If you’ve heard of Lean management then you know its origins come from Toyota’s revolution of the manufacturing world. In the late ’80s and ’90s, Western manufacturing companies were getting crushed by their Japanese rivals, especially Toyota. At the time, it was no secret that the United States and Europe had lost their competitive edge. The pressure to regain their spots at the top was certainly on.

It was throughout this time that several improvement methodologies rose to existence. Those methodologies included: Total Quality Management, Theory of Constraints, Just-in-Time, and Six Sigma.

Now, fast forward to the emergence of two men by the names of Jim Womack and Dan Jones. They took the principles behind those methodologies and used their differences to create something new. What resulted was a monumental shift from copying specific practices to understanding the principles that made the whole system work.

That all sounds great right? But how do their Lean management principles translate into today’s market and how do you apply them to your firm?

Before we jump into that, let’s recap the seven types of waste that we discussed in Running a Lean Law Firm: How Eliminating Waste Can Drive Revenue. Remember, eliminating these waste types are fundamental to the ideology of Lean management.

Defects- This could range from filing errors, calculation errors, or even sending a client the wrong set of forms.

Over-Processing- Are you spending an excessive amount of time on a particular work item? If yes, you’re over-processing.

Motion- One word: ergonomics. If your work environment is not set up to allow you to move around efficiently and access what you need, you’re producing motion waste.

Waiting- It is what it sounds. Waiting breeds lost time and whether you’re waiting for an action item to be returned to you or you’re experiencing delays within other verticals of the firm, you’re waiting.

Inventory- Your matters or inactive files that have not been closed out or paid on.

Transportation- How much time do you estimate you waste driving to and from client meetings? Probably a lot. How much time do you end up wasting on excessive manual file movement? Also probably a lot.

Over-production- If one part of the firm produces more than others can handle, or if you’re doing too much of one thing, then you're over-producing.

Now that you’re refreshed, let’s jump in.

7 Principles of Today’s Lean

The claim could be made that one of the hardest challenges that businesses face today is the speed at which they must constantly be innovating to meet the pace of disruptive competition. Luckily, the Lean system that Womack and Jones ironed out can be applied to any business or any team because the applications of its principles were designed for exactly that.

The most common metaphor that is being used to describe Lean is fitness. It's the notion of building sustainable muscle and athletic stamina over merely cutting fat.

To start, it is true that if you’re overweight, the first thing you have to do is lose that weight. But once those pounds have been shed, you can’t stop there. Sure you can try to starve yourself to fitness, but inevitably the number on the scale will start to increase again. That, or you’ll just lose your mind in hunger. To become truly fit and sustain a healthy lifestyle, you have to create a system of healthy eating, a balanced workout program, a good night's sleep… you see where this is going. At the end of the day, you have to understand how your body works, what it needs, and how you can optimize your journey to becoming and staying fit. If you just look at each part of the process individually, you’ll be in for a rough ride.

Optimize the Whole

Depending on the size of your firm, you may be working with different partners and stakeholders across a variety of channels. Your goal, whether you’re a small or large firm, should be to create an ecosystem where all those parts could work both dependently as a collective whole and independently as standalone pieces. No one part should be more efficient than the rest.

The best and easiest way to create firm-wide optimization is by automating your processes with technology. From capabilities like centralizing your matter related information, Automatic Time Capture, and firm-wide calendar syncs, you’re going to be able to improve your efficiency and maximize profitability.

Lean law firms know that they must constantly review their services to ensure they’re bringing the most value to their clients. With automation, you will decrease human error and you will gain greater visibility into the operations of your business.

Eliminate Waste

We discussed the different waste types in Running a Lean Law Firm, but it is important to reiterate that although Lean isn’t only about cutting, it is important to be constantly improving.

Think of your waste as anything your clients wouldn’t willingly pay for if they saw it on their bill. Would they be okay with paying for the extra time it took for you to find documents in your file cabinet? Or an error made in the pre-bill approval process? Probably not. Your business fundamentally exists to serve your clients. If you do that poorly your business will fail.

Deliver Fast by Managing Flow

A finished matter is valuable for both you and your client. Until then, it isn’t.

In a world that expects results in an instant, it’s important to deliver those results as fast and seamlessly as possible.

Not only is extra work in progress (WIP) not valuable, it’s slowing you down. Your firm is a value stream that takes in raw materials of some sort, processes them through a series of steps, and delivers an end result. You may not own a physical factory, but you at least have a virtual one.

Somewhere along the line of that value stream is at least one bottleneck. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a fact. Some step in your process has a maximum capacity that’s lower than other stages before or after it. That constraint is the limiting factor for the delivery capability of your entire system. For example, if you’re a lobbyist in DC and have been hired by three large corporations who want to split your fee. What’re you going to do? Spend hours manually splitting each line item? No. Invest in a service that offers the capability of split billing and eBilling. Ultimately, the goal of a Lean firm is to balance the work in the system to the capacity of that constraint.

