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.

Focus on Profitability to Maximize Resources

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.

Actions to Take

Use AI for Good in Family Law Practice

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.

Actions to Take

Foster a Culture that Values Your Firm’s People

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.

Actions to Take

Embrace Progress to Build Your Firm’s Future

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 

Moving Beyond Billable Hours 

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. 

Understand Attorney Cost Rates to Set a Profitability Foundation 

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: 

Attorney cost rates include base salary, benefits, overhead and practice area specifics


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. 

Practice Area Profitability: Analyzing Where the Firm Thrives 

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. 

Leverage and the Concept of 'Highest and Best Use' 

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. 

Associate and partner-level attorneys, staff, and technology handle different types of law firm work

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 and Profitability Tracking 

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. 

Turn Insights into Action 

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. 

Where Technology Drives Profitability in Law Firms 

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: 

Technology Shouldn’t Be the First Budget Reduction 

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. 

1. Underutilizing Software Features 

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. 

2. Lack of Ongoing Training and Support 

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. 

3. Not Using Technology to Attract and Retain Talent 

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. 

The Future of Law Firm Profitability is Powered by Technology 

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. 

Why Profitability Matters for Law Firms 

Profitability is one of the most critical measures of success for any law firm. But while it’s easy to fall into the mindset of “more billable hours equal more profit,” the reality is more complex. Simply focusing on the standard math equation of revenue minus expenses equals profitability doesn’t always tell the full story of a firm’s financial health

In a recent webinar, “The Next Generation of Law Firm Profitability,” Debbie Foster, CEO of Affinity Consulting, and Paige Roncke, Chief Revenue Officer at Centerbase, explored the essential components of law firm profitability, moving beyond the basic math to consider how different practice areas, lawyer cost and billing rates, client profitability, revenue generation, and cost management play a crucial role. 

How Do Law Firms Calculate Profitability? 

At a foundational level, profitability is calculated as revenue minus expenses. It's a straightforward equation, but there are multiple factors influencing law firms’ revenue and expenses.  

“While the simple math for profitability is accurate,” Debbie says, “in law firms, we need to look beyond what the profitability number is to what the profitability number could be in order to maximize what is left.” 

To do this, you can define your firm’s profitability inputs by considering:  

“There are many ways to look at profitability, so you have to double down and figure out what combination of these inputs makes sense for your firm, and how will you track it,” Debbie suggests. 

Let’s take a look at where to start. 

The 5 Key Drivers of Law Firm Profitability 

To move beyond the basic profitability equation, analyze the underlying factors that influence both revenue and expenses at your firm. By doing so, you can identify opportunities to maximize profits and make data-driven decisions. Here are five key areas to assess in your firm. 

1. Lawyer Cost Structure and Billable Rates 

Each lawyer in a firm has a different billing rate and cost structure. Partners might bill at a higher rate, but they come with higher compensation. Associates, on the other hand, may have lower billing rates but can be profit centers if their work is leveraged effectively. 

Take the time to figure out each of your lawyer’s cost rate — what it costs them to provide their services — factoring in their salary, benefits, office space costs, and technology costs. By calculating this cost, you can determine the minimum amount each lawyer needs to bill to cover their expenses and contribute to the firm's profitability. 

Example of a lawyer cost rate calculation

  1. Start with the lawyer's annual salary — for easy math, we’ll use $120,000. 
  2. Calculate the monthly salary: $120,000 / 12 = $10,000 
  3. Factor in billable hours. Divide the monthly salary by the lawyer’s expected monthly billable hours to get an hourly rate: $10,000 / 100 billable hours = $100 per hour 
  4. Add benefits and overhead. Factor in the cost of benefits per hour (e.g., $30/hour) and overhead per hour (e.g., $70/hour) to get the lawyer’s hourly cost rate: $100 per hour + $30 hourly benefits + $70 hourly overhead = $200 hourly cost rate           
Example of how to calculate a lawyer's cost rate

Actionable insight: Now that you know how much it costs for this lawyer to provide their services, you can better determine a billable rate that will enable profitability. Follow this method to calculate the hourly cost rate for each lawyer and compare it to their hourly billing rate. If a lawyer’s cost rate is higher than their billing rate, this could indicate a profitability problem. Ensure that work is assigned based on each lawyer's cost-effectiveness, balancing their rates with the profitability of the cases they handle.  

