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Family law firms face unique challenges that require innovative strategies to ensure long-term success. In advance of the AAML Annual Meeting in Chicago, Affinity Consulting Group, Centerbase, and 12 AAML fellows discussed how family law practices can adapt to future demands.
The conversation centered around three critical areas: profitability, the transformative role of AI in family law, and cultivating a strong, people-centered firm culture. This summary captures the group’s insights and actionable recommendations, offering a roadmap for family law firms looking to thrive in a competitive and tech-driven future.
Profitability is an important measure of success for any law firm because it helps determine how efficiently the firm utilizes resources and how much value it delivers to clients. Measuring law firm profitability requires analyzing the underlying factors that influence profitability’s core components — revenue and expenses — which helps you identify opportunities to maximize profits and make data-driven decisions.
The usage of AI is changing the way attorneys and law firms operate for good. But rather than fearing AI, the mindful adoption of AI offers tremendous promise to enhance the way legal professionals work, reducing tedium in the practice of law while freeing up valuable time for thinking strategically, identifying creative solutions, and engaging thoughtfully with clients. Embracing AI thoughtfully is an act of helping your firm operate in a modern legal landscape.
Your people are your number one asset. Prioritize onboarding and retention strategies that help you take care of your team and build a strong culture centered on the firm’s values. Implementing these strategies proactively will help safeguard against costly employee turnover and set your firm up for greater success.
Family law firms have an opportunity to set new standards in how they serve clients, support their teams, and use technology to streamline their operations. Embracing this future requires a commitment to rethinking traditional approaches to profitability, talent management, and the role of AI. Now is the time to assess your firm’s strengths and identify where these strategies can make a meaningful impact.
By Debbie Foster, CEO, Affinity Consulting Group
Law firm profitability is often viewed in simplistic terms: the more billable hours attorneys log, the more profitable the firm becomes. But the reality of assessing profitability is far more nuanced. Profitability can be sliced and diced in several ways — by practice area, client, lawyer, and matter profitability, and more — and your firm has to determine what’s appropriate to analyze.
That can get complicated, but my goal with this article is to help make profitability analysis feel doable by looking at just one example — practice area profitability. We’ll look at how you can use practice area information to make strategic decisions about resource allocation, maximizing your profit margins, and maintaining a healthy work environment for your attorneys and staff.
Before we can begin analyzing profitability by practice area, we must understand what it costs your firm to provide its services by determining each attorney’s cost rate.
This is essentially the hourly cost of employing them, including salary, benefits, and overhead expenses such as office space and technology. This rate forms the foundation for assessing whether your firm is pricing its services appropriately and whether each attorney is contributing to overall profitability.
Calculating attorney cost rates involves several components:
Calculate the cost rate for each attorney by adding their salary and benefits to their share of overhead expenses. This will give you a baseline cost per hour for each attorney, which can then be compared to their billing rate to determine their contribution to profitability.
Now that you’ve established attorney cost rates, you're ready to analyze profitability by practice area. This is often a relevant category to assess within a firm because it can reveal valuable insights that might not be apparent from a high-level overview of your firm's financials.
For example, a firm may appear profitable overall but harbor unprofitable practice areas that are being subsidized by more successful ones. This situation can lead to resentment among partners and potentially affect staff retention.
Not all practice areas are created equal — some may generate substantial revenue but come with high costs, while others may be highly efficient profit centers.
You can understand practice area profitability at both a high level and a granular level. By breaking down profitability by practice area, firms can identify which areas are driving the most profit and which may be underperforming. Here are some guidelines to approach this analysis:
You want to regularly assess the profitability of each practice area by tracking revenue, costs, and utilization rates. Adjust resource allocation to ensure the right attorneys are working on the right matters to maximize profitability.
Another crucial factor that impacts profitability is how work is allocated across the firm. The concept of “highest and best use” can help ensure that the right person is doing the right work at the right time. This is particularly important for maximizing profitability in practice areas with mixed levels of complexity.
