Since 2000, law firm PEPP (profits per equity partner) have increased on average 11% for Amlaw 100 firms and 8% for Amlaw 200 firms.  Some observers fear that, like other markets that have sustained growth periods at or near double digits in the past 10 years, the law firm partner profit "bubble" may soon burst as well.

Looking at Amlaw 200 data, PEPP increased by 2% in 2001.  In 2002, the increase was 7%.  2003 saw an increase of 11%, 8% in 2004 and 2005, and 10% in 2006.

This increase doesn't only apply to Amlaw 200 firms.  Looking at the differences from 2005 and 2006 for the top respondent firms in the Law Firm Economic Survey  by Juris Inc. and LexisNexis, respectively (the only two years available), firm PEPP increased 11%.  It is likely that most firms in the mid-market and small market increased incomes by respectable if not similar percentages over the same period.

What can you do to prepare for a stunt in the growth (or decline) of PEPP?  Bruce MacEwen posted an article May 5th  on his blog Adam Smith Esq., titled A "Bubble" in PPP? that looks at some short term ideas to help "mitigate the downward trend" and predicts a change in the las firm business model over the long term:

Short term ideas:

• Redeploy lawyers in troubled practice areas to healthier ones;
• Use the opportunity of "shared pain" with your key clients to get closer to them;
• Adroitly stand by while the normal waves of attrition take their toll;
• Build or at least safeguard capacity in selected practice areas that you anticipate will emerge strongly from the downturn;
• And always, always, keep a sharp eye on costs–although, truth be told, you don't have much material flexibility here. You're not moving your offices to Brooklyn and you're not paying less than market for partners and associates.

Long term predictions:

• the billable hour, lamented by many but eliminated by few, will eventually replaced with a more "value-based" model, though MacEwen stresses that he is not "holding [his] breath" on this;
• the traditional associate/partner model changes to include more non-equity partners and more contract attorneys;
• at least fundamentally, "the core processes by which law firms manage cases and deals must and will change" (ie, more project management, more team philosophy centered around practice groups to become more efficient).

Ultimately, MacEwen believes that due to increased demand (at least for Amlaw 100 firms), finding work won't be the problem.  However, he sees the traditional model as being unsustainable based on the limits placed on things such as productivity (>2,400 hours?), rates (>$1,000 per hour?)and realization (>100%?).  Because of this, if PEPP does suffer a downturn for an extended period of time, the long predicted changes to law firm dynamics may happen.

If this occurs in large law firms, it is incumbent on smaller firms to adapt quickly.  The predictions above are all point towards efficiency that allow firm profits to increase through efficiency rather than increased rates and worked hours.  Much has bee written about the "unmanageability of law firms".  Despite this, firms have continued to make exceptional profits - due in no small part to their enviable margins.  With good management, law firms can see profits that far exceed anything that firms receive currently.   And if partner profits start decreasing, your firm will be in crisis -  just as it is not a good idea to go to the grocery store on an empty stomach, it isn't a good time to contemplate an overhaul in processes during a crisis.

Much of the allure of smaller firms is quality service at a lower price.  Some large firm partners charge rates in excess of $1,000 per hour.  If large firms realize they can offer similar services at lower prices and still increase profits, smaller firms can be squeezed out of the marketplace.

Think Walmart.  As Walmart entered the scene, small businesses were unable to compete based on their lack of purchase power.  Walmart could offer more product selection at a lower price.  Home Depot and Lowes did the same to small hardware stores.  The small shops that survived did so by using their secret weapon - customer service and personal engagement.  Still, you won't find many of these shops who don't struggle on a monthly basis and have to watch as their clients often come to them for advice, then go to Home Depot to buy the big-ticket items.

For small and mid-size firms to compete in this changed environment, they will have to embrace workflow efficiencies that meet or exceed that of the larger firms - and use their "secret weapons" of personal engagement with clients and responsiveness.  However, without the fundamentals of an efficient business in place, your firm will suffer under the weight of your processes.  

There will always be individual clients available, but more dependable sources of income often come from business clients and their leaders.  These clients are already demanding more cost certainty.  If larger firms are able to provide this value to business clients first at a price that isn't so different than yours, your firm may be in trouble.

The time to act is now.

