KPIs for Law Firms

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And today we've got a topic that I think is going to resonate with a lot of bookkeepers and accountants, and hoping that it will also resonate with law firms and attorneys because I think this is a topic that we find that when we broach the topic with our clients, sometimes they don't— they're kind of like, I've never been asked that before. So it's called— this one's really about law firm KPIs, and I'm going to toss it right to Steve because he was the most excited of the 3 of us to talk about this. So we'll get you started, Steve. And I think, why are KPIs valuable?

Yeah, I want to back up just a little bit there. They become valuable When you reach the point that you need them.

Mm-hmm.

And in order to reach the point to need them, your books have got to be clean and in balance. Your trust ledgers have to be in balance. Everything has to be ready. And during that process, 'cause you know, so many, so often we get people that we have to clean up their books and they're right away, they're like, well, I want to know what my cash flow is. I want to know what the monthly nut is to run the business. I want to know, this, I want to know that. And you can make notes along that path to start preparing you to lead them into KPIs. So once you get them used to their books being clean, then you can start the dialogue with them. And they're so important because they're metrics that, you know, evaluate the organization's performance and success. That's the basics of KPIs. They are tools that you're going to use to measure things that are important to you and your business. And, you know, many times, like in the Law Lab, I've heard you say, Linda, don't come out of the starting gate on KPIs and say, you know, I need these 50 KPIs. Really listen to the client, figure out what's important to them, what their pain points are and what they're after, and then come up with some workable KPIs to help them out because it gives them the data and the knowledge to answer critical questions in their business. And that there's 3 things that they've got to be measurable, specific, and targeted.

That's right. And one thing to back up a little bit too, in case anybody doesn't know what a KPI is, which we've had that happen. What are you talking about? Because accountants, we like to talk in code. It's a key performance indicator, as you said, a metric. So it's measuring something, but it's hard. Sarah and I, and I'll let Sarah tell the story. We had a client come to us that he wanted— he's like a kid in a candy store. He wanted like, I don't know, was it 8, 10, 20 KPIs measured? And we were like, why?

Right? Why do you need this?

Exactly. Exactly.

Ultimately, it was like, what, 2, I think, is ultimately what it kind of distilled down to. It's just that it made sense to have all these measurable pieces. But the true ultimate performance marker needed to be just the remaining 2, and the other ones was data to support it. I'm like, well, you don't need it in 5 different ways. It's one pie. Let's not slice it up too much, right?

Plus, if you overanalyze, it's gonna be harder to— I mean, you really have to look at— really have to drag it all the way back to what are your goals. Start with that before you even start to dive into— and like Steve said, get clean data, right? Garbage in, garbage out. You need to get good clean data. But then also you want to know where are you looking to move towards? Because you don't have that vision. Measuring this stuff is fine. And I know one that is really a lot of attorneys like to see is attorney— if you've got a larger firm, what is the performance of each attorney, staff attorney? They want to know the metrics behind who's bringing in money, who's billing out. That's another one that's big because sometimes they might have a lot of work in process, but they haven't billed it out. And you have to stay on top of that if you've got a larger firm. I know that's a real beneficial one. But there's— it's really, we're just measuring performance in that way. But you should also have goals there too. So as a firm, maybe there, you know, there's performance goals and then you can track that and see if the attorneys can actually hit those goals. So—

Wouldn't you find though, Steve, in your dialogue about cleaning up and kind of like what Linda was saying, the garbage in, garbage out, wouldn't you find, and I feel like this might be true of just natively of a business owner, You start to put the data together, and it may not be maybe exactly the way you want it. So you have to learn how to refine it to get those measures in a way that makes sense to digest. But the data has to be probably moved and/or re— so you get it all clean, the squeaky clean, and then you probably have to delve a little bit deeper, I imagine, right?

You have to find out what it is they want to achieve.

Okay.

