TLOMA Today

The end of a year always comes up fast and the end of 2021 is no different. None of us could have predicted the number of lockdowns, openings, and closing’s we had in 2021 and yet as we come out the other side, we can look forward 2022. 2021 will go down as the year of change, one in which many firms needed to change the way staff work and connect. Many of these changes are very positive for our industry and will provide foundation for how many of us work moving forward.

I am pleased to announce the search for our Executive Director is complete and the new Executive Director will join TLOMA on January 4^th, 2022. The board would like to acknowledge the hard work of the hiring committee of Georgia Rennick, Christl Mittendorfer and Karen Schrempf who worked closely with our recruiter to bring forth a number of strong candidates. Leah Halpenny, Dawn Millar and I made the final recommendation to the Board who agreed unanimously to move forward with the hire. A formal announcement will follow later this month.

We are extremely excited to host our holiday networking event at The Ballroom on December 21^st. It appears firms are split between in-person and virtual holiday events this year. As a board, we wanted to give you an opportunity to meet in person and toast the new year. The Ballroom requires us to follow all protocols for the event and has limited capacity. I hope to see many of you in person for the first time in a long time!

Our SIG leaders have been working diligently to plan sessions for 2022. Many of which are on the website already which I encourage you to visit.

As a reminder the TLOMA offices will be closed from December 17 through to and including December 31.

Finally, I would like to thank our members for taking advantage of the membership renewal. If you have not done so already, there is still time to receive a 10% discount if you renew by December 10^th.

I wish you all the very best for a safe and happy holiday season.

Mark Hunter
TLOMA Vice President.

In this article we adopt a fresh approach in relation to how a law firm should choose its time recording platform by looking at the different stakeholders, their needs and how to address them.

Stakeholder groups and what they value 

Attorneys

Time recording matters to attorneys as they’re tasked with hitting aggressive daily and weekly targets. They therefore care about:  

• Accessing the means of capture quickly
• Capturing time easily
• Getting help with capturing more time 

Accessing the means of capture quickly

Capturing time quickly starts with having an easily accessible, web-based, time recording interface that is available via desktop, laptop, tablet or phone, integrated with other software used by the attorney. 

Capturing time easily

It should also be quick to capture time. The optimal arrangement for many attorneys is for time recording to always be in view. In addition, Natural Language Processing should make it possible to dictate or loosely draft a time entry, using unstructured text that can be turned into a suggested time entry.

Getting help with capturing more time

Attorneys will welcome help with recovering time that’s not been captured as they worked and has been forgotten. The best time recording systems offer ‘passive’ capture, tracking the attorney’s digital footprint as they go about their working day: viewing web pages, drafting emails or making phone calls. 

Assistants 

Legal assistants routinely receive unstructured time records in multiple formats from the attorneys they’re entering time for which can arrive in volume and at speed. They will benefit from a facility where they can paste unstructured records from emails or word documents for example, that are then instantly translated into structured time entries. 

Billing and finance 

Billing and finance recognize that time records need to be compliant with Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs). Otherwise much of the captured time will be written down or written off, eroding realization rates. 

Billing and finance teams will want a time recording system that:  

• Makes attorneys aware of the relevant OCGs as they capture time
• Validates compliance as attorneys submit time
• Offers flexible and programmable validation 

Awareness of OCGs

Compliance with OCGs begins with increasing awareness of the rules, at a time that’s most important for the fee earner to know them. Importantly, at this juncture of the process, the system doesn’t attempt to enforce compliance by restricting or preventing time capture, even if the records are incomplete, partial, or non-compliant. This is because it’s crucial that attorneys aren’t impeded while entering time.  

Validation and enforcement

Billing and finance teams will look for a compliance validation ‘safety-net’ when the attorney submits their time records. Enforcing compliance at the right juncture is important because a compliance breach caught at the point of submission takes just a few seconds of the attorney’s time to correct. 

Flexible and programmable validation

The best time recording systems on the market can generate alerts that give attorneys ‘soft’ warnings. For example, billing has exceeded 95% of the pre-agreed budget for the matter; or ’hard’ notifications can prevent the attorney from submitting an entry that goes over 100% of the matter budget.  

