The Top 8 KPIs for Personal Injury Law Firms

When running a personal injury firm, it can be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day without tracking your numbers or strategizing how you can improve your overall business processes. After all, you went to school to become lawyers, not business professionals.

However, the last thing you want to do is forget about your key performance indicators (KPI’s). These numbers help you track your performance, so you can increase your chances of bringing in more revenue and managing your team with more efficiency. 

We’ve done the hard work for you to gather the top 8 KPIs your firm can measure to track your monthly performance and set your team up for success. 

What are KPIs?

KPI stands for key performance indicators and can help you measure the performance of your firm in specific areas. With time the KPIs you track might change to reflect your goals for growth or improvement to help you continuously improve to establish stronger client relationships and increase revenue. 

Your KPIs should match your SMART goals, so you can focus on the data that is most meaningful to your firm. SMART goals have criteria that are: 

The top 8 KPIs we recommend for your personal injury firm

          1. Client satisfaction

How do you want your clients to perceive your firm? Building trust and nurturing your clients throughout their process can help you build strong relationships. In the long run, this will help your firm bring invaluable referrals and create a strong and trustworthy reputation.

One way to go about this is to leverage a net promoter score (NPS). This will help you measure the likelihood of past or existing clients recommending your firm to one of their peers. To do this, you can send out a survey once you’ve finalized your services.

           2. Conversion rates

To measure the success of your client intake, you will have to calculate your conversion rates. 

You can do this by measuring how many of your leads actually convert and use your firm’s services. A low conversion rate might suggest that either your marketing methods aren’t up to par or your intake methods aren’t resonating with your leads. 

           3. Cost of acquiring a new client

Your client acquisition cost measures how much your firm spends on average to acquire one client. This will help you measure the overall effectiveness of your marketing and help you determine what areas you might need to redistribute your resources or rethink your marketing spend. 

           4. New matters per month 

To keep up in such a competitive field, you will need to account for how many files your firm creates on a weekly or monthly basis. Again, this KPI will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing, as well as help you determine the growth of your firm over a certain period of time. 

           5. Stalled matters

Along with new matters per month, you will want to identify the cases that aren’t active or that have somewhat hit a wall.

This can help you determine what resources you need to either get the case back up and running or what cases you can deprioritize for the time being. 

          6. Employee satisfaction 

The work environment your firm creates will affect your bottom line. Unhappy employees can potentially lead to unhappy clients, low retention rates, and high employee turnover. You’ll want to keep a pulse on employee satisfaction to ensure optimal growth and increased efficiency.

Similarly to client satisfaction, you can use a simple employee net promoter score (NPS), which allows employees to answer the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend working at our company to a friend or colleague?” Employees will then answer the questions based on a 0-10 scale. You can calculate your team’s NPS by using the following simple formula: 

          7. Revenue collected

Tracking your fees can help you determine your revenue collected over a certain period of time, by case type or by an attorney. Keeping a pulse on your revenue will help you and your team celebrate your wins or narrow in on what can be improved in your SMART goals. 

           8. Profitability

Measuring your profitability will involve calculating your productivity and your performance. You will need to take your revenue and subtract it from your overall operating expenses, including:

• • • • • • Payroll
          • Tax liability
          • Office overhead expenses

This could take a while to set up manually, but you can implement a legal practice management system to help you gain visibility into your firm’s performance by allocating all of your data in one place. 

KPIs are not one-size-fits-all 

The truth is, there aren’t any right or wrong KPIs to track, but you will want to ensure that what you measure is the most meaningful for your firm. 

Firms outside of personal injury might focus on metrics associated with billable hours and monetary success. However, you understand how important client success is to your overall brand and reputation. Focusing on KPI’s that help you monitor your client satisfaction, coupled with your firm’s overall efficiency will be the most impactful for your bottom line in the future. 

In our ever-changing legal landscape, you must continually evolve your measure of success accordingly. Just ensure that at the end of the day,  the KPI’s you choose to track should allow you to understand what’s working within your processes and what’s failing. The ultimate goal of defining and monitoring KPIs is to help you adjust your business practices in order to achieve optimal success.

About CASEpeer

CASEpeer is the leading cloud-based case management solution built for personal injury attorneys and their firms. With a turnkey solution tailored for the unique needs of personal injury law and backed by industry-leading support, your firm can onboard and hit the ground running that day. Gain visibility across your entire firm’s operations, from case management and calendaring to employee performance, pipelines, and profitability. Built around the feedback of successful personal injury law firms nationwide, CASEpeer provides everything your PI firm needs to succeed. See what CASEpeer can do for you and book a demo.