Overview
Law Firms compensate their attorneys and staff based on a wide range of criteria including origination, management of cases and work performed. Zola Suite provides a number of reporting tools to enable firms to generate compensation data.
Simple Origination
If there is only one originating attorney for a matter, you can designate an Originating Attorney per matter and generate a report which will display matters grouped by the originating attorney with values for amounts billed and collected in a particular date range.
Where you can set this preference
You can set Originating Attorney when creating a new matter.
Depending on your firm’s compensation methodology, you may allocate a percentage of overall fees billed or collected as a basis for compensation for the matters originated by the originating attorney. Most firms use collected values as the basis for compensation.
Split Origination
Certain matters may be originated by more than one attorney, in varying amounts. For example, one originator may be responsible for 75% of the origination and another for 25%.
Where you can set this preference
These varying percentages can be set when creating a matter under “Advanced Origination Options” and under the matter’s dashboard in -> Options -> Advanced Origination Options
Report: Split Compensation
Note: This option allows you to also provide special compensation for matters that are managed by more than one responsible attorney.
Split Compensation displays values of collected values for matters in which an originator has partial origination rate along with percentages of such rates and the origination share which is the collected amounts multiplied by the corresponding originator’s rate.
Compensation for Working Timekeepers
A common form of compensation from the standpoint of incentivizing attorney and non-attorney staff is to provide additional remuneration for work performed by timekeepers, usually to the extent collected by the firm.
You can generate this report into a spreadsheet and add a column for a percentage that is provided to the timekeepers, either as a multiple of Billed or Collected values, or some combination of both, depending on your desired compensation structure.
Hybrid Compensation
Some firms have a hybrid compensation model whereby a certain percentage of revenues are allocated to the “house” (equity partners) and the balance allocated to originators and timekeepers. This can be achieved by obtaining the data from the above reports and using the weighted average of each category against total billed or collected revenue.