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[Music] good morning everyone and welcome to today's webinar entitled how to increase profits in sanity by running a lien law firm today's webinar is being presented free of charge as part of the 2020 virtual annual foot of our convention and it's brought to you by the 4-bar into a legal education committee legal fueled practice resource center of the four d'Ivoire and rocket matter before we get started lected over a few housekeeping items we'll be recording this webinar and will share the link after the event the recording in any supporting resource as well speak hosted on our website legal fuel comm any questions you may have during today's presentation can be asked for the Q&A feature which you'll find out at the bottom of your zine screen in the control panel our presenters will do the best answer any questions you have over due to time constraints they may not be able to address them all today's presentation has been approved by the Florida Bar for one hour of general CLE credit and one hour of technology and the course number is going to be three three six eight all right now like to introduce today's presenter the report the report is a CEO of rocket matter a leading legal cloud based practice management and time and billing application he's a speaker and award-winning writer at the crossroads of the legal profession cutting edge technology in business management its experience running a technology company and insight into law firm operations led to his co-author at the number one best-selling ABA book the lean law firm to enjoy today's presentation and take away Larry yeah okay we got an ask to repeat the course number all right so we got a we are we got our first question there Jonathan was it 3 3 6 8 did I hear that correctly you got it all right so hopefully you can all see my screen just let me know in the webinar chat widget if you can see my screen and please use the chat widget because it is super fun if you're if it's interactive we got a lot of people on today we got over 400 then I've done it when there's this many people and usually get some interesting dialogues going all right great wonderful so people were Terry thank you very much Melissa Troi while our a a lot of people okay great let's make it fun so um I know these are difficult times for law firms let me tell you so so I run rocket matter and here let me get my bio up on the screen and and Jonathan did a wonderful job repeating my intro which I probably need to update but in addition to other things you know I'm a husband I'm a father I'm an animal lover I have two dogs and a cat I I don't get the code anymore I wish I could still code but like once I built rocket matter then you know I know I have to run rocket matter so I you know I miss it I love it and I would encourage you if you have like kids and they like the code great career or if you want to like change careers I love coding so very active in the anti-defamation league I'm a fighter of hate I'm a seeker of wellness I'm doing the meditation thing you may have seen my stuff that I've done with the Florida Bar on that um but you know in my role as the CEO of rock you matter one of the things that's interesting is I get to work I have this weird vantage point where I see how thousands of law firms work and also you know one of the things that we're able to do is we're able to run aggregate anonymized data across all of our installs and we can see certain trends that are happening in the industry so let me tell you a little bit about what's going on right now and I'd be curious through the chat widget if you know if you're seeing these kind of things what we've seen is that during the May April and May time period that there was a significant drop-off in new clients that was the biggest drop-off there was a drop-off in new matter creation and there was a decrease in invoicing that's one of the things that we saw across all of our and if you look at a trend line across all of our installs on in June we're starting to see a little bit of a bit of a rebound so I would be curious to see so the numbers in June seem to be coming back up from what we were seeing in April and May so I'd be curious to hear what your experience is there so that's like a little bit of a a little bit of a data point that you guys can happen if you have any questions for me definitely ask them along the way now so I have a co-author his name is Dave Maxfield he is not here okay and but Dave is really smart so I'm not a lawyer I'm a software engineer I built software for the legal profession before that I built it for HR and payroll software I built it for a financial software like equities and futures and things like that and I also built stuff for the Defense Department when I was in graduate school so you know my ideas are like look I see how the software industry works I don't understand why law firms aren't using these basic techniques that we use in software because it could certainly apply these lean ideas and and then Dave is this guy that I met he was a speaker at a BA tech show and what Dave said is that like yeah he runs his firm with these things so I met him years ago and eventually we ended up writing this book for the American Bar Association and we wanted to make it fun so like there's graphic novel elements you know and there's so there's like drawings in it and it was the first one to do that for the ABA we're actually coming out with an audio book so if you don't like to read and you'd prefer to listen that's going to be coming out in probably a month or two somebody said Audio is cutting in and out so I just want to make sure that does anybody else having that issue or is that issue just want to make sure you there we go all right we're good I'm getting all sorts of like stuff into the chat about the audio but if you are having issues with the audio going in and out that's on your side because as long as people are hearing me that means that it's working okay all right well good now we're getting a lot