Meeting Your Billable Hours Goal Post-COVID-19: How Technology Can Help

Is your law firm on track to meet its billable hours goal?  

Or has working from home (WFH) begun to negatively affect profitability?  

As the president of an IT company that serves law firms, I understand the high value placed on productivity.  

While work ethic, firm culture, or other factors can affect billable hours, they are not the only determinants. Your technology matters too because it helps attorneys focus on client work—or it creates unnecessary roadblocks. This is especially true in our new WFH environment! 

Let me share 3 pointers for putting technology on your side…  

1. Create WFH environments that support your billable hours goal. 

Consistency is key for keeping your team productive. 

Home environments can be anything but consistent with office environments. From finding the right keyboard to setting up a printer, WFH can create challenges that distract partners and associates from revenue-generating activities.  

I recommend providing at-home attorneys with the same tangible technologies they’re accustomed to at the office. The more team members’ remote workspaces mimic office workspaces, the more team members can focus on billable work.  

2. Be savvy about the technologies used for internal communication.

Communication within the firm can consume a lot of time—and it’s time that’s unbilled.  

So it follows that, when striving to meet a billable hours goal, managing partners should examine internal communication habits and look for ways to improve efficiency.  

Does your firm employ multiple communication tools? If your team is using Zoom for meetings, Slack for chatting, and email for document sharing, consider whether juggling several platforms is burning up time that your firm could be billing for.  

When you consolidate collaboration with a single solution, such as Microsoft Teams, you can reduce time spent on internal communication—empowering your attorneys to dedicate more time toward client work. 

3. Implement a location-flexible strategy that supports productivity.

Post-COVID-19, uncertainty abounds.  

If your firm transitions back to the office, it’s possible that a second COVID wave (or societal unrest) will force a return to remote work.   

You need a location-flexible model that allows attorneys to be productive and secure from anywhere. You need a strategy that fosters more time working and less time coping with piecemealed technology solutions.  

There is more than one way to accomplish this goal. To improve resiliency, you might transition to serverless networking, or you might install on-premise remote desktop services (RDS).  

Since there is no “right” strategy, I’d recommend starting with your business objectives and then finding the technologies needed to accomplish them. If you want our help determining which approach to take, shoot an email to info@weareproactive.com.  

Don’t let technology stand between your firm and its billable hours goal.   

Over the years, our company has worked with some big-name law firms.  

From experience, I know just how undesirable downtime is. Law firms have a solid grasp of the time-money equation. They’re willing to implement solutions to keep their teams productive.  

So let me ask a few questions…   

Does your IT company understand the importance of helping your firm run smoothly?  

Can your managed services provider support efficiency and convenience without compromising your security?  

Does your IT vendor think long term when it comes to WFH?  

If your current WFH strategy is negatively impacting billable hours, reach out to us at 704-464-3075 or info@weareproactive.com.