Law Firm Dashboard Example
“More Partner Income” is a site dedicated to helping lawyers make more money. What’s nice about their site is that they articulate their business model of law firm performance using a set of metrics.
It would be nice to see a cause and effect diagram showing how Lawyers * Utilization Rate * Blended Rate * Realization less compensation and other expense contributes to total margin.
Their dashboard commits many of the classic sins of dashboard design, but again, I very much like the metrics they have chosen. The day’s to cash process is extremely important and deserves prominence on the display. However, in order to be actionable, it would be useful to compare this performance over time, or by practice area / lawyer. One or more stacked column charts would be a better choice than the gauges.
Hours vs budget is also a very useful metric. Again, I want to be able to see which cases or lawyers are falling behind so I can have a discussion about why.
Some of this information is included in the Alerts view. I really like the idea of including unstructured, qualitative information on a dashboard in this form. However, these appear to be automated alerts – effectively the text version of a traffic light. I suspect there may quickly be too many of them to be useful and that it will be difficult to prioritize the ones that need attention. I also see no way to remove or mark the alerts that have been dealt with.
The 3-D pie charts (also a common dashboard sin) continue the analysis of time to cash displayed at the top. It would be better to tie these two areas together visually, and to use column or bar charts to show the number of accounts that are late. I would also be interested in how much money is sitting out there at 120 days, as opposed to the number of accounts.
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