The metric most PI firms do not track
Most personal-injury firms can recite their intake numbers cold. Lead volume, sign-up rate, cost per acquired case, all of it lives on a dashboard. Far fewer can tell you the median age of their open files, or how many cases have sat untouched for ninety days. That blind spot is expensive. Case cycle time, the elapsed span from sign-up to disbursement, is the single number that most directly controls a contingency firm's cash flow, and the files that quietly stall are the ones that erode it.
An aging inventory does not announce itself. It accumulates one deferred task at a time until a third of the caseload is older than it should be and no one noticed the drift. Measuring cycle time turns that invisible problem into a managed one.
Define the stages, then measure each
Total cycle time is only useful once you break it into stages, because a file can stall in very different places for very different reasons. A workable breakdown for a typical auto or premises file looks like this:
- Sign-up to treatment complete or maximum medical improvement.
- MMI to demand sent.
- Demand to offer or suit filed.
- Litigation to resolution.
- Settlement to disbursement, including lien resolution.
Track the median days a file spends in each stage, not just the average, because a handful of ancient outliers will distort a mean and hide a healthy middle. When one stage runs long across the whole inventory, that is a process problem, not a series of individual lawyer problems, and it has a process fix.
Where files actually stall
Two stages tend to swallow the most time, and both are fixable. The first is the stretch between treatment and the demand, where records and bills sit in a request queue and a paralegal is waiting on a provider who does not answer. The second is the gap between settlement and disbursement, where lien resolution drags and the client's check, and the firm's fee, wait on a payoff letter. The medical-records bottleneck responds to vendor management and a firm follow-up cadence. The disbursement bottleneck responds to starting lien resolution early, a discipline we cover in depth under liens and settlement rather than treating it as a closing-day scramble.
Build the aged-file report
The reporting tool does not need to be sophisticated. Any case-management system can produce a list of open files sorted by date of last meaningful activity, and that list is the backbone of file review. Flag anything with no substantive action in sixty days and anything past a target age for its stage. Review the flagged list on a fixed weekly cadence with the responsible attorney and paralegal, and require a next action and a date on every stalled file. The value is in the routine, not the software. A file that has to be explained out loud every week does not sit for six months.
Set target ages by case type rather than applying one number to everything. A soft-tissue auto case that should resolve in nine to twelve months needs a tighter clock than a disputed-liability premises case or a file with extended treatment. The point of the target is to trigger a look, not to force a premature demand. Some files should be old, but the firm should be able to say why each old file is old.
Tie cycle time to staffing and capacity
Cycle time and caseload-per-handler move together. When files per paralegal climb past what the team can service, cycle time stretches, demands slip, and the aging report swells, usually before anyone reports feeling underwater. Watching the two numbers side by side gives a firm an early signal to add capacity or slow intake, well before a backlog turns into missed statutes or malpractice exposure. It also disciplines intake itself, because a firm that measures throughput learns quickly which case types clear fast and which tie up a desk for two years, a selection question that runs across our auto accident inventory and every other beat.
What the number pays for
Shorter cycle time is not only a cash-flow gain, though the compounding effect of turning files a month or two faster across a full inventory is real. It also produces a better client experience, fewer bar complaints about neglected files, and cleaner leverage in negotiation, because a firm that moves files is a firm that can credibly try them. The reporting takes a few hours to stand up and a standing meeting to maintain. For most firms it is the highest-return operational change available, and it belongs on the same dashboard as the intake metrics already tracked across our practice operations coverage.