Remote Productivity Case Study

As the coronavirus pandemic intensified, The Law Offices of James Scott Farrin successfully transitioned over 200 employees to remote work in just one week with GrowPath’s case management and analytics software. Can their story become your story?

The Challenge

On March 30, 2020, North Carolina issued a stay-at-home order for residents and non-essential workers. This was done in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. Even though legal services were considered essential under the order, the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin (JSF) had already taken action. A week before the order was issued, the Farrin firm had transitioned the vast majority of its employees to working from home. As one of the largest plaintiffs’ firms in the Southeast, the firm wanted to stay fully staffed while avoiding potentially exposing employees to the virus.

There were, however, considerations regarding the best way to manage the newly-formed remote workforce. The firm’s operations still had to proceed efficiently. Indeed, clients were now relying more than ever on the continued and effective resolution of their cases as they faced the prospect of layoffs or illness.

How could managers and supervisors make sure that productivity was still being maintained? How could they tell if teams and individuals were remaining as productive as they were before the onset of COVID-19?

The Options

Time tracking tools and software can provide their users with some basic numbers: log-on and log-off times, time on page, and number of views, for example. While these numbers matter, the managing attorneys at JSF knew that they needed more insight to get the whole story. What was actually being accomplished while a given page was being viewed?

There are some work product metrics that can deepen the insight for management. For instance, the number of demands sent or the number of intakes completed can give a much better idea of employee productivity than simply time spent on a page. However, in managing a remote workforce, those metrics do not paint a complete picture. Other important indicators of productivity can include the number of calls made or emails sent. Few managing attorneys, though, have the time or energy to gather and analyze such information. This is especially true for voluminous data across software and systems for each and every employee.

As firms are challenged by stalled cases or decreased caseloads in an evolving world, reviewing the productivity of remote staff is pivotal. It is crucial to know that each employee is giving a solid hour of work for the hour of pay.

The Solution

So why was JSF so comfortable handling all client needs remotely with just a skeleton staff in the office? The answer is GrowPath’s legal case management software. While other tools leave you only minimally enlightened on remote workforce productivity, GrowPath is different. It provides for granular, limitless, and intuitive reporting.

Using GrowPath’s next generation legal technology, employee productivity can be fruitfully and comprehensively tracked. Staff activity is viewable in user-friendly bar graphs by time range and selected task. There is perhaps one captured indicator of productivity that gives JSF the most confidence in managing its remote workforce. That indicator is simply notes created by user. Other firms and managers may wonder if user activity matches reported hours. JSF, in contrast, is able to assess each user’s exact level of interaction.

Additional data points of productivity include fields completed, emails/texts sent, calls made, documents created or merged, reminders edited, and much more. Using this data, managers can compare one staff member versus how productive he/she was in the office, or one staff member against the average values of staff in like positions and roles. Completely cloud based, GrowPath’s employee productivity tracker even allows users to track their own progress and set individual success goals.

The Verdict

One pain point that managing attorneys have frequently reported during the coronavirus pandemic is the inability to measure remote staff productivity. They feel blind to their team’s activity when their employees work from home. But there is a solution: Data reporting in GrowPath is intuitive and updated in real-time. Managers can now compare their staff’s current productivity against its productivity in a pre-pandemic world.

View the image below to fully appreciate how GrowPath’s dedication to next generation legal tech served the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin well when crisis and uncertainty hit:

GrowPath’s Remote Productivity Assessment Tool

GrowPath provides attorneys with an instant apples-to-apples comparison of attorney and paralegal productivity while they work from home. In addition to users’ browser activity and page views, additional key productivity indicators are captured by the software:

• notes created
• fields completed
• emails sent through the application
• calls/texts made through the application
• documents created/merged within the application
• remote prints sent
• reminders edited
• and more

When JSF managers wondered if reported activity matched actual activity or if page views translated into case progress, they didn’t have to stay curious for long. Accurate, insightful, and user-friendly productivity charts and graphs from GrowPath kept the firm nimble and ready to face the future head on.

What to Do If Your Case Management and Analytics Software Is Leaving You Blind

Business intelligence is more important than ever: Explore and engage with your data in a simple, beautiful, and secure environment with GrowPath. For firms without data reporting capabilities, GrowPath Insight is our standalone data reporting and business analytics tool.

Once you experience the power of actionable business intelligence from GrowPath, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it. See your firm in a whole new light by scheduling a demo today.