Build Quality Into the System

The goal of a Lean law firm is to create a system that is incapable of routine errors. In Japanese, this is described through two overlapping concepts: Poke Yoke and Autonomation. Poke Yoke is error proofing as you do new things and Autonomation is the automatic identification of errors in your operations. Both of these allow you to quickly intervene to solve specific problems instead of wasting your time monitoring for problems to happen. Make sense?

If you invest in legal software, your matters will be expedited, you will have more billable hours, and a reduction in human error throughout your pipeline. The bottom line is: your revenue will increase. End of story. Oh, and not to mention the continuous integration of code, automated unit and UI testing, and rigorous monitoring that are all hard at work so you can sleep peacefully at night.

Create Knowledge

A Lean law firm works to absorb knowledge about their field from the outside world. But knowledge, as it applies to innovation in your specific context, can’t be learned. It has to be created. You and your firm gain knowledge best by doing. And when you do something and fail, what happens? You learn. If you don't learn from your mistakes and figure out how to improve what went wrong, you’re wasting your time and your client's time too.

Much of what you learn will be tacit. You can and should invest in tools for documenting knowledge. But ultimately, your tools will function as a backstop for the experience of the rest of your team. If you can create policies and cadences that allow you to build upon what you’ve learned, you will retain high-quality employees and offer stability even through times of change.

Defer Commitment

This isn’t the greatest name for a principle, but don’t stop reading.

What this means is to keep your options open for as long as possible. By the time the decision needs to be made, there is a greater chance that you will know more about every possible option and every potential outcome. Essentially, you are providing yourself with the greatest opportunity to take the most optimal route. It also gives you time to explore different options in more depth and experiment with solutions that may help bring you to the best conclusion.

In areas of complexity or uncertainty, things are very likely to change. Give yourself the opportunity to make the best choice by deferring your commitment.

Respect People

One of the misconceptions of Lean is that it is mechanistic and impersonal. The painful realities that came with having to reduce waste through massive cost-cutting at the dawn of Lean in manufacturing didn't help with this misunderstanding.

But at its root, the waste that Lean truly aims at removing are the layers of overhead between the client and the people who are directly working on that product for the client. Lean firms recognize that the vast majority of the value generated in their organizations is by the people with their hands on the matter.

The best ideas for improving how you work and deliver value to customers come from the place where the work happens. This should go without saying but, treat people kindly, listen attentively, respond promptly, and most importantly, have empathy.

In Sum

The Challenge

Lean requires a culture change within the partners and the workforce. Because of this, leadership must be proactive in practicing and implementing the system. Support for the method must come from the top-down. If you’re investing in new legal software to begin this change, partner buy-in through training must be evident or adoption won’t happen. If you’re wondering how your firm can get the most out of your tech investment, check out this webinar.

The Opportunity

The benefits of adopting the Lean system are endless. Your firm may see dramatic reductions in cost through waste elimination, improvements in quality and consistency, and faster legal processes through the improvement of client services. And most importantly, your firm will see revenue-driving results, and a sustained culture of ongoing improvement and higher staff retention.

Training is one of the leading factors that creates the largest gap between buying and utilizing technology.

For many people, even the word “training” triggers a whole host of negative feelings from angst, stress, and even dread.

But training doesn’t have to be such a pain point. At its core, the key is to look at technology training as an investment rather than a cost. To foster a mindset that training is a piece of a holistic project versus an unavoidable burden.

Let’s take a look at 5 key questions that can help you get the most out of your tech investment.

1. What are the elements of an effective, successful training program?

Leadership Buy-In

First and foremost, the leaders in a firm need to be the advocates for the training. Partners and firm administrators know exactly what they want to achieve with the software, and that information should always travel from the top down. Overall success can largely be controlled by the expectations that upper management sets early on. Clearly defined goals and objectives will naturally promote a sense of direction and purpose for the training.

Micro-Learning

The hope of any training is that your staff retains what they learn. Studies today show that our retention rate for audio/visual material is about 20% in any given session. And if that training surpasses one hour, we retain less than half of the total information presented. Crazy, right? So, how do we combat this? You guessed it, with micro-learning. The key is to break your training into sessions. Never do everything all at once or you can guarantee that your staff's retention will be less than noteworthy. A common complaint is that training takes time away from completing day-to-day work. With micro-learning, you can not only prevent mind drifting, but also reduce the stress associated with not finishing work or meeting specific deadlines.

Relevance of Information

Break your training out by content and who it specifically pertains to. The best way to maximize engagement is to provide training material that is relevant to the work each person has to produce. Matching training content with staff roles will also encourage specific questions that will allow for deeper discussions on pointed topics within the training. Everyone’s work and expectations of producing that work are all different. Keeping that in mind throughout your training sessions will lead to a happier, more attentive team. Another key to utilizing relevant information in your training is to import your firm's own data into the system prior to the training. You can combat the foreign nature of a new software with the familiarity of known data. When people see information they know, they will not only grasp the concepts you’re teaching faster, but they will naturally be more inclined to learn.

