Now 18 months into her tenure as CEO of Minster Law, Shirley Woolham (pictured) is keeping her sights fixed firmly on the future.
Recent news of Minster Law’s £1.9 million profit for 2018 indicates the success of an efficiency strategy adopted by the business – one that Woolham credits to a dual approach of digital transformation and a sizeable reduction in administration costs. Here, Woolham discusses the impact of this strategy on the organisation, and how simply achieving stability is not enough in an environment where the needs of Minster Law’s broking and insurance partners are changing so rapidly.
Regulatory changes
As a legal services provider specialising in personal injury, Minster Law is highly impacted by regulatory changes in the highly volatile public sector.
“The significant change was LASPO (Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012),” said Woolham, “which changed the business model and the way in which law firms earned their money.”
The most significant impact of this was the adjustment from law firms being paid for every hour worked on a case to a fixed fee for a significant proportion of their work.
“That in itself drove much more of an efficiency mindset,” said Woolham.
With efficiency highlighted as its end goal, Minster Law worked ceaselessly at restructuring its business and changing its operational model. A key element of this strategy involved the digital transformation of the business.
This transformation saw investment in technology to simplify essential processes, thus eliminating costly time-wasting. It also involved taking control of fixed costs. The legal sector, Woolham said, particularly in the area of personal injury, has traditionally made a lot of money and it is easy for businesses to lose perspective.
“Minster was never in that camp,” she said, “but it still meant that we didn’t have an opportunity to really look at our fixed costs.”
When the area of fixed costs was examined, Woolham outlined how opportunities for savings ranged from simple changes such as using email instead of post, to more fundamental changes such as property consolidation.
That move saw the amalgamation of three properties into a single headquarters, thus cutting back on multiple leases and rates. The recently reported profit of Minster Law is heavily supported by a 21% reduction in administration costs, driven largely by this property estate adjustment.
Redesigning the organisation
Organisational redesign was another major component of this shift, Woolham stated, and is in part attributable to the technological transformation of the business, as technology and automation has been successful in eradicating quality issues in a wide range of processes.
“We’ve shut down and identified any duplication in roles,” she said.
This reduction in the colleague base of Minster Law has led to the removal of approximately 90 positions within the organisation, largely in non-customer facing roles.
Woolham is aware of the impact on people of resizing and restructuring an organisation and of the industry-wide connotations of technological automation impacting the workplace.
“Many organisations out there envisage a future where there are machines doing everything and we all don’t work, and I’m sure in some sectors there is some truth to that,” she said. “In the legal sector, you can’t underestimate how the human touch is still essential, so we still imagine a business model where you have technology and people working together.”
Woolham detailed how technology will inevitably mean different jobs for people and highlighted how the organisational redesign of Minster Law has enabled the business to invest more in their customer-facing staff, and to focus on aligning the right skill with the right work.
Automation, she said, takes out more of the manual tasks but should mean more meaningful work for those who are hired.
“It is beholden on any of us to continually resize our organisation,” said Woolham. “When you look at our accounts…I am really proud of the fact we have reduced the size of our business.”
Lessons for brokers
Woolham’s assertion that the human touch is still essential in the insurance industry is, she said, particularly relevant to broking firms. Brokers, said Woolham, need not be wary of the digitalisation of the industry if they focus on what she identified as the key value of their offering.
This, she said, is “[their ability] to sit by their customers when they’ve had a claim and provide a service through what is a pretty complex process.”
This personal relationship, Woolham said, is the key value of a broker and, if this is emphasised, brokers should have little to fear from the digital reforms of the insurance industry.
Her key advice for a broker looking to undergo a digital transformation is to focus on fixing customer problems and not your own. Successful digital transformation occurs when your mindset is customer-driven, she said, and not driven by concerns about internal problems. Therefore, all such developments should be carried out with the customer experience in mind.
While Woolham stated that it would be wrong to say that the efficiency journey of Minster Law had been completely precipitated by legal reforms, this journey has nevertheless been an extremely timely undertaking. With the looming Civil Liability Act likely to further highlight the need for efficiency in the legal services sector, Minster Law is well prepared.
And, as Woolham summarised, this business is not just prepared but has a restructured form, cash in the bank, a strong balance sheet and an excellent working capital position.
“We think this puts us,” Woolham said, “in a really strong position to give our broking and insurance partners more than just a safe harbour. Safe harbour is a boring outcome.”
