In today’s episode we’re sharing a presentation from MaxLawCon 2020. Our originally scheduled MaxLawCon 2020 speaker Craig Goldenfarb presented LIVE to the Maximum Lawyer Guild community and today we share his presentation: Scaling and Growing Your Firm Through Business Structure and Metrics.
You can also watch the video here.
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Transcript: “Scaling and Growing Your Firm Through Business Structure and Metrics” w/ Craig Goldenfarb
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. Our originally scheduled next icon speaker Craig golden fire presented live to the maximum lawyer guild community. And today we share his talk scaling and growing your firm through business structure and metrics. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the video of this presentation. If you’d like to see visuals of Craig’s reports in action now to the episode. All right, today, we have another Max law con 2020 presentation and we have Craig Goldfarb with us, Craig, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself.
Craig Goldenfarb
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the guild guild members. And thank you, Tyson and Jim for allowing me to talk. Sorry, we couldn’t do it in St. Louis, but maybe next year. So I’m in the mountains of North Carolina right now, trying to escape the COVID disaster in my home state of Florida. So I came up here to find that the COVID experience is a lot better here. Although Nobody wears masks. But of course, Nobody wears masks in Florida either. So we’ll get going. But it’s nice to say that I’m able to leave my law firm, and come up here to North Carolina for quite a bit of time, because of one of the things I’m going to talk about today, which is to create a structure in your law firm that doesn’t require you. And in other courses on men, it talks about that the lawyer is the hero. And we all as lawyers, we all put on a cape in the morning. And we go to work because we solve every we are the hub of all solutions and brilliance. My wife says I’m like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. And therefore I think I’m the smartest and best and I can do everything in the law firm. But all of those theories are disruptive, to being able to grow, to being able to make more money, to be able to come up here to the North Carolina mountains with your family for a week. And completely detach except for this one seminar I’m doing. And all of those egotistical and visions and stories we have about ourselves, really prevent us from growing our law firms, and in fact, growing our profits as well. So who am I my name is Craig Goldfarb. I’ve been a personal injury attorney for 25 years. My main office is in Palm Beach County, Florida. Down on the east coast near Miami. I have two offices one is about an hour north in Florida. Also on the East Coast. I have clients from all around the country because so many people in your home states may take a trip and vacation in Florida and get hurt in a car accident. So I get quite a bit of my referrals actually from out of state attorneys, unlike some people who don’t get that many referrals from out of state attorneys. So like most states, I give a 25% referral fee. So that was my one shameless plug business wise for my law firm here in Florida. Now my practice what is my practice, like many of you, I do personal injury. I happen to know my numbers. And that’s part of what we’re talking about today. And I do 55% of my cases are car accidents. 30% of my cases are what you’d call premises accidents, which are slip and falls. And that type that adds up to 85%. The remaining 15% are what I call the catastrophic cases. They concern wrongful death, medical malpractice, nursing home neglect product liability. So pretty much the full realm of personal injury here in Florida. Now, I said I’ve been a lawyer for 25 years, and I have, but I started my own firm in 2002. So I’ve had my own firm for 18 years here in Florida. And many of you may listen and start to tune out because of the size of my firm. But let me encourage you, every single thing I talk about does not just apply to a firm as big as mine, because the way I’m going to talk about this will make sure it applies to your law firm, whether it has one lawyer or 20 lawyers. So when I started I had one lawyer, you’re looking at me and one employee, Debbie. Today I have 60 employees 10 lawyers, and those 60 employees include Debbie, my first employee. So you can see that people tend to stay at my law firm, probably because of the good structures I have set up and because I treat them pretty well. I started with 65 cases, some of you may have 55 cases or fewer. I now have 1400 cases in a 10 years. And that’s due to a lot of the scaling and business structure that I’m going to talk about today. As some of you know, I also have a seminar series that I run called seven figure attorney, where we take what I’m going to talk about today for maybe half an hour, 40 minutes. And we have a full day seminar on all of my business structures, all of my metrics, how I run my law firm, and that was supposed to be in Manhattan in March. But of course, March was not a good month for Manhattan. So we’ll be rescheduling the seven figure attorney. And the last thing about me before I get into the substance of my speech, is that I also privately coach personal injury attorneys across the country. That’s kind of my side gig. And I don’t have that many lawyer clients. They’re all personal injury attorneys. But I won’t take anybody in Florida because