2. Practice Area Profitability 

Not all practice areas are equally profitable. Some might generate higher revenue but come with greater expenses, while others may be less lucrative but require fewer resources. For example, family law cases might involve more administrative work, while corporate law could bring in larger retainers but demand more expensive expertise. 

Actionable Insight: Start by analyzing each practice area’s cost rate to determine its profitability. Track the hours billed, expenses incurred, and the average rate charged. By understanding which areas are most profitable, you can make strategic decisions about where to focus your resources and who to leverage in your firm for different types of work. 

“Understanding cost structure gives insight into appropriate billing rates for attorneys within a practice group,” Paige says. “With this information, you can balance the practice area’s work, having attorneys with a lower cost rate handle work that doesn’t require a senior partner’s expertise, which starts to help you adjust your profitability for that practice area.”  

3. Client Profitability 

Not all clients are created equal in terms of profitability. Some may require more time, resources, and attention, while others are more straightforward and generate higher profit margins. By understanding which clients contribute most to the firm's profitability, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest your time and effort. 

Actionable Insight: Regularly review client profitability by tracking the time spent on each client’s matters and the revenue they generate. This will help identify high-maintenance clients who consume resources without delivering commensurate revenue, enabling the firm to renegotiate terms or focus on more profitable clients. 

4. Revenue Generation 

Maximizing revenue might seem like a straightforward goal, but the practical aspects of capturing all billable time, diligently following up on leads, minimizing write-offs, and optimizing accounts receivable collections often fall by the wayside. It's common to underestimate the significance of these seemingly mundane yet critical tasks that can make or break your firm's profitability. 

Graphic showing areas for law firms to optimize revenue

Actionable Insight: Maximizing these revenue-generating tasks comes down to having the processes and tools in place to set your firm up for success. Paige sums up four actionable areas to optimize your firm’s revenue. 

5.Cost Management 

Law firms have three main expense categories — personnel, office space, and technology — and managing these costs is another important factor in a firm’s profitability. However, it’s not necessarily about minimizing expenses, but rather optimizing what you spend.  

“It’s important to not waste money,” Debbie says, “and you do that by making sure you’re leveraging what you buy. You need to think about people planning, space planning, and technology planning to utilize them all effectively.”  

Actionable insight: Using technology as an example, if you invest in cloud-based software but don’t review the updates and learn about new features regularly, then you’re not leveraging the software — or your money — to its full capacity. Similarly, when you hire new staff members but provide little training on the firm’s processes, technology, and culture, you’re not optimizing personnel or technology, and you’re risking additional expenses through attrition if staff members become disengaged to the point of resigning. 

Law Firm Profitability is About More Than Just the Bottom Line 

Understanding profitability isn’t just about looking at the revenue minus expenses equation. It’s about going beyond basic math and exploring how you can optimize each component of your business. By focusing on core drivers of profitability — cost and billing structure, practice area profitability, client profitability, revenue generation, and cost management — your firm can uncover opportunities for long-term growth and profitability. 

Stay tuned for our next article, which will focus on the impact of technology and how to leverage it for law firm profitability. 

As the legal landscape becomes more complex and competitive, adopting modern law practice management software is one of the best ways to help your law firm keep up. Legal technology can greatly increase your competitive advantage, make your operations more efficient, and continuously enhance client service. 

However, this journey isn’t as simple as purchasing the first legal software you come across online. It involves a step-by-step process of assessing your firm’s needs, conducting due diligence to select the right vendor for your firm, and implementing the software. 

Based on the latest insights from Centerbase's 2024 Guide to Buying Law Practice Management Software, this article will help you navigate and simplify the path to selecting the best legal practice management software for your firm. 

