Resource & Capacity Planning for Lawyers – Herding Cats??

I just finished a small job for a 25 lawyer law firm. The problem the managing partner had was that his team were always overloaded and requesting more staff to handle the excess workload. You would normally think of this as a growth opportunity but unfortunately the fees billed at the end of the month didn’t reflect this overload. There are lots of potential implications here but without any information to base decisions upon it was difficult to isolate what the issue is.

The firm had started to formalise its management procedures and had recently instituted a weekly task list for lawyers that required tasks to be prioritised and reviewed by their supervisor. They had looked at a number of software systems to collate this information (or alternatively define the planning process) ranging from very expensive to very basic. In fact, none of them really fitted the bill so there is a little bit of a market opportunity here. The expensive ones were a massive overkill or addressed a different problem. The cheaper ones had approaches that didn’t really work for a law firm and required the use of a different and non-integrated timesheet. Then again, maybe there are other reasons that there is no simple solution.

In the end I built them a “mini-system” in an Excel spreadsheet. It maps out the weeks going forward for all staff and the lawyer is now required to estimate the effort required on their task list as well. We then categorised the priority to be either “must be to be done this week” or “could be done later than this week”.

All the estimated hours from the task lists are then entered by the receptionist into the spreadsheet based upon priorities, just the total hours though. Future leave, booked CLE commitments and seminars are also entered into the spreadsheet for the week that they were to occur. This process was already in place with the firm’s receptionist in terms of updating the absentee calendar so it was a simple step to also update the resource planning spreadsheet.

The “report” aspect of the tool then applies agreed standards on non-chargeable business development and management effort to map out planned utilisations based upon available time. It also looks after non-full time employees with lesser capacity for the week. Nothing too complicated, just calculating the capacity and highlighting in red when a week exceeds 100% and orange if it exceeds 80%.

The spreadsheet is then available on line in read only mode for all staff and is reviewed at the weekly management meeting. The idea is that the team can quickly see which lawyers are over capacity and which are under capacity. They can then look to use people that have available time for the week on tasks rather than having some people super busy and others idle, balancing the load so to speak. A snapshot of some of the report is below.

Now before all you systems guys out there say “this should be a software application to ensure data integrity and validations and ease of entry”, I know it should. The fact of the matter is that the firm didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this process and I fully agree with that stance. It was difficult to work out how well the process would work and what value would be obtained hence the goal was to keep the investment low until we learnt a bit more about what was possible. Basically, the above took a bit over two days of consulting effort.

But how good would it be to have a distributed entry approach with the tasks stored in a database and linked to the actual matters. Information could be rolled forward, compared to actuals and collated in a whole range of different ways for management information. Imagine also assisting the planning process by examining the lawyers Outlook calendar to capture future commitments.

Now the process has been in place for a month or so, what has been learnt? The first challenge has been to get the lawyers to think about tasks more from a time management perspective than the professional work aspect.

Prioritising work is an issue. We have continually had lawyers reporting on their task lists that they have 60, 70 and 80 hours of work that had to be completed in the week. What we haven’t seen though is super stressed staff as a result of this workload nor real issues with customer service because the tasks haven’t been done on time. We are hoping that as time passes the lawyers, after seeing the feedback from their numbers in the report, will be become more disciplined as to how to prioritise.

Estimating work is an issue. Basically, the system needs a number of hours, not a range. What we have ended up doing is taking the midpoint of the information provided but when you see a range of 8-60 hours you worry that a greater breakdown of the actual task is required. Of course, tasks can have different possibilities of resolution so estimating can be difficult. Once more, we are hopeful that as the tool is used these things will work themselves out. In the end, however, it is the aggregation of data that is important not the individual items so the variations should come out in the wash.

The interesting thing that has happened since implementation has been the introduction of another category for “potential future work” for a bit of a longer range forecasting ie. the next 2 to 3 months. This is not future new clients from business development activity but work that is reasonably likely to occur from existing matters. This has allowed the management team to decide on hiring people in one of the practice areas based upon real information rather than a feel. The first small sign that the processes are maturing.

Automating Client Reports

We just finished an interesting project with an Elite 3E customer. It was building on work we had done with their Keystone database but interesting nevertheless.

The business requirement is that the firm has a number of clients that regularly want information about their matters in electronic format, most typically Excel. The information varies from client to client, either in content, layout or sort sequence. What they did previous to our involvement was highly manual, employing the equivalent of a person just to manually create the reports.

