Outer operations
You hired more people. The work still does not move.
Your firm is losing hours every week to work that should not take that long. We come in, find what is costing your team the most time, and fix it. No big rollout. No disruption. Your staff will not dread it.
What the week looks like
You already know where the hours go
None of this is on anyone's list of problems. All of it costs the firm a day a week.
01
A paralegal emails to ask where a records request is
Then emails again on Thursday. One person becomes the status database for the whole firm, and answering counts as their job.
02
The trial calendar is a Word document
Someone maintains it by hand, it is out of date the day it is circulated, and half the firm keeps a private copy that disagrees with it.
03
Time gets entered on Friday for work done on Monday
Six minutes a day, per timekeeper, is a real number at the end of a year. Everyone knows it and nobody has time to fix it.
04
Every new case, someone rebuilds the same documents
From memory, or from whichever version was on somebody's desktop.
05
The IT vendor bills for every email
So you think twice before asking, and small things stay broken for months.
06
Your attorneys are already using AI
Nobody wrote the rules, and nobody wants to be the one who asks what has been pasted into a chat window.
Why it never gets fixed
There is nobody whose job this is
Every hour in a firm is billable or it is overhead. Fixing how the work runs is neither.
So it lands on whoever is least able to say no, on top of everything they already do. It gets started in a quiet week. It does not get finished.
Most firms we meet grew faster than the way they run. Fifty people, still operating like the twelve person firm it used to be, because nobody ever had a spare quarter to change it. So you do the one thing that is easy to approve. You hire.
An administrator told us they had hired and it still was not enough, because the volume kept climbing faster than the headcount ever could. That is the part that makes it unsustainable. You cannot hire your way level with something that is still rising, and at some point the only thing left to change is how the work runs.
By then people are burning out, and it is rarely the cases doing it. It is everything stacked around them.
Which is why firms now name technology decisions as their biggest operational problem, ahead of the volume of work itself. Not because the software is bad. Because choosing it, moving onto it and getting people to actually use it is a job, and in most firms it belongs to nobody.
You are not going to hire a project manager for this, and you should not have to. What you want is somebody who has done it before, for as long as it takes and no longer.
Right now that is a firm in the middle of exactly this. A shared scheduling system, a live trial calendar the whole office reads and updates, and the move onto a new case management system, which is the largest technology decision a firm makes and usually the one that has waited longest.
What changes
The same week, minus the parts that were never the work
01
Scheduling a mediation stops taking three weeks
Someone proposes dates. People reply slowly. The dates expire and you start again. One link replaces the whole exchange: everyone marks what works, you confirm, it locks. This one is free and you can have it today.
02
Nobody rebuilds the same documents again
Letters of representation, denial letters, affidavits. Your assistants know them by heart because they have written them hundreds of times. They get drafted from the case information instead, and your team reviews and sends.
03
Billing stops being reconstructed on Friday
Entries get drafted while the work is happening. Your team approves them rather than rebuilding the week from memory, which is where the six minutes a day goes.
04
The case management decision finally gets made
Compared properly, chosen on how your firm actually works rather than on the brochure, and moved onto without the firm stopping. It is the biggest one and it is usually the one that has waited longest.
How we work
We start small, then we take the big one
01
We watch how the firm actually runs
Not the process on paper. The one your people run, including the workarounds nobody documented.
02
We build the small things first
A shared tracker so nobody has to email for status. A live trial calendar instead of a document. An onboarding that does not depend on somebody remembering. Things your team can feel inside two weeks.
03
We take the decision nobody wants to own
Usually the case management system: choosing one, or replacing one that never fitted. Side by side comparison, claims checked against the software rather than the brochure, references called, discounts asked for, and every number in one workbook you own.
04
We help you get it approved
The part of the job nobody helps with.
We recommend ninety days. That is how long it takes for a change to hold, and the first weeks go into learning how your firm works.
What the numbers look like
The arithmetic partners respond to
Six minutes of unbilled time a day, per timekeeper, at a $175 average rate, across twenty timekeepers, is roughly $100,000 a year.
That is an illustration rather than a promise, and almost nobody has calculated their own version of it. It is what hides inside “we enter time on Friday.”
