Law Firm Reporting Dashboard — Utilisation, Realisation and Lockup From Your PMS Exports
Law firms run on hours recorded, billed and collected — and most cannot say quickly where the leaks are. DataHub Pro turns practice management exports into a firm dashboard: billable utilisation, realisation rates, WIP ageing, lockup days and matter profitability, with the partner pack generated automatically.
Updated 10 June 2026
What is a law firm reporting dashboard?
A law firm reporting dashboard tracks the pipeline every managing partner worries about: hours recorded against capacity (utilisation), the proportion of recorded time that survives to a bill and then to cash (realisation and collection), work in progress and its ageing, lockup (WIP plus debtor days — the months of the firm's labour tied up unpaid), and ultimately profitability per matter, per client and per fee earner. These metrics are standard in legal practice management literature; what is rare is a firm that can see them, current, on one screen.
The data exists in the practice management system — Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Practice Evolve, or the time-recording module of whatever the firm runs — and all of them export time entries, billing and collections as CSV or Excel. But PMS reporting tends to stop at lists and totals. The questions that change behaviour are analytical: which matter types consistently realise below 80%? Which clients pay in 30 days, and which in 110? Is the fixed-fee book profitable once recorded hours are counted against it? Answering those means joining time, billing and collection data — typically a job for a finance director the firm may not have, or a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
The economics of getting this wrong are unusually direct. A firm's inventory is time: every recorded hour written off is product destroyed after manufacture, and every day of lockup is the firm financing its clients. Sector benchmarks put average lockup well over 100 days for many UK practices — meaning a quarter of a year's work delivered but unpaid at any moment. Five points of realisation or thirty days of lockup are usually worth more than a year's marketing budget, and both are management problems that start with measurement.
DataHub Pro provides the measurement layer without a BI project. Upload time, billing and collections exports and the platform computes utilisation by fee earner and team, realisation by matter type and client, WIP ageing, lockup trends, and matter profitability — with anomaly detection flagging the outliers and Ask Your Data answering partner questions in plain English, every figure carrying an audit trail. Auto Report generates the monthly partner pack as an editable Word document, on schedule. Data stays in UK/EU infrastructure under GDPR — and is never used to train AI models, a line many firms rightly require in writing.
The reporting problems firms recognise
Managing partners, practice managers and COFAs will find these familiar:
- Utilisation is discussed annually, leaked daily. Hours drift away in unrecorded time and quiet under-recording. Without a current utilisation view by fee earner, the conversation happens at year end — eleven months too late to act.
- Write-offs hide inside realisation. Recorded time quietly shrinks on its way to the bill, matter by matter. Few firms can say which matter types or clients drive the write-offs — so the same unprofitable work keeps being taken on the same terms.
- Lockup is a known problem with unknown anatomy. Everyone agrees cash collection is slow; few can name the twelve matters driving most of it, or which clients' payment behaviour has deteriorated this year.
- Fixed-fee profitability is taken on faith. Without recorded hours counted against fixed fees, nobody knows which fee structures make money — and pricing reviews run on instinct.
- The partner pack is a month-end production. Someone assembles utilisation, billing, WIP and aged debt figures by hand every month. It arrives late, in a format nobody reads past page two.
- Partner-level questions need finance-team excavation. "How profitable is our employment practice?" is a fair question with a buried answer — joining time, billing and collections data that no one report contains.
DataHub Pro features mapped to law firm work
From the platform's 50 analysis tools, these map directly onto practice metrics:
Utilisation analysis
Billable hours against capacity by fee earner, team and period — with trend lines and anomaly flags on under-recording patterns, so the conversation happens in-month, not at appraisal.
Realisation waterfall
Recorded → billed → collected, broken down by matter type, client and fee earner — variance analysis shows exactly where write-offs concentrate, the same logic as our budget vs actual guide applied to time.
WIP & lockup tracking
WIP ageing and lockup days tracked monthly, with Pareto analysis identifying the matters and clients driving most of the locked-up cash — a collection priority list, not a lament.
Matter profitability
Recorded hours at cost rates against fees billed, per matter and matter type — including the fixed-fee book, where the answer is most needed and least known.
Ask Your Data — auditable AI
"Which clients took over 90 days to pay last year?" Plain-English questions with answers that show their working — every figure defensible at the partners' meeting.
Auto Report partner packs
The monthly management pack as an editable Word document — utilisation, realisation, lockup, aged WIP and AI commentary — generated on schedule from the latest exports.
Worked example: from time-entries.csv to three partner-meeting findings
You export time-entries.csv, billing and collections data from your practice management system — a year of activity across 38 fee earners — and upload them. Three findings return in minutes:
Utilisation 68%, variance is the story
Firm utilisation averages 68% — but the spread runs from 41% to 89% by fee earner, with two teams consistently low. The capacity conversation now has names and numbers, not impressions.