Reinforce

Now that you have gotten through your initial steps of training, you may think the most important part is over, but don’t be fooled! Reinforcing that information is just as crucial to ensuring you are implementing it correctly, avoiding bad habits, and maximizing the potential of your investment! Simple steps like hosting a Q&A session once a week or providing a resource library with videos and guides will go a long way in making sure your team is less reactive if issues appear down the road. Most importantly, make it fun! Training and review sessions don’t have to be as awful as they sound. Bring food, have giveaways, create an atmosphere that makes it easier to learn the new material. If you are constantly reviewing best practices and streamlining your sessions to focus on specific questions, you will see an overall faster adoption time and run into less user error in the future.

The Positive Change chart above shows the emotional cycle of new users and the effect the technology adoption has on their mood as they go through the training process. Reinforcing relevant material will help reduce that drop between Uniformed Optimism and Informed Pessimism.

The Staff Emotional Cycle of Change chart gives a high-level view of the unavoidable stages a team will typically go through in the period of a new technology adoption. The pit between stages one and two can be minimized with effective training.

2. What are a few different types of training and which is the best for law firms?

Instructor-Led and Group Discussion

There are a variety of ways a firm could structure how they train their team. From hand’s on individual coaching, group lecturing, and instructor-led training, the style you choose is entirely up to your discretion. However, for law firms looking to adopt the best practice of a new cloud management system, instructor-led training and group discussion are the two most ideal types of training. Instructor-led is the most beneficial if you’re in a remote environment. If everyone is on Zoom together, it is important to have one leader who can direct the group, answer questions, and have a specific roadmap for that session. This style of training is also great for efficient micro-trainings on specialized material. Group discussion is also a preferred method of training because you will be able to break your team out into a variety of segments based on attendance size, relevant content, and personality of the group. Group discussions tend to boost participant engagement and foster an environment that is better suited for questions and suggestions.

Superuser

Superusers are composed of individuals from different departments within a firm who have the strongest grasp of the new software. The goal of these users is to be prepared and make sure that the objectives of each training session are being met and discussed. These superusers, whether they’re partner’s, firm admin’s, or tech-savvy paralegal’s, need to prioritize discussions around various decisions, procedures, and facilitate the overall configuration of each training. All training decisions will be made by this group of superusers prior to attorneys and other staff members getting involved. Superusers provide a unified voice to the rest of the team and offer immediate support for the staff on go live. Superusers are critical to helping keep the internal environment calm and minimize that emotional dip of informed pessimism.

The Timeline for a Training Roll-Out

Superusers should be involved in the training process from day one all the way up to go live. Typically, attorneys can be up and running with the software after an hour and a half of initial training, however, paralegals, secretaries and firm admins may need more time. Training time largely depends on whether utilization is streamlined or more manual, and how active leadership is in encouraging their staff to view training as more of a benefit than a hindrance.

3. How do I evaluate a trainer?

Successful adoption of a new technology will largely be determined by training. A great trainer is someone who is empathetic, patient, and can adjust their teaching methods to best suit the learning styles in the room. It is important that your trainer is someone who will go through all the ups and downs with you throughout the process. You can ask your technology vendor who will be training you and ask them to come to the office as soon as possible for initial discussions. Don’t be afraid to interview the trainer, make sure their skill set is at a level you need it to be, and make sure they understand the preferences and personalities of the people they are going to train. Some software vendors offer free training, but don’t let the word free deceive you. With free training, you will simply get what you get. You won’t have much control over when the trainer comes in, nor will you have much flexibility to select a different trainer if the one given to you doesn’t meet your needs. Getting the right trainer is half the battle in ensuring you’re getting the most out of your technology investment. If the person isn’t the right fit, it could lead to poor adoption of the material.

4. How do I evaluate the success and effectiveness of a training program?

This question largely depends on how deeply you want to analyze the training. You have to decide whether you’re going to do a general cost-benefit analysis or a long-detailed cost-benefit analysis to determine if the training is meeting your ROIs. Prior to the start of your training, ask yourself what you’re trying to measure. Are you looking for more billable hours? Trying to create an environment more appealing to younger attorneys? Attract new talent? These goals will help measure what you’re looking for. The easiest way to evaluate the training is by getting your staff involved. Create surveys, have pre and post-training assessments, and self-evaluations. Giving your staff a voice will not only decrease inefficiencies but will allow you to change strategies and pivot approaches when need be.

5. Why should I measure the effectiveness of my training program?

There are so many metrics to gauge performance, from marketing reports, KPI’s, and applications with metric dashboards at a glance, a firm can measure their performance on many levels, but what we aren’t measuring is how teams are really doing with their software. Could they be doing better? Are they using the most effective strategies? Are they streamlining the process? Additionally, users are now working remotely, so how can we measure performance in a way we’ve never had to measure it before? All of those answers will point to the areas where you need more training. If you can measure your learning objectives, you will be able to measure your efficiency metrics a little better. Everything is being broken down and analyzed these days and training shouldn’t be an exception. At the end of the day, if you can locate your efficiencies, you can increase your competitive advantage. For example, let's set a goal of increasing your billable hours. What do you do next? Well, you can invest in technology that gives you features like Automated Time Capture (ATC). ATC functions solely to help you bill more hours. But what if you don't know how to use the tool? Looks like you won't be reaching your goal.

