Life Beyond the Briefs

The 4 Numbers You Must Know Before Your 2026 Law Firm Planning

• Brian Glass

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If you’re planning for 2026 without knowing your numbers, you’re not planning, you’re guessing.

In this solo episode, Brian breaks down the 4 numbers every law firm owner must know before heading into annual planning:

  • Average case value (including your zeros and how to handle those big outliers)
  • Cost to acquire a new client (and why messy QuickBooks are silently killing your clarity)
  • Total owner compensation (the real “am I winning?” number, not just revenue)
  • Wanted lead to client conversion rate (the lowest-hanging fruit in your firm)

If you’ve ever thought:
 “I sign everyone I want to sign,”
 “I’m spending ‘about right’ on marketing,” or
 “I’m making okay money, but it doesn’t feel worth the stress…”

…then this episode is your wake-up call.

Brian walks you through how to use these four metrics to:

  • Build a firm you actually like showing up to on Mondays
  • Stay in the game long enough to build real wealth
  • Stop burning cash on marketing that doesn’t convert
  • Decide if you’re truly better off as an owner, or just self-employed and exhausted

No fluff. No guru talk. Just a practical, numbers-driven framework so you can walk into your 2026 planning retreat with confidence instead of vibes.

Hit play, grab a notebook, and start measuring what actually matters.

Bonus:
Want to steal notes from the latest Great Legal Marketing (GLM) Summit? Get them for free at: glmsummitnotes.com

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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.

Want to connect with Brian?