Conduct regular reviews of workload distribution to ensure that partners, associates, and support staff are all working at their highest and best use. This will help optimize profitability while maintaining a balanced workload across the firm.
Benchmarking plays an important role in understanding whether your firm is performing as well as it should be. You can benchmark against both internal and external standards to identify areas for improvement and set realistic goals for growth.
Use benchmarking data to set performance targets for practice areas and individual attorneys. This will help create accountability and ensure that everyone in the firm is aligned with profitability goals.
Maximizing profitability requires moving beyond increasing billable hours to taking a holistic approach. This should include understanding attorney cost rates first, and then analyzing a category that makes sense for your firm, such as practice area performance. With this combined cost rate at practice area data, you can begin allocating resources strategically — all to identify hidden opportunities for growth, make data-driven decisions, and ensure long-term profitability for the firm.
By Paige Roncke, Chief Revenue Officer, Centerbase
The legal industry is at a critical inflection point where law firms can no longer identify only as legal services providers. Law firms must also be data and technology companies in order to effectively compete in the market for long-term success.
I discussed this new landscape with Debbie Foster, CEO of Affinity Consulting, during a webinar on law firm profitability. A substantial portion of that conversation was rooted in the theory that profitability is more than a simple math formula of revenue minus cost; rather, it’s about understanding your firm's opportunity to maximize revenue streams while also minimizing costs without compromising quality of legal services.
It’s a misnomer to assume the application of technology only minimizes cost. Yes, technology has a critical role in automating administrative tasks, optimizing billing processes and creating comprehensive and speedy communications both internally and externally. However, technology is best utilized when the full power of software is applied to maximizing potential revenue streams.
This can be software-driven enhancements like improving time capture to create more billable hours, building reports that provide deeper insights into profitability at various levels — from individual attorneys to entire practice areas — through data clarity and availability, and utilizing that data to retain and attract stronger talent that can bill at higher rates.
In other words, as Debbie stated, “Technology should be used as a revenue multiplier.” And multiplied revenue leads to greater profitability.
While many firms have already made investments in technology, they may not be fully utilizing these tools. Let’s examine how technology can enhance law firm profitability by improving time tracking, managing billing, and providing actionable insights into the firm’s financial health. We'll also discuss common technology pitfalls and how to avoid them, so your firm can make the most of your technology investments.
With the right tools, firms can unlock efficiencies that translate directly into higher profits. The key is knowing how to leverage technology effectively to improve law firm profitability, such as:
Despite these opportunities to use technology as a revenue multiplier to drive significant profitability gains, many firms struggle to fully leverage the tools they have — and that often leads to cutting technology costs. But cutting costs isn’t a sustainable path to profitability.
Consider these common pitfalls to avoid so you can maximize your technology to advance your revenue streams.
Many law firms invest in technology but only use a small fraction of the available features. For example, your firm might not be taking full advantage of your practice management software’s time tracking, billing, and reporting features that could improve efficiency. Leveraging a tool’s full capabilities can not only improve efficiency but help reduce stress at work, too. Encourage continuous learning, where attorneys and staff explore new features and share tips for improving efficiency.
Too often, technology implementation is treated as a one-time event rather than an ongoing process. A lot of effort goes into the rollout and not enough into continuous training to learn about the tool after it’s been implemented.
As Debbie says:
“We really need to marry up our technology spend with building a culture of training.”
Pay attention to new updates and features, and make sure your staff learns how to use them by providing ongoing training and support. Consider hosting monthly lunch-and-learn sessions to discuss new ways to use your tools more effectively.
One of the best things technology can do for your firm is standardize processes. Sure, every lawyer prefers to do certain things differently, but technology can help you agree on standardizing core elements of practicing law and running a firm. The result goes beyond efficiency.
New associates coming out of law school want to gain experience with modern technology — and they expect it. Maximizing your technology presents your firm as forward-thinking and committed to providing resources to work effectively, and that can help you stand out as an employer of choice.
