With many insurance defense firms facing rate pressures and a competitive legal market, it’s more important than ever to capture all your billable time and avoid write-downs on your bills.

But running a profitable firm doesn’t start with how you bill, it begins with how you manage your cases. To operate more effectively, you may need to go “upstream” and address billing challenges from the moment a file is opened.

Watch (and read!) below to hear how top-performing firms are starting with better case management processes to optimize how timekeepers work, reduce time leakage, and automatically adhere to billing guidelines across every matter.

Is your insurance defense practice facing these common profitability challenges?

From our work with hundreds of law firms like yours, we’ve seen firsthand some of the common business challenges that may be driving down profitability.

• Inconsistency in how cases are being managed across the firm means revenue is being lost and support staff ratios are too high. Additionally, if you’re also facing a lot of staff turnover, this inconsistency creates confusion in terms of what has or hasn’t been done on a case and requires you to constantly get new hires up to speed on how to work a case — which may also differ between different teams or office locations.
• Time is slipping through the cracks or being written off due to gaps in your process or oversight. If you’re already facing lower rates, your firm may not have any financial wiggle room, which makes it more important than ever to capture all your billable time and avoid write-downs on your bills. Plus, non-billable work is taking up more of your staff’s time, making it more difficult to log the hours you need to be financially successful.
• Clients are becoming more results-oriented when selecting outside counsel, and you need to be able to prove repeatable results and report on outcomes at scale. Developing new business and maintaining good relationships with the clients you already work with is important so you can improve your position on their panels and win repeat business.

To increase profitability, it’s time to “go upstream”

While challenges like these may appear distinct, they each have a direct impact on revenue and profitability. And with such clear downstream effects, you may have started with billing software to address them.

However, many firms that have invested in billing technology are still facing the same struggles. While better billing tools are a critical component, in isolation, it’s become clear they’re not the total solution. It’s time to go upstream and address profitability challenges at the source — with better case management processes that will standardize how your team works and captures time from the moment a file is opened. Case management is no longer just an organizational tool, it’s now a critical way to manage and optimize revenue as well.

Turning your case management into revenue

1. Optimize how each timekeeper works

The highest-performing firms are experts at making sure the right people are doing the right work. For example, if a legal assistant does a task that a paralegal could have billed for or an associate handles something the carrier will only pay a paralegal rate for, there’s no way to go back and fix that at the billing stage — you’ve already left money on the table.

You’ll always want to encourage a bit of flexibility to enable staff to work cases their way or proactively jump in to keep case cycles low, but if taken too far, you’re left without any best practices to optimize how cases are handled across the firm. It’s not just about knowing what needs to get done on a case, it’s about making it clear the best person to complete them. While billing managers can help you correct details on a time entry, they can’t go back and change who did the work. Case management software can help you get this right on the front end so that you deliver accurate, optimized entries that your billing team can send out to clients.

2. Reduce time leakage and write-downs with automation

Again, it’s not just about doing the work or making sure tasks are assigned to the right person, it’s also about capturing that billable time! This is especially valuable for all the small tasks your staff is working on throughout the day — those 0.1 or 0.2 entries. They’re easy to do and even easier to forget to bill, but over the course of a month, quarter, or even a year, they quickly add up to substantial amounts of billable work that’s being left on the table.

We’ve seen that standardized case management processes are a great jumping-off point for automations that can help law firm teams capture these tasks and ensure they’re not falling through the cracks — reducing time leakage and driving revenue throughout the case lifecycle.

E-filings are just one example of these time entry automations. We worked with the law firm above to track the volume of e-filings they were receiving each month. Through an integration with ECFX Notice, e-filings enter the Litify platform and are named and sorted into the correct matter. As an attorney reviews each court filing, that 0.1 task was likely getting lost in the shuffle. We built additional automation to log a time entry for the review task each time a court filing was entered into Litify so that attorneys could focus on completing the work without forgetting to track the time — and over the course of a month, the firm’s captured an additional $225K in revenue in billable time that may have previously been left on the table!

Of course, your team will also be manually entering a significant amount of time, and case management software also enables you to automatically enforce billing guidelines too. These can be set up at the firm-wide level, the client-specific level, or down to the matter-specific level to catch errors before they’re sent to the billing team or client.

3. Showcase results to clients with reliable, real-time insights

Finally, as firms have begun standardizing their case management processes and capturing their work in real-time, they’ve also unlocked rich insights and analytics that can be used to showcase their performance to clients.

If you’re tracking every piece of data across the case lifecycle, it should become available for use in reports and dashboards so you can easily track initial demand or average demand, cycle times, attorney utilization, the number of voluntary dismissals for a particular client, or the specific metrics your business or clients care about most. That’s the aggregate power of people managing because, at scale, this data becomes really powerful for conversations with your clients. You can now show them, “This is how we performed for you,” or “This is the average amount that we’ve saved you,” so that you can compete and win based on performance, not price.

Introducing Litify: Modern case management software for insurance defense firms

Litify is the leading case management software that helps ambitious insurance defense firms achieve their business goals. From intakes and case management to timekeeping, billing, accounting, and robust analytics, we offer everything you need to run your firm like a hig-powered business.

Learn more about the Litify platform and how we’re helping firms like yours to address to turn case management into revenue.