The test is simple. Can a partner look at your dashboard for 30 seconds on Monday morning and know who to call? SaveYa Tech’s Chris Lanzilli explains the six most useful numbers for a plaintiff firm’s KPI dashboard, and where to find them in Clio (or any other case management platform).
The 4 Questions Personal Injury Partners Always Ask
Most law firm KPI dashboard advice is written for hourly firms. Utilization, realization and collection rate numbers are fine if you bill by the hour. But nobody sends an invoice for hours on a car accident case, so a dashboard built around them tells a plaintiff firm almost nothing.
We build dashboards for law firms based on their own practice management data. The personal injury lawyers we talk to are asking four questions.
- Are good cases coming in?
- Are they moving?
- Where is our cash tied up?
- What is a case worth when it closes?
These 6 Numbers Answer Their Questions
Below is where you’ll find the answers to these questions in Clio when building out your KPI dashboard — and what to do if you are on MyCase, Smokeball or something else.
(Ed. Note: This month at Clio Con 2026, Clio announced its new “intelligent legal work platform,” which unifies Clio Manage — its base practice management product, the Clio Grow CRM, and Clio Work, its legal AI product, under a single interface. Along with new analytics and custom reporting capabilities in Manage and Grow, users can prompt Clio’s AI assistant directly for custom reporting metrics.)
1. Signed Cases by Source
Not calls. Signed contingency agreements, grouped by where the client came from. This metric shows which marketing and which referrals actually pay.
Clio’s Lead source revenue report tracks intake matters, hired matters, not-hired matters, and the hired conversion rate for each source in Clio Grow, and directly from the central dashboard view on Clio’s AI platform.
The Referral report lists the contacts who send you cases, based on the “Referred by” field. The report is only as good as that field. On a busy Monday, if intake skips it, by Friday a lot of your new cases will say “Unassigned.”
Make the source a required step at intake and look at the blanks every week.
2. Intake Conversion
To arrive at your intake conversion rate, divide signed clients by qualified inquiries. Only count the people you would have taken. If you count every wrong number and every case you’d turn down, the rate looks terrible, and nobody believes it.
The Matters Added report gives you a rough rate by lead source and matter type. It counts every matter added, so you want to close out junk inquiries first, or the number will look worse than it is.
3. Cases by Stage
How many open cases sit in each stage. Most plaintiff firms use some version of intake, treating, demand, negotiation and litigation.
This one is about balance. A pile of cases in treatment and nothing in demand means next quarter’s fees are going to be thin. This KPI lets you see it months before it hits the bank account.
Clio Manage has matter stages on select plans, a Kanban-esque board for each practice area under Matters > Stages. You can also turn on the Matter stage column in your matters list and export it.
4. Days in Stage, and Days from Sign-up to Settlement
Watch the stragglers, not the average. If one case has been in demand three times longer than everything around it, that is a phone call someone needs to make this week.
Each card on the Clio matter stages board already shows how many days the matter has been in its current stage.
For time to resolution, Clio Manage’s custom reports, a newer feature on the Signature and Elite plans, include a Matters dataset with open dates, close dates and stage.
For time to resolution, Clio’s newly expanded custom reporting datasets allow you to pull open dates, close dates and stage. Using the unified AI platform, you can also prompt Clio’s built-in assistant to find resolution times across your active matters.
5. Costs Advanced
This is the money the firm has lent to its own cases for things like filing fees, records requests and experts. For a lot of plaintiff firms, this number determines whether they can take the next big case.
Record costs as expenses on each matter. If you use Clio’s Personal Injury Add-On, the Settlement tab subtracts matter expenses in its recovery calculator. Expenses you record on the matter flow into that tab on their own, so one entry does two jobs. If your plan does not give you a firmwide total, export the costs advanced once a month and put the number in front of your partners.
6. Fee Per Resolved Case
This KPI shows the firm’s fee on each resolved case, after referral and co-counsel splits, averaged by case type and by source. Set your marketing budget with this one. It’s where you find out your smallest referral source might be paying you the most.
Clio’s Personal Injury Add-On lets you record recoveries and fees on the Settlement tab. While real fees are still coming in, Clio Grow’s Lead Source revenue report totals the estimated value of matters by source, which gets you a rough version. Ignore its Revenue column — it counts billable work, which a contingency case barely has. (Note that if you are using the new unified Clio platform, you can query your intake and billing data using natural language to evaluate estimated values by source without exporting raw spreadsheets.)
When Clio’s Built-in Analytics Reports Are Enough
If you are a small firm using Clio’s Personal Injury Add-On, and your team consistently fills in the source and stage fields, you may not need anything custom for your dashboard. The built-in stage boards and reporting tools, plus the Clio Grow reports, cover most of this list.
Customizing dashboard reports makes sense for a plaintiff firm when the numbers live in more than one place (intake in one system, cases in another, costs in a spreadsheet), or when someone spends hours every week copying numbers around to build a report.
If You’re Not on Clio
The same six numbers work on any practice management, case management or CRM platform with a stage field, a source field and custom fields.
8am MyCase. The Case List Report (Reports > Case & Contact Reports) filters and groups by case stage, and you can add case custom fields as columns. Set up settlement amount or costs advanced as a currency custom field, and you can report on it. The Leads dashboard charts conversion by referral source, and the Leads Forecasted Pipeline Value report shows what is sitting in your intake pipeline.
Smokeball. On the Prosper+ plan, Firm Insights includes a Personal Injury Settlement Insights dashboard. It shows average days open, average settlement per client, average proceeds per client (your fee after referral splits), costs recovered and lost, and settlements per referrer. The Projected Settlements dashboard breaks expected settlements down by stage.
Anything else. If your system can save a filtered report and export it, a monthly export and a simple spreadsheet will get you all six KPIs.
Verify the KPI Dashboard Before You Trust It
A dashboard can look full and still be wrong. We once built a report that pulled only a firm’s oldest cases. Every number looked reasonable. We caught it because nothing from the last two months ever showed up.
Honestly, this is the step most people skip.
To check the dashboard, pick one number you already know, like how many cases you signed last month, and make sure the dashboard says the same thing. If two systems give you two different counts, fix that before you add anything new.
Always Put the Statute of Limitations Date in Plain View
This one isn’t a KPI, but it probably matters more than all six. Make sure every open case has its statute of limitations date in a field a report can read, so everyone can see it. We’ve seen that date live only as a task or a calendar entry, where no dashboard can find it. It’s the one number here that can actually hurt you.
Plaintiff Firms Can Skip These KPIs
Skip utilization and realization rates unless you also do hourly work. (We keep the full list, hourly and contingency, in our company’s guide on law firm KPI dashboards.)
Skip anything nobody will act on.
How to Start Building a Useful Dashboard
Here’s the true test of a plaintiff firm’s KPI dashboard: Can you and your partners look at it for 30 seconds on Monday morning and know who to call?
Start with these three KPIs:
- Signed cases by source
- Cases by stage with days in stage
- Costs advanced
Look at them every week for a month. Once people check them without being reminded, add the other three.
Featured Image Licensed under the Unsplash+ License
Read About Additional Law Firm Metrics to Track
Law Firm KPIs: 5 Metrics to Track for Pricing, Profit and Predictability by Mori Kabiri
Checklist for Conducting Your Law Firm’s Year-End Financial Review by Camille Stell
Tracking Growth: What Should Be on Your Law Firm Dashboard? Brooke Lively
