Best KPIs for Law Firms to Track
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are measurable targets businesses or organizations can use to track their progress toward goals over a specific period. Law firms and legal departments can use KPIs to track performance in key metrics, including their budgets, employee performance, and operational efficiency. Learn about the best law firm KPIs for your legal office and how AdvoLogix legal software solutions can help.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable targets set by law firms to gauge their progress towards specific organizational objectives.
- Tracking KPIs enhances accountability, enables trendspotting over time, facilitates informed decision-making, and aids in planning for predicted growth.
- Law firms should select KPIs tailored to their objectives and size, and follow best practices like setting SMART goals and adjusting KPIs as needed.
- AdvoLogix’s legal software solutions, built on Salesforce, offer tools like Spend Management, Legal Matter Management, and the AdvoLogix Caster, facilitating efficient KPI tracking.
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are among the most useful tools businesses, organizations, and public agencies have for tracking their progress toward a specific goal. They can help you review your company’s performance, identify areas needing improvement, and focus on organizational goals.
High-quality legal software solutions are an essential resource for developing and tracking KPIs. When partnering with AdvoLogix, you can identify the best law firm KPIs for your firm or department and keep track of them as you seek to meet your goals.
What Are KPIs?
Key performance indicators, often referred to as KPIs, are measurable targets that you can set to see how well your law firm is meeting its organizational goals.
The defining characteristic of a KPI is that it sets metrics tied to a specific organizational goal within a specific period. KPIs can measure any type of data relevant to an organizational goal for your law firm. For example, you could set a KPI to track client retention. Alternatively, you could have a KPI to track your firm’s expenses to identify areas where you could reduce costs or increase income.
What Are the Benefits of Tracking KPIs?
A few key benefits of tracking KPIs for law firms and legal offices are:
- Accountability: By tracking KPIs, you can see how well you are moving toward certain goals and make changes if you are not.
- Trendspotting: KPI tracking over an extended timeframe can help your firm identify important trends in your client base, legal operations, or finances. Long-term KPIs might reveal greater success in onboarding particular types of clients or improvements in your firm’s budgetary efficiency correlated with specific actions.
- Informed decision-making: KPIs can reveal strengths and weaknesses in past organizational goals. You can use this data to better plan your financial, organizational, and marketing goals.
- Planning for predicted growth: If KPIs reveal past growth in key areas, you can use this data to upscale your firm’s operations accordingly.
- Auditing expenses: KPIs may reveal areas of inefficient or excessive spending. You might identify budgetary redundancies, insufficient income sources, overpriced vendors, etc.
Determining What KPIs To Measure
Your law firm can get the most out of legal KPIs if you find the best ones to track. There are a few that all law firms and legal departments will want to use, such as budgetary KPIs. Other KPIs may suit different firms better or worse based on factors such as size, budget, and goals.
For example, if you work in a personal injury law firm that consistently needs new clients, you can track KPIs that measure how successful your marketing is based on new client intake. If you work for a nonprofit organization’s legal department, you may benefit from tracking KPIs that measure your organization’s effectiveness at eliminating legal barriers to achieving its mission.
Best KPIs for Law Firms To Track
Here are some of the best KPIs for law firms and legal offices to track.
Client KPIs
Client KPIs measure goals relating to your firm’s client base. This could include client satisfaction metrics, client retention, resource expenditures per client, and income per client. A client KPI could track the number of positive vs. negative reviews your law firm receives. You could also track how many repeat clients you have or how many clients retain your firm’s services over a longer timeframe.
Marketing KPIs
Marketing KPIs measure the success of your firm’s marketing outreach. If a marketing KPI shows an increase in new clients correlates to a specific marketing campaign, you can invest more in that campaign in the future. Alternatively, you can change course if the KPI shows no change in new clients following a marketing campaign.
Financial KPIs
Financial KPIs measure your firm’s budgetary statements to track specific financial goals and identify problem areas. Major financial KPIs for law firms include:
- Profitability ratios: These measure your firm’s income against overall expenses.
- Liquidity ratios: These measure how well your firm manages its short-term debt obligations based on current assets.
- Solvency ratios: These metrics track how well your firm can pay its long-term debt.
- Turnover ratios: This data measures how quickly your firm can perform certain tasks based on its budget.
Staff Performance KPIs
Staff performance KPIs measure goals relating to the performance of your firm’s employees. These can include employee satisfaction, hours worked, absenteeism, employee turnover rates, and the number of applicants for job openings.
Productivity KPIs
Productivity KPIs measure how well employees, working groups, and entire departments meet specific goals in a limited timeframe.
Best Practices for KPI Tracking
Best KPI tracking practices begin with identifying clear and measurable goals for your firm or department. The best KPI goals follow the so-called SMART criteria, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. When choosing KPI goals, identify areas for improvement or where you are looking to upscale.
Once you have settled on goals, the next step for KPI tracking is to promote them to all relevant personnel. If each employee of your firm understands the goals and the designated period, they can perform their tasks in accordance with them. Don’t be afraid to adjust your KPIs if your circumstances or goals change.
Track Performance With AdvoLogix
Legal software is an essential tool for tracking law firm KPIs. AdvoLogix legal software solutions provide firms with all the technological tools needed to keep track of KPIs and make improvements. AdvoLogix uses secure, cloud-based legal document management software that gives you the power to keep track of all relevant data and perform advanced analytics to identify long-term trends. All AdvoLogix software products are built on Salesforce software for law firms, providing essential cybersecurity and integrations with other Salesforce products.
The AdvoLogix Spend Management solution uses advanced artificial intelligence tools to help you keep track of your firm’s financial goals and performance. The AdvoLogix Legal Matter Management solution lets you create customized reports on interactive dashboards that track organizational performance KPIs. The AdvoLogix Caster automates much of the data-entry process to boost efficiency in processing invoices and help you meet your goals.
Partner at Lucent Law, PLLC
Highly Recommended
We’re a small law firm and have found Advologix and Salesforce to be a fantastic tool for our growing practice. Having the ability to make firm-specific modifications and receiving great technical and customer support from Advologix has added significant value to our operations. We have found Advologix to be very responsive to inquiries, and we look forward to the updates that they push out on a regular basis.
Get Started with AdvoLogix Today
Whether you work in a large, well-funded law firm or a small legal department with a modest budget, legal KPIs are an excellent tool for improving performance. But you need the best software tools to get the most out of KPIs.
To learn more about whether the legal software solutions available from AdvoLogix can help your organization keep track of its KPIs, talk with one of our specialists to see firsthand how we can enhance your capabilities.