Benefits of Data-Driven Productivity for Law Firms - LeanLaw
Take Control of Your Law Firm’s Data
What are the Benefits of Data-Driven Productivity for Law Firms?
When you track time, send out invoices, receive payment, and disburse payments to the lawyers at your law practice, you are creating useful data that could help law firm productivity. You just need to understand how to harness it.
LeanLaw is a legal tech app for the modern legal industry. LeanLaw customizes QuickBooks Online for midsize law firms. It gives the feel of easy to use, boutique law firm accounting software — the kind that you enjoy using, rather than the one you loathe. It also sets the foundation for data analytics for law firms.
The accounting folks work in QuickBooks Online while the lawyers and law firm staff work in LeanLaw. Everyone is in their comfort zone for the user interface of their workflows. Everyone is looking at the same data in real time.
What is a Data Driven Law Firm?
A data driven law firm is one that keeps careful track of its operations, meaning timekeeping, billing, and reporting. If you develop a habit of recording your timekeepers, your clients payments, your unbilled work and so on, you’ll be able to aggregate the data to get a clear picture of the financial health of your law firm.
But where to begin?
We all know by now that data doesn’t lie. If you know who are the most and least productive and profitable legal professionals in your law firm, you can make decisions or adjustments or improve workflows and legal services to prevent waste, encourage growth, and put your timekeepers in a position to excel. LeanLaw’s legal billing software can help you discover the metrics to guide you there.
Time Tracking as the foundation of a data driven law firm
The origin of all data in the law practice is time tracking. Time entries create the basis for useful internal data analysis – the essential law firm productivity solution. You just need to understand how to harness it.
Read More: Timekeeping habit as the foundation of a data driven law firm
In LeanLaw reporting, you can access the following reports with just a few clicks:
Timekeeper Reports Help You Understand Billable (and non-Billable) Hours
LeanLaw provides a summary of timekeeper activity with regard to billable and non-billable hours and for specific clients. You can easily export this data in a non-invoice format to understand the productivity and profitability of your timekeepers.
With these data insights, you can understand how your timekeepers trend in real time. You won’t have accounting surprises. You’ll be able to forecast business decisions in the operation of your law practice because you’ll have a deeper analysis and understanding of the data. Building a successful law practice depends on habitual timekeeping.
Compensation and Collection Reports: How to Track Productivity for Law Firms
LeanLaw creates an automated breakdown of payments on invoices into detail based on:
- Revenue by attorney
- Revenue from a client
- Revenue allocated to originating attorneys
- Revenue by practice area
You can fully automate the generation of monthly, quarterly, and annual reports to calculate attorney compensation, based on client collections.
Contingency reporting
Even with Flat fee billing you can understand the kpis of a contingency matter in real-time in three ways:
- Expense tracking
- Hours
- Non-advanced costs
With LeanLaw, the clumsiness that can happen on the back end of the settlement disappears.
Read More: LeanLaw Return on Investment (ROI)
Real-time expense reporting
When you understand the external expenses of a matter in real-time, you can more accurately budget attorney time, continuous outlay of expenses, and invoicing.
Read More: Should Lawyers Bother with Timekeeping in a Fixed Fee Practice?
Benefits & Advantages:
- See the exact costs associated with a contingency matter: both expenses and time.
- Know exactly where the matter stands in relation to accounts receivable — accessing the data yourself in just a few clicks without having to ask support staff.
- Enter reimbursable costs or expenses in LeanLaw or QuickBooks Online, your choice.
- Tag expenses from your bank or credit card feeds: LeanLaw will automatically sync and stage them to an invoice.
Client Reports
In LeanLaw, you can see all the transactional activity of your client:
- Compensation, productivity, and client management
- Ready to bill, billed, paid
- Trust balance, trends against the trust balance
- Timekeepers recent activity with client – drill down into matters
- Integrated QuickBooks data: payments, AR balances
LeanLaw creates one place to have all the data on a specific client.
The data that the law firms create have traditionally not been used to the law firm’s advantage. The data analytics within the timekeeping, invoicing and payments workflow can be used in strategic ways to help you run your law practice more productively and profitably.
