Outer operations
You hired more people. The work still does not move.
The systems that worked when the firm was smaller were not built for the volume you carry now. We come in, listen to the people doing the work, and fix what is costing them the most time. No big rollout. Your staff will not dread it.
A gift, before anything else. Our scheduling tool is free. Pick the dates that could work, send one link, and stop running mediation dates by email.
Open the schedulerWhat the week looks like
You already know where the hours go
None of this is on anyone's list of problems. When we ask people what the worst part of their week is, the word that comes back is tedious.
01
We are still scheduling mediations by email
Someone proposes dates. People reply slowly. The dates expire and you start again.
What changes
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
We have a forms folder, and nobody trusts it
So people go hunting. A recent case they know was done properly, the person at the next desk, or memory. Then they save a private copy, and now there are two. Do that for three years and nobody can say which one is current, or who owns it.
What changes
One hub carries the current version of each document, with who approved it and when, because that is what people check before they use one. New drafts get built from the case information, with AI doing the first pass. Your team reviews and sends.
03
We know we are leaving billing on the table
Six minutes a day, per timekeeper, is more than four thousand dollars a year at a $175 rate. It goes because time gets written on paper and retyped by somebody else, and because a hundred emails a day have to be read, saved and then billed. By Friday the week is being rebuilt from memory.
What changes
We redesign the flow so time gets captured where the work happens and the double handling goes. The person who writes on paper keeps writing on paper, and their hours still reach the system.
04
One person knows where everything stands
Ask her about a records request and she knows, because she is carrying forty matters in her head.
What changes
That moves into something the whole team reads and updates. Nobody emails for status, and nothing walks out of the door with the person.
05
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Someone maintains it by hand, it is out of date the day it is circulated, and half the firm keeps a private copy that disagrees with it.
What changes
It becomes one live calendar the office reads and updates, on the same link every time.
06
The IT vendor bills for every email
So you think twice before asking, and small things stay broken for months.
What changes
We take those conversations. Your IT company, your software vendors, your accountant. You stay copied, so you always know where things stand.
These are some of the things we have run into. Every firm has something we have not seen before.
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 did not plan the growth. Other firms stepped back, the work came to them, and the way the firm runs never caught up. Fifty people, still running like the twelve-person firm it used to be. One process laid on top of the last one, every one of them sensible when it was made.
You may have an administrator holding it together. Almost nobody has an operations person, with an operations background, whose whole job is how the work runs.
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. The volume kept climbing faster than the headcount. You cannot hire fast enough to catch that. 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.
Firms now name technology decisions as their biggest operational problem, ahead of the volume of work. The software is rarely the hard part. Choosing it, moving onto it and getting people to use it is a job of its own.
What changed is the other side of it. The tools that were built for firms of five hundred are now within reach of a firm of fifty, and they no longer cost a fortune. Most firms are already paying for more than they use.
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.
How we work
We listen first, then we build with your people
We start by sitting with the people who do the work. Half an hour each. We ask what took the most time this week, and they tell us things nobody has asked them before.
All of this runs remotely. Screen shares while people work, short calls, and one shared place for whatever we build. It means we watch the actual screen where the work happens, which is the thing you cannot see from a conference room. No travel on your invoice, and no day lost to hosting us. We come in person when there is a reason to.
We work alongside your administrator, or whoever is holding it together, and we build with the paralegals and assistants who will use it. Their version usually exists already, somewhere on somebody's desktop. We make it the standard, with their name on it.
Where it goes from there depends on your firm. Sometimes it is a set of small fixes and the week gets shorter. Sometimes it is the system decision that has been waiting years. We tell you which one you have, and we say why.
Nobody gets forced. If a partner wants to keep writing time on paper, that stays. We start with the people who want it.
What it is like
The first week
Every firm is different. The first week usually goes something like this.
Day 1
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.
Day 2
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.
Day 3
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.
Day 4
We sit with your people and try it on live work
Here is what it does, try it now, on a live file. Anything that feels wrong gets fixed while we are sitting there.
Day 5
We check what saved time
What worked, what did not, what comes next. The tools stay either way.
We recommend ninety days. That is how long a change takes to hold.
What the numbers look like
The math a partner will check
Six minutes of unbilled time a day, per timekeeper, at a $175 rate, across twenty timekeepers and 250 working days, is $87,500 a year.
That is an illustration. Few firms have run 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 can run into six figures 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.
The smaller numbers are the ones that surprise people. In one firm the forms folder held seven thousand files. About eight hundred were still in use. Thirty were versions of the letterhead, and one of them was named Bad.
The team is grateful for what FINO built. The workflows, the processes, and the time and the billing we got back.Firm administrator
How it runs
What this asks of you
We work remotely. Ninety days is what we recommend, month to month, two weeks notice either way.
In the first week we ask about two hours from each person in the group. Screen shares on live matters, while they work.
After that, short sessions of thirty to forty five minutes, a few times a week. This replaces work your team is already doing.
If the first month is not working, we stop, and your firm keeps everything we built.
Any subscriptions are yours, billed to you, and you can cancel them. We take nothing from vendors.
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, she was the person at the front desk who knew where the files were. She has been the one everyone asks.
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 part is what we are trained for. It 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. Most firms have this one, so we built something 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. 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 it with your people. Everything we hand over has an owner on your team who can change it. That is what decides whether it is still running in a year.
No. They are the reason any of this works. What comes off them is the chasing, the retyping, and being the person everyone asks where a file is. What is left is the work that needed a person. They also become the people who know how to run the tools.
That is the reason to do it, and it shapes how we do it. In the first week we ask about two hours from each person. After that it is short working sessions, a few times a week, on live matters. It replaces work they are already doing.
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. That does the convincing better than 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. Better to know. We write the usage policy with you, and we help your team put it in place.
No. We take nothing from vendors. You get our honest read on where a product is weak as well as where it is strong.
You do not manage it. We do. We come in, work out what needs fixing, build it, and stay with your team until it sticks. Your part is one thirty minute call to start.
No. Most of what we have seen is defense work, medical malpractice and insurance. The problems travel. Intake, records, scheduling, documents and billing look much the same in a personal injury firm, and much the same again in a practice that does neither.
Often we leave it alone and build around it. When it does have to change, we run that decision properly.
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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