Empower Your Legal Services with More Revenue for Legal Services

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[Music] hello everybody all right everybody's uh coming on into the webinar hope everybody's doing well today we're going to get started here in just one second as we wait for people to log in so well we have a bunch of people on today's webinar a lot of people interested in uh lean technologies and lean techniques and how to run a better business so um um you know very excited i haven't done a lean webinar in a while i wrote the book in you know last year and uh it has been a while since i've actually presented on lean um actually actually the book came out in 2018 time has flown really so um we're just going to get started here in a second um as people kind of roll in so um i guess you know one of the first things i'd like to kind of ask everybody let's let's let's kind of get used to the tools i want to make this as interactive as possible right so um let's do that so let's let's launch a poll all right this is just a practice poll so uh this is just a little pop culture quiz okay um you know as people are rolling in let's see what people have to say about things okay so very important who is your favorite ted lasso character is it roy keeley ted rebecca or other okay so take a look at your screen and please participate because you know this is the way that we're gonna make this like a lot of fun and very interactive um is by you know participating in coal in polls and um and and chatting with me in the chat widget right so um let's see what people have to say all right all right and the other question is is that did you enjoy any of the following books so so one thing that i i love about working with lawyers is that you know they're um they like to read in fact i i've thought about even like starting a reading club uh like a monthly kind of book club for people online um but all right um let's see more people a lot of people are not watching ted lasso it is absolutely phenomenal you got to watch it it's it's a lot of fun um oh so um i by the way in terms of the books i wanted to represent a couple of different genres so i put like you know some non-fiction um i put um you know whatever somebody put there's uh no place to record a no vote um okay then just put like what other book you recommended in the chat widget or if you don't like to read it all just but yeah i don't like to read it all in the chat widget or whatever so i'm always looking for books to read okay um let me share my screen uh most people don't watch ted lasso by the way and um the people that uh had the most response was to the gentleman in moscow which if you haven't read that book's one of my favorite books in a long time all right let's get started so um i'm gonna share my screen right now and um let's make this as interactive as possible um so i'm gonna talk and talk and talk and that's gonna be boring well hopefully not but the more you interact the more you ask me questions the better off things will be so but in any case i guess the big question is like who the hell am i so um you know my i started rocket matter so i was the software architect behind rocket matter in 2007 and uh back then it was you know there there really were no web-based software options for law firms to do practice management and time and billing so built rocket matter and off off it went and uh you know we've been in business ever since it's now like what 14 years later and continue to do our thing we got customers all over the world um but you know um i got kids i'm married i got animals and all that kind of stuff that goes along with it so i also wrote with this guy dave maxfield so i'm a co-author of this book called the lean law firm and it was published by the american bar association in 2018 and last year we uh have an audible version so um fun fact the audible version is a lot cheaper than the actual version from the aba so if the aba knows that i'm saying this on the webinar they're probably going to be like pretty annoyed with me but the nice thing about the audio version is that you don't actually have to manually turn pages you can listen to it we also have a podcast we haven't published an episode in a while but we've been um we have like close to 100 episodes on lean topics just go to leanlawfirmbook.com and there's also all sorts of like free resources uh that are linked to kind of things in the book so there's like spreadsheets and so on and so forth so there's a lot of good stuff on leanlawfirmbook.com so let's keep moving um in general this is the mindset behind lean is that you kind of want to understand what you're doing at your law firm to bring value to the client if if you're not doing something that brings value to the client then that's considered waste so in lean really there's two core concepts one of them is waste and one of them is value so you want to eliminate the waste and you want to focus on value that's kind of in a nutshell what's going on so what lean forces you to do is kind of think through all of the things that you do at work and figure out what you should continue doing and what you should get rid of all together okay so um with that said all right with that let's do this um i'm gonna ask you guys another poll that i have ready to fire up and i really need you to participate okay so this is gonna help us like guide the webinar so here's the poll which is that like and be honest you know you don't have to be afraid of hurting my feelings like what is your primary motivation for joining us today is it cle credit you want to earn more revenue at your law firm did you hear about lean and you want to know more so you know i know people are like um you know when they attend webinars sometimes they put it on and they go vacuum the house but if you can return your attention to the screen and please vote on this um are you interested in law firm processes and operations at all um or other so you know let's uh be frank and just let me know what the primary interest is in um uh your attendance today and if it's just cle credit that's fine too i'm cool with that um the next thing i'd like to understand is like how many total employees are in your law firm um are you a solo do you have two to five users is it six to ten users like where are you you know um in