Newer technology presents employees with an enhanced user experience with fewer clicks, simpler and more modern interfaces, and intuitive ease of use. This streamlined experience over older systems leads to higher job satisfaction, boosting your talent retention and attraction.
Technology is no longer optional — it’s essential for creating a long-term competitive edge. Whether it’s automating time tracking, streamlining billing, or analyzing profitability across practice areas, the right tools can make all the difference in how efficiently your firm operates.
By embracing technology and ensuring it is fully integrated into your firm’s processes, you can unlock new levels of profitability, improve client satisfaction, and future-proof your business for years to come. The key is not just investing in technology but leveraging it to its full potential—and continuously improving how you use it through ongoing training and fostering a culture the embraces technology.
Written by Robin Neill
More and more law firms are recognizing how important it is to manage themselves like a business to survive in today’s competitive market. Businesses operate with efficiency, strategic planning, and a keen eye on the bottom line — principles that law firms can adopt to enhance their operational effectiveness. By embracing business management practices such as budgeting, law firms can optimize their resources, streamline processes, and invest in technology to improve their service.
A budget provides a structured roadmap for financial stability, strategic decision-making, and sustainable growth. Creating a law firm budget requires careful planning, collaboration, and attention to detail. Here are seven steps that can help your law firm create an effective budget.
Budgeting shouldn’t be a last-minute task. Law firms should initiate the budgeting process well in advance, ideally in the third quarter. Starting early ensures firms have ample time to assess their current financial standing, analyze past spending patterns, and anticipate future costs.
A fundamental step in budgeting is examining the firm’s profit and loss (P&L) statement from previous years. By comparing actual expenditures with previous years’ data, law firms can identify trends and patterns.
Areas to focus on include salaries and rent, which tend to be the largest expenses in a law firm budget. Don’t forget to consider inflation.
Setting clear, measurable, and realistic goals is fundamental to the budgeting process — and those goals must align with the firm’s overall strategic objectives. Whether the aim is to sustain current levels of success or to expand to new locations or practices, having a well-defined vision guides the budgeting process effectively.
For instance, a law firm planning to increase its partner count from 10 to 20 in the next year needs to account for higher advertising costs, additional attorney salaries, and potential increases in professional dues and liability insurance.
Successful budgeting necessitates collaboration between key stakeholders. This includes financial experts, managing partners, human resources professionals, and accountants. Each participant brings a unique perspective to the table, ensuring that the budget addresses all aspects of the firm’s operations.
Regular consultations and brainstorming sessions with these stakeholders can provide invaluable insights and foster a culture of financial transparency within the firm.
While analyzing the P&L statement, law firms often overlook certain unexpected costs. Items such as professional liability insurance, litigation expenses, or regulatory compliance costs can fluctuate, impacting the budget unexpectedly. By accounting for these variables and having a contingency fund, firms can avoid financial strain when unforeseen expenses arise.
Recognizing that employees are a firm’s most valuable asset, law firms should offer a competitive salary and benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, and professional development opportunities. A comprehensive benefits package can attract top talent and ensure staff retention and satisfaction. Additionally, employee well-being initiatives such as mental health support programs or flexible work arrangements can enhance productivity and foster a positive work environment.
Law firms must factor in the costs of these employee benefits while budgeting. Firms should also take into account salary increases, such as cost-of-living adjustments, to stay competitive in the market.
Law firms should invest in advanced legal software with accounting features to track expenditures efficiently. These legal technology tools provide detailed reports on profitability based on various parameters, such as attorney performance, case type, and office location. Implementing artificial intelligence-driven tools can deliver insights into future financial trends and assist firms in making proactive budgeting decisions.
Transforming a law firm into a business entity demands a proactive approach to budgeting. Law firms can use budgets to position themselves for sustainable growth, client satisfaction, and long-term success.
Centerbase has a robust suite of tools designed to optimize law firm financial performance. Get in touch for a free demo of our tools and learn how our software can improve your law firm’s profitability.
