Key Metrics Every Law Firm Should Track – Legal Up Virtual Conference 2025 by InfoTrack

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Scott:

Hello and welcome to On the Road with InfoTrack and Legal Talk Network. I’m Joe Scott, one of the programming coordinators at Legal Up the annual virtual conference hosted by InfoTrack. Over the next few weeks we’ll present special episodes of the On the Road podcast to highlight some of the best insights from past events. This next installment features our friend Bryan Billig. Brian brings useful insights to find the data that makes a law firm successful, what to track as well as what not to sweat. Brian is the VP of Customer Education at Assembly Software. We hope you enjoy this episode. And don’t forget to preregister for the next Legal Up virtual conference at Legal Up 2020 six.com.

Bryan Billig:

So I’m going to be talking about four key types of data, lead sources and marketing intakes, the actual cases themselves and your staff because your staff is very much a part of your data set. Lead sources and marketing intakes. Then cases, then staff. When you’re looking at gathering data, you need to ask two important questions to determine if this is actually useful information, useful data. One, is it meaningful? Is this going to make an impact? Is this something that’s important? And two, is it quantifiable? Can you actually measure it one way or the other? It can’t be just binary, yes or no. Next up is data entry. And this if you don’t take away anything else that I’ve talked about today, when it comes to data entry, accuracy and consistency are king, meaning the information that’s put in is obviously true and accurate representation of whatever that piece of data is.

But, and this is the tougher one. It’s consistently entered across your entire law firm. You may have 10 people, you may have 50, you may have 500 people at your law firm, but if all 10, all 50 or all 500 might be doing things in a different way, you have no consistency, which means you do not have the ability to report. All you can do is report on each individual person separately and the way that they do things. The only way that you can get the information is if everybody is working with the same procedure. Proper data entry is the non-negotiable price of admission for accurate reporting, and I’ll say it one more time because it’s critical. Proper data entry is the non-negotiable price of admission for accurate reporting. So if you want the payoff, you want those reports at the end. You’ve got to have accurate data entry, consistent data entry at the beginning.

So what you need to do is establish your processes and procedures. I know it’s nerdy. I promised it was going to be nerdy. The data entry at your firm needs to be a culture literally started at the top. If you are the senior partner, managing partner, whoever you are, if you can establish that culture of we are a team and we are going to collectively do this together in this way, the payoff of information you are going to get at the opposite end is invaluable. So let’s talk about some of these reports. I have four different categories I’m going to show you and in each of these categories are a couple of different types of metrics. So this is the payoff on the title and the subject of our presentation today. So again, classic obvious out of the gate intake count by month, obviously every firm should be looking at how many intakes are coming.

In a simple metric, it should be easy to track. You shouldn’t have to build out anything to know this number, but you should absolutely know this. Number intakes are the lifeblood of your firm. This is where your information, where your cases are coming from. So you need to be aware of that pipeline and if it’s starting to dip, you need to adjust accordingly quickly. Again, pretty easy stuff intakes by source. So if you’re getting a certain number of intakes, that’s great. I need to know where they’re coming from. How much am I getting from Google these days? How much am I getting from my social media presence, those really expensive TV ads or that billboard up on 95 that I’m so proud of and it’s got my big smile and face, how much did that actually bring into my firm? What was the actual result of that expenditure?

But then go deeper. It’s not just about the intakes. You want to track the once versus the rejects and if you do it versus the referrals, because if the rejects are too large, if that percentage starts to climb and it’s up to you to decide what your personal firm threshold should be, you should be aware of that because that means you are wasting money. You are putting money into one of these sources and they are giving you, I’m going to say something you can’t use. I’ll say it kindly, but they are taking your money and they’re throwing it away. So you’ve got to make sure that you are tracking not just the number that comes in, but the quality of the ones that come in. And then of the once you absolutely should be tracking signups versus lost. And again, this should be easy to do, but so many firms don’t do it.