terms of like layout because the more people that are at your firm the more complex your firm's operations are you know if it's one person you can just decide to do whatever it is you want to do and move forward and not have to answer to anybody but the second you have another person that you know if they have to answer to you that's a different story but like if you have another partner or so on and so forth then you know that's when things become a little bit more complex and then as you go up the scale if you're like in a six to ten user firm or a 51 plus user firm then you know that that can be that can be uh tough so uh here we go and the last thing i want to understand from everybody is that if you had to guess what's the least efficient part of your law firm um and uh so we have the the options i put was like collecting dollars uh invoicing and processing the invoices uh filing in document management um specific phase of legal work and i said in in the chat widget like let me know what it is that is inefficient that you feel or or something else altogether so use the chat widget and communicate to me um and then let's kind of see what people responded with all right so in terms of the people that um like are mostly interested in cle credit uh and that's your motivation for joining i will tell you that today's uh webinar is only accredited for half an hour uh or 0.5 credits for florida bar general credits for cle so if that's your primary motivation and uh you know 0.5 credits doesn't do it for you then no no harm no foul if you want to like duck out of here um let's see um a lot of people want to er er learn about like lean and general and operational processes it looks like the mode is most people are solos on this call which is going to make it very easy for you to start implementing things um uh it looks like most people are in like small firms or less than 10 and like um only one person is in a 51 or larger person firm um so if you're in that firm that 51 or larger person firm i would like to know what your role is because if you're like i want to know if you're an administrator or a managing partner or so on and so forth and then the mode on this one least efficient part of your law firm filing document management so on and so forth so um all right so we'll we'll talk about some of this stuff because because it does affect and i i can show you like you know some different techniques and stuff that you can do all right um here we go me just see real quick if there's any like uh chat widget activity okay someone said they loved reading the republic by plato so all right um like little light reading here we go the oh we got one more chat um and the and the person in the 55 lawyer firm is of counsel all right so here we go um the basic thing we're going to kind of focus on is like how these processes tie into revenue right and how reducing waste ties into revenue because there's a real effect we're going to talk about what types of lace there are there's many different kinds and we're going to talk about constraints because uh theory of constraints it's kind of a big idea in like business and manufacturing and um it really dictates uh what you're able to do and in surprising ways actually so we're gonna talk about tech and the first thing that the way that we're going to dive into this is really answer this following question which is is a law firm so different from factoring now this is not something i would dare to put out there because i'm not a lawyer i'm a software engineer that serves lawyers but um this concept is really kind of comes from directly from my co-author my co-author is um a he does contingency-based billing so basically he represents consumers in like cons it's like a consumer defense law firm and so he gets paid whenever he wins and um this is how he view things he he went out when he started his law firm and he he read everything there was to know about like kind of like processes and industrial kind of things and he he really became attracted to lean and from my angle i i knew about lean and i knew about different techniques like agile and things like that because of my exposure in the software industry and and then when i started looking at law firms all across the country and i saw how how um inefficiently they operated i was i was to be honest i was very shocked that law firms don't operate in a more efficient manner and i i don't i don't think it's a surprise i think you know most people went to law school um and that that a law school that did not teach management or that did not teach business and in my opinion that's a real shortcoming of the law school education because it's no secret that 88 of all lawyers end up in a firm that has 25 people or fewer it's no secret that the average size of a law firm is like four people so if if that knowledge is commonly available then why aren't they teaching people how to run a business anyhow i'll get off my soapbox now but the reality is is that a law firm is a lot like a factory um so i mean before i leave this slide a factory has like raw materials that come in and a finished product that comes out and a law firm is the same but the raw material is really the problem that the client has so a client comes to you with an issue that you need to solve for them or help them out with and um at the end we some sort of resolution happens to the client situation and money is exchanged usually that's kind of how it works so in a factory things are a little bit different in a factory you have an assembly line so and things kind of progress through it it's not a physical thing that you can see in a law firm that it's not like you have a little assembly line and matters are all over the place that's not how it works um so what what you can do though is you can model your processes with things called kanban boards and a kanban board is an example is what you see exactly on your screen right here usually something that is divided into swim lanes and the matters travel through the swim lanes so this is about as simple example of a kanban board as you can possibly see there's like up next there's work in progress and there's done okay so for up next you see i have two matters in there and work in progress there's another two matters in there and then you see done now um i'll show you another example