For practice leads: making Workzilla part of your week
How practice leads can use Workzilla to shift time away from chasing and reporting — and toward analysis and business improvement.
Practice leads keep the business side of the firm running — invoices out, WIP submitted, targets tracked. Workzilla lets them democratise much of that effort to team leaders and fee earners through role-based dashboards, freeing up hours each month that can be redirected toward deeper analysis and firm-wide improvements.
Sarah had been running a weekly targets report, pulling numbers into Excel and adjusting for matter performance before sending to team leaders. After publishing targets in Workzilla, she ran a short training session with each team. Fee earners could now track their own progress. The weekly report was gone, morale improved, and Sarah recovered several hours a month.
Sarah gave her team leaders access to the Unrealised Cashflow page and ran a quick walkthrough. She followed up with a short weekly email reminding them to check it. Within a few weeks the behaviour was embedded — team leaders were managing their own WIP and outstanding invoices without being chased. Sarah stopped feeling like the bad guy.
With hours freed up each month, Sarah turned her attention to activity patterns across the firm. She noticed a pattern: low estimation on certain matter types was leading to cost blowouts and write-downs. Working with team leaders to templatise parts of the estimation process brought write-downs down — and raised the average profit margin per matter by 2%.
The shift from chasing to analysing is where a practice lead's time is best spent. Workzilla makes that shift possible — but only if the habits are put in place first.