|
ADERANT
Overcoming
the Attorney Productivity Paradox
by Don Howren,
Senior Vice President of Global Marketing
ADERANT |
For years, law firms have faced a paradox when it comes to investing in technology to improve the productivity of their attorneys. On one hand, the need for productivity tools is clear as clients demand outstanding quality work from professionals that are highly responsive to their needs.
On the other hand, productivity tools enable professionals to do the same amount of work in less time. This has led to an erroneous perception in some firms that productivity tools lead to less billable time — and lower firm revenues and profits.
While firms might view the contributions of their professionals primarily in terms of billable hours, their clients do not. Instead, clients view the contributions of the professionals working on their matters in terms of the perceived value and effectiveness of the services being provided.
Today’s highly competitive legal landscape and increasingly demanding clients are forcing firms to re-evaluate the role of productivity solutions for their professionals. The next generation of productivity tools, such as mobility and email management solutions, can help firms improve both the quality of service they provide to clients and increase the revenues they generate. These new solutions eliminate some of the non-value adding administrative activities lawyers face everyday, freeing them to focus on the practice of law and allowing them to more fully leverage what they are ultimately being hired for — their expertise and experience.
Turning Down Time into Billable Time
Client sites, courthouses, and home offices — as well as trains, planes, and automobiles — have become important locations for professionals to get work done. To cope, many firms have provided their professionals with mobile devices to increase their productivity while they are out of the office. The near universal use of the BlackBerry and other PDAs clearly demonstrates the importance to firms of helping their professionals stay connected while they are on the road.
However, many firms are realizing that there should be more to their mobility strategy than just allowing their lawyers to access email while they are out of the office. Truly effective mobility strategies leverage the often substantial investments firms have already made in accounting, CRM, and other systems, enabling professionals to access critical information, deliver better client service, and stay on top of expense approvals, check requests, and other critical business processes.
Beyond increasing information access, mobility technology can also improve a firm’s bottom line by turning what was once downtime for their professionals into billable time. By enabling lawyers to remotely capture time easily — either through a BlackBerry or laptop — firms can boost both their revenues and cash flow. Mobile time entry increases firms’ revenues by helping professionals capture billable time when — and where — the work is done. Mobile time entry increases a firm’s cash flow by eliminating the delay typically experienced with traveling professionals between the completion of work and when that time is entered into their billing system.
The investment in mobile solutions that go beyond simple email access makes solid financial sense for law firms. For example, by using mobility tools to capture just 30 minutes of additional billable time per workday, a firm could increase its revenues by $20,000 per attorney (assuming 200 workdays per year and an average of rate of $200 per hour). For a firm with 75 attorneys, that’s an additional $1.5 million in revenues.
Taming the
Email Monster
In today’s world, email has become an essential business tool for sharing information and communicating with clients and colleagues alike. Lawyers may receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails each day related to their clients’ matters. And each email must be properly profiled, assigned to a matter, and filed to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Managing this never-ending flow of emails, unfortunately, is a time-consuming task for attorneys.
Additionally, the person-to-person nature of email itself makes it difficult for lawyers to share information between colleagues, especially once it has been stored in someone’s in box. The result is that each lawyer has an incomplete record of vital client communications and documents that increases their firm’s exposure to risk.
New technologies, such as email management solutions, can help firms tame the email monster. These solutions allow professionals to automatically file incoming and outgoing emails according to individual matters. More importantly, they enable lawyers working on the same matters to share related emails — and any attached documents — even if they were not originally sent to other lawyers. The most effective email management solutions are seamlessly embedded within popular email applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, providing lawyers with easy access to functionality without requiring them to open or even learn how to use the new software.
The advantages of email management solutions are obvious. They allow lawyers to more easily share and store critical client communications. They decrease a firm’s exposure to risk by ensuring essential information is not “lost” in someone’s in box. They improve a firm’s responsiveness and improve the level of client service their lawyers can provide by automating non-value adding administrative activities.
Additionally, email management solutions can help a firm either improve the quality of service it provides to its clients or add significantly to its bottom line. Assuming that it takes just 30 minutes per day to manually profile emails and assign them to client matters, email management solutions can free up the equivalent of 120 hours of time each year per attorney.
The time savings gained by eliminating such a non-value adding administrative activity can be used to either increase the quality of service the attorney can provide to his or her client (e.g., additional research, more aggressive litigation, etc.) or it could be used to allow the attorney to work on other matters. If the time savings was applied to other matters, email management solutions would enable a firm with 75 attorneys to increase its annual revenues by $1.5 million.
Having Your Cake and Eating It Too
The latest generation of attorney productivity tools enables firms to have the best of both worlds. They make it possible for their professionals to simultaneously improve the quality and level of service they provide to clients as well as increase the revenue they generate.
To learn more about how productivity tools can improve your firm’s competitive stance, please visit www.aderant.com or call 888-604-2366.
Special Advertising Section
|
|
