve all been there. The high that comes from making new connections – or reconnecting with people we’ve met before – and the confidence that’s part of the immediate after effect. But what do you do with that high? What’s next?

For most of us, while we have the intention to follow traditional networking wisdom and follow up with these new contacts immediately, we lack the know-how. And without a plan or a systematic approach in place, following up can feel awkward or self-serving. Time passes – even just overnight – the feeling dissipates, and in its place sits that self-doubt and sense of uncertainty about what to do next. And what do we do when something feels awkward? We simply don’t do it.

Note that we’re just talking about uncertainty – not certain rejection, or even implied rejection. Just a little nagging ‘what if.’ And that is enough to take us offline and put us into doubt.

One of the most unhelpful aspects of human neural processing is that whenever we have insufficient information to draw a clear conclusion about a situation, whenever a positive outcome isn’t all but assured, our brains automatically default to the worst-case scenario.

In a networking context, the outcome of that neural processing manifests in telling ourselves all kinds of terrible things about what might happen when we follow up that are not only unhelpful, they’re patently untrue. These include thoughts like:

• If I follow up I’ll look pushy.
• I don’t have anything of value to offer that would justify continuing our conversation.
• They don’t really want to hear from me.
• If they wanted to connect, they would have reached out to me.
• They were just being friendly or polite.

These thoughts don’t serve us, so we need tools to help us address the objections we have created in our minds, tools to take us past the awkwardness and pull us into empowerment and confidence in our ability to follow up effectively.

Poetically, the root of the problem lies in how our brains operate, and so does the root of the solution.

Your brain has a compulsion, a hard-wired need; (i) to act in accordance with what you say and (ii) to automate (i.e. make a habit of) any activity or process that you employ repeatedly.

You can leverage these hard-wired needs to make it easier for yourself to take any kind of action that you want to take, and to take that action consistently.  All it requires is that you:

a.  tell someone else that you are going to take the action. Your brain will latch onto that statement and make you feel compelled to act in accordance with your stated intention; and

b.  exercise a little bit of discipline to take the action that you want to take the same way, in response to the same catalyst. Once you have taken the action a few times, the habit-forming features of your brain will take over and make you feel compelled to take that same action any time that catalyst appears.

If you apply this to following up, it might look something like this.

Right now, as you read this, make the active decision that whenever you meet someone that you feel a connection to and alignment with, you will tell them expressly - while they are still standing in front of you - that you are enjoying your conversation with them and that, if it is OK with them, you will follow up in the next few days to continue it.

Make sure to put your own personality and voice around how you express the intention to follow up. For example, I will often say something about the fact that I make a point of collecting people that I find interesting or inspiring and since they are falling into that category for me, I will reach out to them through LinkedIn or by email in the next few days to set up a coffee.  But it doesn’t have to be that colourful as long as it’s authentic and feels comfortable to you. It can be as simple as saying you really enjoyed meeting them and want to continue talking, or as detailed as picking a specific aspect of the conversation that you would like to pick up again in some way.

And then, do that. And do it again and again, consciously and with intention, every time, until it feels strange not to do it. At that point, you will know that you have created the follow-up habit. Just like that.

Remember, the critical elements of creating the follow-up habit are:

• That you first consciously make the decision and commitment to cultivate a habit of following up consistently;
• That you commit to expressly telling the people you meet, while you’re in the conversation, that you are going to follow up with them, and;
• That you exercise a little courage and discipline by keeping the follow-up commitment in mind, stating your intention to follow up and then following through, until your brain automates the process.

You will be amazed how your brain will drive you to act in accordance with what you said you would do, and how quickly it will make a habit out of your follow-up process. Before you know it, the process will have become so much a part of who you are that it will feel stranger NOT to follow it than it does to just stick with the program, and follow-up. Your follow-up habit will have been created, and networking will never be the same.

At TLOMA, we provide education, professional development, mentorship, and support to our Membership. Through these initiatives, TLOMA members are offered both a professional and social network of professionals working in law firms of all sizes. To encourage members to grow their network at TLOMA, we would like to profile TLOMA members in each issue of TLOMA Today to give readers a snapshot of who we are within the legal industry.

Name: Mary DaRosa

How long have you been a member of TLOMA? Since 2005.

Where do you work? For the last five wonderful years at the Canadian office of Cozen O’Connor as their Regional Office Manager.

What do you enjoy most about working in the legal industry? Having worked in this field for over 25 years, I can say with confidence that the constantly changing environment is what I enjoy the most. Being challenged and always learning while forever growing is truly motivating!

Describe a career accomplishment that you are particularly proud of: Most recently, my ability to bring a “Canadian” voice to the table in a U.S. dominated platform.

Where was the last place you vacationed? Northern Germany last summer, my spouse’s birthplace – stepping into the North Sea was a first for me. I definitely will be travelling back soon to visit the southern half as well.

What is your favorite sports team? Toronto Maple Leafs – long-time suffering fan for life!

What are your favorite hobbies? Photography and, most recently, real estate (weekend fun – using my acquired interpersonal skills, always in search of real estate opportunities for myself and anyone who asks).

If you were able to start a blog, what would it be about? Anything about the ever-changing real estate market, followed by my thoughts about photography… maybe food, too!

Name one thing you can't live without? My iPhone (I’m sure I’m not alone with this answer ;) ).

If you could have a 60-minute conversation with anyone (fictional, famous, not famous, etc.) – who would you choose? The One And Only: Bill Gates!

If you are interested in participating in the Member Spotlight feature of TLOMA Today to share some of your experiences at TLOMA, please email editor@tloma.com for more information.