Managing Your Practice Like a Real Business

Every once in awhile, you see an individual at a firm make a tremendous difference, and I've tried to make it a custom to celebrate the situations when I think I've identified such exemplars.

Today I offer John Alber of Bryan Cave's St. Louis office, who has been laboring in the vineyard for years to realize his vision of a suite of customized applications and managerial "dashboards" enabling essentially every (appropriately authorized) lawyer in the firm to see what they need to see to help manage their caseload, their practice group, and their clientele. 

Building on the Redwood Analytics "business intelligence" platform, but extending and customizing it for Bryan Cave's purposes, the tools now available tie not just into the firm's financial systems, but into its PeopleSoft HR system, and other firm data as needed.  I should note that Bryan Cave's internal "Client Technology Group" worked closely with Redwood to extend the basic Redwood functionality—which by default, and "out of the box," as it were, sits on top of a firm's financial and accounting systems—to enable it to hook into and present data from other systems internal to Bryan Cave aside from the accounting data. 

What I'll show you is, I believe, remarkable in my experience with law firms for its power, flexibility, and just plain usefulness, but I should also warn you—if you want some of this for your firm—that John has told me the suite of applications now available at Bryan Cave has taken years to develop, starting with the simple matter of instilling fundamental network "hygiene" (no latency, resiliency, failover capability, etc.) and then going on to cleaning and "normalizing" data, before one can even tackle the fun stuff.  But assuming your infrastructure is fundamentally sound to begin with, and if you want to start with Redwood's financial-analysis "dashboard" functionality, you should be all but ready to go.

The screenshots that follow are all courtesy of John, and he characterizes what they represent as "fake, but realistic" data—a characterization that in my observation applies to a wide array of  people and situations.  What follows are available only internally at Bryan Cave, but the firm has begun exploring offering similar analytic tools to its clients:  One of the first they've rolled out is a "diversity" dashboard, displaying how each client's matters rank on the diversity criterion of Bryan Cave lawyers assigned to and working on it. 

What can the Bryan Cave lawyers do?

While the screenshots that follow are necessarily small, and unnecessarily difficult to read, following are some of the highlights.  Note:  A "gallery" showing these shots in much higher resolution is available here:

• In planning a matter, they can choose different ways to staff it ("scenarios"), different billing and realization rates, different estimates of time actually worked, etc., and see how those assumptions in turn affect fees billed, fees collected, costs, gross margin, and net contribution to profitability.
• In analyzing a client (for example--the same obtains for a matter or other subject of analysis), one can look at WIP (work in progress) and A/R (accounts receivable), updated as of last night, compared to 3, 2, and 1 year ago, and YTD compared to firm-wide averages, and other measures.
• In managing  your practice group, you can look at all fees collected and billed by client, their "contribution" to collections and billings, and your effective rates realized, all by any number of dimensions (for example, by timekeeper or by client, by time period, by office or firm-wide).

Plan:

Analyze:

Manage your practice group:

And switch to a very user-friendly (read:  lawyer-friendly) "dashboard" of gauges:

In the hands of savvy, ambitious, analytic, and creative lawyers, these are competititve tools par excellence.  Need I mention they beat seat of the pants?