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, my friends, and welcome into another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. This is the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually like showing up to on Monday. We had our holiday party last weekend, and that was one of the things that I said to the team during our holiday toast, which is you know, we spent a lot of time as lawyers and as business owners talking about numbers. How many cases did you sign? What's the average case value? What's the revenue? What's the profit? What's the total loan or take home? And all these things are important, but none of them are as important to the long-term health of your law firm and arguably your life, and your long-term wealth as building the kind of place that you actually want to show up to Monday after Monday after Monday after Monday. Um, you know, I think I think Morgan Housel has this line in one of his books, which is like, you would be shocked at the amount of wealth you can generate just by being average for an exceptionally long period of time. And so many of us end up sacrificing happiness or sustainability or team members for short-term gain. And if you can tolerate some shortcomings in some of those areas, and it allows you to play the game for a long period of time, either because it keeps you in the game or because um it allows you to remain happy with the game or or whatever, like that's the key to building enormous quantities of wealth at the end of the day. Playing the game for longer than everybody else, which really is like defining the category of what game do you want to be playing, which maybe is a weird way to start today's episode, which is gonna be about if I were doing my 2026 annual planning here, the the four numbers, which I think you actually need to know in order to put down pen to paper an annual plan, right? And so there's there's two things, just like on a meta level to begin with. Number one, it is important that you be playing a game that you want to play for a long time. That's how you win long term, that's how you get really, really wealthy long term. Number two, you can't stay in the game year after year after year after year if you are running a losing business, if you're running a business that's not profitable. And the thing that makes those businesses not profitable is when you bury your head in the sand and you don't know your numbers. Okay. And so today's episode is about knowing the numbers. These are the four numbers that I am focusing on nailing in December so that we can come into our annual two-day US meeting in the beginning of January and actually like predict what might happen in 2026. Number one, average case value, which seems like really basic. Like everybody should know your average case value. There's a couple things to um to talk about in this. Number one, if you're a contingency fee lawyer, your average case value actually is lower than you think it is, right? Because most of us, and I did this for a number of years, you just go in and you divide your revenue by the number of cases that you resolved, right? That number leaves out the number of cases in which you didn't get paid, right? The number of cases that we opened and then closed without a fee, the number of cases that we lost at trial, the number of cases where the client fired us middle of the way through the case for one reason or another, right? You have to incorporate all of your zeros into your equation of your average case value, or else you can't do good predictions on future revenue, right? Because if you if you're saying, okay, last year we resolved 100 cases, just to keep the numbers really simple, and we had a million dollars in revenue, that's$10,000 average case value. Okay, and next year we opened 120 cases, we're gonna have$1.2 million in revenue if our average case value stays the same. Well, that's not true because it doesn't include the number of zeros that you have. So you actually have to open more cases, probably, than you think you need to open in order to get to the revenue goals if you're using average case value to cast your revenue goals. Now, we'll uh be quick to point out that you should be using the mean and not the median number as what when we're talking about average case value, because you're gonna have these outliers that skew, especially if you're a contingency fee lawyer, skew your number way up, right? If you have a 100-case portfolio and you have a$10,000 um, quote, average case value, but one of your cases worth was a four million dollar fee, that means that everything else was really, really small. Okay. And so I've done this a couple of ways in the past. For a long time while we were growing, I excluded everything that was a six-figure fee or above. I have learned from years of doing the numbers in our firm that two out of every hundred cases that we handle is gonna have a six-figure fee or above. And so now I will run the numbers in two ways. I will run it as a um as an everything number, and then I will run it excluding the two. But honestly, it doesn't really matter because if you look back over our last five years, two exactly two or almost exactly two of every hundred cases has been a six-figure fee. And so if you don't know that number, the safer thing to do when you're projecting your revenue is to just exclude your high value ones. And then if at the end of the year you surprise yourself and you have more money in the bank than you thought you would, like amazing. Second thing that's important for you to know is what's the cost to acquire a new client? And this is a harder number to get to. If your QuickBooks is a mess, you're not gonna find this number. Because what can happen is that your marketing costs are all over the place in your QuickBooks. It, you know, maybe your website fee, whatever you're paying to your vendor is in one place. There's a hosting fee somewhere else, your the money that you're giving to Google or to Facebook to run ads is in a different place. If your QuickBooks are a mess, I wouldn't even really worry about trying to get to this number for my 2026 projection, but I would make a really diligent effort in 2026 to make sure that my QuickBooks was not a mess for next year. And you know, once you have three months and maybe six months of this data, you can project out across the course of the year. So you're not far from being able to figure this out, even if even if your bookkeeping is kind of a mess. The way that I do this when we're looking at an annual basis is I look at all my marketing costs. And that includes the money that we ship out the door to vendors, that includes the money that we spend on any paid advertising, that includes our print newsletter, but it also includes salary costs. So my marketing director, my intake manager, and my referral relationship manager, all of their salaries, and then I roughly calculate okay, add 20% for the benefit. All of that goes into the cost to acquire a new client. And then we divide, of course, by how many clients did we acquire, right? And so looking backwards, that can give you for 2025 what your cost to acquire a new client was. And you can play around with it and try to figure out within certain channels which is the highest, which is the lowest. As a small law firm owner, if you can just get globally to what's my cost to acquire a new client, amazing. If you have a CFO, fractional CFO that you're working with, they can walk you through how do we set QuickBooks up so that I can look for every every channel. I can use a two tool like Lead Docket so that I can look backwards and see how many, how much money did I spend on Facebook, how many clients did I acquire through Facebook, something like that, right? And then the second level is then tying in the fee from those clients so you can figure out how much did it cost, what channels cost me a whole lot to acquire clients where I was not making my money back. But this is uh an important thing to know is what you cost to acquire a new client. The other number that you can grab from here is the percentage of your revenue that you're spending on marketing, right? Once you have all your marketing costs in one place, really easy to do the division on how much money to make and how much are we spending on