InetSoft Webinar: Attorney Performance Management Dashboards

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Applying Analytics to Improve Performance in Law Firms" The moderator is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark: So again, I am looking at this attorney performance management dashboard on my PC, but of course, in your environment this could also be in an iPad as well or another sort of device. So let’s move ahead. I get this first report here. Can you tell me what I am looking at?

Ron: Yes, this is the main focus of the cluster performance chart. It takes just a couple of minutes to get your head around it. And then once you have done that, it’s quite easy to use. So I will just explain there are few things about the layout, and then we can get into some of the detail. So at the top left hand corner there, Mark, you can see we have got cluster one showing another dropdown. We have got four choices there so we can pick cluster two or cluster three, whichever one you like, and the numbers just automatically change on the little bars.

Mark: Very good, yes. So the bars change, and so do all the metrics.

Ron: Yes. So that’s just jumping between the different clusters. At the bottom left hand corner we have got some contextual KPIs. They are things that we said we won’t actually measure in terms of metrics you need to improve on, but they provide context for them. The number of partners in the cluster for example is 9.

So that just gives them a feel for someone that doesn’t know that team particularly well that there are nine partners in the team. We put in there a figure like lawyer turnover because when we were doing the KPIs we wanted to have some non-financial indicators available.

They were fairly tough to be honest to come up with. A lot of things you would like to report on are very hard to measure. What we put in there is lawyer turnover. We thought we would track that and just see how it goes as an indicator.

We have this suspicion that groups with the higher turnover that maybe there is something not quite right with that group, and certainly it’s expensive to go find replacement people and recruit them and all that sort of thing. This one we are looking at now, cluster one is 41% turnover which would be pretty high.

Mark: That would be very high I am sure. But one or the other clusters, just as an example, it changes too. There was none for cluster two.

Ron: In fact, we would like them to have a little bit of turnover. We set a target. We said 16% would be okay. This is what we thought, but we are going to track it, and see how we go. Billings inflow and outflow is a key metric that’s looking at the work that at this particular team is doing for other groups outside of their department and also the work that they are getting coming in. Here you can see how much work they are doing for other teams. What we were concerned about in this whole thing is when we were driving performance we didn't want this group or any particular group to be saying well we will do whatever it takes to win new clients because we need to grow our practice.

We wanted them to be sharing the work and bringing in the work across the firm having the most appropriate person doing the work for the client. So that was one of the indicators we put in there. Again, we weren't sure how it would quite work, and we are just tracking that as we go for the first few months just to see how good a measure it is.

The whole report is meant to be read from the bottom. So we start down the bottom, and there are the first five KPIs we see. They are what we call operational excellence. The next three up from that are market growth ones, and then there is leadership at the top which is really the focus for stage three.

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