Billable hours are any hours you spend that can be accounted for toward your client revenue. Another way to gauge the productivity of your firm is to look at revenue totals and billable hours per employee for a given time period. While attorney utilization rates look at the percentage of time an attorney spends that is billable, this KPI shows you the total amount of revenue and hours billed regardless of the unbilled time spent.

Some firms set targets for revenue and hours billed per employee by week, month and year. According to a recent study by the National Association for Legal Professionals, the average attorney bills 1,892 hours per year.

The matters — or cases — that your firm works are where you actually make your income. Typically each matter is quite unique in terms of it’s own budget, fee schedule, hours billed and profitability.

Analyzing revenue per matter can give you a better understanding of the types of case work that are the most profitable and drive the most income for your firm. That in turn allows you to profile new clients that have the highest potential for success for your practice areas.

Each of your practice areas is unique. Tracking revenue by each practice area can be challenging for some firms. LawKPIs makes it easy to determine the percentage of revenue for all of your practice areas in a single report that can be shared with the appropriate reviewers in your firm.

This is helpful for determining which practice areas generate the most revenue. It also help you determine and share best practices across your practice areas based on real data.

By analyzing revenue by attorney, you can determine how much income each attorney has brought into your firm. By comparing attorneys and also visualizing averages across your firm and in each practice area, you can identify areas for improvement.

Some firms set a minimum bar — say $500,000 per attorney — and then overlay the actual revenue per attorney over other KPIs such as utilization rate and billable hours to help improve the growth of their firm.

It’s important to find out as early as possible if an attorney is coming up short on their revenue goals so you can step in to give them assistance and make them more successful:

• How many hours have they billed compared to their peers?
• What is their utilization percentage of hours?
• Is your support staff overworked so some attorneys are doing too much simple administrative work?
• Is revenue per matter too low in certain areas?
• Does the attorney need help in converting consultative meetings?

How quickly your client pays is the most important determinant of the health of your cash flow. The best way to avoid ongoing collection issues and maintain client relationships is to stay on top of outstanding balances and not let them grow in days or total amount.

Staying on top of your outstanding fees by client allows you to be proactive in working with clients that face payment issues. Stepping in early to review any questions or disputes not only improves your cash flow but helps with client relations and retention.

Most law firms have many different lead sources for new clients:

• Referrals from other firms
• Public speaking
• Email marketing
• Search marketing, SEO and pay-per-click advertising
• Events
• Other advertising, mail and phone

In an ideal world, all leads would result in new business. But in reality, different types of leads from different types of marketing initiatives convert at different rates.

It is important to stay on top of your lead conversion rates to know the best places to invest your marketing funds. Just because a marketing campaign generated hundreds of leads doesn’t mean it is your most successful effort. Tracking conversion rates by lead source allows you to be nimble in your marketing spend and grow faster.

While lead conversion rates help you determine the best places to spend your marketing dollars and source new business, matter conversion rates can help you understand the effectiveness of your consultations and highlight improvements in your client’s journey to success.

It’s a fact of life in every law firm that some attorneys are better at generating new business than others. Some are able to rely on a larger network of friends, colleagues, partners and current clients for referrals. Some have established themselves as thought leaders in the communities and industries that they serve. Other just flat out work hard at driving new business.

By keeping track of how much new business each attorney generates, you can help to spread best practices across your firm and encourage successful attorneys to mentor younger attorneys for the overall growth of your practice.

Every person you meet is a potential referral source. It is usually the case that many of your best clients come from referrals from other happy clients and colleagues. Staying on top of your new clients through referrals helps you track the overall health of your practice growth and also highlights referrals sources that deserve some extra attention and nurturing.

Did you know that it can cost five times as much to find and convert a new client as it does to generate the same amount of business from a current client? You invest so much time and resources in creating new business for your firm, but if you don’t keep those clients you might just be treading water.

In addition to improving profitability, keeping an eye on client retention rates across your practice areas and attorneys can help you identify areas for improvement in multiple areas.

• Where can you streamline your workflows to spend more time on what matters most to your clients?
• Do clients see some areas of service as inherently more valuable than others?
• Are some attorneys simply more client-centric than others?
• What areas are cultivating the longest client relationships and how do you attract more of those clients?

Your website is your first and most important representative from your firm that most prospective clients meet. Tracking visitors is essential for your law firm so that you can measure the overall performance of your digital marketing efforts. Any firm, regardless of size and traffic volume, can improve their marketing by raising awareness of their website visitors.

Tracking visitors makes it easy for you marketing team and webmasters to optimize your site to convert visitors into leads. It also helps you determine what the most valuable parts of your site are and where you should invest in future content.

LawKPIs is integrated to Google Analytics. Unless you have a degree in interactive marketing, Google Analytics may not be the easiest tools for most law firms to use. We’ve made it easy to quickly analyze what is most important to you in your web traffic with integrated dashboards right out of the box.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important marketing techniques for law firms. Because the legal industry is so competitive, law firms are spending more and more of their marketing dollars trying to gain the top spot on Google and other search engines.

Getting real-time information on your search positions can help you make the adjustments in your web and content strategies that will drive new business with the right keywords and data comparisons.

How quickly can you perform a comparison of year-over-year (YOY)  revenue growth? Knowing your YOY growth rate keeps you in charge of your financial health and in a better position for making any necessary strategic adjustments.

YOY revenue compares your revenue from the previous year with that of the current year to see how much you have grown in that time period. It helps you identify new areas for growth and change. It is one of the most important indicators of success in your business and can help you attract new partners, employees and clients. It can also help you put other larger trends like seasonality, market fluctuations and industry changes into context.