Give your law firm a full hearing with Filevine Periscope™
We push ourselves hard to perform well at court hearings. But do we ever turn inward to give our own legal practice a ‘hearing’?
One synonym of a ‘hearing’ is an ‘audit.’ It’s connected to ‘auditory’ and ‘audition.’ Though we may have unpleasant feelings associated with audits (does the IRS want to poke through my receipts?), at its root the word is about listening.
Listening to figure out the truth is the core of any attorney’s job. But along with hearing out your clients, you need to direct some of that attention inward.
How is your practice doing? Do you have the right systems in place? Where are your bottlenecks? Who’s really doing the work around here?
To manage your practice, you need a clear, objective vision of its day-to-day workings. How do you get that? We’ve touted the awesome power of advanced reports and data analytics. But now Filevine offers a tool with even greater detail and precision.
It’s called Filevine Periscope, and it gives you unprecedented perspective on your law firm’s data.
Beginning April 29th, 2018, every action taken by your legal team in Filevine has been logged in your system. With Audit Reports, you or your administrators can tap into this data. You can see the activity of your legal team — work performed, cases reviewed, reports run. Everything.
But with Filevine Periscope, you can go even further by easily making deep analyses and comparisons of what your data is actually saying.
Why is this important? Here’s are just three ways Filevine Periscope can revolutionize your practice:
1. Monitor individual productivity
Some staff members provide tremendous service to your practice — but they’re often not listed with the big names that land a hefty settlement.
Then, there are team members that come early, stay late, and always wear a stressed or harried expression. But appearing busy is very different from actual productivity.
To find your MVPs — and your free-riders — you need objective measurements. Typical metrics can provide some good correlations between team members and returns on cases. But Filevine Periscope goes further: it shows you the day-to-day behavior of members of your legal team.
But with Filevine Periscope, you can see who’s doing the lion’s share of high-value work. And you can go deeper, analyzing the habitual behavior of your top performers. How are they interacting with clients over the course of a case? What kind of tasks are they completing? You can see how these habits compare with staff members who aren’t performing as well.
The day-to-day data of Audit Reports presented through Filevine Periscope can help you answer hard management questions, such as when to hire more staff (and what kind of staff), and when to simply train up or replace current staff members.
2. Analyze case value – in real time
No attorney wants to pour their time into a case that goes nowhere. No client wants to be dragged through a lengthy, invasive litigation process that leaves them with peanuts. You need to target your high-value cases.
With traditional metrics, you can compare the length of a case with the final settlement or award. You can see if those drawn-out cases are really worth it.
But we all know there’s another layer to our work. It’s not just about time, it’s about the intensity of work within that time.
Maybe you’re up against an opposing counsel that’s litigating hard or making excessive discovery demands. Or perhaps you’re working with a difficult client, who requires much more attention and hand-holding than usual. And maybe you’re not even seeing this extra work, because it’s being done by your staff.
So how can you account for these variables when you’re analyzing your caseload?
Filevine Periscope lets you view the work your team is putting into each of your cases. See all of the tasks, notes, documents, and revisions they’ve created in easy-to-digest graphs and charts. You can even see how many times a user has had to open up a case to review or retrieve information from it.
Some cases demand a huge amount of your team’s effort. With Filevine Periscope, you can catch those cases early on. You can discover the day-to-day work put into a case, and compare that with the case’s expected outcome. This enables you to make the best decision for your practice and your client.
You can even compare workflows between high-value and low-value cases, to see what practices should be standardized across your legal team (and what bad habits should be squashed).
3. Increase system security
There are myriad benefits and rewards your firm will enjoy if you use Filevine Periscope, but one of the most important is added security.
The Age of Information is also the age of information-breaches. Clients and bar associations alike are demanding more intensive cybersecurity efforts by attorneys. Legal security experts Sharon Nelson and John Simek warned back in 2013:
“The time to get started on all this was yesterday. And we predict with a fair amount of confidence that many law firms will sashay into the future as vulnerable as ever unless clients force them to take security seriously.”
They cynically conclude their plea with a line from Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Jaws: “…I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you in the ass!”
But for those attorneys who aren’t ignoring this problem, Filevine Periscope gives you a crucial weapon in your arsenal. Now you can see everyone who has logged into your Filevine, with the date, time, and location of access, as well as what logged-in users were up to during their session.
This additional level of security helps you work with greater confidence — and assuage the worries of security-minded clients.
Enlist the power of Filevine Periscope™ today
Filevine Periscope dives deep into your data so you can have the information you need to make your law firm’s most important decisions. This feature requires additional setup to integrate with your current Filevine System, and will be implemented by our Support team on a first come-first serve basis.
So act fast and reserve your seat for Filevine Persicope!
Filevine’s new Audit Reports are available to existing Filevine users at no extra charge but are not equipped with the graphing functionalities of Filevine Periscope. Learn more about running standard Audit Reports here.