How Law Firms Can Increase Income By $100k Per Partner In 1 Year

Admin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:00:13 GMT

Measurement improves performance. If you measure the following 5 key performance indicators, your profits per equity partner will increase. These drivers are:

Leverage
Rate
Realization
Productivity
Margin

Leverage in the above model is based on head count leverage. Head count leverage is the ratio of equity partners to non-equity fee earners.

Rate in the above model is based on the effective billable rate for all fee earners. You get this by adding all fee earner rates and dividing the sum by the number of fee earners.

Realization in the above model is based on the amount of fees billed against what was worked. You get this from dividing the sum of all fee earner hours billed by the sum of all fee earner hours worked.

Productivity in the above model is the sum of all fee earner billable hours divided by the total number of fee earners.

Margin is net income divided by total fee revenue.

Here is the scenario. Your firm has 29 fee earners. Eleven equity partners, eleven associates/non-equity partners/of counsel, and seven paralegals. You have a total of 50 employees including equity partners. Your effective billing rate is $275, your average fee earner productivity is 1,690 per year, your firm writes down or discounts an average of 10% of work performed (90% realization) and your cost per head is $140,903.

Based on the above, profits per equity partner would be $462,255.

Now, let's play with the numbers. First, we'll look at rate. If we increase rate by 6.5% (which was the average rate increase predicted by respondents of the 2007 Law Firm Economic Survey by LexisNexis), factor in cost inflation (currently around 4.25%), total PEPP increases to $486,314, an change of $24,059.

Factoring inflation, the increase in income is not substantial. However, it underlies the importance of increasing rates annually to avoid devaluing your rate due to inflation. The secret to beating inflation, though, isn't rate; It is productivity. High productivity creates the gap (margin) between cost (which includes inflation) and revenue. The higher your margin, the less inflation hurts you. The lower your margin, the more inflation works against you.

So let's consider productivity. If you increase billable production by 100 hours per fee earner per year (a meager 24 minutes per day based on a 50 week year), PEPP increases to $527,505, a change of $65,250 per partner!

This is one way to make a substantial increase in income with very little change in your workload. In fact, you can likely make up the 24 minutes per day by just entering your time as you are doing the work. Tools such as MyJuris Mobility take advantage of mobile devices such as Blackberry devices to recover nearly an hour per day of productive time.

Finally, we'll consider leverage. If you add two non-equity fee earners (assuming you have the business to necessitate such growth), PEPP increases to $512,686; a change of $50,431 per partner.

Best performing firms, however, do well in several indicators. If you were to combine the above, the results would be striking. If you increased rate 6.5%, added 24 minutes a day to each fee earner's billable goal, and added two associates, you would increase income from $462,255 to $609,677, a change of $147,422 per partner. The effect of compounding factors works to increase the effect of each indicator on income more than you would by increasing any of the indicators alone.

Even if you only increased rate and productivity, you would increase PEPP by $90,733. Click here to download a sample spreadsheet (you must be registered to this site to access the downloads page) and work the numbers yourself. Use it to forecast your increases and measure your performance to reach your financial goals.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Make More Rain : forecasting, rate

How Law Firms Can Increase Income By $100k Per Partner In 1 Year