Garbage in, Garbage out: Big Data collection in time-based billing systems

As you might have noticed in some of my other articles, I’m really going all in on law firm management based on big data. In this fast changing times you can’t make business decisions anymore based on best practice or even worse, tradition and deontological rules made more than a century ago. But big data collection has its challenges in this profession. And when the data gets skewed because some of the team don’t register like you want to, the whole data set is basically garbage. And because that’s the case, it’s hard to push decisions based on flawed data.
Data collection comes naturally in the law profession
When I coach people who are on the brink of burnout, I give them a log. For 2 weeks they have to log what they do, how long they do it, what their mood was going into the activity and their mood finishing the activity. The first few times I was taken by surprise to see that their logging was very inconsistent. Sometimes they felt like it (most of the time the bad moments), and sometimes they just forgot about it (most of the time the moments of flow and the good moments). The first few times I was taken by surprise by this observation. Working almost my whole career in the legal sector, it seemed almost natural to me that everyone logged their activities, assigned it categories or cases and set targets based on those logs.

What I’m trying to say is that most law firms base the pay on what was billed. And to bill something, it has to be logged. So lawyers are very much motivated to log their activities. The worse they do, the less they get payed. The result is a really big data set. On the left you see a piece of my data set that I’ve been collecting from 4 lawyers from feb 2014 until aug 2017. In a little more than 3 years I’ve collected 22.348 records. In those records I can see trends like peek periods, average time for a brief per lawyer, the short term effects of marketing actions, the impact of pricing changes, changes in litigation vs. advice,… In theory.
Not only the time spend is more easily maintained in a law firm, but the calendar might be one of the most important tools for a lawyer. Deadlines are one of the cornerstones in litigation. If you are a couple of days late, the law is unforgiving. There too, is data being stored. And it all has to be centralized, no personal calendars without overview of the whole firm.
Data consistency is a different story
Take the time billings for example. Because the data is only used for the bottom line, only the time is billed ‘accurately’. And even then it’s not as segmented as I would like. I can’t differentiate by kind of activity and I can’t see for example at what time of the day it is billed. Most of them just bill at the end of the day what they did that day.
I can think of a couple of reasons the billings are inconsistent and unusable. For starters it’s timeconsuming to declare all the activities a category. Even if every declaration would only take 20 seconds, the total lost time for all the records in my example above would be 5 full workdays a year. And those are none billable.
Another reason is that many of the categories that I use are non-exclusive. Which means that you can write a brief and do legal research at the same time. So even if they use the categories, they just say they wrote a brief in 2 hours in stead of differentiating that activity in 20' research, 90' brief and 10' redaction & layout.
And the more I use the data, the more reluctant some of the lawyers become because the more we adapt our pricing strategies to the way we work, the more important it is to work efficiently. If I notice in the data that some lawyers do redaction and layout in 5' and one of them loses 15', I might go investigate. Is their equipment outdated, are they using the provided templates, do they need a walkthrough session or a manual for easy and efficient MS Word formatting? Now, if they score significantly lower on some stuff, they can blame it on the data, and I an only acknowledge that.
Restrictions and recognition
I strongly believe that what is measured should be standardized from a law firm management perspective. If all law firms share at least the same baseline metrics, a whole new science will emerge where the legal profession can learn from each other. Certainly in Belgium, the bar association is one of the most tight-knit professional bodies in the country. They speak of confraternity, but lack the tools to be taken seriously when it comes to policy decisions.
But how it’s measured can be very different depending on the culture. I’m lucky to work in a relatively young, small and mostly agile firm. Agile in the way that they don’t like the status quo. So when the story is compelling enough or the data is convincing enough, they at least give most of the suggestions a shot. So I can suggest technological innovations, or a more UX-friendly customer service experience.
What I did for example was make categories which have a default time segmentation. So in my example of the brief writing, they just had to click one button in a dropdown menu and the time sheet said 20':research, 90':brief, 10':redaction. And they could easily change any of those numbers. I took away friction. The other side of the coin is that, except when it’s significantly less or more, they now pick 2 hours for writing a brief, so they don’t change the data, which skewes the data in its own way. The data set has a more detailed and in depth feel, but some categories like redaction are hollow because most of the time they just use the default value.
In some cultures, using the data is the best way to get buy in. In my redaction example the data was used to aid the lawyer in making the redaction activity more efficient. It doesn’t matter who you work with, but showing quick results might be the best motivation there is…IF you can link the data, the remediation and results in the mind of the coachee.
Automation is another way to handle the situation. As admin I could write a program that checks the logs of our CMS, analyses when everyone logged in, which documents were checked in, checked out, when the CMS was minimized or closed, where they surfed,… and reconstruct a time sheet based on that. But it’s a huuuuuge invasion of privacy. And my programming skills are not so good that I would trust automatically generated data from one of my programs. I could do it manually with our CMS system en RescueTime but the time investment won’t justify the results.
In some cultures, it’s still the secretaries task to manage everything from billing, to calendar management, invoicing,… If it’s a small office with such a culture, you could see if the secretary can record and maintain the data herself.
And of course there’s recognition. The time in the office the data was maintained the best, was when a huge white board had the most important metrics on it, and praise for the effort of the whole firm to make these metrics possible and reliable. I’m trying to make a good PowerBI dashboard, but it’s definitely not as engaging as the white board.
Conclusion
I’ll be writing a lot about big data analytics here. That’s because it’s usefull in so many ways. If I’m writing about law firm marketing I’ll mention big data, but also if I’m talking about legal project management, pricing models, automation, clientcentricity, gamification,…
But every piece of data you are collecting must play a part in a story you are trying to convey. Convey to your colleagues, your clients, your bar association, society,… If you make everyone register the time they spend in the bathroom, you better have a good and compelling reason.
Having standards and a shared understanding because these standards are thought in law school, it would just be a logical thing to gather certain kinds of data. Like it’s just natural to bill every billable minute of the day. But in the meantime it’s just important to have a strong mission, think about how you want to measure how close you are to that vision, and talk and listen to your team how it can best be measured and what to do with that data.