And if you're listening to them throughout the entire process of number one, learning their books and the nuances, number two, the cleanup and listening to them and what they're saying are their pain points, that day will come where the sun comes up and you're like, it's time for the key performance indicators. And I remember talking to you, Mr. Attorney, about this. 3 months ago when you said X, and that might be to your point, Linda, maybe it's a marketing KPI. You know, I need more business. So then we look at, you know, what are the components of the marketing KPI? Because that was your, that was your big pain point. You want more business. So how many marketing actions do you take in a period of time? What are your ratios of marketing spend to the total fees billed to clients? Are you billing flat rate? Are you billing hourly? What, what does that KPI look like? with marketing dollars related to it. What's the marketing cost per client, the firm's website traffic, email marketing, landing page conversions, all those sorts of things you can tie into a KPI just on that piece.

But on that piece, like if you get into it and we're in antiquated software, how do you measure that?

Exactly.

Do that in an antiquated space, you've got to find easy ways to be able to measure that traffic.

And that goes back to what are they trying to achieve?

Yeah, exactly.

And if they're trying to build a client base and you want to see— and a lot of times we see with law firms, especially the bigger ones, they'll hire a marketing firm, but then that's the end of it. They just go, oh, hired the firm. They're going to take care of that. They're going to put out the Facebook ads or they're going to put out the billboard or whatever that's going to be involved there. But then if nobody's tracking in how that's coming in and how the clients are getting in the door, When it starts out as a lead, where does the lead go? Where you— it's a good idea to maybe have a HubSpot in place or even Clio Grow to track those things. Because if you're not tracking the lead from the beginning to wherever it comes to, how are you going to know if your marketing is working? You might get a ton of calls, but if they're not turning into clients, that's an issue. So those are the things you have to track. And a lot of times we'll find out that if they're spending— and they spend a lot of money sometimes, like Personal injury firms spend a lot of money and they throw a lot of money at marketing.

And billboard ads.

It's expensive, right? You got to get your name out there. A lot of competition when it comes to that. So if you're that personal injury firm, you've got to compete. You've got to be out there. People got to know when the accident happens, where do you go? And I can think of the commercial because that's almost part of the commercial. Call Morgan and Morgan, whatever you hear on the TV repeatedly, right? And it might be 1-800-ACCIDENT. You hear that because they get the phone number for that. But that's effective marketing. So you need to know how your marketing is working. And it could be that you put a lot of money— I mean, I tried Facebook ads. It was a total dud for me. And maybe I didn't know how to do it right. I kind of did it on my own. But you need to have that guidance. And when you hire that marketing firm, you really— they shouldn't just be setting it up and just letting it go. Yes, it's got a lot to do with SEO and keywords and all that. If you start to do marketing where there's blog posts and videos and Shorts now, the big deal, big thing, all that's good. But if you're doing it like I tell Sarah, accidental marketer, I don't know how all of a sudden these calls are coming in, but, um, sometimes they just come at us and then we're figuring out what did I do. And we actually look at what kind of client is coming to us. That's also important. So if you're a law firm out there and you're looking for a specific client or avatar, you would need to know what that is because you need to speak to that person in your advertising. And that's all part of this book marketing KPIs. And it's by getting a good firm, you need to measure it. And that's what this is all about, really measuring. And I don't know, any— do you have any other KPIs, Sarah, that maybe you think are good ones that we can track? I know attorney productivity is always a good one, but I don't know if you have any in mind that you think of that maybe I know one is client satisfaction.

Oh, that was on my list.

Yeah, that's a big one, right, that we can help them with. So, and that's— oh, there's an acronym for that too, the client satisfaction score. Oh, I'm trying to think of it because I'm thinking of that same client again that we had, Sarah.

That's the one I was— I didn't realize I muted myself. That was the one I was running away from because I felt like the way that that individual was also rating. So there was a rating on performance of the client experience, which makes sense, right? But it was a big piece. The client satisfaction, productivity. It depends too on the firm, Steve. I don't know if you have this.

Well, one of the things too, Sarah, with satisfaction, one of the tips I have, if you're going to do client satisfaction, Don't just do it at the end of the matter. Do it maybe in the beginning to see if the person that set up the job and was interacting with the client was a good fit and that client felt supported from the very beginning. Because initial reaction with working with anybody, it's important. Then maybe—

The honeymoon stage, you're saying? Are you saying get past the honeymoon stage?

