Earlier this year, QL Incorporated and SAI Global, with support from the NSW Law Society and the College of Law launched “LAW9000”, as a replacement for QL Best Practice scheme.  This article explains what LAW9000 is, and what it means to legal practice management.

LAW9000 is an Australian legal practice management benchmark built on the ISO9001 international standard.  ISO is a Geneva-based organisation whose members are national standards bodies (including Standards Australia, the British Standards Institution, and over a hundred others).  It publishes standards which are used for everything from health records to port security.  But its most far-reaching and widely-applied standard is ISO9001.

ISO9001 was first published in the late ‘80s, and was based on an earlier British standard.  It specifies the level to which an organisation controls its business processes.  In a manufacturing firm, these will include raw materials and parts purchasing, manufacturing and delivery.  In a bank they will include teller operations and security audits.  The processes will be different in every case: but ISO9001 does not care what they are.  It cares only about the level to which they are controlled.

The basis of this control is (usually) a set of written policies and procedures, which set out exactly what managers and staff need to do to run the organisation effectively.  When an organisation feels that they have these sufficiently developed to meet the ISO9001 standard, they can then purchase the services of an accredited firm to come and audit the organisation, and - if the audit finds no major problems - issue a certificate which shows to the world at large that the organisation complies with ISO9001.  This gives the organisation the right to claim that it is “Certified to ISO9001 by XYZ Audits”.  There are over a dozen such firms operating in Australia.

The general term for this process is ‘quality assurance’; the certification process ‘assures’ the organisation’s customers that the organisation has a ‘quality system’ in place which conforms to the ISO9001 standard.

Many thousands of Australian organisations (including, incidentally, Realisation) have gone through this process.  But why do they do it?

There are two reasons, one with small short-term benefits and the other with major long-term benefits.

In the short term, many customers (and in particular, government) require tenderers to either have ISO9001 or be working towards it.  Some insurers will give a discount where the insured organisation has certification.  Some organisations hope to use their ISO9001 certification as a ‘badge of honour’ to show their owners, customers and competitors that they are truly committed to quality.

In the long term, costs and risks are what drive all organisations.  And both of these can be reduced through the intelligent implementation of ISO9001.   Unfortunately, a focus on the short term (“let’s just get the stuff in place to pass the audit”) tends to mitigate against the long-term benefits, and many organisations drop their certification after a few years because it doesn’t deliver benefits.

The requirements of ISO9001 are very carefully constructed so that they can be applied to any organisation (including government organisations) in any field of endeavour.  LAW9000 takes this base set of practices, and adds some very specific requirements for legal practices.

For example, a typical ISO9001 requirement is that an organisation communicates product information, customer feedback/complaint mechanisms, and enquiry mechanisms to its customers.  LAW9000 adds to this specific requirements on costs and disbursements, undertakings and retainers.

As with ISO9001, law firms can apply to be certified to LAW9000 by an external audit organisation.

Implementing LAW9000 (or ISO9001) is not something to undertake lightly.  A typical ‘standing start’ implementation will take 6 to 12 months, and should involve every single individual in the organisation in some way.  The College of Law runs a training course (partly using material developed by us) for interested practices.

Organisations which have been through an ISO9001 implementation come in two kinds: those who implemented the standard in a cynical and superficial way and did not gain long-term benefits, and those that took the whole process to heart, got everyone involved, and will reap the cost and risk benefits for years or decades to come.