Law Practice Management Asked and Answered Blog

Category: Doing

Apr 30, 2020


How are Law Firm’s Doing During COVID-19

Question: 

Our firm is a four lawyer estate planning firm in Bakersfield, California. As you know our state has been under stay at home orders for sometime. We have everyone except our receptionist and one attorney working remotely from their homes. We are doing much better than I expected. In fact we are getting new clients at close to our usual number per month and our fee collections have actually exceeded our normal monthly fee collections. How are other firms doing?

Response: 

It depends on practice area and firm size. Many of the very large firms are facing dramatic work slowdowns and are laying off attorneys and staff and or cutting partner, associate, and staff compensation. However, many small consumer facing practices such as estate planning/probate, general practice, family law, and personal injury advise us that they are doing well in terms of fee collections and new matter signups. Intellectual property firms also advise us that they are holding their own.

The biggest issues for many of these small firms have been:

Small firms that are “paperless” and are using cloud-based billing and practice management systems are having the easiest time of working remotely.

Don’t get too comfortable based on March and April’s numbers. I believe that May or June will provide you with a better glimpse of the future both in terms of new business and fee collections. There could have been initial client demand based on the need for people to get some things done in preparation for the virus lock-down and you could see in May or June client demand dropping off. Also keep in mind that some of your fee collections were based upon accounts receivable and prior unbilled work in process. In addition, some of the billable work for the past month or so was probably performed on matters or cases that you already had in the pipeline.

May or June may give us all a better picture.

Good luck!

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John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC

 

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