of okay's thumbs up thank you all right so in general what is lean so first of all it does come from the Toyota Production system Toyota Production system was invented by Tai Chi on Oh No over in Japan and it has really it's a mindset and it's a mindset about what is a value to your clients and what is waste so basically waste is anything that's not of value to your client so it's very easy to understand so that's kind of you know when we when we talk about waste we'll go into that but it's divided into different types when we talk about revenue we're gonna be talking about something called the income formula which is really kind of like a revenue formula and if you're new to financial modeling it's a very very simple basic and effective financial model there's one of the drawings from our book we're gonna talk about waste as I mentioned the different types of it we're gonna talk about constraints okay so these are just like but I'm just planting seeds here about what we're gonna be going into it all this stuff is gonna help you run a more efficient firm and you know really focus on what's important to your clients to get paid more effectively we'll talk a little bit about technology too because technology is one of the most powerful ways to eliminate waste which is what we talk about a lot in the book so from a big-picture perspective is a law firm so different from a factory on the surface the answer is yes they a law firm is very different than a factory because you know it is a you know you're you're dealing with a completely different set of things it's not a manufactured good but you know underneath that really let's think about what a factory is really kind of doing before the end-user so really you have raw materials coming in and you have products going out that's ultimately what's happening at a very like high level in a factory and in a law firm it's very similar so you have a client coming to you with a problem you are running it through a process and value is created on the other side so you know you have problem process solution or at least attempt that solution or settlement or something that that is what you're doing that's similar to a factory and if we can embrace that idea at a very high level then we can start to model how our law firm works I am going to raise my desk so you are going to see me standing as my desk raised I have one of these like sit down standup desks which by the way I highly recommend for everybody these are awesome okay so um let's explore this a little bit more so if you use something called a Kanban board which is a big thing in Lee then you can start modeling your process the same way a factory can model how they things so a Kanban board is simply a left-to-right mechanism and it is deceptively simple you look at this thing and you're like okay this is what a kid would do in their project in like junior high and but this has tremendous power and this is like one of the foundational elements of lean so the way a Kanban board works and I would encourage you to try this if you haven't done it before and it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be a software thing it could be physical with like index cards or post-it know it's first in a white board or something but and by the way I'm going to be distributing slides to answer Jones question so law firms can manage their firms away so if you if this is the most basic one there is up next work in progress done right so you have all of your cases that you have to work on you have all of your stuff that's none has to be clearly defined so Don means that much with firms one thing that I see is that they're very interested in getting new clients because they think that is the ticket to new revenue in reality one of the things that you see is that a lot of firms they have all this stuff that's in work-in-progress that they never finish so or or that they delay finishing so when you have when you when when you don't clear out the cases that are in work-in-progress that's one problem start arising in a law firm because what I like and I've even seen this with personal injury firms that have won their cases and that they're just very slow to collect on right so it's something about the victory but then they don't collect but in an hourly firm not sending out the invoices and not collecting efficiently is a major problem that they have and so they think that they they think they need more clients so then they go and they spend three grand a month on advertising so then they're spending three grand what they spend three grand a month on advertising and then you know nothing happens so they're they're not getting more clients and or they are getting more clients and and they're still not finishing the cases and if they're not careful then you create a downward spiral okay so if we know that we have Kanban boards then we can start but this does all this has all sorts of implications down the road but before I get any further I do have some questions okay all the questions are out Michael Michael says my presentation would be more beneficial if you could leave out the SOEs you know and like noted I will try to leave out this those you know and like nothing more appreciated than brutal honesty so there we go oops I said so all right so let's talk a little bit about income formula so the income formula is very basic financial modelling alright so if you've never been introduced to financial modelling before it is a way to approximate what kind of income you're gonna be having down the road right so and this is new for a lot of attorneys now if you think about it when you have this this formula is very very simple it's it says that your income is going to be related to your throughput rate times your average unit value and we'll talk about what that means in a second but one thing that I want people to understand is that if you want more insight into the kind of money that you're going to be making down the road then financial modeling is your friend it is it is it is critical to be able to