Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
KPI Mastery: Simplifying Your Law Firm Metrics for Real Growth
The quest for clarity in law firm metrics can feel overwhelming – staring at spreadsheets filled with numbers, wondering what actually matters, and questioning whether you're tracking the right things. But what if you could distill the noise down to just a handful of metrics that genuinely move the needle for your practice?
This eye-opening exploration of key performance indicators cuts through the complexity that typically surrounds law firm analytics. Whether you're a solo practitioner or leading a multi-lawyer team, you'll discover how tracking fewer metrics – not more – leads to greater clarity and better decision-making. We reveal how Ben Glass Law achieved 4X growth by focusing on a streamlined dashboard of numbers that tell the real story behind their success.
At the heart of effective metrics tracking lies a counterintuitive truth: simplicity outperforms complexity every time. We share practical strategies for determining which numbers truly deserve your attention, how to work backward from revenue goals to identify the metrics that predict success, and the game-changing approach of assigning metric ownership to team members. This distributes accountability throughout your firm and empowers your team to solve problems before they ever reach your desk.
You'll learn how to avoid being fooled by small sample sizes, establish clear criteria for what you're measuring, and implement systems that track case velocity – revealing bottlenecks in your processes that directly impact profitability. We also demystify calculating your true cost to acquire clients, explaining why improving your intake process might be the fastest path to reducing that number and boosting your bottom line.
Ready to transform how you track, measure, and improve your law firm's performance? Join us to discover the metrics that actually matter and the systems that make tracking them nearly effortless. The path to predictable growth starts with knowing your numbers – but only the right ones.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello and welcome to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of law practices they actually like showing up to on Mondays. Now today's Friday solo episode is not actually a solo episode. Every couple of months I go back into the GLM tribe module vault and I pull out what I think is the most important or maybe the best module that Ben and I have recorded in the last couple of months and I release it out into the world here for you to listen to, and today's episode is one of those episodes. This episode is for every law firm owner who's ever stared at a spreadsheet, tried to make sense of a dozen metrics and then wanted to bang their head against the wall. Because we get it, metrics can be overwhelming, and while everybody says that you should have KPIs and OKRs and you should track these things either on a weekly or daily or quarterly basis and everybody's kind of got a little bit different rules about them, like, the question that we get from almost all great legal marketing members is am I tracking the right ones? Because if you're not tracking the right things at the right frequency. It's like flying a plane with no instruments what to track, how to define what you're tracking and how to make your metrics actually mean something. So, whether you're a true solo or you're running a multi-lawyer team, you're going to walk away from this episode with at least four big ideas to help simplify your KPI tracking. And I want to pause on that, because the temptation with KPIs is to complicate, and the simpler and actually the fewer numbers that you can track, the better off you will be. So, anyway, we're going to help you simplify your KPI tracking, improve your profitability and empower your team to help solve problems before they land on your desk.
Speaker 1:And we'll show you how we built a system at Ben Glass Love that took us from you know kind of like a gut feeling about whether we were going to be profitable that month, to predictable growth and to, uh, four X growth in the last four years or so. Um, and how we avoid getting fooled by small sample sizes, or what I call the law of small numbers. How we assign metric ownership to individual team members to get the team to step up into leadership roles. And why the real secret to better numbers might just be better intake. And again, as you've heard me say many, many times, before you spend another dollar on marketing like, unfuck your intake.
Speaker 1:This episode is not just theory. This is about what we do week in and week out, and the last thing I'll say before we dive into it is, if you're not already a member of the Great Legal Marketing tribe but you would like to get more stuff like this, along with worksheets, individual question and answer calls and all the things that you need to help grow your practice profitably and predictably, you can just reach out to me either on LinkedIn or Brian at greatlegalmarketingcom Love to talk to you about what membership entails and get you set up with a 60-day trial Again, brian at greatlegalmarketingcom. And now we are on with the show.
Speaker 2:We are talking about KPIs and metrics and you know, Brian, you know, as the visionary, I KPIs, I immediately leap to numbers and then I immediately want to just bang my head up against the walls.