If you have the tools but they are never used, you’re not going to gain the efficiency and you might as well not pay to have the tool in the first place.

Training is essential. Proper training that fits your firm's needs is crucial. You will get the most out of your technology investment by embracing training, tailoring it to your firm’s needs, and evaluating its overall effectiveness.

***

We want to thank Laura Kennedy, Co-Founder of Circle Management Group, for providing the Positive Change and the Staff Emotional Cycle of Change charts. Laura was also pivotal in conducting the webinar, How To Get the Most Out of Your Tech Investment, hosted alongside Centerbase's own, Rob Joyner, VP of Sales and Marketing. This blog was written based off their discussion on how proper training can make or break the successful adoption of any technology investment.

Laura has over thirty years of specialized technology training and change management experience. Her approach to training has helped thousands of professionals adopt new systems and processes.

The most common misconception of Lean or Lean management, is that you have to expeditiously cut costs, maintain a small staff size, or use as little resources as possible. Fortunately, none of that is the case.

Before Lean became the methodology that it is today, the initial concept was created by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer and manager at Toyota Motor Corporation. Following WWII, a group of American professors went to the Toyota factory in Japan to study what they were doing to rebuild their economy and industry. What resulted was a summarized theory of the Toyota production system that Taiichi invented. They then took these findings back to America and labeled it Lean.

So what is Lean? How can being a Lean law firm drive up your revenue or improve your overall efficiency? Simply stated, a Lean business is a business that maximizes value while minimizing waste. A Lean business model focuses on improving processes across the value stream in order to eliminate waste and deliver optimized value to the customer. This can help teams and organizations achieve their goals in smarter, more sustainable ways.

Lean is being used in the software industry, government organizations and healthcare, but it is not being used in the legal space. The most fundamental concept of operating under a Lean principle is being able to pinpoint and eliminate waste. For law firms, the key is to understand the difference between this waste and the value you bring to your clients. If your firm can understand what brings value to your clients versus what is waste, then you can eliminate that waste and focus on bringing more value.

Throughout the creation of Taiichi’s production system, he took into account seven kinds of waste and identified them as: overproduction, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, waiting, and transport. Now, within these waste types you have what are called bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are composed of constraints that cause points of congestion in a process that slow down your firm’s flow of income, case load, daily operations, etc. Typically, bottlenecks are caused by the activity that requires the longest time in operation. So for your firm, that could be billing, timekeeping or any essential task whose process is slowing down the rest of your legal supply chain in a given case flow.

So the question remains, how can you optimize your law firm? Let’s take a deeper look at these seven waste types and learn how your firm can minimize or eliminate them entirely to improve your practice and increase revenue.

 

Seven Types of Waste

 

Overproduction

This type of waste results from producing more than what your client or the specific matter is requiring at any point in time. Overproduction leads to work pile ups that prevent efficient law firm operations and time management. To determine if you’re falling victim to overproduction, ask yourself these four questions:

 

• Is one part of the firm producing more than others can handle?
• Is there a way to help supplement the slower workers to leverage that production?
• Are you doing too much of one thing past the point of it being productive?
• Does what you’re working on have to be done right now?

By answering these simple questions, you can pinpoint the areas in your firm that are overproducing and eliminate the bottleneck effects that are caused by unsynchronized work production.

 

Inventory (your matters) and Waiting

It is a common thought that more clients equal more money. Which in a sense is not wrong. However, the money spent on marketing campaigns and inbound leads to get those clients add up very quickly. More often than not, there are matters in progress that aren’t closed and collected on. In the process of waiting for these matters to close, you are losing time and income. In order to optimize your workflow, think about these three questions:

 

• Are you closing out cases promptly? (If not, is anyone at the firm holding up the process?)
• Are you collecting payments as promptly as possible?/Can your billing be faster?
• Are you making it seamless and for your clients to pay you?

Automation is the easiest and most reliable way to ensure these two waste types are being minimized. Allowing your clients to pay online and setting up recurring payments will ensure your billing process is optimized and the income you’re waiting on is collected as efficiently as possible. Before you spend money to increase your workflow, look at ways to improve your current process. This will not only save you money in the long run, but it will make you more too.

 

Transport and Motion

One of the biggest waste of resources for attorneys is the amount of time lost searching for documents or information. Using technology to quickly navigate through documents and instantly pull information is crucial. Eliminating the time and effort that’s wasted from manually sifting through file cabinets will speed up your operation and lead to an increase in revenue.

Adopting technology that will also allow you to go paperless will reduce these two waste factors. Simple steps like capitalizing on electronic signature programs like Docusign, emailing your bills, and meeting your clients virtually to reduce commute and travel time, will all aid in your production and efficiency. Even things as simple as setting up your workstation in a way that will allow you to quickly move around and find the information you need faster will contribute to eliminating transportation and motion waste.

 

Overprocessing

Overprocessing is the act of doing something in a more complex way or adding complexity to a process that could be much simpler. For example, it is no secret that billing is a burdensome process, but there are ways to make it easier. Let’s look at these four questions:

 

• Do you send out paper or electronic invoices?
• Are you sending them out in batches?
• How do you generate invoices?
• How do you create documents?