I don’t want to teach them how to be my competitor. And also, I only have time for five right now, because I’m running, running a pretty big law firm. So let me tell you about what I’m talking about today. Today’s talk has two parts. The first part is business structure that allows you to scale without you being the hero. So I can scale I can add different parts to my law firm. And I don’t have to be the builder, I don’t have to be the one because I’ve already designed those parts. So to plug on another litigation team, or another pre suit could have another free suit case management team takes almost zero of my effort or time. So as I said, the first part is a business structure that allows you to grow. The second part of my talk today is matching up your metrics. Many of you call metrics, KPIs key performance indicators, but matching up your metrics, so that they meld with your business structure. And once you have your business structure set up, and your KPIs set up, and they’re measuring the same things, it takes you out of the mix even more. And you can run your entire law firm, based on metrics, that’s assuming that you want to have very little client interaction, and that you want to run a company. I personally spend zero time on law, I’ve spent zero time on law for five to 10 years, that was a choice. Now many of you may want to be a hybrid, you may want to spend 50% of your time on cases, and 50% of your time running your business. And that’s because you’d like working on a case. And I would say that you have to do what you like 10 years ago, I realized I was not happy being a trial lawyer. And I was really happy when I was behind my desk. Pulling the spring is like the Wizard of Oz. And running the whole law firm. So some of you have heard me say that I’m a CEO. And that’s true. But I refer to that as a chief encouragement officer, because I spend a lot of my time with my 60 employees, encouraging them, making sure I’m a leader, making sure I know what they need, making sure I know them personally, so that I can run a company through my employees, because I don’t meet with my clients much. So what do you want to be? Do you want to be 100%? An entrepreneur, like me, no law, no case involvement? Or do you want to spend most of your time on cases? Well, if you want to spend 75% more of your time on cases, and you’re listening to the wrong video, push pause and go do something else. Because I’m not here to talk about spending 75% of your time on case, I’m here to talk about how to run a business. So let me tell you about my best. I have seven departments. And don’t zone me out because you only have two employees don’t do it. Because the seven departments are what I call functions of a law firm functions of a law firm. So whether you’re two employees, or 60, employees, we all have the same functions. Now, as you get bigger, you can turn each of these functions into a department like I have. But when I had one employee, I had the same business structure. It’s important. You’ll hear about my very advanced business structure right now, by the same business structure when I have one employee, one employee. So here are my departments. And if you want to take notes, take notes, but these are my seven departments in my personal injury law firm. Number one intake number two, pre suit. That’s everything before a lawsuit is filed. Number three, and you may not have this, but I have it’s called critical case. So my critical case department is any of the catastrophic cases because I know they get treated differently. You have to have more involvement with the client. More involved more things, you’re getting more emergencies, more experts hired at the beginning. So I have an actual unit called critical case, which has a Makita say about 80 or 90 cases in it. And these are all deaths, medical malpractice, nursing home catastrophic injury Be. And that’s critical case. So three is critical case, four is litigation. And again, if you have one employee, I hope you’re realizing that this applies to your firm to intake pretty soon, maybe critical case, litigation. Number five is marketing, and community community relations, marketing, community relations. Number six is HR, I’m sorry, HR and administration. So everything that goes into HR, running the office, office supplies, administration, anything that doesn’t deal with a case, that’s number six, and my seventh department is called finance. Now, again, if you have one employee, I hope that you realize every single one of these departments applies to you too, because those are just functions of your law firm. They don’t have to be departments. So what are your basic functions? You know, some of you are not personal injury attorneys. Some of you are other types of attorneys. So you need to think of the beginning of the client interaction, till the end of the client interaction. Those are your case related functions. And mine were, of course, intake, pre suit critical case and litigation. Those are case related or law related functions. And then you have your non law related functions, such as marketing, administration, slash HR, and finance. So if you want to make if you took notes, and you wanted Circle, circle, the first four are law related. And the next three are not not related to law, non law related. So those are the functions of a firm. Now, again, if you’re an estate planning firm, or some other type of firm, I would ask that you spend 10 minutes, that’s all it takes 10 minutes listening all the functions of your law firm. And that’s how you can