A win for the Slater and Gordon finance team

Slater & Gordon are a leading Australian consumer law firm founded in 1935. They provide specialist legal and complementary services in a range of areas including personal injury, superannuation and insurance, class actions, commercial litigation and employment law.

Trial by spreadsheet – data inadmissible for proper forecasting

Slater & Gordon are a complex business. They have many practice areas, each with different Excel models to support planning activities.

Consolidation in Excel was difficult, clunky and time consuming.

The finance team spent all their time on putting a budget together or doing a forecast that was out of date before they finished it. This was not workable and drove them to look for a solution that would help save time.

Slater and Gordon’s solution: a motion for clarity

Slater & Gordon landed on Workday Adaptive Planning as the technology that could help, and QMetrix as their implementation partner.

To provide context of the business: Slater & Gordon have 13 different practice areas with a strong focus on personal injury law, broken down further into departments such as workers compensation, motor vehicles accidents and medical negligence.

They were innovators of the “No Win – No Fee” model which means if they do not win a client’s claim, legal fees are not paid. They also run class actions, coordinating legal action on behalf of a wider group of claimants.

Slater & Gordon can have as many as 16,000 individual cases running at any one time and these cases are funded over several years, accumulating internal charges, disbursements, investigation costs, external legal fees and more – with the hope of getting a profitable settlement when they win.

Modelling the risk, cash impacts and return on investments for such cases are complicated, and it is an enormous task to manage when you have thousands of them.

A reliable 3-way planning model linked to revenue forecasts

One of the early objectives for Slater & Gordon was to set up an integrated 3-way planning model. When this was in Excel spreadsheets, it was a struggle to make last minute changes and the implications of inaccuracy were huge, potentially resulting in millions of unaccounted future fees.

Now with Workday Adaptive Planning, reliability is no longer a problem.

Depending on the practice area, revenue models in Adaptive Planning are built on differing drivers, but commonly include the probability of success, settlement value and expected length of case. Importantly, changes are quick and easy to update.

Easier and higher quality forecasts, with seamless data integration

With a longer term focus, Slater and Gordon can now do a five year plan at a higher granularity leveraging the same capabilities within Adaptive Planning.

Part of what has simplified the process is seamless integration.

Trent says, “The amount of time it saves is the best thing about it. The data we need for planning comes from our finance system, HR system and operations system. We have thousands of legal cases at any one time so it’s great to have it all integrated”.

The data connected includes general ledger, with transaction level data so they can drill into transactions on demand.

HR related headcount details are loaded with secure access to support labour cost planning, and operational data is sourced to understand enquiries, appointments and growth in new cases. There is no need for clunky SQL to pull data, and Trent says there have been no performance issues with Adaptive Planning’s integration capabilities.

Adaptive Planning’s most underrated feature

Adaptive Planning’s Microsoft Office plug-in, OfficeConnect, has been a bonus for the team at Slater & Gordon.

Trent notes, “OfficeConnect has definitely made month-end reporting a lot easier. You just set up all your templates, push a button to refresh it each month, and you get PowerPoints or board packs at the end. It has been a big benefit. The value of it is underrated; it has saved us so much time”.

While it is the finance team members who use Adaptive Planning primarily, practice managers can also view and access reports and information on demand.

Getting both the big picture and small details, where you need it

While it helps you see the big picture and plan for the future, Adaptive Planning also lets you get right into the detail when you need it. For Slater & Gordon, their biggest cost is people. To manage this component, they built a powerful labour model in Adaptive Planning which incorporates dimensions and attributes.

This allows them to categorise staff types (such as professional or support staff), and tag people who are going on parental leave, pending promotions or changing departments. This means when they do a budget review, it is far simpler to pinpoint reasons for variances on a comparative basis.

The verdict: A successful solution, now managed in-house

Beyond the initial build and support phase, Slater & Gordon are now self-sufficient and do not require support from an external partner. Trent says Adaptive Planning is easy enough to maintain, and when someone new joins, it is not hard for them to pick it up.

Impact for Slater and Gordon

• Reliable planning models that provide the big picture view, but enable drilling into details when needed
• Seamless data integration with finance, HR and operations systems
• Quarterly forecasts and month-end reports that are higher quality, more accurate, and quicker to create
• More time to focus on the right things: Moving from manual time-consuming tasks, to more business partnering and value-adding work