In 2016, the company released its Legal Trends Report, which studied benchmark data from its 150,000 daily active users. It found on average, users only billed 28 percent of their available work hours, and the average billable hour rate across the country was $232.
Big data is increasingly available to industries, but lawyer information still tends to be self reported, which can be problematic, said George Psiharis, vice president of business development and partnerships at Clio. Sometimes the information isn’t accurate, and it’s from a smaller pool. That’s why, he added, the company decided to gather user information and release the 2016 report.
“From 2010 to 2016 the [billable] numbers stayed pretty stable. But when you look at the consumer price index, legal services trailed what people paid for other stuff over time,” Psiharis said. “The days of raising rates to make more money, at an aggregate level, doesn’t seem to be the way of the future anymore.”
