Originally published on LinkedIn on 9 July 2026.
Andre Thomas
Founder at Thomas Telman – I help partners in law and accountancy recover revenue they don’t know they are losing.
Run this test on your own numbers before you read any further.
Take your collection rate, the percentage of what you invoice that actually gets paid. Then take your billing realisation rate, the percentage of work performed that makes it onto an invoice in the first place. If the first number is healthy and the second isn’t, you don’t have a billing problem. You have an invisible operational pattern causing the leak, and the two call for entirely different fixes.
The numbers behind it
Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report puts the average collection rate at 93%. Once work is invoiced, firms get paid on almost all of it. The average realisation rate sits at 88%, meaning 12% of work actually performed never makes it onto an invoice at all, before collection is ever involved.
Put that in pounds and it stops sounding manageable. Take your firm’s total worked value for the year and multiply it by 0.12. On £5m of worked value, that’s £600,000 that never became revenue, and it isn’t a one-off dip, it’s the shape of every year running the same pattern underneath it.
It’s also worth being clear about what ‘average’ means here. 88% is the midpoint, not the target. Firms with poor visibility into how work gets captured and scope gets managed sit well below it, and it’s their numbers dragging the average down, not the top performers pulling it up. Industry benchmarks generally treat 90%+ as healthy, which means the average firm is already short of good before you even account for the firms doing worse.
The billing engine is doing its job. The leak is in what never reaches the point of being billed in the first place, in whether the work gets seen, logged, and flagged as it happens.
Why your software doesn’t find it
The usual response is to fix with technology, better time capture, AI-assisted review, faster invoicing. These tools improve what happens once something is entered into the system. They cannot create an entry that was never made. If a scope shift gets confirmed on a call and never written down, there is nothing for the software to capture, because nothing was ever given to it. This is why firms that upgrade their billing system often see collection improve while realisation barely moves.
Not a leadership failing
A partner running a full caseload and a team cannot be inside every informal call and every quiet scope shift. That isn’t inattention. It’s what happens when the structure of leading a team outpaces the structure built to see what’s happening inside it. The team usually knows before the partner does; the information just isn’t reaching the person accountable for the number.
What to look for
The leak won’t show up in a report. You’ll find it by asking three questions this week.
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When did a client last shift scope on a call rather than in writing, and was that logged anywhere?
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When a fee earner mentioned a matter was “getting complicated,” did that turn into a budget conversation?
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When you last reviewed a write-off, did the reason on the form tell you what actually happened?
None of these will give you a number. They’ll tell you whether the pattern is present. The Financial Diagnostic is where you find out what it’s costing.
Running the test
If your collection rate is strong and your realisation rate isn’t, don’t reach for a billing fix, and don’t assume new software will find it either. That gap was decided weeks before it reached a finance meeting, in a moment nobody flagged.
The next step is finding out exactly where that gap sits in your firm and how much it’s costing. That’s what the free Financial Diagnostic is built to show you in ten minutes.
Start her by booking a call: https://www.thomastelman.com/leadership-blind-spot-financial-risk-diagnostic