The firm, who have strong plans for growth, were looking for a way to capture, collate and present matter related financial data with the ultimate goal of increasing their quality of service to clients.

Mullins Chief Financial & Operating Officer, Stephen van Dorp, commented ‘In today’s highly competitive market, clients expect more than law from legal service providers. Law firms need to provide exceptional service, offer value based pricing and accurately predict turnaround times at the start of a matter. I think it’s fair to say the majority of law firms, and certainly mid tiers, find achieving consistency around these three things to be challenging.’

With the client in mind, Mullins began looking at financial analytics and business intelligence systems which could assist them.

‘BigHand was the logical solution for us because we were already familiar with their technology having implemented BigHand Workflow Management, BigHand Styling Tools and BigHand Smart Note in 2017. In reviewing Business Intelligence and Matter Pricing it was clear these two programs could help us analyse matter and client related data, but also display that data in a way that was easily understood by the Partners and management staff,’ Stephen said.  

BigHand Business Intelligence is a business intelligence and reporting program which translates key financial and matter related data into easily interpretable and visually appealing dashboards and reports. The program is comprehensive in its collection of information allowing users to identify gaps in time recording, get real time updates on work in progress, review debtors and write-offs, amongst other key business data.

BigHand Matter Pricing is a pricing and planning tool that will help the firm accurately budget for and manage its matters from not only a financial point of view, but also from an industry perspective, by practice group, by lawyer or by the legal service provided . The software also enables key financial information (such as work in progress and fees billed) to be easily accessible throughout the life cycle of a matter, meaning updates can be provided to clients in real time and the fees against a matter can be easily and regularly assessed against the original budget.

When asked about the value of BigHand Matter Pricing, Stephen commented ‘The ability for our lawyers to quickly and easily identify what we call “scope creep” is invaluable to pricing discussions. Clients expect to pay the original fees quoted. So if costs blow out, we need to manage them. Our lawyers need to be able to easily identify why costs have increased and then have the necessary discussions with the client immediately, rather than at the completion of the matter. BigHand Pricing & Profitability will help us do that’.

Both solutions are integrated with the firms existing practice management system Open Practice. 

‘From what we can see so far, both programs are going to provide excellent solutions to support our vision of being more than law for our clients.’ Stephen said.

Mullins are currently in the implementation phase for these programs but expect to have both fully functional by 1 July, ready to help achieve their growth plans for FY2020.