Write-offs concentrate in fixed-fee matters
Realisation is 84% overall, but the waterfall shows fixed-fee conveyancing realising at 71% once recorded hours are counted — the pricing review the firm postponed, now with its business case attached.
Lockup at 92 days, driven by 12 matters
Pareto analysis shows twelve matters account for 58% of total lockup, eight of them with one institutional client whose payment behaviour shifted in Q2 — a specific conversation, not a general cash-flow worry.
Auto Report assembles the same analysis into the monthly partner pack, with each figure traceable to the source export via the audit trail. The month-end production becomes a review-and-circulate.
How it works — three steps, no implementation project
There is no onboarding call, no integration scoping and nothing for IT to install. The workflow is the same whether you are testing on one file or running scheduled reporting across a team:
- 1. Bring your data. Upload an Excel or CSV export from the systems you already use, or connect Google Sheets, SharePoint or Shopify for sources that should stay live. DataHub Pro auto-detects your columns — no template to conform to.
- 2. Run the analysis. The KPI dashboard builds itself on upload. From there, pick from 50 analysis tools — Pareto, cohort, RFM, anomaly detection, variance, what-if, Holt-Winters forecasting — or ask questions in plain English with Ask Your Data, where every answer shows the operations behind it.
- 3. Ship the report. Auto Report turns the analysis into an editable Word or PowerPoint document with charts and AI-written commentary. Schedule it, and the recurring version arrives without you — same method, fresh data, every time.
Plans that scale from a single file to a whole team
- Free — $0, forever. One user, 3 uploads a month, 8 core analysis tools and watermarked PDF export. No AI features, no credit card — but a genuine way to test the workflow on your real data before paying anything.
- Pro — $14.99/mo, or $9.99/mo billed annually. All 50 analysis tools, Ask Your Data auditable AI, Auto Report DOCX/PPTX export, scheduled reports and team roles. This is the plan most teams on this page run.
- Enterprise — custom pricing. Everything in Pro, plus white-label reporting, SSO, unlimited usage, multi-client workspaces and organisation-level audit-log governance.
Every plan runs on UK/EU infrastructure under GDPR, and uploaded data is never used to train AI models — on any tier.
What DataHub Pro is not
It is not a practice management system, a time-recording tool or a legal accounts package — and it does not touch client files or matter documents. It analyses the management data your PMS exports: time, billing, collections. Client-confidential matter content never needs to be uploaded; the metrics work on reference numbers and figures.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with Clio, LEAP or our practice management system?
Yes, via export. Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Practice Evolve and every mainstream PMS export time entries, billing and collections as CSV or Excel. Upload those files and DataHub Pro auto-detects the columns — no integration project, no IT dependency.
Is client data kept confidential?
The analysis needs management data — hours, values, dates, matter references — not matter content, so client-confidential documents never need to be uploaded. All data is hosted in UK/EU infrastructure under GDPR, never used to train AI models, with a DPA available and a full audit log of access — the assurances firms typically need for supervisory and professional-conduct purposes.
How is lockup calculated?
Lockup days combine WIP days (unbilled work at standard rates over fee income per day) and debtor days (unpaid bills over fee income per day) — the standard legal-sector measure of cash tied up in delivered work. DataHub Pro tracks it monthly, by team and client, with Pareto analysis naming the matters that drive it.
What does realisation analysis show?
The waterfall from recorded time to billed fees to collected cash, with the leakage quantified at each step and broken down by matter type, client and fee earner — so the firm can see whether its problem is write-offs at billing, discounting, or slow collection, and where each concentrates.
Can it measure fee-earner utilisation fairly?
It computes utilisation from your data against the capacity assumptions you set — full-time hours, part-time arrangements, non-chargeable roles. Trends and anomaly flags prompt conversations; the judgement about what a number means for a person remains the firm's.
Can it analyse fixed-fee matter profitability?
Yes — recorded hours at cost or standard rates set against the fixed fee per matter, aggregated by work type. It is the analysis most firms want and few run, because it requires joining time and billing data that live in different reports.
Can partners get a monthly pack automatically?
Yes. Scheduled reports re-run the analysis on new exports and Auto Report generates an editable Word pack — utilisation, realisation, lockup, aged WIP, with AI-written commentary. The practice manager reviews and circulates rather than assembles.
Who in the firm can see what?
Team roles control workspace access — for example, partners see firm-level dashboards while team leaders see their own teams — and the audit log records every view and analysis. Finer-grained governance and SSO come with Enterprise.
What does it cost for a firm?
Free tier: 1 user, 3 uploads a month, 8 core tools — enough for a practice manager to pilot on a quarter's data. Pro is $14.99/mo per user ($9.99/mo annual) for all 50 tools, AI and scheduled packs. Enterprise adds SSO, team roles at scale and white-label reporting.
Find the five points of realisation you're leaking.
Upload time and billing exports. Get utilisation, realisation and lockup analysis in minutes — and a partner pack that builds itself monthly.
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