No, actually get through. Yeah, get into the middle of it. And then maybe not every client, but do just a survey. How was your interaction with the receptionist, with this? Because it's the whole unit, the whole team of the law firm that's going to make the law firm successful. Do some in the middle. How's the attorney doing? A check-in. And then also at the end. But people tend to do the end. And if they won, that are the people happy. They lost, they might not be happy. And that's not a really great measurement of satisfaction.

Steve, in your notes for the way that you talk about this, How do you address not just on client satisfaction, but like when their productivity— if we're doing, let's say they're doing the flat rate because they figured it out, but they don't want to have any way to track, like they don't even want to put the hours as unbilled. How do you do that? Like, that's a hard one, huh?

That is a hard one. But, you know, you need to look at how many attorneys worked on the case, how many paralegals, what the paralegal did.

Okay.

You know, all those sorts of things that go into that, how many days it's taking those flat rate clients to—

Oh, got it.

Oh, you're getting into the realization rate.

The realization rate, or how many of them are on retainers? How many extra, to your point, the non-billable hours? How many non-billable hours? You've got to track non-billable. To me, that's a non-negotiable. It should be on every client bill. And it can say no charge or courtesy discount or whatever you want to use in the firm. But tracking how many— let's say I'm getting so excited here again because I love this. Let's say you are a family law attorney.

Okay.

Divorces are $10,000. Okay.

Okay.

We'll just use that number.

Yeah.

All right. So on those $10,000 cases, How many attorneys were assigned to it? What did the paralegals do? How many filings did you have to do? How many non-billable hours were there in there?

Okay.

And so what was the realization rate on that $10,000? Was it a client referral? That's another KPI. You know, there's a lot of things that can go into that and it should be tracked. And you might find out that you're charging too much, you're not charging enough, or, you know, we talk about scope creep a lot in the accounting industry. They have that in the legal industry too. How much extra work did you get put on top, added on top of that because the client expected it for that $10,000. So it's not as hard to track as you think. And it's what is your goal? What do you want to achieve here? What do you want to learn?

And most of them do have like a maximum hours. So that's how I've seen it with clients that they do the fixed rate. A lot of the family law will do it, but there'll be a cap in there because as you know, with like a divorce that can turn south really quickly. Other attorneys fighting.

We as a— we as law firm, you know, accounts, we run into this all the time when we're doing cleanup on trust accounts. It is a shot in the dark to know what to tell the client it's going to cost them. And so, you know, in our company, we keep track of— Exactly. We keep track of the number of— this is a KPI for trust cleanup. We keep track of what it costs them, how many clients there were that had to be cleaned up, and how long it took. And work that into some ratios for KPIs. And it helps us develop more confidence in what we're quoting because it's always a stab in the dark on those projects. And attorneys run into the same thing.

Yeah.

They don't know where that case is going to go.

Yeah.

The cool thing is if you're tracking, like Sarah and I just did a big— Sarah actually did the most of the bulk of the work of doing this workup for an attorney and figuring out compensation models for us. We have to kind of see what's out there. And if somebody's building a new one, you want to help them through that. I think too, if you're looking at anything like a realization rate, you really have to kind of look at benchmarks too. Clio does a phenomenal job with benchmarks in the Clio Trend Report. And now I'm really excited 'cause Sarah told me about this mid-market thing that's coming up and I'm like, oh my God, I gotta, like, I'm clearing the calendar for that one so I can be on because that's our sweet spot.

I'm just gonna do a little clarity. They're breaking it up because there's the boutique ones, right? The smaller firms, the ones that are more than the solos. And then the, you know, and so they're going to break them up, which I think is brilliant. It is. Because you, it is so hard to read something and understand, do I offer that as a salary? I'm a solo. Do I offer that as a, like, what is a real metric here for me to be able to understand so I can move forward? And so I love that they're silo style in these beautiful reports. They're so—

Apples to apples for us. And I always get excited about the Clio Trend Report, but this year, the fact that they're doing it with the mid-market. I do. I love that thing. I'll be writing a lot of blogs on it because it's fascinating to read. I mean, we love our attorneys, so we love this industry. And when we get into that, it just gives us so much data. And of course, as accountants, we love data. And it's really— I mean, it goes by region and everything else, and you're really going to get a good, clear picture of where— and they see the trends. So they always— they do such a great job with it. And maybe Tierra can put a link in the show notes on how you can go get 2022s. And 2023 is going to be coming out At their, it'll come out in the conference that we're going to. You'll get to see the detail of how everybody's doing. How's your neighbor next door doing? How do the other attorneys, how do they rate? How does your firm rate against other firms of the same practice area or specialty? And I think that those are, I think that's a good way to look at your, I think looking at that report is better than most of the places you can really look because then they do a great job of seeing the trend. They saw trends during COVID and you followed that. You saw trends. When the economy goes down, the economy goes up, they'll go in deep on that stuff. And that's what makes that report so valuable.

