Working on your firm – versus working in your firm – means asking the right questions and finding the answers that will drive business growth. The challenge many encounter as they begin the process of growing and improving their law firm is figuring out which questions to ask.

It’s easy to get side tracked and spend time measuring the wrong KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which can hurt, rather than help a firm’s business.

We asked a group of successful plaintiff law firms how they use data to grow and improve their businesses and found that many are measuring a range of KPIs across, Marketing, Intakes, Referrals, and Matters.

Cost per Retainer Sent

“Cost per retainer sent tells me where to spend more money and where to stop spending money in order to acquire new business most efficiently. I use the cost per retainer sent because it’s the deepest KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that we can get fast enough to be usable in the business context.

Unlike many companies, ROI (Return on Investment) or ROAS (Return on Advertising Spending) doesn’t work due to the length of our revenue cycle. Cost per lead doesn’t work because it doesn’t account for lead quality.

Cost per retainer sent is a fast metric that weighs in quality (since we don’t send packets to people that aren’t potentially clients) and thus, is the best core metric for knowing how hard your dollar is working for you. Without an engine, having a pretty car is pointless.”

-  Anthony Johnson, Johnson Firm

Milestone Moments of a Case

“Our business has many different facets to it. We attempt to distill it down to several key metrics that allow us to confirm that we are moving the ball forward. We do this by watching the milestone moments of a case.

By tracking at a very high level that we are hitting specific milestones across the firm, we can quickly see if the firm is trending in the right direction. If our attorneys are opening new cases,  sending out demand letters, signing releases, and closing cases at a better pace than last month it is typically a telling sign that our business is healthy and growing.

We use many metrics to measure the success of our business, but these metrics that confirm the machine is both pumping and picking up speed are the key indicators that we are on the right track.”

-  Emery Brett Ledger, The Ledger Law Firm

Tracking the Full Life Cycle of a Case

“Most important to us is Cost Per Conversion of a Lead Source and the Average Attorney Fee per that Lead Source.  This allows us to compare how much it costs for us to bring in a lead from that source to what fee we can expect for a case from that lead source.   Then we can take our overhead (minus marketing costs) and divide it by how many cases we handled in a given year and find out what our margins are for our cases per lead sources.

Using these metrics we can really track the full life cycle of a case and follow it back to its origin. These metrics will influence our marketing spend, our overhead, our headcount, and our entire business.”

- AJ Bruning, The Bruning Law Firm

Learn more about how you can accelerate your insights with the use of artificial intelligence in our 2023 Litify State of AI Report.