Are law firm inefficiencies good for business?

By on March 27, 2011

The attorneys are always busy, hopefully, working on that they do best, practicing law and rack-up billable hours. The attorneys rely on their administrative staff to run the operations.

There is no similar situation in corporate America, the people doing a great deal of the work and billing the most, are also the owners, the partners. There isn’t just one “CEO”, there are dozens, they form committees, many times made up with members who just love to over-analyze and debate. So how does this effect inefficiencies, it promotes it on the operations side of the business.

If a corporate CEO analyzed a mid-large size law firm roughly the same size as his business, he’d be amazed at the operational inefficiencies. Corporate CEO’s, in general, have discovered that operational efficiency quickly equate to bottom line profits. The CEO passes down to his vice-presidents and managers the requirement to be low cost producers. The CEO doesn’t need to be concerned about a few dozen other owners when it comes to lowering the cost of operations.

Law firm managers might believe they have the responsibility and authority to streamline operations and reduce the internal costs of processing. However, just try and reduce the manual paper process and you’ll have a partner up in arms over something. Process improvement is very important, so long as no one is inconvenienced.

Law firms are always looking for a competitive edge in pursuing client engagements. Clients are looking for law firms that they believe are efficiently run.

So the moral of the story is: don’t let your corporate CEO client spend a lot of time with your operational staff, inefficiencies will not be good for business.

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Categories: Best Practices, Productivity, Technology, The Legal Market

“The Money Machine and Human Nature – What a trade show draw reveals about adoption theories”

By on March 16, 2011

For some time, we have used a “money machine” as a trade show booth draw and incentive.  It’s a little “used car sales-ish,” but it really works in getting people to the booth, and it draws a crowd. Plus, it ties into our marketing campaign of “See More Green”.  The booth is a rectangular cube with plexi-glass sides and a fan on the outside. The fan, obviously, blows the money around while the player stands inside trying to collect as much cash as they can in 15 seconds. Once the timer goes off, the money stops blowing and the player has to stop collecting.

 I have been observing this game for a few years now, and, by far, the most interesting thing to watch is “the approach”. The most timid people have surprised me by going hog-wild in the machine once locked in – shoving money down their shirts (against the rules, by the way) and grabbing at the green like a victim being attacked by killer bees. Then there are those who take a more strategic approach and come up with a strategy ahead of time, e.g., let the money get at arm’s height and grab it. They also watch others and judge what they are doing wrong/right. There are those who have a fair amount of trepidation about getting in an air blowing money trap, and then there are those who beg to get in. A lot of these observations can be applied to many people’s approaches to purchasing new software/hardware/technology in general. It reminds me of the “Adopter Curve” that has been around for some time now (applied in a variety of arenas):

  1. The early adopter/innovators, aka killer bee victim: This purchaser buys something new because, really, they have to be on the cutting edge, and it is cool. It is more of an emotional purchase. They also have a problem that may be wasting a lot of time/resources and want to solve it so they make a quick buy. Sometimes this may lead to a non-fiscally responsible purchase and sometimes it works for them.
  2. The conservative/early majority/late adopters, aka studier:  These people purchase something new because it solves the problem at a reasonable cost. They study all of the ins and outs of the product and then, when the time is right, make an informed purchase based on facts.
  3. The late adopter/laggards, aka anti-machine: Usually the late adopter waits for the deal or they take the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. While they may have the same problems as others, they can live with it.

It is always a little difficult for me to understand why people have any reservations about winning free money. I guess they think there must be a catch or they just don’t want to put themselves in the spotlight. As the old adage goes, “it takes money to make money”. A lot of technology companies promise to make firms money if they purchase their wares. A lot of times they are right. Sometimes it’s just a waste of resources and other times it really will make your firm money. Make sure to do your research and you may inherit your own money machine.

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Categories: Going Green, Legal Marketing, The Legal Market

Corporate America …. want to lower legal costs, here’s how! (Part 2)

By on February 27, 2011

You hear it everywhere; companies want to lower legal costs. In my previous blog post I discussed the need to adopt standards. Law firms have a “hidden” high cost of e-billing because there is no single e-bill standard, there are hundreds or thousands of “standards”.

 Firms are delaying their billings, proof-reading every entry on every bill, submitting bills that get rejected or short-paid, and finally writing off a great deal of money. Corporations need to understand that all this is reflected back into law firm rates.

 Here is a simple way to fix this problem and lower costs to both firms and corporations:

  1. Quickly accept the current LEDES XML e-bill standard. The XML technology allows for tremendous flexibility for dealing with custom fields. Corporations should force the middle tier processors to accept this single standard. There won’t be a standard until the very top recipients of e-bills, primarily insurance carriers make the switch.
  2.  Work with Time and Billing vendors (or LEDES) to provide specific billing guidelines in an electronic format that the Time and Billing system can import and use for Bill Scrubbing. Law firms want to submit bills that fit your guidelines, but like e-bill formats, there are few standards. Time and billing vendors can provide tools to “scrub” bills if they had your guidelines in something better than just written documents.