So I know we talked about marketing, client satisfaction, a little bit on the realization. What are some— well, oh, I know. So we— you need the software to track, like what you brought up first, Steve, the marketing piece. You need something to be able to track that and measure it or some sort of system. So I guess what we could speak to is if you have somebody still in, in a space of tracking time or tracking— they're not in a, in a practice management style software that's amenable to being able to track this stuff. You need to also look at that, right? You can't be in an antiquated type space.

Like a timesheet?

I mean, spreadsheet. I'm not going to call out software names.

Well, I'm just thinking of desktop software, right? So we should be well past this.

But I don't want to—

yeah, in all fairness, no, I don't want to bash this software because it was good in its day.

But I'm just saying in general, you can't be in a spreadsheet. How many of us have gotten the spreadsheet, uh, law firms?

Yeah, we do. And then you look at the formulas and they're not right, and it's not actually good measurement because again—

Well, it's not even that they're measuring it in there. Their ledger system Is in a space that's a non-accounting ledger system. So you need to be in something, I'd imagine.

You also need to have goals. And you can't, I don't think, because we can do all the measuring we want for them, but if they don't have a goal or a target to where they're going, I don't know.

What do they want to achieve? What do they want to achieve?

Yeah, I think that, and distilling it in that way is like, I like saying, what do you want to achieve? Goals are fine, but to me, goals equal weight loss goals. Where do you want to see your business in 2 years' time?

Here's one that really opens their eyes and is easy to do. In the scenario where the firm waits until the end of the month for everybody to put their time in, or they're giving it to the receptionist to put in, or Bop, bop, bop, that sort of routine. You can look at their return rate and how long it takes for— to recover accounts receivable and the number of disputes and all of that, um, and their collection ratio or write-offs.

Write-offs.

Or you can— and then you can work them towards the attorney getting their time in on time. And, um, in one law firm that I worked in, every Friday afternoon everybody knew to leave me alone, and I— it would take me all afternoon to draw up this spreadsheet of everybody's time and what the KPIs meant and 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, then you take a KPI for performance.

Yeah.

I'm big 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 Linda gets a $5,000 bonus because she did this. She improved her KPI on her timekeeping and collections. Sarah gets a $10,000 bonus because she got it. Or let me flip that.

So you drive— what you're saying is you start to drive these new spaces. And it's interesting, Linda, I thought, was really good at this over the course of about a month and a half where it was like, how many clicks was this going to take? How many people are you putting in this to do this line of work when you have a software that's a click of a button? And she— I felt it was really just the way she handled it was so intelligent. It was like, hey, you do realize there's software out there that can handle this, right? You're losing sleep and being able to understand this very clearly because you're asking to do it in a model that's just broken.

He was doing it in a very redundant way. And I think too, when you're talking about this, this is one way if you're a bookkeeper or an accountant listening, One of the places Sarah and I hop into after trust is accounts receivable. And we look at how much money is sitting and not collected 90, over 90 days, right? That's money where you can help them collect it, but then find out why. So we need to know the why behind that. We can help them bandaid it and fix it. But then look at if they're starting to write down, they like to write down. So look at the bill at the end of the month and go, oh, I spent a lot of time on that, but I can't really charge that. Well, that's important for the owners to know.

How does that happen?

Because, yes. And you might see as you start to analyze that, okay, well, Mary's writing an awful lot of time down, but June is getting through quicker, or Bobby's doing a lot better with that and the billable time. And then maybe they're collecting it. So if they're billing but not collecting, well, you can bill all day long. I don't care if you bill. It doesn't matter if it's not collected, right? So that makes a big difference.

Mm-hmm.

