If I told you successful lawyers need to have vision into the future, you might go out in search of a crystal ball, or consider me crazy. I’m going to suggest that you do neither of those two things, and instead let me explain how successful attorneys and law firms can begin to spot problems that could be in their future, before they ever really become problems.
While the idea of gazing into a crystal ball to avoid future complications sounds exciting, data driven dashboards can have the same effect for your law firm. By taking some of a firm’s most important data and pulling it into one centralized dashboard, a firm gains insight in real time into trouble that may lay ahead.
Some of the data we suggest that firms include in their dashboard are:
- A snapshot of some of their most important billing items. This includes unbilled time expense cards, unpaid invoices, overdue invoices, unbilled tasks, unbilled events, and unbilled notes.
- Timekeeper utilization data that details how many hours have been put in against how many hours have been billed.
- Information concerning a firm’s four most important balances; unpaid balance, unbilled balance, the operating retainer balance, and trust retainer balance.
- A record of completed events, tasks, or notes that are billable but have not yet been billed.
- A billing summary that identifies what the firm has billed, and how much of what has been billed has been paid by clients.
- A record of top clients in order of who has submitted the most in payments.
By beginning to track, understand and analyze this data your firm can begin to identify problems concerning collection of fees from clients, your firm’s balances, and the productivity of different attorneys inside the firm.
A dashboard may not be a crystal ball, but an analysis of the data included in that dashboard can provide valuable insight into where your firm is headed. CosmoLex provides a dashboard with the suggested data at login. If you’d like to see your firm’s future, you can try CosmoLex for free.
