Fractional CFO Services for Law Firms
You built a firm that wins work. Whether revenue arrives as billable hours, flat fees, or settlements, the money leaves every week for payroll, marketing, rent, and case costs, and no bank balance can tell you whether that trade is working. We fill the finance seat on your leadership team. You get a forecast you can run the firm on, profitability by practice group you can act on, and a law firm CFO in the room when hiring, compensation, and growth decisions get made.
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Law firm Expertise
More than 130 firms nationwide work with our team: personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, immigration, employment, and corporate and business practices.
US based team
38 finance professionals stand behind your CFO. The function never rests on one person.
2 times inc. 5000 honoree
Recognized among America’s fastest growing private companies.
Law firm CFO services built around how legal work turns into cash
A law firm CFO has to understand what a generalist does not: trust accounting, unbilled time and work in progress, realization and collection, advanced case costs and settlement timing, partner compensation, and what a signed matter costs to acquire.
We are making money, but I do not know if we are managing the firm well.
We understand the financial complexity of running a law firm
Hourly work bills in arrears and collects later. Flat fees arrive before the work is done. Contingency fees land years after the costs go out. A useful forecast models each of them on its own terms, firm-wide and by practice group.
A $3M firm and a $50M firm need different answers on lines of credit, term debt, case cost financing, and partner capital, and a fast growth rate changes the answer again.
Client acquisition is the largest discretionary spend in most firms and the hardest to evaluate. You need a finance partner who understands cost per signed case by channel and brings professional skepticism to the reported numbers.
Private-equity and MSO-backed firms and national advertisers are moving into more practice areas, raising the cost of acquiring clients and compressing margins for independent firms.
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See the next 18 to 60 months before you commit to them
Hiring, expansion, a new practice area, office space, partner buy-ins, and capital investment are all decisions your firm has to make ahead of the revenue that will pay for them. Few firms can look 18 to 60 months ahead, or weigh every factor involved, without a specialist CFO.
No confusing spreadsheets.
We set up purpose-built financial projection and analysis software, not a spreadsheet that only one person understands, and use it to model where your firm is heading. For example, what adding two associates and a paralegal does to net income and cash over the next two years, or how long a second office runs at a loss before it carries itself.
You set the vision - we help you get there.
Inside a CFO engagement, we will:
Guide
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strategy discussions large and small, alongside the managing partner and the leadership team.
Interpret
financial and operational metrics as one operating system, so finance, intake, and production describe the same firm.
Connect
hiring, intake, marketing, staffing, utilization, realization, compensation, and cash into a single forecast.
Predict
what next year holds, using leading indicators, planning horizons, concentration risk analysis, and financial modeling.
Every month, your leadership team runs the firm on the Critical Four
Revenue
Know where the firm creates value, by practice group, office, and attorney.
Gross Profit Margin
Find the practice groups, teams, or matter types that need attention before they cost you the year.
Net Profit Margin
Protect the bottom line while revenue and headcount grow.
Cash
Run the firm on a forecast instead of a bank balance.
A structured CFO function, not occasional advice
Every CFO relationship at Law Firm Velocity runs on the same repeatable system, tuned to your firm’s goals for partner compensation, margin, liquidity, capacity, growth, and eventually succession or sale.
Your first 90 days
- Review of your systems, data, and financial operations, including the handoff between your practice management software and the general ledger
- First-draft income statement, balance sheet, and long-term cash flow forecast
- Scorecard build for marketing, intake, legal production, and the leadership team
- Gross profit forecast for the firm and by practice group
Your ongoing CFO cadence
Monthly CFO calls
- Current financials, what changed, and the actions they call for
- Long-term cash forecast review, including financing and distribution decisions
- Blockers to quarterly and annual goals, and who owns each one
- Hiring, capacity, and compensation decisions on the table
- Marketing and intake results against plan
Check-In calls
- Marketing KPI review
- Intake/Sales KPI review
- Open tasks and projects, with owners and due dates, to hold the leadership team accountable
A CFO team with extensive legal-financial experience.
Each fractional CFO at Law Firm Velocity works alongside a Director of CFO Services and a peer group of legal CFOs who work only with law firms. Behind them is a team of 38 finance professionals working with more than 130 firms every month, so the patterns we see across the profession show up in your firm’s plan.