of what a kanban bin a kanban board would look like and um let me show you what it looks like in our product so if i go to rocket matter for example and i go to kanban board this is what a kanban board might look like for an auto accident type of matter so we have many more swim lanes than not started work in progress and done right so we have client receiving treatment they can move it to demand and litigation then settlement the file closed and you can see it's a little bit more sophisticated here because we can see on each matter card here index card um you know how many how many more days i have left in order to do certain things or how long it's been sitting here and if it's green it's which means that it's on time if it's red it's overdue and so on and so forth so there's like a lot more sophistication in electronic board but uh for all intents and purposes you can go ahead over to your whiteboard right now and and put some swim lanes in place and get little index cards and move them around for yourself so you can see where things go and and it seems like the dumbest most simple way to manage things but it has pretty significant implications that we'll talk about a little bit uh there's something that we need to talk about which is called the income formula which is a huge part of our book and basically um the income formula is is really like a very very very boiled down financial model most businesses use financial modeling to try and predict what kind of income or revenue they're going to have over the next year so what we put one together was is one that we think is relevant for attorneys and it has really three components income equals throughput rate times something that we call average unit value and by the way this graphic is from the lean law firm book what we did with the lean law firm book is we actually commissioned like a comic book artist to like make it somewhat of a graphic novel uh so like we thought that would be kind of interesting so more fun way to present this information so if income equals throughput rate times average unit value what does that mean okay so first we need to define throughput rate the throughput rate is the number of case units your law firm finishes during a given time okay so finishes has a very specific definition that we'll talk about let's go back to that kanban board i showed you so if you go to that done column in those three matters if those were finished in the same year you have a throughput rate for your year of three right very simple idea it's just how many things finished during a certain time period um you know in your head start thinking about restaurants so you've been to restaurants you may have worked at a restaurant if you've worked at a restaurant um or you know about them you know that um they the more tables that they serve the more money that they're going to make so if you think about from a restaurant's perspective the number of total tables that they serve in a given night is their throughput rate for that night right um so the higher that throughput rate is the more money the restaurant makes so that's that's one component right the next thing is the average case unit value or the average unit value so here's where we start saying okay on average this is what my case is worth now this is where a lot of attorneys fall into this trap where they're unable to like think abstractly about the work that they do um a lot of people are like so when i present this idea to people they get stuck um they get they're like well some cases that i work on um you know i make very little money in other cases that i work on i make a whole bunch of money so how can i be an average well i'll tell you how there can be an average you take all your cases you take the values of them and you divide it by the number of cases just like you come up with any other average right so if you have one case that's worth two dollars another case that's worth eight dollars um on average your case is worth what would that be it would be it would be 10 divided by two it would be five dollars right so that's what an average uh case unit value would be um that's just how it works it's abstraction and that's how we predict things it's the same thing with rocket matter we have the same situation we have solo attorneys firms and we have firms that have like 150 users on them major difference in firm size but we can average them we also do payment processing right and we have firms that process like 100 a month we look we have firms that literally process a million dollars a month in credit cards and but on average we can say that on average our firms collect 15 000 in credit card processing and and the reason that that's important is because we can then use that to financially model what's going to happen down the road somebody said that thank you for hosting the cle this cle is for the state of florida it's going to be 0.5 credits it's for florida only if you are applying for cle in another state you are completely on your own um we will be distributing recordings and slides and if you can use that then um you're in business okay any other questions right now while i'm uh taking a quick break here all right so uh i kind of talked about this before you have cases of various different sizes some of them will have an average all right now if we the reason that this is important a financial model is because once you isolate these variables throughput rate average case unit value then you can start figuring all right there may be ways here that i can increase our income so we can either increase the number of cases we finish a year or we can increase our average case unit value and that way we can increase our income so let's go into each one of these right so this is the whole idea is like we're going to start seeing why waste is important and why all these subjects are kind of interrelated all right first question is is that how do we increase the throughput rate so if we can increase our throughput rate we make more money great if the restaurant can turn more tables they can make more money perfect all right so how do we do this well we have to shorten something called cycle time so cycle time is a big concept in business in general you might have heard of a sales cycle um well really they're talking about the cycle time of the