Post by Nuno B.M. Lumbrales, lawyer, partner at Lumbrales & Associados and LawRD user. He is also the new LawRD Blog contributor:

The use of any technology always goes through distinct stages that can be longer or shorter, depending on the technology in question and the specific geographical features (cultural, technological, etc) it is deployed into.

Several countries are living exciting times, typical of the recent findings (Portugal included) in IT, or to be more precise, its use in certain areas of the Legal and Public Administration fields.

Actually, political powers have been passing legislation in order to be in some cases mandatory and artificially advantageous in others (i.e. benefits of a doubtful justification when it comes to judicial costs), the use of electronic means for submitting legal suite elements, namely via the Internet and the “Citius” platform managed by the Portuguese Ministry of Justice.

Investing in IT and updating IT in Courts and the Justice system at large is not wrong at all. Using artificial incentives through legislation in order to constraint the judiciary actors to the immediate and exclusive use of a tool not yet fully reliable when it comes to ensure integrity,management and preservation of lawsuits, doesn’t make much sense tough!

In deed, problems are frequent concerning the certification of digital signatures, transferring data among complex and autonomous IT systems, and so on, not to mention the constitutional issues raised up by some magistrates (unfortunately in vain) as to the fact that they are being coerced to using an IT system that is managed and run by the executive power and not by the judicial magistrature itself.

Jurists are known for being conservative by nature, not so much into the newer tech trends, more of  “sheet of paper” fans…

That’s true, and for good reasons too, you know, paper does not “crash”.

Post by Gustavo Rocha, lawyer and consultant in management, IT and quality for law firms. He’s the author of Gestão.Adv.br (content in Portuguese only):

“Direction is more important than speed “(Roberto Scaringella)

This also recalls for Seneca’s words:“If you don’t know where you are heading to, no wind will favour you”

More and more teams are focused on achieving goals, results and growing, growing and growing. But, to what purpose? A financial one?

Yeah, why feel surprised? Finance is not a purpose. Purposes are tangible plans or dreams yet to be fulfilled. It won’t be speed that will make them happen.

No direction means you don´t know where you are going to.

If you have no direction, any planning will be no help at all.

Use speed only when you know where to go.

Speed up only with a plan.

Speed when you get the big picture.

Setting a fast pace to your team but no direction, will keep a yearn to succeed that is not possible to know if it can be attained.

Reach your goals by planning. Keep the speed within your planning. Just running is for those with no plan.

Exercise planning your goals day by day, whether they are short, medium or long term ones. Update your goals. Write them down.

To conclude, make your planning the speedometer for your practice.

Nicole Black mentioned LawRD - Reports on Demand on a post in the Firmex company blog.

Nicole Black is a lawyer who writes books and on blogs about legal issues. Firmex’s blog is one of them. Firmex provides Financial Advisory Firms, Corporations, Private Equity Groups and Law Firms with a privately branded virtual data room to securely share and exchange documents online. Law firms are among their clients ranks.

The post titled Web-based Law Practice Management Systems starts by standing out the advantages of the SaaS solution:

“Advantages include lower costs due to reduced overhead, less hassle related to maintaining and upgrading the case management system and greater flexibility, since the Web-based system can be accessed anywhere, at anytime.”

Further on the post, she refers 4 of the most interesting SaaS solutions for law firms. LawRD is on the list:

“Another web-based system well suited for larger law firms is LawRD. A distinguishing feature of this platform is that it helps managing partners review and track associates’ time sheets, expenses and assigned tasks.”

LawrRD offers a distinguished output that provides its users reports to support law firm management making available, at any given moment, data on productivity and profitability either concerning employees as well as clients.

LawRD’s team is grateful to Nicole Black and to Firmex’s team for mentioning LawRD: thanks a lot!

Post by Gustavo Rocha, lawyer and consultant in management, IT and quality for law firms. He’s the author of Gestão.Adv.br (content in Portuguese only):

“I am not an expert on Brazil but I’m entitled to say one thing: cheap labour is no longer an advantage.” (Peter Drucker)

May be the quote from Drucker might answer to the title question, but some employers (lawyers, partners, directors and managers as well) do not share this point of view. Why is that? I could understand their disagreement, given that finances talk louder.Why should I hire any lawyer on an attractive wage when I could pay peanuts, given the few jobs and big search on the present market?