Why Law Firms Change Technology 

Law firms turn to technology for a variety of proactive and reactive reasons. Proactively, firms seek opportunities to increase efficiency, improve client service, and maximize cost savings. Reactively, they are compelled to switch software when faced with challenges such as missing functionality, the need for remote work capabilities, system consolidation, data security issues, or the need to retire an old server

Proactive and reactive reasons for choosing law firm software

Assessing Law Firm Technology Needs 

Before embarking on the legal technology journey, take an inventory of your firm’s current technology infrastructure. Then, ask your team to identify gaps your current tech stack doesn’t fill to understand their vision to optimize law practice operations. 

By building a cross-functional team to represent your law firm's software user base and setting expectations for what the new software should accomplish, law firms can outline a clear vision for their technological needs. Be sure to consider budgets during this assessment, too.  

Choosing a Legal Software Vendor 

Once the technology needs have been assessed, the next step involves selecting legal practice management software that's right for your firm. This process requires a comprehensive review of potential vendors based on selection criteria that go beyond cost.  

Features and capabilities to consider in law firm software 

Create a short list of best law software vendors 

Now that you've researched various software vendors' offerings, make a short list of finalists, send them a request for proposal, and set up demonstrations. 

Collect your findings on how well each legal practice management software meets your team's expectations, conduct reference checks, and review terms of service and service level agreements. 

You're now ready to score the proposals, run pilot tests of the best options, run the numbers, and make a choice. 

Implementing New Legal Software 

With a vendor selected, the next step is implementation. This process may include stages like data migration, setup, configuration, and testing.

Training is also indispensable at this stage as it is vital for maximizing the return on the investment in law firm technology while also driving successful software adoption.

What to look for in effective technology training

Just as you're evaluating the software's overall ability to meet your firm's needs, you should put equal emphasis on understanding the vendor's process for creating a smooth legal software implementation

Moving Forward with New Legal Practice Software 

Keep in mind, legal technology isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. It needs to be the right fit for your law firm to truly optimize operations and stay competitive in the fast-evolving legal industry. 

With the meticulous planning, careful selection, and continuous learning we've outlined, you'll be on your way to using technology as a powerful tool to enhance efficiency, improve client service, and contribute to your firm's overall success. 

Get our complete guide to buying legal practice management software for detailed tips and considerations to choose the right technology for your firm.  

In today's legal landscape, staying competitive and efficient is crucial. If your firm isn’t using an all-in-one legal practice management software to streamline firm and client operations, you’re missing out on the highest level of efficiency and competitive advantages to set your firm apart. The cost of not having such software is too great to not act.

Multiple types of productivity software exist to improve law firms’ efficiency with certain tasks, such as client intake, case management, and timekeeping. But having multiple disparate systems requires opening each one, toggling among them when switching tasks, leading to less efficiency overall, not more.

Yet, many law firms hesitate to adopt legal practice management software that could solve their efficiency woes, underestimating what law firms stand to lose by choosing the status quo. Just like neglecting IT infrastructure, ignoring legal technology can lead to significant financial and operational downsides. 

But why do law firm hesitate to adopt legal software? According to Forbes, choosing not to upgrade software is rooted in common fears, including:

What’s the cost of not having legal practice management software?

Without legal practice management software, you’ll miss out on operational efficiency, best practices, and firm culture benefits that optimize your law practice. Let’s dive into some of the greatest potential costs associated with not implementing an all-in-one legal technology platform.

Efficient and accurate accounting

Building your general ledger accounting into your timekeeping, billing and accounting operations in one platform gives you the most efficient and accurate accounting operations.

Integrating data for each of these processes means you enter the data once, and it populates everywhere. This helps your firm avoid double-entry recordkeeping between multiple software systems, and it ensures consistent data across the entire system.

Without the right legal practice management software, you might even miss out on the ability to integrate general ledger firm and trust accounting in one place, which enables reconciliation across your client and firm accounts. With such a system, you can track every dollar in and out of your law firm.

Loss of Billable Hours 

Without streamlined processes, you and your attorneys are wasting time on administrative tasks. Legal practice management software automates billing, scheduling, and document management, freeing up time for billable work. This directly impacts revenue, as even a small increase in billable hours can lead to substantial financial gains over time. 

