Tag: Law Firms Industry

Preeminent LLP*, a leading U.S. class action law firm ranking nationally, in nine practice areas, sought P&C’s guidance to streamline their operations and prepare for the next phase of expansion. Building upon decades of landmark legal victories and unrelenting advocacy for their clients, they asked P&C to refine their practice mix, improve the usefulness and clarity of financial reporting, and assess key leaders of core business functions across the Firm.

The Firm’s Executive Committee sought P&C’s insights and recommendations on the following topics:

• Is the Firm optimally allocating resources across its current practices and offices?
• Could the Firm optimize its costs to become more profitable?
• Are there attractive opportunities in new practice areas yet untapped by the Firm?
• Is the Firm consistently and effectively projecting its brand image to key target audiences?
• How can we improve current financial processes to streamline effort, reduce manual labor, and provide timely and transparent visibility and controls across both revenues and expenses?
• How do our compensation and benefit programs compare to local and national peer groups; specifically, are our compensation and benefit programs competitive to attract and retain the best talent in the nation?
• What tangible near-term opportunities are available to reduce costs and maximize revenues?

P&C proposed an integrated approach to address the Firm’s questions and goals:

Responding to Preeminent LLP’s ambition to rapidly transform their business and prepare for the next phase of growth, P&C designed and executed a series of three initiatives spanning the full spectrum from strategy through implementation:

• Strategic repositioning. Assessed each practice and office based upon their historical financial performance and strategic fit – in terms of reinforcing or conflicting brand perceptions and relationships with key decision-makers – developed corresponding staffing plans to grow or triage the practice, launched new offices, and prepared for future mergers and acquisitions.
• Capability development. Dramatically strengthened core functions, establishing the infrastructure to drive and support subsequent expansion:
  • Marketing and Public Relations: articulated the organization’s brand, refined key target business development and other stakeholder audiences, selected a best-in-class public relations firm, and developed critical platforms to generate prospects and to develop successful, enduring client relationships.
  • Finance: streamlined the incumbent accounting system to inform key decisions by transforming the general ledger structure, implemented revenue and expense forecasting processes and controls, automated low-value transaction processing by digitally transforming the accounts payable processes, and implemented an aggressive procurement program to optimize non-labor expenses.
  • Technology: overhauled the practice and financial management systems, implemented an enterprise document management solution – shifting from a legacy platform to an industry leading enterprise software platform – and implementing a best-in-class digital workflow which integrated firm-wide business processes to eliminate duplicative, manual work. Integrated all enterprise systems together for seamless straight-through transaction processing and reporting. Identified and addressed an array of IT infrastructure needs including optimizing networks, improving cyber protection, deploying state-of-the-art communications and content archival solution, and desktop virtualization to reduce costs and improve availability and fault-tolerance of critical new infrastructure.
  • Illuminated financial insights by developing comprehensive analytics dashboards providing real-time access to key financial and operational results, supported by a robust data quality remediation program.
  • Developed the organization by benchmarking professional staff compensation against local and national peer groups, designed a performance management system that formalized roles and responsibilities of key positions, assessed functional leadership against available candidate pools, and conducted targeted executive recruiting to address key gaps in expertise.
• Value capture. Implemented a variety of tactical projects to reduce costs and drive consistency and compliance including maximizing the recovery of client-related expenses, optimizing insurance coverage, consolidating and reducing travel expenses, automating workflows such as expense management, and standardizing processes such as conducting conflict of interest checks.

What appeared as a large undertaking became a very successful rejuvenation that will continue to yield benefits for the Firm and their clients. Preeminent LLP identified clear priorities for investment in practices and offices, and shifted staff and other resources accordingly. A new office was launched to expand the Firm’s reach to all key markets nationwide while also enhancing brand image and industry position. The Firm also embarked upon a public relations campaign to highlight its successes and capabilities with target audiences.

P&C led vendor selection, build-out, implementation, and training for three new platforms that transformed how the firm manages all expenses including vendors, employees, and client cost recovery – savings millions of dollars of annual costs and gaining millions of dollars of additional recoveries. These integrated platforms will reduce manual labor and waste and increase profitability for every practice. It also launched replacement efforts for document management and eDiscovery, and articulated a longer-term roadmap to upgrade the core practice management and financial system.

Additionally, P&C created and implemented a dashboard analytics platform that provides key decision makers with clear, actionable financial insights.

Preeminent LLP’s transformation rapidly accomplished all goals, delivering an impressive 515% return on investment in multiple of P&C fees over 11 months.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.