InetSoft Webinar: Reviewing Law Firm KPIs

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in February 2018 on the topic of "Applying Analytics to Improve Performance in Law Firms." The moderator is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

So we set off in to set up a workshop with four or five senior partners and the managing partner and the deputy managing partner. We reviewed all the alternative structures that were available a law firm like us, and we also reviewed all our different financial reports and all our different KPIs.

We workshopped them for probably two or three months. Most of that was because of structural issues of who could work with whom and what would work best. What we came down to was a group of 24, we call them, clusters. Each cluster is between six to 10 partners and the supporting lawyers and support staff, and we pointed cluster leaders to look after them, and we created five business line leaders for them to report to.

So that was the new management structure. And the second thing is that we went through all our KPIs, and we had probably 30 KPIs that we would report on regularly, and we got that down to a list of 10 KPIs that we thought would drive the performance of the firm and particularly improve the profitability of the firm.

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Mark: What was your thinking that drove you to want to cut down on the number of KPIs, Greg?

Ron: The main thing was, Mark, that we thought that was just too many, and that it was too much clutter, and I guess noise. And also, in our environment, typically, with lawyers, they would like more evidence or more proofs. So over the years, we built out just dozens of KPIs and then more and more detail to support that. So it got to be lots of reports, but we are trying to get it down to something simple and clear that they could have that we could measure and report, and they knew they would be accountable for it.

Mark: I would say that we have seen that here across a number of firms, as well. It does make sense to keep the number of KPIs down to a reasonable number. Ten is probably about as many as you would want to think for any given group. Different groups might have different KPIs, but certainly, the idea of not having too many resonates with what we have seen, as well.

Ron: Yes, that’s our plan, and certainly we haven’t taken out any other reports. We still have the other reports. So particular people might need a particular report. I can still see that, and certainly some people need that sort of transactional details. So it is still available to lawyers or the partners to go and look at. Now we have got the high level few KPIs reported on in our dashboards, and that’s driving the business. And we have still got the supporting reports that they can get right into the detail if that’s what they think they need to manage it.

Mark: So this was around July that you agreed on the smaller number of key performance indicators and had the cluster structure in place. What happened then?

Ron: Well, the good part of the story was that as we were developing the KPIs and getting down to the structure, which was roundabout May, our financial year ends in June, and that was the deadline to get the new structure and new KPIs in place for 1 July, the new financial year. In May, we just became aware that InetSoft was launching the tablet version of the InetSoft BI solution.

So I spoke to the InetSoft guys saying, can you help us with a prototype. We had built a bit of a mockup of what we would like to do and how to show the KPIs and the dashboard, and the InetSoft guys took that away for a couple of days, and they built up a proof of concept for us.

So what happened was we got to June, and we had a two-day workshop with about 30 of our partners. So it was a fairly high investment by our firm. We have got guys charging $1,000 an hour, and we had 30 of them in a room not supervising other lawyers, so it was a big investment to get them all there. And we launched the charts, the KPIs; we told them about the structure.

These were the guys that were going to be involved in that structure, and we would put them in to manage their different teams which we called clusters. And that was a two-day workshop. At the end of that, and I hadn’t told anyone that we had it, I was able to plug in an iPad and put it up on the projector, and none of them had seen it before.

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