Case costs advanced and carried for years. The question is not realization but which advanced costs will never be recovered and are still on the books.
A contingency practice is a lender that also litigates. You advance costs for years against an outcome you do not control, and the balance sheet question — which of these advances will actually come back — is usually answered by instinct rather than by a number.
advanced costs
case acquisition cost
fee splits
liens
settlement disbursement
portfolio carry
referral fee
These are the terms the review uses with you. A page written for
law firms generally would not contain any of them.
Where it concentrates here
Specific to plaintiff and contingency, not to law firms generally. Each is
concentrated — a single agreement, a single code, a single account nobody reviews
— which is why a sample of the operation tends to miss it and a full pass tends to
find it. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Advanced case costs carried at full value on matters whose realistic recovery changed years ago, because writing them down requires admitting the case turned.
Case cost advances funded from the operating account rather than tracked as the financing they are, so the true cost of carrying a portfolio is invisible.
Referral and co-counsel fee splits agreed verbally or in an email, and honored differently by each side when the fee finally arrives.
Settlement disbursement and lien resolution — medical liens, ERISA, Medicare set-asides — handled per matter with no standard process, which is where trust account exceptions come from.
Case acquisition cost per signed matter, by source, almost never calculated — so marketing spend is allocated by which channel feels busiest.
Where this data actually lives
Filevine, SmartAdvocate or Litify for case management
A separate case-cost ledger, frequently in Excel, that does not reconcile to the GL
Lien resolution through a third party whose fees are rarely reviewed
Named because it changes what the intake asks
for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them
rather than surprised by them.
The proposal is written for law firms as a
whole — the sequence, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your
number of operating units. What is on this page is what we would additionally expect to
find in plaintiff and contingency.