In this blog, we feature insights from Mary Ellen Murrah, chief strategy and marketing officer at Vista Consulting, about the four common pain points holding back plaintiffs law firms.

Growing a plaintiff personal injury firm is hard work. You’re juggling volatile cash flow, high client expectations, and relentless caseloads. If your firm’s growth feels stalled, chances are one (or more) of these four common pain points is at play…and fixable!

4 Common Pain Points

1) Inefficient processes 

If your team members reinvent the wheel with every case, you’re bleeding time. Common symptoms include unclear handoffs, inconsistent case stages, and too many “check in” meetings.

Vista’s Recommendations:

• Map your core workflows (intake, treatment, demand, litigation). Define who does what, by when, and what “done” looks like.
• Build simple SOPs where 80% of cases follow the same path; handle the other 20% with exceptions, not ad hoc chaos.
• Leverage your case management system (CMS) to automate task triggers, deadlines, and reminders. If a task repeats, automate it.

2) Inadequate data analysis 

You can’t improve what you can’t see. Many law firms collect data but don’t convert it into actionable decisions. That often leads to blind spots like bottlenecks in demand prep, missed statutes, or money wasted on underperforming channels.

Vista’s Recommendations:

• Start with a manageable and focused dashboard, tracking critical data like intake conversion rate, average days in each case stage, cases per pod or attorney, cost per case, time on desk, and projected fee pipeline.
• Establish data hygiene rules. Define fields, owners, and update cadence. Junk in, junk out isn’t just a phrase; it’s a profit and efficiency leak.
• Meet weekly to review trends and take one action per metric. Reports don’t move the needle. Proper analysis and data-driven actions do.

3) Ineffective marketing strategies 

More spend doesn’t equal more value. If you’re not tying leads to signed cases and settlement. value, you’re guessing, and guessing can be expensive.

Vista’s Recommendations:

• Track source-to-value. Connect marketing channels to average fee per case, not just lead volume.
• Speed to lead matters. Under five minutes wins. Use call routing, texting, and after-hours coverage to boost conversions.
• Test and prune. Monthly, nix what underperforms and redeploy to the channels that drive profitable cases. Celebrate efficiency, not vanity metrics.

4) Difficulty scaling and expanding

What got you here won’t get you there. Scaling breaks when growth relies on heroics, not systems. If leaders are the bottleneck and new hires struggle to ramp up, you’re capped.

Vista’s Recommendations:

• Clarify roles. Distinguish Operations from HR. As you approach 30-40 team members, make HR a dedicated seat to drive recruiting, onboarding, and performance.
• Standardize training. Create role-based playbooks, shadowing paths, and a 30/60/90-day plan. Onboarding should be a system, not a scavenger hunt.
• Build capacity before you need it. Forecast pipeline and hire one role ahead in intake, case management, and demand prep to avoid feast-or-famine cycles.

The Secret Sauce: Turn Pain Points into Power Performance

Moving from pain to power requires focusing on four key efforts: Fix the process, fuel it with clean data, invest in the right marketing, and build the structure to scale. Do that, and you’ll experience faster resolutions, happier clients, and a healthier bottom line. If this list makes you a little uncomfortable? Good. That means you know where to start.

Looking for more insights from Vista Consulting?

Read our blog “Cultivating an Exceptional Intake Culture: A Winning Strategy for Law Firms”, featuring Mary Ellen Murrah of Vista Consulting.