We hear stories about law firms that assign 100 cases, 150 cases, and sometimes even more to every lawyer in the firm. That seems absolutely crazy to us. If you think about it, a lawyer with 100 cases means they can spend only one day every five months working on each case. The reality is that the cases are actually being handled by non-attorney employees, with little or no supervision.
That might be good for the profit of the law firm, and honestly, it might be fine for injury cases where people are not badly hurt. But it is horrible for the level of care and service that their client’s deserve, and need when they have suffered serious, life changing injuries.
At Swope, Rodante, we keep a tight grip on the number of cases we accept into the firm, to avoid us having too many cases to be able to do a good job on each one. We keep our staffing rates lower than fifteen cases per lawyer, on average for the entire firm.
That’s right. Twelve lawyers, one hundred and eighty open and active cases in the entire firm.
We work long, long hours, have incredibly well experienced staff support, many who have been with us for 10, 15 and even 20 years. But even with all that, our experience has shown that you cannot do all that is required on a large injury case if you try to handle more than a dozen at a time.
If a law firm is serious about handling large personal injury cases like we are, the first thing they need to do is focus themselves on only a few cases at a time. ASK THIS QUESTION, and if you find that a law firm has more than 20 active cases per lawyer, think seriously about leaving that firm, right away.