 So, corporate America, do you want to collaborate to use technology to reduce costs for everyone involved?

 Your feedback is welcome.

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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Law firm billing, Productivity, Technology, The Legal Market

“iPad and the Apple – The Pros and Cons of Mac-king it”

By on February 8, 2011

The post holiday doldrums have set in, the credit card bills have arrived, and techno-geeks everywhere are enjoying their new toys. Apple wins again; this time with the iPad, the iPod Touch and the iPhone 4. I will admit, I am a PC and proud of it. But, the uproar Apple products cause sparks my interest. Although I think PCs are superior to Macs, especially in a law firm environment, I would like to be educated on this opinion.  So here’s my take on the main differences between Macs vs. PCs and how viable is this product in the law firm environment.

  1. The first thing that comes to mind is that Mac just looks slicker.
    There’s a reason the Mac commercial features a cool beatnik type guy and PC is a buttoned up nerd. Macs are cool. They have a bright screen, with the backlit Apple symbol and especially appealing keyboard buttons. Apples are well designed computers and PC companies have spent a lot of time trying to catch up, but never do. Advantage Mac.
  2. Macs allow the user to run two operating systems. PCs do not.
    The Mac user is able to run both OS X and Windows. PC’s do not enable users to run OS X (as far as I know). OS X is the operating system in a Mac. It is user friendly and efficient, Windows 7 tries to close the gap, but never will.  A user can choose to use Windows as the operating system on a Mac. Advantage Mac.
  3. PCs are compatible with more software than Macs.
    When it comes to legal software or any other kind of software for that matter, as of now, PCs are the way to go. Many software companies are not Mac-centric. Most software is designed to run on a Microsoft operating system and although Macs have plenty of applications that work with them, outside software vendors can’t “break through”. This could be especially difficult in the legal arena where time and billing software, and document management are key enterprise products running in the firm. Advantage PC.
  4. Price tag – PCs are generally cheaper and more customizable.
    PCs can be built from the ground up (I’ve done it before). The same amount of RAM, hard drive capacity and processor can be purchased for a lot less in a PC than in a Mac. PCs are also much easier to customize. Individual components can be added very easily and RAM, etc. can be added on for little cost. Advantage PC.
  5.  Macs retain their value.
    Whereas used PCs are a dime a dozen, Macs are well made and tend to retain their value better than PCs. They tend to be easier to sell; both the parts and the unit themselves. Advantage Mac.
  6. Macs are user friendly.
    As aforementioned, I am a hard core PC user. I’ve heard, though, that Macs are very easy to use. They are intuitive and well made. I always think of Macs as better suited for creative types, but it seems they have become more mainstream and tweaked design and other interfaces for the computer “layperson”. Advantage Mac.
  7. It is easier to upgrade with a PC.
    Honestly, more businesses use PCs. They are cheaper and easier to upgrade and there are more choices. Mac users are limited to the Apple product line and often upgrades are expensive and cumbersome. Advantage PC.

I guess when it’s all said and done, Macs vs. PCs is a matter of choice. It does seem that most firms, and businesses in general, are using PCs and, to me, for good reason. They are cheaper, more customizable and run more software applications. If you have a different opinion, I’d love to hear it. As more and more applications move to the cloud, the desktop may not be as important as in the past.

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Categories: Legal Marketing, Productivity, Technology, The Legal Market

Finally, Solving the Excel Data Insertion Problem

By on January 23, 2011

This is my fourth blog posting examining the problem facing law firm CFO’s who need to get critical data from their financial management system into Excel spreadsheets

 1st posting – Challenges faced by CFO’s

2nd  posting – Current choices and new requirements

3rd posting - Expose queries

We have already examined the challenges, looked at the requirements, and discussed the concept of using SQL queries to make it simple for CFO’s to get financial system data into simple or complex spreadsheets.

 Microsoft .Net technology allows a vendor to build an Excel Add-in utilizing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to expose queries that already exist thus allowing users to retrieve data with a simple point and click.

 Let’s look at a full set of capabilities users will have:

  1. Easily insert data into either a new or existing spreadsheet, by clicking on a description of the data from a pop-up Excel Task Pane.
  2. Allow the user to insert different data pieces in multiple sections of a single or multi-workbook spreadsheet.
  3. Validate the users level of security to access the data requested.
  4. Upon saving the spreadsheet containing the links to the data, save the links and all other formatting.
  5. Allow the user to specify what data will be automatically refreshed from the database when the Excel spreadsheet is opened and what data can be refreshed by manual selection.
  6. All the Excel spreadsheet to me moved around the firm’s network while always knowing how to reconnect to the databases involved.
  7. Allow users to store their personally used queries in a separate area for both convenience and security.
  8. Allow for the ability for anyone to add new or custom queries without programmer involvement. For example, copy and paste from an email sent by a vendor.
  9. Provide all of the above capabilities for PivotTables, charts and graphs without necessarily building spreadsheets firms.

