Key Performance Indicators: A Law Firm Guide

Indicators should meet the following three criteria to qualify as a KPI for your firm:

1.It must reflect the firm’s strategy and goals;
2.It must be key to the firm’s success; and
3.It must be quantifiable

Your firm’s strategic focus will impact its selection of KPI.

The author is not suggesting that all that counts in a law firm can be counted but rather what gets measured is what gets done. Therefore, if an indicator is not quantifiable, it is not likely that it will be incorporated into a firm’s decision-making process which may in fact cause issues to go unaddressed.

The list of KPIs identified in this booklet is not intended to be exhaustive but rather as collection of common and not so common KPIs that firms are and will be using over time. The KPIs identified in this guide are broken down into the following four categories:

•Special Pandemic
•Marketing
•Productivity
•Financial

A word of caution – KPI is simply a tool – they are no substitute for the use of common sense and good judgment when it comes to the management of a law firm.