Speaker 1:I was going to say this is your favorite thing.
Speaker 2:But you know, running a small law firm without tracking the right numbers is like flying a plane without any guidelines whatsoever. And I know that when we got better at Bangalore Law at creating tracking the right metrics and it took a bunch of experimentation to figure out like, what should we really be measuring? Because a lot of things you could measure things got a lot better. And so that's where we begin. We're going to give you four big ideas to think about, no matter what your practice area is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just before we start, like it's kind of hard to shoot modules like this for people across the tribe because we have solo members with no staff at all, and then we have firms like Tim Summeroth's with like 17 lawyers and 50 team members, right, and so I don't know where you are on your KPI journey, but there'll be something in this video that will be useful to you, whether you have never put pen to paper and try to figure out what you should be tracking, or whether you're like us and you've been doing it for five years and you're constantly asking is this the right number and is this thing actually tracking to the result that we think it's tracking?
Speaker 2:The other big challenge that most of us have is that we're operating in the world of small numbers, so we're not spending a bazillion dollars on advertising. You know the actual number of leads you get, qualified calls you get, is. You know it's a relative handful compared to many big giant firms. And so while we do this we have to be careful to not sort of be tricked by trends that aren't really trends. And again, that's something that just takes some getting used to and it takes somebody in the leadership meeting to go out. That just might be a small numbers thing this month.
Speaker 1:Trends that aren't really trends and then trends that are influenced by somebody tracking the numbers who doesn't have a really good feel for exactly what you're tracking. So one of the things that you should do early on if you're going to track something like qualified leads, is write out a very clear criteria for what a qualified lead is, because a lead can start to feel qualified in a week where the phone hasn't rang very much right. And so, having really good criteria for what it is that you're tracking, and then revisiting the criteria, you know, maybe after 90 days, and saying is this really what we think it is? And then, as you're like comparing a year and a half later, if your criteria has changed, then your numbers have changed, and it's not that your firm is doing any worse or any better at marketing. It's just that you're counting. You know apples when you're counting oranges.
Speaker 2:And everything we, brian just said like we have fallen into those traps before. So I think a big important point particularly we're talking about qualified leads is having some system in place where you go back and you look after 90 days and say is this case what we thought it was? We thought it met our criteria, we accepted it, we counted it 90 days in. We've done some investigation, is it for real? But let's just start with sort of the simplest thing in mind. Really, that is a profitability number. I mean, you are in this because you are a law firm owner and obviously you want to make money and take it home to your family and there's a certain baseline that you want and need to make. And so let's just talk about the simplest thing, brian. Talk about how much money do I want to make? And then counting backwards or designing KPI structure backwards from that profitability goal.
Speaker 1:So the profitability goal really starts with your revenue numbers. Right, and that's the easier number to get to. I think it's really challenging to model KPIs into profitability. Do you have to do it? Yes, but I don't think you should start there. I think you should start with your revenue, because most of the firms that we talk to who start their journey with great little marketing are thinking something like I want to do 2X the revenue that I did last year, and I'll tell you, that number never, ever, changes. Three years from now. Most of those firms are still thinking I want to do 2x the number that I did last year.
Speaker 1:But that's the easier one to model to, because it's really basic math.
Speaker 1:It's what's your average case value times, how many cases do you need to get to a revenue number? And then you can back into how many consultations do I need to have in order to sign that number of cases? How many phone calls do I need to generate in order to have that number of consultations? And then what kind of marketing do I need to do in order to generate that kind of those kinds that number of phone calls, right? And so that's the way to think backwards from your lag measure, which is your revenue number, and your ultimate lag measure, which is your profit number, to the lead measures that you should be tracking, which is how many times did the phone ring, how many of those phones were qualified leads. And then the real trick that we have tried to get better and better at is figure out what the activity is that your team can engage in in a week to week or month to month if you're dealing with smaller numbers, basis that will lead to those phone calls.