Related posts

• Survey Targets Business Development In Law Firms
• Reflections on the 2007 ALM Billing Rates & Practices Survey
• Law Firms with Non-Lawyer Management Achieve Higher Per-Partner Incomes
• Law Firm Survey Shows Link between Leverage and Partner Income
• Law Firm Business Model: Margin

An article in the Tampa Tribune (hat tip:  Estrin Report) reports that foreclosures are so high in some areas that firms are hiring as many as 200 additional staff to handle the workload.  Foreclosures in Hillsborough County, Florida in February more than doubled the amount from February 2007 and is more than 5 times the foreclosures from February 2006.  This reportedly is putting a strain on the "assembly line" approach firms here use to push these cases through the system. 

This is an extremely worrying sign.  Granted, the investment houses purchased in Florida may not be the primary residences of the owners.  However, their investments were lost and many lost their savings in the process. 

This is more evidence that the 2008 Client Advisory published by Hildebrandt and CitiBank is off the mark.  There does appear to be offsetting legal work to be found.  This is reassuring news to law firms, especially those who have expanded practice areas, that they may not suffer what the Client Advisory termed "the perfect storm" where all areas of practice trend downward with no offsetting surge of work.

However, it is likely that Congress will act to slow foreclosure activity on primary homes sometime this year.  Though good news on the surface, Congress isn't very effective in softening the effect of a market correction.  

Our economy is volatile.  Opportunities for work will be everywhere but not necessarily in areas traditionally served by your firm.  Firms need to prepare to be innovative in their business development approaches this year to take advantage of the continued fall out from the several market corrections that have happened and will happen in the coming months.

We have begun taking submissions for the 2008 Law Firm Economic Survey.  If your firm is interested in participating, please contact Brian by clicking here.

Related posts

• What Margin Should Your Law Firm Generate?
• Partner Income Related to Law Firms Fees
• New Contributors For More Partner Income
• Cash Flow An Important Metric For Law Firms
• 450 Law Firms Report Issues and Trends

We will soon start accepting submissions for the 2008 Law Firm Economic Survey.  This is our 3rd year to conduct the survey and in two short years we have created the largest survey of its kind focused on the mid-sized law firm.  Our survey serves several purposes, including but not limited to:

• Providing a measure of annual performance for mid-sized law firms based on per-partner income;
• Validating the core profit drivers that affect per-partner income;
• Providing expert analysis and content for managers to help increase per-partner income.

This year we are adding a focus on client development activities.  In our 2007 survey, 25% of managing partners responded that marketing and business development activities were their firm's best ways to achieve higher profitability.  In the 2008 survey we are asking managing partners what marketing and business development activities they utilize and how effective each are.

We are also asking questions regarding rate as it pertains to practice area.  I have had more questions regarding what firms charge for specific industries than any other finance-related question.  Attorneys want to know whether they are charging the appropriate market rate for their specific industry.  Since each industry can be pretty specific, we have chosen some broad practice areas that we hope will give firm leaders some insight into pricing. 

We are also hoping to do more regional breakdowns by rate, utilization, margin, leverage, etc.; another area in which we receive many requests.  Of course, the main focus of the survey will remain the law firm business model and the key profit drivers that affect per-partner income.

The survey will be broken down into two main parts:  the first part requires financial data and will take some time to assemble since there will be questions regarding 2007 year end numbers (such as standard blended rate by equity partners, non-equity partners and associates, and paralegals).  We will be conducting this part by telephone to help respondents with any questions.  We hope this will also reduce the possibility of invalid responses.  There have been several instances of firms having their responses disqualified due to inaccurate numbers after we were unsuccessful in our attempts to contact them to correct the responses.  We believe the best time to validate responses is at the time of submission and hope the telephonic interview process will help in this regard.

The second part will be for managing partners/shareholders/directors/etc.  Because this part doesn't require financial data (and thus shouldn't require assistance to complete accurately), it will be offered as an online questionnaire to encourage participation by managing partners.

The survey is geared to mid-sized firms.  For us, that means firms from 5 to 100 fee earners (which includes partners, associates, paralegals and others who bill clients for their work).  Although we hope to broaden the scope of the survey in the future, this year we are only accepting submissions from firms in the United States.

All respondents who complete the survey will receive a complimentary copy of our 2007 Law Firm Economic Survey and 50% off the price of the 2008 Survey.  The price has not changed and is still $495, so the value for participating is approximately $750.  The cost of the survey at $495 is among the lowest (if not the lowest) in the industry.  Further, firms who also complete the Managing Partner section of the survey will be offered a summary benchmark comparison of their firm against other respondents.  The benchmarking comparison is valued at over $1,200. 