And you can do that measurement And bring that to the client. And when the client sees that, they're going to be like, that makes it— I think it's so out there when they look at it, they're like, wow, I did not realize. Because in their head as a firm owner, and I know we've seen this, Sarah, where we're talking to the client and they're thinking, well, you know, I've got Pete, Larry, and Jane working for me and they work 40 hours. So that's 40 hours times 3, that's billable. No, there's lunch. There's all sorts of non-billable time. So you have to look at how much productivity is happening during the billable hour day. And that's another metric that is in that Clio Trends Report. That's an eye-opening metric for sure.

I am so passionate about law firms who bring in associates out of law school. And you have 2 different scenarios here. One is the beat 'em up scenario where you sit 'em down and you go, sink or swim, I'm throwing you in the pool and you better bill a million hours and you better work a million hours and you burn 'em out. And what are you teaching them? But that's one KPI. And then the other one, let's say, Linda, you're the attorney and we give you an associate and it's going to take time for you to develop that associate the correct way instead of just throwing them in the deep end of the pool. And so that's going to change your KPI compared to Sarah's KPI, and that should tie into your year-end bonus as well, you know, because you're developing somebody. And You teach, you teach that associate about the business of the business because they don't get that in law school.

Mm-hmm.

The law school's job is to teach them how to become an attorney, graduate, pass the test, and get on your way. It's up to, it's up to us as owners of businesses and to the attorneys that are listening out there to really passionately care about your associates. Because if you invest in them upfront, you watch their KPIs, You watch the person that's training them, you're going to get some information that you need to really make decisions. Number 2, one of the big bugs, and for our attorneys that are listening out there and are watching this, please don't take this the wrong way. I'm just saying what I've seen.

Don't shoot the messenger.

Yeah, don't shoot the messenger. But when you are a firm that has it in your mind that I'm going to have a very rich blended portfolio of benefits for the employees, Have you really found out what those employees, what makes them tick? What do they want? So if you're giving them bus passes, lunch, this and that and this and that and this and that, what is that doing? What is the effect on the KPIs that you've picked out compared to maybe they just want to work a 4-day work week? Will their productivity go up?

Right.

Yeah.

Do they want a bus pass? Maybe they won't even use it. I've seen firms say you're going to get a bus pass whether you want it or not. You know, um, yeah, yeah, especially the downtown firms, you know, to get to attract people. We have bus passes. Well, a lot of people don't want that nowadays. They'll ride their bicycle or their scooter in, or they'll take, they'll take the train in or whatever, you know, or maybe an option.

Yeah, on the flip side of that, we've had 2 guests on now.

Um, Theophan, I'm thinking of first. Yeah, he came on and talked about how he can— he has implemented with other firms where he brings in that person that does The rainmaking, right? Was it rainmaking, Sarah? The selling part of the job where it's not the attorney doing that work. They're doing the law firm work. But he's had this person in place on the bigger firms that this was a really effective model to not have a person that could bill out at $400, $500 an hour.

A non-attorney offering consulting, basically selling, but you're doing it and it's a consulting. Um, without giving away a lot. So you're putting a layer between. And his episode, I don't know when we released that, but it, it, to me, it would— I'm just really excited for him to come back and talk about it. And Steve, I, I just would love for you to meet him because the way that you're talking about your passion for this topic.

Yeah.

Really I feel like it's a lot of the front-end metrics that we're looking at. Obviously, the back-end stuff does— that's the important part. You were bringing up the realization and those sorts of things and knowing kind of where you settle to understand how much each one is costing you. But I think, Steve, the other part that I thought was interesting, and maybe you're leading to this, is those compensation models.

Yeah.

How you actually develop those and what does that look like?

Because— I can't tell you how many times I've been in, you know, in firms. I've been doing this for quite a long time.

Yeah.

Where Christmas bonuses are handed out. And I could, I could tell you as the accounting person in-house, I could sit there, watch and say, that one's going to leave after they get their bonus. That one's going to leave after they get their bonus.

That's amazing that you in your tenure When are you teaching your class that I can watch?

