I spent a good bit of time in the Juris exhibit booth during last week’s ALA conference in Las Vegas. Just about every fourth attendee was an administrator from a law firm using Juris software. One of those attendees had read some of my posts dealing with realization and the benefits of faster billing and better collection efforts. They wanted to see something that could help them in their effort to encourage improved billing attorney performance in these areas. The Juris team member they were talking with used the company’s new Active Information application to create the report shown below.

The report not only gives the viewer a quick snapshot of unbilled and billed-but-uncollected fees, but it shows the average days that each billing attorney is taking to bill and then collect from their clients.

Now here is the important part: all the viewer has to do is highlight and click on a field in the report to see the details. Click on WIP over 90 days and view the clients, then matters, and then the transactions that represent those unbilled items. Likewise, click on A/R and view the bills that comprise the billed-but-uncollected balance.

It is one thing to get a snapshot report like the one above. But converting that into actionable information is a different story. A report can show you a problem, but you can’t do anything about it unless you can get at details to identify the reason for the problem. That is what makes Active Information so valuable. The information is actionable. You can spot a problem and then drill down to its source so you can do something about it.

Why should firm leaders have to waste billable time digging through traditional reports that just tell them what has already happened when they can start getting targeted actionable information in time to change the outcome? If you are not a Juris law firm, talk to your software vendor to find out if they have anything with similar capabilities. If not, you might check into Handshake Software. Handshake, a Juris Alliance Partner, has similar capabilities and works with both Juris and non-Juris software.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center at 877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

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Yesterday I received a pre-release briefing on the latest addition to the Juris suite of law firm software, Juris Active information.  While I avoid writing blog posts that are, or appear to be, a commercial, there are times when the benefits of new capabilities are just too important not to share with morepartnerincome readers.  

Juris, Inc. has been revolutionizing how business and competitive information is presented and used in the law firm.  The addition of Active Information to the Juris software suite is another example of the performance edge Juris law firms have over their peers.  What Juris has been doing through its product development program is moving the event horizon for law firm leaders to the present and slightly over the edge into the future.  Juris Active Information targets actionable and navigable information to the individual in the firm to whom it is relevant and then can provide it in an instantly digestible form.

What do I mean by “event horizon”?  Event horizon is a boundary in space/time beyond which events cannot be observed.  Managing Partners and other law firm leaders have been at a disadvantage for years because their information systems only told them about events occurring well into the past.  In other words, information available to them is out-of-date.  It is about events that have already occurred.  It is too late to take any action to change the outcomes of events that have already occurred.  

If we draw a vertical line to represent the present in a law firm, the future would be to the left of that line and the past to the right.  See the image below:

Over the years law firm leaders have had little or no information about the present or into the future.  Traditional reports are often available only weeks, sometimes months, after the period on which they are reporting.  Even if they were immediately available, they are still just historic documents—looking only backward into the past.  They give you no opportunity to change the present—your current situation.

What is needed to guide a law firm to a targeted goal is information that is:

• Timely

• Relevant

• Accurate

• Comprehensive, and

• Navigable

Most law firm systems provide accurate and comprehensive information but come up short when it comes to timely.  The less timely it is, the less relevant or useable it is.  And unfortunately the available information is usually not navigable.  It is static or inert-numbers and text printed on paper or displayed on a computer screen.  You can’t navigate through the information to more detail or to other related information.  The typical information provided is not actionable without the additional work of information gathering and analysis.  Rather than information that is instantly digestible and actionable, the individual is left to analyze information to isolate that which is relevant and then to determine if action is required.  All of this is another way of saying “information, information everywhere and nothing to quench my thirst for knowledge.”  The typical law firm event horizon is shown below:

Juris has been moving the event horizon to the present and slightly over the edge into the future.  It is targeting actionable and navigable information to the individual in the firm to whom it is relevant and providing it, wherever possible, in an instantly digestible from.  The information is dynamic versus static and inert.  It can be manipulated, extracted, rearranged and navigated through to more details.

Juris is revolutionizing how business and competitive information is presented and used in the law firm.

• Juris anywhere/anytime .NET technology tracks firm-wide client services (including activity normally beyond the event horizon in that it has not yet been submitted to the firm’s accounting department) to provide a real time view of fee earner activity.

• Juris dashboard technology provides working attorneys and law firm leaders with situational awareness over their area of responsibility.

• Active Information targets and delivers actionable information to the person for whom it is relevant—information that is both tailored to the individual’s need and that is timely, immediate, and navigable with drill down capability.

• Juris Insight automatically collects and tracks the law firm’s performance metrics against its peer group providing firm leaders competitive information and benchmarks for achieving the firm's targeted goals for the future.

And there is more on the way—including advanced budgeting and forecasting to take the present budgeting capabilities of Juris to an entirely new level for law firm management.