The answer seems straight forward: less pay, less cost, more gain.

It doesn’t work like that, though.

When hiring someone we’re trusting them with a job, an activity, a sector. They’ll spend weeks and months training (even while doing their job, they’re adapting to internal routines, other people, procedures, etc) and by the time they’re ripe to do the job, they like to prospect some sort of growth.

Growth, yes. Who wants to keep on doing the same thing for years on end?

Some might say: when I hire a receptionist, I want her to be always a receptionist. Right, but it depends, I might add. If you run a small business, that receptionist will help with the documents, supplies, answering the phone and lots more. In time she could- and should- get the chance of performing some other job. Then, instead of just hiring a new employee, the firm will actually hire a new receptionist, thus transferring the former to the new position.

Just think this through, cheap does come costly.

If you don´t invest in a career plan adequate to your reality and add to it goals and structural investments, this might sentence the end of your business.

It’s the people who make the companies. This has to be the point of view.

Hire people on a 3 month trial. After that time reassess their performance and give them a raise, if you find them worth it. First get to know people, then invest on them.

If hiring for a partner position or any like that, let them know that they’ll be assessed within 6 months. Just set a deadline and keep it. Telling an employee that there’s going to be an evaluation to renegotiate the pay and just “forget” about it, is worse than saying nothing at all.

Remember that when you create expectation, you either create joy or frustration.

Invest in your business. Invest in people!

Post by Braz Pereira, muchBeta’s Chief Commercial Officer:

Since we got LawRD out, we’ve had a two way approach as to spread its users community: the Internet and its social networks and the direct approach to legal practice professionals.

When contacting law firms for demoing LawRD (on the premises or online), we’ve systematically faced the ’software salesperson stigma’, which recalls them an array of bad memories from previous cases of IT deployment: the need for training, trying to figure how ‘this and that’ is done or bothering someone with tons of questions about it, trying to get in contact with the vendor to solve problems and glitches and never getting to solve them in due time, …

It’s by the time when clients realize that LawRD is altogether different from what they’re used to, or someone who has used or already using LawRD recommends us, that the ’software salesperson’ label gets yanked off. From then on things get smoother, our clients can immediately spot what sets our app from the rest: easy and intuitive use, available from any Internet connection, free 30 day trial, great pricing and no need for upfront investment.

Aiming to override this hurdle when presenting LawRD, we’ve come up with an affiliates program so we can support and reward those willing to make LawRD known and used by the most number of users. This means that we will pay a monthly amount for as long as 10 years, per active user each affiliate brings to us. Whoever has tested LawRD’s performance has the chance of having an extra source of income, helping us overcome the ’software salesperson stigma’ by scheduling LawRD demos.

We have a SaaS application for supporting the email contacts from our affiliates, which allows them to keep up with their contact performance and who have read their emails and when.

The challenge is set. It pays to pay a visit to affiliates.lawrd.com:

Post by Gustavo Rocha, lawyer and consultant in management, IT and quality for law firms. He’s the author of Gestão.Adv.br (content in Portuguese only):

When we think of a marketing initiative, we should have some basic principles so it won’t be in vain.

Three questions that I rate as essential:

• Who?
• What?
• How?

Or better yet:

• Who are your target audience?
• What can you offer them?
• How can you reach them?

It’s not enough to say that you will do everything for your client. That won´t do. You need to focus on a target audience.

You either dwell on B2B or B2C.

Think of what differentiates you from the rest. It’s not enough to say you’re honest. That is basic. You need to have a product, a palpable edge.It doesn’t have to be the pricing but instead a personalized dealing with clients, or even an important connection that will make you speed things up, i.e. something that will set apart and above the competition.

And this is vital: How to reach your target audience? What actions to take? Practical ones: blog, site, newspapers, interviews, connections, etc.

It all depends on your target, your business and your view of the market.

All your decisions have to go through these three filters, though.

Think about it and rock and roll!

Post by Daniel Nunes, muchBeta’s Chief Financial Officer:

Your LawRD account has a preset matter: General Internal Matters.

