Digital White Papers

24 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER POTPOURRI Using Analytics To Boost Aorney Productivity The billable hour is also opaque to partners. Is Associate A, who billed 200 more hours than Associate B, a beer or harder worker? B might be more efficient than A and take less time to produce the same quality of work. By measuring aorney performance in terms of billable hours, firms punish efficiency: over the course of a year, B may have worked on more maers and produced more documents than A, but she could be deemed less effective because she billed fewer hours. Better Measurement = Better Metrics For best practices to evolve, firms need more granular metrics to evaluate aorney performance. Rather than the billable hour, enigmatic in terms of actual productivity, use the following four metrics: » Response times to email » Rate of work turned in on time » Rate of work that is correct the first time » Hours spent per assignment measured against other aorneys Some of these factors currently find their way into performance reviews, but in a manner based on partners' subjective impressions rather than objective data. When evaluation time comes around, partners try to identify associates' weaknesses and areas where they could improve. The problem with this approach is twofold: Even if partners try to be meticulously fair to each associate, their perceptions inevitably come from anecdotes that might not reflect the associate's overall performance and are colored by the partners' own unconscious biases. 1 If a problem recurs oen enough to be noteworthy at a performance evaluation, it has already had an associated financial cost for the firm. Also, being called to account for and correct a behavior that has been ongoing might affect the associate's morale and vision of whether he or she can continue at the firm. This is where network-connected soware comes in. Almost everything aorneys do with soware generates metadata, from email timestamps to research website logs to document version control. All this soware is connected through the firm's intranet or the cloud, which allows the firm to gather and compile metadata continuously without requiring aorneys to do anything outside their normal routines. Response Times to Email An associate's email responsiveness is simple to compile and analyze, and firms already have all the data needed siing on their email servers, waiting to be collected. Aorneys conduct most of their communications via email. The volume of email messages each aorney sends and receives per day is large enough to generate a meaningful dataset over time, so firms can use email metadata to get a good sense of whether their aorneys are communicating effectively. Knowing how quickly each associate responds to email messages from partners, clients and other associates gives partners insight into whether individual aorneys and the office as a whole are functioning properly. Responding to email in a timely fashion is a big part of the job. Partners giving out new assignments or following up on existing ones can work much more efficiently when they receive immediate responses from associates. 2 Even if partners try to be meticulously fair to each associate, their perceptions inevitably come from anecdotes that might not reflect the associate's overall performance.

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