Ropes & Gray can now build their revenue models with confidence and accuracy with CCH Tagetik's flexible solution.
FinanceOctober 12, 2022
Planning in a law firm with CCH Tagetik - Ropes & Gray and their unique nuanced of planning
Ropes & Gray is a global law firm, specialized in corporate law, IP litigation (Intellectual Property Litigation) and various other practices. They have offices in eleven locations around the world, six in the US, one in London and four in Asia.
Ropes & Gray was using Clarity for their overhead planning only but they didn’t have the flexibility in report building that they needed nor the ability to drill through the system to better understand their results. Their revenue and their cost of service planning were done entirely in Excel models so it was a manual process, very time-intensive, that took a full FTE's worth of work to build and maintain every year.
Ropes & Gray has a very unique way of planning, maybe even more unique to other law firms, and that for revenue purposes. Everything starts by understanding the attorney FTE, the lawyers are the ones who are driving billable hours and therefore revenue and so any revenue planning that Ropes does has to start with understanding that attorney population and ultimately they want to aggregate that population into various buckets that they will use to apply demand assumptions or activity assumptions. That unique planning model is something that CCH Tagetik was able to solve for Ropes & Gray with a very flexible system that allowed them to build a plan from a per lawyer basis and then apply demand and activity assumptions to various cuts of that population.
Hear what Ben Snietka, Senior Financial Analyst at Ropes & Gray, has to say.
Ropes & Gray was using Clarity for their overhead planning only but they didn’t have the flexibility in report building that they needed nor the ability to drill through the system to better understand their results. Their revenue and their cost of service planning were done entirely in Excel models so it was a manual process, very time-intensive, that took a full FTE's worth of work to build and maintain every year.
Ropes & Gray has a very unique way of planning, maybe even more unique to other law firms, and that for revenue purposes. Everything starts by understanding the attorney FTE, the lawyers are the ones who are driving billable hours and therefore revenue and so any revenue planning that Ropes does has to start with understanding that attorney population and ultimately they want to aggregate that population into various buckets that they will use to apply demand assumptions or activity assumptions. That unique planning model is something that CCH Tagetik was able to solve for Ropes & Gray with a very flexible system that allowed them to build a plan from a per lawyer basis and then apply demand and activity assumptions to various cuts of that population.
Hear what Ben Snietka, Senior Financial Analyst at Ropes & Gray, has to say.
Ropes & Gray is a global law firm, we specialize in corporate law, IP litigation (Intellectual Property Litigation) and various other practices.We have offices in eleven locations around the world, six in the US, one in London and four in Asia.
The legal marketas a whole has been roughly flat for the last few years now and so any growth and demand that our firm and any other firmwho wants to capture has to be either by winning business from competitive firms or by bringing in partnerlaterally from other firms, they come with a book of business, and so our lawyers have to be particularly focused onmaintaining and building client relationships and still you know providing that legal expertise that our clients demand.
We were using Clarity that was our legacy system, for our overhead planning only and we found that we didn't have the flexibility in report building that we needed and we didn't have an ability to drill through the system to better understand our results,those were the two key pain points in the Clarity system but our revenue and our cost of serviceplanning were done entirely in Excel models and that was the biggest pain point, it was a manual process, very time-intensive,it took basically a full FTE's worth of work to just build and maintain this every year.Ropes & Gray has a very unique way of planning, maybe even unique to other law firms, and that for revenue purposeswe really have to start by understanding the attorney FTE that we have, the lawyers are the ones who are driving billable hours and therefore revenueand so any revenue planning that Ropes does has to start with understanding that attorney population and ultimatelywe want to aggregate that population into various buckets that we'll use to apply demand assumptions or activity assumptions.That unique planning model is something that we found CCH Tagetik was able to solve for us and that the system wasvery flexible and allowed us to build our plan from basically a per lawyer basis and then applydemand an activity assumptions to various cuts of that population.
It was really the flexibility and building the models, we went through vendor demonstrations and CCH Tagetik was really able to recreate in those demos the unique way that we plan and so we had confidence in CCH Tagetik above other competitive systems, that we would be able to take our nuanced way of planning and apply it inCCH Tagetik.
We've taken a manual cumbersome planning process that took a whole FTE months and we'veshortened that down to weeks just in our first planning cycle following the implementation and we expect that further phases of implementationwill shorten that cycle by even more, so we ultimately now have a flexible system, it's more streamlined and we're confident that the data coming out of that system is accurate.
The biggest most positive impact is having a streamlined, automated and flexible revenue model now, not managing that process in Excel like we had been doing but it's a shorter process, we have more confidence in the outputs of that process and so that's been by far the biggest win for our team.
I would absolutely recommend CCH Tagetikto someone else, particularly other law firms who may have a nuanced way of planning that they think a system might not be able to capture,CCH Tagetik was flexible enough to capture our nuanced way of planning and so for that alone I would absolutely recommend CCH Tagetik to others.
The legal marketas a whole has been roughly flat for the last few years now and so any growth and demand that our firm and any other firmwho wants to capture has to be either by winning business from competitive firms or by bringing in partnerlaterally from other firms, they come with a book of business, and so our lawyers have to be particularly focused onmaintaining and building client relationships and still you know providing that legal expertise that our clients demand.
We were using Clarity that was our legacy system, for our overhead planning only and we found that we didn't have the flexibility in report building that we needed and we didn't have an ability to drill through the system to better understand our results,those were the two key pain points in the Clarity system but our revenue and our cost of serviceplanning were done entirely in Excel models and that was the biggest pain point, it was a manual process, very time-intensive,it took basically a full FTE's worth of work to just build and maintain this every year.Ropes & Gray has a very unique way of planning, maybe even unique to other law firms, and that for revenue purposeswe really have to start by understanding the attorney FTE that we have, the lawyers are the ones who are driving billable hours and therefore revenueand so any revenue planning that Ropes does has to start with understanding that attorney population and ultimatelywe want to aggregate that population into various buckets that we'll use to apply demand assumptions or activity assumptions.That unique planning model is something that we found CCH Tagetik was able to solve for us and that the system wasvery flexible and allowed us to build our plan from basically a per lawyer basis and then applydemand an activity assumptions to various cuts of that population.
It was really the flexibility and building the models, we went through vendor demonstrations and CCH Tagetik was really able to recreate in those demos the unique way that we plan and so we had confidence in CCH Tagetik above other competitive systems, that we would be able to take our nuanced way of planning and apply it inCCH Tagetik.
We've taken a manual cumbersome planning process that took a whole FTE months and we'veshortened that down to weeks just in our first planning cycle following the implementation and we expect that further phases of implementationwill shorten that cycle by even more, so we ultimately now have a flexible system, it's more streamlined and we're confident that the data coming out of that system is accurate.
The biggest most positive impact is having a streamlined, automated and flexible revenue model now, not managing that process in Excel like we had been doing but it's a shorter process, we have more confidence in the outputs of that process and so that's been by far the biggest win for our team.
I would absolutely recommend CCH Tagetikto someone else, particularly other law firms who may have a nuanced way of planning that they think a system might not be able to capture,CCH Tagetik was flexible enough to capture our nuanced way of planning and so for that alone I would absolutely recommend CCH Tagetik to others.
Budgeting Planning & Forecasting
Enter the next evolution in planning with CCH Tagetik Budgeting, Financial Planning, and Forecasting software.
Enter the next evolution in planning with CCH Tagetik Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting software.