do this it like if you talk to anybody who's in the investment or the private equity world then then they are going to be big financial modelers in raqqa matter when we have two financial model what we do we don't have the luxury of having something as simple as what's on my screen here we have to model like for example how much the subscription to the software costs how many of those people end up buying our credit card processing Lex charge what's the average size of users per firm what are you know and so like are our financial modeling has all these really complex and crazy different elements into it but for you guys for the legal profession it really has to do about how many cases you can finish a year and what the average value of those cases are so okay so let's go into what there's really only three elements but really only two elements and if you exclude the result so the first one is the throughput rate so a throughput rate is and I'm gonna define what case units are but the throughput rate is the number of case units your law firm finishes during a given time so do this exercise how many cases do you think you finished in 2019 you don't have to like go back in your history and look at it but just think in your head like you know how many cases that you finished in 2019 and how many cases do you think you're gonna finish in 2020 right so those are like kind of numbers I want you to be thinking about now get this same Kanban board that I showed right now it has to be done in the same time period if those if what you see in the done column is done in the same year then you have an input rate of three here you have a throughput rate of three I'm sorry so throughput rate of three so you got to know your throughput rate average case unit value okay now a lot of attorneys like struggle with this one because they're like well I have such a radically different value for my cases so I have some that are pretty small and I have some that are pretty big that's true for a lot of people that is true for some people they trade in a much narrower range let's say you do a state playing or so on and so forth and it's more transactional more flatfeet oriented then it's more of a narrower range but let's say that it's you know you're a litigator it could be anything right however you do have an average because an average is computed by adding up all of the different like cases that you have and dividing them by the number of those cases so you do have an average and then I've had say well that's kind of an artificial number but financial forecasting is part science but it's also part part art and what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out okay how much money do I need to be able to sustain the life that I want to live right that's what financial forecasting does so we know two things now we know our throughput rate how many cases we can finish in a year and then what our average case unit value is right so sorry I went backwards right so if we can increase the number what what this means if we have an equation now if we can increase the number of cases we finish in a year and/or increase our average case unit value then we can increase our income okay so we got a question from Randy he says sounds like much of the seminar is not applicable for hourly transactional billing we don't care how many cases we finish because we keep billing until the case is closed closed and we get paid currently so if you're an hourly biller and so and somebody else asked this if we aren't doing contingency work why does the number of cases finished matter right so the first thing I want to say about that is like as long as if you're doing hourly billing the the one of the most important things that I can stress to everybody is that you have consistency with your invoicing right if you're doing flat fee or contingency billing this is where you can like really make a lot of money right and one thing that I'm saying with hourly billers is you know they're there you've probably heard about alternative fee arrangements so the whole notion there is that hourly billing is great as a consumer I hate it if I have the choice between two law firms one that does hourly billing and one that has a handle on their costs and can divide it up at the phase base phase base works or something called like a flat fee with collar then I'm gonna definitely go with the alternative fee arrangement firm and more and more legal consumers want that right so like for example with hourly billing the way that you can chop that up is that like if you know on average like how much it takes you to finish a certain portion of a case not maybe the entire case but at least a certain portion of the case then you can do things like okay I'm gonna charge a flat fee for this phase or I'm going to charge a flat fee with collar which means that if I go above or below a certain amount then I'm gonna charge an overage or give something back to the client and we have if you're interested I have a white paper that I can send you on an alternative fee arrangements but the more that hourly firms can go and and adopt those mechanisms the more competitive they will be in the market and the more money they will be able to make because what they can then do is when you charge on an hourly basis you're limited to that hour but if you charge on a flat fee and you can reduce the amount of time that you spend on a case then you end up making more money so there's a big incentive in my opinion for hourly billers to take a good hard look at this okay let's see yeah if if you want the somebody says it is impossible to do flat fee this is Carla it is impossible to do flat fee etc for complex transactional law because you never know what the matter involves until you see documents and get into the matter right so uh that that's why phase based approach to things is great like I would I'm if you have to come up with an alternative fee a in advance of seeing anything that would be foolish right you need to be educated about how you do things and you to