Personal Injury · Template post · Published Aug 13, 2026

Personal Injury Firm KPIs: The 10 Numbers (Free Dashboard)

A PI firm runs on a pipeline: lead to treatment to demand to litigation to settlement to disbursement. Most owners feel that pipeline but never measure it, so they cannot see where cases pile up, where value leaks, or where risk is building until it costs them. These are the 10 numbers that show a personal injury firm's health end to end, plus the two risk numbers that always come first, with a free dashboard to track them. Ten numbers, one rhythm, a firm you can actually see.

A PI firm's economics run through a pipeline, lead to treatment to demand to litigation to settlement to disbursement, that most owners never measure. Ten numbers make it visible. Two risk numbers come first: deadlines/SOLs at risk and medical records outstanding, because a miss there is catastrophic. Then eight pipeline numbers show throughput: new leads, intake response time, lead-to-signed conversion, cases in treatment, cases in demand/negotiation, cases in litigation, cases settled, and time-to-disbursement. Track them on a regular rhythm from your intake log, matter list, and deadline and records systems. The free dashboard gives you the structure. Fix risk first, then intake speed and conversion. Each system supplements, never replaces, the firm's own processes.

Ask a PI owner how the firm is doing and you will usually get a feeling, busy, slow, stretched, rather than a number, and the feeling is often wrong in expensive ways. The firm feels busy because cases are piling up in treatment, but conversion has quietly dropped and the pipeline is thinning behind the pile. Or it feels slow because few cases have settled lately, when the real problem is that settled cases are stuck in disbursement and the money is not moving. A pipeline you cannot see is a pipeline you cannot manage, and PI firms run on a longer, more stage-heavy pipeline than most practices, which makes the invisibility more costly. The remedy is not a data project; it is ten well-chosen numbers, looked at on a rhythm, that turn the feeling into a picture you can act on.

The pipeline you cannot see

The PI pipeline has more distinct stages than most legal work, and value can stall or leak at every one. A lead has to be answered fast and converted to a signed client. A signed client moves into treatment, where the case waits, sometimes for a long time, on medical progress and records. Then it moves to demand and negotiation, then possibly into litigation, then to settlement, and finally through disbursement to a paid client and a closed matter. Each stage is a place where cases can accumulate unnoticed, where time can stretch, and where a case can quietly stop moving, and because the stages are long, an owner working case-by-case rarely sees the shape of the whole. Measuring the pipeline is how you replace a series of individual case impressions with a view of the firm as a system.

The goal of the ten numbers is not sophistication; it is visibility with the minimum that suffices. Ten numbers is few enough to actually maintain and look at, and enough to reveal the firm's real state: where cases are, how fast they are moving, whether interest is converting, and, most importantly, whether risk is building. This is the PI-specific counterpart to the general owner's scorecard in the KPIs guide, expanded to match the longer PI pipeline and its particular risks.

The two risk numbers

Before any pipeline metric, two risk numbers take absolute priority, because a failure in either can undo everything the pipeline produces. The first is deadlines and statutes of limitations at risk: the count of matters where a critical date, above all a limitations date, is approaching without being safely handled. This number must be watched first and kept at or near zero-at-risk, because a missed limitations date is the catastrophic, often unfixable failure the whole firm exists to avoid, as detailed in the PI SOL system. No amount of pipeline throughput compensates for a missed SOL, so it sits at the top of the dashboard by right.

The second risk number is medical records outstanding: the count of records requests that are stalled or badly overdue, because records are the most common thing that silently freezes a PI case in treatment, and a pile of stalled records is a pile of cases that cannot progress. Watching this number turns the records black hole from an invisible drag into a visible, managed metric, and it directly feeds the chase workflow in the medical records guide. These two numbers come first on the dashboard and first in priority: get them green before optimizing anything else, because they are where a PI firm's worst outcomes live.

The eight pipeline numbers

With risk handled, eight numbers show the pipeline's throughput and health, tracing a case from first contact to a paid client. The first three live at the front: new leads, intake response time, and lead-to-signed conversion, which together show whether the firm is attracting inquiries, answering them fast, and turning them into clients, the front-of-funnel economics where, in PI, speed is unusually valuable, as covered in the intake speed guide. The next three show where signed cases sit: cases in treatment, cases in demand or negotiation, and cases in litigation, which reveal how work is distributed across the pipeline and where cases are piling up or thinning out. The last two show the exit: cases settled in the period, and time-to-disbursement, which shows whether settled cases are being paid out promptly rather than stalling in the lien-and-disbursement phase covered in the lien cadence guide.

The rhythm and the dashboard

The numbers are only useful if they are looked at, so the discipline that matters most is the rhythm: a standing weekly or monthly moment when the owner reviews the dashboard and acts on what it shows. A dashboard nobody opens is worse than no dashboard, because it creates the illusion of measurement without the benefit, so the goal is a cadence sustainable enough to actually keep. Most PI firms do well with a weekly look at the risk numbers and the front-of-funnel numbers, which move fast, and a monthly look at the fuller pipeline, which moves more slowly. What you are looking for is not perfection in any single number but movement and pattern: a conversion rate slipping, a treatment pile growing, a time-to-disbursement stretching, each of which points to a specific place to act.

The dashboard itself is deliberately simple, because the ten numbers can be sourced from systems the firm already has: new leads and response time and conversion from the intake log, the pipeline counts from the matter list, and the risk numbers from the deadline and records systems. The free dashboard in the Kit gives you the structure, the two risk numbers up top and the eight pipeline numbers below, so you can begin seeing your firm as a system this week without a data project or new software. Track it, look at it on a rhythm, fix the risk numbers first and then intake speed and conversion, and the pipeline you used to feel becomes a picture you can steer, which connects back to the whole-firm view in the operations report guide. That is what the ten numbers buy: a PI firm you can actually see and manage, rather than one you run on impressions.

Where to go next

• The Owner's Scorecard

  The general five-number version.

• PI Intake Speed

  The front-of-funnel numbers, in depth.

• Lien and Disbursement Cadences

  The exit numbers, in depth.

• The PI SOL System

  The first risk number, protected.

Frequently asked questions