ShareDo founder Ben Nichoslon gives his view on how to boost law firm profitability

One of the biggest problems law firms face is figuring out how to increase or even just maintain their profitability in the face of increasing competition. Here’s how work disaggregation helps — and two ways ShareDo makes it happen:

Work disaggregation is all about breaking down large pieces of work (like a full legal matter) into its constituent parts, processes, or tasks.

Once we’ve broken down the overall matter into a number of discrete parts, we can then look at what is the optimal allocation of those pieces.

Who should perform that work?

Should it be the lawyer, or could it be a paralegal?

Could it, instead, be a machine?

The aim here is to get the right person to do the right work, where “right” in this case means having the right amount of expertise at the right price without destroying customer satisfaction.

HOW SHAREDO HELPS

1) We enable you to model your work management organization.

This is different from your organizational hierarchy, instead layering based on competencies and things like that.

So with that in place, it’s super easy for people to manually find the right person to do a piece of work. You save money because you’re not deferring exclusively to higher-ups to get things done.

2) We enable you to establish allocation rules.

These abstract the concept of who should do the work. They could include:

– Availability
– Competency
– Experience
– Price

As a result, you can maximise profitability by getting the work done at a high quality for the lowest possible price.

Ron Friedman states that the best way to create more value is to do less.

Work disaggregation is about driving work down the hierarchy so the lawyer, in the end, does less. It makes each task cheaper and leaves attorneys with more time to fill with higher-value work, raising both productivity and profitability.