Using Analytics To Boost Attorney Productivity

by Adam McDonell of Salladore 

From technology companies to traditional corporations and now into legal practice, sophisticated analytics have been driving a quiet revolution in business productivity. The model of assessing employee and business performance through annual or semi-annual review has become obsolete, abandoned even by old-fashioned companies like General Electric, Coca-Cola and Kimberly Clark. In legal, the billable hour has long held sway as the gold standard of attorney performance. But, with analytics, law firms have a more reliable method of evaluating the performance of their attorneys.

Before the adoption of connected productivity software, trying to gather continuous performance data would have caused an inordinate disruption in employees’ primary responsibilities as they filled out endless surveys and other paperwork. Now, the software employees already use generates a goldmine of data on their habits and performance; managers just need the right tools to compile and analyze everything. The objective for firms is to figure out which metrics are most important and how they can use those metrics to improve the firm’s productivity. 

Productivity vs. the Billable Hour

Legal management has come to recognize the inadequacy of the billable hour as a measure of attorney performance. While billable hours are a convenient way for firms to assess legal fees for clients, they inherently fail to value productivity gains. If a new technique or technology allows an associate to complete the same work in less time, that associate will bill fewer hours than an associate using obsolete practices. Inefficient practices allow firms to bill more, but, as clients demand greater transparency, firms must show ever-increasing productivity per billable hour to justify their billing rates. 

Even if partners try to be meticulously fair to each associate, their perceptions inevitably come from anecdotes that might not reflect the associate’s overall performance.

 The billable hour is also opaque to partners. Is Associate A, who billed 200 more hours than Associate B, a better or harder worker? B might be more efficient than A and take less time to produce the same quality of work. By measuring attorney performance in terms of billable hours, firms punish efficiency: over the course of a year, B may have worked on more matters and produced more documents than A, but she could be deemed less effective because she billed fewer hours.

Better Measurement = Better Metrics

For best practices to evolve, firms need more granular metrics to evaluate attorney performance. Rather than the billable hour, enigmatic in terms of actual productivity, use the following four metrics: 

? Response times to email

? Rate of work turned in on time

? Rate of work that is correct the first time

? Hours spent per assignment measured against other attorneys

 Some of these factors currently find their way into performance reviews, but in a manner based on partners’ subjective impressions rather than objective data. When evaluation time comes around, partners try to identify associates’ weaknesses and areas where they could improve. The problem with this approach is twofold:

1 - Even if partners try to be meticulously fair to each associate, their perceptions inevitably come from anecdotes that might not reflect the associate’s overall performance and are colored by the partners’ own unconscious biases.

2 - If a problem recurs often enough to be noteworthy at a performance evaluation, it has already had an associated financial cost for the firm. Also, being called to account for and correct a behavior that has been ongoing might affect the associate’s morale and vision of whether he or she can continue at the firm.

This is where network-connected software comes in. Almost everything attorneys do with software generates metadata, from email timestamps to research website logs to document version control. All this software is connected through the firm’s intranet or the cloud, which allows the firm to gather and compile metadata continuously without requiring attorneys to do anything outside their normal routines.

Response Times to Email

An associate’s email responsiveness is simple to compile and analyze, and firms already have all the data needed sitting on their email servers, waiting to be collected. Attorneys conduct most of their communications via email. The volume of email messages each attorney sends and receives per day is large enough to generate a meaningful dataset over time, so firms can use email metadata to get a good sense of whether their attorneys are communicating effectively.

Knowing how quickly each associate responds to email messages from partners, clients and other associates gives partners insight into whether individual attorneys and the office as a whole are functioning properly. Responding to email in a timely fashion is a big part of the job. Partners giving out new assignments or following up on existing ones can work much more efficiently when they receive immediate responses from associates.

If an attorney underperforms in email response times compared to his previous averages, analytics can flag the issue so partners can look into it, determine whether an intervention is necessary and fix problems before they fester. 