Written by Carol Patterson
For five quarters in a row, law firm profitability has fallen, according to the 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market, a study conducted by the Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown. (Data are based on reported results from 170 US-based law firms, including 46 AmLaw 100 firms, 47 AmLaw 200 firms, and 77 midsize law firms.) Profits per equity partner are down for the first time since 2009. Client payments and realization rates are down too.
Demand has also dropped for everyone except midsize firms, where clients are flocking because they want quality legal services without the major firm price tag.
So, how can small and medium-sized law firms capitalize on this demand and optimize their profitability? That’s what we’ll cover in this article.
Law firms should focus on profitability for a number of reasons. First, being profitable ensures that the firm can sustain its operations and provide quality legal services to clients. Having a profit allows firms to comfortably cover their operating expenses, such as rent, salaries, technology, research materials, and marketing, and establish contingency funds and reserves for unexpected expenses or downturns in business, such as a global pandemic, potential lawsuit, or market uncertainties.
It’s also important for law firms to have sufficient funds to invest in resources and infrastructure to stay competitive and deliver efficient services. To stay ahead of the curve, firms should make investments in technology, legal research tools, document management systems, communication tools and client portals, matter management systems, and training. The more profitable a firm is, the better it can enhance its capabilities and client service through investments like these. And the more investments a firm makes, the better able it is to attract, engage, and retain attorneys and staff members — not to mention pay them competitively.
Finally, profitable law firms are positioned to pursue growth opportunities and expand their practice areas or geographic reach. They can invest in client and business development strategies that attract new clients and increase their market share.
The baseline profitability goal for a law firm is 50 percent. If your firm isn’t hitting that mark, it may be because your expenses are too high or you aren’t earning enough revenue. Or maybe you are too heavily staffed, which can drain your law firm’s financial resources. The key is to figure out what is causing the problem.
Many firms look at their profit and loss statements, but these statements don’t tell you the whole story. The typical law firm P&L report isn’t granular enough to help you determine the true source of revenue and expenses. You may have a timekeeper who brings in a lot of revenue but not enough to cover their incredibly high expenses, for example. Or you may have a million-dollar client, but what you shell out to keep that client and maintain their business is so high that you’re essentially paying the client to remain on your roster. But you likely can’t tell that from your current financials.
The problem stems from too many law firms not running their firms like a business. Law firms that lack accountants don’t fully understand the concepts of what makes firms profitable. If your firm’s office manager or paralegals are managing your accounting, they are certainly capable of handling billing, checks, and cash receipts, but they won’t be able to focus on your law firm’s bigger financial picture.
The bottom line is that if you’re focusing just on revenue and expenses, you’re missing important details. Many law firms overreact when expenses look high and look for ways to make cuts. But if you’re focused on reducing spending, you’re also contracting your business, and the revenue will follow, as will employee morale and output.
And if you aren’t yet using law firm accounting software, you’re just planning your law firm’s future based on guesswork. That wouldn’t pass muster for your clients, and it shouldn’t pass muster for your shareholders, either.
The key is to study profitability by timekeeper. This way, you can discern which attorneys are in the clear and which need help. To get the full picture of expenses and profits for every timekeeper, you need to monitor direct expenses, indirect expenses, plus overhead. But most law firm billing platforms can’t deliver this information without running reports from hundreds of general ledger accounts.
Centerbase is here to fill the gap. Our new Profitability Reporting tool delivers the data that your partners need to drive smarter business decisions. Our tool goes beyond showing more than just data on what’s been billed and collected. Our platform helps you track revenue, expenses, and profit margins at the firm, practice group, and individual levels, so you can optimize your firm’s profitability and improve its financial performance. You can also analyze key metrics such as billable hours and realization rates so you can set profitable billing rates and pricing and create accurate budgets. With our platform, you can determine which timekeepers are most valuable to your firm, what practice areas to expand, and which matters are contributing to — and hurting — your bottom line.
Centerbase puts real-time accounting tools in the hands of everyone in your law firm. It’s like having your own personal accountant on call. Contact us for a free demo and learn how our profitability reporting can help you kick-start your law firm’s growth.
