2 February 2022 · 4 min read

Enhance Your Firms Efficiency and Profitability through Matter Planning

In today’s modern legal climate, accurate and predictable matter budgets have become essential for both internal and external use. On one side, clients request more flexibility and transparency in their matter costs. And on the other side, partners, associates, and matter managers are interested in knowing ahead of time if there will be write-downs and write-offs.
To address these requests, there are technologies available that provide valuable financial matter management at your fingertips and can answer the questions:
While firms embrace more flexible pricing arrangements, the traditional billable hour is still the norm, with over 86% of matters still being delivered this way.
Whether your firm is engaging in new strategies for matter budgeting or keeping the standard methods, matter planning is a crucial element of making sure that matters come in on time and within the agreed-upon budget. Tracking matter budgets is critical to delivering transparency and greater value to their clients.
Read on and learn about the financial benefits of matter planning, enhancing efficiency, and how your firm can streamline the planning process.

How Will You Benefit from Matter Planning?

In today’s reality, transparency between the partner and client is key. To empower a partner-client relationship, it’s crucial for clients to be informed over the course of the matter so that their needs are met while keeping track of the budget.
In order to satisfy not only client needs but also enhance efficiency, the first step is to have a centralized location to monitor all relevant data, like client information, staff, KPIs, historical data, budget vs. actuals values, and other important metrics.
The current challenge for many firms is that partners are at the forefront of client communication and pricing. As clients request accurate and predictable matter planning, it is important for partners to have this information at their fingertips. By providing them with easy access to this information, their initial budget plans can match the real costs involved in the process.
Creating an initial matter plan helps mitigate any miscommunication between the partner and the client, ensuring that the price presented reflects the real matter-budgeting costs. In turn, this supports creating transparency in the process and also helps build long-term relationships with clients.

Standardization Powers Efficiency

With many firms using different tools – like Excel or others – to plan their matters, data can be spread across disparate data sources. Such data cannot always be located quickly. This can set up a scenario in which the matter team may have to start planning a matter from scratch regularly. Couple that with the necessity to rely on manual updates to current matters, the team’s efficiency and accuracy of the planning are impacted.
To add to this challenge, firms use multiple systems that don’t speak to one another — having to manually move data from one system to the other increases the probability of data entry errors, ultimately reducing staff efficiency and effectiveness even further.
Matter planning takes the guesswork out of the equation all while standardizing the process. Not only that but having a centralized location for your matter plans enables firms to monitor & report on them and keep clients informed at all times.
On top of that, as 76% of law departments find it challenging to manage current workloads, efficiency is key. How do you achieve that? By streamlining the processes involved in matter management.
About 87% of firms say associates spend too much time on repeatable tasks. That’s why having matter budget templates, or using historic templates to plan for new matters, enhances efficiency. This way, you don’t have to create a matter budget from scratch each time.
These templates also minimize human error since you don’t have to constantly keep up with rate card changes, fee arrangements, and other components.
To take efficiency to the next level, automating these processes does just that. This way, keeping track of matters is a breeze, and applying new changes can be done in just a few clicks, ultimately reducing time and cost.
Many firms have already streamlined their matter planning, enhanced efficiency, and fostered a transparent relationship with their clients by keeping data in a centralized location, automating the processes involved, and eliminating manual work for repeatable activities through templates.
How did they do that? Using a financial matter management platform like Prosperoware Umbria.

How Umbria Helps

Prosperoware Umbria is the financial matter management platform for law firms. It enables partners, legal project management, and pricing departments to plan, alert, monitor, and report on matters, allowing firms to deliver matters within the scope and expected budget.
Umbria’s data-driven approach ensures that firms are planning and delivering matters profitably, all while improving client value, transparency, and predictability.

Here’s more of what you can do with Umbria:

Flexible Planning: Plan matters accurately and in any way you want. Whether it’s hourly, by alternative fee arrangements, top-level budgeting, or break down by phase, task, activity, location/cost center, periodic, recurring amounts, and user named phases, to name a few. Utilize out-of-the-box templates and historical matters to create new plans. Plan ahead for multi-year matters with rate and cost increases and test different scenarios with What-If Analysis.
Monitoring & Alerting: Ensure matter stays within budget and time by setting up email alerts and notifications on anything from WIP, Billed, Billable, Collected, and Write-Offs. Schedule Threshold, Escalation, and Recurring Alerts with configurable templates.
Reporting & Dashboards: Tailor reports the way they best work for you through custom Widget-Dashboards. Mix and match widgets and visualizations such as grid, pie chart, stacked chart, etc. Choose from 300+ KPIs to report on or create your own. Export dashboards and reports via Excel, PDF, or PNG.
Decision Support Tools: Enable partners and pricing departments to make the best planning decisions by understanding multiple scenarios with What-If Analysis and Customizable KPIs. Forward forecast with simple discounts and alternative fee arrangements. View the impact of adjustments during the matter lifecycle with Write-Down and Burn Analysis.
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2 February 2022 · 4 min read

