Legal Marketing Department Time Analysis

Working in concert with firm leadership, IT and the Marketing department, Calibrate deployed a web-based time tracking tool to compile the entire marketing department’s time over a five-week period. The results were then fed into Calibrate’s proprietary task analysis data model, which contains over 30,000 hours of time logged against common tasks within the legal marketing function. This shows not only where the firm’s marketing department was committing its resources, but also benchmarks their results against other anonymized Am Law 200 firms that have conducted a time analysis exercise with Calibrate.

Some highlights from the analysis included:

• Roughly 25% of the team’s time was spent addressing individual attorney requests.
• Significant time was spent across the team on low-value work (such as promotional item fulfillment) that could be potentially outsourced or automated.
• Almost one third of all leadership (Manager and above) time was spent on tactical work that is better delegated, automated or eliminated.
• The team allocated twice the amount of time to email messaging compared to benchmark firms in our data model.
• Over a quarter of the entire department’s time was devoted to administrative tasks.
• Less than 10% of the team’s time was spent on tasks that would correlate to a high probability of influencing revenue.

The resulting report provided the guidance needed for the CMO to build a case to present to firm management. Ultimately the CMO was able to gain approval for personnel and compensation adjustment as well as enhanced technology and budget to put processes into place to increase service delivery aligning with the firmwide strategic plan.