To address this we developed a program that allows them to register a report for a client. The first step is to give it a report name, some grouping and filtering information, column sequencing, report headings, the file format to be created (Word, PDF, Excel) and then the email address of who it is to be delivered to.  The next step is to pick the columns of information to be included on the report by ticking check boxes.

Once the report is registered, it can be set up to run every day, week, month, quarter etc… for a particular range or period of time. The user runs the report production program, selecting which schedule to run. The program then automatically requests SQLServer Reporting Services to generate generic content and Excel macros to format and customise the layout for each client..

As it turns out, they typically email to the partner/secretary responsible for the client first to check the data quality rather than email the client direct. The document is reviewed first and then forwarded to the customer. One manual step but at least people aren’t involved in the monotonous task of extracting and formatting the data each month now!

The net result from the firm’s view point is that the process is significantly less labour intensive and setting up a new report is simply adding a line in a program we have created. The number of reports produced like this now for clients is well over 50 and, because it is all automated, the costs involved have diminished considerably.

Inprotech: Emailing One Off Statements (and reports in general)

Ever been in the situation where you are chasing debt and the customer requests a copy of the invoice or statement. Rather than re-print them, scan them or mail them, why not e-mail directly from Inprotech.

With statements this is relatively straight forward. Release 4 includes the ability to create PDF files on the majority of print functions. To e-mail a statement:

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the PDF file option and click the Email Report option.
3. If the e-mail address of the person/organisation that you want to send to is recorded in Inprotech complete the name in the Email To field. This will cause the system to extract the e-mail address from Inprotech and use it to the construct the e-mail. If it is not, leave this field blank.
4. Select the Print button and an e-mail with the statement attached is created. If the e-mail address can be found within Inprotech it will be used to create the e-mail otherwise the e-mail address will be left bank. In this instance enter the e-mail address from your contact list or simply type it in.
5. Send the e-mail!!

As a note, this functionality is available on virtually all print dialogs in the system.

Prior to release 4 the only file format that you could send to a customer in any sort of readable manner was RTF and if you follow the above using the Rich Text Format File option then the process is exactly the same.

If you are not comfortable with this approach another way to create a PDF version of the statement and e-mail it is as follows. Unfortunately it is a bit more convoluted (and hence the potential to go wrong is higher) but still better than a manual process.

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the Print Set Up button.
3. Select the Inpro Document Converter printer and OK.
4. Select the Print button. The document will be created as a PDF, save the file to your desktop.
5. Double click on this document to open it with Acrobat reader. Selected File and Attach to E-mail from the menu in Acrobat, this will create an e-mail and attach the file to it.
6. Complete the e-mail address and send the e-mail.

Unfortunately invoices are another story so I'll cover that in another article.

Doing Business in 2009 part 1

Welcome to the new year. I trust everyone had an excellent Xmas and holiday season, I certainly did. Apologies for the delay in getting a new article published but it has been hard to get back into a work mindset after a nice and lengthy holiday!!

2009 certainly promises to be an challenging year from a business viewpoint. In fact, the financial crisis is nothing like I have seen in my life time and I suspect this is the case for the majority of people. Governments reaction to all this with the traditional Keynesian response of pushing public funds into the private sector to stimulate demand, using both monetary policy and budget deficits, but does this economic theory hold true today? For myself, I could never have imagined a position where the entire car industry in the US could have self destructed (and where it still may) and most commentators are saying that it will get worse before it gets better.

The legal profession, and IP law firms in particular, have always been very recession resilient. The nature of the work changes but the volume and the margin remain. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case this time around.

In any case, the market will turn around at some stage in the future and growth will return, if for no other reason than we keep populating the planet. Of course, the $64 million question is how long it will take but, once again, most commentators can’t see this happening for the next 12 months at the earliest.

So what should a firm be doing in this uncertain environment? My general view is that this year is a great opportunity to be preparing the business for when the growth returns, focusing on operational efficiency, business development and optimizing investments already made.

At this point I'll take a caveat and skip the basic financial stuff where I think you need to be very, very confident to be extending any debt facilities and leave that for another forum. Equally, major investment needs to have a quick return guaranteed. Significant investment that has a return in 1, 2 or 3 years time would need to be considered very carefully.

So how can Inprotech help?

Operational efficiency is the area that I would be focusing on first. I’ll write a future article about how the product can help with business development and marketing.

