Overview
Law Firms compensate their attorneys and staff based on a wide range of criteria including origination, management of cases and work performed. CARET Legal provides a number of reporting tools to enable firms to generate compensation data.
Simple Origination
If there is only one originating attorney for a matter, you can designate an Originating Attorney per Matter. Afterwards, you can generate a report which will display matters grouped by the Originating Attorney with values for amounts billed and collected in a particular date range.
Report: Originating Attorney
Where you can set this preference
You can set the Originating Attorney when creating a new Matter.
Depending on your firm’s compensation methodology, you may allocate a percentage of overall fees billed or collected as a basis for compensation for the matters stemmed by the Originating Attorney. Most firms use collected values as the basis for compensation.
Split Origination
Certain Matters may be originated by more than one attorney, in varying amounts. For example, one originator may be responsible for 75% of the origination and another for 25%.
Where you can set this preference
To set these percentages:
- Navigate to the Matters section and select + in the action bar or select New Matter from the Quick Add menu to display the New Matter modal.
- Click Advanced Origination Options to set these varying percentages.
- Enter of select options, then click SAVE to complete the process.
Report: Split Compensation
Split Compensation displays values of collected values for matters in which an originator has partial origination rate along with percentages of such rates and the origination share which is the collected amounts multiplied by the corresponding originator’s rate.
Compensation for Working Timekeepers
A common form of compensation from the standpoint of incentivizing attorney and non-attorney staff is to provide additional remuneration for work performed by timekeepers, usually to the extent collected by the firm.
Report: Billed and Collected (or for details of collections, Fee Allocation Report)
You can generate this report into a spreadsheet and add a column for a percentage that is provided to the timekeepers, either as a multiple of Billed or Collected values, or some combination of both, depending on your desired compensation structure.
Hybrid Compensation
Some firms have a hybrid compensation model whereby a certain percentage of revenues are allocated to the House (equity partners) and the balance allocated to originators and timekeepers. This can be achieved by obtaining the data from the above reports and using the weighted average of each category against total billed or collected revenue.