The other number is the case management system. For a mid-sized firm the software alone is a six-figure commitment over a multi-year term. It is the largest technology decision a firm makes, and it is usually made once a decade, by people carrying full caseloads.
That decision is worth preparing properly. Systems compared claim by claim against the software rather than the brochure, references called, discounts negotiated, and every number in one workbook the firm owns.
The team is grateful for what FINO built. The workflows, the processes, and the time and the billing we got back.Firm administrator
What it is like
The first week, in detail
Every firm is different. The first week usually goes something like this.
01
We get on a call and ask one question
What took the most time this week. You and one or two people from your team. We listen and take notes, and we do not pitch anything.
02
We come back with what we would fix first
A short list, with what each one is costing you now and what it would take to change. You tell us whether it makes sense before we build a thing.
03
We build the first versions
Usually the documents that get rebuilt every case, the scheduling that runs on email, and whatever is eating billable time without showing up anywhere. You see all of it before your team does.
04
We sit with your people and try it on live work
Not a training session. Here is what it does, try it now, on something real. Anything that feels wrong gets fixed while we are sitting there.
05
We check what actually saved time
What worked, what did not, what comes next. The tools stay either way.
We scope it so the hours it gives back are worth more than the fee.
The part nobody helps with
Getting it through the partners’ meeting
You can be right about the decision and still lose it in the room.
Partners want to see where their files will live, what a billing entry looks like on screen, and what happens to the calendar on their phone. Getting twenty minutes on their calendar takes two weeks, so the twenty minutes has to work.
We build the numbers, we get the vendor to demo their own product because they are better at it than we are, and we name the gaps out loud before anyone in the room finds them. A recommendation that hides a weakness does not survive the first partner who spots it.
Why us
Anna ran a law office before she ran anything else
Anna paid her way through college working as a legal assistant, and ended up managing a law office because someone had to.
Years before the operations career, before the coaching training, before AI, she was the person at the front desk who knew where every file was. She has been the one everyone asks. This work gives that person their real job back.
And software decisions in firms fail for people reasons. Somebody is afraid of the new system, somebody is protecting the old one, and the change dies in a partners’ meeting. That layer is trained work for us. It is the layer that decides whether the software was worth buying.
The free tool
Stop scheduling mediations by email
Someone proposes dates. People reply slowly. The dates expire before everyone agrees and you start again. It is the one problem every firm has, so we built the thing that ends it.
- You pick the dates that could work and get a link
- Everyone opens it and marks what suits them
- You see where the overlap is and confirm
- Everyone gets the confirmation and the link locks
No account, nothing to install, and no conversation with us. If you can send an email you can use it.
Questions
The concerns we hear most
Then you already know the work did not speed up in proportion. More people move more work only when the work has somewhere to go. We start by finding where it stops, which is usually two or three places, and none of them is a person.
We build with your people rather than for them, and we hand over things one of your own team owns and can change. That is the part that decides whether it is still running in a year.
No. They are the reason any of this works at all. What comes off them is the part that was never their job: the chasing, the retyping, being the person everyone asks where something is. What is left is the work that needed a person in the first place, and they become the people who know how to run the tools, which makes them harder to replace rather than easier.
That is the reason to do it, and it shapes how we do it. We work around the calendar you have, not the one a project plan would like you to have.
Most of them will, and they are usually right to. So we start with two people who want it. When the rest of the firm sees how much time those two are getting back, they tend to ask to join. We would rather let that do the convincing than run a firm wide rollout nobody asked for.
We work inside your existing permissions and confidentiality obligations, and we agree what we can and cannot touch before anything starts. We have worked inside locked-down firm servers before.
You are not unusual, and finding out is better than not knowing. We write a usage policy with you that your attorneys will actually follow, and we make sure the vendor agreements underneath it hold up.
No. We take nothing from vendors. You get our honest read on where a product is weak as well as where it is strong.
From $4,500 a month, month to month, two weeks notice either way. The number follows the shape we agree on. We scope it so the hours it gives back are worth more than the fee.
Tell us where the week goes
A short call, and an honest answer about whether we are the right people for it.
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