divide your your cases up into phases right so so that's one of the approaches to doing that so there's there's lots of ways to skinning this cat and a lot of attorneys have figured it out so what I would encourage you to do is take a good hard look at that and because you don't want to get flat-footed that's for sure you don't want the competition to come and knock you out so if you want the e-book I saw some people requesting it email me Larry at rocamadour comm with alternative fee eBook in the subject so Larry at raka Metacom with alternative fee ebook in the subject line great wonderful because I'm not sure if I'm gonna get a transcription of this chat window or not okay now how do we increase the number of cases that we finish in a given year one thing you do here is you you shorten your cycle time right so and believe me I've given this presentation or some form of it to thousands of lawyers across the country and and if you have questions ask them and some people are asking questions and I want to be able to make sure that I answer your questions right especially there's some really good things in here that I'm seeing coming through the chat so cycle time right is closely related to throughput rate and the way you can think about both of these things is if you think about like what like to go to a restaurant so cycle time and I'll get to the restaurant analogy in a second here but what it is is the amount of time a case unit spends between the day you accept it formally in the day that case is considered done and even for you hourly billers out there that says that say that this does not apply to you if you can shorten the time it takes you to receive payment you make more money right so my so that's that's very important by the way somebody was asking about my email address it's Larry at rocamadour com so the amount of time it takes you to between the time that you accept a case and the time that you collect money right so that's very important okay now think about like a restaurant and what a restaurant is like right so a restaurant it illustrates this phenomenon this is called littles law of systems is really what we're talking about here so this is all like systems thinking this is and the reason that this Kanban board is important and thinking about your law firm as a factors important it's because it allows you to see your firm as a factory and once you see your firm as a factory you can apply things like systems thinking and you can like do all the slicing and dicing to like make your firm more efficient right somebody Randy is saying attorneys are a profession subject to ethical rules and prescriptions we are neither a restaurant nor an engineering coding the DC bar associations a pines that flat fees must be reasonable can measure it with actual time spent on the case that is very true yeah you you absolutely have to do that which is why flat fees with caller are certainly worth looking at so and I can get into those that's an alternative fee arrangement that we that I mentioned before which makes sure that you are being fair to the client in addition to yourself but still if you can finish more cases in a given year it makes more sense and if you can do it more efficiently all the better now so it's obvious that a law firm isn't a restaurant Randy it's obvious that a law firm is in a factory Randy so the the point is is that by looking at other industries we can make analogies and understand systems okay so if you look at a restaurant and and you think about like how tables are turned so it these illustrates system thinking ideas right so a system thing so so the faster restaurant will turn a table it might not be pleasant to you as a client that's the one thing and you got a you know client care is obviously something that you have to take into consideration but we all know that the more tables a restaurant turns in one night then the more money they make and so the shorter people stay at tables the more money the restaurant will make if they're all doing the same thing here so in any case so that's the whole idea right you want to be able to think at least from a systems perspective and let's think about the how do we shorten cycle time how do we shorten cycle time how do we make our law firms more efficient how do we get more cases per year across the finish line well that's where waste comes into play so let's think about waste for a second what are the different types of waste that you can think of in your law firm so right now there's there's remember waste is to find in lane as something that does not provide value to the client what does not provide value to the client that you are doing even see alleys like this now Randy may disagree with me but this provides you know value to your client because this is helping you understand and practice law better any CLE is right so any Cele that you're doing allows you to keep your license and move the ball forward for your practice now what doesn't provide value to your client well a lot of things so this is the category that taiichi ohno defined when he talked about lien a lot of them applied to legal as well so for example transportation and motion waste how long does it take you to find contacts and documents are you not paperless yet that's a big question I have if you are not paperless then there is a lot of waste going on in your law firm right because it takes a lot of fine documents if somebody else has those documents then you don't have those documents you can't get them you have to file them back and forth can you meet clients virtually I hope so because like what is what has been going on in the past couple months you need to be able to meet the clients virtually so if you haven't been meeting them virtually I'm assuming that you've figured out a way to do it can you use tools like very important love using by the way I've engaged attorneys I'm a I'm a consumer and I'm not that young I mean I know I am technically savvy I'm a software engineer but when I like so I've engaged estate planning attorneys