Monitoring your progress is essential when you’re implementing change. Without an effective system for tracking your progress, it’s easy to get off track and miss potential pitfalls that jeopardize your success.

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Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

Now that you’ve set SMART goals and broken them down into smaller, actionable tasks, how can you measure your performance and ensure that you stay on track? 

KPIs are the key. 

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively you are achieving an objective. You can use KPIs to evaluate the success of your implementation efforts and make decisions based on valuable data.

KPIs provide you with the information you need to make predictions about the future of your firm and spot problems in time to avert them. They also provide an effective system of accountability for yourself and your team. As they say, “what gets measured, gets done.”

KPIs should be very specific and measurable, and they should align with your major goals for your practice.

Let’s say your SMART goal is to improve the firm’s online visibility by establishing a blog by July 1 and publishing 1 post per week in Q3 and Q4. Because you’ve chosen a specific goal, it’s easy to identify your KPI. To measure success, you need to track whether the blog is established by the end of June and whether posts are published weekly for the rest of the year. Whether the blog posts lead to more business is a separate consideration. For your goal, you are simply measuring the establishment and maintenance of the blog. 

Suppose your SMART goal is to increase each lawyer’s average monthly utilization by 5% by December 31 in an effort to generate more revenue. Again, the KPI is clear from the goal itself. Success means you meet the target of a 5% increase in utilization by the specified date.

There are many KPIs relevant to a law firm setting, whether you’re measuring productivity, profitability, or the success of marketing activities. Do you know your practice’s ratio of billable hours to unbillable hours worked? How about your average fee per client? What about your margin on hourly work or fixed fee work? How many cold calls do you get every week, and how many of them become clients? If you have a website or blog, how many visitors become clients?

This week’s tip: determine what you need to measure and then set 2 or 3 KPIs that align with your goals for your practice.

Legal professionals who use KPIs to track their performance can stay focused on their objectives deliver more value for themselves, for their firm and, most importantly, for their clients. Put simply, they’re much more likely to be recognized as true value-driven professionals.

And that’s it. Join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice.

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