sales process right how and that's why it's called cycle um so how long does it take to get something done and when we're talking about let me just see what my next slide is here this is important it's it's between the time that you accept the case so let's say that the engagement letter is signed and that and that it's done now when i'm talking about done i don't mean that the case is like finished i mean it's finished and money is collected all monies are collected that's what done means now this is law firms have notoriously poor collection practices um it's just part of the ball game it's and it and it's it's it's not something that you should judge yourself about it's not something that you should fault yourself about there's just you're a lawyer and your job is to help people and so not only does collecting um take you away from doing actual legal work but there can be something very unpalatable or or distasteful about asking your client who you're trying to help oftentimes through a major life crisis for money it's a tough gig right but when we're talking done here we're talking from the time you accept case and everything money is collected and all that kind of stuff so um thinking about the kanban board again the amount of time it takes a matter to travel through the whole kanban board is your cycle time so the question is if if that's the cycle time how do we shorten it right and that's where waste comes in and lean comes from the toyota production system so what happened was is that like going way back in history like after world war ii when we were trying to rebuild japan we sent some industrial engineering experts over there to help them like get their factories up and running but then they took over and they did some really inventive things and especially a guy named um taishi ono at toyota he invented something called the toyota production system and he and he kind of quantified all these different types of waste and he's really the godfather of lean so it's kind of funny it went full circle what happened is in the um late 80s in the early 90s we had our own we had american industrial engineers go back over to japan to study how they became so good at manufacturing with so few heirs you remember there were like movies made about this there was a movie called gung-ho where i mean you grew up when i grew up you remember that american cars had like a bad reputation for quality so in this movie i think michael keaton like has to like go like they work with the japanese to improve the processes uh in the american factory so but the generalized methods that toyota introduced across all things have been called lean and they've been introduced into government and they've been introduced into the healthcare system and pretty much every industry aside from legal they're they're in software as well and and just because it applies to just because it came from cars doesn't mean there's nothing we can learn from from from that when we're doing knowledge work because we still have concepts like inventory and motion and waiting and overproduction and things like that and defects and so we're going to take a look at that we're going to take a look at each waste one by one now i want you ideally on the webinar right now you got a pencil in your hand and you're thinking through some of this stuff in your own law firm that's kind of how it's going to be the most productive use of your time and unless you're here just for the cle credit if you're here just for the cle credit god bless but if you want to try and improve your profitability here's the time where you need to start jotting down some ideas um i do have a question let me see where we are with that um all right somebody wrote i have a client for whom i successfully tried a case that took 3.5 years to get to trial she ran out of money to pay my fees but i carried it through to successful completion this is very nice and generous of you she is paying me at the rate of 50 per month and it will take her 34 years to complete payment of all my fees and i'm already 70 years old oh my all right well um that's a very generous payment plan but you know um hopefully it worked it was a successful result for your client um but if we operate like that all the time then we're gonna kind of run out of money so um but that's a pretty funny anecdote now uh transportation and motion waste so let's think about this this this has to do with the kind of physical elements of running a law practice now think about this stuff i mean and don't blow it off as like okay that doesn't apply to me let me tell you a story so dave uh my co-author he thought it would be more efficient he thought it would be more efficient than whenever he filed his cases what he was doing was he was having somebody uh go down to the courthouse and have them file the cases in person but he thought that was like a bad use of people's time so what he started doing was he started like mailing them in like doing the whole certified mail thing and and and getting the response from the courts but then he realized that the cycle time on his cases was extended out by seven days uh because if he went down to the courthouse and filed them the same day then he gets them filed immediately and he doesn't have to wait seven days so the start date is seven days prior so um you have a lot that's not in your control in this business uh if you are dealing with opposing counsel or you're dealing with the courts obviously you have rules of civil procedure um you you can have um opposing counsel come in with god knows what you can have the judge come in with something the judge might not rule on a hearing for like years so um you have issues that are beyond your control but you have things that are in your control and that's what you have to focus on um electronic signatures okay um first of all from a client's perspective love electronic signatures and in florida you can do electronic notarization now um that's kosher so some of these things that are like lengthy manual processes involving sending things back and forth can be completely eliminated and you can reduce the amount of time taken to work on things and usually everybody's happier as a result um inventorying and waiting okay this is where you kind of like for those of you that are solos you kind of need to look in