Paul Carlson, CPA
Having built Law Firm Velocity into an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company, Paul now leads our fastest-growing client relationships.
Jackie Latorre
Jackie specializes in plaintiff and contingency practices, enabling firms to tame settlement-driven volatility in cash flow.
Jane Phillips
A leader among legal-financial leaders, Jane oversees our accounting operations and serves as CFO to a portfolio of multi-office firms.
Janeen Halversen
With two decades of operational finance behind her, Janeen now focuses on partner compensation modeling and profitability analysis.
Stephanie Rivera
Stephanie leads CFO engagements for rapidly scaling firms, establishing financial infrastructure that makes fast growth sustainable.
Our current provider records the past. I need someone who helps us make decisions.
You know revenue, not profit
The bank balance is up and the pipeline looks full, but nobody can say which practice groups, offices, or attorneys make money, or whether cash covers payroll six months from now.
Big decisions come down to nerve
You want to add attorneys, open an office, raise marketing spend, or change compensation, and without a forecast each one is a seven-figure bet on instinct. If your tax CPA is the strongest financial voice at the firm, a tax return once a year is not a growth plan.
Every team reports a different number
Marketing reports one figure, intake reports another, and no one agrees on cost per signed matter or realization by attorney. We build the firm’s KPI reporting and hold every team to the same numbers.
The fixes have stopped working
Revenue is flat, margins keep slipping, and the changes you tried have not moved the numbers. You need a financial leader who can find the real constraint and set the plan.
Frequently asked questions
A fractional CFO for a law firm gives the firm senior financial leadership on a part-time basis instead of a full-time hire. At Law Firm Velocity that means a named CFO who builds and maintains your forecast, reports profitability by practice group and attorney, sits in your leadership meetings, and brings the numbers to decisions about hiring, compensation, marketing spend, financing, and growth.
The work is forward-looking. Your bookkeeper and tax CPA tell you what happened. Your CFO tells you what the current plan will produce in revenue, margin, and cash over the next 18 to 60 months, and what to change if that is not the answer you want.
Mostly they are different names for the same idea: CFO-level leadership for your firm without a full-time salary. Search for it and you will find the same role described as a law firm fractional CFO, a law firm virtual CFO or vCFO, an outsourced CFO, a legal CFO, a law firm contract CFO, a law firm freelance CFO, a part-time CFO, or an fCFO, depending on who is describing it.
The label matters less than what sits behind it. A contract, freelance, or virtual CFO for law firms is usually one person selling hours, and the function stops when that person is on vacation, overloaded, or gone. A fractional CFO from Law Firm Velocity is backed by a Director of CFO Services, a peer group of legal-finance CFOs, and a 38-person accounting team, so your firm buys a function rather than a person.
A bookkeeper records what happened: transactions, reconciliations, trust ledgers, payroll entries. A controller owns the accuracy and timing of the financials, closes the month, and keeps trust accounting and compliance clean. A CFO uses those financials to decide what happens next: forecasting, pricing and billing model decisions, partner compensation, financing, hiring plans, and profitability by practice group.
Most growing firms need all three, and many firms that ask for a bookkeeper are actually describing controller or CFO work. CFO work only produces good decisions when the books underneath it are right, which is why our CFO engagements sit on top of our own law firm bookkeeping and accounting services.
There is no single revenue number, but the pattern is consistent. Firms reach for a CFO when decisions get expensive enough that guessing wrong hurts: adding attorneys, opening an office, taking on debt, acquiring a practice, changing the compensation model, or scaling marketing spend. In practice that tends to start around $3M in annual revenue, and earlier for firms growing quickly. Below that, controller-level service is usually the better fit, and we will say so.
The other trigger is the horizon. If partner buy-ins, a merger, or a sale are anywhere in the next five years, three years of clean financials and a forecast that has proven accurate will change what the firm is worth. That infrastructure takes years to build, so the time to start is before you need it.
Our law firm CFO service ranges from $2,500 to $8,000+ per month, as a fixed fee rather than hourly billing. The number moves with the size and complexity of the firm.