Practice Group Leaders 

Practice Group Leaders (PGLs) are tasked with making their practice area run as smoothly and efficiently as possible while maximizing its economic contribution to the law firm. PGLs care about: 

• Visibility of timekeeping performance data 
• Reporting that contributes to accurate forecasting  

Visibility of timekeeping performance data

PGLs want systems that easily show the volume of time submitted across the practice and by attorney in each period, and via clear dashboards, who has met their targets. It’s also important for PGLs to see how quickly time is captured after the work is completed (velocity of capture), slow velocity results in less accurate records that are more vulnerable to client queries, write-downs and write-offs.

Forecasting capabilities

PGLs also benefit from time recording platforms that can help with accurate forward planning. Reporting on this forecasted time can help ensure the practice’s resources are fully utilized, but not over-committed going forward. It also enables future revenue forecasting, which helps with investment planning.

IT 

The IT team cares about enabling the smooth, effective and cost-efficient practice of law across the whole firm. Therefore, they will want time recording systems that are:   

• Robust, reliable, secure and accessible
• Cost-effective, future-proofed, elastic, and extensible

Robust, reliable, secure and accessible

IT will look for platforms that can be depended upon to deliver SLA uptime in excess of 99.5%. Good data security is a key requirement, so IT staff will want to use a time recording platform that possesses world-class data security as standard. This is found in systems that encrypt every bit of data. They’ll also maintain strict system access controls and have industry recognized certifications (including ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC accreditations).  

Cost effective, future proofed, elastic and extensible

Cloud-based systems are also more cost-effective and offer elastic capacity, ensuring the firm is only ever paying for what it’s using. There’s no on premises infrastructure to provision and maintain, and IT employees don’t need to spend time worrying about what adaptations they’ll need to make in the future.

Clients 

Finally, clients care about being able to capture, control and assess the value for money when it comes to legal spend. They want to work with law firms that provide them with timely and accurate invoices that are compliant with their OCGs. This way they can compare the performance of different suppliers, and that of external legal services, against internal counsel. 

In summary 

• Attorneys want easy and quick time entry
• Assistants want automation that will do the heavy lifting
• Billing and finance want high-quality and compliant time entry
• PGLs want visibility and oversight
• IT want low cost of ownership, business continuity, security and extensibility
• Clients want accurate and timely invoices

When a platform meets all these needs, the law firm can be confident that its new timekeeping solution will be widely adopted and successful.

If your organization is in the process of planning your office layout for the future or considering switching to a hybrid office model, there are many decisions to make, and in a time that’s still constantly changing.

What we’ve come to realize after the events of 2020 is that the physical office can mean many different things to today’s work environment. It can be a place that represents corporate culture, a destination for gathering and collaborating, or an environment that’s perfectly set up to help maximize productivity.

The same physical office can also meet different needs for each employee. Some might enjoy the space as a place to socialize and beat feelings of isolation that come with working from home. Others might value the space for being a distraction-free environment that helps them get the job done.

Knowing that your workforce can have drastically different needs like this, how do you go about designing a physical space that can meet all these needs? And how can you be confident that what you design today will continue to meet evolving needs in the future? 

The secret for futureproofing your physical office space is to take a scientific approach, one that’s based on a deep analysis of your staff’s work style personas. 

The Scientific Approach to the Hybrid Office in Three Steps

To get to the most effective solution, the scientific approach can be broken down into 3 steps.

1.  Get Stakeholder Alignment On Your Strategy

The very first undertaking to designing your physical office space for the long term is to get complete stakeholder alignment on the future of your office. A few ways you can achieve this is by holding one-on-one interviews with your partners and executives, rolling out surveys to leadership, or consulting with experts in the matter. This crucial first step helps you make sure that your leadership is on the same page from the very beginning of your design process before major decisions are made. Having this leadership alignment in place will then give you the confidence you need to design the right workspace for your organization with everyone on board.

2.  Analyze Your Staff’s Work Personas

Next, it’s time to discover what works best for your team right now, and what they’re going to be needing in the future. Arriving at this understanding involves assessing each and every employee’s:

After assessing your staff, you’ll be able to assign each employee into one of a few workstyle personas. By categorizing your whole workforce into one of these personas, you’ll be able to make sense of the makeup of your entire staff pool. 