the mirror here um for those of you that are in firms with like multiple people that are involved in the process of legal work that's where you need to kind of take a look at their work um first question is are you closing out cases promptly so this is a big one guys for for small law firms one of the things that we notice is that they do work on cases but stuff just kind of sticks around like before it gets finished but if stuff is sticking around before it gets finished that means that you're not collecting money on it a lot of times right so um law firms can approach a downward spiral this is a very important point so if you're like vacuuming right now and you're in a small law firm this is like one of those put down the vacuum and and and pay attention to this one what we find is that a lot of times law firms think they need more clients because they need more revenue sometimes they can be 100 correct but more often than not the real issue is that they're not finishing their cases quickly and so they have all these accounts receivable and all these money i've seen i've seen small law firms with two attorneys have like eighty thousand dollars in accounts receivables a hundred thousand dollars in ar so um closing and collecting is going to do more for your cash flow than going and signing up for some sort of crazy expensive like internet marketing service or fine law where you're spending three or five grand a month and then that money is now tied up and then you're not closing out your cases and then the next thing you know you become tangled so you don't want to do any of that you want to close out cases as prompt as you can then you need to take a look does somebody have a big inbox are you waiting on people a lot like is that a thing is there somebody in the firm that is holding you all up take a look at that right and that's and you'll start seeing if you start using kanban boards you'll start seeing those constraints happen um okay um i've talked about this before but invoicing and collections is like kind of like one of the biggest problems that law firms have and i can show you what a good billing and collection flow will look like because that's kind of what i know best so we talked about this a lot in the lean law firm okay the um next major kind of we touched about we touched on this when we did the poll but probably the the next biggest thing that you could uh do in running an efficient law firm in in shortening cycle times and eliminating waste is to go paperless right by the way i say muda here waste is muda's the japanese are the lean word for waste in this system so um it's kind of funny i i do a every november it's kind of like it's like shark week at rocket matter but it's not really shark week it's paperless office month so every november which is coming up we'll be doing a lot of activity around going paperless and a lot of times i work with a man named brian sims this brilliant attorney out of illinois and um his whole thing is that he says that it's the number one thing you can do to make your law firm more efficient is to go paperless so if you haven't gone paperless email me larry rocketmatter.com or go to rocketmatter.com and download our paperless office ebooks or listen to our paperless office webinars we have a ton of stuff on this topic very very important that you move in this direction um over processing um this is a common area where law firms fall down and so this this is like okay first of all the question i would have for you guys is do you even have standardized repeatable processes having standardized repeatable processes is kind of like where you need to head so that you do this do things the same way every single time the problem is is that when you have a standardized process it may be inefficient and so you're doing the same inefficient process every single time so it's really important to take a look at how you do things and to kind of like understand if it's efficient how do you generate invoices how do you create documents like are you do you use document assembly do you use do you generate invoices uh simply or does it take you like a full day or two days to slow down um and i can show you how to do both of those things uh quickly so um but zooming out zooming out we've been talking about all these different things that you can do in your law firm to maximize your efficiency you maximize your efficiency you shorten your cycle time again eliminate waste shorten cycle time that increases your throughput rate the other issue that we talked about was the average case unit value so um pardon me before we get to um average case unit value let's talk a little bit about uh something called constraints let me just check in with things ah by the way um for the client who says that they have uh a very interesting suggestion came in from a guy named barry on the webinar um so russ who is seven years old and um is awaiting 34 years off of 50 per month payments barry says that he should sell the contract to a 30 year old that's a good idea all right russ something to think about for you okay um let's talk a little bit about constraints so constraints there's a great book on this by the way um we talk a lot about it in um we talk a lot about it in uh the lean law firm book uh but there's a book called the goal by uh an israeli like physicist turn industrial engineer called eli yahoo gold rat and it's told in novel form like so it's it's a textbook it actually kind of inspired how we wrote the lean law firm the lean law firm isn't as much of a slog as you might think because half of each chapter tells a story about a lawyer who's trying to transform his firm so the goal is all about this guy who um has to transform this factory and it's pretty high stakes because if he doesn't like improve the factory or turn it around then they're going to close down the factory and he grew up in the town and everybody's going to lose their jobs and then in the middle of this his wife decides to divorce him and it's this whole crazy thing but it talks about this concept called the theory of constraint so um basically the idea is this is that like in any system there are uh things that will kind of slow you down and and imagine in a factory you have these different machines you have one machine that machine one in the assembly line can spit