Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21725
lead to more efficient staffing on matters, improve responsiveness and ensure quality work. CREATING ALTERNATIVE FEE ARRANGEMENTS Before law firms can confidently offer alternative fee arrangements, they first have to understand how work is done. Firms should have a thorough understanding of the component parts that go into handling a particular transaction or type of litigation. By analyzing what has to be done (and what does not have to be done), how it is done, who is doing it and how long it takes, firms can get a clearer picture of their process and associated costs. Armed with that knowledge, it becomes possible to create fixed-fee or task-based billing arrangements with greater accuracy. Today, to collect metrics about how work is done, firms typically look to fee earners’ time entries, which often do not contain enough detail to track back to a specific task or component of a case. Using time entries to understand the time spent on a prior art search or e-discovery phase for a single matter can be difficult. It is virtually impossible to collect and analyze that data across a large sample of matters in a meaningful way. But without this kind of analysis, fixed-fee arrangements or task-based billing structures tend to be guesswork or based on anecdotal evidence, which exposes firms to a greater risk of crafting unprofitable fee arrangements. IMPROVING BUSINESS-PROCESS AWARENESS Case management tools should be able to assist firms in their effort to understand, manage and improve the way legal teams work. By making case management tools business-process aware, they can help guide the execution of a case, provide project management capabilities and build a history of performance data. A business-process aware case management solution knows the ideal steps, as defined by the practice, required to complete a type of case; it can automatically add or remove steps based on properties of the case; it is aware of the expected duration of each component of the case; and it is flexible enough to allow members of the legal team to initiate additional tasks as needed. Case management tools that manage and track the progress of a case can also record and report on process metrics. By being able to review a history of similar cases, firms can glean statistics such as the average time to complete a particular deliverable or type of transaction. In this way, firms can gain insight into where time is being spent on various activities and thereby reduce cycle times by eliminating valueless tasks or more efficiently accomplishing other tasks. Gaining information about how work is executed presents opportunities to staff matters more efficiently and reduce costs. Firms can analyze individual cases after they have closed to compare actual time and costs to initial estimates. This look into past performance allows firms to hone their cost and profitability estimates on future proposals. DELIVERING A MESSAGE OF VALUE TO CLIENTS For firms that have already invested in process management and improvement initiatives, case management solutions can leverage that www.iltanet.org ILTA’s Greatest Hits 35