Another week and more great things to report:
- Powerful new features and finalising the initial version of Hivelight
- Speaking at the NSW Law Society Conference
- More Roadmaps added covering the entire life cycle of a claim step-by-step
- 256 matter types across 19 practice areas built in, plus an additional category for internal business projects.
- New article on leading change and turnaround in your business
- We finally got our new logo
The last of the core features of the Hivelight platform have been added.
We are now going through the process of rigorously testing all aspects of the platform, optimising the code, and enhancing the search and filtering capabilities.
New Feature: Custom Properties (Tags) to Your Matters
One of the core features we’ve just added was astutely requested by Sythany McKay of New Path Legal. This is the ability to tag matters with any properties you like.
This powerful feature means that you can track any data points you want to across the matters in your firm. You can also search and filter your matters by these properties.
Track and filter by courts, perpetrators, institutions, opponent types, monetary values, dates, class action membership, really anything. Track anything you want, you’re in charge.
New Feature: Add Status Updates for Your Matters
You and your team can also add status updates to your matters. This is a great way to let everyone know the latest of what has been done to progress the matter.
These Matter Status Updates will also show up in the All Matters view, providing a high quality live report on the latest developments across all your matters.
This is good news for everyone.
Staff can spend less time reporting on the work, and more time doing the work.
And principals can have up to the minute data on every matter in the firm.
This is also ideal for hybrid working.
New Feature: Search and Filter by the custom properties/tags on your matters
Easily find the cases that you are after based on their attributes.
New Feature: Set the Teams for Each Matter
In Hivelight you pick the team for each matter. You allocate who owns the matter, who has day-to-day responsibility for it, and the team providing legal and administrative support.
This might sound like a dull feature at first, but it’s not (promise!) – bear with us, and read on!
This has powerful benefits. It doesn’t just provide clarity about roles and responsibilities (which significantly boosts productivity), it also powers the automatic task allocation feature in Hivelight (and this feature is productivity magic when you see it in action!).
In Hivelight, if you first pick the team for a matter, and then load a Roadmap (precedent set of Milestones and Tasks for completing stages of work in a matter – like workflows, but simpler and more powerful) to the matter, Hivelight will automatically allocate all the tasks to the appropriate members of your team on that matter.
This is a powerful time saver and promotes consistency across the firm. It is also the way to manage employee retention risks. As some people leave and new people join, they can quickly see which matters they are working on, what they are responsible for, what they need to do next, and how to do it.
You are not locked into using our Roadmaps though. You can start from scratch creating your own milestones and tasks and save them as a Roadmap, or quickly edit and adapt one of ours to save time.
New Roadmaps: Everything from Initial Enquiry to Payout and Closing the File
To help you hit the ground running, Hivelight will come with a detailed set of Roadmaps built in.
Each Roadmap provides all the tasks (with instructions) broken into Milestones for completing each stage of a matter – from vetting new clients, to settlement negotiations, running the trial, to paying yourself and closing the file.
We’ve done the painstaking work to ensure that Hivelight is the most low effort way for firms to have first class processes and workflows. At last count, we’re up to 135 pages worth!
Everything in our Roadmaps can be edited, adapted, deleted, or added to to suit how you like to run things. No need for expensive consultants or complicated training days. You need a system that you and your team can easily adapt on the fly as each case develops.
New Feature: Comprehensive Set of Matter Types
When you join Hivelight you’ll have no trouble finding the matter types to suit your practice areas and niches.
That’s because we’ve methodically compiled a list of 256 matter types (divided into 19 practice areas) for you to choose from. And beyond that, you can use our Matter Tags feature to add any number of custom Sub Matter Types that want – be as specific as you need to be for your firm.
We have also added a further dedicated category for internal business projects. This is because Hivelight is not just great for managing client work, but also for managing the business goals of your practice and completing your internal projects (e.g. New office expansions, wellbeing events, recruitment, sales and marketing goals, process improvement, and even the office Christmas party).
New Article: Leading Change in Your Practice
Change management and business turnarounds are hard! But there is a method to it.
We’ve penned an article with the key lessons from IBM’s multi billion dollar turnaround “How to Lead Change in your Business: Learning from IBM’s transformation under Lou Gerstner“. This is taken from Lou’s interview from the excellent business podcast ‘Wisdom from the Top’ (link to the podcast is included below and in the article).
These lessons apply regardless of the type of business you are in and are great framework for achieving change in your practice.
New Event: NSW Law Society Conference 2022
We’ll be delivering a talk at the upcoming NSW Law Society Conference on 5 September 2022. We’ll be talking about how you can apply the powerful techniques from the fields of behavioural economics, systems engineering, and project management in very simple practical ways to boost the wellbeing and profitability of your practice (based on our e-book “10 Keys to Systematically Grow your Legal Practice”).
New Logo
We’ve been in the process of re-branding from LawLite to Hivelight. We had a few setbacks and it took longer than expected. But we’ve finally got the new logo, so we are on our way.
The other limitation is of course having the development bandwidth to convert our LawLite assets over to Hivelight. Currently, everything is dedicated to getting the Hivelight platform ready for our design partner firms.
Litigation and Project Management
Finally, a shout out to the formidable team at Kare Lawyers and their recent article “Why Litigation is like Construction“. We couldn’t agree more! There’s a good reason why project management methods adapt so well to the management of litigation work.
As always, if you’re interested in getting early access to Hivelight, just head to Hivelight.com and submit your email address.
Feel free to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.Thank you for your support!