One lens through which to view a large part of the corpus of business and management literature is that of metrics. Simply consider how much of what’s written consists of discussions about what to measure, what to optimize, and how to enhance all those numbers.

So, in retailing, we have such yardsticks as sales per square foot, same-store sales, sales per employee, inventory turn, store traffic, percent average markdown, and so forth. For cellphone providers it would be customer churn, net customer growth/decline, network reach/coverage and network speed, cost per customer acquisition, and much more.

I could go on: Selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) as a percentage of revenue, new product life cycle speed, relative market share, but you get the idea.

So what do we have in Law Land?

In terms of comparing ourselves firm to firm and not counting inward-facing items such as utilization and realization, basically just four:

  • Total topline revenue
  • PPP
  • Headcount (number of lawyers), and
  • Revenue per lawyer (RPL).

Today I want to focus on topline revenue, but a few words about the others first.

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