Due to the time it takes to compile the data and prepare the survey for release (which we hope will be mid-summer), we are only accepting submissions for a two month period and may stop accepting submissions at any time after we reach our target of 375 respondents.  If you would like to participate in the 2008 Law Firm Economic Survey, please email me by clicking here and fill out the email request.

Related posts

• Law Firm Economic Survey
• The Case Against Income Partners
• Size Does Not Have to Determine Law Firm Partner Income
• Six Basic Law Firm Metrics
• Midsized Firms Have Available Capacity and a Pricing Advantage

Paul Calthrop, writing in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review, gives all of us something new to think about regarding pricing. Calthrop is a partner in Bain & Company. His article is titled “Higher Net Price—Or Bust.”

He makes the point that lower pricing may be a viable strategy for entering a new market or launching something new, but otherwise it signals a path toward commoditization, which he says “…inevitably undermines the firm’s prospects of achieving sustainable revenue and profit growth."

For a law firm, Calthrop’s warning reinforces the importance of tracking the firm’s effective blended rate metrics. It also explains why it is so important for the firm to have strategies and tactics in place to increase its blended rate. You don’t achieve a continuing increase in the firm’s effective blended rate through price increases. It comes from increased value:

• Increasing efficiency coupled with pricing alternatives
• Moving into more valuable practice areas
• Increased specialization
• Adding new value to established services—convenience, response times, certainty, etc.
• Moving to new clients for whom your services have higher value
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

Price increases are still important, but the typical pricing increase strategy for a law firm is the annual increase to cover increased operating cost. Adjusted for inflation, it has a zero impact on the firm’s effective blended rate. Moving the blended rate can, however, be achieved through better pricing strategies:

• Multiple standard price sheets pricing higher value services at appropriately higher prices
• Targeted price increases to move underpriced services, clients and matters to higher competitive price
• Having more prices based on the deliverable versus the hours worked, i.e., Alternative Pricing

And the effective rate can be increased through improved collection and faster billing of services. Both improve realization and decrease lost revenue arising from adjustments and uncollectibles.

Managing partners need to take Calthrop’s warning to heart. If your effective blended rate is not moving up, then the firm is increasingly engaging in areas undergoing communization. Short of reinventing how legal services are provided, that will lead to an unsustainable trend of declining partner income.

For more on measuring and tracking blended rate, go to the prior post Blended Rate and Utilization Model for Law Firms.

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.
 

Related posts

• Role of Realization in the Law Practice Business Model
• Is your firm overselling itself?
• How Likely Are Your Clients to Recommend Your Law Firm?
• Growing a Law Firm by Cutting Clients
• Collection Realization in the Law Firm

Related posts

• Law Firm Standard Rate Realization
• Partner Income Related to Law Firms Fees
• Measuring Law Firm Margin
• Law Firm Business Model: Margin
• Want To Have A Record Year For Your Law Firm?

A recent study by Redwood Analytics as reported by Larry Bodine identified the distinguishing characteristics of clients retained by law firms.  The absence of those characteristics and the presence of others can identify clients most likely to go elsewhere.  The study is a reminder that law firms can use their business system to create a scorecard according to attrition risk and having done so can target those clients for remedial steps.  The scoring part is the easy part; developing a culture willing to take action to improve retention is the harder part.  As for actually producing the attrition risk scores, your business software should track the necessary indicators.  To produce a scorecard you will need a custom reporting procedure.  Law firms with in-house capabilities should be able to do that internally using reporting tools but, in any case, your software provider should offer custom reporting services for a reasonable fee.  If not, you have the wrong software or wrong software provider. 

What are the attributes you want to measure?

On the plus side Redwood found that long-term clients had the following attributes:

1. Provides the firm a large amount of legal work

2. Has a mature, established relationship with the firm

3. Uses the law firm for matters involving two or more practice areas

4. Two or more partners are significantly involved with the client’s work

Redwood also found the following:

• First year clients have an attrition rate of 50% compared to 20% for clients with a four year history. 

• Clients with only one partner involved have the greatest attrition rate.

• Too much or too little partner time on matters creates an attrition risk. Morepartnerincome believes that the danger zone is anything less than 10% or more than 60%. 

• Clients most at risk have an overall realization of less than 80%, i.e., discounts don’t retain clients.

