Return on investment

As recession bites harder, recent research by industry analysts Gartner reports that cuts in IT budgets are not likely to be as extreme as first predicted, because IT is seen as an important contributor to relieving economic strife.

Although this survey was conducted with around 1500 top IT executives in global companies, the results serve as a reminder that the reason practically every law firm invests in IT is to improve efficiency and profitability while achieving cost-savings.

At SOS, delivering law firms a return on investment is a key objective in every project we undertake. There are many specific and tangible ways we can achieve this; through automated time recording of incoming and outgoing emails and attached documents (currently one of the biggest causes of time leakage in many law firms), to the linking of your ‘phone systems to SOS Connect whereby incoming calls are automatically identified, the matter opened up on the user’s screen, a time logger started for the user for that matter which, at the end of the call, posts the correct appropriate of units to the file, again completely automatically.

Conservative example of revenue impact from automating email time recording:

Take the example of 50 fee earners charged out at an average of £200 per hour. Capture just an extra two units of billable email time (6 minute units), per fee earner per day.

Two units of extra billable time per day = £40
Multiply by 50 fee earners = £2,000 per day
Multiply by 230 days = £460,000 additional revenue - per year!

Other examples on the same basis:
10 fee earners at £150 per hr = £69,000 additional revenue - per year!
25 fee earners at £150 per hr = £172,500 additional revenue - per year!
75 fee earners at £175 per hr = £603,750 additional revenue - per year!

Bear in mind of course, two additional units per day is an extremely conservative estimate considering the volume of emails a fee earner would generate/receive in a single day.

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