The 28-Day Profit Diagnostic for Law Firms
£40,000 of specific, recoverable value identified in your firm, or you don't pay.
Most managing partners are doing two jobs. The law, and everything else. The second one happens after hours, chasing lock-up, juggling capacity, wondering why the profit never quite matches the fee income on the board. No rule says the partner who's best at the law has to run the business as well. That's habit, not design.
You'll know some of this already. Nobody needs to tell you that fees sit tied up in WIP and unpaid bills. What you probably don't have is the numbers. How much, where it's stuck, what it costs you each month, which fix comes first.
Vague problems wait. Priced problems get solved.
Price your own lock-up in sixty seconds.
This calculator needs JavaScript. The arithmetic it runs: annual fee income divided by 365, multiplied by your lock-up days, gives the cash currently tied up.
That's the size of the problem. The diagnostic prices yours line by line.
Four weeks. Six hours of your time. A priced map.
The 28-Day Profit Diagnostic. £4,000.
Days 1 to 7
I interview your key people and go through the numbers. By day seven you have my first finding in writing, with a figure on it.
Weeks two and three
The whole operation gets mapped. Cash, capacity, meeting rhythm, roles. Not just where money is stuck, but why it keeps getting stuck.
Day 28
You receive the priced map of your firm and a costed ninety-day plan your team could run without me.
Your time commitment across the month: about six hours.
The guarantee
If the map doesn't put at least £40,000 of specific recoverable value against named causes, ten times the fee, you don't pay.
For most firms above £1m it isn't close.
How it's scored: every finding carries a £ value, and we agree each one together at the day-28 review. The guarantee is settled on numbers we both sign, not on my say-so. Aged debt is valued at realistic recovery rates, not face value.
The last big one.
I recently rebuilt collections for a US law firm. Collections went from 79% to 92%, revenue and profit grew, and the firm hired six new people.
For scale at home, the Law Society's latest benchmarking puts median lock-up at 134 days. Over four months between being appointed and getting paid. On £1m of fees, roughly £367,000, waiting.
I don't name clients in public. You'd want the same discretion. On the call I'll walk you through the numbers behind the result above.
Who this is for
For
Founder-led or managing-partner-led firms in England and Wales, roughly £1m to £5m in fees, eight to forty people.
Not for
Firms under £1m, where I can't honestly promise the £40,000 floor. And not for anyone who wants analysis without the intention to act on it.
I'm not a lawyer. I run the business side of founder-led firms, the job a chief operating officer does in a bigger practice: collections, capacity, meeting rhythm, roles. I've worked in operations since 2006 and advised founder-led businesses since 2015. Lock-up is where I start, because the cash it releases is what the firm builds with.
US firms put professional managers on the business side years before most of ours did. I've built that machinery on both sides of the Atlantic. It works the same here.
Based in Leicestershire, working across England and Wales.
Twenty minutes to see if the guarantee can be honoured at your firm.
If it can't be honoured, I'll tell you on the call.
If you've used the calculator above, your numbers come with you into the booking.
Questions
Why the guarantee?
Because a stranger shouldn't carry the risk of trusting me. I carry it until the numbers are on the table.
What happens after day 28?
You get the map and the plan. Run it yourselves, or run it with me. Nothing renews, nothing auto-continues, and the plan is written so your team could execute it alone.
Who sees our numbers?
Me. Client confidentiality is absolute; I never name clients in public, and the same will be true of you.
Is the call a pitch?
It's twenty minutes to check the guarantee can be honoured at your firm. If your lock-up is tight and the operation runs clean, I'll say so and we'll part on good terms.
Why not just ask our accountant?
Your accountant can tell you the number. They are not there to sit in your firm on a Tuesday and change what causes it. The same goes for a practice manager, who usually knows exactly where the money is stuck but has no authority over partners. The longer answer is here, including the cases where you do not need me.
We're under £1m. Can we still talk?
Yes, but the £40,000 promise may not hold, and I won't pretend otherwise. Book the call and we'll be straight with each other.