Expert Matter Planning is a new Aderant Expert module that enables firms to more easily and confidently respond to and manage requests for both standard and alternative fee arrangements. It was developed to address the challenges firms are facing as clients increasingly request non-traditional fee arrangements. Users can search and collate prior or existing matters and design preconfigured templates to build matter profiles. Matter Planning enables firms to review work performed on prior matters to ascertain the duration, effort, and expertise required for the new engagement. It also brings together hours and roles to produce a fee estimate and a projected P&L so that firms can ensure each new matter meets their profitability thresholds. The innovative, flexible design handles all types of alternative fee agreements and monitors the matter through the entire life cycle.

One key advantage of Expert Matter Planning is its full integration with Aderant Expert. Integration allows the use of Expert rates, ranks, timekeepers, phases, and tasks all to be shared, ensuring a seamless movement from the matter planning phase into file opening, time recording, and billing. The tight integration with Aderant Expert also provides streamlined matter inception through cutting edge workflow processes, as well as accurate monitoring of the estimates created in the planning phase against actual time entries and reports on any variances.

• Enables firms to more quickly and confidently respond to alternative fee arrangement requests
• Reduces the time and effort to retrieve like matters.
• Leverages historical data on similar matters to create more accurate forecasts and proposals
• Reduces the risk of taking on new matters with fixed or alternative pricing models
• Tracks the life cycle of matters to report actual revenues and costs vs. budget and ensures profitability targets are met
• Integration with Aderant Expert provides smooth transition to file opening, time entry, billing, and reporting
• Creates a flexible, repeatable process that can be used to plan, forecast, and monitor all new matters

• Easy-to-use wizard approach simplifies matter planning and forecasting
• Search across meaningful client and matter attributes using many criteria to find pertinent historical matters
• Categorize matters using a firm-defined taxonomy
• Perform side-by-side comparison of matters
• Integrated Aderant Expert rates support
• Multi-currency capabilities
• Multi-level P&L that can be viewed by phase, task, and rank to determine the estimated margins
• Graphical performance review charts to track actual vs. budgeted results
• Get alerts and notifications based on preset values and thresholds to closely monitor matters

When starting a matter plan many similar matters may exist in the Aderant Expert database. Expert Matter Planning's search capability delivers the ability to search and return relevant matters for the development of a matter plan. You can run multiple searches and select specific matters from each search to use in the planning phase. Users can search through a variety of fields to construct an overview of previous clients and matters:

• Client, Client Category, Client Class, Client Open Date, Client Type
• Matter Billing Person, Matter Responsible Person, Matter Category, Matter Class, Matter Open Date, Matter Type
• Total Hours (range), Total Revenue (range)
• Office
• Department
• Jurisdiction

Accurate estimates of cost and budget are critical in new matter planning. The planning phase of Expert Matter Planning uses the selected search results and templates to construct a new matter plan. The new matter plan can be built from scratch or built based on actual data from previous clients and matters. To assist with these plans, the selected matters from the search results include relevant data such as partner/non-partner hours, number of ranks employed, and P&L.


Using the Expert Rates Structure, the forecast phase allows the firm to take its historical matter data, and its new matter plan, and develop anticipated profitability metrics. By understanding previous client and matter profitability and contrasting it against current matter planning, you can construct an accurate estimation of future profits from a particular matter.

Forecasting supports the rate structures held within Aderant Expert, allowing firms to use a variety of unique variables to define whether a matter will be acceptable. Supported metrics include:

• Forecast Rate
• Standard Rate
• Cost Rate
• Revenue
• Cost
• Gross Profit

Once a forecast is complete and it is linked to a matter, Expert Matter Planning enables users to easily compare the actual hours recorded against the forecast. Graphical performance reviews indicate how the matter is performing overall, with the ability to study the matter in its component pieces. Alerts can be set to notify you if variances stray beyond preset values relative to projections for:

• Hours
• Revenue
• Cost
• Profitability
• Billing realization
• Cash realization

  


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