Utilizing technology to automate your billing and document creation will not only reduce human error, but save your time! Manually printing a bill, folding it into an envelope, addressing, and then mailing it is inefficient. Becoming a Lean law firm means losing those inefficiencies and adopting strategies that will maximize your time. That is Lean management!

 

Defects

Quality errors that cause defects invariably cost you far more than you’d expect. Every defective item requires rework or replacement, it wastes resources and materials, it creates paperwork, it can lead to lost clients. How often do you have to redo work? Have you ever gotten into trouble with a judge, client or your bar? Utilizing a system of automation will reduce these errors and produce more uniform results.

Now that we have covered the seven types of waste, how do you quantify your success? The Lean method won’t work its magic on your firm overnight. Do not expect to eliminate your waste all at once, instead follow a practice of continual improvement and watch the results follow.

 

Quantifying Success

The best way to eliminate waste is through automation. Most, if not all of the waste types can be solved with technology, but how else can you determine if the Lean method is right for your firm? Let’s look at a few terms to help quantify your efforts.

 

Cycle Time

Think of cycle time as being the total duration, from start to finish, of a process that’s defined by you and your clients. For law firms, cycle time is the amount of time it takes you to start and complete a matter. Kanban cards or platforms like Trello, allow you to track your matter progress and measure how long it takes you to move through the entire process. Invariably, shorter cycle times will lead to more revenue.

 

Throughput Rate

Throughput is used to measure your business process flow rate. This metric is important to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of your operation. For law firms, this could be the number of finished matters in a designated amount of time. So, how do you increase your throughput rate? By decreasing your cycle time. How do you decrease cycle time? By eliminating waste and adopting the Lean principles. Is it all making sense now?

 

Average Case Unit Value (ACUV)

ACUV is the average value in dollars brought to your firm from each matter “unit.” If you know on average, how much each case brings in, and how many cases you take and finish within a given amount of time, you will be able to predict what your yearly revenue will be. Just remember this formula: Income = Throughput Rate x ACUV. With all models, it is important to remember that there will be an element of simulation.

A lot has been covered here. But don’t worry! Your first step should be replacing your manual processes with automated ones. Although that may seem like a pain at first, the amount of time you will save and efficiencies you will create will help significantly increase your revenue. Eliminating the seven wastes is something that can be done through the implementation of Lean and the various Lean tools.

Remember, use the principles of Lean to identify the value you bring to your client first. Only then can you identify and remove the waste hindering your firm’s ability to drive revenue.

Want to learn more about how your firm can become Lean? Check out Principles of a Lean Law Firm: Creating a Framework to Optimize Your Business

 

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For one-third of law firms, a 2019 survey revealed recruitment is among management’s top challenges. There’s no doubt about it: the dip in specialized talents, as well as the pitfalls of education in recent years, are simply not meeting the needs of the modern firm. Certainly, attracting the next generation of legal talent has its fair share of demands, especially when it comes to new needs in technology.

Of course, you’re well aware of that. It’s a matter of what those changes are – and how to implement them smoothly and effectively – that becomes the bigger obstacle. Because not only do you need to hire that talent, you want to retain them to be your future leaders, too.

Here are some tips on how you can incentivize new talent to join your firm:

Align With Their Core Values

Most firms function similarly, so it won’t be day-to-day operations young talent look at when job hunting. Instead, these stars are searching for a place that aligns with their morals and values. These values, indicative of your company’s culture, are going to be your “secret sauce” to distinguish yourself from other firms.

Pinpointing your values originates in two key places: flexible work policies and sustainability efforts.

Flexibility

Millennials and younger generations prefer versatility in their workday. Gone are the days of eight hour workdays sitting in front of a computer pushing paper. The more effective technology available that takes manual, iterative work out of young lawyers’ days, the better. These workers want fulfilling careers that move the needle for clients – so balancing that desire with a flexible work schedule rewarding dedication with remote hours is sure to make your firm more appealing than others out there.

Many law firms are now offering flexible work policies, so if you haven’t yet, consider implementing work from home days as a perk to the job. It goes a long way with this new workforce, and you could get passed up for a firm that does have it.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Championing social and environmental causes outside of your firm is an important aspect the younger workforce holds in high esteem. Keep any notes of causes you support in your job descriptions and recruitment notes, and prospective employees are sure to take interest.

If you aren’t currently making monetary donations, consider a volunteer day at a local soup kitchen or a toy drive during the holidays to help your local communities. Current employees may have ideas on who to reach out to through Facebook groups or other Instagram pages. This is all part of the desire for emerging talent to make a difference bigger than themselves – and what better way to do that than through helping the environment and future generations?

Technological Efficiency

Gone are the days of legacy, on-premise dinosaur computers that aren’t mobile or user friendly. Like many industries, firms are going digital, and new lawyers are going to covet systems that work with their flexibility, not against it. The easier your systems are to learn and use, the more people will use technology to make their jobs better (your accounting department will also thank you when they regularly enter their billable hours and client matter notes).

