Most Law Firms that work on contingency cases or flat fee services believe that they do not need to track how much time an employee is spending on a particular task. The hourly fee firms track time for billing purposes only. A lot of time firms will track time just so that they can produce a statement for the courts. Is it really true that Law Firms do not need to track employee performance?

That is not true. Any firm that is in business needs to track employee performance as it impacts their bottom line. Here is a simple example. Let’s say it takes an employee an hour to produce a document when it should normally take half an hour. If you don’t track that time, how are you going to know that you just lost half an hour of your employee’s time which could have been utilized for a different task? You will also have no idea that this employee is struggling with that task or needs more training to do their job better.

Obviously, you do not want to micro manage your employees. So why not setup a system where you capture all the time the employee spends working on different tasks and then at the end of the day evaluate what was done with reports.

This leads into conformance issues. Office managers tell us that the employees don’t have time to capture how much time they have put in on a task and some employees won’t put their time in as they are an attorney. Are attorney’s exempt for performance evaluations? The bottom line is no. A law practice is just like a traditional business where lack of performance becomes a huge overhead that is not recoverable and affects the bottom profit line for each and every law practice. It surely cuts into the partner’s profits.

So how do you get employee conformance? By simply designing an incentive plan, that has points for conformance and negative points for non-conformance. Employee performance evaluations and raises can be based on those points or even design bonus plans based on that.

Have you ever sat down and evaluated what is your true employee overhead? Something to think about…