I've engaged litigators I've engaged deal attorneys so on and so forth and I can't think of the last time I've ever been in their office baby I've met them for lunch but there's a lot that you can do to to avoid this by the way somebody's asking me what muda is let's see muda is Japanese for waste so in the lean system they talk about muda so it's a good question all right inventory and waiting so the good news is is that like we don't have like physical inventory in like the knowledge profession like so we don't have to worry about like manufacturing like a bunch of guitars and then having a bunch of guitars sitting in our warehouse right so but we do have cases and cases are our inventory so for me and software it's all difference more like projects our inventory are you closing out your cases promptly this is like I said the number one issue that affects law firms if they want to increase revenues close out those cases sooner than later collect sooner than later right invoice often and collect an invoice early and often and that's another role is that a lot of times law firms don't invoice promptly if you're not doing a 30-day invoicing cycle then you're gonna be getting more and more haircuts from your clients so we have a kind of a rule and we have by the way another ebook that we have we do have best practices around invoicing and collections and things like that so if you want that ebook I can send you an e-book on that Larry at rocket matter comm so we have a lot of this content related that that can help you okay there are many reasons for law firms leaving money on the table ranging from poor billing practices to unpalatable nature of asking clients for money to a lack of investment in good technology and what I what I want to do is after I go through these waste types I want to kind of like show you some real efficiencies that you can gain right okay going paperless if you're not running a paperless odd office you're neck deep in muda or waste right that is a major major thing so and then over processing this is another form of waste can some of your processes be simplified how do you generate invoices how do you generate documents right so big picture again like if the ink if your income is equal to your throughput rate times your average case unit value right so if you are able to eliminate all this waste from your firm you're able to get more things across the finish line and your average you're able to increase your income the other way that you can do it is if your hourly or flat fee oriented and you're not contingency is you can increase your rate now that's oftentimes a very scary thing for an attorney but if but take a look at it to see what your rate is you know and is your rate if even an increase of 5% you know usually a 5% increase in your rate is not gonna like knock knock you out of your you know competitive standing and it's gonna have a pretty profound impact on you know what you're able to earn in a given year so that's something absolutely worth considering so you want to look at not just the throughput rate but the average case unit value contingency you don't have a lot of control over the the average case unit value the reason that is is because you know obviously you know you don't have complete control over like the settlement or what's gonna happen with that so so in a contingency case that's changing the value of the cases is not as easy to do as in a flat fee or or an hourly case so if your contingency then you really have to focus on your efficiencies much more so than an hourly biller does if you are an hourly Billy biller or a flat fee biller then you really do have to you can look at the average case unit value but like I said before there's I really would strongly encourage you to take a look at different flat fee models even if it's a phased based approach just so that you don't get annihilated in the years moving forward as people move away from the hourly bill right so one other thing talk about is another way that you can kind of like eliminate constraints is this notion of or you can shorten cycle times is this notion of eliminating constraints so eliminating constraints what is this like let me tell you a story and this comes from the book the goal by eliyahu Goldratt who is like an Israeli physicist that wrote one of the most important books about system thinking ever called the goal and it's actually kind of worth maybe getting the audio book for or reading it's the goal is considered a business classic and it's a it's a novel so we we actually wrote ours as like half novel half business book just to make it less dry and more engaging and it to some extent it's also kind of like a nod and an homage to the goal what Goldratt wrote and so we toast the story so the story is is that the guy is the protagonist has to turn around the factory so he's in this town and like basically everything's on his back he like grew up in this town and if the factory closes then everybody's gonna lose their job and it's gonna become this like dead Rust Belt town so like this is the setting of the book so he's got a like going to this factory that's failing and turn it around and the whole idea is about what he did was he eliminated constraints so you know he the you know there'd be some machines that weren't going fast enough and other machines that were going too fast which which caused their own problems so really the whole idea is it boils down to like this experience that he had on a boy scout hike so he he was responsible the protagonist from getting like 12 Boy Scouts from point A to point B without any of the Boy Scouts like getting lost or eaten by Tigers or whatever so the way you you can't just like let the group go and like people arrive when they arrive like they all kind of have to leave and arrive at the same time and you know he kept on seeing these huge gaps in the line between the kids and what he realized is that they had this one guy named Herbie who was super slow and and the insight was that they could only go as fast as the