Data Security Risks 

Without robust software solutions, your firm could be at risk of data breaches. With the high degree of sensitive client information you handle, a data breach can be costly and damage your firm’s reputation. Legal practice management software often includes secure data storage and encryption, ensuring client confidentiality and compliance with legal standards. 

Client Dissatisfaction 

Efficient case management is key to client satisfaction. Manual processes can lead to delays, missed deadlines, and errors, frustrating clients. Legal practice management software enhances communication, tracks case progress, and ensures deadlines are met, leading to better client relationships and retention. 

Competitive Disadvantage 

Law firms that use technology risk falling behind competitors who are more tech-savvy. Legal practice management software enables firms to leverage analytics and reporting, improve marketing efforts, and offer better services, helping them stay competitive in a crowded market. 

An investment or a cost?

Investing in legal practice management software is not just about improving efficiency; it's about protecting your firm's financial health and reputation. The cost of doing nothing can far exceed the investment in the right software solution. If you're considering enhancing your practice with technology, now is the time to act. Don't let your firm fall behind — explore the benefits of legal practice management software today. 

Modernizing your law practice management software is an enticing — and strategic — end goal. Whether that means moving your firm’s data from a server to the cloud or upgrading to an all-in-one law firm management and growth platform, you can significantly enhance efficiency and client service with modern software.

But all the features within law firm management platforms mean nothing if you find yourself questioning the accuracy of your firm’s data. Christopher Holmes, Chief Operating Officer at Hackett Feinberg P.C., knows this reality all too well.

Modernizing law practice management

In 2020, Chris led the charge to modernize his firm’s operations. A long-time user of Timeslips, Hackett Feinberg was eager to upgrade from an on-premise server to a cloud-based solution.

The firm decided on practice management software that seemed to fit the bill, as it offered the integrated practice management documents, email, and accounting capabilities Chris and his team wanted.

“The goal in moving to that system was to have a modern platform that would better serve our clients, be user friendly, and improve our firm’s efficiency,” he says.

When your legal software’s data integrity fails

After three years with the software, Hackett Feinberg learned its limitations. Primarily, the firm encountered data integrity issues in its accounting, where a deposit would have a date different from other deposits made the same day, throwing off the firm’s bank records.

In other instances, the system showed that clients’ payments were due, even though they had been paid.

“These issues were alarming, and they made us wonder what we might be missing,” Chris says.

The firm recognized other limitations, too, namely a lack of robust, customizable, user-friendly reporting.

“The reporting dashboards were not useful,” Chris says. “They were templates that couldn’t be customized, weren’t based on user roles, and they didn’t have proper user-based restrictions.”

Converting to Centerbase’s law practice management platform

Eventually, it was time to explore other options.

“I got a demo of Centerbase and saw the difference immediately,” Chris says.

Centerbase’s advanced reporting and customizability now give Chris the information he needs.

“I love that I can customize our dashboards by user roles, so we can have a managing partner dashboard, a new associate dashboard, etc., with information that’s relevant to them, and they can do what they need to,” he explains.

He especially appreciates not having to enter data and calculate compensation manually, thanks to Centerbase’s Production and Origination report. “I can let attorneys know their compensation on a daily basis if I need to,” Chris says.

Prioritizing data integrity during implementation

Chris particularly appreciated Centerbase’s focus on data integrity during the onboarding and implementation process.

Centerbase has been in communication with us during the entire data conversion process, working with us to overcome the limitations of the data available from our prior software.

Christopher Holmes, COO, Hackett Feinberg

Centerbase’s proprietary implementation methods deliver accurate data imports by mapping and validating the firm’s data, ensuring it is accurate, organized, configured to fit the firm’s needs, and ready to use on day one.

Chris also likes that his team has an organized implementation process to follow with clear expectations, accountability, and target dates for completing tasks. Additionally, thorough live and online training give them the support they need.

“I’ve been part of software conversions before with larger law firms, and Centerbase’s implementation process brings back those previous positive experiences. The Centerbase team has been great and very helpful. They are magicians,” Chris says.

