Watch Hannah Mroz, Chief Financial Officer at Steptoe LLP, discuss BigHand Business Intelligence, how firms can identify revenue leakage, influence partner behavior, and give attorneys the financial information they need to make more profitable decisions.

Transcript

My name is Hannah Mroz. I am the Chief Financial Officer at Steptoe LLP.

We are an international firm. We have a lot of practice groups and a lot of priorities. It’s a large firm, so we’re focused on the future and the growth that we can bring to market.

Q: What are the financial pressures you're seeing beneath the surface?

I think we’ve been, as an industry, leaning more toward revenue based on increased rates. Eventually, that will run out.

We can’t keep raising rates by 10% to 15% every year. Our clients will not accept that at some point.

We really do need to focus on the other side of margin, which is all of the different ways that our financial hygiene plays into leakage of revenue and profit.

I think it’s a shift of mindset from revenue to profit, and really how we can get the most out of where we’re spending money, where we’re investing time, and where we have different people in different leverage models with our clients.

Our billing attorneys are the ones who really drive that success. We have to put information in front of them that is realistic and manageable and can actually drive different performance.

It is the democratization of information, so they can make the right decisions at any given time, for any given client and even matter, and we can really drive it from the bottom up.

Q: What information do you need access to and how does data enrichment help?

It really depends on the role at your firm.

If you’re a working attorney, we focus on how utilized you are. Where are you spending your time? Are you focused more on billable time or non-billable time, and how productive are you on a day-to-day basis?

If you’re a billing attorney, it shifts more to how we are staffing our jobs. What is the profit margin of our jobs? Where can we make different changes in the staffing model?

Then, of course, where is all of our financial hygiene? Is everyone getting their time in? Do we have to focus more on that hygiene?

Are we writing off time, writing down time, or writing off our receivables, versus it being captured at the end of an engagement when we really can’t call that back?

We have to tie that to what is productive for the firm.

Q: How is BigHand Business Intelligence making a difference?

In order for us to move forward as a firm, we needed something that our partners would actually invest in and that they could easily use, without it being 10 different clicks to get to one metric they’re trying to find.

It also needed to be flexible for my team to highlight different things at different times, depending on how we want people to perform or what we want them to focus on moving forward.

Going to BigHand was a huge decision for the firm.

It was very much about what the user interface looks like, but also how we can highlight the right things. Having those two things together is a very important part of why we chose BigHand.

On top of that, we have the expertise from our BigHand team. Having that expertise has been world-changing for us because we don’t have to build something.

To have the expertise that can build and house something for us, which we can then change in a way that makes sense for our firm, is a huge time-saver.

It also highlights what our colleagues in different areas are looking at and where our peers are really focused.

Q: What has changed since bringing Business Intelligence in?

It really is driving partner behavior.

We’ve made a very conscious decision to highlight where we wanted to see improvements and to have our partners focus on that in their overview.

As soon as they open anything in BigHand, it highlights exactly what we want them to focus on. That is extremely important because we know that if we are focused on these metrics, we will be successful going forward.

Making everything easier to use, from both my finance team’s perspective and for the end user, is a huge facet.

Having one source of data, rather than data coming from all different systems, injects respect and rapport back into the team.

We’re not making silly mistakes based on data that is either stale or from a different source.

Q: What advice would you give leaders about improving profitability?

We analyze those different groups and really understand where the firm itself can make improvements.

It might be that our WIP is aging substantially and we want our billing attorneys to focus on getting bills out. Or it might be that our AR is aging and we really need the investment from our partners to push that forward.

We have to focus on where the risks of revenue leakage are and how we can highlight those metrics so that our billing attorneys can make the right decisions every day.

It’s really figuring out where we are falling down and whether realization is there at every step of the way.

Then it’s bifurcating that between what the teams and business professionals can focus on, what the messaging looks like to the billing attorneys, and how you can highlight different areas of opportunity to inject more revenue and profit into the firm.

Q: What stands out about BigHand?

The team themselves go above and beyond.

They are very patient when it comes to where we want to spend time and what decisions we have to make.

They also bring that extra value of saying, “This is how other firms are looking at this issue.”

Even with small issues that are very specific to our firm, they already have knowledge of how other firms have captured that and made sure it is working going forward.

Having that extra value is extremely important in any relationship with vendors.

With BigHand, I feel like they’ve gone above and beyond to invest in our relationship and help us create what we need for our firm to be successful.