things out at like 50 units per day machine 2 can spit things out at 40 units per day machine 3 can spit out 70 units per day and that's the last machine so what is the throughput of this factory the throughput of this factory is only 40 units per day even though the last one is is 70 units per day because the 70 units per day machine can only ever receive 40 units per day so there are some like like downstream non-intuitive effects about constraints in an organization that don't readily make themselves apparent now from your perspective you can spot um oh by the way somebody said can somebody spell the name of the book my book is the lean law firm and the other book i talked about was called the gold and i put these in the chat widget so everybody can see it um so the lean law firm and the goal i would recommend by the way the goal is worth listening to if you do if you do the audible thing it's a good way to go it's actually really funny because they have like they play like they play music and stuff like when he goes out to dinner with his wife they play like sexy music it's like it's ridiculous so it's it's almost worth listening to from the like the like um silly entertainment factor of all things um so anyhow back to uh the theory of constraints there's there's a good story in the goal so um the protagonist in the goal has to go from he has he gets roped into a boy scout troop where he has to and this is where one of his key insights occur so he has to take a boy scout troop from point a to point b and he's walking with him and there's a slow guy named herbie one of the boy scouts is very slow and and the problem is with boy scouts is that like they all have to arrive at point b at the same time you can't proceed to point c because like if they all get strung out too far along the path and like you know mountain lions come along and they they devour the boy scout so everybody has to kind of stay together so um the entire group was slowed down by herbies so but that's true of any industrial process so that's what that what that's what led to the inside as the slowest machine is is the bottleneck for the entire process same thing is true with a law firm the the slowest part of your process is the bottleneck to your entire process okay um it doesn't just affect that part or the parts around it it affects your entire throughput rate so in order for you to like boost your throughput rate you need to really do a good job of eliminating as many constraints as possible um okay let me get out of the presentation for a minute because i do want to show you guys a couple of things that you can do um and then we have not for very long okay but so i showed you in rocketmatter these are kanban boards one thing i do want to show you is that um in here like when you look one of the values of a canon board is you can see which part of your process or the slowest and because if you start having uh if you start having a bunch of cards like appear at a certain place i'm gonna cancel that for now it's just more functional so so you see this say like litigation just for arguments purposes this particular swim lane has more cars than anything else if a swim lane in a kanban board has more cards than anything else odds are you have a bottleneck right the other thing about our system is that you can kind of see all right well um certain things in this thing there's two of them that are red that means that two of them are overdue so if you have a kanban board swim lane that has a big pile up in it or it has a lot of late stuff in it then there's a there's there's something telling you that something is wrong with that part of the process that's why kanban is important now um i want to show you in in a couple of examples of ways that you can make things more efficient in in your law firm so the the biggest one that we see is the invoicing um and then the other thing that i was going to talk about is paperless so i'm going to do two little things where i'm going to demonstrate number one a paperless invoicing flow and then a paper paperless document creation flow and you can kind of get a sense of how it might be better than the manual process so let's do this i'm going to add a new matter and i'm going to call this matter um from i'm gonna i'm gonna make myself the the client okay and i'm gonna call this uh larry versus um i don't know uh ted ted lasso that would be a sad thing and um let's just say that there is we're gonna bill on an hourly basis and we're going to set it up it's a it's a specific thing and i'm just going to save this matter what we're going to do is we're going to set this up so we can share an electronic invoice with it and what we're going to do here and there's all sorts of ways to kind of like save time um doing things like we have like recurring billing and hourly or like recurring billing and can and payment plans so in our case of our friend you could set up a payment plan to charge 50 a year for the next 34 years if you really wanted to in rocket matter you could do that so you wouldn't have to like send out an invoice that would do it automatically um and we're going to share this invoice with the client which is lawrence board and we're going to share with email right so uh now what happens is that if i create an invoice and i send it out then it's going to be invoiced to um uh it's going to be sending it out and everything is going to be electronic so let's add a quick little billable time and let's say that it's um test or yelling and i'm going to say that this was like 2.2 billable units and i'm going to save all right so we have 220 ready to go locked and loaded let's go ahead and invoice this thing now the nice thing about um invoicing is that electronically is that you get rid of the step of printing it out stuffing it into an envelope uh stamping it sending it out waiting 30 60 90 days and then getting this information and then like and entering the check details into your ledger and rocket manner all this stuff kind of happens automatically so you don't have to do any of that work so if i click process invoice what's going to happen is an email is going to be sent out now to that email address and then the client can then go in and pay electronically through a link so and then what happens is is that it's a beautiful thing for attorneys like