 By providing the above capabilities CFO’s and other law firm members will be able to finally analyze information in the way they choose. Getting critical data into Excel and keeping it fresh will never be a problem again.



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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Technology

Scrub Bills to Substantially Reduce Write-off’s

By on January 2, 2011

Corporate clients have imposed daunting billing requirements on their outside law firms. These clients spend hundreds of millions on legal expenses and if they can reduce these expenses by 2-3% consistently, they save a ton of money. These clients have learned that complex billing requirements force law firms to write-off millions instead of dealing with all the appeals, delays and frustrations.

 Firms already spend a great deal of time (read cost) proof reading bills by billing specialists before sending them out. This manual process delays cash and at the end of the day costs firms a lot of money. Even after manual proof reading, the rejections still come and the specialists are back at it again, appealing, re-billing or in many cases just taking substantial write-off’s.

 So, how can law firm’s deal with this growing problem? By utilizing a Bill Scrubber™.

 New technology developments provide a way to “scrub” client bills prior to submission to insure they meet client requirements. A Bill Scrubber checks each bill for a series of client rules and points out time and cost entries that need “help” prior to submitting the bill.

 Firms using this new technology will make it harder for clients to reject bills or short pay because of not following the billing guidelines. The use of scrubbing technology will also identify clients with more difficult rules and additional training requirements that might be needed within the firm to reduce the billing violations.

 Bill scrubbing will make money for a firm and improve adherence to client guidelines.


Bill Scrubber is a registered Trademark of Rainmaker Software, Inc.

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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Law firm billing, Productivity, The Legal Market

Internal Benchmarking and Business Tools – Where do you rank?

By on December 21, 2010

The term ‘benchmarking’ gets been tossed around a lot about this time of the year as firms develop their 2011 budgets. What does it mean to your firm? To most it is the process in which firms compare cost, hours recorded or the quantity of work against another firm of similar demographics or size. The gauge is somewhat the same across the board; people use surveys from providers such as Redwood Analytics or Altman & Weil to see where they rank, but how the information is used is another story.  

There are two categories of benchmarking, internal and external. Internal benchmarking is more of an individual thing. This is usually based on the use of business intelligence within the firm.  Individuals, departments and offices can view their ranking in productivity, performance to budget, value to their clients, and other criteria. Many times this analysis drive best practices as a result of fixing poor performing segments.

External benchmarking compares the firm to other firms to find out where they rank by revenue, profit, diversity, pro-bono work or other metrics. Tools such as benchmarking surveys – Lexis Firm Insight 3.0 compiles some of this information on a quarterly basis – are a great way for firms to see where they rank on a more competitive basis, on a group and individual level.

Some of the most useful information is how a firm ranks the profitability of areas of law and even clients. Understanding what to measure and how to measure the “measurables” (if that makes sense), are the most important parts of the process.

Below are a couple of tools firms a firm can use internally to utilize the valuable information already stored in their time and billing software. These tools can help measure and apply the benchmarking information:

Business Intelligence
I’ll start out by saying not all time and billing software systems come equipped with Business Intelligence, but, for the most part, the mid to up-scale systems provide this module.

 The three major components of Business Intelligence software are: data warehouse, user interface for selecting criteria and the presentation layer. Separate from the time and billing system, the data warehouse is a database designed specifically to provider fast analysis of granular data cube-type information about clients, attorneys, billings, cash receipts and expenses. Business Intelligence software allows firms to equip attorneys and other business managers, to gauge and proactively review information from the existing financial system data. This information is pushed to the end user, in a practical format where they can see it easily and compare the stats to others. This is where dashboards come in.

 Dashboards
Dashboards aid in internal financial benchmarking by providing information in a pleasant and intuitive format. The data warehouse can pull up granular information in seconds. Although it’s nice to have information such as profitability and billable hours quickly, in report format sometimes it’s just not convenient to look at. A dashboard provides the end user with an “at a glance” type gauge to see the financial metrics. If the firm provided attorneys with volumes of paper reports, the reports would have little impact, we all know this. When the firm provides attorneys with dashboards that are simple to read, easy to analyze and fast preforming, they will get used and attorneys will be in a much better position to support business decisions and strategic development, and this is only internal use.

I’ll visit external benchmarking at a later date.