Another place too for guests that we've had here, and this one has happened and maybe Tierra can ping back on that, is Cole Box, the folks at Cole Box. So you've got these attorneys that are billing out and nobody has the time to follow up. But why have somebody that can bill out at $600 follow up on their billing? Have Cole Box and the accounts receivable specialists do that for the firm at a very low rate, and that will help bring that money in. So that's another avenue that you might not think of because I didn't think of Theophan's way. I never— that never occurred to me that they could stick somebody in that seat to be able to do that. I always thought it had to be the attorney doing the consulting. But in this case, he has this model that actually works real well.

Well, and, you know, to your point on Callbox, I'm teaching a class at the Colorado Bar Association in August, and the subject is accounts receivable and collections in law firms. And I'll be plugging Callbox at Yeah. But, you know, one of the things, you know, that a KPI can be tied to is the realization rate on getting new clients and how you're getting them and all those sorts of things. And, you know, tying that into like your example of the $600 per hour, you know, what's it worth? What happens when you start referring out to somebody like Callbox?

Yeah.

You know, what happens to your realization rate on accounts receivables?

Then, because that's your cash, that's, that's, you worked hard for that.

It's like sitting there. Yeah, you know, you know, and I look at a little treasure trove there that we can help them with, you know.

It all starts with the, the, the client agreement. Yeah, you know, what are the expectations? How, how is it spelled out in there? You know, how are your collections spelled out in there? And how do those things impact KPIs? Um, and when you have that conversation, again, I just get so excited about this because You reach a point with the client where you've been listening to them for 2 years and you're like, okay, we've got this KPI fixed. Now let's talk about your client agreements because I've heard you talk about those for a couple of years now. Let's look at your verbiage in there. Let's make sure you're in compliance with the requirements that you have to have, the things you have to have in your, your agreement. But then we're going to track the KPIs and see what the difference is going forwards. Compared to the past on your collections, because we're going to spell that out in the client agreement. What are the expectations for getting paid? What happens when this happens? What happens when we're in the middle of your divorce and suddenly there's something you didn't tell us? And here's scope creep. You know, does this turn into hourly then for additional work? You know, all those sorts of things.

Are you saying us accounting people Can, like, help advise on this side.

I call it the business of being.

Yeah, I'm playing.

But yeah, you could look at how many new clients did you acquire in the year? Or another one that you can look at. So that's part of your marketing, right? To see how your leads are coming in. How many leads did you have? How many new clients did you acquire? Referrals. Where are your referrals coming from? And this has all got to do with setting yourself up for success in the beginning, which is why that Clio Grow We don't have many clients using it, but it's really not a bad program that you might want to consider. Or HubSpot is a good one. And there's also—

Analytics is another one that people like.

There's client retention, obviously, if you're in that type of practice area, is another one. You could look at how many cases have you won depending on the practice area. Maybe you're criminal defense. How many cases have you won? You could even get to the nitty-gritty of, okay, when you're tracking, because we can do— and I just did an article, a blog post on Clio and some of the custom fields you can track these things in. So you, you customize your Clio to track some of these metrics. One of them, and these are metrics that aren't really math metrics, but they can be metrics like opposing attorney. How many times are you going against this opposing attorney and how many times did you win as opposed to that opposing attorney? You can get that detailed, but you have to put the data in and it's really about the data. So that article, I think I, I was surprised when I discovered where this was and some of the ideas you can have by practice area. And I gave some samples and there's Another article I think I pinged back to in Clio that goes into really deep on all the different custom field suggestions. And you can really have fun, I mean, with tracking some of those custom fields.

You know what I want on my t-shirt? KPIs are fun.

You don't want lips.

Let's see.

My lips, you could kiss them away. No, I'm kidding.

But see, that's the thing. And this is kind of all Ties back to hiring the right people to help you guide you through your business, right? Hiring that bookkeeper that gets so excited about this stuff and can help you because that's not what you guys do is if you're a lawyer attorney looking at this, this isn't what you do.

I'm practical.

Going, wow, this sounds great.