form different job descriptions, and departments if you ever get that big. And so those are the seven departments I had. So if you would do that exercise, at some point, it really helps you form your structure. Of course, most companies have an organizational chart, I have an organizational chart, that’s one tool. And if you just Google organizational chart, you’ll get plenty of apps or programs that can have you make them but list your basic functions and figure out who’s in each of those positions. So one of my one of my coaches and coach Nyan but business structure and organization insisted that only a maximum of five department heads report directly to you. So what I did is I combined a couple of the meetings I have once a week, and I make sure that I only have five meetings a week, with my department heads, I strongly encourage in running a law firm, that you have weekly meetings with certain head people in your law office, you need to have a time, when they know they’ve got you know, you’ve got your attention. Otherwise, they’re gonna be interrupting you, they’re gonna be sending you emails, and the more you train them to batch their items. For that once a week meeting, you’ll get fewer emails, no text messages, they won’t walk in and say, Hey, Boss, can I talk to you about something, because they know Thursday at two, or whenever your time is, they’re going to get your for an hour, or maybe two hours, I have those with all five. So they don’t randomly bust me on my phone or call me or text me or email me unless they need to give me some information, a bunch them all for my two hour meeting with them, or my one hour meeting. So I strongly encourage I read since I’m in the office all day, and I’m not a lawyer anymore. I’m just a CEO, I strongly encourage you the way you structure your week is through structured meetings. And again, it can be based on functions, not necessarily in departments. So if you’d have a marketing person who also does HR, that’s fine, meet with her or him for an hour on Thursday on HR, and meet with that same person on marketing the next day or the prior day. So those weekly meetings are all I do all week, frankly, is meet with them and guide them and get updates on their projects. weekly meetings can be case related if they’re with someone who works in a case related department. So again, how does this apply to your firm since I’m huge, or medium sized? And you’re not, it’s really important that you recognize that you don’t look at this as a big law firm. This is an any sized law firm thing. And think of the functions of your law firm. And then draw it out, maybe make an organizational chart, or maybe even a linear chart for the cases, what happens at the beginning, middle and end. And then that’s how you form your job descriptions. That’s how you place people in the right jobs. And that’s how you have a firm that scales. So before I move on to section two, I wanted to ask Becca, do we have any questions that have come up? Or let me invite you right now in the chat room? Any questions on my business structure?
Becca Eberhart
Do I don’t have any questions related to that. You had mentioned the seven figure attorney seminar. Is there a website for that?
Craig Goldenfarb
Sure. It’s pretty easy. It’s seven feet. It’s spelled out seven feet. Get your attorney.com seven figure attorney.com. And we held it virtually instead of Manhattan about a month or two ago. And I think Manhattan gets April 2021, to reset the whole thing at the W Hotel in Manhattan. So it’s the same location that’s posted at the website right now. And if you just check the website, again, maybe in a few months, if the world is still existing in a few months, then we’ll reset it for April 2021, ASAN the other.
Becca Eberhart
That was all that we had so far.
Craig Goldenfarb
Okay, so I’m going to share my screen. Let me tell you what this is. So the second part of my talk is what I call metrics, and metrics, some of you know as key performance indicators. The basic word for for those of you who are not gates, is, these is the data These are reports that report on things that I want to know about my company. So I happen to have a case management system called file vine. There are lots of good ones out there. But I found file vine and smart advocate to be probably the top two for personal injury attorneys. And we we’ve added we took a look at eight different ones including practice Panther Clio, at our editorial office needles, and solidify, file, Vine, and smart advocate. So we demoed a lot, and we really found the file vine was the best for us. So a cool function that fog vine has is an add on. And as you’ll see, in the upper left of the screen, it says the word Domo. So Domo is a system that takes your data in foul line, and creates reports, with your assistance or with Domos assistance on any metrics at all. In your file line system, anything that’s in your system that has a box where you fill in anything in your entire system, you can use it to create a report since so since I’ve been doing this 25 years, I was able to figure out in a couple of months, what other reports that I want, in order to run my law firm. Well, being as Type A as I am, I came up with 45 reports. But the reason is because I haven’t divided up how based by department, just like I talked about before. So you can see at the top of the screen where it says CMG reports, that’s my initials. And then below that it says entire law firm reports. So my first 10 reports. And I’m going to scroll down and talk about maybe 10 of them total. But