By moving the event horizon, Juris Law firms benefit from income increasing capabilities and resources unavailable elsewhere.  While others are digging through reports to find out what happened, Juris dashboards communicate instantly digestible information—current to the moment and in time to change the outcome.  While others are analyzing last year’s surveys, Juris law firms can view the law firm’s performance against current information for its peer group—because measurement improves performance.

The Juris team is unapologetic about the motivation behind its new product development activities.  It is a commitment to increase the income and wealth of law firm owners, the equity partners.  Doing that in a way that benefits all, clients and the firm’s non-partner employees, is accomplished by “Doing the right things and doing them right.”  One of the ways Juris, Inc. has been helping Juris clients do that is by moving the “event horizon”.  

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc.  For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

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I ran into two situations last week that illustrate why you should not settle for “no” when asking “Why can’t I?” questions about your law firm’s enterprise system. If the software is not working the way you think it should or not giving you what you want, do not accept an unsatisfactory answer from the firm’s staff. Insist that the staff member go to the software vendor and that they explain to the vendor what you want and why—what you are trying to accomplish. If the answer is still unsatisfactory, you should personally go directly to the software vendor. If you have to, go to the top—the COO or CEO. What will surprise you is that the right answer is almost always “Yes!”

When it comes to software, most of us only use a small portion of the product’s capability, and that goes for individual attorney use of the enterprise business software for the law firm. Training is front-loaded—it occurs when law firms first install systems. Unfortunately, skills are not always updated with refresher training. It gets worse. Updates to software add new capabilities and features that, without training or self-paced study, go unused. Law firms experience turnover among accounting and administrative staff, and before long, the people in the law firm with primary responsibility for the system only know what has been handed down from their predecessors.

Today’s systems have options and defaults that will change how the software works to fit individual preferences and patterns of work. What works for one person’s work pattern can be cumbersome and frustrating for another. Unchanged, those hand-me-down settings become frustrating to the attorney.

Almost all enterprise software provides the capabilities for custom reports and views. The leading software vendors offer services to design these custom capabilities for you and most include optional tools to equip the firm to do their own.

Chances are that your firm is not using all of the vendor’s products. If there is something you need, you can pretty well assume others do as well, and the vendors may have optional products or services that fill that need.

At two different firms last week with two different issues, we ran into attorneys that were upset because their system would not do what they wanted and they had been putting up with this adverse condition for months. We showed them how their existing system already does exactly what they wanted exactly the way they wanted it done. It was a simple matter of changing built-in options and defaults. The problem was the law firm’s staff only knew what had been handed down and the attorneys had accepted “No” as the answer.

There are two morals to this story. The first is, do not accept “No” as the answer. The second is that there is material value in continuing training to update and refresh staff knowledge and skill regarding the firm’s enterprise systems. The Juris team reminded me the other day that the newest Juris law firms have a more valuable system than long-term Juris customers. It is the same software, but the newer firms have been recently trained on the system’s full and powerful capabilities. The long-term clients only have hand-me-down knowledge.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Companies like Juris will go to the law firm site to conduct refresher training. They offer off-site classroom training. Training CDs are available and online supplemental training is available over the Internet. Juris, Inc. recently put in place a certification program and will take responsibility for continuing certification of key staff members in your firm. Other vendors may offer a similar program. Ask your staff for the ongoing training options offered by your vendor and put in place a regimen of ongoing training to keep their knowledge and skills updated. It will pay off. What they learn will increase per-partner income.

ASK, don’t settle, and demand the best… Several years ago the folks at Juris coined the phrase “The Power of Yes” to convey to all Juris team members and Juris law firms that saying “Yes” is the company's objective.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.
 

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If you don’t believe in strategic planning, you must read Rob Millard’s post Creating Prepared Minds. His post includes an excerpt from an article by McKinsey & Co.’s Eric Beinhocker titled Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe.

Breinhocker gets it right. If you think strategic planning is about predicting the future, you are dead wrong. If that is why you are not doing it, you need to revisit the issue. Assumptions (predictions) are inaccurate. If you get one right, it is just the luck of the draw. The first rule of the planning process is that you must plan to change the plan. As the future gets closer, you continually change your expectations and reactions to it until you arrive on target.

Planning gets the entire law firm team playing from the same play book. It prepares the team for the future and capitalizes on its opportunities. Rob’s post is a must-read that may inspire you to read Beinhocker’s entire article.

Chance does favor the prepared mind. Top performing firms do it. If you want a good reason to start, consider this reason: more than an eight fold difference in per-partner income. A soon-to-be-published survey of midsized law firms by Juris, Inc. discloses that the top performing 25 percent of firms earn more than eight times the per-partner income of the bottom 25 percent. That seems to be a good enough reason to start.

Three important rules for successful planning include:

• The planning plan must be to change the plan. Strategies are temporary targets based on inaccurate assumptions and estimated capabilities.
• The planning document should consist of words and phrases to facilitate frequent updating.
• The structure is a critical part of the process.