So be patient. Understand it's a relationship. It's just like any sort of relationship. We might be outside, but it's guidance. We're a resource. We have that bird's eye view on multiple things. And like Linda, you brought this up too, is I love our client for this. I want to change the compensation model for my team. We did all this work to figure it out. And he says, gosh, I was playing checkers and you were playing chess, Sarah. And I thought that was the sweetest thing he could have said to me. It was really cute. So honorable. But it really, it was a great project for Linda and I to do. I really enjoyed it. I was like, hey, Linda, I want to make sure I'm not driving the bus the wrong way. How, what does this look? She pulled up Clio Trends report. We got really detailed, you know, for the region and the area. And like you said, we get passionate about it, but you've got to be able to set yourself up and allow that to drive. If you're just so transactional in the relationship with us, it does not support a win-win situation.

No.

That is not what we want as clients. That's not why we went into business ourselves. Was, oh, let me just get demanded upon. So I like to be really practical about this because I feel that it's important to say because it gets lost in the relationship and it's like any sort of front door.

But you know what else you can do too and share with clients? You can say, hey, Sarah, client Sarah. You don't mention Linda, the other client. You just say, we have another client.

Yes.

were able to change their KPI because we found out what they wanted to measure. We found out what data they already have. We found out what the target was. We went through all the steps and then we rinse and repeat it. And guess what? We had success with their turnover rate on employees or whatever it is that the KPI was measuring. And they're like, you did that? And you're like, sure. And we can do that for you.

I'm just behind the green curtain on the What's the Wizard of Oz do?

This is what we always talk about in the Law Lab, right? So we have a lot of people in the Law Lab that are— want to get small attorney, the one-person firm. And yes, you can measure on those too. But these bigger firms, when you start to— we're not looking at past data. We're not doing— what do they call it? Backwards accounting where this is the stuff that AI is going to do after the fact. After the fact, right? We're not looking in the rearview mirror for everything.

Yeah.

Part of this is figuring out where do you want to go and then Starting to steer the ship to that place. And a lot of that has to do with what we measure and knowing where they wanna go and what will be the outcome. And what we really love, Sarah, and I really love doing this, and I know you do, Steve, too, is going through it, figuring it out, finding out maybe that there's an attorney in the company. And usually the owner has that gut feeling. They kind of know, but maybe there's one that's just not producing or Something like that, or an employee that's a bad apple that's kinda making a bad apple situation with multiple employees because it kinda trickles down and starting to see where there's areas where that might need improvement. And there's a lot of ways we can help with all that. And this is more of that advisory hat. I hate the word advisory, but it's the advisory hat that we are going to start to need to do and use as we move towards the future because this is, this is going to be our job.

Right?

This is our job. And I have to tell you, I am happy about that. Bring on that AI and let them do the The grunt work. I'd rather do this. This is more where we have to use our brain to figure this stuff out. And it's strategies and it's financial strategies and, you know, roll up my sleeve, let's go. And that's kind of where we want to be in looking for the future. And I think that's part of why you want to join the Law Lab because you get to learn some of this stuff. Learning it now is what you want to be doing, especially if you're younger and you're, you know, even older, even us older people, Steve. I thought with older folks, we still get excited about it, right? I mean, it's really—

it's—

We finally have the tools to do these things. And, you know, we do.

We're not pushing paper.

When you get a pushback from a client and they're like, I'm not interested in that, it's fun to go ahead and just pick out some KPIs based on their pain points.

Don't tell them we do that.

Start tracking them for a few months. And then when you have a meeting with them 6 months down the line, say, here's your trends on this or that. And they're like, oh, you are right.

But you got to get paid for it. So you've got to be able to package that in and make sure you're getting paid for that. Because if you're not getting paid for this extra work, it's not worth it. So don't sell yourself short. If you're a bookkeeper or an accountant and you're doing this kind of work and you're specialized, you have to get paid for it. I'm sure that's a whole nother show we can do, but that has to be baked into your pricing so you have the ability.

I love her passion on this like I love yours, Steve.

Well, you know what?

You guys are wonderful.

You can build confidence. And this next statement is all for all the new bookkeepers out there that are scared half to death. You can build your confidence In what you do and become so incredibly valuable to your clients by embracing KPIs and learning them. And to your point, Linda, if you're not at the comfort zone where you're going to start charging for it, you can still pick a simple one and track it and then sell it to the client. Say, you know what? I've been watching this. I saw this in your business. Would you like to take this further? Would you like to explore more KPIs? Would you like to stop working 60 hours a week and cut it down to 50 or 40 or whatever? We can help you do that by monitoring all of these things.