Enhance Your Firms Efficiency and Profitability through Matter Planning

In today’s modern legal climate, accurate and predictable matter budgets have become essential for both internal and external use. On one side, clients request more flexibility and transparency in their matter costs. And on the other side, partners, associates, and matter managers are interested in knowing ahead of time if there will be write-downs and write-offs.
To address these requests, there are technologies available that provide valuable financial matter management at your fingertips and can answer the questions:
While firms embrace more flexible pricing arrangements, the traditional billable hour is still the norm, with over 86% of matters still being delivered this way.
Whether your firm is engaging in new strategies for matter budgeting or keeping the standard methods, matter planning is a crucial element of making sure that matters come in on time and within the agreed-upon budget. Tracking matter budgets is critical to delivering transparency and greater value to their clients.
Read on and learn about the financial benefits of matter planning, enhancing efficiency, and how your firm can streamline the planning process.

How Will You Benefit from Matter Planning?

In today’s reality, transparency between the partner and client is key. To empower a partner-client relationship, it’s crucial for clients to be informed over the course of the matter so that their needs are met while keeping track of the budget.
In order to satisfy not only client needs but also enhance efficiency, the first step is to have a centralized location to monitor all relevant data, like client information, staff, KPIs, historical data, budget vs. actuals values, and other important metrics.
The current challenge for many firms is that partners are at the forefront of client communication and pricing. As clients request accurate and predictable matter planning, it is important for partners to have this information at their fingertips. By providing them with easy access to this information, their initial budget plans can match the real costs involved in the process.
Creating an initial matter plan helps mitigate any miscommunication between the partner and the client, ensuring that the price presented reflects the real matter-budgeting costs. In turn, this supports creating transparency in the process and also helps build long-term relationships with clients.

Standardization Powers Efficiency

With many firms using different tools – like Excel or others – to plan their matters, data can be spread across disparate data sources. Such data cannot always be located quickly. This can set up a scenario in which the matter team may have to start planning a matter from scratch regularly. Couple that with the necessity to rely on manual updates to current matters, the team’s efficiency and accuracy of the planning are impacted.
To add to this challenge, firms use multiple systems that don’t speak to one another — having to manually move data from one system to the other increases the probability of data entry errors, ultimately reducing staff efficiency and effectiveness even further.
Matter planning takes the guesswork out of the equation all while standardizing the process. Not only that but having a centralized location for your matter plans enables firms to monitor & report on them and keep clients informed at all times.
On top of that, as 76% of law departments find it challenging to manage current workloads, efficiency is key. How do you achieve that? By streamlining the processes involved in matter management.
About 87% of firms say associates spend too much time on repeatable tasks. That’s why having matter budget templates, or using historic templates to plan for new matters, enhances efficiency. This way, you don’t have to create a matter budget from scratch each time.
These templates also minimize human error since you don’t have to constantly keep up with rate card changes, fee arrangements, and other components.
To take efficiency to the next level, automating these processes does just that. This way, keeping track of matters is a breeze, and applying new changes can be done in just a few clicks, ultimately reducing time and cost.
Many firms have already streamlined their matter planning, enhanced efficiency, and fostered a transparent relationship with their clients by keeping data in a centralized location, automating the processes involved, and eliminating manual work for repeatable activities through templates.
How did they do that? Using a financial matter management platform like Prosperoware Umbria.

How Umbria Helps

Prosperoware Umbria is the financial matter management platform for law firms. It enables partners, legal project management, and pricing departments to plan, alert, monitor, and report on matters, allowing firms to deliver matters within the scope and expected budget.
Umbria’s data-driven approach ensures that firms are planning and delivering matters profitably, all while improving client value, transparency, and predictability.

Here’s more of what you can do with Umbria:

Flexible Planning: Plan matters accurately and in any way you want. Whether it’s hourly, by alternative fee arrangements, top-level budgeting, or break down by phase, task, activity, location/cost center, periodic, recurring amounts, and user named phases, to name a few. Utilize out-of-the-box templates and historical matters to create new plans. Plan ahead for multi-year matters with rate and cost increases and test different scenarios with What-If Analysis.
Monitoring & Alerting: Ensure matter stays within budget and time by setting up email alerts and notifications on anything from WIP, Billed, Billable, Collected, and Write-Offs. Schedule Threshold, Escalation, and Recurring Alerts with configurable templates.
Reporting & Dashboards: Tailor reports the way they best work for you through custom Widget-Dashboards. Mix and match widgets and visualizations such as grid, pie chart, stacked chart, etc. Choose from 300+ KPIs to report on or create your own. Export dashboards and reports via Excel, PDF, or PNG.
Decision Support Tools: Enable partners and pricing departments to make the best planning decisions by understanding multiple scenarios with What-If Analysis and Customizable KPIs. Forward forecast with simple discounts and alternative fee arrangements. View the impact of adjustments during the matter lifecycle with Write-Down and Burn Analysis.
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