Compare that to a full-time law firm CFO, which typically runs $250,000 to $500,000 a year all-in, for one person with no bench behind them.
Many in-house law firm CFOs are controllers with an outsized title, and highly skilled legal CFOs are hard to find.
Hourly, flat-fee, contingency, hybrid, and subscription firms. Our more than 130 clients include personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, immigration, employment, and corporate and business practices, from single-office firms to multi-office practices with revenue past $50M.
The CFO seat looks different in each. A personal injury law firm CFO, like any plaintiff law firm CFO or contingency law firm CFO, works mostly on advanced case costs, case inventory, and settlement timing, and that work has its own page. A family law firm CFO keeps retainer replenishment, realization, and collections moving across a high volume of matters. A corporate law firm CFO, or a business law firm CFO serving closely held companies, watches work in progress, client concentration, and partner compensation. In every case the forecast, the KPIs, and the profitability reporting get built to match how your firm earns.
Forecasting starts with your firm’s revenue engine, not a generic template. For hourly work we model billable capacity, realization and collection rates, and the lag between work performed and cash received. For flat-fee work we model matter volume, average fee, and cost to deliver. For contingency work we model case inventory, expected values, and settlement timing across multi-year horizons.
Most firms run more than one engine at once. We build the model firm-wide and by practice group so you can see which one is carrying the firm, and what happens to cash when the mix shifts.
Revenue and cash run on different clocks. Growth consumes cash before it produces it: you hire ahead of the work, spend marketing dollars months before a matter signs, and carry unbilled time, receivables, or case costs in between. A profitable year on the income statement can still be a tight year in the operating account, and partner distributions make it tighter.
A long-term cash forecast turns that from a surprise into a decision. You see the trough coming and choose in advance whether to slow hiring, change billing and collection practices, hold distributions, or arrange financing on your terms rather than the bank’s.
We build gross profit reporting below the firm level, by practice group, office, attorney, and matter type, so contribution is measured rather than inferred. That means allocating direct labor and weighing each group’s contribution against the capacity it consumes.
The finding is usually specific: a practice area that looks busy but prices below cost, a referral source that produces volume without margin, an attorney whose realization has drifted, or a matter type where the cost to deliver has quietly climbed. Once it is visible, leadership can price it, staff it, or stop taking it.
We build the firm’s KPI reporting and hold each team to its targets. On the marketing and intake side that means cost per lead, lead-to-consultation and consultation-to-signed rates, cost per signed matter, and return on spend by channel and source. On the production side it means capacity, utilization, realization, cycle time, and collections.
We are not your CMO or your sales coach. Our job is to make sure every team is working from the same numbers, and to bring professional skepticism when a channel’s reported performance does not show up in the financials.
No. We work inside the systems you already run. Our team works in Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Actionstep, PracticePanther, Smokeball, CASEpeer, CosmoLex, Litify, SmartAdvocate, CloudLex, Soluno, and Caret, with QuickBooks Online as the ledger. Most reporting errors in law firms live in the gap between the practice management system and the accounting file, and closing that gap is part of the first 90 days.
If a system cannot produce the data your firm needs, we will tell you what that is costing you and what the alternatives are, as a recommendation rather than a prerequisite.
You work with a named fractional CFO who leads your engagement, attends your leadership meetings, and runs the monthly CFO and Check-In calls. Behind that CFO sits a Director of CFO Services who reviews the work and a peer group of legal-finance CFOs.
Between calls, your CFO is the person you bring the live questions to: the offer letter about to go out, the lease, the line of credit renewal, the compensation conversation with a partner. The value of a CFO is being in those decisions when they happen, not reporting on them afterward.
The first call is a fit conversation, not a pitch. We ask about the firm’s size, billing model, practice mix, systems, and the decisions you are trying to make, and we tell you plainly whether the right level is bookkeeping, controller, or CFO work. Firms that are not a fit hear that on the call, along with what we would do instead.
If it fits, we come back with a written proposal that sets out scope, the monthly fee, and what the first 90 days will produce. Onboarding begins with the review of your systems, data, and financial operations, and most firms have a first-draft forecast in hand inside the first quarter.
I do not want to babysit a finance person. I want the function handled.