Assessing your staff in this way will arm you with the data you need to inform your next steps.

2.  Create Workspace Solutions Based on Your Findings

• Current preferred work style (i.e. in-office, remote, or hybrid)
• Preferred work style in the future (which workstyle they would like to transition into)
• Current productivity levels for focus, collaboration, and client meetings

It’s now time to use the data you’ve acquired to design the best workspace solution for your staff. This can take a number of different forms. It might look like creating the best layout for staff in your physical office, complete with focus spaces, socialization areas, and high-tech meeting rooms based on the makeup of your staff personas.

You might go through this process and choose instead to dedicate your physical office space to a place that’s available for meeting spaces “as-needed”, rather than requiring your staff to come in every day. To make this work, you might also choose to get rid of rows of desks and cubicles and assign that space to meeting and collaboration areas instead.

You might even take the data you’ve obtained through this process and choose to design a more flexible work environment altogether. Perhaps you choose to give all levels of staff the freedom to work from home, opening up the opportunity for you to downsize, save tremendously on real estate costs, and invest that capital elsewhere.

No two workspace solutions will look the same, but by this stage, you can feel confident that the solution you’ve arrived at is based both on data and on strategy.

Use Factual Data to Inform Your Design

Workplace design is changing overall, and it can be almost too easy to hop on a trend, assuming it’s the right move, without carefully considering if it works for your particular organization.

You might be in the know that law firms are shifting towards designs that offer more uniform seating arrangements, reducing the number of private offices to give all levels of staff access to prime spots and ensure they get equal enjoyment out of the same space.

Before assuming that a particular office design or space allocation like this one will work for you, be sure that your decision is based on:

• Factual data
• Your workplace strategy
• The specific needs of your personnel
• Future growth plans

This 3-step approach will arm you with the insight and data you need to make informed decisions on space that will effectively serve the needs of your workforce for years to come.

Introduced to strategic management during university, the topic has evolved into a passion throughout my career. Leveraging that experience within and in partnership with law firms over the years, we have used many key performance indicators to identify trends that would help us map out solutions to complex problems and drive the change needed to compete. The lessons gained from experience that resonate the strongest are on the concept of profitability.  

In today’s competitive legal environment, we want to repeat the success for areas of practice with higher-than-average realization rates, long-standing clients with significant portfolios, rate of new business earned from industries undergoing significant growth and/or partners with the greatest books of business. Surely these measures and metrics identify what we should focus on to repeat the biggest financial contributions for the firm… or do they? What I learned is that comparative profitability conclusion on the segments relevant to the firm’s success needs more sophisticated analyses than most single metrics provide.

Profitability is considered a KPI when making forward-thinking decisions.  Through an example that builds from cost to profit, this article reveals the disadvantage of using fee billed measures or realization metrics, to draw relative profitability conclusions.  The results highlight the benefits of cost-based profitability analysis to gain strategic and tactical perspective to drive operational efficiency; and shows how to calculate past, current and future profitability for relevant dimensions.  Leveraging these strategies allow the firm to make effective decisions about the expansion or contraction of investments in current or alternate initiatives, amidst the functional areas of your business. 

What is Profitability?

Profit is defined as revenue-less expenses incurred in the production and sale of legal services. Whereas overall profitability for the firm is an easy number to calculate, profitability by segments like area of practice or client industry is more challenging. This is because of the different levels of granularity used by the firm’s accounting practices. For example, fees billed may be journalized by matter, however, rent may be journalized by office. Our goal is to be able to allocate expenses across different dimensions regardless of accounting practices.

The revenue measure can be easily captured in the context of time by most systems, however, to analyze whether an area of practice or growing industry is profitable, the expenses incurred by the firm must also be allocated to the same unit of measure.

