#MANICTIME STANDARD MANUAL#
#MANICTIME STANDARD SOFTWARE#

#MANICTIME STANDARD SOFTWARE#

I then installed a similar piece of software locally, called Manictime. However, while I’m a big user of many cloud services, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with sending some of this data (document names, email titles) to a company I knew little about, so after a very short trial, I binned it. All in all, a fairly sophisticated tool, with some nice web-based analytics to use to understand the data.

#MANICTIME STANDARD MANUAL#

This was a million miles away from the clunky, manual time recording systems I’d used in law firms (when I first started practice it was a paper timesheet pad) – running in the background and capturing application use, automatically learning behaviour and applying tags.

I was inspired to revisit this after reading tweet from a contact saying he was trying a web-based package called timerescue. This makes comparing the return on investment for the project challenging and without an idea of these sort of development costs for previous legal products, makes forecasting and budgeting for future product development more difficult. But often any upfront development cost in creating the service (market research, pilot projects, legal research, designing template documents) is lost because it is recorded under a general non-chargeable code. The documents needed for the service are all ready and the people involved get quicker and more skilled at providing the service as they get more experienced. As law firms begin to think more about efficiency and identify some more standard, repeatable services (some firms have been doing this for years) which are nicely packaged for clients at a set price, they usually “get” the idea that the service becomes increasingly profitable as volume of sales increase. The other non-chargeable area that it’s important to track is product development. Law firms often talk about the challenges of calculating return on investment for marketing events such as seminars and events, but when looking at how business development budgets are prioritised and spent, much of the focus is just on the hard cash being spent on venues and collateral, rather than the cost of the people involved in preparing and administering the event.įor example, having a top partner at a City law firm prepare for, attend and follow-up at a seminar overseas which takes him or her out of the office for a couple of days is a significant cost which can be accurately measured but is often overlooked. It’s also important to understand cost in other areas too. Without knowing what the cost is, running a profitable firm (file, project,team, department etc) is nigh on impossible. The most obvious point is that as knowledge workers, typically the cost of labour is one of the largest components of the cost of providing a legal service. However, to my mind there’s a critical distinction between tracking time and charging purely based upon time. Profitability increased along with client satisfaction and employee retention. My mind often turns to a partner I know who runs a management consultancy business, who almost immediately on taking over the department abolished time-based billing. On the other side of the fence, I’ve written a fair bit around what I believe the problems with charging by the hour are, not least the impact this has on the firms as well as how it affects the client relationship. It allowed sensible and transparent choices to be made around different priorities (if I support this deal and this HR project, the position paper on IPR ownership will need to wait until next quarter, or we’ll need to resource things differently) which I believe kept me more aligned with the company and led to some very productive conversations. In practice what it meant was that I could have much more informed discussions with my major stakeholders around how best to allocate my time to achieve organisational objectives. I’d been inspired to do this after reading Drucker’s book “ The Effective Executive” (well worth a read) in which he makes the point that an individual can’t maximise their effectiveness unless they know where they spend their time.

Admittedly at the time it was a pretty crude mechanism – I tracked data in hour long blocks in an Excel spreadsheet over a period of months, but it did the job.

and no-more timesheets”, with knowing glances being directed at any private practice lawyer in the room.īut within a few years, I was voluntarily tracking my time as an inhouse lawyer. Subsequent conversations with other in-house lawyers validated that I was not alone in those feelings.Īfter I moved in-house a huge number of conversations with peers included the words “…. The IT director proudly unveiled the firm's latest timerecording application - robust, wireless and mobile, it represented the future of the firm's management information system

Manictime standard