Speaker 2:That's the real secret of all of this. And now let's just step back for a moment, because and we used to think this too, we used to think it was very difficult to our contingent fee lawyer members. Don't think that this doesn't apply to you, because you can quote, never tell or never predict what cases are going to come in. You actually can, and last year we came within literally thousands of dollars 2% of predicting in end of December, early January, predicting what December 31st, how many dollars in each of our two verticals, we would have in the bank as revenue within 2%. Now that didn't happen overnight and we did a lot of things, and one of the things that we did, Brian, which goes to step number two is is to be able to track and identify a manageable number of metrics.
Speaker 2:Because here's what you will see is that with all this technology that's available case tracking, marketing tracking you know, figure out where all the leads come from there is a ton of data available, a ton of data that you can get and that this software will give you. And if you're working with a financial consultant, your consultant can give you. But for guys like me, like that becomes overwhelming If I have a 20 page report of data, like I don't really have an actionable item to do for next week, so let's just talk about keeping this, as I think, as simple as we can, because you can always get bigger, you can always get more numbers.
Speaker 1:What are we looking for? I mean, at our uh, at our leadership level, I think we have 11 or 12 right qualified leads and signed cases in each vertical, so that's four number demand packages out the door. A number of cases settled gets you to six, and then the corollary numbers on the ltd side number of appeals set out, number of lawsuits settled gets you to eight. And then we track a lag measure, like people that come to the website that weren't looking for a branded search term, google reviews and something else. But the point is, neither of us is is in charge of those 10 or 11 or 12 numbers. We're each responsible for less than four, right? Everybody on our leadership team has less than four numbers. We're each responsible for less than four, right? Everybody on our leadership team has less than four numbers that they're responsible for. They have to be the one who can explain why a number is up or down or sideways week to week, and can answer questions about whether that number is actually tracking to the thing that we want it to track to.
Speaker 2:One of the things we found quite valuable and I think this applies whether you're a contingent fee firm or a billable or a flat fee firm is, as a case goes through your office, how long does it sit on someone's desk at a certain stage Really, really important for a contingent fee, and one of the things we've been able to do over the last 24, 36 months in particular is shorten the amount of time that a case stays in a certain area. Just for a quick example end of treatment to time demand letter gets out, like if you know how many days on average that is, and you can shorten that. That's money in the bank. I think it's the same if you're billing somebody as well, like how long from the time you do the work to the time you take the money and put it into your side of the account and look at each step of the way. It's been a sort of a critical, really important thing for us. Money flow really, really matters, and it's not just tracking to get to your ultimate revenue goal.
Speaker 1:It also helps you understand where the bottlenecks are in your firm and when you need to hire or replace somebody or replace a technology are in your firm and when you need to hire or replace somebody or replace a technology.
Speaker 1:And so to your point about end of treatment to demand package sent out the kind of sub statuses that we track in that is, how many cases do we have where we have outstanding medical bills that are outstanding for longer than 45 days?
Speaker 1:Right Now, I know whether my medical records collection team needs some help or whether they need a new technology or a new person in that space. And then the other one is how many cases are stuck in demand writing, and that goes to either the paralegal or the lawyer team. Are they underwater? Are they not reaching out to the clients as frequently as they should be? Do we have somebody or a batch of demands that we're waiting for client approval on because we're afraid to talk to the client, or something like that? So what you want your KPIs to do is indicate to you when there's a yellow flag and a red flag that you need to dive deeper. We for a long time talked about this, as what are the 10 or 12 numbers that you would want to know if you were sitting on a desert island, that would alert you to when you needed to get on the plane and come back and solve a problem in the law firm.
Speaker 2:And we have these numbers in front of us every single week at our leadership meeting. It doesn't mean that we're diving in and fixing every aberration we may see every single week, but we don't wait until you know. You paid your taxes eight months after the tax season ends or the fiscal year ends and now you're looking at your numbers. We don't wait for our quarterly meetings. Every single week we have the numbers in front of us. Talk about assigning ownership of KPIs and ownership of numbers to each person really at least on the leadership team and they may have people that they assign ownership to other like in our each vertical we actually have some different KPIs that are not necessarily reported at the leadership level, but we have people responsible for them at the PI level and the long-term disability level. But why is that important? Like it's not just the owner that's keeping his or her eyes on this.