Of course, nothing happens overnight, so if you are in the market for revamping your system, notify new lawyers about the process during recruitment and add their input is valued in order to bring in the best possible new upgrades to the firm. This new generation loves knowing their feedback is taken into account, and it makes them feel like they’re being part of a positive change.

Career Advancement and Mentorship

Offering non-monetary incentives during recruitment is crucial for young workers. In this Robert Half Legal survey, one in four (25 percent) of lawyers interviewed said that leadership or advancement opportunities are the most attractive incentive. Like most careers, lawyers will need to learn on the job, and learn how things work at your firm specifically. The best way to navigate the twists, turns, and mistakes and turn them into victories for your firm is to have top associates and talent guiding them.

Show your aspiring talent you will prioritize their ongoing growth, and you’ll have loyalty and commitment from them to work hard.

Continuing Education

Not everyone you’ll hire will be lawyers, but they’ll still need to know the requirements of law they’re working within. There’s been an uptick in one-year master’s programs offering Legal Studies, which helps prepare students for the business aspects of dealing with courts and law. This could be a useful incentive for employees.

Of course, take time to assess the needs of your current workforce first, but when you look to other positions, you could offer tuition reimbursement for a certain amount of tenure at your firm. Not only will this help with retention, it will demonstrate your commitment to their ongoing improvement and career excellence.

Competitive Salaries

While money is not the end all be all when it comes to hiring new talent, it certainly can get their attention. As stated in the aforementioned report, a competitive base salary can make a huge difference when looking to recruit top talent. Be sure when recruiting to offer salaries that meet and exceed the job market trends – this will help attract star players who have the potential to enrich your firm’s services.

This isn’t a one time thing, either – as salary trends are constantly changing, it directly affects employees’ feelings of worth about their jobs. When it comes to promotions and market level compensation, if you’re not adjusting based on their performance and worth, there’s a chance they’ll end up going somewhere else that will.

Find Top Talent and Keep Them

In order to survive through the digital age, you’re going to want talent that will drive your business and its clients forward. Since this educational gap doesn’t look to be filled in the near future, it’s up to you to create incentives and help bolster your incoming talent to be the very best.

We hope these tips helped you keep on top of recruiting top talent for your firm, and that you’re ready for the continued digitization of day-to-day processes.

Have questions on digital services for your firm’s matters? We’re here to help. Centerbase works with hundreds of law firms to improve processes and speed up the billing cycle while still keeping true to accuracy. Learn more by subscribing to our blog or contacting us today.

Much like supermarket fruits, there are many law management software options of all shapes and sizes out there – but to make the most of your staff’s efficiency, there are some basic functionalities needed to claim that highly coveted time back in everyone’s day. These integral features include: word processing, email, practice management tools, billing, accounting, and document management. For some of you, the first two on the list often live in the form of Microsoft Office or G-Suite. While these certainly have the potential for efficiency on their own, it’s important whatever software you choose has the capability to share information in real-time between programs.

Although integrating with existing apps is one option, you’ll reap the biggest rewards by consolidating your practice management, billing, and accounting software all in one place. Why? No incredible, life-altering reason – simply that it’s easier and more convenient this way. It’s a decision that requires careful consideration, since a software investment can be quite costly upfront, and individual “best of breed” solutions may seem more appealing when comparing them.

To help your decision, we’re going to explore the advantages to consolidating your legal technology:

Advantages to legal tech consolidation

1. Easier training and onboarding

One software platform to train employees on all their day-to-day duties simplifies onboarding for everyone. Depending on the work a staff member may do, having to train them with multiple interfaces and programs means more time until they’re up and running on their own without asking for help. With three separate programs, for example, that means three systems users will need to learn and navigate. Learning only one system saves time and empowers people to be more productive quicker.

2. One Access Point for logins

There’s no dancing around it: multiple programs are more difficult to manage. Along with training, providing access and logins to new employees can be a big pain when you have to do it three to five times across all your programs. This means not only giving them a user ID and password, but also setting up permissions on what they can and cannot see. For small to midsize firms, this can be laborious when people come and go – constantly removing access and ensuring your data is secure and only seen by those currently still in your firm. This difficulty increases when you have to adjust permission types for sensitive data.

Read our tips on how to begin using legal practice management software for a deeper dive on getting everyone working efficiently together with new software.

3. Data accuracy

Data accuracy is the biggest benefit to using one program for billing, accounting, and practice management. One-time entry for a client versus multiple minimizes the chances of human error. It’s happened before – entering information in your practice management system for client communication separately from your billing system. These differences, even if one number of an email address is mistyped, can cause problems later when you need to mail important correspondence or contact the client.

Those errors cost valuable time figuring out where the discrepancy lies. Even if these different systems claim to “communicate” with each other, temporary disconnects and ascertaining which software is prioritized or “wins” in information adds more complicated variables to the confusion.