That's the best way to do it. If you're new starting out and you want to go down this road of working exclusively with attorneys, get that smaller firm where you've got a one-on-one relationship with that client. And yeah, you're not going to get charged for it now, but work through that. Get the practice in, you know, get a few hours of doing that under your belt. And you get more comfortable, more— it's all about confidence, right? It's all about confidence. So if you can get that confidence and be able to present it and kind of go forward with it, that's how you start, right? Everybody's gonna start somewhere.

But actually, we didn't all start knowing everything. Oh my God. Remember how scary? It's still scary.

Yeah, it can. It's daunting sometimes depending on what you're in front of, right? And how you share the knowledge or Maybe learn the knowledge and admit that I'm not actually as experienced in this area. I need a minute to kind of figure that out.

That's all you have to say.

If you want to learn more, newbie bookkeepers and accountants, go out to the software sites for all the billing software. Go into their library of blogs and, you know, you're going to find all kinds of things about KPIs out there and you're going to go, oh, well, this isn't that scary.

There's 3 blogs I think of right off the top. Obviously, Clio's blog is phenomenal, right?

They're incredible.

It's good trusted information. Cosmolex also has a really great blog, and Build4Time is another one that I find has a lot of great information. Those 3 right there. And I know MyCase, I think, has some. I haven't really looked at them recently, but they did have some great stuff out there. So there's a lot of those really, like Steve said, really valued software, trusted software that you know that what's being written is true. You can always go to the Artesani blog or you can go to the Accountants Law Lab. We've got some great content there too on our website. Yeah. Or follow us on right here on this podcast because that's going to be able to— if you listen to this, we're really touching on some of these law firm topics and I think you're going to learn a lot by just following us too and putting your headphones on. Go for a walk, get your healthy walk in and just listen and learn. Well, that was a great time.

Why are you giggling, Sarah?

Yeah, I just love it because we always wrap it into our identities of what we enjoy. Exercise, walking. I know that's something we all enjoy. Just it's great. And also the fact that my little Frenchton just walked in here and I'm like, please don't start snorting.

Oh, we miss Walter. He usually tells us when to take us away and he's not there.

Yeah, he's out playing around, I think, in the hot sun right now.

So well, Steve, you're taking us out, and I know you're going to tell us where you are too in this whole conversation today.

I'm still at home. I'm going to be at home for about 5 weeks, but we're hosting a huge rally with about 50 Airstreams in 5 weeks up at the Meeker Classic Sheepdog Trials. And so we have 50 here. We have about, well, we have 20, 22, 23 Airstreams coming in, about 50 people. So I'm staying home for about 4 or 5 weeks and getting a lot of working on KPIs.

Oh, okay.

That sounds good.

That's awesome.

I saw a little Airstream when I was riding my bike the other night, and I said to— told my husband about you and the Airstreams and everything. And he says, well, now you'll never, you'll never mess that name up again.

The Airbus.

The Airbus. Yeah.

Sorry.

Well, we'd sure like to invite all of you to subscribe to the podcast and our YouTube channel. We'd also love it if you'd rate this podcast. We really need your ratings. So, friends, and you know what? We watch those ratings.

Thank you.

And today, before this podcast, we were really excited because we saw this massive spike in our downloads, which was just great.

Thank you.

And, you know, in the class I'm teaching next month at the Bar Association, I've put a slide in and I'm going to be pushing our— promoting our podcast. So, you know, please join, please like it, please share it with your friends, share it with your legal friends. If you've got questions or topic requests or Or great guest suggestions, you can mail us at info@accountantslawpod.com or send us a message through the website at accountantslawpod.com. And if you want to join us at the Accountants Law Lab, which I absolutely love, visit our website at accountantslawpod.com to sign up. We'd love it if you'd follow us on Instagram and TikTok as well. Just about anywhere you can listen to podcasts, we're everywhere. You'll find us. And we're seeing that in our statistics now. We launched on June 1st and we are blessed And we thank all of you.

Thank you very, very much. Yeah, this is fantastic. My dream come true is happening.

It is.

It is. Well, everybody, until next week, we'll see you all then. Bye now.

Bye.