Blog · Industry
Which clients instruct you on employment and take their corporate work elsewhere. Which partner's book is one client deep. Which long-standing clients have opened no matter in a year. From the practice management system, client IDs only.
How a law firm measures whether matters are staffed as they were priced, from time entries and the engagement terms: the fee-earner mix a matter was priced on, the mix actually recorded, the cost of the difference at cost rates, the matters and clients where partners do associate work, the practices where the mix drifts most, and the identity that matter costs sum to the practice's cost base.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a law firm measures lock-up per client from time entries, bills and receipts: work in progress days and debtor days, the total days between work done and cash received, the norm per practice from the firm's own book, the clients whose lock-up is well above it, the partners whose books carry the most, and the two levers, billing cadence and collection, that the split points to.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a law firm measures, from the practice management export alone, which practice areas each client instructs against the norm for clients like them, which long-standing clients have gone quiet, and how referrals flow between partners, reconciled to billed fees and without exposing any partner's book to another.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a law firm measures realisation per client from time entries and bills: billed value over worked value at standard rates, the write-downs and write-offs behind the gap, the trend per client and per partner, and the clients whose effective discount has widened year on year through a hundred small decisions that nobody made as a policy.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a law firm measures cross-referral from its own matter data: the originating partner against the working practice, referral share per partner, the norm from the firm's own book, and the list of clients with a single-practice relationship whose profile says they should have three.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions a managing partner of a law or accounting firm puts to the partners about the book, which clients use one practice, whose book depends on one client, which clients drifted in price, which have not started this season, where is the cash locked up, which partners send work across the firm, which proposals cost more than they win, what triggers sit in the compliance data, which matters were staffed above their price, and what changed, each with the table from the practice management system, the identity behind it, and the answer a managing partner should send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow law firms should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20264 min readThe ten client KPIs a law firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: practice areas per client against the norm, dormant clients by prior fees, billing and collection realisation by client, lock-up by client, partner book concentration, cross-referral between partners, matter profitability by leverage, client fee concentration, share of client legal spend, and new matter origination. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete lock-up calculation on five clients of a professional firm, small enough to check by hand: worked value from time entries, billed from bills, received from receipts, unbilled WIP and outstanding debtors, average daily billing, WIP days, debtor days, lock-up days and lock-up cash, the split that says whether the delay is billing or collection, the practice norm, and the identity that WIP and debtors reconcile, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own practice management exports.
17 Sept 20262 min readMatter and client analytics for law firms. Where the next matter is, by client and practice area.
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