To achieve a cost rate that is not challenged, it is more important that the allocation of expenses be viewed as fair and reliable by the firm’s stakeholders than to negotiate details by office square footage or office supplies used by the timekeeper.  To start, these expenses can be categorized as direct – compensation for timekeepers (associate and paralegal salaries and benefits, partner draws and bonuses etc.); and overhead – support-staff and management compensation, rent, marketing etc.  Direct expenses are attributed to the timekeeper and depending on firm culture, overhead expenses are allocated to timekeepers equally, or weighted based on a timekeeper attribute such as firm title.

Expense Allocation and Cost Rates

In this illustration, we are using a 1.5:1:1 weighted value structure for partners, associates, and paralegals respectively to allocate $100,000 of calculated overhead expenses for the year to the paralegal and the associate, and $150,000 to the partner. To calculate their cost rates, we divide total expenses for each timekeeper by their hours billed for the same period.    

Profitability Analysis Illustration

In our industry the basic unit of measure is time, and services are sold by matter. In this illustration, we compare three different situations for the same matter to reveal the shortfalls of looking exclusively at billed hours and fees billed measures, or realization and effective rate metrics, as well as the benefits of adding profitability analysis to your decision-making toolkit. 

Fees billed and allocated expenses are calculated using billed hours multiplied by the effective and cost rate respectively.

Situation 1: The paralegal billed 90 hours, the associate billed 400 hours and the partner billed 245 hours.

Leverage of 2.0:1 is typical for the firm.

Situation 2: The partner delegated work increasing total hours billed and write-downs and negatively affecting the realization rate for the paralegal and the associate. The paralegal billed 155 hours, the associate billed 540 hours and the partner billed 140 hours.

Leverage of 5.0.1

Situation 3: The partner took on more work, reducing total hours billed, eliminating previous inefficiencies and increasing the realization for the paralegal and the associate. The paralegal billed 75 hours, the associate billed 245 hours and the partner billed 315 hours.

Leverage of 1.0:1

At first glance, we may conclude that the third situation achieved the best results. It gained the highest rates, a realization of worked value, and net fees billed; however, despite showing the lowest results for the same performance indicators, the second situation earned the top net contribution and the best value to the client, while liberating partner hours to be invested in gaining profitable work and mentoring new talent to drive up non-partner realization metrics.

What can Profitability insight do for you?

Using matter profitability, the firm can chart clients or segments of interest – for example, area of practice or growing industries - from most to least profitable; to identify and analyze trends impacting profitability and recommend actionable changes in the context of strategic initiatives and/or operational efficiency. Changing the perspective from hours billed and financial results (looking back) to forward-looking measures - targeted or budgeted hours and financial budgets - provides additional context when making forward-thinking decisions. Working with hours collected and their associated cost at the time they were worked, also provides a different viewpoint.

In the last five years, we have seen profitability analysis gain momentum affecting changes to marketing initiatives, helping develop competitive pricing strategies, providing insight to curb non-profitable areas of work and investment, and highlighting previously unseen trends and competitive advantages to refocus firm resources to its most profitable work and client segments.

Take Away

• Calculate the cost rate using basic principles that stakeholders can get behind. Keep it simple to start.
• If your system does not calculate cost rates, you may be able to manage them in a rate table.
• Use matter profitability to gain perspective on important business segments for your firm.
• Calculate matter profitability from the perspective of past and current results to identify trends and efficiency gaps
• Calculate profitability using forward-looking targets and budgets to compete for new work and develop profitable pricing arrangements.

The specialized skills of the most successful leaders adapt and evolve in tune with the needs of their business environment.

Remember when Tim Cook was chosen as the CEO for Apple? There were many questions about why you would prefer a supply chain expert for the head of Apple? Well, continuously since then, he has shown why and at this point in history, the impact of his genius in supply chain strategy is unrivaled.

Before that, possessing sales skills were critical to the success of the enterprise and its leader, and before that, superior operational skills were essential. It does not take a rocket scientist to connect the dots – successful leadership must respond to the requirement of evolving specialization, which is driven for the most part by the most significant underlying challenges of the times.