Like if I have two hours to spend with a law firm to try and improve their bottom line, this is where I’m going. If you’re going to give me 120 minutes, I’m going to zoom in on this immediately because a lot of firms aren’t even aware that they’re losing good cases. And a lot of times it’s something that’s fairly easy to rectify. It’s usually based on response time to a client or how you approach them or how friendly your and knowledgeable and professional your intake people are. So if that lost percentage, once you start tracking it is anywhere at five or above 10%, that’s 10% of cases your law firm absolutely should have. You spent the money they called you, they went to your website, they reached out to you, that’s your case. There’s no reason you should have lost it. So you got to make sure that that percentage is as small as humanly possible cases.

Again, I could go on for hours, but a couple of just key case reports. One, this is your inventory for your firm. You better believe any other type of company. I don’t care if you’re a car dealership or a grocery store. They understand their inventory, they know exactly how much product they have out on the floor. They know the value of every single item in that inventory. Law firm should be no different. You should know exactly what you have in your law firm. So the very simple one is give me the case inventory by case type. How many auto cases do I have versus med mal versus premise liability, workers’ comp, mass tort. I’ve got to understand how many I have of each because each of them require different amounts of effort, different payoffs, different values to our firm. So you have to know what you’ve got and make sure you have the expertise to handle it.

But if you go a little deeper, you can look at your case inventory by phase. Now, what’s critical to knowing the phase, the checklist, if you have a task management list set up, if you’ve got an assembly line where these things need to be accomplished on each case every time, then it’s very easy for you and your system to determine sort of where the lines are between the phases. And I’ve just got examples here, but you can decide what phases are appropriate for the type of cases that you handle, but set those borders. And then with a task management list, you can easily report and say, I’ve got this many in the first phase. I’ve got this many in the second, third, fourth, fifth, however many phases you’ve got. This is crucial because again, this is the pipeline of your firm. If you look at this and 80% of your cases are in settlement, awesome, that’s great.

You’ve got money coming your way, fantastic, but you better hold onto it because you’re going to need it to float for a while if your intakes and your investigation and negotiation phase cases are significantly lower. So you have to constantly manage this pipeline to make sure that you’ve got enough cases coming in the door and you’ve got enough cases going out the door at the same time to all flow smoothly. If any one of these is out of whack, you got to get on it fast because it’s a harbinger of things to come. Now this one in the bottom left-hand corner, I call this a billboard metric and I love these. Most people when they’re thinking dashboards, when they’re thinking data, they’re thinking pretty charts like some of the others that I’ve shown you, and those are absolutely useful. But I love these billboard metrics because they can be warning signs, red flags for issues in your firm or amongst your cases.

So in this example, I’ve got cases without activity for more than 30 days. For the billboard reports that I like, I like them to be zero. That’s my goal. I can set up an entire dashboard of individual tiles that on a good day are 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. But what happens is if anything trips one of these red alerts, one of these red flags, then a number pops up. And on my dashboard I can see I have four cases that haven’t been touched in 30 days. I’m going to give that a click and find out why and get to the bottom of it. Alright, staff reporting. So critical your staff is data as well. So again, very simple staff caseloads. How many cases are assigned to each one of my attorneys or case managers or paralegals or anybody in my staff? What’s the volume that they’re handling? This is easy stuff.

Not only should you know how many cases are assigned to each person, but each of them should know how much is on their plate as well. But then we’ve got another billboard metric for you here. If you build a task management system, if you have a checklist, you can report on that. So let’s say everybody has these tasks. We know who they’re assigned to and when they need to be accomplished. Then you can report and say, okay, show me how many tasks are more than 30 days overdue and I can click that and I can see by whom. Now that number might be a little bit higher because depending on the size of your firm, you’ve got hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of tasks across all of your cases. But still, if the goal is for everybody to be marking their things done by their due date, nonetheless, 30 days overdue, then this number should still be very low.