Speaker 1:Well, primarily because it's not always the owner's problem to solve, or their owner isn't the best person to solve that problem, right?
Speaker 1:Uh, and so having somebody on the team who's responsible for going and sourcing the number before the meeting, putting it on the scorecard and then should be able to answer any questions about why the number is high or low depending on whether high or low is a good or a bad thing is important because it gives your team the autonomy to go and solve problems on their own and it teaches them to start looking for solutions to problems before it's the third meeting in a row.
Speaker 1:When you're talking about how come we haven't signed any new clients, right? If there's not somebody on the team who's accountable for it, it's easy for your kind of B-minus players to sit back and do nothing. But if they know that they're going to be called on to answer a question about how come we had five qualified leads last week and none of them converted, right, what kind of follow-up have we done? Have we gone back and listened to the tapes of the calls? Have we? Did we send the retainer agreement out on time? Did we check back in on the client? Did we answer all of the client's questions right. All of these things having a person who's responsible for and accountable for it, which is what EOS teaches are the things that empower your team to operate autonomously and help solve problems for you, so that you don't have to be the only one who's thinking about these things.
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting because you remind me with that scenario of the story. So a couple of years ago, getting a lot of long-term disability leads where we're not getting very many conversions or the conversions were going down. And so we did the process of going back and looking at the notes and listening to the calls and we found out that we had someone sitting in the seat who was really willing to help people by telling them you can do this on your own. Let us show you how to do it. Where these people, these prospects, had called us, asking us for help. So we fixed that ultimately by doing a substitution of the person right and making sure that our system was being ruthlessly meaning we pay attention to it ruthlessly followed.
Speaker 2:The other thing we did a couple of years ago, brian, is we made a decision to really go deeper into technology and make some investments, and you know changing technology, whether it's case management technology or marketing tracking technology or you know anything else you have. That's always a pain If you have a kind of discovery process like what should we pick? We talk to different people, then you have the. After you choose, you have the whole training and onboarding process. I think we've been really good over the years to having people that were open to change and those who weren't open. They're not here anymore. But let's just talk about maybe even our technology stack now and how that has helped us make better decisions going forward.
Speaker 1:Sure. So 18 months ago we I think 18, probably almost two years ago now, a little bit longer yeah, we moved or started with LeadDocket. We didn't have anything as a lead management. I think maybe we were using Casepeer as a lead management. It's not built for that. We went to LeadDocket. But you know, the great thing for us is we had Lauren, our marketing director, who built out all the automations tied in the phone numbers and the landing pages and the Google business profile and all of the other things into it. Right and so. And then we have on the case management software side, we use Casepeer. Now we're moving to Filevine. But again we have Tammy, one of the PI paralegals, who has really been a champion for the technology and attends every webinar on the new feature that one of these technologies rolls out and brings it back to the team. So the important teaching point for the software is, again, it doesn't have to be you. It's really nice to have a champion on the team who will be interested in the software, attend the webinars and bring the new stuff back to you. So our technology stack stack.
Speaker 1:That's what you asked about a lead docket. We're moving to filevine that'll launch, hopefully, a week after this video comes out. Uh, that'll be really good. And then we have some automation. We have hona. Um does some of our push automation. That's not really a api tracker. We we track our KPIs in Excel, in Microsoft Teams, so that's still very manual. But with Filevine we'll have access to Domo cards and this whole automated suite. And the promise of Filevine is any field that's in your system you can create a report off of. So we may come back in a year and have 500 KPIs.
Speaker 2:Well, we may, and the cool thing about our spreadsheet with KPIs on it is that that work is divided up to four or five different people, like the person who owns the KPI inserts in the spreadsheet. The other thing I think about having somebody like Tammy is you know, it's one thing, you and I we go to conferences and come back with great ideas and we tell the team this is what we're doing. When you have an insider, like one of the paralegals, who gets excited about software and technology and she is bringing in our case, she is bringing it to the firm, like the buy-in is really really huge. All right, yeah, well, you've got.
