Making It Rain (Torrentially!) in Your Law Firm

After a decade of working with thousands of lawyers, Rocket Matter's CEO shares his clients' best tips on boosting profits.

I’m guessing if you want to make it rain in your law firm, you don’t want a little drizzle. You want noisy, tropical, fat-raindrop downpours like the afternoon thunderstorms we get here in South Florida.

I’ve worked tightly with thousands of law firms for more than ten years in my role as CEO of Rocket Matter (a leading cloud-based legal practice management and time and billing software). Our team works closely with our client firms to make sure they’re always operating well. And through the years, I’ve learned a lot about what helps them boost profits—and what doesn’t. I’ve discovered that, in terms of making more money, the three tips below have the power to transform a law firm.

Making It Rain Tip #1

The first thing we need to do is admit that law firms are businesses, allowing us to use words like “profit,” “revenue,” and “net income.”  Learning how you make money is the next critical element to making it rain.

Making money is not as simple as landing clients and working on matters. You have to think about the entire picture of where money comes from and how it gets into your pocket, which is what I refer to as a “revenue cycle.”  For a law firm, the revenue cycle looks like this:

This picture looks different for contingency, flat-fee, and other alternative-fee based firms in that they skip the time capture component, but no matter what your revenue cycle is comprised of the following steps:

  1. A sales funnel, in which prospective clients are made aware of your firm and eventually choose you to represent them
  2. Time capture, if you work with billable hours, and expense capture for all attorneys
  3. Invoicing on a regular basis, ideally once a month
  4. Collections

All stages of the law firm revenue cycle must be strong—if even just one is weak, then your revenue won’t be what it should be.

For most firms, streamlining invoicing and collections—along with more accurate time capture, if your firm bills hourly— is the quickest way to boost revenue. Unfortunately, most small law firms don’t do a good job collecting on the work they perform. In fact, a recent joint study by Georgetown Law and Thomson Reuters indicated that the average law firm only collects 71% of the work they perform. That’s a lot of money left on the table!

Investing in a platform that offers mobile time and expense capture and automated, batch invoicing will radically transform your firm’s revenue if you don’t already have a system in place.  This is what my company’s software, Rocket Matter, is finely tuned to do. Automated collection techniques such as payment plans and recurring billing options can also significantly boost your law firm’s revenues.  

What we also realized at Rocket Matter is that if law firms could send out all of their invoices at once as emails and then invite their clients to pay via a link with a credit card, law firms would greatly simplify their invoicing and collection operations. That’s why Rocket Matter Payments was born, and our clients have greatly eliminated the expense, complexity, delay, and procrastination from their monthly billing process.

Making It Rain Tip #2

To increase revenues at your law firm, you must periodically stop working and shift your mindset.  

When I say “stop working,” I mean you should actually stop working as a lawyer from time to time and focus on the business aspects of your firm instead. It may seem counterintuitive, but the continual lurching from emergency to emergency and the round-the-clock grind of text messages, emails, and communication related to your cases does not allow you to think strategically about your firm.

If you want to make it rain, you need to recognize that your law firm is a business that needs love and attention. As the saying goes, you need to work ON your business, not just IN your business. That’s why you need time to chart a strategy, establish concrete goals, and track your progress against them. You need to identify your strengths and weaknesses, evaluate how you fit into the market, and ask tough questions.

However, it’s impossible to do these kinds of things when you’re caught up in the daily stream of interruptions and minutia. You have to get out of the day-to-day operations and conduct off-site planning sessions or plan quarterly or yearly initiatives. Most smaller law firms don’t do this—but  it can really make a difference in your bottom line.

To understand which key performance indicators (KPIs) are relevant to a law firm to help you set and track goals, check out The Lean Law Firm by Dave Maxfield and yours truly. If you need a good guide about how to plan offsite meetings and set priorities, you’ll find great information in Traction by Gino Wickman.

Making It Rain Tip #3

My last tip for making it rain concerns the new clients aspect of the revenue cycle. Follow the mantra we use at Rocket Matter: If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.  

In other words, spend time understanding what your KPIs are for marketing and review them as you go about your marketing initiatives. Otherwise, you have no idea if your efforts are successful or a huge waste of money. (Again, I cover the most critical marketing KPIs extensively in my book.)  

Once you start studying your numbers, you can set goals. You can also keep your marketing staff or consultants accountable for their performances.

Additionally, focusing on measurable marketing helps you to experiment with different campaigns. You can, for example, test one ad campaign versus another ad campaign to see which one results in more website visitors or inbound calls. This technique is known as A/B testing.

Measuring your marketing is not only the domain of advertising and the web. You can also apply it to your best source of business referrals. Ultimately, you want to identify which are your best sources of new clients and invest in them until they no longer bear fruit.


Larry Port, Rocket Matter founder and CEO, is a speaker and award-winning writer at the crossroads of the legal profession, cutting edge technology, and law firm marketing. He is the co-author of The Lean Law Firm: Run Your Firm Like the World’s Most Profitable & Efficient Businesses, an ABA bestseller. Larry also frequently discusses design and efficiency and quality techniques in the software industry that can be leveraged by lawyers and other legal professionals. He was named to the Fastcase 50 honoring the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.