This matter is devised for logging the time spent on tasks not to be billed to clients. Let’s consider two examples that will show how useful this particular matter can be:

• Lawyers will log here the time spent on weekly firm meetings.
• The partner in charge of back office chores (i.e. overviewing accounts receivable and accounts payable) may log that time spent into this General Internal Matters.

On both cases, by not logging, the data on time spent will not be realistic. This time is actually allocated and is of the firm’s interest. For the weekly meetings instance, it will look as if there is a day in the week that less work is done, whereas the partner in charge of the back office tasks seems to put in less than all the others who just work for the clients matters.

Checking the Status tab within General Internal Matters, allows for consulting data on how do internal affairs affect the overall firm performance as well as, keeping up with its evolution through time.

Following the said example and figuring that we are in early March 2010, we may state that:

• The total amount of time spent on Internal Affairs is increasing by the month (Time chart).
• Consequently to that, losses related to this matter are growing (Money chart)
• The General Internal Matters quota for the Inefficiency Share will rise up to 45% by December 2010 (Productivity chart). The Inefficiency Share is the ratio of the non billed time on a matter and the total non billed time on all the firm’s matters.

In presence of this data, it is up to the firm whether or not to hire to someone to supervise internal affairs, thus freeing lawyers to just working on clients matters. The best first step in order to best go through this issue might be checking reports on the time  each lawyer wastes on internal affairs:

Post by Braz Pereira, muchBeta’s Chief Commercial Officer:

When we first started to develop LawRD, we were quite aware that, in many fronts, the concept we meant to come up with was going to be ground-breaking to most law practice professionals.

The innovation here, is the fact that LawRD is a service, not software sold in a CD-ROM demanding an upfront investment and periodical upgradings.

Being a SaaS, all its data is hosted in the “cloud” (Amazon data centers in LawRD’s case) thus being available through any Internet connection, freeing its users from concerns with servers, firewalls, viruses, IT infrastructure, compatibilities and safety.

LawRD has a mandatory free 30-day trial, no upfront investment and its monthly payment is done  accordingly to the number of active users. No long-term contracts or commitments, quit when you want to.

These facts are self-evident and, in our view, point to the new paradigm to which we move into at fast pace (thanks Gmail, homebanking, Salesforce and all other that paved the way to solutions such as LawRD).

The awareness for these advantages really stands out when a software “glitch” turns up, though. Usually, users call the software vendor presenting a complaint or asking for customer support. Then, a location visit from a technician is scheduled, which never happens as soons as needed, plus there are delays of all sorts, traffic jams and other setbacks until the problem is fixed and that support is paid for.

On the other hand, LawRD’s support is requested through the application itself:

Right away, LawRD team takes charge of the situation and, on most instances, users doubts are cleared or the problem is solved in a couple of hours. Most of our replies to help requests are just to inform our clients that the situation they contacted us for in the first place, is now solved.

Odd as it may seem, it is there and then, when doubts and problems arise, that we can better prove the edge that SaaS presents, being much more than software that one must pay for the the right to use it, LawRD is actually a service, provided by a team that stands only a click away, to solve any doubts or problems from our clients, in a quick and swift way, shortening waiting and offline times to a minimum.

To conclude, for LawRD, solving doubts and problems, is a deciding factor in our clients trust and satisfaction.

Post by Nelson Teixeira, muchBeta’s Chief Data Officer:

The wage/hour value on LawRD is directly preset on the Users tab. By default, only those who have System Administrator profiles can access it:

In order to check the wage/hour value and fee of any given lawyer, just click their name and then click Change:

The Wage/Hour box displays the firm’s cost per hour for that lawyer and the Client cost box stands for the hourly rate billed to the client that very lawyer has worked on the client’s matters.

The Wage/Hour value is mostly used within reports and on the Timesheet tab within the Matters tab.

In reports, the wage/hour value is key when assessing lawyers profitability. The equation to assess profitability is:

The desired result for this indicator should be over 100%. Values under that bar mean that cost has surpassed gain during the period chosen to assess.

This indicator can be analysed through time for the same lawyer, compared against the same indicators referring to other lawyers and the firm’s global profitability indicators .

Thus, LawRD allows for comparisons throughout time and space!