A few months ago, an email accidentally went out to all our subscribers about an event that was only open to our Practice Accelerator members. Some people who learned about the event by accident wanted in but couldn’t join. Our assistant felt terrible and offered to email everyone again, owning the error and apologizing. I said no. An apology went out, but it went from me. Why? Two reasons.

First, because we’re a team and we don’t throw individual team members under the bus.

And second, because the mistake resulted from a process problem, not a person problem.

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Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

For the last 2 weeks, we’ve been looking at root causes of inefficiency in your law practice. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that root causes tend to fall into these 6 broad categories:

1. Methods
2. Environment
3. Technology
4. Knowledge Management
5. Clients
6.  People

Check out our tip on Methods, Environment, and Technology and last week’s on knowledge management if you missed them.

Last on the list are root causes that relate to clients and other people (that includes your team, opposing counsel, judges, etc.). I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Wait! A lot of my problems ARE because other people are making mistakes or they’re procrastinating…”

Sometimes you’re right. Clients may procrastinate. Despite all your best efforts, they may give you the wrong information (or even lie). Another firm may churn a document or overwhelm you in paper. A team member may really be uninterested or careless. That’s why Clients and People are on the list of potential root causes. But they’re at the bottom of the list because when it comes to improving efficiency, it’s usually all about the process, not the people.

People are very good at adapting to broken processes. When something doesn’t work, or we don’t understand exactly how to do something, we just create a workaround. And then we continue to use that workaround instead of solving the underlying problem. But that workaround is like the band-aid we’ve talked about before. It fixes the symptom that we see or feel, not the root cause. That root cause continues to fester until it can no longer be ignored and causes even bigger issues.

This week’s tip is to remember that while clients and other people MAY be the root cause of a problem you’re experiencing, most often, there’s something else going on.

Perhaps your clients put off filling out your intake form because it’s too long, or because they don’t understand some of the questions, or because it’s not a fillable PDF and they don’t have a printer. Maybe your team member is making a mistake at one point in the process because he hasn’t been trained or the precedent hasn’t been updated.

Your action item is this: the next time you consider blaming a person for an error or a delay, look deeper. Ask yourself WHY the error or delay occurred. It may indeed be the person…but most often, it’s not.

That wraps up our series on the 6 most common root causes of process problems in your law practice. Just to recap, they are:

1. Methods
2. Environment
3. Technology
4. Knowledge Management
5. Clients
6. People

Join us next week for more tips on building a productive, profitable law practice! And if you want to achieve your goals faster, join our Practice Accelerator coaching program. You’ll get regular coaching from us and a panel of industry experts, plus access to a year’s worth of courses, guides, templates, and other resources and a community of like-minded people. And we’ll be there every step of the way in 1:1 coaching and accountability calls to make sure you succeed. Join today – we have a few open spots left.