my first 10 of my 45 reports are for the entire law firm. What am I? What do we want to know about our entire law firm. So I’m gonna go through a couple the ones I find to be particularly useful. So you can see on the left side, if you include closed cases or archived cases, and you have closed cases that are settled, settled as well, I have 1970 cases. And then the screen shows you in what phase they’re in. So this is we phase the reports. And you can see that the phases there’s about on the left side, there’s about 20, or 25 phases, as to what stage the case is in Report Number two, on the right, is active cases, the only differences this is cases that are actively being worked on. So I said at the beginning of his talk, I have about 1400 cases, well, I was pretty close, because I looked at this morning, I have 1361 cases. Now if you notice the title, the title is active cases per case type. My first two metrics, these are my first two metrics. Metric number one is how many cases do I have? The answer 1361. Now, how often do you get asked that question? Probably pretty frequently? Or how many times you wonder, I wonder how many cases are in my office? Well, metric number one here, I don’t have to wonder anything because this is updated. And the date they pull the data from file vine every hour, once an hour. That’s cool. So within the last hour, I know that I have 13 161 active files. That’s metric number one. Metric number two. Well, I really want to know what type of case it is. Well, I didn’t have to guess what I said about 30 minutes ago, 20 minutes ago. What percentage of my cases are car accidents? You can see right there 55.33% of my cases are car accidents. Now what’s cool is we have a list right here. These are the number of cases that I have car accident 750 premises for 35 sovereign immunity cases wrongful death. Now if you notice here, I have 40 wrongful death cases 27 med mal cases 17 nursing home cases, those are all in that department I was talking about earlier called critical case. So those are my catastrophic cases right there. These Three sections right here. So, metric one, how many cases do you have? And the reason I’m pointing this out, folks, is because if you don’t have a way of measuring these metrics, I’m only going to talk about five or 10, that are the most important to me. But I have 45 reports here with hundreds of metrics. But I’m going to really point out the ones you just have to know about your case. First one, how many cases in your office, the next one, how many cases per case type. And you may only have two case types, you may have 10, case types, I have actually about 20, there’s about 13, or 14 of them listed here. But I only that you can tell the top to make up 55 plus 30 85% of my cases. So how many cases you got? And what type are they? So I’m gonna try to scroll up a little bit. Report Number three. Again, it’s the same number of cases 1361. But it’s where did they come from referral source, same cases, metric three, if you don’t know where your cases came from, you cannot run your business period, you don’t know where you’re getting your product, you have no idea. Report Number three is crucial. So it’s you can see in Report Number three, that I get 21% of my cases, from prior clients, or past clients, I get 16% of my cases from lawyers, I get 13 13% of my cases from my employees. Now, there’s a ton of reasons for that, I have about an hour long presentation on my employee referral encouragement program, but it’s quite robust. So I have 60 employees, but I get 13%. And I’ve got to say, I’ve got to move on to the embarrassing one, my TV commercials only produced 12%. So those of you who know me from the south Florida TV market, I get more cases from my 60 employees than I do from my very large TV budget. So we’ll seek it behind the curtain. Google and internet, if you add all the different kinds of internet together, it’s about 10 to 15%. So metric number three, write it down. If you don’t know where your cases are coming from, I call that the referral source, you cannot run your business. This fourth report here, fees generated per referrals referral source that I would say is important metric number four. And the reason I say that is because if you come if you look that I get 21% of my cases, from my clients, but they produce 34% of my income. That’s a great comparison. Think about it. So what does that mean? So it means I only get 21% of my cases from clients. But those cases are good. They’re good. Why are they good? Because they produce 34% of my income? It’s good to know. So do I want to encourage ways of my clients referring me cases? That’s a business decision I make? What decision would I make based on these two metrics? The answer is Hell yeah. Because the ones my clients send me produce me more than 21% they produce me 34% of my income. Same thing with employees was just interesting. They produce 13% of my case, my cases, but my employees produced 21% of my income. Again, that means the money I put into getting my employees to refer me clients, which I can’t pay them, that’s illegal. But the various ways I incentivize them are making me money. So I look at each of these and I compare, and I see what which referral sources referring me the best cases? Why is that important? I hope you’re able to answer that question. Because where you put your marketing money should be towards the referral sources. That sends you the best cases, right? So you can tell how I can run all these decisions based on four reports. I’ve only shown you four reports.