We would suggest that the declining level of engagement by the workforce has rapidly become entrenched as the most critical challenge of our time in all areas of the economy. Some of the underlying reasons for this disengagement and why it will require a very different leadership to resolve include:

• Not feeling they are being valued by their employer/manager (sense they are a transaction and not appreciated as an individual );
  
  
• Not feeling a sense of belonging to their firm/company;
  
  
• Not feeling that their effort/work is valued nor meaningful;
  
  
• The Great Reassessment -a decrease in the value placed upon the net worth and an increase in the value placed on net freedom (avoid using Great Resignation as it establishes a negative connotation on change) - the pandemic has created a sense of freedom;

• Lack of movement from promises to concrete action on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts; and
  
  
• Surging mental health crisis and failure to fully understand and act on the untreated impact individuals and families.

The above issues will require successful leaders to possess strong human capital management ("HCM") skills to address these issues. How the following abilities are deployed will be as equally important to successful leaders as having them:

Cohesiveness - Sustained bond with coworkers (relationship-focused — continued dialogue)

Collaboration – Participative teams

Communication Style - Descriptive approach instead of an authority- obedience relationship (descriptive is a relationship where discussion is possible)

Conflict Management – Work through problems with a more collaborative approach

Process Orientation - The process itself and the impact on others

Task Orientation - Emphasize complex and multitasking activities, actions, and team development by expanding leadership into various tasks rather than from dominance by one task

EQ - Tune in emotional vulnerability — focus on situational emotions before dealing with problem

Individual Development - Promote skill and talent development through and emphasis on verbal encouragement and praise

Autonomy - Continually work toward helping others express emotions verbally (strength in networks)

This newly evolving skill set that successful leaders urgently require has and will impact the gender makeup of the leadership group in most industries.

This premise is not based on hope or wishful thinking. Instead, on the science of the brain in general and the differences in the attributes of male and female brains, which continues to grow and evolve.

There have been a number of studies conducted on the differences in male and female brains. When you just look at broad factors the differences can be interpreted as cancelling each other out, leading to thinking that sex differences in personality do not exist.

However, a report from December 2019 provided the following example:

“For instance, males and females on average don't differ much on extraversion. However, at the narrow level, you can see that males on average are more assertive (an aspect of extraversion) whereas females on average are more sociable and friendly (another aspect of extraversion).”

So well there is nothing to indicate a difference in intellectual performance; there are differences in behavioural patterns including:

• How and what we remember: Women tend to take in more through their five senses than men do and store more of this material in the brain for later use. Thus they tend to remember more details during a conversation.[1]
  
  
• How we process words (including how many and what kinds of words we use): Women use many more words than men while speaking, reading, and writing.[2]
  
  
• How we experience the world: Female retinas have more P ganglion cells — which see color and fine detail — while male retinas have more M ganglion cells, which more easily see the physical motion of objects around them.[3]
  
  
• What we buy and why we buy it: Women's buying is linked to immediate complex sensory experience, so they enjoy walking through a store and touching objects; men relate more of their buying to performance competition, so they tend to buy memorabilia from sports teams with which they identify.[4]
  
  
• The way our midbrain (limbic system) and emotional processing works: A woman can process a major emotion‐laden experience immediately, whereas it may take a man hours to do so. This often creates a lot of tension between men and women.[5]
  
  
• The amounts of white and gray matter in the brain: Women have more white matter, which connects brain centers in the neural network, while men have more gray matter, which localizes brain activity into a single brain center. This is one reason the genders bring different perspectives to the same problem or design. Women can connect widely different elements that men don't make, while men tend to focus on one element or pattern without distraction better than women.[6]
  

These differences in thought patterns generally result (not always, of course) in a more in-depth possession and fluid and effective use of the HCM skills identified earlier in this article.

A real example of this difference is in how the genders would deal with diversity and inclusion. First, it is essential to understand that leadership stating that the entity strongly supports diversity and inclusion and has policies to be followed neither ensures their execution as intended nor matches peoples' experience.

Successful execution requires a combination of participative collaboration, descriptive communication, EQ, and individual development so that policies mirror what people experience.

Muhtar Kent (former chairman and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola) perhaps said it best when he shared that  “we need to make everyone more aware of the benefits of empowering women. Then I think we can succeed faster. Because it's one thing to achieve success, and another to repeat success. That's the job of a leader. Promoting women leadership and creating a more level playing field is a huge enabler to repeat success.”