Oleksii Nosov, a partner at the Miller law firm, told us about the specifics of a law firm’s work, the benefits of using Worksection for their workflows, and how they managed to migrate from Bitrix24.
Quick reference:
Miller is a Ukrainian law firm that operates in the following areas: criminal practice, economic and service crimes practice, litigation practice, and business protection practice.
Migrated in two weeks…
Before the full-scale invasion, we were using Bitrix24. However, after the events of February 24, we decided to switch systems entirely, because ours was a product of Russian origin. That’s when we found Worksection. Migrating an entire team off a system we’d relied on for several years was extremely stressful — any manager knows the feeling, but there were no problems with Worksection. We migrated with the team, which at that time consisted of 24 people, in just two weeks. It also helped that Worksection has a convenient import feature for all tasks and contacts.
How exactly does Worksection help your team?
We log cases in the system, track their progress and handle billing. Our lawyers work on an hourly basis, so it is very important for us to track the time and work of each employee, since our lawyers have high hourly rates. Previously we did it using timesheets, but this is extremely inconvenient. If you have ever tried to track time in timesheets, you know what I mean.
In Worksection, we have the option to add time to tasks and a time tracker that helps to fix the hourly payment directly within the task, which is very convenient for both reporting and clients.
What is the greatest value for you as a law firm?
The nature of legal work is that you need to see the every history of cases. Currently, the company has 34 employees and we need visibility into everyone’s tasks, deadlines, what has been accomplished and what is planned. Worksection deals with these issues: we can monitor projects, tasks, workloads among employees, and pull reports on the time spent.
Communication on a case is very convenient because it is contextual and is conducted not in separate work chats, but directly in the task. This way, even new employees can simply enter the task and immediately understand what was happening and start execution.
In our company we have several areas of activity. With the help of a convenient time tracking in Worksection, we understand in which direction we invest our time and which area is the most profitable. That tells us where to focus our growth.
Each lawyer in Worksection sees only the projects related to their specific area. However, there are cases when the question concerns different areas of law. Therefore, we have overlapping projects where several practices collaborate. For such cases, in Worksection we can configure the visibility of projects, participants, collaborators and viewers by adding people from other departments to a specific project.
Another issue that Worksection helps us with is the task distribution by their complexity. We use labels to allocate tasks between specialists of different levels: Junior, Middle, Senior.
All data from Worksection can easily be exported separately for accounting and for financial analysis.
We also use the “contacts” feature to work with contractors.
Do you have internal rules regarding the use of Worksection?
Yes, we have our internal company rules, including how we use Worksection. This is standardized and described in a separate document. When an employee has completed a task, hey must note what was done and when, and describe the next step. All this is recorded in the comments to the task.
Would you recommend Worksection to other companies?
Absolutely! We have been searching for a Ukrainian system of this quality for a long time. We even considered developing our own. However, there are no equivalents to Worksection in the Ukrainian market.