400+ Lawyer Firm McCarter & English Saves 23% on Support Services
Why pay more than you have to for support services? McCarter & English agrees.
McCarter is a firm of over 400 lawyers with offices in Boston, Hartford, Stamford, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia and Wilmington. In continuous business for more than 160 years, they are among the oldest and largest law firms in America.
The firm will reduce its support services costs by 23 percent in the initial year of the new contract and 14 percent in subsequent years without reducing services or switching providers.
Mattern, which handled the support services RFP processes for the firm, applied its three-phase approach Mattern Method® to assess McCarter & English’s costs, utilization of labor, equipment, supplies and services against industry benchmarks and best practices. The firm also implemented Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery™ - patent pending- that allows McCarter & English to pass litigation support project invoices directly through to its clients to recover more of their costs.
Ask yourself if you would rather pay your support services vendors an extra 23% or put that money into the firm’s coffers or the partners’ pockets? It’s not a tough decision, right?
Click here to read more about how McCarter & English’s saved big - and you your firm can, too.
The Time has Come for Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery™
Today Mattern & Associates issued a press release announcing our filing of a patent for the Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery™ method. We truly believe that this process, in which we structure your on-site support services as a hard cost pass-through increasing the realization of your billable cost recovery revenue, will be the future of cost recovery in the legal environment. In every situation where we have analyzed our client’s cost recovery situation, the implementation of Plan B would have had a significant impact on the realization of their billable revenue. If you would like to learn more about Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery, please visit http://www.matternassoc.com/services_cost.html.
Rob Mattern
Legal Management Coverage of Robinson & Cole Case Study
Times have certainly changed when it comes to managing office services at a law firm. Robinson & Cole LLP (R&C) is a Hartford-based law firm with eight office in the Eastern United States with more than 240 attorneys. The firm recently came face-to-face with the fact that it needed to modernize and consider outsourcing its office services for the first time.
Nancy Hayes is Chief Operations Officer at R&C. Hayes notes that many firms have been outsourcing office services for years, but her firm historically preferred to have full-time employees to handle such duties as hand-delivering court documents, making copies and mail routing. Over time, it was becoming clear that keeping these services in-house was not really in sync with their desire to be an efficient, cost-effective firm. “Robinson & Coles core business is the practice of law. We were spending far too much time focusing on the management of the support services,” said Hayes.
Click here to read the full article.
Isn’t it Time for a Change?
In a preliminary review of the 2010 Mattern & Associates, LLC Cost Recovery Survey, the average net realization on billable items (the amount the firm actually gets paid for after internal and client write-offs) is below 50%. In other words, the firm is only getting reimbursed for less than 50% of what they are billing their clients on soft cost items. If you factor in the non-billable amount, this amount decreases to 33%. What does this data tell us? That the traditional method of cost recovery, and support services as we know it in law firms today, is dying.
As Einstein said about insanity, it is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – isn’t that that what we are doing with cost recovery and the support services?
Computing Needs: Making tech hardware purchases
Published by Robert C. Mattern today in the Chicago Lawyer Magazine - (link to article below)
Rob Mattern says: Over the years, a law firm will procure millions of dollars of technical hardware for the benefit of its employees and physical plant. These technical items can range from multifunctional devices to cost recovery systems to vertical lifts for 34-story office buildings - quite a diversity of purchasing decisions. Given the complexity, importance and variety of these purchases, we propose the following suggestions to ensure your firm benefits most from what you buy.
DO:
1. Examine total cost of ownership
2. Try before you buy
3. Determine and check your specs
4. Build flexibility into every deal
5. The lemon out-clause
6. Specify the after plan
DON’T:
1. Don’t forget to get it in writing
2. Don’t fall in love until you are walking down the aisle.
Click here to read the entire article published in the September 2010 edition of the Chicago Lawyer.
