By Julie Bays, OBA Management Assistance Program Director

Lawyers are trained to work in the practice.

They answer client calls, prepare for hearings, draft documents, negotiate, solve problems and meet deadlines. Those tasks are urgent, visible and necessary. Most lawyers are incredibly good at them.

But a stable law practice also requires time working on the practice.

Regular attention to billing, workload, intake, collections and office operations can help lawyers identify problems before they interfere with timely communication, careful representation, appropriate staffing or the ability to meet client obligations. Sound business practices are not separate from professional responsibility; they help support the competent and diligent delivery of legal services.

These tasks are often less urgent than a looming deadline or a client emergency, which means they are easy to postpone.

Unfortunately, postponing them does not make them less important.

Avoiding the numbers can turn an ordinary slow period into a crisis and hide problems that are easier to fix early, such as unbilled work, unpaid invoices, a weak pipeline or overreliance on one referral source.

The answer is not to become a business-school graduate. It is to develop one simple monthly habit.

Schedule a Monthly Owner Meeting

Set aside 30 to 45 minutes once a month for a meeting with yourself—or, for firms with more than one lawyer, a brief meeting with the people responsible for the firm’s finances and operations.

Put it on the calendar like any other appointment. Treat it as part of managing a competent, diligent and sustainable law practice.

The agenda does not need to be complicated. Start with a few straightforward questions.

1. What money came in this month?

Look at revenue actually received, not merely work performed or invoices sent. This helps distinguish between a busy month from a financially productive month.

A lawyer may have spent many hours working on client matters but still have cash-flow concerns if bills have not gone out or clients have not paid them.

2. What has been billed but not collected?

Accounts receivable is one of the easiest numbers to avoid and one of the most important to understand.

Review unpaid invoices. Identify which clients need a reminder, which accounts may require a payment discussion and whether the firm’s billing and collection procedures are working as intended.

3. What work has been done but not yet billed?

Unbilled work is often a warning sign that a lawyer is too busy to keep up with the business side of the practice. A monthly review can reveal whether time entries need to be finalized, invoices need to be prepared or a workflow needs to be improved.

4. Where did new matters come from?

A lawyer does not need a sophisticated marketing dashboard to learn something useful from this question.

Track whether new clients came from former clients, other lawyers, online searches, bar activities, accountants, financial professionals, community contacts, social media, or another source.

5. What does the pipeline look like?

Legal demand is uneven. Some months bring several new matters at once; other months are quiet. That does not necessarily mean something is wrong.

Still, lawyers should know whether they have potential clients awaiting follow-up, consultations that need engagement letters, referral sources who have not heard from them in a while or practice areas that appear to be slowing down.

6. What type of work do we want?

Not every matter that generates revenue is necessarily a good fit for the firm.

A monthly review creates an opportunity to ask whether certain matters are profitable, manageable and consistent with the practice the lawyer wants to build. It can also reveal recurring work that creates stress, collection problems, excessive administrative burden or an unhealthy concentration of risk.

Consistency Matters More Than Complexity

The lawyers who build stable practices are not necessarily the ones with the most elaborate financial reports or marketing plans. Often, they are the ones who consistently pay attention to the basic information that tells them how the practice functions.

A regular pause to review cash flow, billing, collections, prospective matters and referral relationships can make the natural ups and downs of practice less surprising and far less disruptive.

Working in the practice serves today’s clients. Working on the practice helps ensure there will be a healthy, sustainable practice to serve tomorrow’s clients as well.

Further Reading: Jay Harrington, “Why Legal Demand Is Unpredictable — and How It Affects Business Development for Lawyers,” Attorney at Work (June 15, 2026). Michael E. Gerber, Robert Armstrong and Sanford Fisch, “The E-Myth Attorney: Why Most Legal Practices Don’t Work and What to Do About It,” was published in 2010 but remains a helpful read for lawyers thinking about systems, delegation and the difference between practicing law and building a law practice.