For managing partners
Who actually fixes lock-up?
Your accountant can tell you the number. Your practice manager can chase the worst of it. Neither one is paid to change what causes it. Here is an honest division of labour, including the parts where you do not need me.
First, what lock-up really is
Lock-up is the time between doing the work and holding the cash. Work in progress plus unpaid bills, counted in days. The Law Society's benchmarking puts the median at 134 days. On £1m of fees that is roughly £367,000 of your money sitting somewhere other than your account.
It is almost never one problem. It is five or six small habits. A matter billed late because the fee earner was busy. A bill that goes out with no payment date on it. A client who was never asked for money on account. A credit control call nobody owns. A partner who does not want to chase a friend.
That last one is the reason this is not an accounting problem.
Your accountant
Good at: the number, the year end, tax, the statutory picture. Telling you lock-up has moved from 140 days to 160 and asking what happened.
Not there for: sitting in your firm on a Tuesday, asking why matter 4412 has not been billed since March, and changing what that person does next month.
An accountant reports the score. Nothing in the engagement letter asks them to change the game, and it would be unfair to expect it. Keep yours. You will want them at the end to confirm the recovered cash is real.
Your practice manager
Good at: keeping the office running. Suppliers, compliance deadlines, holidays, the hundred things that stop the week they are away.
Where they get stuck: authority. A practice manager usually cannot performance-manage the partners who employ them. Chasing a partner's unbilled work in progress is a quick way to make an enemy of the person who signs your payslip.
This is rarely a competence problem. Most practice managers I meet know exactly where the money is stuck. Nobody has given them the standing to fix it.
Your bank
A facility against your work in progress or your debtor book will get you through the month. It will also make the problem invisible and charge you for the privilege. Borrowing against lock-up treats the symptom and postpones the cure.
A consultant with a report
A good report is worth having. The trouble is what happens next. The report lands, everyone agrees with it, and then the firm goes back to being busy. Nothing inside a document changes what people do on a Tuesday.
That is the honest risk in what I sell, too. A diagnostic is a report. The difference is that every finding carries a figure, the causes are named, and the plan attached to it is costed and specific enough that your own team could run it without me. If you want the map and nothing else, take it and run it yourselves. That is a legitimate outcome and I will say so on the call.
New software
Case management, billing automation, drafting tools. All of it works. None of it works on a process nobody owns. A new system installed over an unowned process gets you to the wrong answer faster, and now you have a subscription as well.
Buy the software after you have decided who owns billing. Not before.
The difference
Someone doing the chief operating officer's job
What is different is not intelligence. It is three things: time inside the firm, authority delegated by the partners, and no relationships to protect.
The work is unglamorous. Deciding who owns billing. Putting a payment date on every bill. Agreeing what happens on day 30 and day 60, and who makes the call. Getting the partners to accept that the same rules apply to them. Then holding it long enough that it survives without anyone watching.
I am not a lawyer and I do not go near your files. I run the business side of founder-led firms, the job a chief operating officer does in a bigger practice. I have 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.
When you do not need me
Your number is already good
Lock-up under 90 days, and you knew that without having to ask anyone.
Someone already owns it
One named person owns billing and credit control, and has real authority over partners as well as staff.
The phone is not ringing
Too little work is a marketing problem, not an operations one. I would be the wrong answer.
Nobody intends to act
If the firm wants the analysis but not the argument that follows it, save your money.
The order I would do it in
Get the number
Ask your finance person for the firm's lock-up days this week. If it takes more than a day to produce, that is a finding in itself.
Find out who owns billing
Ask three people who owns it. If you get three answers, or a job title rather than a name, nobody owns it.
Price the gap before buying anything
Software, a hire, a facility. None of it should be bought before the gap has a figure against it.
Want yours priced?
Twenty minutes, no deck and no obligation. If your firm does not need this, you will hear it from me on the call.