You will have to play around with this but start out trying the following:

• Give 10 points to a firm whose prior year fee revenue met the 1% test.  (To keep it simple, divide your annual fee revenue by 100.  Use the amount in your report to identify clients meeting the “large amount of legal work” test.)
• Deduct 5 points if the fee revenue for the prior three months x four is less that the 1% test, i.e., fee revenue is declining. 
• Add10 points if the client has been with the firm for three or more years.
• Add 5 points if the client has matters in at least two practice areas.
• Add 10 points if the client has multiple billing (supervising) attorneys on active matters with billed amounts during the prior three months. 
• Add 5 points if partner hours on the prior three months’ bills were greater than 10% but did not exceed fifty percent.
• Deduct 5 points if unbilled fees exceed the prior two months’ fees.
• Deduct 10 points if billed but uncollected fees exceed the prior three months’ fees. 
• Deduct 5 points if prior year collections where less than 80% of the prior year value of billable hours at standard rates.  
• Deduct 5 points if the percent of partner hours on the prior three months bills were less than 10% or greater than 60%.

There is nothing magic about the above weights for the items listed.  You can and should vary the weights to fit your firm’s experience.  There is no perfect score.  Those with the highest points are the least likely to abandon the firm within the next three years.  Those with the lowest score are the most likely to leave. 

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.

Related posts

• Fitting Your Law Firm for Case Management
• Client Profitability: What Is The Cost Of Partner Time?
• What Margin Should Your Law Firm Generate?
• What Corporate Clients Read Into Law Firm Bills
• Top Five Practice Areas for Midsized Law Firms

The recent Law Firm Economic Survey conducted by Juris, Inc. illustrated the relationship between the fees charged by midsized law firms and their per-partner income. While that relationship might seem unsurprising, it should be thought provoking.

The above chart divides surveyed firms into quartiles according to per-partner income and then shows the comparison between their average fees. The actual realized blended rates, as well as reported standard rates, were lower for each subsequent quartile. Partners of law firms in the first quartile earned twice the per-partner income of the second quartile and seven times the earnings of partners in the fourth quartile. Is this a blinding glimpse of the obvious—law firms that charge more make more?

Here are the important questions: Are the lawyers in the top 25 percent of surveyed firms better lawyers? Are they smarter? Did those firms pick more profitable practice areas? Have they done a better job at branding?

Let me suggest a simpler answer. Midsized law firms with higher rates simply set them higher to start with! If we take a look at individual firms, we can find clear reasons why one firm can charge higher rates than others. But when I review the 2005 survey results, these reasons don’t appear to explain the aggregated results in the survey. The composition of each quartile appears to be similar mixes of practice classes and size.

Law firms regularly increase rates from year to year to cover increased operating expenses, including associate salaries. In most cases, such increases do not contribute to higher margins. They simply recover higher expenses. If a firm starts with lower fee rates, they tend to stay lower in spite of annual or periodic increases.

Midsized law firms need better information about competitive prices in the marketplace. Rather than think in terms of annual increases to the existing fee structure, they need to reset those fees based on market information. They need competitive and peer group intelligence. Traditional surveys provide some insight, but they are often 18 to 24 months behind the curve, and matching your individual firm to a meaningful peer group is an imperfect task. Better information is on the way through new benchmarking services such as those from Redwood Analytics, Peer Monitor and Juris Insight.

Even with better information, individual law firms can have a difficult time restructuring rates. Compensation plans often lead to partner resistance toward anything other than moderate increases. Partners dependent on origination credit for a significant portion of their income can feel threatened by possible client defections. The best approach may be an incremental one. Reset fee structures for new business and develop an incremental plan to rework existing relationships over time. A helpful guide to price increase implementation was suggested in the prior post Law Firm Rate or Fee Increase Letter.

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.
 

Related posts

• Top 25% of Law Firms Earn Margins Above 40%
• Survey Discloses Factors That Influence Law Firm Partner Earnings
• What Margin Should Your Law Firm Generate?
• Too Busy to Increase Law Firm Performance
• Law Firm Business Model: Margin

Competitive intelligence and specifically peer group benchmarking has been growing in importance as law firms increasingly adopt traditional business practices. This post is one of several summarizing information garnered from the September 2006 Benchmarking Symposium held in Nashville, Tennessee.

Understanding the Importance & Power of Legal Surveys was the title of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ presentation at the September 2006 Benchmarking Symposium. While their presentation slides are not generally available, Laurie J. Lieb, PWC’s Director of Law Firm Surveys, indicated that she would make them available to attendees. I have noted below some of the key points made during their presentation. For more information about PWC’s benchmarking programs or to request a copy of their presentation, contact Ms. Lieb. You can reach her at 623.561.8481 or laurie.j.lieb@us.pwc.com.

