Can LeanLaw generate a compensation/payout report showing what each attorney is owed?

Compensation tracking is part of LeanLaw’s Elite plan. Whatever system produces a payout report, it has to reconcile to collected revenue split across origination, responsible, and working attorney credit — not hours billed or hours worked, because a payout comes out of cash the firm actually has in hand.

What a payout report has to reconcile to

Origination, responsible, and working attorney are the three credit categories most firms use to divide a matter’s revenue: who brought the client in, who’s accountable for the relationship, and who did the billable work. A compensation report worth trusting has to split collected dollars across those three roles for a chosen period, then reconcile back to what the firm’s bank account actually shows. Reporting against billed amounts instead of collected amounts overstates what’s available to pay out, because billing velocity and collection rate — how long cash takes to arrive after work is billed — determine when that revenue is actually real.

Basing payout on billed amounts rather than collected amounts creates a second, quieter problem beyond overstating what’s available: it pays out on revenue the firm hasn’t actually received yet, which means a client who pays slowly, negotiates a write-down, or never pays at all can leave the firm having distributed cash it didn’t end up collecting. Reconciling to collections instead of billings is what keeps a compensation report tied to the firm’s actual bank position rather than to an optimistic snapshot of work in progress.

A test for your current comp process

Pick one attorney and one closed period. Try to produce three separate totals — origination credit, responsible-attorney credit, and working-attorney credit — that add up to what was actually collected in that period, not what was invoiced. If your current process can only get there by merging a billing export with a separate spreadsheet of origination splits, that manual merge is the real gap in your comp process, not a missing report. The same isolation test applies to a firm’s productivity and realization reporting more generally: any report that requires hand-merging two systems to answer a question by attorney is telling you where the actual gap sits.

The test gets harder, not easier, at firms that split credit across more than one matter type. A firm doing hourly work alongside contingency matters has to run this reconciliation twice, against two different definitions of “collected” — cash received against an invoice on the hourly side, and a distributed share of a settlement on the contingency side — and a compensation report that quietly assumes only one of those exists will misstate payout for whichever attorney works the other kind of matter.

Origination credit in particular tends to get informal treatment even at firms that are disciplined about everything else in their billing. It’s common for an origination split to live in an unwritten understanding among partners, or in a single spreadsheet one person maintains, rather than in a policy that’s actually attached to the matter from the start. That works until the person maintaining the spreadsheet leaves, or until a matter’s origination is genuinely disputed between two attorneys — at which point the firm discovers the split was never really documented anywhere a report could reference.

A hypothetical example

Picture a hypothetical matter where one attorney originated the client relationship, a second is the responsible attorney overseeing the file, and a third did most of the billable work. If the firm collects $30,000 on that matter in a quarter and splits credit three ways by policy — say a hypothetical 20/30/50 split across origination, responsible, and working credit — the payout report needs to show all three shares against that same $30,000 of actual cash, not against what was billed before write-downs or a slow-paying client thinned it out. The split itself is a firm policy choice; the numbers here are illustrative, not a template.

What this depends on

• How your firm defines origination, responsible, and working attorney credit, and what percentage split it uses
• Whether compensation is based on collections or on billings
• Which plan tier your firm is on, since compensation tracking sits in Elite
• How compensation accounts for non-billable contributions, like business development, that no revenue report captures

The question worth asking goes past whether a report can total attorney compensation to whether your firm’s credit-split policy is written down clearly enough that any report can apply it consistently every period.

That question sits downstream of the same four numbers that describe the rest of a firm’s revenue cycle: an hourly practice’s comp report leaks accuracy wherever realization is weak, and a contingent practice’s leaks wherever cash velocity is slow, because in both cases the report is only as good as the collected-dollar figure it’s built on.

Related questions

Could you also produce an origination-only report? Origination credit is already one of the three splits a compensation report has to track; whether it’s broken out as its own view is a firm reporting preference, not a separate capability.

Can I see, against what an attorney worked or collected, whether a client hasn’t paid in a while? That’s an aging question layered onto the same origination-and-attorney mapping used for compensation; what counts as “too long unpaid” is a firm collection policy, not a fixed threshold any report applies for you.

What about compensation revenue by attorney? That’s the core of a payout report — collected revenue split by attorney across origination, responsible, and working credit for a chosen period.