Management Reports: Identifying Serial Slashers and Inefficient Timekeepers

One of the most illuminating Management Reports I've crafted over the years generates a matrix to more easily identify "Serial Slashers" and "Inefficient Timekeepers".

A Serial Slasher is a billing attorney who utilizes a wide base of timekeepers, but then cuts that time dramatically before sending the bill out to his or her clients. There are several reasons why billing attorneys become Serial Slashers - some reasons are legitimate, most are not. The end result is that firm resources are squandered by effectively rendering free legal services. Typically, a Serial Slasher will cut everyone's time ... except their own.

An Inefficient Timekeeper takes substantially more time to accomplish a given task than his or her peers. There can be several reasons for the inefficiency: inexperience, incompetence, and laziness - to name a few. Whatever the reason, the report helps identify the problem so that corrective action can be taken - and sometimes the cure has nothting to do with the timekeeper and everything to do with case managers and mentors.

The report pulls together serveral sources of information from the SQL database - relying heavily on temporary tables and "case when" statements in order to get the information into one clean report. First, all timekeeper's hours as originally entered are summed and categorized by billing attorney. Next, you conduct the same operation for hours that were actually billed out the door. Finally, you display the delta between those original hours and the billed hours and display the results in a matrix. The Billing Attorneys are on listed the X-Axis and All Timekeepers are on the Y-Axis. Drop in a variable that prompts you for a date range at runtime.

In the table above, the Serial Slasher is highlighted in red. The Inefficient Timekeeper is highlighted in blue.