Craig Goldenfarb
I’m going to skip over a couple of these because they’re just for my law firm. So one thing I started measuring, if you’re a personal injury attorney, you might like this clever metric, because it’s a new one. When they say the policy limits, I don’t know what you call it in your state. We call it a tender tender of policy limits. So I wanted to figure out which lawyers in my office, were getting the policy limits on their cases successfully getting the policy limits instead of settling for less. So I started measuring each lawyer. And at the bottom of the screen, you can see the names of lawyers. What percentage how often are they getting tenders? So on the one on the right, you see that Don on the left, this one here by attorney named Don, several settled 70 Auto cases this year, and 49 of them were tenders. That’s a pretty good ratio. So I did another report because I wanted to figure out the percent Ah, so look here at this report. This is the percentage. Spencer settled one case, he’s a litigator. So he settled one case for policy limits. But he’s not that important for this graph. These three, here are my three pre suit attorneys, Marissa Don, and Seth. Interesting. I wanted them to be above a 70% tender rate, I told them that this year, you can see they’re at 76% 70% and 70%. That’s pretty good. They met my goals for how often, these three attorneys medically manage the case well enough to get policy limits. So this percentage tender rate I stole from the lawyer in Florida named John Morgan, you may know him, he’s the largest personal injury firm in the United States of America. I saw his dashboard. Like this is my dashboard. And I saw he had a tender percentage rate metric. And I’m like, that dude’s pretty smart. He makes a fairly good living, maybe I should steal that one. So I did. So I can see that my pre suit attorneys ever to 70% tender rate, if you run a law from personal injury law firm of any size, that’s a great metric. So I would encourage you to use that metric. So my first portion was entire lawsuit, law firm reports, you remember that? So now I go department by department. So the next department I have, I combined the intake and marketing. So again, this is my dashboard from Domo, this is the second section. The second section is intake, marketing, these reports or reports, we all want to know. So let’s call it metric number five, or metric number six, whatever I’m on, look at their port on the left, I assume that you do know in your head because it’s like a number like five or six, or you’re big enough to keep track of this stuff, how many cases you’ve signed up this month, this month. So you can see that this month, as of one hour ago, we signed up 41 cases. And then if I click on this, what’s good about Domo is when you click on it, it gets down to all the details, and you can see a list of all the cases. So I’m only going to do that once because then you gotta go back to the main dashboard. But when you click on any of these reports, it goes down and you can get the case list for any of these things.
Becca Eberhart
Hey, guys, it’s Becca here. I’m sure you’ve heard Jim and Tyson mentioned the guild on the podcast and then the Facebook group. That’s because we’re seeing some really exciting things happening with guild members and their businesses. The Guild is this perfect mix of a community group coaching and a mastermind. Inside you’ll gain support, tap into a network of connections, and continue learning a common theme among successful entrepreneurs. There are so many benefits inside the guild, including weekly live events and discounts to all maximum lawyer events, head over to maximum lawyer.com forward slash the guild to check out all of the benefits and watch a few testimonials from current members. Investing in a community is like the self care of business ownership. Being in a community with other people who get it is crucial when you’re creating a rock solid foundation to build your business on one that’s strong enough to withstand setbacks, transitions and growth. So head to maximum lawyer.com and click on the guild page to join us. Now let’s get back to the episode.
