We received a very pleasant surprise this week when we were notified that our founder Ian Walker had been shortlisted in the category of Practice Manager of the Year
Managing Partner of the year in the prestigious Law Society Excellence Awards.
The Law Society Excellence Awards are designed to celebrate the hard work and inspirational achievements of solicitors, legal teams and law firms of all sizes across England and Wales.
The Awards have been run for for the past 12 years.
These are national awards – organised by the Law Society (of England and Wales).
Essentially the aim is to promote the legal profession. Lawyers are often portrayed negatively in the media, but in reality they play a very important role in society, in assisting clients to resolve personal/family problems (e.g. family law), sort out their personal affairs (moving house, making and administering wills et cetera (private client law), helping businesses interact with each other, resolving personal injury disputes and other forms of litigation, protecting human rights, ensuring that those accused of crimes have a fair trial, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The specification for the Practice Manager of the Year award is as follows:
Law firms often operate in a highly competitive and volatile business environment, which creates risks but also huge opportunities to thrive and develop. We are looking for individuals who help their firm to:
Law Society president Simon Davis said:
“There are more than 140,000 solicitors in England and Wales – to be shortlisted for an Excellence Award is to be recognised as among the very best of the profession.
“The firms and solicitors shortlisted should be commended for going above and beyond to support their clients, often navigating tricky and sometimes contentious areas of the law.
“With the justice system so under strain, we should take this opportunity to celebrate the incredible work solicitors do day-in and day-out – and to recognise the immense contribution they make to our society.”
Winners are announced at the Law Society’s Excellence Awards ceremony in London on 23 October 2019.
As a practice, we have now been in existence for 6 1/2 years. For the first two years the practice was simply Ian a computer.
We have since grown into a practice that consists of eight solicitors and legal executives (nine if we include Briony who is a trainee legal executive) and a total headcount of 16. The practice has more than doubled in size in the last 18 months.
In the last 18 months we have also:
There are also other improvements that we have adopted which we do not have the space to deal with here.
Whilst the shortlisting of Ian Walker in the Law Society Excellence Awards category of Practice Manager of the Year is an individual category, we are of the view (quite rightly), that this is a nomination for our whole team.
Continuous improvement/development and positive change requires working together as a team and everyone sharing in the vision of achieving continuous improvement. No one has all the ideas. A good team will always outperform a group of individuals.
Our shortlisting is therefore in our mind a shortlisting for us all.
If you scroll through LinkedIn, there seem to be endless awards and endless awards for similar things.
These are marketing opportunities. Many firms will employ PR consultants to make sure that they are entered into every award competition and directory going.
As a practice, our priority is, and will always be to prioritise meeting the needs of our clients. As a consequence we are busy because we are working hard to meet their demands and the demands for our services.
This is only the second time we have entered an awards in the existence of our practice. We simply haven’t had the time or the inclination to enter the multitude of other awards.
We were therefore very surprised and flattered when we receive the shortlisting. We didn’t employ anyone to nominate us. Obviously not every practice/practice manager for a law firm in England and Wales will have entered, but because these are national awards, we anticipate that the number of entries will have been much higher than more localised awards.
In our view, within the legal profession, these are the most prestigious awards. It is very nice to have been shortlisted (Ian is one of four on the shortlist), if by chance we did win, that would be very nice, but ultimately this changes nothing about how we want to run our practice and our never-ending striving for improvement.
It’s very nice to have some recognition for all our hard work – but the best recognition is always unhappy clients, for whom we have achieved good outcomes!
I am a Solicitor who has specialised in Child Law since qualification in 1992. I was admitted to the Law Society Children Panel in 1996. My practice has one of the most experienced teams of child law specialist solicitors in the South West.
Over the years I have represented many parents and grandparents in Court Proceedings brought by Social Services. The Court now expects most cases to be finished in 26 weeks or less. This means that the window of time for parents and grandparents to make the right choices so that they will succeed is very small. Good decisions need to be made at the very start of a case.
No Solicitor who represents parents and grandparents in Social Services cases can claim that they have succeeded in keeping children with their parents/grandparents in every case. Sometimes the problems are simply too great to overcome in the timescale of the court process. Sometimes clients are unable to follow our advice or panic and switch off.
We always try hard to make sure that our clients give themselves the best chance of achieving the best realistic outcome and that their case is clearly heard by the Court. Over the years we have helped clients to achieve some excellent outcomes.
Being taken to Court always involves the risk of a bad outcome. This is because decisions are made by someone else. The best way to succeed is always to avoid ending up in Court in the first place.
There is no substitute to seeking specific advice from an experienced Solicitor. The following is a good place to start:
Be Honest. This might sometimes seem like a bad idea. Surely it’s better to pretend things were not as bad as they were? No. If you are open; show you understand where things have gone wrong, you are well on the way to putting things right. If you lie, chances are you will be found out. You will then be someone who cannot be trusted, and potentially in serious trouble. Often the lie is worse than what is being lied about.
Don’t be horrible or rude to Social Services. They are doing their job. They are people too. They are motivated to protect children. All you are doing is making things harder for yourself.
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We invest a lot of ourselves in our personal relationships. The break-up of a marriage or long term relationship is likely to unleash a lot of negative emotions.
As an experienced family law solicitor I know in this emotional maelstrom there is a serious risk that one or both of the couple may make poor decisions which they might later regret.
Before taking any steps on behalf of a client, I would always wish them to be clear that they are certain in any decision to separate. “The grass is not always greener”. On the other hand some relationships do reach the point where they are broken beyond repair and are even harmful. (more…)
As an experienced family law solicitor I know that the Christmas period is not a happy time for everyone. In the run-up to Christmas we deal with a surge in cases between separated parents who are in dispute about where their children are to spend time.
Some families manage to hold things together over Christmas but the cracks within the relationship are such that as the New Year arrives one will decide that they cannot face another year together.
This explains why Solicitors see an increase in new instructions each January.
Separating in a planned way represents an opportunity to avoid hasty decisions and bad choices.
Before taking any steps on behalf of a client, I would always wish them to be clear that they are certain in any decision to separate. “The grass is not always greener”. On the other hand (more…)
