The Client
Roger Lomman is the Operations Manager at Tindall Gask Bentley (TGB), a law firm that provides respected, service-oriented legal services in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. TGB offers its clients extensive experience and peace of mind across a wide range of legal issues, and has done so for more than 50 years. TGB’s key practice areas include personal injury, workplace law, wills and estates, business and property law, and they have a particularly strong focus in family law. Roger has been with TGB for more than 15 years and his focus is on providing high quality, innovative IT systems to his staff in a way that supports them to be adaptable and productive.
“My focus really, is providing a quality IT system to our staff that’s innovative, adaptable and supports the way our practitioners work.”
Roger Lomman, Operations Manager
TGB has a long track record of delivering exceptional client outcomes and a culture that supports its people to do a great job. To further drive TGB’s success, Roger looked at how he could support fee earners to increase billable fees while reducing the effort to record their time. As in most firms, TGB has a cross section of fee earners ranging from some with decades of experience, to graduates straight out of university. With that comes a variety of approaches to time recording and activity capture. This variation historically meant there was a lack of consistency between fee earners in terms of what activities were being treated as billable—some would record meetings, calls and emails, but others not.
With this lack of consistency, it was also difficult to make expectations clear to new staff, as they often learnt by osmosis from more senior practitioners. Additionally, the whole process was manual and relied on each fee earners’ memory of events, resulting in further missed billables and significant time and effort populating timesheets which could otherwise have been spent on client service.
“We’ve got a firm with lawyers who have been practising for 40 years and lawyers that have just come out of the university, and the way they practise is completely different. We knew that we were missing billable activities in what some people were recording.”
Roger Lomman, Operations Manager
The Solution
Roger had seen the success of other firms solving these challenges with Mitimes, so the decision to move to automated time recording in Lexis Affinity™ via Mitimes was an easy one.
It was crucially important though that the solution be simple and work seamlessly with Affinity. Of particular appeal with Mitimes, was not only its deep integration with Affinity, but its powerful integration with TGB’s PBX and Exchange server. This gave Roger a cost-effective way to utilise the rich data coming from those systems, allowing the automation of time recording for a wide range of activities.
Using Mitimes, TGB was able to offer its fee earners a tool which automatically populates their timesheets with calls, emails and meetings, with intelligent, automatic matching to matters. This eliminated the need for fee earners to toggle between other tools and applications such as email to try and recall interactions with clients.
The simple user interface and intuitive workflow is clear and instinctual meaning that fee earners usually need only verify the time entries automatically populated.
Even better, because Mitimes can be accessed from any device in any location, this makes it easy for fee earners to stay up to date, eliminate manual effort and ensure no billables are missed. This flexibility was particularly beneficial for TGB with many of its fee earners rotating between regional offices.
For Roger, it was also important to have a smooth implementation of the solution and that his users were supported with comprehensive training Mitimes delivered, running both group training sessions and even on-on-one tutorials when necessary.
“We needed a solution that would work out of the box. We are well tied to the LexisNexis® world because it’s an all-encompassing practice management system, so it‘s important that integrations are plug and play—we got that with mitimes.”
Roger Lomman, Operations Manager
The Result
According to Roger, automated time recording in Lexis Affinity via mitimes has had an “overwhelmingly positive” impact at TGB.
Since moving to Mitimes, TGB has seen significantly higher levels of productivity, particularly among their poorer time recorders who used to struggle to keep on top of things. The automated push through of time entries for all their calls, emails and appointments has vastly improved billable hours and time recording accuracy.
The fact that mitimes is pushing complete and accurate time entries directly to the Affinity Fee Sheet, where they can be automatically submitted for billing each day has meant much greater efficiencies for all staff. Says Roger, “I’d certainly recommend Affinity and mitimes to other firms”.
“Mitimes is fantastic. It’s now one area of my practice I no longer need to worry about! I’m recording a lot more time — at least one hour extra per day. But usually, I’m recording an extra two hours per day. So that’s ten extra hours per week.”
Fiona Fagan, Senior Associate