Craig Goldenfarb
So back to intake and marketing reports. So I’ve signed up 41 cases. So I don’t need to worry about how my month is going. And I don’t have to call anybody I don’t have to ask or text or email. This is one hour old. We have 41 cases. Now I always want to know in comparison, how many did we do last month? So last month is the second report here. And we did 44 cases. So when I go into COVID freakout mode where I’m worried, am I signing up enough cases am I settling, settling enough cases, or when I go into any of my other various Scout modes, this is my happy place. Because in order to make me feel better, I can get out of freakout mode by looking at the real data. And the real data. And my law firm is always pretty encouraging. So whenever I’m freaking out about anything, this is my my meditative dashboard. And guess that makes me a total loser. But this is what I go to when I’m worried about money, what I’m worried about how is my firm doing? And luckily, I can remote in and do this from anywhere in the world. As long as I have internet. So you can see I signed up 41 cases this month, 44 cases last month. And well how many have I signed up for the year? So report number two here? How many for the year 365. That’s good. 365 Now I know I have an internal goal for 700 cases for the year COVID has put put a little damper in that plan. But I can figure out at any time how I’m doing on that 700 For the year by going to this report. 365 So we’re on July 23. Probably a little bit behind pace because of COVID but at least Federal freaked out too much. So this report on the right is similar. It’s similar. But this is the case I signed up this year by referral source. So I can compare that with the earlier report, which was all the cases in my office. This is just this year. So you can see, it’s pretty close to the percentages that the report we looked at before, pretty close. So it means that my referral sources are staying consistent in their percentages. So the report I looked at before was all the cases in house, but were those referred by this report, instead of all the cases in house, it’s just what was that what I signed up this year. That’s the only difference. But I can look at that report in this report and see that my referral source percentages has stayed pretty consistent. So the last couple of reports were just this month, and last month, and reports number two and three are for the year. And again, report number four is year to date by by case type not just the active case in my office, but this year, this year alone. So again, these are similar to the percentages, I told you a bit, but they’re a little higher for auto accidents. So what this tells me is that this year, I signed up 64% auto accidents. And last year, if you remember that report, only signed up active 55%. So that’s a good indicator, a good metric, that my number, my percentage of car accidents that I’m signing up, has gone up by 10%. Pretty important information for me to know. Now this report number five is what I call my COVID report. Because if you look at the first three months, I had a decent January, pretty damn good February 80 cases, March, you know, march 13, was the declaration of emergency. So March, the second couple of weeks, took a hit 60 cases. And then April was a disaster. May was more of a disaster. And then our stupid governor started opening stuff up in June. But that was to my benefit, because people started getting hurt more. So 44 in June, and we’re only on July 23 today, and we’re already at 41 for July. This to me is just This is gold. This is golden data. When someone says I was COVID affected your business. Everyone’s been asked that what like five times a day for the last four months. So I can say, well, as far as intake, it’s affected me about 50%. Why do I know this? Well, all you have to do is look at January, February, March versus April, May, June, total those three, total these three, figure out how I can answer the question, How has COVID affected your business? Most of you are kind of struggling for that answer. Because you’re looking just to your fees. Or you’re looking at are people working from home? Or you’re guessing how much they’re working? Or you don’t know how to answer the question. I can answer the question, because not only do I look at intakes, but I look at every other metric to see how has COVID affected your business. So COVID Report Number five is my COVID report one of my COVID reports. So I’m gonna move on to the next department. Again, don’t think of it as a department think of it as a function of your law firm. And this function is pre suit. So I have probably about 1200 cases, pre suit 1200 cases. And I’ve three lawyers, and maybe 20 staff that are devoted to pre suit, I need to be able to organize all that data so that I can see how pre suit is doing. So I have another 10 reports. I’m not going to go through all 10 that are just pre suit. So some people asked me if you look at the report on the right, three suitcases for all attorneys. I get asked a question all the time, Craig, how many cases should a lawyer have? And I say what litigation or free suit and they go oh, pre suit? Well, Take Take me for example. I have a maximum of supposed to be a maximum about 325 cases per pre suit lawyer. You can see that the first guy has 369 He has too many. And the next two are about right to 95 to 89. So these are my three suit three pre suit attorneys. Again, if you have one pre suit attorney, or if you’re the pre suit attorney, I found that with staff under you, that’s with staff under you. You can handle up to 300 files per priesthood attorney that is only with staff under you have so if you look at report