Lynda ArtesaniLegal Accountant and Data Migration Specialist at The Proper Trust

KPIs and Law Firm Performance

5 Sept 2023 · 1 min

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1:07

In this spoken anecdote, the speaker describes how, at a law firm, they spent Friday afternoons compiling a detailed spreadsheet of each employee's time, key performance indicators (KPIs), and related ratios, which was then delivered to the managing partner. On Monday, the managing partner would confront staff whose numbers were off, using the KPI data to drive corrective action with three weeks left in the month. This weekly KPI monitoring enabled the firm to shift focus from chasing write‑offs to securing retainers, accelerate collections, and improve overall operational efficiency. At year‑end, the firm used the same KPI data to allocate bonuses transparently, exemplified by a $5,000 bonus awarded to Lynda for improving her KPI performance.

Chapters

In one law firm that I worked in, every Friday afternoon, everybody knew to leave me alone and it would take me all afternoon to draw up this spreadsheet of everybody's time and what the KPIs meant, what the ratios were. And I would turn that into the managing partner. And on Monday morning, you could tell whose office he was going to take a pile of paper and go walk down the hall and knock on their door and go, why are your numbers this way? And we have 3 weeks till month end. And that was a KPI. That was the result of a KPI being monitored every week. And we were able to turn that around. That's brilliant. Have more time to get retainers and less time to chase people on write-offs and all those sorts of things and speed up collections. And guess what? Then you take a KPI for performance on this, and at the end of the year, instead of just opening up the checkbook and handing out bonuses, you have good intelligent data to say Lynda gets a $5,000 bonus because she did this, she improved her KPI.