4. One place for upgrades

Regardless whether you have on-premise or cloud software, it’s important to note that your firm is always responsible for scheduled diagnostics to ensure separate systems communicate properly. An update in one program may not be compatible with another program, leaving you with the difficult choices of having to disconnect and operate separately, not upgrade, or invest time with the vendors to find and address issues.

When working with multiple programs and an issue emerges, the onus is unfortunately on the firm to troubleshoot and determine the root cause. If it’s something between two programs, the firm will need to invest time and resources to work with the vendors, resulting in them pointing at each other if neither vendor accepts responsibility. While this is not ideal, it happens more often than we might like to think.

With a single program for billing, accounting, and practice management, you don’t have to worry about who’s responsible. There’s one place to contact for support and maintenance issues. This can save the firm time in troubleshooting and help bolster efficiency.

Those errors cost valuable time figuring out where the discrepancy lies. Even if these different systems claim to “communicate” with each other, temporary disconnects and ascertaining which software is prioritized or “wins” in information adds more complicated variables to the confusion.

5. Time tracking

A single system also makes it easier to track time. Whether you bill time or not, there are valuable insights in knowing where your staff spends most of their time on areas of improvement. That way, you can eliminate roadblocks and create an open dialogue that helps empower your staff to feel they have all the tools needed to help clients.

Plus, having one system to remind you in your calendar and automatically generate invoices for tasks creates less friction for accounting and record-keeping.

6. Accurate billing, every day

Have you ever generated a client bill and received a call saying “we paid that balance already last month?” That embarrassment can be caused by separate billing and accounting systems. When you have to record the payment in two places, it’s easy – almost inevitable, even – for something to be missed. Someone must siphon time from other money-making tasks to ensure everything is correct in both places.

When it comes to billing and accounting, these reconciliations include not only payments, but trust deposits, withdrawals from trust to outsiders, as well as the firm and expense disbursements. Given the critical nature of trust accounting makes this even more important.

Failure to bill clients for expense disbursements in a timely manner can have a significant impact on firm profitability, especially if the firm is paying the vendor before receipt of payment from the client. This impacts cash flow considerably over time. When disbursements must be entered in one system for billing and a separate system for general ledger accounting, the risks of missing something increase.

7. Remove the guesswork from reporting

When information is in one place reporting becomes simpler. If data is in multiple places you may have to export data from the programs and combine into a single report using something like Excel. This is additional time as well as adding the possibility of errors. And, if something is discovered as missing, you have to redo the reports.

A single source is always more efficient and accurate here.

Consolidating practice management software has its benefits

While you probably can’t find one program that does everything, there are benefits to consolidating where possible without losing functionality. Focus on your firm’s needs and consider your choices while keeping in mind the benefits of consolidating your legal tech stack. Software can be expensive – but the amount of time and peace of mind you’ll save can be well worth the investment if it fulfills all your needs, and updates with the needs of your business over time. 

If you're curious about what kind of practice management software your firm should pursue, check out our blog, 3 Types of Legal Practice Management Software to Consider for Your Law Firm.

For law firms, time is money, and there’s no time to waste on inefficient billing practices. But many law firms still rely on slow, tedious, paper-driven legal billing processes that hamstring their productivity and profitability. And many have yet to implement—or enforce—billing policies that would govern the creation and review of time entries and hours worked. Yet firms wonder why they can’t shrink their revenue capture cycle.

Inefficient legal billing practices create difficulties at every level of a law firm. For lawyers, every precious minute they spend tracking and recording their time is a minute they aren’t adding value through their legal work. This drives lawyers to take shortcuts, such as omitting explanatory details or using cryptic abbreviations, that lead to unclear bills. Those ambiguous notes, in turn, require further review and clarification and add more delays. Lawyers may not check to see whether their work matches client service agreements, and they may fail to specify proper billing codes. Those that cling to paper timesheets and bills often scrawl notes incoherently in the margin of invoices or pre-bills for their assistant or accounting team to decipher, contributing to confusion and inaccuracy. At the end of the month, the law firm’s administrative team and accounting department must deal with these headaches—and more—all under the time pressure of closing out the month.

Legal billing doesn’t have to be this hard. Here are our top tips for ways that you can start accelerating your law firm’s billing processes.

1. Require Timekeepers to Enter Their Own Time in a Digital Timekeeping System

While administrative staff should support lawyers and paralegals in entering their time, they should not have the primary responsibility for it. Timekeepers themselves are in the best position to describe and categorize their time worked.

2. Require Timekeepers to Enter Time Contemporaneously

Timekeepers often wait until the end of the month to enter their time. At that point, they either consult their own manual or electronic system (both of which require duplicative work), or they comb through the recesses of their brain to recall what matters they handled, what tasks they performed, when they performed them, and how long they spent. Even attorneys who rigorously keep their time while in the office often forget those good habits when they go to court or travel to meet with clients, leading to the end-of-month reconstruction process.

When lawyers enter their time daily, they more accurately capture the time they’ve billed—and they can prepare their bills more quickly. They’re also less likely to be late in submitting their bills for reconciliation, which keeps the billing process running on time. At a minimum, your firm should require its lawyers to enter their time weekly and provide additional incentives for lawyers who finalize their bills by the month’s end.