Why are surveys important? PWC noted the following key reasons:

• It gives the law firm a sense of its place in the market compared to peers.
• It provides the firm with insights for making strategic decisions such as expanding into new areas or practice areas.
• It points to opportunities to improve performance by disclosing weaknesses compared to similar firms.

One of the helpful tips was the speaker's point that not everyone in your firm needs the same benchmarking information nor do you have to settle for a one-size-fits-all survey report. As I understood the speech, PWC can custom design survey reports to fit a law firm’s needs. With that in mind, the speaker suggested that you find out the needs of the functional and practice management members of your firm: 1. where you are currently blindsided; 2. what do you need to know? PWC also pointed out that you can control the focus of information needed:

• Firm-wide by geographic area
• Office level by location
• Practice group comparisons
• Your custom peer group

The point is benchmarking is detective work; it is market intelligence.

Participating in surveys can be costly because of the drain on law firm resources. With that in mind, the firm should determine carefully which surveys it will participate in. Certainly you should follow PWC’s advice and consider the reputation of the survey vendor—and today you have the option of going with a vendor that extracts survey information automatically, substantially eliminating the labor and billable hour drain of participation on the law firm. PWC will introduce its data extraction option in 2007.

PWC has two off-the-shelf flavors of survey offerings. Their Law Firm Statistical Survey (LFSS) is the more mature one. The LFSS program was started in 1957 and has a consistent base of participants. The total number of firms participating in 2006 was 180. PWC’s standard surveys are aimed at large firms, those generally characterized as BigLaw. The statistical survey is unique for its focus on expenses including staffing ratios and functional area cost.

Their Billing Rate & Associate Salary Survey program was initiated in 2000 and for 2006 had three hundred participating law firms. Three fourths of the participants are in the AmLaw 200. Its focus has traditionally been on billing rates and associate compensation but in 2005 PWC added other revenue drivers. They have the ability to provide office level and practice group benchmarks. The introduction in 2007 of a new data extraction tool will give firms the option of eliminating the labor intensive participation of the traditional survey format.

As noted by the PricewaterhouseCoopers representative, there is always a small group of firms (perhaps 5%) that are unusually concerned about confidentiality, security and antitrust considerations. The well established vendors have procedures in place for confidentiality and security that all but that small minority of firms consider adequate. As for antitrust, there are safe harbors. For example, the following safe harbors currently apply for shared fee-based information:

• Conducted by a third-party
• Data that is three months old
• Minimum of 5 firms in a peer group

PWC follows the safe harbor guide and adds others as well. It is worth noting that the safe harbors represent a conservative approach. One you would expect from PWC’s Big Four position among CPA firms. Technology lets us capture and return more current information. That does not automatically mean an antitrust problem exists. Likewise a group of three versus five may be perfectly okay with regard to some data.

There is significant value from benchmarking to participating law firms and in the end it is the law firm that has to sign off on the acceptability of the vendor’s confidentially and security measures. Likewise, the firm has to decide that it may participate in the benchmarking process without violating antitrust laws.
 

Other benchmarking providers speaking at the symposium included Juris, Inc., Redwood Analytics and CitiGroup Private Bank. Juris Insight service is targeted at midsized U.S. law firms. Redwood, PWC, and CitiGroup are primarily targeted at the largest, 250-attorney to 300-attorney law firms.

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.
 

Related posts

• CitiGroup Private Bank Benchmarking Involvement
• Benchmarking Services for Midsized Law Firms
• Benchmarking Services by Redwood Analytics
• New Web-Based Benchmarking Service for Law Firms
• Legal Benchmarking Symposium brings together Redwood, Citgroup, Juris and PriceWaterhouseCoopers

I reported on the results of health care survey questions a few days ago. The same survey asks about practice classes.

The top five practice areas were litigation, insurance defense, corporate non-litigation, real estate, and trust & estates. Collectively, the top five practice areas constitute approximately 64 percent of fees for survey participants. The top two, litigation and insurance defense, accounted for 38 percent of fees.

What I found interesting was the segmenting of practice types by firm size and then partner income. The most profitable firms, the top quartile, had a heavy weighting to litigation at 33 percent of billings, while the least profitable firms were most heavily weighted to insurance defense at 26 percent of billings.

Before you conclude that insurance defense is not profitable, the top performing quartile of firms indicated insurance defense as their second most significant practice area at 11 percent of fees.

What I conclude from this data (along with other survey data) is that insurance defense is still lucrative and growing, but rates are constrained by both competition and pressure from clients. In addition to requiring lower rates, insurance firms are generally slow to pay and frequently adjust bills unilaterally and/or reject line items or entire bills.

