The Challenge
As part of developing a three-year strategic marketing plan, the CMO of an Am Law 200 firm wanted an accurate understanding of where their team was adding value, what departmental activities were helping to drive revenue, and how department resources were currently being allocated. The firm engaged Calibrate to conduct a time tracking exercise across the department over a prescribed period. This analysis intended not only to indicate what work was being done, but where resources were allocated, and who was requesting said resources.
Calibrate’s Solution
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.
Let’s Connect
To learn more about how Calibrate partners with firm leaders to track, assess, and provide recommendations for increasing their department’s efficiency, please reach out to Gordon Braun-Woodbury, Senior Consultant at Calibrate.