3. Make it Easy for Lawyers to Capture Time

Lawyers, particularly when working remotely, may not capture the full extent of their billable hours. Adopt billing software that automatically captures time spent on client calls, texts, emails, and documents, whether from mobile devices, email apps, and even Microsoft Word. For example, Centerbase automatically captures client phone calls and texts as billable time, leading to an average increase of six additional billable hours per attorney each month.

4. Standardize Narrative Guidelines

To ensure consistency between timekeepers, implement, and enforce guidelines that detail how lawyers should describe the tasks recorded. The more granular your requirements are, the more uniform your bills will be—and the faster they’ll process.

5. Train Timekeepers on Outside Counsel Guidelines

Outside counsel guidelines should help to standardize the firm’s billing practices, but not all firms ensure that the guidelines are disseminated and readily accessible to all timekeepers. Make sure all lawyers and paralegals have access to the most up-to-date versions of all guidelines. Send periodic reminders to counsel to improve consistency. If you have billing software, see whether you can use the guidelines to create rules that will alert timekeepers to potential violations at the point of time entry.

6. Adopt an Electronic Pre-Bill Process

Many law firms still rely on paper-based pre-bill review processes that are fraught with issues. For instance, these processes create bottlenecks anytime that multiple lawyers must review bills. A bill’s first draft is often rife with inaccuracies, such as incomplete or vague descriptions or missing details like task codes, meaning the bills must be returned to the timekeeper for revisions—further extending the billing cycle and adding to the lawyer’s non-billable workload. If these issues aren’t corrected, clients may refuse to pay and lose faith in the firm, leading to lower collections in the near term and a decline in overall revenue in the long term.

Paper processes afford little transparency into billing practices, particularly edits and writedowns. Furthermore, there’s no audit trail documenting who made changes or when changes were made, which may create challenges if clients later dispute the charges.

An electronic pre-bill process avoids the delays of circulating paper printouts of pre-bills, reduces the risk that documents will be lost, and eliminates the frustration of illegible handwritten adjustments. Billing software that allows online revisions also enables firms to see changes at a glance and track bill changes over time, avoiding writedowns on top of writedowns and allowing businesses to identify the source of changes in the future.

7. Streamline Your Approval Workflows

Billing software can automate the approval process, notifying the next person in the workflow when the prior reviewer’s work is complete. This process also gives lawyers and accounting immediate visibility into where bills may be stuck so they can rectify delays.

8. Measure Billing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Billing is no exception to the adage that what gets measured gets managed. Billing KPIs should go beyond basic metrics such as hours billed and realization rate. Consider adding metrics to improve timekeeping quality, such as the number of edits made during pre-bill review and the dollar value of those edits. A review of metrics would then suggest which timekeepers may require additional training on billing processes (and if you're curious about how to create a billing training program, check out How to Create a Legal Practice Management Software Training Program). Firms may also want to measure the time it takes to finalize a bill or other time-related measures that may identify logjams in their billing processes.

9. Establish a Set of Written Billing Policies and Enforce Them

Your firm should establish clear policies that govern billing for attorneys, administrative staff, and accounting. Outlining your billing processes will help you identify problems that you need to resolve and enforce your policies. It may be prudent to add a penalty for those who persistently violate your policies.

10. Follow Change Management Best Practices

Technology is the linchpin for effective change in billing efficiencies, but it cannot stand alone. New solutions must be reinforced with policies, training, and support. Timekeepers and administrative staff must learn how to use billing software and understand billing guidelines. Follow-up training will help to increase adoption and reduce mistakes.

Peruse any standard law school syllabus, and you’ll find a class – and a curriculum at large – that rewards individualism. An attorney’s entire career rides on their sole expertise to attract clients. With this in mind, from test scores to days in court, it’s no secret attorneys often prefer to practice separately. It’s easier, not to mention they don’t have to rely on someone else – and thoughts of “What if they steal my client?” can be put to bed.

But it’s lonely and risky at the top. We’re seeing the narrative is starting to change with the advent of successful collaboration and the value it’s bringing to law firms. (Who knew working together could pay off so well?)

Legal collaboration “involves specialists working together substantively to deliver a project rather than experts working separately in disciplinary silos.” (Source)

Distinguished Harvard Law School Fellow Heidi K. Gardner uncovers the empirical, often unlocked potential of collaboration: that “clients served by multiple practices are far more likely to retain their law firms for longer – even when the client-relationship partner leaves.” The higher margins brought on by attorneys working together are often ignored due to the inherent risks and lack of competency trust. After all, as we mentioned before, attorneys are led to their profession on the efficacy of their own work; their own test scores; their own intellect. It’s far easier to trust yourself than another associate in an area of law you’re not well-versed. And what if they take your client?

On a surface level, matter collaboration may not seem palatable to risk-averse firms, but the long-term payoff reaps considerable rewards for attorneys by helping them gain a wider breadth of experience and higher payment margins – often by hundreds per hour in a few short years.

So let’s demystify the stigmas around collaboration and discuss how you can take actionable steps toward adoption of its practices in your firm: