Law firm KPIs: what to measure and how to read the figures

Why are a few indicators better than a crowded dashboard?

The managing partner of a law firm in Doha does not need dozens of charts; they need answers to questions that come back every month. Is the work growing, or piling up? Is it shared fairly among the lawyers? Is what was agreed in the fee agreements actually being collected? A useful indicator is one that answers one of these questions and is calculated from data the team already enters in its daily work, not from an extra spreadsheet someone fills in hastily at the end of the month.

• Litigation indicators: cases by degree and status, the number of files still under study, and the memoranda not yet written.
• Team indicators: cases per lawyer, and the files each employee received or was assigned.
• Financial indicators: income and expenses, office expenses, late payments and consultation fees.

The system has two places for figures, and neither replaces the other: the dashboard for the daily view, with its “Dates needing attention” and the number of memoranda being written; and the “Statistics and reports” page for periodic review over a period you choose. Mixing them up is tiring: a working day is not run on an annual statistic, and a whole year is not judged by one morning glance at the dashboard, however reassuring its figures may look.

The indicators and where to find them in the system

The table below brings together the indicators Murafe actually displays, what each one tells you and where to find it. Most are on the “Statistics and reports” page, where you choose the period from ready-made options running from the current month to last year, or set it between two dates, and display either the whole office or a single lawyer. The report can be printed or saved as a PDF, or exported as a file that opens in Excel.

Cases: degree, status and files under study

Start with how cases are spread across the litigation degrees. An office with a growing number of appeal and cassation files needs more time for research and for writing memoranda, while an office with many execution files needs more administrative and field follow-up. Because the system opens a separate file for each degree, linked to the degrees of the dispute before and after it, a dispute that has reached cassation is counted in more than one degree — deliberately, so that each degree’s statistics stay accurate.

Then look at the statuses: pending, reserved for judgment, judgment issued, stayed, struck out and closed. A rise in stayed or struck-out cases is a sign worth asking about, and many files sitting “under study” for a long time may mean decisions waiting for someone to take them. Most importantly, clicking any degree or status opens the list of matching cases, so the figure turns at once into named files that can be discussed one by one.

The team: reading the workload, not ranking the lawyers

Choosing a lawyer on the statistics page shows their figures alone. This is a tool for distributing work, not for ranking lawyers in a race: a complex cassation case is not the same as ten simple execution files, and a lawyer with lower figures may be absorbed by one heavy file. So read the figures with the lawyer themselves, and ask about what they do not show. Which file is taking up their time? Where do they need support before a memorandum runs late or a deadline draws near?

The “Received and assigned” report adds an angle that appears nowhere else: for each employee, the number of files whose papers they received and recorded during the period, and the number of files assigned to them, across cases, police reports, services and consultations. A secretary who receives clients shows up in the received figures, a lawyer in the assigned figures and a consultant in consultations. Every figure in the report links to the files it counts.

• Read each lawyer’s figures against the kind of files they handle, not in a bare comparison with their colleagues.
• Compare a month with the same month last year and with the month before, not with the best month of the year.
• Discuss individual figures in a private conversation, not in a general meeting where they might embarrass someone.

Consultations: a window on demand

A consultation is often the door through which a new client comes in, so it deserves tracking of its own. The statistics show the number of consultations and their fees over the period, broken down by month, category and consultant. The breakdown by month reveals the seasons and the busy periods, the category reveals the areas people ask about most, and the consultant reveals who carries the load and who needs someone to support them.

• Are consultations concentrated in a category that only one lawyer in the office works on?
• Has the number gone up while fees went down? Free consultations may have multiplied without anyone deciding they should.
• Are the consultations given a follow-up date actually followed up, or forgotten after the first meeting?

Money: income, expenses and collection

The “Financial summary” shows income and expenses for the period, separates the office’s running costs — rent, salaries and petty expenses — from case and client expenses, and shows contract instalments that are late or due within 30 days. That separation is essential to reading it: a rise in expenses may be fees the office paid on its clients’ behalf, which appear in their statements of account, rather than an increase in the cost of running the office itself. All amounts are in Qatari riyals.

1. Compare income with office expenses alone to see whether fees cover the running costs.
2. Open the “Office expenses” page to see the totals by item, and keep an eye on petty expenses if they grow.
3. Review late payments in “Contract instalments” with their clients’ names, and decide who follows up each one.
4. Look at what falls due within 30 days to anticipate your cash flow in the near term.
5. If the office takes on court-appointed cases, review in “Court-appointment fees” what the court has awarded, what has been paid out and what has not, and which of those cases have yet to have their fees assessed.
6. To look into a particular client in depth, open the “Client statement of account” for the period: from the opening balance to the closing balance, through every debit and credit entry and a summary of their fee agreements.

The monthly review in one hour

Indicators are no use without a fixed time to look at them. Set a standing meeting in the first week of every month, attended by the managing partner, the office manager and the accountant, which the office manager prepares by printing the statistics for the month just ended, or saving them as a PDF, together with the financial summary. Because the figures are calculated within the permissions of whoever displays them, they should be prepared by someone who can see every case in the office, so that the meeting does not discuss an incomplete picture.

1. Deadlines first: what appears under “Dates needing attention” on the dashboard, and the number of memoranda being written.
2. Cases: what has changed in the statuses, and the files that have been under study for some time.
3. Team: the workload per lawyer, and files received and assigned.
4. Consultations: the number, the fees and the most requested categories.
5. Money: income, expenses and late payments.
6. Decisions: who does what before the next meeting, written down with names.

After the meeting, export the statistics as a file that opens in Excel and save it in a monthly folder with the minutes of the decisions, and start the next meeting by reviewing what was decided before looking at the new figures. After six months you will have something no single snapshot can give, however accurate: a clear trend that shows whether the office is heading where it wants to go, and which of the past months’ decisions actually made a difference.

Common mistakes in reading the figures

• Judging a lawyer by a single figure without looking at the kind of files they handle and how complex they are.
• Comparing the figures of two people with different permission scopes, so that each of them sees a different part of the office.
• Trusting figures built on data that has not been updated: if a case’s status is not changed after the judgment or after it is struck out, the “pending” count stays higher than it really is.
• Confusing the snapshot with activity: today’s spread of statuses is not last month’s.
• Adding a new indicator every month until what matters is lost among the many.

The rule that ties all this together: figures ask the questions, and files answer them. That is why clicking the case figures in Murafe’s statistics opens the files behind them, so the meeting is not a discussion of abstract percentages but a review of files by name, number and owner, in which every item ends with a decision, someone responsible for carrying it out and a date to review it. A figure that does not lead to a particular file remains an impression.