Understanding the True Cost of Your Technology Decisions with SmartAdvocate
Download Michael Zucchi’s presentation, the Cost of a Click here: Michael Zucchi The Cost of a Click SA
More often than not, at least 97% of the time, Personal Injury firms do not want to pay for technology: not the hardware, not the software, and especially not the IT support and specialists. A Legal firm’s goal is this: save as much money as possible by acquiring the cheapest solutions.
Cheap solutions=Saving money=less costs=larger profit – YAY!
But this equation does not add up, and it couldn’t be more mathematically incorrect. The reality looks more like this:
Cheap Hardware + Cheap Software + Cheap IT Support + Expensive SA CMS=DISASTER=Major Loss in Annual Revenue – NOT YAY…
While you may not think it’s true, we’ve looked at two actual Case Studies from real clients we’ve worked with to determine what the cost of a click really is, and how your poor technology decisions are costing you big.
Slow System, Slow Clicks
At this particular firm, there were 40 users working on SmartAdvocate CMS. Their problem: there was a backlog of work, paper everywhere, and the system was too slow. Like many other firms, they believed SA CMS was the problem. It wasn’t.
When using SA, each user would click on something within the CMS and it would take roughly 10 seconds to load the page. This occurred every single time.
If each page took 10 seconds to load, a user was only able to have 6 clicks per minute.
That means, users were only able to click 60 times in an hour, and 420 clicks in a day. At the best law firms (where they invest good money in technology), users experience no more than a 2 second wait per page. Because of the extremely slow click time, which was costing the firm roughly 10 cents per click, per minute, per user, this firm was losing serious revenue.
Why was the system slow? It wasn’t SA! It was the firm’s poor choice in user workstations. Cheap workstations could not properly run SA. Users got impatient waiting 10 seconds between clicks. They broke the process of digitizing information and went back to writing on paper. Data got lost. Cases became unorganized. And so on.
12 Seconds Will Make You Cry
At this firm, there were 30 full time employees, two of which were designated to scanning, full-time, every single document into the system. Their problem: every single time they scanned a single piece of paper, there was a 12 second pause. Yup. EVERY. PIECE. OF. PAPER. The two female full-time scanners were physically in tears at the torment their job caused them, because as we all know, broken technology is extremely taxing.
The women could scan less than 5 papers per minute, and less than 240 pieces of paper per hour. Imagine how many cases they were missing out on because the information could not be delivered to the lawyers fast enough.
This firm, like the last, had invested a large amount of capital into SmartAdvocate CMS. And, like the other firm, they soon discovered there were major issues they believed were the fault of SA. Again, they were not.
So what was the issue? The poor performance was caused by poor technology choices and a neglect to invest in standardized business machines that could handle the capabilities being asked of it.
The Bottom Line
As you move forward in making technology decisions with your law firm, it’s important to keep in mind that cheap isn’t always right. It may be less money upfront, but in the long run, it will cost you big.
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