The product itself has been designed with excellent automation facilities that can both lower the cost of a performing a transaction while improving quality. Look at reviewing the workflow and processes around your higher volume transactions. For example, if a major part of your work is filing locally or PCT national phase entry, look at fine tuning these processes. When was the last time these workflows were looked at? Are all the steps still necessary, can they be deleted or consolidated? Removing 1, 2 or 3 steps in a highly used process can release a lot of clerical and/or professional time with affecting margin.

Do you do a lot of European Patent, CTM or Madrid applications? Have you made effective use of the automatic copy facility for creating national phase or related removal/opposition cases?

Then the renewals process. Can this be improved and streamlined? For foreign renewals can you make use of the fees & charges module to automatically calculate and manage estimated charges for reminder letters (even if you are not using the Billing module – I must write an article on this)? Is the reminder letter process efficient and effective? Do you, for example, make use of the multi case reminder letter approach and bulk instructions receipt for those clients that require reminding in this fashion or is there an expensive manual process in place that manages this? Are you using standing instructions to handle auto renew processing and differing reminder letter numbers and frequency for those clients that request processes outside of the norm? Can the substitute letter functionality be used for those clients that require correspondence in a different format?

Overall, the system has a lot of power in this area and renewals is one “department” that should be highly automated from both a productivity and risk management perspective.

Next area to look at are letter templates. A simple SQL query on the database can return the list of letters produced over the last 12 months so that you can isolate the letters most used. Take the top 10 or 20 or whatever is appropriate. Is there any manual intervention involved to produce the final version of these letters that could be removed by a slight modification to the file take on or data capture process thereby allowing data to be captured and hence included in the letter automatically rather than manually. A simple change to a highly used document template could bring high return at low cost.

Please note that I am not suggesting a review of all templates, just the ones that are highly used. Remember the Pareto 80/20 rule. 80% of the effort is generated by 20% of the tasks. Focus on this 20%.

A similar thing should be done with letter templates that are created on an ad hoc basis through the PassThru process. Simple changes to highly used letters could bring big return. Question why things are done in a certain way. Just because they have always been done that way doesn’t mean that it still needs to be.

Another thing to consider is maybe using the Fees List program for lodgement processing if you have a spreadsheet, Word-based or manual process. This program can be used standalone without the need to use the charge generation. Simply set up the Fee Types and create the lodgement list with the program by selecting the case and the lodgement type. The integration will bring in the relevant case details without the need for re-typing and potential errors. If you want to go a bit more advanced the system can be set up to calculate the official fee but I am not sure that the benefits in doing this outweigh the set up effort so I would probably suggest just entering the amount manually.

I would also be looking at the name & address management process. Take on of new clients is often an area that causes issues and improvements and tightening of control here can bring big productivity gains right through the process. Ask yourself whether control should be centralized? Can the name copy facility be used to assist with getting some of the base data right? Have the country defaults been set up appropriately? Have you implemented audit trails so that issues can be tracked down and investigated to iron out issues as they occur?

Are the facilities for credit control being used effectively? If you are not using Billing and the Accounts modules then the Restrictions functionality is the main assistant here but the Correspondence and Billing Instructions fields could be used to warning on outstanding debt. Of course you would have to weigh up the effort required to keep this up to date but, depending upon your accounts module, maybe some simple SQL could be built to make this a process that doesn’t require that much manual intervention.

If you have Billing maybe putting a budget against a case and monitoring against it can be of assistance in managing your financial exposure to clients. You can also use Billing to collect, use and monitor prepaid funds even if you don’t have Accounts Receivable. If you are using Accounts Receivable are you making use of credit limit monitoring?

If you have Billing and are not using Fees & Charges then you can get big benefits. I know the set up is counter intuitive and there can be a bit of maintenance involved but if you can work through this and understand the concepts there is a lot of power there that can lead to productivity and control improvements. Once more I would look at initially implementing with the high transaction load areas such as renewals, filing applications, examination requests and for areas that you suspect fees are slipping through the cracks with the manual process.

Of course, I am probably preaching to the converted here but hopefully there may be one or two areas to explore. It always difficult to be generic with these types of things. When you know the specifics of customer it is much easier!!

In any case, the goal should be to fine tune, to improve, to build greater productivity & quality that means your systems are as effective as possible, both for the short term return and to be ready for growth when it returns.