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

A client current-account represents the financial situation before a lawyer or law firm.

That being said it’s all very clear: when I (lawyer) issue a billing sheet to clients they owe me money, therefore I will log that debtor position on the current-account. By the time clients pay billing sheets, they no longer owe me any money, i.e. they now have a creditor position before me (lawyer). Thus, clients payments are always credited on their current-accounts. This is why, whenever a money provision is advanced for fees and expenses, I have to credit the client’s current-account.

Yet, a current-account that just reflects financial movements and responsibilities is not enough. A practical example:

A lawyer starts a new matter for a client and asks for a fee provision of $2,000. The current-account shows a creditor balance of $2,000.

Throughout one week, a lawyer has input 20 hours of work into the client’s matter. If that lawyer charges a $150/hour fee, what is the client financial position then?

For any usual billing software the answer would be: the client is creditor of $2,000. According to that application all is OK regarding this client.

But if that lawyer were a LawRD user, when checking the client’s current-account the information would have be:

LawRD displays two balances:

• A green one shows the amount of $2,000 representing a credit to the client, for the advanced provision.
• A red one with the negative amount of -$1,000.

This red -$1,000 stands for the real financial situation of the client towards the lawyer. By the end of the month LawRD will read the client situation as:

$2,000 (provision) - [20 hours input x $150] = $2,000 - $3,000 = -$1,300

LawRD displays two diverse concepts of current-account:

• The traditional, i.e. one that reflects the issuing of billing sheets and the client payments.
• And another, we call Global Current-Account, which mentions tasks and expenses already logged on the matter, but not yet issued  and billed to the client.

Given the scenario on the example, a lawyer faces two options: either a new provision is requested or all debts are billed to the client so that the balance is altered.

Looking at the first option and that a new provision of $2,500 has been added, the current-account will show a positive balance of $4,500, if only financial flow is considered. A positive balance of $1,500 is shown if the total input of tasks already accomplished but not yet billed is taken into consideration, though:

That $1,500 balance equals about 10 hours worth of work ($1,500 divided by $150) that the lawyer may use for that matter. Once that happens, the client will be in debt before the lawyer, again.

Should the lawyer bill all work to the client, the balance in both accounts will be the same: a negative -$1,000:

LawRD displays as negative and in red all the client’s debtor positions. This is a way to red flag the client’s debtor positions to the matter manager or anyone in charge of the administration.

So, what is the upside of showing two concepts of current-account? Here’s one: the client financial situation to the lawyer or law firm is displayed in real time. Billing never keeps up with the work actually done. By using LawRD, users are informed earlier when the client’s financial position is negative… and real time info is valuable for it allows swifter decisions without having to wait on the administrative time it takes for billing sheets to be issued and only then being able to decide.

LawRD is valuable data for your valuable time.

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):

“The client knows best”, this is an adage not always true and ought not to be interpreted in its stricto sensu.

What is the client’s dream is another issue. Dreaming is good, it is free, but one needs to “keep it real” so the dream can come to be. If a client looks for a wreckless quest, should I play along so I can prove him wrong. What about the lawyer’s ethical code, then? Is a client’s dream any good, if it means to work in the German market, which is known for its demands for price and quality, when he is not up to those standards?

We have to put the clients inner yearns and hopes along side with the facts of reality, possibility and professionalism.

Being a lawyer and consultant and psychologist and entrepreneur, is what Being a Lawyer is all about. The market demands for professionals with business strategies, calculated legal risks included. In this mind frame, to be a lawyer is to be a strategist. Not just a petition clerk, but a real Guru for clients.The one they look for guidance in rough moments, through hard times.

The same goes for lawyers who deal with individuals. Employees in any company. To be aware whether  the company they work for is compliant with the legislation, their rights and duties (not only the rights,
like many love to stress) are all fundamental by the time to decide  whether or not to stay working in the present job.

Clients do not always know best.

Dreams do not always come true.

Recurring to the law is not always the best move.

In any of the above cases, a lawyer who has a strategic overview of the market, who is sensible to human interactions and has a good knowledge of the law, can provide an outcome closer to justice and the truth.

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!

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

From its genesis LawRD was devised in close proximity to law firms’ reality, so that their performance and ease of use needs are met.

During the stage of sorting procedures and requirements, the law professionals we’ve consulted were unanimous on the growing level of demand from their clients, regarding client support and on updating them on their matters.

More and more, clients want be informed and updated on the development and what’s being done in defense of their interests. To fulfill such legitimate yearning, they usually contact directly the lawyers or firms they’ve contracted. To keep their trust and satisfaction, one has to display professionalism, control over the matters and the ability to answer issues such as dealines, tasks undertaken, fees and payments.

With this reality in mind, we aim to ease the work of those who have the responsability of keeping updated and supporting clients, enabling, from a simple Internet connection, data related to any given matter thus allowing them answering, on the fly, to most questions clients ask.

Once the Matter is clicked on, the matter in question  selected, the following page opens up:

Besides the header showing the client’s contacts and matter ’s generic info, it is possible to consult immediately reports on: money, time, productivity and profitability. These provide for an overview and immediate grip on the matter’s status.

Questions on tasks already executed or billing sheets, can be answered through the Time tab, wherein one can find about: who, when and what!

Any doubts on matter expenses, a click on Expenses gives way to seeing all expenses, sorting the ones pending on approval, the ones already approved and the ones that have been billed:

The Comments tab gives access to comments submitted by the team working on that matter and other documents related to it:

The Events tab presents dates and events with significance to the matter:

The Billing tab adresses billing sheets, with the matter’s history and the billing sheets already issued:

Gathering all data concerning a matter in a single place, gives way to respond, on the fly, to the majority of concerns by clients, thus conveying professionalism, control over the matters, transparency, service quality and aiming the client’s satisfaction.  This approach ranks high on LawRD’s users degree of satisfaction, namely those who deal directly with client support.

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

LawRD’s reports are devised so that any law firm manager gets an immediate answer on data submitted to the system.

To that end, we’ve identified in the system, the main Entities to which data is associated to. These are: Clients, Matters, Lawyers, Rainmakers and Performance. These entities can be individually used as value aggregators or combined as data filters.

Next, we’ve also identified all numerical Pointers on: how much we have forecast on costs, how much are we actually spending and how much are we profiting. We have also crossed these basic pointers with invoices status and the partial amonts of these dedicated to expenses and tasks. This data allows us to know, among other important issues, the Net Worth logged in the system the Plan Accomplish Ratio or the Time Productivity.

This data analysis will enable the end user with a tool for spotting, in an analytic fashion,  the causes for an atypical billing period, a decrease on revenue, growth or slowing trends. When examining the issues we’ve mentioned, LawRD’s reports will tell us about: Who, to Whom, What, When, Brought by Whom, under Whose Responsability and the ever wanted HOW.

In order to ease the equation of problems, reports are sorted by Entities, each having four analysis groups: Money, Time, Profitability and Productivity. Every group contains a set of pointers clustered by the entity previously chosen. If willing to do so, users can also filter data through a form containing all six entities.

Example: lawyer John presents a 25% decrease on productivity for this month. Given his quite up to standard and regular performance over the past few months, I’m having some trouble pin pointing what is the cause for that. The issue may present three possible angles:

• John is losing focus and is just not keeping up with his usual performance, as the productivity report states.
• The firm is going through a rough spot. That can easily be concluded by the time line of the report on Turnover.
• Jonh is working on a matter that turned out to be a black hole. To check on this case, I must select the matter entity, the Time analysis group and the filter lawyer John. A discrepancy between the logged time and the billed time will sort the cause for this problem.

Given the large amount of data used in every report, which involves nearly all application’s data structures, we had to devise a strategy of data cache in order to simplify and streamline data selection. The sole minor issue here is that, data is not displayed in real time (updating happens every half hour), but when it is imperative, users can override this by manually updating it in a single click.

Keeping up with a matter’s profitability is but one of the features on LawRD, reports wise. The Reports tab enables users with an array of pointers most useful to any lawyer or manager:

The following example shows how thoroughly detailed reports on LawRD are. Let us picture this: there’s this lawyer, who is partner in a firm, about to have a meeting with a client to debate the annual fee for the legal advisory service.

That lawyer logs into LawRD and on the Performace option, clicks on the Money report (data retrieved from our Demo Account). This report displays various firm’s financial data:

This report compiles data from all clients and matters: once the math is done, one can conclude that in the last 3 month period the firm billed a total amont of £131,635.94.

The lawyer, wants to see the data from this report that concerns the client Pub & Creativity, though. To do that, all that’s need is to use Filters, cliking on show filters:

To gather data from a single client just pick the name from the Choose a Client box, then click on Filter >>. The lawyer will then get from that report the following:

The lawyer has come to the conclusion that the client Pub & Creativity represents a revenue of £32,012.83, i.e., nearly 25% of the last quarter’s gross revenue (the time span of the report can be changed through filters). This is an important client… which will shorten the range for him to negotiate.

However, the report stands out an amount of £31,865.00 (Unbilled column) that has not been billed yet, during those 3 months. That makes the lawyer wonder: “Are we billing all the work my team has been putting into this client’s matters?”. By sellecting the Time report on the Performance option, he’ll get his answer:

Next, he has applied a filter to check the data concerning only the client Pub & Creativity:

.. to conclude that the team worked about 259 hours for that client, but only 143 of these were billed. This might prove to be a valuable argument when negociating with the client.

And all it took were 2 LawRD reports.. from a total of 24 that LawRD can provide, along with the possibility of customization (to be dealt with in future posts).

Sometimes there’s the need to go back to square one. This should have been the first post ever on LawRD’s Blog: LawRD, what is it good for?

There’s a debate going in the law milieu on whether or not hourly rates are the best way for charging  legal services. We will not go into that! It is not up to us to tell lawyers what is best for them on that concern. What we can state for sure is that LawRD meets the several models of fee convention that lawyers choose for their clients’ matters. LawRD allows you to bill hourly, flat fee, contingency fees and success fee.

Whichever way a lawyer chooses when billing fees, there is an unavoidable fact: lawyers do invest time on matters. An example: when emailing to a client during working hours, a lawyer is investing  time which has a cost that is equal to the lawyer’s hourly rate times the total time spent on that task.

An issue arises here: how can lawyers account for their cost per hour? That calculus can either be simple or complex. In a law firm the cost can be achieved by adding the lawyer’s salaries, bonuses and other costs that are to that person related, divided by the total amount of hours the lawyer worked during a certain period of time (a month, a year). A solo practice will have to bear in mind a minimum amount so it is profitable. For instance: if a lawyer needs to have a minimum of $15,000/month proceeds and is willing to put in 150 hours, the hourly cost will be $100.

Knowing the cost is just the half of it. The other half is logging the time spent on each matter. Any way… there is only one way of doing that: using a timesheet. Such a sheet can be as simple as piece of paper stapled to the folder wherein they will hand write down the time spent. That will do the job, but can it help answering swiftly to issues such as:

• How much time did I spend on a matter?
• What is the total cost of a matter?
• Is the matter profitable?

This is where LawRD - Reports on Demand comes into action! Use LawRD and the answers are just a click away. Check this example from LawRD’s Demo Account:

The Total line displays an amount of 62:30 which has a cost of $8,210.25. This is  a hourly rate matter and there is an amount of $14,370.00 billed, therefore it shows a profit of $6.159,75. There you have the answers for the previous questions. It just took a click on the Timesheet tab.

The Timesheet tab still remains relevant for matters that are not billed by the hour. The reason why is very simple: there is the need to match the fee agreed with the client with the actual costs of that matter. Recurring again to the Demo Account, you can notice that the amount of €1.500,00 was agreed with the client:

By clicking on Timesheet you can answer to:

• How many hours were spent on the matter? A: 9:35
• What is the total cost of the matter? A: $1,012.25
• Is this matter profitable? A: yes, it shows a $987.75 profit, at the moment.

Now we can answer to what is LawRD good for? In a sentence: LawRD allows for a swift answer on any matter’s results.