Last week in The Shift, we talked about the numbers so many lawyers put off looking at. If you read it and thought, “I’ll get to that once things settle down,” this week’s exercise is for you. It’s deliberately small:

Pick one number you’ve been avoiding. 

Here are three good places to start.

Your realization rate. Of the time you recorded, how much did you actually bill and collect? Most billing or practice management software can show hours worked against amounts billed and collected for a set period. Last quarter is a good place to start.

Your average matter profitability. Choose a matter type you handle often and compare what you collected on a few recent files with the time and effort it took to deliver them, including your team’s time. If you work on flat fees, this number tells you whether your pricing is holding up.

Your actual take-home percentage. Add up everything you paid yourself last year, including draws, salary, and distributions, and divide it by your firm’s gross revenue. Your bookkeeper or accountant can pull this from your year-end statements.

Once you’ve chosen your number, look at it and write it down. That’s the whole exercise. You don’t have to benchmark it, explain it, or build a plan around it this week. 

If it surprises you, you’ve learned something. 

If it confirms what you suspected, you’ve traded a vague worry for a real figure you can work with.

The first step is ending the avoidance. After you’ve faced one number, the next one gets much easier.

When you’re ready to go further, Brooke Lively’s From Panic to Profit walks through the six numbers that matter most for your firm and what they should tell you. It’s the book we ask every coaching client to read before we start working together.

This isn’t about doing more. It’s about thinking differently about what matters most.