slowest person in their troop and that's true for any system and this is this is a kind of a crazy thing to think about but if you have if you have a factory let's say and one machine is able to produce 60 parts a day the next in line produces 40 part today and then the part after the machine after that produces 70 parts a day the fastest you'll ever go is 40 parts per day because that's the most that any one given part of the chain can produce so your law firm is constricted by your weakest link right you're you're only going to be as fast as the slowest part of your process right so that's enough you you you oops lost audio again alright I am going to have to replace this thank you very much guys but looks like I'm going to have to replace this wire all right are we good now we good now apologies about this wire I'll have Jonathan buy me a new one okay all right we're good we're good great thank you okay so that's the whole idea is that when you start seeing when you start seeing pile ups and given swim lanes then that's when you have problems right so let's say in in a real law firm you're not gonna just have three swim lanes you're gonna have a lot more you're gonna have like let's say you're gonna have up next then you might have discovery then you might have pretrial then you might you might define however many lanes you want like let's say you have eight lanes and when you see a collection of cards in one lane you have a constraint there's something going on in that lane that you need to take a good hard look at and make sure that you can fix I don't know if that makes sense but that's the power of Kanban boards so that plus the whole idea of like measuring your firm and seeing it as a system so let's go into let's get out of this presentation for a second and let me show you some technology is there any technology that people have specific questions about I know somebody had a question about somebody said question about someone said is is not user friendly the person using it cannot mean make changes to the document well if somebody's making changes to the document then you're not at the point where you need to be using you know is for the signature portion of it right so if you're still going back and forth on a document then then you're not ready for at that point somebody said what are examples some examples of a Kanban board for a contingency based practice well examples of a Kanban board for a contingency based practice let's see we can do one together actually why don't we do one together I'm gonna use the tool called Trello and we can build a board right all right so let me log into Trello and let's create a new board okay sample for Florida Bar and let's just use a blank background create board okay alright so let's say so a rally who was in there let's say the first thing is intake okay alright now the next thing might be investigation right what might be another swim lane how about you know in this case let's do pre-suit alright so a rally is actually doing this all right there's a lot of these different things in here evaluation let's maybe do we have something where we're in are we doing discovery and this or not I don't know but then we go to pretrial and then you might have then you might have you you might have liked settlement or you might have trial or something and then you might have done right okay analyst right so that's just an example of like what you might have for like one type of case right now here's you know what you might want to find out it can some of these be combined right because you know you ideally you can you can we can shrink it down right this is tool this tool is called Trello by the way and one thing is is that we do have we do have Kanban boards inside of rocket matter and they're tied into our like our workflow production system so I don't have an example that I think I can show right now cuz it's like a little bit of more of advanced features for like kind of more enterprise kind of situations but then let's say that we have a case and by the way when you move things through the Kanban board for a law firm what I'm a fan of is that this has to map to a matter or our case unit the reason I just say case unit as opposed to a case is because let's say that there's four defendants so you know the example that let's say that I'm I'm suing like Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee and Hulk Hogan right for kicking my butt for my microphone problems so then I'm gonna sue them but they're each gonna have their own trajectory so Larry versus mr. t goes here alright and then there's Larry versus you know Bruce Lee right goes there and then Larry versus Chuck Norris so it might be the same initial complaint or what have you or lawsuit but these may settle all at different trajectories and stuff so that's why we call them case units right because they all might be in different places and I don't like individual tests going through here what you want to see is where the matters are right that's what's important okay I have some examples of waste elimination and so here is how a lot of law firms do their invoicing right now this is and this is what I know because this is what we do this is incredibly wasteful so and it's also a shame because there's so many better ways for law firms to get paid so there it's really a three-part process for the hourly billers they don't track their hours accurately so what they'll do is though like maybe scrounge through their like documents at the end of the month or they'll look through their legal pads or Outlook or whatever and I'll try and reconstitute their month they're billing for the month then what they'll do is they'll some of them will even like not generate invoices using dedicated software some of them will build the invoices in Word and then they have to print them out and they stuff them in envelopes and they stamp on and address them and do all that kind of stuff and then they have to wait 30 60 90 days for the payment to arrive however long it takes them then they get this