Clients also expect prompt responses from their attorneys. While partners have a general idea of which associates are good communicators, collecting quantitative data facilitates associate training by allowing firms to set targets against which associates can measure their performance. This feedback lets firms intervene when associates need to work on their efficiency and also creates an office- wide culture where attorneys continually challenge themselves to improve their communication skills.

Email response times also show the health of attorneys’ working relationships. Studies have shown that email response times reflect the strength of relationships, and that algorithms can accurately predict the closeness of working relationships based strictly on response time metadata (see Jonah Lehrer’s 2011 article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Why You Didn’t Hit ‘Reply’”). By analyzing this metadata, firms can gain insights into whether, for example, new hires are building  effective networks or need help integrating. It can also help firms diagnose morale problems that otherwise could go unnoticed. If an attorney underperforms in email response times compared to his previous averages, analytics can flag the issue so partners can look into it, determine whether an intervention is necessary and fix problems before they fester. Each associate represents a substantial investment for the firm and using all the tools available to measure associate relationships and morale helps protect those investments.

Rate and Quality of Work

Beyond responsiveness, firms should also measure analytics to determine if associates are finishing assignments on deadline, correctly and within the expected number of billable hours. These criteria tell partners whether associates are functioning effectively within the firm’s workflow or creating bottlenecks.

Firms have a few options for tracking whether associates are completing work on time. If firms enter assignments into a database as they are handed out, it is as simple as comparing due dates in the database to when partners mark the assignments as complete. Firms that use Outlook or other calendars can utilize extensions that ask partners whether assignments came in on time as they become due. Another option would be to have partners enter this data as they review associates’ billing records, although this is less efficient because it adds extra work for partners and relies on them remembering accurately.

For measuring whether associates are doing work correctly the first time, firms can look at the metadata generated by document management systems whenever a user reviews or edits a document.  

Word processors like Microsoft Word also track this metadata, and firms could use extensions to extract this data. Analyzing these records can tell firms how much time partners spend editing an associate’s work and how much time associates typically spend redoing their own work. Attorneys who consistently need an unusual amount of back- and-forth to finalize assignments can be as disruptive to firm workflow as those who miss deadlines. Partners must set earlier deadlines for those associates’ first drafts and make sure they schedule enough of their own time to review them. Having objective data can also help firms diagnose communication issues or other problems causing associates to get work wrong on the first try. 

Hours Spent Per Assignment

For tracking associate efficiency in terms of hours spent per assignment, firms can use data from their time-tracking software. If associates code their work properly, firms can compare how much time it takes different associates to complete similar assignments. There are caveats to using this type of data — assignments with the same codes can vary in scope and complexity. But, particularly for larger firms generating bigger data sets, algorithms can increase the signal-to-noise ratio so it becomes possible to track trends in attorneys’ efficiency over time and compare different attorneys’ efficiency. This allows firms to determine whether capital investments are bearing fruit and also increases transparency, showing clients how those investments translate into better value per billable hour. Knowing how much time associates need for each assignment also gives firms more predictability when offering clients alternative billing arrangements.

The Power of Analytics

The real potential of using analytics based on metrics that more closely reflect day-to-day attorney performance will come from seeing the otherwise invisible patterns that will emerge from the data. As it happens, Uber was market-testing a side-by-side view of carpooling and individual ride prices in the Washington, D.C. metro area at the same time as ILTACON 2016. For most trips in the area the cost-savings were not significant, but for routes like those passing by Reagan National Airport (near the ILTACON venue), the high probability of picking up an additional passenger allowed Uber to offer savings of as much as 80 percent, which was even cheaper than taking the Metro. This was the power of analytics at work.

It is impossible to know what kind of dramatic opportunities the data will reveal for attorneys, but we know how to find them: by analyzing the fundamental day-to-day interactions between attorneys in ways that would have been impractical even a few years ago.  

ADAM MCDONELL

Adam McDonell is the founder and President of Salladore, a software platform that streamlines assignment workflow and facilitates communication for attorneys at law firms and corporate legal departments. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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