The Nagamoto Retainer: The Nagamoto Invoice

• TRACKING YPUR PRODUCTIVITY
• PUTTING A VALUE ON YOUR TIME

Its been 12 months now and Grace & Co has been representing Nagamoto industries all over Africa, the Law Firm has built a strong partnership with 20 law Firms across 15 countries across Africa, managing cross-jurisdictional teams on behalf of their prized client. Bar. Grace has built the firm from an initial team of 7 as at the time of snagging the Nagamoto brief to a staff strength of 170; consisting of 30 Partners, 100 Lawyers 30 Paralegals and 10 dedicated IT Support Staff.

Apart from Nagamoto Industries, Grace & co has gathered a Clientele of more than 20 high-value clients from outside and within Africa.

The Firm is known for its swift response time, depth of research and professional representation across the African continent, a relatively unknown Law Firm is well on its way to becoming the 10% leading law firm in such a short time.

Having said all the above, If you ask Bar. Grace to tell you what her most significant achievement is with regards to the growth of her practice she will quickly tell you that it’s her Billing system.

An effective billing system helps Grace & Co extract the true value in the collective intelligence that the Firm has and also helps the Firm reward productivity and not longevity amongst the Lawyers in the Law Firm, it provides certainty with the Clients who know what to expect from the Firm and how much to pay for it.

A major success factor in any law firm is indeed its billing system and Grace & Co is no exception to this.

ACTIONS

HOW DO YOU QUANTIFY THE VALUE OF YOUR WORK TO CLIENTS AND HOW DO YOU TRACK PRODUCTIVITY WITHIN YOUR FIRM? WHO IS YOUR MOST PRODUCTIVE LAWYER?

The key factors to deploying and managing an effective billing system within your law firm are:

1. AUTOMATION: The Time tracking mechanism must be automated and not manual for obvious reasons.

2. DISCIPLINE: Management must enforce compliance or else it will not succeed.

3. INTEGRATION OF WORK: Work processes must be fully integrated unto your Case Management platform (i.e. Word documents and email)

4. CLEAR DIVISION OF LABOUR: Team coordination must also be tracked and identified so that there is a clear path to identifying who is actually doing work as opposed to who isn’t.

5. HOURLY RATES: tracking it, ascribing it to your lawyers, rewarding the most hardworking lawyers based on the hours put in is key to running a law firm with a culture of productivity.

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