Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/83718
ILTA Financial Survey Quick Adoption Microsoft's Reporting Services is built into Microsoft SQL Server and is essentially free to firms that use SQL Server. Reporting Services enables us to easily customize the information we deliver to our attorneys and clients to the specifics of the engagement and offers an easy method to deliver the information directly to their Outlook Inbox. Adoption of this approach by our lawyers was immediate as opposed to the slower acceptance rate of our Web- based platforms. The report-driven email messages deliver the specific information they need to know rather than expecting the lawyers to decipher what they need from our financial dashboard or Elite's WebView product. We now send out over 300 email messages each day with different reports and status information. As a result of the increased transparency and immediate access to status, we have seen the profitability of the alternative fee engagements we help manage significantly improve over the engagements that elect to not receive this information. The Right Solution for Us Although there are a number of products entering the market that attempt to provide end-to-end solutions for pricing and monitoring alternative fee arrangements (or hourly budgeted work), we already had a sophisticated financial dashboard in place complete with pricing, budgeting and monitoring tools, and we did not see a need to purchase overlapping products. Our experience is that, although some lawyers will use Web applications to budget and estimate prices, most do not have — or take — the time to go back to the applications to monitor status and progress against ILTA White Paper 37