Reichman Jorgensen LLP is an elite national trial firm that handles high-stakes commercial litigation and intellectual property disputes. They were founded by top counsel from big law who saw a need in the market for a law firm truly aligned with their clients’ best interests.

Their differentiator? The firm rejects the billable hour in favor of fee arrangements such as project-based invoicing to align interests — the more efficiently Reichman Jorgensen is able to complete its work, the more money it makes. It’s as simple as that. And that’s why they needed Hive.

Finding The Right Solution

When Reichman Jorgensen began evaluating different platforms, they knew that they needed something that would allow them to focus on the amount of work that was getting done as well as the quality of work. Efficiency was critical. When they started looking, the team found Hive, and immediately fell in love.

Reichman Jorgensen uses Hive to power the end-to-end workflow of a case through trial; everything from client intake, resource management, case management, task management, client reporting, and internal communications is done in Hive. On the back end, Hive allows real-time utilization analysis and helps the team balance head count with demand, and permits assessment of attorneys based on efficiency, quality of work, and sophistication of work product.

Key features that sold Reichman Jorgensen on Hive:

1. Real-time notifications/automatic update: Enabling Reichman Jorgensen to avoid sending, or emailing out, case updates daily, which eliminates unnecessary coordination and facilitates higher-impact meetings. Hive allows a dashboard to track attorneys’ work real time.
2. Multiple layouts: Allowing employees to collaborate and work the way they want as various people in their organization worked differently — so finding a tool that had Gantt, Kanban, table, calendar and label view was important.
3. Customizable: Needed a tool that allowed them to add sub-projects down to any detailed level, add labels, and assign/track projects by attorney, and manage complex deadlines and intermediate reviews.

When the team found Hive, they knew it had an ideal collection of features that would allow the teams across the country to work together, track progress, and produce the best possible work.

Clients have provided valuable feedback for a law firm using business project management tools required in most other industries. This feedback has included:

• Seamless teams: Teams are in sync and literally ready from the same page. This becomes critical in remote working environments and high-speed cases.
• Visibility: Clients have real-time visibility to work being done by the law firm.
• Billing: Bills reflect deliverables that are viewable by the client in real time.
• Case planning: Client can have control over and visibility into how various case-related tasks interact with each other and how resource needs are managed toward important case milestones or due dates.

Efficient case management has always been critical to getting results for clients and providing value. Eliminating the billable hour underscored just how important it is to remove inefficiencies in case management—the cost is on the law firm, not the client. Hive is a game-changer, saving us a substantial amount of time and money across the various aspects of client service and law firm management.  – Courtland Reichman, Managing Partner

Having implemented Hive, Reichman Jorgensen saves 60 hours every month by streamlining case management.

A Look Under The Hood: How Projects Break Down

Let’s break down their Hive framework. At a macro level, each project corresponds to a case. Let’s say they’re working for a major beverage distributor. When a case is taken on by the team, a case file (project) is immediately created in Hive based on project templates, which helps automate their workflow and save time.

These templates are pre-saved project formats, actions, sub-actions steps and timelines that the team can apply to a case with one click. Labels are added to each case and individual tasks to help their teams group and sort specific to-dos.

If the case they’re working on is, say, a patent litigation lawsuit, they’d apply that specific template, which you can see here:

From there, a team is assigned to the case. The best part? The senior leadership team can easily find the right associate with Hive’s summary view — they can see exactly who is working on what, and who has the bandwidth to take on this new case.

Once our beverage distributor’s case has been assigned and kicked off, senior team members can quickly check-in on any and all tasks pertaining to the case with Hive’s table view.

And if a client wants to see a list of all tasks completed or on-deck, the Reichman Jorgensen team can quickly export project lists from Hive and send it over to their clients with Hive Mail.

Lastly, one of the best parts about working in Hive is that, throughout the case and project lifecycle, the Reichman Jorgensen team can track all work on the case in Hive, which provides an audit trail for their team and clients and logs all progress. Now, if someone new needs to join in on the case or quickly get an update, they can go straight to Hive.

Hive saves time on billing, but also saves hours upon hours of time managing workflows. We can tell in real-time, without having to send emails requesting the information, what projects our attorneys are working on. We estimate that Hive saves us 60 hours per month on case management alone, and at least $150,000 per month on workflow and billing. – Jennifer Estremera, Deputy Managing Partner

Overall, Hive delivers for Reichman Jorgensen because with Hive they’re able to operate as a 21st century law firm fully aligned with their clients. They believe this is the way of the future, and Hive helps them accurately track all work in a seamless and efficient manner with live updates, transparent case views, and one centralized hub for communication.

As one client remarked, “This is fantastic, but why aren’t all law firms doing project management?”