Speaker 1:I mean there's marketing analytics on here that it's again back to like delegating to the team. I don't even actually know what Lauren looks like. I think it's SEMrush, I think it's Google Analytics. I know she gets a report from Hennessy's team, but I don't know the bottom line look for marketing, like we know the cost to acquire a client in each of our verticals.
Speaker 2:and, and while we don't spend a ton on advertising per se digital advertising or otherwise we do test a bunch, in part for the glm tribe, in part because if we find something that produces clients at a cost less than it's costing us now because we know the cost, then we would likely adopt it and use it, and so that's why well, let's talk about that quickly, because I think people are probably interested in the way that we calculate cost to produce a new case.
Speaker 1:So the way that I track this is on an annual basis. I look back at last year's P&L and I take all of our marketing costs digital referral boxes, newsletters, email, software but also the people costs, so marketing director salary, referral relationship manager salary and a piece of the intake team salary, and that gives me, you know one, one big number. And then I just divide that simply by the number of cases that we signed in each vertical. Now that actually is going to give me a slightly lower cost to acquire a case than the real case, because the thing that you said in the beginning of the video is something that we haven't been doing, which is tracking the drop rate right. We started tracking that last year and, as Filevine helps us track this a little bit more easily, we'll do it on a more regular basis this year. But one of the things that we've learned is in the LTD vertical, when we started signing people up from the very beginning without getting the claim file and without diving through the claim file to say, is this a case that we can actually win, right, we've sent a retainer out, they signed. Then we go get the claim file and then we do for free this service service of can we help you or not. We have like a 27 drop rate right. So we are probably underestimating our cost to acquire a client by quarters, by maybe a little more than a quarter anyway, uh, in that vertical. And then in pi our drop rate is somewhere between five and ten percent. So there's there's a that cost to acquire is actually a little bit higher.
Speaker 1:Um, and so the point of this is you can really dive down the rabbit hole on what does it cost me to acquire a case?
Speaker 1:But when you get pitched on things like pay per lead and the pay per cost per lead is like 2,400, you also still have to factor in all of your overhead costs related to the people that are servicing those leads. So it's not as though that's a new $2,400 case. That's probably a $3,500 case when you factor in what you're already paying to the rest of your people. And so just be cognizant of that. When you, when you hear, okay, I can acquire a case at 2,400, but my average fee is like 15,000. That sounds pretty good, but as you start to factor in what you're already paying. Maybe it's like 35 or 4,000 to acquire a case and your average fee is 15,000 and it's probably lower because it's a digitally acquired client and that's a whole other calculation that you can do. But just be cognizant of those added costs going into the stack that you can do, but just be cognizant of those added costs going into the stack that you already have.
Speaker 2:And that could be depressing if you just keep taking that out, because pretty soon, it's way too expensive to get a case. But we go back to the whole reason we have KPIs, which is how can I improve the entire process from the time someone notices us to the time their case is over? How can I look at each step of the process and make it 10% better, including the client satisfaction part, because getting that online review is valuable, and I think that's really what KPIs are about. So if you're listening to this, you might be way over here, like I've never actually tracked much of anything myself. I'm surviving and I've got enough money to keep paying all the bills, and you may have a very robust system.
Speaker 2:I think we have a pretty robust system. I know lawyers that have a much more detailed and bigger robust system. What we want to get you to do, though, is to start thinking about this, because the best time to have started something is years ago. The second best time is now, and get on the call this month, because what you will see when you get on the call, particularly for our newer tribe members, is there's a community of people out there, and they have answers Like we have answers, but the tribe community has bigger, broader breadth of experience than we can have in our two per contingent fee verticals.
Speaker 1:If you're new here and you're now depressed by the fact that you're spending $4,000 to acquire a client, understand that the best way to reduce that number is by getting better at intake. So check out the intake success system that you have in the tribe membership site and the better that you can get at converting the people that are actually calling you, that's the quickest way to slice your cost to acquire a client.