stack of bills especially if they're in a high-volume practice and they have to open them and they got a stack of checks and then they got I like deposit them into the bank and then they also got an interim into their ledgering software however they do it so contract compare that to what I'm about to show you right so if you can see my screen and I'm assuming you can see my screen right now right you can see this is the rocamadour application all right what I want to do is I'm going to add a new matter all right so let's just add a new matter let's add me Laurence port and let's call this banner blue blue versus green all right that matter so we have a new matter let's go in there and let's change one or two things let's make sure that when I send out my bills that they get emailed to me right now I can always share it with somebody else but I'm sharing it with a client in this sense which is Larry port and let's leave let's use this email address this comes directly from my contact system because you know I've represented this guy before okay and let's save this matter so let's do this let's let's say that we had an event right and let's say that we met with client and let's say that it happened yeah let's say that it happened from 10:45 to 11:45 a.m. let's say let's let's make it yesterday okay all right perfect and let's bill for that so what this is my calendar event so it was something that was on my calendar and it's gonna be I'm gonna be billing for it as well right so we're trying to capture that time organically right and then let's say that there was like a task that we had to do let's say that it was like do some research do some research okay and I could run a timer or I can just say it's one point one billable hours right I can do that oops I got a assign a date for that so let's say it was today and let's copy the task title and let's say that all right so organic kind of time capture based on like how you're doing your work right and then let's just say I did a straight-up time entry - right so straight up time entry right so the whole idea is that you know you want to make it as simple as possible to track your time and tracking your time let's be honest is a total pain in the ass sorry for my French but it really is but it's the best way for you to measure the ROI on what you're doing and what I'm talking about ROI I'm talking about return on investment so if you're doing flat fee or contingency or or one of those types of matters where you're not doing hourly how do you really know if what you're doing is how do you know if you're ahead or behind on the matter you don't you only know unless you're like kind of tracking your time on that kind of thing so the more you can kind of do it organically the better if you are an hourly biller and you're not billing as you work like I showed you with calendar events and tasks and just randomly adding time as you go through your day then you're gonna end up like shortchanging yourself because when you go through at the end of the day or at the end of the month you're not you're gonna misrepresent and you're going to err on the side of your client that oh you know I'm not your gonna miss stuff so there was a statistic from to tuck going back and talking about waste there was a statistic from in Georgetown law they published this report about like legal billing and the report was that like lawyers only collect about seventy one percent of the work that they truly perform which is a shame I mean that's that's tremendous amount of waste twenty nine percent waste so in any case let's say that we're it's the end of the month and we're ready to aim voice right we click invoice now one of the big problems too is and so I'm doing this on a matter by matter basis right I'm just showing you for illustration purposes what it looks like when I build one when I built one matter and then we have this ledger and we can go and we can see okay I have like three hundred and twenty dollars that's due to me for this matter and I can see that there's a little envelope here that shows me that this has been invoiced out right that has been sent over email so on the client side of things I'm pretending that I'm Mike I'm the client for right now and I get this new email it says your current invoice for blue versus green and it comes with an invoice and look from the lava from the and here we go met with client do some research straight up time entry the stuff that we just entered from from the law firm side of things think about how easy it was to produce this how much less waste there was there was no folding this thing there was no sending it there was no stamp a lot more straightforward right now so here there's also a link to pay now this is another major thing right if I go back to rocket matter and i refresh this page you'll see that the envelope has been opened which means that the client has seen the bill the client has gotten the email and they've opened it and we know that they've seen it right so that's like usually like kind of a an issue so it in there's like reporting on this kind of stuff so what this allows the law firm to do is be like okay look I know that my client has seen it they're a step closer to paying it if there's a dispute you can say hey look I know you saw the invoice or whatever it is um but in reality this takes us to a point like so people get a lot of like same-day payments right so they send the invoice out and because people are used to paying this way now with credit cards they just go ahead and they pay it right away so I'm going to use that that by the way the way that the my address just spit out right there that's using a tool called text expander so if I type in BR lowercase BR it's gonna whoops BR not in our it's gonna spit out Boca Raton right because I'm using a tool called text expander and by the way if there's any questions on anything that I'm doing right now during this demo feel free to ask me so remember my spirit is let's reduce waste everywhere we possibly can so you know that's why I use tools