Task based billing: A way forward

Are you a law firm looking for ways to drive out in-efficiency from your firm in order to be more competitive and profitable?

Do you as a firm find it difficult to measure the productivity of your firm?

Are you losing out on your fortune setting up the compliances and then ensuring that they have been adhered to by your employees?

If the answer to the above questions is yes then probably the time has come to look for the innovative ways in order to be the preferred choice of your clients in today’s competitive world. Though, innovation has no end and there can be umpteen numbers of things that a law firm can seriously consider to achieve the desired results. Today as always I would like to talk about outsourcing in this article.

Outsourcing in today’s time is synonymous with the curbing of local jobs in order to increase the profits of an organization.  However, the only reason why it has been so successful is because of the model that it is based on rather than just the lucrative profits that come along with it. The model that I want to highlight over here is the concept of task based billing which means that now you pay once you get the desired output from your vendor.

It is no secret that the legal industry is going through drastic changes all across the world. This is bringing in tougher times for legal professionals especially in the US and the UK. The fact that the number of sole practitioner law firms have suffered the steepest fall since the financial crisis, as the lack of bank lending continues, tells the entire story. As a result, almost every law firm today is looking for ways to increase their efficiency more than ever. Usually the increase in efficiency means the increase in the productivity with no compromise on the quality of the work. This can be done by identifying the areas in which there’s scope of improvement and removing the wastage of time at every level.

Since, it’s the people who are doing work and are the moving force for any organisation, it becomes imperative that a firm ensures that it’s getting the optimum output from its resources and this is where task-based billing can just be a ‘rabbit out of hat” kind of a thing for the struggling law practitioners.

The best part over here is you’re paying for the final work that is being done and not for the time consumed for doing that work. Even if you hire a fixed resource from your vendor, usually the efficiency of that person is decided in the contract itself which again gives you an assurance for the amount of work that will be done for you no matter what. Also requirement for the supervision is at its minimum as there’s a sense of ownership among people for whatever has been assigned to them. And last but not the least, it leads to the promotion of entrepreneurship among people who are associated with the organisation and therefore can make vital contribution to the growth of the firm.

In the end, I would say that not only law firms but companies should look at this aspect very carefully as it is the way forward in the present scenario.