marketing. Everybody wants the rule of thumb for this. I mean, depending on who you talk to, it's gonna be anywhere from 10 to 15 to you know as much as 30% if you're in a highly competitive um space and also in hyper growth mode. The thing with rule of thumbs is that it almost certainly doesn't apply to you in the stage that your business is in, right? And so really the question isn't what should a law firm be spending on marketing as a percentage of revenue. The question is what should I be spending on marketing as a percentage of revenue? And what is a good use of my next marketing dollar an hour, which is, by the way, what we're really good at helping law firm owners figure out at great legal marketing. And so if you have questions about your particular firm, given your practice area, given your geographic region, given, you know, whether you're trying to grow or whether you're coasting out the next seven years till retirement, we would be happy to talk with you about whether we can help you figure out are you spending too much, are you spending too little, or are you spending the right amount, but in all the wrong places? And that's that's what we do at Create Legal Marketing. All right. Now a third thing I would want to know, and again, this is dependent, highly dependent on practice area and cycle of your business, is a profit margin or the total owner compensation. This is for small law firm owners, like this is the most important number. It is a lagging indicator, right? You get everything else right and this number is high, get everything else wrong, this number is low. But this is kind of the last thing to measure is how much of my money that's coming in through the law firm is am I keeping? How much am I taking home? It's not revenue, it's not top line growth, it's how much of every dollar that comes through the front door, walks out the back door with me, ends up in my bank account, right? And this is more than just taking what you pay yourself and the FICA on what you're paying yourself if you're paying yourself a salary, plus whatever's at the bottom line at the end of the, um, at the end of the year. Of course, every everybody has their own risk tolerance and their own quasi-personal expenses or true personal expenses that they're running through the business. And so you have to put all of these back into the business, back into that calculation when you're thinking about what your total owner compensation is. And of course, this is the number that really helps you figure out like, dude, might I just be better off as an employee working for somebody else? Like if you're running a law firm that's generating a million and a half in revenue, but your total loan or comp is only 100,000 and you don't have a path to make more money somewhere, you've you got a problem and you got to consider, would I be better off, freedom be damned, making$200,000,$250,000 for somebody else? All right. So we've done four numbers so far. Average case value, cost to a colliery client, total owner compensation. And then the last thing that I would want to do, because I you've heard me talk about this before, because I think it is absolutely the lowest hanging fruit for most small law firms in terms of leveraging up your revenue and ultimately leveraging up your profit, which is your wanted lead, your qualified lead to client conversion rate. This is the one that, you know, most law firms who aren't actually tracking this will say some version of we sign every case that we want, or everybody who I want to work with who calls me ends up working with me. And it's just, it's just not true because uh I think we quickly forget the clients that we don't get. But there's all these other people, you know, in most firms that your intake didn't get to in time or didn't follow up with enough, who otherwise you would have wanted to, if you knew enough about their case, you definitely would have wanted to work with them. But you just didn't get the opportunity to. And most law firms, unless you have a really good data tracking tool in place, you actually really don't know what this number is, right? For a long time, we really didn't know what this number is. Um we and the second struggle is for most law firms that you haven't really clearly defined who you want to see walking through the door and what your criteria for a case that you will take and work on is. And the better that you get at explaining this first by yourself on a piece of paper, and second to your intake team, and then tracking is the intake team counting as wanted every case that we actually want, or are they juicing the numbers by saying, no, we didn't want that one, um, the more money you'll make in your law firm, right? Your team should be able to tell within probably a 90% accuracy rate which cases do we want and which do we not want. Now, every law firm has the lawyer who is the weird shit magnet. Lately it's been me. I'm the weird shit magnet. Like if something comes in that's outside the box, maybe kind of interesting, the word, probably a long shot to us making money. I'm interested in at least talking to that person. And that accounts for the other 10% of the cases, right? I said your team should be able with 90% accuracy say we want that case, we don't want that case. But there is a 10%, especially on an injury law firm, where you're like, I see a route to turn that one into money. Hell, I settled a case this year, six-figure case for a guy who swallowed a grill brush needle off of a food truck. I did not think that for the first time in my 18-year career this year, I'd be filing a complaint that used the words implied warranty of merchant ability for consumption. But here we are, right? Weird shit magnet. And the team, you know, most I don't know if my team caught this to begin with or didn't know what to do with it, but it's one of those where it comes in, you go, maybe there's something there. I'll I'll talk to them. Anyway, you you need to know what is your lead-to-client conversion ratio, and and you need to start tracking it and holding people accountable to those numbers. And the easiest way, lawyers, I think, by and large, hate holding people accountable, hate holding our employees accountable. But the easiest way to hold them accountable is to just start having them report the numbers week in and week out, right? And I don't think that you want to set metrics first if you don't have these numbers in place, right? But just by tracking and just by reporting, we took our and also by bringing it in-house and having a really good salesperson in-house. We took our wanted lead to conversion rate from somewhere in the low 60s to somewhere in the high 80s. And some weeks, some months, it's 100%. And that's amazing, right? The highest leverage dollar in your law firm is spent on your intake in your sales department because you're not spending any more marketing dollars to attract new calls. You're just making sure that you don't miss the ones that you're already getting. And if you don't know any number on this list, average case value cost to acquire a client, client, client, the average case value cost to acquire a client. That's harder to say the second time around, total owner compensation or your lead-to-client conversion ratio, that's the one I would start with because it really is. I think this is the lead metric that law firm owners should be tracking that will make all of the other dominoes fall just a little bit easier. All right. So if you're going into your annual planning in 2026, those are the four things that I think you absolutely want to spend December of 205 figuring out what's your average case value? How much does it cost to get somebody to walk through the door? How much of that money are you as the owner taking home as total owner comp? And then when somebody calls, what's the likelihood that a case that calls that we want to work on, we actually get to work on? If you could just start tracking those numbers and you don't do anything else, just track what gets measured, gets managed, what gets measured and reported on improves. All right. Have a great 2025 and 2026 planning season, and I'll catch you guys next week.

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Brian Glass

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