In a personal injury law firm, time truly is money. The longer a case remains on your desk, the longer your clients wait for their recovery and your firm’s revenue realization is delayed. This is where the concept of Time on Desk becomes crucial—the period from when a client hires your firm to the final disbursement of their recovery.
Why Does Time on Desk Matter?
Optimizing Time on Desk is one of the most impactful strategies to enhance profitability without increasing your caseload. By focusing on Time on Desk and strategically outsourcing tasks like lien resolution, you can streamline operations, reduce delays, and significantly boost your firm’s efficiency and bottom line.
The key is efficiency. By reducing delays, particularly in the resolution-to-disbursement phase, you can accelerate cash flow, improve client satisfaction, and increase revenue. For example, shaving 30 days off your timeline could mean doing 13 months of work in just 12. One place to do this is during the resolution-to-disbursement phase.
Solving the Lien Resolution Bottleneck – Accelerating Disbursement
A major bottleneck during that phase often occurs during the lien resolution process. Lien resolution is often a tedious, time-intensive process that creates significant bottlenecks. Hours are spent managing paperwork, chasing medical records, and negotiating with lien holders—tasks that frequently prolong case closure and delay disbursement. These inefficiencies not only slow your firm’s cash flow but also hinder your ability to move on to new cases, impacting overall productivity.
By outsourcing lien resolution, you can delegate this critical yet labor-intensive task to experts who specialize in handling it efficiently. This allows your team to focus on high-value activities, focusing on what they do best. Outsourcing accelerates case resolution timelines, increases throughput, and ultimately improves your firm’s profitability and operational flow.
Power of Outsourcing
When you outsource lien resolution, you’re not just saving time – you’re also ensuring that your team’s efforts are focused on their highest-value tasks. Tasks like increasing the value of existing cases, bringing in new clients and building your practice. Outsourcing lien resolution gives you seasoned experts who can work on your behalf, ensuring that your client’s funds get disbursed promptly. Meanwhile, your in-house team can continue to move cases forward, maximizing efficiency across the board.
By outsourcing these non-core administrative activities, you streamline your operations, reduce overhead, and ultimately increase profitability. Your firm can handle more cases in less time, leading to better/faster resolution of inventory and higher revenue. It is part of a holistic plan to cut down Time on Desk.
Conclusion
The Time on Desk metric measures how efficiently your firm turns cases into revenue. By minimizing delays and leveraging outsourcing, you can accelerate case timelines, boost profitability, and enhance client satisfaction.
As this year comes to an end, consider: Are you effectively reducing Time on Desk? Do unresolved liens have files stalled on your desk? And most importantly, do you have a clear strategy to streamline Phase 3—settlement to disbursement—for 2025? If you need help answering these questions in the right way for your firm, consider partnering with Synergy to improve Time on Desk. Contact Synergy today.
Written by: Jason D. Lazarus, J.D., LL.M., MSCC | Chairman of the Board
