Legal Recurring Revenue: Grow ROI From Minute Book Records
As a business, every law firm is fundamentally trying to accomplish two goals:
- Service the needs of existing clients to achieve satisfactory results
- Attract new business to the firm and scale growth to new heights
Seems fairly straightforward, right? While most firms are very successful at goal #1, not as many are as consistently fortunate with goal #2. Part of that is simply due to the nature of the business; it’s simply not guaranteed that a new client case is available every single week that a firm can try to represent.
However, one of the main challenges to achieve scalable growth is that most firms have a limited amount of staff. There are only so many professional attorneys with trained clerks or paralegals to do all of the necessary tasks that will help grow the firm. In fact, employment statistics suggest the average firm in the United States has only 3 employees.
On top of that, most of these professionals must spend a sizable amount of time managing, storing, or updating minute book records and corporate documents. All of that work is necessary, but it does little to directly influence Legal Recurring Revenue for the firm.
Time is a luxury that law firms have little to spare
Given the fact that only a handful of professionals work in an average firm, time really is the great enemy for scalable ROI. There are only so many working hours in a day that can be used to prospect for new business, undergo introductory meetings with new clients, and arrange to review cases in greater detail.
All of those business acquisition tasks are compounded by the amount of time that’s necessary to properly manage minute books and corporate records. Due to each of these tasks and other priorities for legal professionals, the average legal professional bills clients just 2.5 hours out of an 8 hour working day.
When you break it down, it means only 31 percent of a working day is considered billable to boost Legal Recurring Revenue. That means 69 percent of any day in a firm is being spent on non-billable tasks that limit a firm’s potential for growth and prosperity.
Financial and labor costs of minute book recordkeeping
Before you can really take account of how much minute book recordkeeping can stretch your resources thin, it helps to break down the actual costs in crisp and clear terms. As they say, numbers don’t lie.
Let’s say your firm still keeps physical records of all minute book documents on location at the office. First of all, this is an expensive way to operate in 2022 since it costs firms up to $2,000 to store one single 5 drawer filing cabinet at the office. More importantly, physical documents are difficult to store and very time consuming to maintain.
With a limited number of clerks or paralegals in the office, it’s an inefficient use of time to physically review, store, or update records page by page. Companies spend up to $350 per record to file or source individual documents as well as reproduce any files that might be lost. That’s just the direct financial burden; it takes up to 5 minutes to scan, tag, and file individual documents within a corporate record. That’s 5 minutes for every file in each client minute book.
Implement innovative and efficient solutions to cut costs
So how do you reduce the number of non-billable daily hours so that you can grow the amount of time that can be billed towards clients? One of the best ways to do that is to reduce the amount of time and human resources devoted to minute book recordkeeping.
Technology has come a long way, and new breakthroughs provide law firms with cloud-based entity management platforms to digitize their minute book recordkeeping processes. Not only is this a faster and more efficient way to manage client minute books, but it also follows the trends that are shaping the industry.
In the 2020 Legal Trends Report, 89 percent of participating legal professionals cited technology as a resource to improve how legal firms operate. In the following year’s report, 79 percent of participating clients said they want the option to work remotely with their lawyers while still having the ability to access their minute books and corporate records.
Cloud-based entity management solutions offer that freedom and flexibility on both sides of the legal relationship. Firms can easily upload files into their platforms with speed and convenience, taking a significant chunk out of the time spent on recordkeeping. It also provides clients with the ability to do as they please and access records from a convenient location of their choosing.
Growth and ROI are important for any firm (any business, for that matter), and there are ways to increase opportunities to achieve those goals. All it takes is a little innovative spirit and an embrace of modern technology to help revolutionize the way your firm gets things done.
Is your firm ready to generate more ROI? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can modernize your minute book recordkeeping processes with cloud-based solutions that will cut costs, save valuable working capital, and help you reinvest those time savings into more billable hours charged to clients.
