Robert Ambrogi Blog
When Adam McDonell practiced law, he saw inefficiency in the way firms and legal departments assign and allocate work to associates and staff attorneys. His new product, Salladore, is his attempt to streamline the assignment process.
Last week at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, I had a chance to speak with McDonell and learn more about Salladore.
Salladore helps partners find associates within their firms (or senior counsel find attorneys in legal departments) who have both the skills and availability to work on a case. The cloud-based application enables attorneys to search for specific skills among associates who have available time to work on a project and then make the assignment.
Specifically, the platform enables attorneys to:
- Check availability by viewing attorney workloads in real time.
- Filter available attorneys by seniority, relevant experience, language skills and more.
- Assign work and receive alerts whenever the associate sees a task or has a question.
- Manage follow-up and track assigned work.
“Our system takes the entire pool of associate talent and use filters to find the ideal associate for a particular assignment,” McDonell told me. “Partners could find someone who has very specific experience or, if they want to do cross-training, could find the opposite. If they need language fluency, we can deliver that.”
The system’s determination of associate availability is not an “exact science,” McDonell said, but is meant to provide a rough sense of what workloads will be like day-to-day. It can draw data from calendar systems such as Outlook or Google, as well as from other firm systems.
Although the system is nearly ready to launch, its actual launch will not be until 2017, McDonell said. Although the system itself is cloud-based, its implementation in a firm will require integration with the firm’s IT infrastructure, which will require up-front work.
The system will be sold on a subscription basis. The price is not final but will probably be in the range of $100 to $150 per user per month. There may also be a one-time implementation cost.