The Challenge

Spraggs Law has been serving the people of the Tri-Cities for almost 50 years with exceptional personal injury legal services. By understanding the many facets of personal injury, Spraggs provides a comprehensive legal review and advisory service to get individuals the compensation to which they are entitled. Due to a changing business environment for law firms, Spraggs Law seeks to become a leader with its internal processes across accounting and billing to reduce administrative costs. Spraggs tasked Propel Solutions with the identification of underlying service delivery & backlog issues in order to identify opportunities for improvement.  The project intended to ensure that processes are efficient, effective and scalable for future growth and new service lines.

The Objective

  • Process Review: Propel conducted a review of the current processes to determine opportunities for improving the capacity throughout the departments. This was done through interviewing staff, observing work practices, and creating detailed process maps that were critiqued by managers and staff.  The resulting “as-is analysis” was used to identify opportunities for process improvements.
  • Financial Analysis: A Profit Driver Model was developed to demonstrate the linkages between the cost and revenue drivers of the organization. Using this model, the total cost per settled file across administrative functions was analyzed. From here the impact of changing the organizational targets can be modelled to help determine specific improvement objectives in terms of financial and capacity improvement in the back office.
  • Management Toolkit Analysis:Propel conducted a review of the tools used by the Spraggs Leaders to manage processes including Business Strategy, Forecasting, Planning, Execution Control, and Operational Reports. From this analysis, Propel was able to identify missing tools that should be developed in order to increase staff engagement, operational capacity and communicate the expectations to staff in a common language.

The Result

Staff engagement throughout the analysis was high with over 40 opportunities for improvement identified. The Business Process Analysis provided Spraggs Law with baseline measures of their current state and identified the opportunity to introduce a Management Toolkit to improve the management of key processes, leverage systems to improve reporting, and increase visibility through daily and weekly reporting of results and Key Performance Indicators. Propel determined that through process improvement, Spraggs could improve the capacity of the departments with an anticipated reduction of 20% of the non value-added time in the processes leading to capacity to introduce new service areas.