The structure for the strategic portion of the planning process that I have successfully used includes nine main areas to be addressed by the planning team in the order listed. The nine subject areas are:

1. Nature of the law firm (or activity, e.g., practice area or department)

2. Environment in which firm operates

3. Opportunities/Capabilities (SWOT)

4. Assumptions about the future

5. Objectives–Mission/Strategic Thrust

6. Policies/Procedures (changes or new ones needed)

7. Strategies–How we are gong to achieve objectives

8. Priorities and schedules for programs, new resources required, measurements

9. Organization and delegation

For more step-by-step suggestions, reread the earlier post The Structure to Structured Planning. I also suggest a reread of Consensus Building for a discussion of the role of the structured planning process in building a consensus, i.e., preparing the mind to deal with an uncertain future in pursuit of a common vision.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

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Here is a slice of my own business experience that demonstrates why you have to connect with, and stay in touch with, the decision maker (an individual some call VITO, Very Important Top Officer). 

Juris, Inc. doesn’t lose existing clients to competitive solutions very often. When they do, Juris decided to find out why. The answer was virtually the same in every case. It turned out that Juris includes or offered the same features or services that the decision maker made a change to achieve. So why did they change? The decision maker explained that we did not have a relationship with him or her. They didn’t know we offered the same or better capabilities. In those situations, Juris had forgotten to connect with VITO, the decision maker. The team had become comfortable focusing on the people in the client organization that the Juris team dealt with day in and day out.

Joey Asher, the author of Selling and Communication Skills for Lawyers, puts the principles of business development this way. It is a process of:

_ Connecting with the decision makers;

_ Understanding business needs; and

_ Providing solutions.

You can’t leave the decision maker out of the equation. If you do, you will lose the client to someone who does connect, listen and offer solutions.
 

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The billable hour is only a little more than 50 years old.  Prior to 1950 law firms didn’t track their time and law firm bills were generally one-liners that read, “For professional services rendered."  The billable hour arrived on the scene encouraged by consultants as a way to increase per partner income.  Life was simpler and slower prior to 1950.  Given similar matters, skill was about the only thing that influenced differences in accumulated time.  That could be dealt with through different hourly rates, i.e., partners versus associates, for example.  Time has changed.  Technology and knowledge management now make dramatic differences in efficiency.  Yet, the billable hour continues to be the dominate method of compensation to law firms.

Because of this site’s affiliation with Juris®, some are surprised when I post articles encouraging Alternative Billing Arrangements.  Juris, Inc.’s mission is not to promote the billable hour.  The company’s objective is to provide the law firm with the software and services that increase owner-partner income and wealth.  Thus, the Juris systems accommodate alternative fee arrangements and provide capabilities to help the law firm understand the cost of providing its services by style of case or matter.

I am going to devote the next several postings to Alternative Billing.  I prefer the term Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) because that is what is entailed.  It is not just another way to bill.  What AFA involves is coming to an agreement with the customer (your client) on an alternative way to compensate the law firm for value delivered.

Here is the rub.  Most Alternative Billing methods discussed in the publications and articles within the law firm community do not make the AFA grade.  They are generally defensive in nature and do not address 1) the real cause giving rise to the interest in AFA on the customer side or 2) the need for an alternative on the law firm side.

The customer (and we are talking about the business customer) is looking for predictability—lower cost is a smoke screen.  The law firm needs a new fee arrangement that will let the law firm profit from technology deployed and for efficiency—working smarter, not harder.  If we can pair the efficient law firm with the client under an alternative fee arrangement, both objectives can be achieved and it will lower cost while at the same time increasing per-partner income.  One objective does not have to be achieved at the expense of the other.

Instead of addressing these two issues (predictability and higher partner income), law firms and clients are locked into a dance around the issues.  Clients look for methods that lower their cost at the expense of firm partner income.  Law firms look for methods that defensively appease clients and minimize the impact on earnings.  Those approaches treat only the symptoms.  They are Band-Aids® that do not directly address the objectives of either the client or law firm.  What is needed is not yet on the map¾it is an alternative that increases “value” to the client and, at the same time, increases “profits” of the owner-partners of efficient law firms.

We will search for that missing alternative in the days ahead.

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I just finished reading Ed Wesemann’s book The First Great Myth of Legal Management is that it Exists. Anyone who quotes Douglas Adams in his book is okay by me.

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Over the weekend, I was talking with an attorney about their firm’s lack of a formal planning process.  I wasn’t that surprised, because we recently conducted a survey of managing partners and found that a significant percent of the surveyed firms, also, had no structured planning process.

Given the speed of change, the saying that “any road will do if you don’t know where you are going” is true today more than ever. You may not be happy with where you end up, however. You can either be surprised by the future or take advantage of it.  You need to know where you are going. You need Objectives. Objectives are temporary targets based on estimates about the future in view of your capabilities and opportunities.  

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