Post by Nuno B.M. Lumbrales, lawyer, partner at Lumbrales & Associados and LawRD user:

I was asked to write a personal review on LawRD, from a user point of view, a little bit over one year’s use.

Without being a fully comprehensive one, given the limited use within my firm features such as those related to billing (except for the use of timesheets which, once reviewed are the basis for issuing invoices via outsource accounting), LawRD stands as an important part within our management.

The features we use the most - contacts, matters, tasks and expenses - are all gathered in a single tool, both inexpensive and easy to use as well as particularly reliable, wherein the our data base is hosted, for consultation and billing purposes (as I mentioned above the latter is not our case,though).

I am adamant in saying that LawRD is a sure asset for our management efficacy and key in our practice’s success.

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 asking themselves this, everybody has in mind a software solution that does it all: it can manage matters, it organizes the firm, it will sort all that in your practice can be delt with in the cloud and still keep your business from fallling into chaos.

Foolishness!

Prior to solving the management of your office with a software comes the need to manage your practice.

What do I mean?

Any software solution will enable you with data, swift search (assuming it is provided with a comprehensive database), issue reports, etc. However, for a streamlined performance it will need for its data to be logged  within a certain logic and pattern. Reaching this implies that an advanced acquaintance with the app is a given, i.e. understanding its features, possibilities and actual implementation cost, so that an assessment of its cost/benefit ratio can be realized.

Some myths on legal apps are:

The complete solution

All app developers claim that their soltions are the bench mark of the market, they will meet all your practice needs. The reality is that apps will only do what they were programmed to and without an in depth try out,  there’s no way to find how suited for the task they are or not. Apps will enable you with countless resources that won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to make use of them or those resources are not suited for your needs.

Before buying software ask yourself the following:

• What is my area of business?
• What sort of data will be most usefull for my clients?
• Can I access and log data at any time, from any place (from my cell phone for instance)?
• What area the areas of my practice that the app will manage (matters, fiscal, documents, etc)?
• Can I afford to invest in an ideal software solution or do I have other priorities?

The point is, before thinking of apps you should actually be thinking of management.

Managing matters versus managing your office

This could be a blurry issue. Taking matter management for practice management. Dangerous blunder.

Managing matters is a part of the legal practice. But that’s what it is: a part. Lawyers ought to be a part of their clients businesses, part of their decision making by acting preventively. Matters are important but not the sole purpose of your practice.

If they’re not your only goal, why turn them into the core of your office? No way. You got to manage  finances (bills to pay, invoices to receive, cash flow, costs, etc), e-documents (digitize everything, contracts, bills, etc)  clients and prospects management and so on.

If you still think that there is no app for that, you must have been out of the Earth for the last years. The market has to offer solutions that will serve for general office management and not just concerning matters. Don’t be dazzled with matter management, for it needs to be a complete one in order to be effective.

Implementation

This where lots of firms lose money. Believing that an app will solve all their problems, lawyers leave to the people in charge of implementing, fundamental decisions about their practices.

Not to demerit IT consultants and pros, however very few of these take business management really into their interest. The success of their app implementation in your office is their actual concern. How the data is going to be managed and used is not their aim.

This is the real issue here. Management comes before any sort of app implementation. Sort what routines in your firm are the most suited for the present reality and within a year’s time. You’ll have to know what an app can do, to assess it in your firm’s daily practice.

Once you’ve got this down, IT people can come over to train you and your employees, to implement and check on the reports that your management has previously determined and so forth.

To conclude: software will have to work for your firm and not be it to set what can be done or not. You paid for it, it should be working for you and not the other way around.

To be or nor to be web-based

Some by fear, others by prejudice and others by being oblivious of it, do not use wed-based software.

I am totally for it. More good than bad (if any) comes from it. Available from anywhere (even from your cell phone) you have data, documents, court sentences all within the reach of a LAN connection.

Is it safe? Quite safe. A hefty effort is put into web safety. To be true they invest more into safety than any one single law firm would. It is their business to be safe, isn’t it? And yours is to practice law.

So, is there such thing as “the perfect app for the legal practice”? Of course there is, but it is up to you and not to the app to say so.

Post by Nuno B.M. Lumbrales, lawyer, partner at Lumbrales & Associados and LawRD user:

The billing method is an issue that, mishandled, will cause nasty glitches in the relationships between lawyers and clients.

There are several ways of billing lawyer services, just like in any other area of business, bearing in mind the uniqueness and proper rules that apply in each country as to the legal practice.

One of the most common, and losing preference, is the hourly rate method, for billing lawyers fees. Such method has the quality of its flexibility thus enabling a balance between the service rendered by lawyers and its due compensation, overlooking the fluctuation that will occur unavoidably throughout the diligences.
On the downside, in this instance it is troublesome for clients to preview the cost of  the lawyer’s fee when a given period of time is agreed upon.

However, by demanding a specification for each of the billing invoices (as it is supposed) as to the description and time spent in each item clients can have some control. Without being utterly rigorous this will prevent costs from soaring.

A more classic method is a fixed rate that will settled upon for a matter (flat rate) or for a determined cycle of billing (retainer). This, being a quite clear method, has the advantage of eliminating almost any grounds for litigation on fee agreements (service quality and issues alike are not thus prevented, though). Its lack of flexibility regarding fluctuation of the amount of work through the procedures, come as a negative point.

One other billing method consists on agreeing to a percentage of the results that will come from the lawyer’s services on one or more legal matters. Many countries do permit this form of fee agreement in its pure sate, invoking that this will give way for the leayer to being too much as a directly interested part on the matter at appreciation in court for it will depend on the court’s decision, thus compromising the lawyer’s objectivity, impartiality and independence. A mixed form of this agreement with others is allowed, though.

These methods in their pure forms and an arrangement of different ones will give way for more ecletic and balanced billing methods.

The underlying question to choosing a billing method is the fare quantification of lawyers’ services, considering amount, quality and results they bring to clients.

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 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 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.