Perfection may be a pipe dream, but its pursuit is valuable. Every law firm’s vision of perfection may differ depending on a firm’s objectives and values, but one thing that is common among most firms is that there is always room for improvement. Continual improvement is the shortest path to perfection, and it happens most readily when the characteristics of accountability, motivation, and cooperation are present among all team members. Finding ways to cultivate those characteristics in the workplace is the key to progress and improvement, and business intelligence solutions provide a mechanism to drive your firm to focus on performance improvement.
BI and Accountability among Attorneys
The first stride towards improvement is ensuring that your firm has a system for holding its staff accountable for their work performance. Law firms are complicated machines with a lot of moving parts, and each attorney and non-attorney professional must do their part to make sure your business meets its financial targets. Business intelligence tools produce accountability among attorneys by presenting transparent, data-driven performance metrics, and they enable law firms to set clear, measurable goals for their employees. Moreover, providing attorneys with access to a well-developed BI dashboard that shows how their current performance metrics stack up against firm expectations helps them both visualize and better understand their contributions to your firm’s success.
Internal Competition through Business Intelligence and Analytics
Even if your legal team is consistently driven and self-motivated, a bit of internal competition could motivate them to put forth an even greater effort. Providing benchmarks against their peers gives each individual team member a reason to improve their work performance. Law firms can leverage the business intelligence and analytics they obtain using BI tools to deliver comparative performance metrics, such as monthly billable hours or fees collected, to incentivize their attorneys to find ways to outperform their peers.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
From an operational standpoint, efficiency is inherent in a “perfect” business, and, in the legal industry, teamwork is a prerequisite to efficiency. Without it, resources can go to waste through miscommunication or the lack of a concerted effort. Business intelligence solutions help attorneys assigned to the same client or matter to coordinate and track how their time is allocated to a project, and also provide the attorneys with a way to constantly monitor how their billable hours compare to client expectations. BI can even be used at the executive level to keep an eye on how budgeted hours are leveraged among partners with higher hourly rates and other, less costly attorneys. Your team will ultimately develop a more efficient method for allocating its resources, and your clients will thank you for it.
