InetSoft Webinar: Attorney Team Scorecard

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in February 2014on the topic of "Applying Analytics to Improve Performance in Law Firms" The moderator is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Ron: Yes. From looking at this attorney team scorecard, you can see where the problem area is. You can see what kind of work they’ve been doing, and these other reports provide the supporting detail. For instance, I can see the issue is these five lawyers are not productive enough, and we have get them busy. And here’s what they’ve been working on or haven’t been working on.

Similarly, if you click on staff margins, click just there. That’s the percentage margin. Again, you can filter it for just senior associate lawyers. Thirty-four percent is the benchmark. This one attorney is getting 32%. So, he’s nearly gotten to the 34% benchmark. This is one of the main measures that we particularly focus on.

In terms of what’s driving that business performance metric, sometimes it’ll be the new people. Sometimes they’ve been in training mode. Another thing that’s been good for us, too, is to learn from those high achieving people at the top of the tree there. They’ve actually been saying, well, let’s do something. That’s outstanding to see a 57, 56% margin.

Consultant Performance Dashboard  

Management says, let’s makes sure we reward those guys. We’ve been reviewing them with the managing partner. And let’s learn from them. So, we said, we ask them to volunteer to share what’s working for them. And even underperforming teams will reach out to the overperforming ones and give those guys a call. They say, I’m going to have a coffee with them.

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We’re trying to focus on the end goal of improving overall firm performance. Reward recognitions are part of that strategy. But to get a call from the managing partner probably freaks them out to begin with. But that’s been dangerous not to do that. But the whole reporting mechanism has started to become quite visible and quite easy to use.

It can be tough to improve margin. There’s a opportunity for them to get some 25 clients per attorney, on average. So, they can fix the margin straightaway through the lawyers’ client management. At first you don’t know if it’s a chargeable hours issues or a billing recovery issue. You need to do further analysis on it. But you know whether you need to look into it or not. It’s the same with working capital.

Mark: So, this is your cluster performance report. Now what is the next section of the scorecard here?

Ron: We’ve modified that report section actually just recently. This is focused on client’s KPI, which is a stage two focus. Let’s go back to staff margin there, Mark. We can say the 25%, that puts me in the right in the bottom third. Those little colored lines are showing 34% is the goal to get to stage one.

What we’re trying to do with these histograms is to the get the manager s cluster one to to say, well, here we are here. We’re not that much different to the guys in cluster 19, and they are doing well on their staff margin. So, what we would encourage them to do is go and have a bit of a chat with the guys in cluster 19, and see why their margins are better. We know what they’re doing well to get up there, and so by learning from the high achievers, the lower ones can start to close the gap.

Mark: The idea is to benchmark against people, yes, absolutely.

Ron: There is a lot of learning and sharing and saying, well, those guys are pretty good, what can we copy from them. Now if we clicked on working capital, which is another focus for this cluster, you see they are fourth from the bottom. You do the same kind of thing. You start to look at some of those teams in there, other clusters at the top end of the scorecard, and have a chat with them about how they are getting their billing done promptly or how they collecting from their clients.

They’re getting paid promptly. These are the kind of things we try. And there’s another good performance driver at work in a major law firm. They’re competitive people. The bright ones are used to being number one. And so to see their their team down fourth from the bottom is a motivator, all by itself.

In fact, I was in a meeting just last week where they said oh, that numbers in the red. If you go back to the main page of the report you can see it. There are some of the deficits that are bracketed in red. And they said oh, we don’t want to be in the red. See they’re in the red with their working capital with a minus 28.

They are in the red with their staff margin, and it was interesting that they’d come up that expression, nobody wants to be in the red. I had a talk with them myself. They were doing exactly what we hoped they’d do. It’s been really interesting to see the uptake of the performance dashboard, and just hearing those conversations has been interesting.


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