Compensation and Performance Tracking

This week, our team is heading to Chicago for ABA TECHSHOW. Every year, we look forward to this event: tech-loving legal professionals, interesting sessions, and countless product announcements, all make for a wonderful three days. This year is even more special, it’s CARET Legal’s fifth anniversary! That’s right, we officially unveiled CARET Legal at TECHSHOW 2015 in a slightly warmer Chicago (the event took place in April that year).

During our recent ALA webcast, The Flexible Law Firm: Is your practice ready to embrace a work from home program?, there were dozens of questions around technology solutions required for successful implementation of a work-from-home program. You need the right devices, the right processes and the right software that enforce accountability, keep your team connected and make your data accessible (while keeping it secure).

A work-from-home policy presents many benefits and drawbacks for a modern law firm. With a virtual law office, your firm will save on monthly rent costs and is likely to experience less employee turnover. However, remotely participating in meetings with clients and employees can be challenging when employees must rely on technology alone for critical communication. Luckily, there are affordable technologies available that will alleviate some of these challenges.

“A-B-C. A, always; B, be; C, closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!” Made popular by Alec Baldwin’s character in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” it’s a line that’s all too familiar to salespeople and rainmakers. With greater access to data, however, there’s a new mantra that should be leveraged by all those in business development: A, always; B, be; C, collecting; D, data. Always be collecting data!

The practice of law is complicated. A single case can involve multiple attorneys, dozens of files and hundreds of interactions among a law firm, clients, opposing counsel and courts. Given the vast scope of moving parts and operations of a legal matter, it is ripe for business process optimization.

There are so many benefits to keeping track of your time: efficiency, organization, and responsibility. Once you figure out where specifically you are spending your time, you can then determine where improvements in your time management need to be made. Budgeting your time and allotting more time for higher priority tasks, will lead to fewer distractions, better organization, and more responsibility (and accountability).

We believe that in order for a law practice to thrive, it must operate like a business. A key component of operating like a business is understanding metrics and gaining insight in order to understand how the business is operating – what is working and what can be improved. This is displayed in our guiding principles – what isn’t MEASURED cannot be IMPROVED. As a result, we offer real-time data with comprehensive reports and analytics to help you better understand the business side of your practice.

If you can’t get a real-time, 360-degree overview of your practice and its finances, you have little more than your intuition to help you make smart strategic decisions. This 360-degree knowledge is the “current truth” that informs you about your firm’s financial position and overall productivity. The trouble is, unlike mega corporations who have access to highly-customized applications and a small army of number crunchers, small (and midsize) law firms rely on disparate applications, each perform only a portion of the firm’s activities and hence there is no clear way to perform centralized reporting.