you can go in here and you can even see like you can see that the little like if i look at the invoice then this um if the client looks at the invoice this this little envelope gets open so you can see if they're looking at it what date they looked at it and so on and so forth when they pay it automatically balances out the ledger money goes into the bank the next day all those things are like completely automated so you talk about reducing waste and reducing cycle time and getting rid of things that add absolutely no value to the client moving an electronic way for invoicing and billing absolutely does that and reduces your overhead at the law firm the other thing that you can do is um you can create um [Music] let's see what you can also create flows where you create documents for people so imagine um you have to create a power of attorney document let me sign on to this account and let me log into another one let me log into um kind of an old school one that i use for different demonstration purposes there's our lovely home page okay so if you see uh this client abigail seymour abigail simon this power of attorney this information came through an intake form so i have an a rocket matter intake form on my website so i can slide an ipad over to somebody when they come into my office they don't have to like write anything down um i can i can send them a link through their email and they can go ahead and they can fill out all this information and you can see like they did fill out all this information 5301 like client home address and all these different things um now what i can do is i can create a document i can say all right let's do a let's create uh from a template that i have let's let's stuff this information that was captured through an intake form into the florida power of attorney form right and i go ahead and i generate this thing and it says i abigail simon down here a 5301 north federal highway appoint such and such to do this and that okay so so we have our form and we click next and we're gonna we're calling for to pile returning demo and i want it as a pdf i could also do it as a word and i click publish so instead of firing up word and doing a find and replace and making all sorts of mistakes then i have this new form that i've just created and it's instantly created and then what i can do is i can go ahead and i can go ahead and i can share this i can email this document i can share it in my portal i can download it i can if it's a word document i can make some adjustments to it then i can send it out to my client so you can kind of see how you start embracing some of these automation techniques and you really start reducing waste and you really start increasing your throughput rate and you become more profitable as a result so that's how lean works you eliminate waste you reduce throughput rate i mean you increase throughput rate by reducing the cycle time and you end up with more money at the end of the day that's how it works now if you need more information obviously there's the book there's leanlawfirmbook.com which has our podcast recordings now there's the audio audible version i can always be reached for questions just email me larry rocketmatter.com and um the course number for this one is 5576 uh from the floor to bar um so that's um that's the that's the course number that i may have gone by that a little bit too quickly so it's five five seven six are there any questions for me do you have anything um i think we're in good shape all right so let's see what time is it right now it's 12 47 i got you out a little bit early you still have like 13 minutes to go to your next event i'll stick around for a couple more minutes in case anybody has any q and a's and would like to ask me any questions so if you're interested in rocket matter by the way email me we have a special promotion going on this month for new uh clients so just email me larry rocketmatter.com told me you were on the cle webinar and you want to learn more about that um [Music] the yeah 5576 it is the florida bar course number um 0.5 hours of general credits i want to thank everybody so much i understand how busy attorneys are um and i know how much it takes to like come out of what you're doing and [Music] um know so um and and dedicate your time to this um the price of our service so it depends what you want out of our service if you want like the very basics of just like uh invoicing and processing and you know and payments and so on and so forth it starts at like 35 if you want to start doing um more advanced things like uh what most people want to do if you want to start going paperless and having a little bit more control over things then you're looking at more of like a a 60 price point and if you go to if if you want like super powerful stuff that like allows you to get like really deep insight into your law firm um a lot of stuff with like if you're an insurance defense firm and you have like a lot of those like crazy requirements where you if you want to like define your own rules so that you don't get everything rejected from the insurance carriers yeah then then we start going a little bit more towards like the 80 90 a month so there's a broad range of rocket meta product offerings that that you can take a look at somebody says does rocket matter handle immigration forms one of our there's a there's a partner company that we use called um prima facie that handles them if you have forms that are word based um then you can generate pretty much any form you want but if you're talking about some of the specific immigration forms that have like live barcodes in them currently we don't handle those but prima facie would be something to take a look at that does handle those um but obviously any kind of document that gets generated from any place can be stored along with your matter in rocket matters because we have full document storage anything else okay i think we're in good shape hey thanks for all your kind words and so on and so forth really do appreciated that um please be in touch i hope to hear from you and um you'll be getting recordings tomorrow uh florida bar course number 5576 right there on the screen um and um you'll be getting recordings and copies of the presentation tomorrow so thank you so much and have a wonderful remainder of your day [Music] you