Clio’s new Legal Trends Report brings big data insights to solo and boutique law firms.
October 17, 2016
Clio’s newly launched Legal Trends Report provides lawyers with first-of- its-kind industry information to make data-driven business decisions.
VANCOUVER, BC — October 17, 2016 — Clio, the world’s leading cloud-based legal practice management platform, today announced the release of their inaugural Legal Trends Report for solo, small, and medium-size law firms. The Legal Trends Report, by leveraging anonymized, aggregate data from 40,000 active users and over $60 billion in billing volume, provides new insights into topics including average billing rates by state, practice area, and fee structure, law practice-specific key performance indicators, and how efficiency scales with firm size.
“This unbiased data set should certainly give law firms pause for thought and may even drive changes in how some structure themselves,” said Jack Newton, founder and CEO of Clio. “For the first time in the 4,000-year history of this profession, small to medium-sized law firms have access to information that can help them make decisions like some of the world’s best businesses.”
Traditional solo, small, and medium-size law firm data has relied heavily on self-reported or anecdotal data, which is often heavily skewed due to both small sample sizes and the inherent unreliability of self-reported data. When contrasted with actual usage data, an entirely different picture of the legal landscape emerges, including surprising insights such as:
● On average, attorneys are only expending 28 percent — roughly two hours — of each eight hour workday on billable activities.
● Law firm utilization rates increase as additional attorneys are added, but plateau at five to nine attorneys.
● When adjusted for cost of living, Nevada, Connecticut and Illinois emerge as the most profitable states for attorneys based on real hourly rates; conversely, Nebraska, Tennessee and Wisconsin are the lowest hourly rate states in real terms.
“Among the more surprising insights, we discovered that the average firm only collects one-and-a- half billable hours out of an average workday in billable time,” said George Psiharis, Clio’s VP of Data Operations. “With information like this, that solo, small, and medium-size law firms can finally have the intelligence necessary to make data-driven decisions on how to operate their practice with greater efficiency.”
Clio plans to use the Legal Trends Report as an initial launchpad for providing the industry as a whole with key benchmark data and data insights. Clio’s customers will also benefit from in-application benchmarking metrics and key performance indicators that will help them optimize their firms.
To download the complete Legal Trends Report, visit www.clio.com/2016-legal-trends-report
To learn more about Clio’s integrated suite of solutions, visit www.clio.com.
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