And anytime it’s there, it’s a red flag. Let’s take a look at staff productivity. Presence or activity is not a good measure of productivity. It’s about what got done. So there’s two ways to view this and they have different purposes. So first, again, you’ve got your checklist. You can report across your entire staff how many outstanding tasks each staff member has. Do they only have a couple of outstanding tasks or does somebody have a whole pile of things and why? It might not be that they’re bad at their job. It might be that they have too many cases, they have too many tasks. So you can see that information, get your insight and take your action to adapt and see what’s happening with that staff member. But I like even better the flip side of that, not how many tasks are still on their to-do list, but what have they accomplished over a certain period of time and not all tasks are created equal.

So you can break that down into staff 1, 2, 3 and four tasks A, B, and C and total, and you can see who’s been getting things done. That’s a real measure of productivity to see across your staff as things average out and it’s meaningful and it’s quantifiable. How many tasks has each staff member accomplished? You can see who your rock stars are and you can see who’s dragging. Last set of reports here, results reporting. What I mean by that is the end of the day, the the year, true information that’s going to steer the future of your law firm. Simple stuff, attorney fees. By period of time, every one of your attorneys should be bringing money into the firm and you and probably they should know exactly how much money that is because some folks are going to rock, some folks are going to struggle, and you can decide to take your rock stars and use their methods to help the rest of your team or how you can help elevate your struggling folks or make whatever other decisions you need.

Marketing ROI. This one I love because this takes time. This takes like a year, two years to actually see the payoff. But if you do the whole assembly line process, if you track how much money you put into your marketing and then see how many intakes you got from it, each intake will be associated with that marketing campaign, right? And then that intake becomes a case and then that case gets handled and goes through your firm and then that case reaches a positive resolution. So you can say, this money is attributable to that investment I made, and this is what your marketing agency will never have for you. But if you do the whole process, if you start now, once those cases that were associated with that campaign reach resolution, you can say, I spent a hundred thousand dollars and I only made 200,000 or I made 500 or I made $3 million from that a hundred thousand.

Now you know where to put your marketing resources. These last two fees by case type, time spent by case type. Quick story, there was a firm here in Baltimore, was an auto accident firm for years. That’s what they did, that’s what they advertised, and we helped them start tracking their metrics and 90% of their cases were autocare on this chart. We’ll say 70% of their cases were auto cases and they did the occasional med mal. But it wasn’t until we dived deeper that they saw not only were the fees being collected by med mal almost even to auto, but the amount of time they spent on it was less than 20% of what they were spending on the auto cases. So what did they do? They took that insight and they took action, they went back, they shifted their marketing campaigns, reduced auto and went after med mal.

Not many cases, but they tripled the number of med mal cases they were able to bring in significantly increasing their annual fees, but at the same time, the workload was much lighter, allowing their staff to pursue more cases than ever before because they were focused on a different vertical. Alright, key things to watch out for trends. When you’re looking at your data, look for patterns. Outliers. Outliers are important, but don’t let them throw you off. You’re looking for where most of your results are. Let like your management team figured out if there are staff outliers that need to be fixed to reduce them, but don’t let it change your direction. Bottlenecks critical. This is a staffing issue. Your cases need to follow through your entire firm cleanly a lot of times, and it’s usually a person or a department of people that cause a stoppage on your assembly line, and you need to identify it and open it up.

Reporting versus doing trap, I’m a data nerd. Don’t get so focused on reporting that you get in the way of people doing their jobs. The checklist is important. Is it 10 items? Is that helpful? Great. Is it 300 items? So every little minutiae, then you’re actually getting, you are the bottleneck. You’re the one causing the trouble. So be aware of a balance between reporting and doing forest for the trees. You guys already understand it. I’m moving fast here. Keep reporting front of mind. The concept here is don’t set up reports that you have to go in and look for and go in and run when you remember it. A lot of case management platforms offer subscriptions so that reports come to you every Friday or the last day of the month. So they come to you or set up dashboards that when you come in in the morning, you log in, your data is right there. You’ve got your billboard metrics, you’ve got your tracking metrics so that it’s front of mind, so it’s always a part of your day and always a part of your decision making process. If you’d like

Announcer:

More information about what you’ve heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice.