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):

What would become of us without the time we have?

We keep complaining about having not enough time, but we only worry with what we have to do, not with time itself.

Worrying with tasks alone, leads to the conclusion that there’s lots to be done.

By looking objectively at the time we have, we come to find that we may more of it than we thought by dismissing useless actions that we only are aware of by taking time to manage time.

Having time doesn’t mean having nothing to do. It actually means that you have managed your time better so that work, pleasure and leisure are part of your daily routine. Here’s an article with an interesting reflexion on the subject:

“Time management

The simplest way to increase productivity is to manage your time better.  While many time management techniques sound like common sense, that does not mean they are easy to implement.

Start by identifying troublesome areas:

• How often are you interrupted?
• How do you manage disruptions?
• Can you section off blocks of solid work time?
• Do you make “to do” lists and prioritize them?
• Do you have a flexible work schedule?
• Do you complete your work during regular work hours?
• Do you micromanage?
• Do you take on all tasks yourself?
• Can you say “no?”

Plan how to avoid situations that can waste your time, including:

• Poorly completed work that must be re-done
• Phone calls, email, mail, casual office talk
• Lack of delegation or improper delegation
• Information that is not easy to find or use
• Too many review cycles or layers of approval
• Multiple meetings that aren’t useful
• Postponing your work
• Unclear goals or objectives
• Excessive paperwork
• Too little time and too much work
• Lack of authority to make decisions or too many levels of decision making
• Only dealing with crises
• Perfectionism
• Poor organization

Identify the time management techniques that will work best for you, including:

• Manage your stress
• Prioritize your tasks
• Organize
• Follow your schedule
• Avoid useless memos, travel, conversations, emails
• Don’t procrastinate
• Do the hard parts first
• Start as soon as possible
• Carve out blocks of time for important things
• Delegate wisely
• Give attention only to items that need it
• Don’t let others give up and pass off tasks on to you. Help them to figure out how to accomplish their own tasks, if necessary.

Effective time management begins with taking a single step.  Identify one or two action items from the list above, and start today.”

Now, do you honestly think you worry about time? If you do, just learn to manage it and turn your life around.

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.

Adding to the new website and demo account, during this Fall 2009 other new features are now enriching LawRD. Such an upgrade results from our users community feedback, to whom we are thankful. The improvements are as follows:

• Events: from now on, it is possible to relate events to contacts and matters, by logging on LawRD important dates referring to actions and tasks needed to be acomplished. Such events are either public or private, in the latter case, they will be available only to whoever did add them.
  

• Setting fees per lawyer on matters: up until now, LawRD enabled billing matters accordingly to each intervening lawyer fee. Now, it is possible to set for any given matter, other fees different from the ones preset per lawyer.
  

  When setting up a matter´s team, LawRD will display the standard fees preset on each lawyer’s file, in case the fee is other than the preset one, just change it.
  

• Setting up a success fee in a flat fee matter: by the time a new matter is added, this value is a forecast which can be adjusted when the billing sheet is issued.
  

• Adding a new type of matter within the matter adding assistant: when adding a new matter, if it doesn´t match any of the existing types, now, one can create a new type without needing to close the matter assistant.
  

• The timesheet tab in Matter displays costs and fees columns: this makes way for a easier check on a matter profitability. At any time it is possible to have a grasp on the matter billing potential (Fee column) and the assigned lawyer internal costs (Costs column).
  

• Deleting contacts and matters: this new feature allows to delete unintended duplication of matters and contacts that usually occur during the early usage of LawRD.
  This feature is available, by default, to users on the Administrator and Manager profiles ( the latter can delete only the matters he/she manages and no one else’s) , but its settings can be changed by altering profiles:
  

• Billing sheet deduction row: when issuing a billing sheet there’s the possibility of mentioning a deduction to the total amount.
  

• New billing sheet PDF layout: the PDF billing sheet layout has been upgraded to a nicer look.
  

• Relating users to matters via users tab: that will make it simpler to relate lawyers to the firm matters which are logged in LawRD. Whenever a lawyer is related to a matter, Lawrd will email her/him notifying of that.
  

• Timesheet status: timesheets display now the following different status:
  No tasks: timesheet open by the user with no tasks logged in yet;
  Clear: timesheet open by the user wherein tasks have been logged but not yet approved
  To approve: meaning that the timesheet was sent for approval, but it hasn´t been reviewed and approved yet. In this instance there is the need for the user supposed to approve it to do so;
  Closed: timesheet approved.
  

• Searching through comments on matters and contacts:
  

• Self-suggesting tags: when adding tags, LawRD will suggest tags already added by users.
  

Other issues and glitches reported since the Summer 2009 upgrading are now corrected, e.g. retainers, reports and budget fee matters.

2010 will bring new developments, so we invite everyone interested in LawRD to keep posted on this blog. Thus, subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

The deployment of IT in legal offices is usually related to big investments on expert labour to install, upgrade and maintain. Simultaneously it is demanded from the staff time and availability to attend training, to get acquainted with the features, to streamline procedures and to make the most out of the applications.

Taking the human factor at its core, LawRD is an intuitive tool allowing users to fully and immediately use it, with no need for training.

LawRD doesn’t aim to do everything. It’s goal is only the essential in a simple and effective way:

• Register all billable and non-billable, tasks, expenses and resources in a newer, easier and swifter way;
• Team work and data sharing from anywhere at anytime;
• Improve Customer Relationship Management, create timesheets and schedules, manage tasks and costs;
• Permanent control and update on clients, files, bills, current accounts and on employees’ productivity;
• Management reports on: billing, profitability, billable hours and risk and safety management alert system.

All of this through an Internet connection.

You’ll be the judge of that. Try it for 30 days, free and fully functional.