Your Evaluation Process – Your Way

Many law firms evaluate the performance of their lawyers annually. The evaluation process often supports the distribution of firm income, awarding of partnerships and other significant personnel decisions. Although nearly all firms engage in this process to some extent, the nature, depth and parameters of attorney evaluations vary considerably from firm to firm. In spite of the differences encountered, Data Fusion has found that moving the evaluation process from paper reports to the browser has greatly simplified and improved this annual procedure.

Attorney evaluations can include both subjective and objective criteria. Some firms solicit and collate written assessments for every lawyer, from every lawyer, as an integral part of the process. Others rely solely on purely objective data, such as working, billing, and/or handling attorney statistics (hours worked, fees collected, accounts receivable, etc.). Most include some elements of each, and often refine the criteria as the needs of the partnership evolve. Larger firms can go well beyond the basics when analyzing objective criteria, often including sophisticated measures of profitability, teamwork, realization and leverage in their reviews.

The Power of the Browser

Whatever your evaluation process, we can bring it to your browser – a medium for which no client software is necessary, and no training is required. A browser-based system provides a perfect medium for generating and displaying the objective criteria in a format that is ideal for the interactive nature of attorney evaluations. Using industry standard protocols for the server, clients and security, we have provided comprehensive browser-based, turn-key evaluation systems that not only replace every aspect of paper-based predecessors, but works much faster and include drill downs to supporting detail. These applications combine instructional material, photos, sophisticated charts and graphs, rankings, counts and statistics into a powerful tool that makes the evaluation process more precise and efficient. The analysis tools built in to the application are well beyond what most lawyers require, but for the ultimate number crunchers – data can be transferred into Excel.

The browser is also an ideal vehicle for the solicitation, organization and perusal of subjective data as well. Written material can be composed and transmitted to a centralized facility from any device supporting a browser. The resulting information can then be easily organized, linked and cross referenced in any number of ways – a function that our centralized data source was specifically designed for in the first place. Associations by evaluators, persons evaluated, titles, length, significance, etc. can all be done dynamically via the database and the application. And, for those who still prefer to review hard copy reports, we provide the ability to generate formatted, “.pdf” style reports with standard pagination, headers and footers directly from your browser.

Don’t take it from us.

The degree to which your evaluation process will improve cannot be overstated. The Data Fusion clients who now use our browser-based evaluation would be more than happy to speak with you about the time and money saved, and convenience our solution has afforded them.

Contact Data Fusion for a list of Attorney Evaluation referrals, or to schedule a demonstration.