number three here, I have six PS pre suit case managers. So those are the people I talked about under the lawyers, pre suit case managers have assistants under them called legal assistants. So each each group of 300 is one lawyer, two case managers and two legal assistants. So each pod or each section that I say I can repeat over and over and over again. One lawyer, two case managers, two legal assistants, five people running 300 cases. Let me repeat that because I get asked this question a lot. Five people running through 100 cases. So these reports are by phase. And I like to see how many people have the case and specific phases. These are my logjam reports, or in the plumbing terms, these are where you have a block. So you can look at these reports, and determine that a certain person has all these files in negotiation, and they’re not negotiating, because they have an inordinate amount of negotiation. So you can spot that person and see what how many people do they have a demand that should be written demand that should be done, I can look at all six case managers and see, well, this person has more demands to be done. And this person has a lot of demands to be done. They’re working from home right now. Maybe they deserve a text from me saying, Hey, guys, you have 30 demands to be done. Why? Compared to the other people? You don’t, you have too many. So again, I call these my logjam reports, because I can identify any jams or log jams, or productivity blocks in the system with these reports. So this one on the right here, pre suitcases in negotiation by attorney, you can see I have three attorneys 123. Marissa just started with me. So she only has five cases in negotiation, Donna’s 18, and Seth has 30. So if I did not know the reason for this, which I already know, then this would be good for me to know. Well, why does Seth have 30 cases negotiating and Donnelly has a team when Don has more cases. So that’s a good metric for you to know, you know, how many cases your lawyers have? What phase? Are they at? What stage? Are they in? All these reports? Show them this? So I’m gonna move on to my next department, which is litigation. The metrics for litigation are completely different than the metrics for any other department. So when my lawyers complain, I have too many cases. I looked at this, the complaint report, here are my five litigators. So when Spencer tells me he has too many cases, he’s right. He’s got 105 cases. And I tried to limit my attorneys for this section, which is in suit to 35 cases. And he’s got 38. So this includes all cases a litigator is responsible for which is some that are not in litigation, depending. So he has 38 in suit. Jeff has 52. Mr. Raphael Roque has 50. And George has 41. So Carl, we just let go. So he has no cases. So I look at these and I say, I need another lawyer. Well, we just let Carl go. So it’s obvious we need another lawyer, because my numbers here are all above 35. And I want my litigators to only be handling 35 cases, again, how many cases this metric you got to know how many cases are in litigation? How many? And then to subdivide it, what phase? Are they at? What stage? Are they set for mediation? Are they set for trial, etc. So in litigation, you got to first of all know how many cases you have in litigation. The next thing I wanted to know is what what types of cases have these lawyers have? So I put in my for litigators. And I can see that George here. All we give him his car accidents, and slip and falls, car accidents and slip and falls. Why? Because that’s all he wants. He doesn’t want to do the other types. So I can see that we’ve made no mistakes. We didn’t give him a medical malpractice case by mistake. So Georgia is 18 and 23. And these are cases and litigation. Spencer is my number one guy. He’s got all types of different cases. He’s got 10 wrongful death cases, seven medical malpractice cases. So the point of this is, if you’re looking to divide up litigation, how many cases have each lawyer have, what types of cases to the lawyers have, and at what stage they’re at. One of the things we also measure here on the right side is the case is filed. In other words, lawsuits filed a quarter to date. That’s another metric we use because we have goals and quotas based on that. Because I want to know how many we felt this quarter. You can see here, I want to know how many we filed last quarter. So we filed 25 cases last quarter. And then we do it by attorney. So I want to know which attorneys are filing lawsuits, which are not. So you can see that this month, Spencer filed one lawsuit, Jeff filed for Raphael filed six, and George filed one. Again, if I didn’t know the reasons for all of those, this data would be gold and letting me know that that those things exist. My next report will pass. This is my last section. My last section is the money section. This is the one that I put at the bottom because it makes me feel best. This lets me freak out the least because my firm is quite profitable. So I have several reports. Actually, it’s only three. Let’s see. I have three reports and they’re all free. important. So I have a quota as to how many claims we have settled each month. And so we have a report month by month as to how many we have. And you can see that the total is 20. This month 36 that month. So this is basically cases settled per month, I do have a quota. So if we’re not reaching that quota, it’s a problem. My quota is about 40. So you can see we’re getting pretty close since the beginning of the year. And we’re at 20 for this month. So down to here, you can see we’re in the 30s, not quite at Mikoto 40. So metric number seven, we’ll call it whatever we’re on is how many cases do