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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Productivity, The Legal Market

Ultimate in Billing Legal Confidentiality – Send a Link, Not a Bill

By on December 12, 2010

Law firms may face a dilemma when sending out bills that contain highly confidential information. The routine paper bill sent through the mail may not be secure enough. The use of advanced technology can allow firms to send bills to a client be merely sending a link to a secured web site where the bill can be reviewed on-line or downloaded. To enhance the security model even further, the email message to the client can be generated by utilizing some of the best new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, SQL Agent Mail. With this new technology the SQL database directly sends SMPT email, bypassing the firms Exchange Server. By using SQL Agent Mail the database can provide detail auditing, proper queuing and full reliability. If the firm wishes to incorporate Exchange Server into the process CC copies of all emails may be sent to a public or secured Sent Box. Although Exchange Server is wonderful for user generated emails with tools such as Outlook, it can be overly complicated for software generated email.

 The email link to a client’s bill can be routed to a secured site such as greenlegalbills.com where a client can access or download the bill. Greenlegalbill.com provides a direct secured path to a firm’s extranet site controlled by additional security. The firm’s data is protected by full SSL encryption and internal firewalls.

Emailing a link instead of a bill may help firms reduce costs while providing for the ultimate level of billing security.

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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Going Green, Law firm billing, Productivity, Technology, The Legal Market

Stop sending those paper bills …. Please!

By on October 27, 2010

Here’s a question for law firms … Do your clients want paper bills?

 The answer …. NO!

 This is the digital era, many clients want bill in a digital format.

 More and more corporations are requesting law firms send them bills in a digital format, PDF being the most requested. These corporations have long ago adopted e-Payable systems that require all bills to be imaged and processed via workflow for payment approval.

 Why companies want digital bills:

  1. The email with PDF attachment can be routed to a specific person with much tighter security and less costs than the normal mail room handling.
  2. The PDF file can be immediately loaded into the e-Payable system, saving a costly and delayed scanning process. Confidentiality is also a much tighter.
  3. The bill will arrive sooner. See my blog post explaining why this is a benefit.
  4. If the GC or legal staff needs to print the bill for review they can do it themselves.

 What can law firms do?

Set your time and billing system to automatically email bills as PDF attachments to clients. The law firm also benefits by getting bills out faster, faster payments and substantially reduced costs. Did I mention “going green” by reducing paper and power consumption? One keystroke can send thousands of digital bills.


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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Going Green, Law firm billing, Productivity, Technology, The Legal Market

Streamline your Way to Bigger Margins – #3 -“Is your Time Slipping Away?” – Time Capture Best Practices

By on October 19, 2010

This ongoing series will visit small (and large) overlooked ways firms can save (or gain) money that can add up to big dividends.

A few months back, I wrote a blog entry about law firm time entry. In it, I outlined the results of a survey on time entry and some best practices attorneys can use to avoid “leakage” or “slippage”. One of the points was “If you have a mobile attorney, let them try a Blackberry or iPhone time capture app; see if it will help improve productivity.” Since mobile applications are used for just about everything these days, I thought I would expound on the benefit of using mobile time capture to avoid slippage, and achieve the most accurate time capture possible.

To begin, what exactly is “slippage”? Although there are many different types of slippage (in stocks, foreign exchange, etc.), law firms experience this phenomenon when they simply don’t bill clients for the work performed. This can occur when work is forgotten, small amounts of time are not recorded that may add up to large amounts of time and/or work is underestimated. Slippage is a real issue that negatively affects revenue and may lead to longer billing cycles, and an overall poor reflection on an attorney’s time management skills.

There are many contemporaneous time capture strategies the mobile attorney can implement to avoid slippage, here are a few:

  • This seems like a no-brainer, but find a mobile time capture tool that not only allows you to create time entries at any time, but also interfaces with the firm’s billing system, saving the time spent re-keying, or keying, billable time.
  • Utilize automatic time capture applications that allow users to record time automatically based on the medium, e.g., phone call, email, etc.
  • Make sure the mobile application has an automatic reporting feature. This will allow you to quickly review time spent on specific client and matters and then simply feed it into your time and billing system.
  • Mobile applications not only help lawyers to actualize all billable hours, they also make it possible to get back to clients right away. In this day and age, stellar customer service is one of the primary keys to client retention.
  • Go beyond the “normal” PDA applications and utilize the technology to the fullest extent. For example, some BlackBerry phones offer digital dictation, document review, work product retrieval, etc. This is another great use of down time while on the road.
  • Don’t be afraid to explore the firm’s existing technology. There may be compatible features that an attorney may not know about – these features can help save time and, of course, help to increase productivity.

    These are just a few small things the mobile attorney can implement to increase client satisfaction, make the best use of time and decrease slippage overall.

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Categories: Best Practices, Financial Management, Law firm billing, Practice Management, Technology, The Legal Market
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