Digital White Papers

39 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT » Select five key KPIs » Connect them to your business plan » Market the business plan and the KPIs as one, resulting in them becoming highly actionable, engrained in the firm vocabulary and, hence, directly affecting performance With big data and evolving analytics tools that help visualize, interpret and increasingly predict critical law firm business indicators, most law firms now have far more financial, client/maer, contact and file data available to them to leverage KPIs to manage their business. However, in line with the new law firm-client relationship, which emphasises collaboration and transparency, metrics now hiing the mainstream include "velocity of capture" related to time inventory measurement and legal technology proficiency assessment scores that address the cost-effectiveness of legal service delivery. These metrics can be used to gain a competitive advantage in business development and secure existing client relationships. Time Measurement: More Relevant Than Ever Properly measured metrics rely heavily on knowing your audience and understanding how they consume information. Pundits told us decades ago that timekeeping would be ancient history by now, but recording time is more critical than ever, regardless of billing arrangements, hourly rates or fixed fees. Firms involved with alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) are relying on modern timekeeping techniques and metrics to help them provide proper cost- value ratios and pricing intelligence. From a firm's perspective, the effective recording, registration and notification of time spent on client maers are at the heart of turning a great legal performance into a great business result. Time "lost" during that process, for various reasons, can make all the difference in terms of user and client technology confidence and, ultimately, profitability. Effective time recording is all about velocity, which means eliminating the lag in time between doing work and recording it, between recording it and submiing it internally, and before billing the client. The more firms can get rid of these lags, the faster they will get paid in full for completed work, justifying billings based on transparently accurate records. This is also important to general counsel, who are under pressure to ensure they are being correctly billed by legal advisers. They are now increasingly likely to demand access to individual lawyers' records. As one firm CIO commented: "Our focus on modern timekeeping techniques using consumer technologies has led us to realize more than a 40 percent increase in entry granularity, which has contributed to more timely and accurate client invoicing." Technology Proficient? Prove It! Beyond velocity metrics, which provide a good snapshot of timekeeping proficiency and translate this prowess to clients in the form of KPIs and billing transparency, another area firms can measure and manage performance and positively affect firm-client service is technology competency. Properly measured metrics rely heavily on knowing your audience and understanding how they consume information. Law Firm KPIs: Making the Leap from Inward- to Client-Facing

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