settle a month? How many cases do settle a month? The next one would be? And I’ll tell you that right now is how many cases do you take your fee on per month. But that’s different, right? Because you might settle the case today. But the closing statement may not be done for a month or two. And you can take your fee until the closing statement is done. So it’s important that there’s no logjam there, if you settled 10 cases this month, and you only just distributed one and took a fee of one, that’s a problem, you have a one in 10 ratio between the cases you settle. And the cases you actually get paid on, you might want to look into that. Or you will look into that because you won’t be able to make payroll. So you’ll probably look into that. So this report number two is what I call my receivables. So receivables are when you settle the case, but you haven’t taken the fee yet. The analogy I use for that is the client took the product off the shelf, they put it in their in their cart, but they haven’t been to the cash register yet to pay. So it’s sold, you sold that can of beans at your supermarket, but they haven’t paid for yet. It’s on its way to the cash register. So these are receivables. Because the product has been sold you settle the case, case is done. But it hasn’t been rung up at the cash register yet. So if you look here, you can see I have 78 cases, that’s this number 78. Here, I have 78 pre suitcases where I have to take the fee yet those customers have their shopping cart full, but they haven’t paid yet. So there’s a partial list here. That’s all the 78 cases that list like the first 20 and the fee amount. So you can see the largest one I have pre suit is a $52,000 settlement. And then again, there’s 78 of them. And if I click through on the screen, I get a list of all 78. So when I click through on the screen, I will share some financial information with you because I don’t care. So those 78 cases, if you look right here, total of $730,000. So my three suitcases that our products sold, but they haven’t taken into the cash register yet, are 733 grand. So that’s a good feeling that I know that I have 70 $733,000 waiting for me if I could just get those shopping carts to the cash register that we’ve got 78 cases. And I’ll show you my last report, which is litigation fee receivables. So litigation cases are of course more valuable than pre suit cases. So and they settle fewer, because we’ve only got we have 185 cases in litigation in my firm. So why do I know that because one of the other reports tells me by the hour, how many cases I have in litigation. So I have 185 cases and litigation. And as I as you can see, we have 20 which have settled, but I haven’t taken a fee yet. Now why is it so important? I know pre suit versus litigation? Well, they’re totally different animals because pre suitcases it should get from the shopping cart to the cash register quicker because there’s fewer medical bills to negotiate fewer liens to negotiate. So there’s a quicker timeframe on my soon litigation that has more providers, more liens, client alone or issues, signing the release, so it may take a little longer. But my litigation fee receivables, you can tell I had one settle for a lot of money $900,000 fee, and then a $500,000 fee. So assuming this is up to date, which I’m pretty sure it is another little bit of work product. I have over $3 million in receivables for 20 cases. So those are some damn good cases that settled that we haven’t taken a fee yet. So if I want to stop freaking out from COVID I just look at these numbers. I have 700 grand and pre suit 3.3 million in lips. So I have $4 million waiting for me as soon as I get on their butts and make sure they get the settlement statement side. So I call those my happy place reports. So you know, I know I revealed some numbers. I don’t love to reveal my income and how big my firm is as far as money. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but I don’t really care is assume that you assume that I’m doing okay. But the firm of this law of this size. So that’s my litigation. And that is all my reports. And Becca, I’m 50 minutes in. So I wanted to know what questions people have had on my reports.
Becca Eberhart
Yes, I’m seeing a question here. wondering do you need file mine Domo or both to accomplish what you’ve created here?
Craig Goldenfarb
That’s a great question. So Domo is an independent product. And it works with Liquify. It works with needles. It works with smart advocate works with fine line, you need to ask your case management program, if they have interchange, but if you call it, I’m not techie. If they have a correlation, whatever you call it, between Domo and their program, the newer ones do. I know needles is a second generation one, which is somewhat old, 1010 years old, but it does match up with Domo, you have to pay extra. But to be able to run your whole law firm like I run my whole law firm from one dashboard. It’s worth the extra it’s not really that much money, to be honest.
Becca Eberhart
Perfect. So that is all the questions that I’m seeing here. Before we sign off, if anybody wants to connect with you get a hold of you. What’s the best way to do that?
Craig Goldenfarb
Sure. The best way to connect with me is by email, by email is C golden Farbe. That’s Gol D, n f AR b like boy at 800 Gold law.com. That’s the number 800 Gold law.com. And if you want to see my website, it talks a lot about some of it talks about my business structure. It’s 800 and gold law.com. And again, my seminar series seven figure attorney.com. So thank you, Becca for allowing me to host today’s talk. I love talking about this stuff. And thank you again, Jim and Tyson for allowing me to speak.