Insurance defense can be profitable. A number of insurance defense firms are doing exceptionally well. But matching the profits of other practice areas requires a greater management discipline. Insurance defense firms must focus on leverage. They must eliminate mistakes and delays in billings that are fodder for client adjustments that bring down realization. To that end, some of the higher end business systems, like Juris, now offer software that will audit time and expense entries in real time against insurance client billing rules and instantly notify the fee earner when an entry as proposed would run afoul of their clients’ engagement rules. Bill rejects are eliminated and adjustments are reduced.

The complete survey concerning practice class as well as financial metrics for 2005 can be found in the Juris Law Firm Economic Survey of midsized U. S. law firms. The 55-page survey publication includes results as well as analysis and recommendations for improving law firm performance and increasing per-partner income. The annual Juris survey is provided to survey participants without charge. Others can purchase the survey for $375

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.
 

Related posts

• What Margin Should Your Law Firm Generate?
• The Likelihood of Full Collection Decreases With Age
• High Performing Law Firms Spend More
• What is realization?
• U.K. Law Firms Prepare For Change

I have seen many different case management solutions. All of them were pretty good. Many law firms have already invested in specialized commercial case management products, yet many have not. Unfortunately, I have seen too many law firms who, after investing significantly in a case management system, never really got it off the ground.

Case management isn’t a piece of software. If you are a practicing lawyer, you are managing your cases. Case management software is just a tool for doing so, but so are file folders and day timers. So is the Microsoft® Office Suite including Outlook® — which, if the truth be told, is the most widely used software by law firms for organizing and managing law firm cases.

The ideal objective is to automate as much of the case activity as one can. That is really what case management is all about—making the process for handling each case as routine, intuitive, and automatic as possible. The more homogenous your practice is, the more likely you are going to be able to accomplish that objective. The more diverse your practice, the tougher it will be to get everyone using the same set of specialized tools.

Trying to fit different specialized practice areas on the same set of case management tools can create inefficiencies rather than efficiency. You always need to keep the objective in mind. The objective is to be able to handle the practice area more efficiently. To that end, you may need different tools for different folks. There is no requirement that everyone use the same case management tool. For example, the litigation group may use a product like Legal Files, while the real estate group goes in a completely different direction, and still others may use Outlook. I should note that Juris is an example of a law firm business system that will connect to multiple case management solutions, including Outlook, even within the same law firm. So it isn’t necessary to give up integration if multiple case management products are appropriate in your particular firm.

In many respects, any tool you use for case management is a blank sheet of paper. To successfully implement case management, you have to be committed to training and investing the resources to set up the system to fit your practice areas. You have to continue to invest to keep your system fine-tuned to those needs. It is not something you just take out of the box and start using. What comes out of the box is just the beginning.

Do you need a case management system? Unquestionably, you do. Do you need a commercial case management system, or are you better off using a combination of general purpose tools to develop your case management solution? That is a better question. It is the objective that is important. The tools you use to get there are less important than just getting there. You need to look at the commercial products related to your particular needs and firm culture. You need to research the existing case management capabilities and limitations of your business software in combination with other software such as document management, file management, Microsoft’s Office Suite, etc. You may not be using the case management tools you already have through the connective capability of your existing software.

The commercial case management system that best fits your firm will vary depending on your size and the character of your law firm. To varying degrees, they include the following functions:

• Client intake information including billing arrangement etc.
• Case information: contacts, counsels, experts, witnesses, facts, dates, issues, strategies, etc.
• Calendaring, docketing, reminders, to-do lists
• Conflict searches
• E-mails and internal documents related to the case
• Discovery documents
• Notes
• Templates of case related information used for document assembly or preparation

Today you have powerful case management tools and comprehensive commercial products to choose from. The tool you use isn’t as important as the effort you put into the task.

When considering the addition of case management software, find out what systems work with your law firm business systems. You want the back office and front office systems working together. If you are a Juris law firm, most of the popular case management systems connect to Juris. Juris also works with Microsoft Outlook. It even expands Outlook’s capabilities for activity tracking and docketing. Many of the commercial case management vendors are members of the Juris Alliance Network as Technology Partners.

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.

Related posts

• Choosing a New Law Firm Financial System
• Generation X
• Client Attrition Risk Scorecard for Law Firms
• Will Office 2007 Turn Us Into McLawOffices?
• What Will Determine Your Law Firm's Future?