Successful law firms measure their business’s performance—frequently. They determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for their firm, and take action based on what the data tells them. Tools like Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence software can give a law firm a leg-up on the competition by informing where to spend marketing dollars, when to hire new teammates, or even what type of clients they are more effective at helping.
Why Should Law Firms Run Reports?
At Lawyerist, we believe firmly that running a healthy law firm is a multi-faceted endeavor. You should have healthy finances, healthy clients, a healthy owner, and a healthy team,to name a few aspects. Like anything else, to determine the health of something, you must take a measure of it. What you measure is entirely up to you. Each firm, likely, survives on vastly different numbers. However, it is safe to say some common categories help law firms intelligently measure their business success.
Financial Data
First and foremost, a firm should have a healthy grasp on its financial situation. Firms do this with Profit and Loss statements, aging Accounts Receivable data, and other reports that indicate where firm finances may be going. Many firms are already handling these using their current accounting software. Software like Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence tool helps to connect this information to other data about your law firm.
Marketing Data
Most firms understand they must do something to bring new clients in the door. Whether it’s sponsoring a little league team, participating in a local club, or buying a billboard on the interstate, you have to take action, and there is a cost to that action. Many firms, however, have no idea just how much they benefit from these efforts.
By tracking things like marketing sources, lead conversion rates, and the average value of certain law firm client types, a business can start to understand the return on their investments. This, in turn, will help manage where future investments should go.
Client Satisfaction
With online reviews playing an important role in attorney selection, client satisfaction should be important to any healthy law firm. This is not to say we simply want to encourage good reviews and hide the bad. We can learn a lot from client feedback. A confusing intake process could turn potential clients off and a complicated payment system could delay revenue.
Other Metrics
We are sure your firm has other metrics by which you measure success. You could be concerned with the average billable hours per user per week. Or, you could look at the time it takes to return a web inquiry from a potential client. You could even measure how many hours your firm typically spends responding to discovery. The point is, there are many indicators of success in your firm, but you’ll never know what they say unless you measure them.
Where do Law Firms Get Data?
Simply understanding that your law firm wants to measure its business intelligently is a significant first step. However, you won’t get anywhere if you don’t have data on which to run these reports. Financial reports are commonly the most familiar to lawyers because firms tend to have accounting software that tracks it. Profit and Loss statements are easy to come by. So, to run reports on other data, your firm must first store the data somewhere.
Although most of this could be tracked using an excel spreadsheet, we generally don’t advise that. A law firm’s information should be tracked with software built to manage that information. For Marketing data, a client relationship manager (CRM) will often store the data you need. Likewise, most accounting software will work for your law firm’s purpose for financial data. Additionally, information about the management of your case files will generally come from law practice management software.
How do Law Firms use Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence Software?
A truly data-driven law firm will find a way to connect all the disparate pieces of information they track. Some firms use Zapier or Power Automate, while others integrate their platforms using application programming interfaces (APIs). This allows the law firm to run intelligent business reports on information across all business functions. It means KPIs can be more complex and provide better insight.
Because it’s an all-in-one law practice management platform, Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence tool can retrieve and interact with all aspects of your law firm—without integrations. This sets it apart from other business reporting tools for law firms. With it, a firm can track marketing efforts, intake funnels, client value, and billable hours all in one report.
Beyond the information that comes standard in Rocket Matter’s platform, the Business Intelligence tool gains a lot of value from a law firm’s custom fields. Rocket Matter allows users to add custom fields on both the Matter level and the Client level. Importantly, the Business Intelligence tool can connect with these fields when building and running custom reports. This means any piece of data you want to track in your matter or for your clients, you add it as a custom field, and you can start filtering, sorting, and tracking it in a custom-built report.
Although the Business Intelligence tool comes with some standard popular reports, most law firms will want to build custom reports themselves. Fortunately, you won’t need a data science degree to create these reports. Yes, there will likely be some learning curve, but the platform feels similar to the reporting tools in Hubspot, Zen Desk, or other platforms attorneys are familiar with.
Demo Video
The product team at Rocket Matter recently gave us a tour of their business intelligence tool for law firms. Take a look at the video below to see a walkthrough they provided our Legal Tech Advisor, Zack Glaser.
How to Get It
If your law firm wants to learn more about Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence software, contact them at RocketMatter.com and get a free demo and trial account.
Want to learn more about Rocket Matter’s other features? Check out our full review, where you can see a features list, other demo videos, and community comments. Remember that Lawyerist readers get an affinity benefit through the review page.
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Last updated July 12th, 2023