like text expander and that's why I'm showing you guys how to use this for 96 countries USA and then I have this credit card number that I can use that's a bogus credit card numbers for the purposes of demonstration and and here's my CV B so if I now I review this and I pay it on the client remember and then what's nice for the law firm on the law firm side of things is that if they go back here into their ledger as this process is what's going to happen with this payment is that that those funds are going to be available next day in the bank account for the law firm and for the client they're done and then the ledgers in rocket matter will be updated so this is taking a long time to process so let's just see if this let's just see if the payment has been posted yet or not maybe maybe not the idea is anyhow that you pay the bill and then you get like your rocket motor updated and you have your ledger and so on and so forth so that's basically how this works now somebody has a question is there a way to enter mass time on multiple matters for attorneys who refuse to organically enter their time and has their assistant do it there are bulk time entry ways to do that yes in raqqa matter so if so a lien if you want to email me Larry at raka Metacom and ask that question cuz again I don't know if I'm gonna have these chat transcripts hopefully Jonathan can send me the chat transcripts and I can kind of like help you out with those but if you have any questions email me Larry at Rocket Metacom on that one let's see all right so we have a let me address it by the way here you can see that the online payment has been processes so like if we take this I'm gonna answer the questions in one second but I just want to kind of show that like logical conclusion of this so let's say that instead of billing things one by one we're able to do this across everybody out wads so I go to my billing dashboard and I see that I have seven thousand dollars ready to go out I click that number and then I can filter everything that has to go out by you know whatever number like primary attorney or whatever fields primary attorney clients matter custom custom fields start date end dates anything like that if I want to leave these all blank I can see everything no filters and then I have all these things that can go out I can adjust them you know on an as-needed basis if I need to and then I can click invoice and go through that same flow that you saw before right so in any case somebody's saying Randy we're running out of time but if you want to migrate over yeah migrating over to from to our platform is something that we do very well if you want more information on migrating email me Larry at Rocket matter comm and I can help you with that but I will tell you everybody this is that when you think about like going to a new practice management software and I know that a lot of you guys are on like probably old legacy systems like PC law and time matters or Juris or Orion that are kind of like past their prime it's just important to do that right and spend a lot of time thinking about that and um you know if anybody tells you that migrating data is going to be like a non-event or easy they're not really telling you the straight story again I have a white paper on migrating data so Larry at rocamadour com I can help you with I can at least send that reference your way so that you can know what to expect when you're going to migrate data there's a kind of a complicated question here that has like a four part thing this is from anonymous attendee either saying in the future could you one familiar familiarize myself with ABA Model Rules if there's a certain ABA model rule that you want me to um I am familiar with them that you want me to address I will address those so anonymous attendee if you want to step forward and send me a non anonymous email I will help I will answer your question most frequent areas of attorney discipline right the most frequent areas of attorney discipline usually are trust account violations right the the third so there's a lot of different questions rolled up into this one thing are there any like and if you email me I can answer discrete questions this one has a lot of different things that I have to unpack is there anything else that I can help you answer with again if you need to reach me for anything I I happen to live in Florida I happen to live in Boca Raton so even though I run rocket matter in rocket matters it's like international like you know a company I'm a Florida guy so you know normally I would be at the convention over here at the you know Boca Raton Hotel or up there at the Marriott in Orlando but it's just you know one of these weird situations but you know I'm always happy to talk to attorneys I'm also always looking for podcast guests so if you are doing anything kind of innovative in your law firm like in terms of like processing or streamlining things like always want to talk to people um a lot of attorneys have like kind of little initiatives that they're doing on the side whether like small businesses I love interviewing them too so you know definitely check out rocket matter if you haven't Larry at rocamadour comm check out the 10 minute law firm podcast check out the lien law firm podcast the two podcasts that I do and let me know would love to hear from you guys you you all right well thank you Larry we appreciate your time and the presentation today and also like to thank all the attendees view your presentation today and just remind them that the course number again is 33 68 and you'll need to go and self-report that using the foot of ours number portal and we will be sending an email to all the attendees for the link to the recording and it will have links to Larry's slides and hopefully the white papers that he mentioned as well yeah Jonathan I want to I want to thank you for the opportunity and I want to thank all the participants for their time today too I hope everybody's doing well and I look forward to hopefully talking to people okay thanks Larry