Three Metrics Every Small Law Firm Should Track Monthly

If you’re like many small law firm owners, you consider yourself an attorney first and a businessperson second. But if you want your firm to not just survive, but to thrive, you need to get serious about the operational and financial details that impact your business, and tracking the right metrics is key to that effort.

The good news is that Smokeball users get access to both an easy-to-use case management platform that gives you law firm insights with tools that allow your firm to track the metrics that matter most. So what are some of those metrics? Here are three of the top ones we think all small law firms should track.

Overall Effort Spent On a Matter

Every matter is different. That’s why it’s important for your firm to have a method in place to track activities for each client. Understanding how much effort is really required to see a matter through to completion will allow you to bill more accurately now and to better estimate the effort required for similar matters in the future. By automatically capturing data on every event, document draft, email and phone call, Smokeball Ai will allow you to gain highly valuable insights into the resources your firm needs to do its work.

Individual and Team Workloads

You’re busy, and so is your staff. Some weeks, it may be nearly impossible to check in with your team members to get a sense of their workloads and measure progress on their matters. This can cause you to make bad business decisions, like assigning more work to a team member who is already over capacity, or failing to fully leverage the time one of your more costly salaried employees has available. Why not let tech solve some of these problems for you?

Smokeball Activity Intelligence allows you to review firmwide progress with the click of a button and can help you easily account for activities your team members engage in each week. Ai also allows you to accurately measure margins and compare employee work patterns. Not only is this feature handy for knowing exactly when to make a new hire or change an existing team member’s workload, but it also helps you clearly define your worth to clients when they question a fee.

Reference Reporting

Certain tasks can seem to take up a disproportionate amount of each day. What if there were a way to track exactly what tasks each member of your team spends their day on? Smokeball’s Activity Intelligence feature provides your firm with a complete report of all of your tasks each week. If your firm starts to notice a trend on which activities your team primarily spends its day on, it may be time to restructure daily tasks or resources in a way that is more productive for everyone involved.

Accurately measuring KPIs is crucial to building a successful small law firm. If your firm is looking to start fresh this spring when it comes to metrics and data, take a look at Smokeball for free.