The New Year will be underway soon and a good question to ask yourself is “What progress have I made with my risk management agenda?”

You do have a risk management agenda don’t you; – things you want to do, improve, or achieve in the area of managing your professional or business risks? Well, here are a few thoughts about why you need a risk agenda how to decide what should be on it.

Importance of having an ‘Agenda’- it’s not a dirty word

There are so many risks in practice and in business that you can’t tackle everything at once. Consequently you need a sense of purpose and priority about your risk management activities

Whether you are managing just yourself, your team or your whole firm, the purpose of ‘managing’ is to achieve results; the right results, results that matter to you.

As a practice manager or managing practitioner you have a choice. You can do nothing, leave the outcomes to chance and be satisfied - or not, with the results you get. Or you can take action aimed at improving the odds of getting the results you want.

Even if you were completely free of claims, complaints, rising insurance premiums, bad debts or other practice ‘difficulties’, what are you going to do to make sure that next year goes the same way and there is no deterioration in your position or track record?

Achieving an attractive and competitive risk profile is real work and not an optional extra. Zero risk is not the goalⁱ. Managing risk is about making meaningful efforts to reduce exposure to a variety of threats and uncertainties that can have adverse impacts on clients, staff, insurers and other stakeholders of your practice, including you.

Next year do you trust to luck that existing people and processes will be enough to protect the practice? Or are you actively working your way through a ‘risk to do list’? This should give you some confidence that at the end of the year when you look back you be able to say “I managed the risks as well if not better than last year”.

Remember there is nothing wrong with having an agenda! In fact, having an agenda has been identified in various studies as being a characteristic of high performing managers and was popularised in Stephen Covey’s work “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.

What gives having an agenda a bad name is the ‘hidden’ agenda or an agenda that is unwieldy, unfocussed or unpursued. The most effective agenda is one which has the support of the people most affected about a manageable number of things that have the potential to make a real difference and which actually get done.

How to set a risk agenda – what would you do differently if you were uninsured?

People often say they want to do more to manage their risks but given the myriad of possible risks they don’t know where to start or what should be on their agenda. The right answer is; ‘start anywhere but just start’.

While there are good and bad agendas there is no such thing as a perfect agenda or place to start. In particular, you don’t need to start with a comprehensive risk analysis, valuable as such an exercise may be if you are ready for itⁱⁱ.

You can start with something you know to be a concern, for example because it has caused you grief in the recent past (e.g. unhappy client, unpaid bill, professional indemnity notification, computer crash). Have you done enough or are you doing enough to make sure these incidents don’t happen again?

While every practice has its own unique risk profile and risk factors, there are also some common patterns of risk. So if you don’t want to develop your own risk agenda then use someone else’s. For example, check out the website of your professional indemnity insurer for issues that might be relevant to your practice.

What is important is to overcome initial inertia and do a couple of easy things to get the ball rolling. Once underway then refining or even redirecting the agenda will be easier.

Here are a few more ideas to help you narrow down the areas of risk you are willing to start doing something about:

Is your main current focus professional liability risk or business risk (i.e. risks of lawyers hurting clients or risks of clients or others hurting you)?

1. In the professional liability area do you think your biggest area of exposure is
   1. poor client and matter selection and engagement management
   2. poor technical quality of legal work and matter management
   3. poor client communication
   4. simple oversights that have big consequences (e.g. missed time limits, errors in documents, misdirected emails)
   5. poor record keeping
2. In the business risk area do you think your biggest area of exposure is
   1. financial loss
   2. lack of preparedness for business interruption, fraud, security breaches
   3. non-compliance with business or professional regulation?
3. Are you looking back, looking ahead or looking under your nose to identify weaknesses in your defences and opportunities to strengthen your approach? (i.e. what lessons can be learned from past incidents, non-compliance or losses? What new risks or risk trends could be looming? Since today’s work will give rise to tomorrow’s problems, what are the highest risk current matters or current operations in the practice today and what can you do to intervene to reduce the risk?)
4. What would you do differently if you were uninsured? To what extent consciously or unconsciously, are your risk and quality assurance practices influenced by assumptions about the continuing availability and affordability of insurance?

Hopefully these questions have enabled you to identify one or two ‘hot spots’ that can be hosed down immediately and also to get a better idea of a process for setting a risk agenda.

But a final reminder, while it is important to have an agenda, the agenda is only a means to an end not an end itself. The end is better protection of you, your practice and your clients and that takes action not good intentions. So what are you waiting for?

Safe Practice!