Yesterday I suggested that improving the process of assigning associates could improve partner profits. In fact, Bryan Cave, with its deep commitment to business intelligence, appears to have done so.
I asked John Alber, the firm’s technology partner and author of several recent excellent articles on BI, to comment on my prior blog post. John wrote:
At
Bryan Cave, we’ve developed an ‘availability’ application that helps
lawyers who are staffing a new matter find available associates and
counsel. Every Monday, an automated form goes out to associates and
counsel, who use it to declare their availability as none, limited, or
general. They can also add comments to qualify their declarations.Lawyers
who need to staff engagements use a Google-like advanced search feature
to find available lawyers. They can sort results by various criteria
and view individual comments about availability.After more
than a year of use, our leverage is up markedly. Certainly the business
climate contributes to that, but our increase outstrips anything we’ve
seen during prior upturns. I think the availability application and our
new Financial Dashboard (which reveals the benefits of leverage to
responsible lawyers) have contributed. We are now doing regression
analyses [a statistical method for confirming relationships] to confirm
this finding.