The Salvation Army Raffle is a staple of the CCH festive calendar, right up there with the annual Christmas party and the masses of tinsel festooning team areas.

“It’s a great tradition here at CCH” says long-time organiser of the raffle, Graham Clayton. “It’s been going at least 10 years”, he guesses, scratching his head. It’s probably been going a bit more than that.

Community spirit is at the heart of this event, with employees from all areas of the company teaming up to donate prizes, sell tickets and scrunch up the ticket stubs for the draw itself. CEO Dave Lampert is a passionate supporter of the raffle and can be seen selling tickets every year at the staff Christmas party.

Prize lists are studied carefully – this year’s winner had the difficult choice of deciding between an Apple Iphone and an Amazon Kindle, along with a dozen other fabulous prizes.

Graham says the real reason for the event is not the prizes, but the donation of all proceeds to the Salvation Army.

In a typical week, The Salvation Army in Australia provides people in need with an estimated 100,000 meals. It provides beds to 5,000 homeless people, rehabilitation to 500 addicted and refuge to 400 victims of domestic abuse. It also provides counselling to several thousand people.

Each year the CCH Salvo Raffle raises thousands of dollars, and the company matches the amount raised by the staff. Graham and the CCH team are proud to announce that this year’s donation to the Salvation Army will total approximately $5660.

We recently held our second Innovation Cafe at CCH.  Once every six weeks we conduct a coffee, croissants and creativity session in the CCH Australia office in Sydney. All staff are invited and those who are interested come along to participate in a creativity-boosting workshop or to hear an external speaker. Last week we invited along Dr Jeffrey Tobias, the Managing Director of The Strategy Group, to talk to us about Open Innovation. Dr Tobias has extensive experience in innovation, including being global lead for innovation in the Innovations team in the Internet Business Solutions Group in Cisco Systems.

Using examples from a range of companies and industries – including Cisco, Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi – Dr Tobias explained that Open Innovation involved creating an innovation ecosystem that extends beyond the four walls of your office to include customers, suppliers and partners. Effective innovation doesn’t mean that you have an isolated R&D or engineering team coming up with new ideas in perfect isolation. Instead, companies need to engage with all internal and external stakeholders to maximise idea generation and execution.

After hearing about Open Innovation, we then spent some time with Dr Tobias discussing how we could use Open Innovation concepts to improve innovation at CCH. Our program had already started opening up innovation to all staff at CCH but could we do more to include suppliers and customers? What would be an effective way to do this? Dr Tobias gave us plenty of food for thought and it was a very worthwhile morning.

And as luck would have it, two days later we met with representatives of Lonely Planet, the travel publisher, who it turned out were implementing their own Open Innovation model. We had a great discussion with them about the challenges both our companies face in today’s dynamic publishing market, and talked about ideas and strategies for maximising our respective opportunities.

Next step: engage in Open Innovation with our customers. We have plenty of ideas of how we can do this so I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Accurate. Authoritative. Relevant. At CCH, we say we are but how do we know if this is really true?

Simple - ask our customers!

Since 2006, CCH has surveyed customers across the Asia Pacific region in order to find out what they think about our products and associated services, as well as their perception of CCH in general. By regularly surveying our customers, we aim to develop and deliver high quality products and services which best meet our customers’ needs.

Customers are invited via email to complete an online survey where they firstly rate a chosen CCH product type on a range of factors, including accuracy, ease of use and relevance. They are then asked to rate this product type on overall quality, price and value for money.

Next, our customers are asked about how likely they would be to continue to use our products, recommend them to a colleague and how much they trust and rely on the products. A customer’s likelihood to recommend a product to a colleague tells us two key things: how loyal they are to us as a brand and how enthusiastic they are about our products and services. For example, a customer who said they would be “highly likely” to refer a CCH product to a colleague would also be likely to continue to buy our products for themselves. Understanding these responses ultimately allows us to see our products and services as our customers see them – an extremely valuable insight indeed. 

The results from this survey are shared through our Executive Group and management teams who use this information to better understand what customers think of us. Over the past three years of conducting this survey, we have been able to look at trends in customers’ opinions and use these to identify areas where we can plan strategies to improve in the future.

To thank our customers for taking the time to complete this survey, we donate $5.00 to a charity of their choice. This year, our customers could choose to make a donation to World Vision, Médecins Sans Frontières or the World Wildlife Fund. We raised over $3,300.00 for these three charities – so a big thank you is in order to all of our customers who took the time to complete this survey!

Exactly one year has passed since the commencement of new law allowing separating de facto couples the same legal stance and processes through the federal family court system as married couples. Judicial officers have been grappling with interpreting new legislation, practitioners have been testing and trying different ways of drafting orders and the CCH family law editors (Lydia Lucs and I) have been writing and re-writing and re-writing again our family law suite of loose leafs and books to keep you up-to-date.

Being a family law nerd (former Family Lawyer and Appellate Associate of the Family Court of Australia) means keeping abreast of all the rapidly moving changes in family law and taking (almost personal) ownership of the family law content you see on Intelliconnect and in your black and gold CCH binders.

CCH put the latest legislation book out in the middle of the year. It contains one of the biggest facelifts to the Family Law Act 1975 in recent times. As such, the Rules, Regs and Directions have also changed dramatically. The Family Court has issued a host of new forms, removed the Case Management Directions and word is that they might also swallow up the Federal Magistrates Court of Australia which will create yet another round of major procedural changes in family law.

There is one thing we are still waiting on – and that is the publication of the very first de facto financial matter judgment from the Family Court. We at CCH would particularly like to pull apart and analyse the first meaty de facto financial matter judgment from the Full Court of the Family Court of Australia. The wait continues…

Meanwhile, I am kept extremely busy polishing up and creating content in this ever-changing area of law. Lydia Lucs and I are working super hard to keep CCH as the family law professionals’ first choice. I am also getting out there with members of the sales team and client development to get a closer look at your practice and the way you use our content, the Court and how it plans on tackling new ground and exploring ways to make your job easier.