How to Build a High-Revenue Law Firm: Legal Project Management Tips
Why do so many law firms struggle to grow? Despite being businesses that rely on teamwork, over 95% of law firms never expand beyond 20 employees, and 75% don’t exceed a team of 4 (1).
Consider this: 42% of a law firm’s costs go to salaries, 29% to office space (2), and only 31% of the work day is spent on billable tasks., The rest is lost to unbillable administrative work (3). This inefficiency is a major obstacle to growth and profitability.
Building a high revenue firm means continually improving operational efficiency. It’s about coordinating a large team effectively and minimizing time lost to non-billable tasks. More team members delivering more services means a higher return on wages.
Furthermore, by leveraging your team’s time efficiently, you can slow the growth of your largest overheads. Embracing remote work can also cut down on office space costs, boosting your firm’s profitability.
Overcoming Operational Challenges with Legal Project Management
The good news is that improving your law firm’s efficiency isn’t complicated. You can achieve significant results in a short time by dedicating time to work on it, and treating it as an ongoing project.
Breaking free from the growing operational burden starts with implementing legal project management. This means taking a disciplined approach to team coordination and continuously improving how you work together.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you on this journey. You can tackle it one step at a time, or all at once, depending on your goals and resources.
Implementing Centralised Task and Matter Management
The first step to efficient coordination is implementing centralised task and matter management. Your team needs visibility into the status of all matters and what each person is working on.
This stage will challenge you to grow as a leader. Enhancing your firm’s performance means improving how you operate. If you can’t get your team to embrace new methods, your firm won’t reach the next level. Remember, a business is like a bus–you decide the direction, not the passengers.
Documenting Workflows for Improved Efficiency
After centralising task and matter management, you’ll quickly notice that you repeat many tasks and instructions. This is the time to document your processes (also known as workflows).
Just as you have templates for common letters and agreements, you need documented procedures for recurring tasks and entire matters. This reduces data entry, shortens training time for new staff, and sets the stage for further improvements.
Documenting workflows might not be the most exciting task, but think about the payoff: more billable time for you and your team. Junior staff can work more independently with fewer questions, and senior staff will face fewer interruptions.
Streamlining Reporting with Automation
Reporting is essential, but often burdensome, especially for larger firms. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and gathering and compiling all that information manually can be very time-consuming and quickly outdated by the time it reaches decision makers.
Manual reporting means operational staff spend a lot of time chasing updates, and you’re left relying on self-reporting to manage staff performance. This can be inefficient and unreliable.
However, with centralised task and matter management and standardised workflows, you have a wealth of data ready for automation. This makes reporting much easier and more accurate.
Using a platform like Hivelight simplifies this process. Hivelight automatically generates live reports from your data, saving time and improving accuracy. If you’re not using such a platform, it’s worth investing in this project to streamline your reporting needs.
Empowering Your Management Team Through Data-Driven Insights
By building out these systems in your firm, you gain a significant advantage that’s not always obvious at the start. Now, every member of your management team, even those without legal training, can fully contribute to the firm’s leadership and continuous improvement.
How does this work? Each team member can now review their results in their area of responsibility–whether its financial management, operations, human resources, business development, or marketing– and trace those results back to their causes.
Live reports link back to centralised task and matter management and standardised workflows revealing the root causes of performance issues. With these insights, your management team can recommend practical actions and roll out changes in a clear, disciplined way. This leads to informed, continual improvement across all aspects of your business, creating an empowering environment for everyone involved.
Simplify Your Legal Project Management with Hivelight
With Hivelight, you can implement each stage of your legal project management journey in one place. Our easy-to-use platform is designed for legal teams, working both as a stand alone solution and integrating with various practice management systems and tools.
Ready to streamline your operations and boost your firm’s efficiency? Contact us to get started today.
