“Why is it that Janet is always able to go to lunch and leave early while I barely have time to go to the restroom?” We’ve all been there at some point in our legal career – lamenting the way work seems to be randomly and all too often, unfairly assigned. As managers, we are frustrated by underperforming workers who try to fly under the radar while our top performers are at risk of burning out.
The correct delegation of workload may be the most overlooked and undervalued aspect of in house legal practice. Finding the right balance that will maximize team productivity, reduce risk, increase CRM and boost morale can mean the difference between an ineffective department where your high performers burn out and one where you are saving time and money by maximizing your resources.
As a young in house lawyer, my general counsel would keep track of our work by asking team members to submit a weekly excel spreadsheet detailing projects and hours based on their subjective view of the complexity of their various workloads. She would then spend hours synthesizing this information from multiple attorneys (who are admittedly biased about their workloads) so she could attempt to optimize how she assigned new tasks and provide accurate performance metrics to the C suite. The effectiveness of her resource allocation was largely hit or miss. Think of the time and aggravation she could have saved if with just a click she could not only see all team members’ assignments but also know the level of complexity and time expended for each individual workload. If my boss had that capability, her talents would have been better spent closing deals, minimizing risk and maximizing revenue.
I am happy to report that with ALOE’s one of a kind workpoints value system, the days of hit or miss resource allocation are over. ALOE helps you be a more purposeful manager by telling you exactly how much work and what type of work each person has and allowing you to allocate resources based on facts. Managing from data on work assignments weighted by type of work and duration of existing projects allows you and legal ops to intentionally plan resource distributions. With ALOE capacity planning, you will transform from a manager who reactively doles out work to a more purposeful team leader who intentionally assigns projects to maximize your best performers and get more out of your underperformers.
