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

Managing time, the time each of us spend on any given task, to be more precise, is key when managing a company for it stands as an indicator of how much is demanded from that company to meet its tasks (namely what concerns human resources, which is usually seen as fixed or a general cost, rather than a specific one related to a client or project).

By managing time, it is possible to spot waste, logistics inefficiency and other obstacles that may stand in the way of productivity, slowing down its pace thus affecting the company’s results.

Paramount as it is for any company management, it is more so for law firms and lawyers at large, since they often run on a hourly cost/pricing model that is directly dependent on the enhancement of individual performance of the employees for being a successful one, when it comes to results.

Three practical tips on this subject:

• Try to limit interruptions to a minimum, there are always to many (i.e. that email that just came in, is it that urgent to the point of interfering in your present task, or any others that have been on hold for quite some time and so became urgent just because they are overdue?)

• Do not keep up for too long on tasks which have a doubtful return (is it worthy to attend every conference, when you know that the benefit you get from them is barely none? Shouldn’t you go only when that amount of time won’t hurt all the work waiting you at the office?)

• Do not tag everything as ‘URGENT’ (if all is urgent then nothing is, which leads to loss regarding work quality and organization, as well as sorting priorities. Attempt to figure when does the client actually need the work done and then ‘negotiate’ with them the deadline. Most of them realize that they will benefit from a better and more careful work, as long as the established deadline is observed).

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:

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).

Post by Susana Gonçalves, lawyer, partner at Advogados Associados and LawRD user since 2009:

“When I first started my practice, I was the youngest in a newly found firm and for that reason I was assigned to be the middle person with the IT service that we worked with, assuming that being the youngest equaled to be the most apt to understand IT’s procedures and language. To put it into context I’m talking
about 1993, the time when Windows OS was starting off in Portuguese offices - and on its way to be the universal tool it is now - and emails were timidly sneaking into our routines.

For this reason I was compelled to become acquainted with computers and programs, solely from the user’s view point. By the time I started my own practice, experience had taught me that I couldn’t do without an effective management program, but the ones available were expensive and very limited, which led me to give up IT completely and go back to the good old timesheet on paper, later turned into Excel when it was time to bill, with all inherent lapses.

However, when I found LawRD and the help I get from its support team at muchBeta, the scene changed and now I have and effective control on all relevant management elements, effortlessly and with no significant time cost, checking on data further than I used to be able to, in the little time I have for my practice management, withstanding the assessment of team work and profitability of the resources allocated.

It stands to reason that in order to get results from LawRD there is a need for discipline when it comes to submitting data, but pretty soon it became as natural as checking my email for new messages.

One of its qualities that I couldn’t let go without mention is the easy access it enables at anytime, anywhere, thus allowing me to log any task, even at night from my home and away from the office’s bustle.

And of course I have to stress the pricing: unbeatable and the most inexpensive.

LawRD makes it easy for me to fill in billing sheets, objectively assess performance and make more time for a much better work.

Thanks muchBeta!”