Do you have someone on your team who is responsible for doing a true reflection on how your month ended? Is this person you? If so, reassign this task immediately. If you are the person responsible for setting the vision, implementing the actions to carry out the vision and prospering from the results, you are too close to the situation to see any areas for improvement or any changes that have resulted in wins for your team and your firm.
Your firm is depending on your vision for longevity. You should be depending on someone to hold you accountable for the things you have said you wanted to accomplish. This can be someone internally if they are not afraid of giving you bad news or you can hire someone independently to give you a monthly recap and discuss what is working or what can be improved upon. In the following paragraphs, we will talk about the measuring sticks each firm should be using to recap their month and hold themselves accountable for growth.
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Marketing – did you have a plan for the previous month? If so, did you accomplish the items? What was your cost per lead? What was your cost per signed case? How do these numbers compare to your rolling 12-month average? Where did your leads come from? Which source produced the highest number of signed cases? What did you do to thank the personal referrals you received? Are personal referrals increasing or decreasing? How many online reviews did your firm receive during the last 30 days?
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Intake – How many leads did you receive? Of the leads received, how many did your firm truly want to bring in house? Of the leads your firm wanted to sign up how many did you actually get signed up? Who took the largest amount of leads? Of the people taking leads, how do their want percentages and their converted percentages compare? Is one team member better at converting leads into cases than another? If so, what did you do to ensure you are utilizing their strengths to ensure your firm is growing?
Statute of Limitations – Who’s watching all of your cases? Do you have a rule that every file should have a file review 3 months before the statute date? If so, was this carried out on all of your files? What decisions were made? What actionable items were decided and were they followed through on?
Attorneys – How many demands did they mail? How many cases did they settle? What was their average fee? Did they obtain maximum recovery for the clients based on value? Did they communicate the progress of cases with the clients? What is the average file review percentage for each attorney?
Case Managers – Did they complete all the necessary steps on their checklist for each case during the month? Did they speak to their clients every 15 days (or whatever your rule for client communications is)? Did they disburse client funds timely after receiving instructions from the attorneys? Did they ensure all medical bills were obtained, negotiated and paid for in a timely manner for each client?
Medical Records – Were medical records requested timely? Were they followed up on timely? What was your average receipt time for all medical records received during the month?
Financial Review – Where did your monthly income end compared to the goals you had set for the year? How did your expenses compare to the budget? Where were you over/under what you had budgeted for? What explanation do you have for each variance? How do your expenses compare to the national standards in personal injury law firms?
You should be looking at expenses in three big categories: Advertising, Employees & Other. Once you have your expenses arranged on your Profit & Loss Statement in this order you will then want to ask these questions: What was your total advertising spend as a percentage of total revenue? What was your employee expenses as a percentage of your total revenue? What was your percentage of other expenses compared to the revenue? How do these averages compare to your firm’s history in these categories?
If you don’t know how you compare to other firm’s doing the same type of work you are doing, look for a group of similarly sized firms who meet regularly to compare these statistics so you can compare your firm to theirs and look for other best practices to implement at your firm that will help you further your growth. If you can’t find a group, then hire a personal injury law firm consultant to help you compare your current status to what they know about industry standards.
If you have someone, other than yourself, do an analysis of your firm monthly and report to you their findings and discuss your options for growth, you will see great things happen in your firm.