Strategic financial planning is essential to ensure firm stability and growth. Modern law firms need precise financial data to target opportunities to improve their bottom line and set them up for success, all of which can be accomplished with industry-leading law practice management software (LPMS).

Here are five steps to optimize your law firm’s financial planning.

1. Review your law firm’s financial statements

Take the pulse of your firm’s financial health by reviewing your financial statements from your LPMS. Automated, detailed income statements and balance sheets save time and reduce the risk of errors associated with manual data compilation. Reviewing financial and performance reports can help you identify areas of concern so you can take proactive measures to address potential issues.

The most accurate records are found in an LPMS that integrates timekeeping, billing, and accounting data all in one platform. Integration helps firms avoid double-entry recordkeeping between multiple software applications and ensures data congruency across the entire system: if you enter data once, it populates everywhere.

Leading LPMS platforms also integrate general ledger firm accounting and trust/retainer accounting in one platform. For example, Centerbase’s accounting tools double-check all of your client and firm accounts and complete a three-way reconciliation of your trust accounts, comparing your bank balance to your trust ledger to the sum of your individual client ledger balances, keeping you compliant with IOLTA best practices and state bar requirements.

2. Evaluate your law firm’s financial goals

Conduct a comprehensive assessment of the financial objectives you set for the firm in the previous year. Review your progress against goals, examining aspects such as unexpected expenses, marketing outcomes, and shifts in advertising costs. A detailed analysis enables informed adjustments to your business strategy for the coming year and helps you adapt to changing market dynamics.

Your LPMS likely has features for setting and tracking financial goals that allow you to monitor your fiscal performance in real-time. Leading LPMS platforms give you easy access to key metrics with customized dashboards and reporting that allow you to quickly evaluate whether you are meeting their financial objectives and make data-driven adjustments.

3. Update your law firm’s budget

After scrutinizing whether you met last year’s goals, it’s imperative to update your firm’s budget for the upcoming year. Consider any changes in the business landscape, including new expenses or variations in revenue. Smart resource allocation and accounting for unforeseen expenditures are critical to maintaining financial stability.

Your LPMS can help you create, manage, and update budgets seamlessly. Top platforms integrate with other financial tools that allow you to adjust budget allocations based on changing circumstances, ensuring that your budget accurately reflects your firm’s financial priorities.

Understanding incoming and outgoing cash and taking preemptive steps to address potential cash flow challenges are imperative. LPMS makes it easy to track client payments, invoicing, and expense management in real-time so you can take a constant pulse on your cash flow. This data can help you negotiate extended client payment terms and manage expenses more effectively.

Identifying opportunities to reduce costs is integral to enhancing net revenue and overall profitability. Law firms can explore various strategies, including adopting more cost-effective solutions and streamlining operational processes. Your LPMS can identify areas where you can optimize costs. Check your software’s expense tracking features to analyze spending patterns and identify opportunities for negotiation with suppliers. A detailed breakdown of expenses can help you make informed decisions on cost-reduction strategies.

4. Find ways to boost your firm’s revenue streams

Finding new ways to boost your firm’s revenue can be difficult, but data from your LPMS can highlight the way. LPMS with robust profitability reporting tools can help you track profitability at the individual, practice group, office, and entire firm levels to pinpoint how to improve your firm’s financial performance. Based on your results, you may want to expand your firm’s service offerings, target new client demographics, or revisit pricing structures.

LPMS with advanced automation features, such as automated time capture, can help ensure that you are maximizing your attorneys’ billable hours. This software can also help you accelerate invoicing and follow up with slow-to-pay clients, improving your revenue stream.

5. Seek professional guidance

Engaging the services of a professional accountant or financial advisor provides valuable insights and ensures that financial decisions are grounded in expertise. Your LPMS is a collaborative platform where financial professionals, such as accountants or financial advisors, can access relevant financial data. Centerbase offers accountants a free login to help with end-of-year audits.

Run your law firm like a business

Strategic financial planning ensures modern law firms run like a business. Following these tips and optimizing your use of your LPMS can position your firm for sustained growth and profitability.

Check out Centerbase’s robust accounting and financial management features to learn how we can help you strengthen your law firm’s financial performance.