Lock-up reviews

Unlocking the cash trapped in your practice

"Lock-up"—the combined total of your unbilled Work in Progress (WIP) and unpaid debtors—is the silent killer of law firm cash flow. A profitable firm can easily find itself relying on expensive overdrafts or partner capital injections simply because its lock-up cycle is too slow.

Reducing lock-up is the fastest way to improve a law firm's liquidity. As the only accountancy firm working in partnership with the Law Society, Armstrong Watson conducts targeted Lock-up Reviews designed to accelerate your cash conversion cycle and embed a culture of prompt billing across your fee earners.

Addressing the root causes of high lock-up

High lock-up is rarely just a finance department problem; it is usually a fee-earner behaviour problem. As founding partners of Law Firm Ambition, we understand the cultural challenges within law firms. Our review covers the entire end-to-end billing process:

• Time Recording Hygiene: We identify delays in time being posted to the ledger, which artificially suppresses WIP visibility and delays the billing trigger.
• Billing Cycles: We review how often files are billed. Moving from traditional "end of matter" billing to interim or milestone billing can drastically reduce WIP days.
• Credit Control and Debtors: We assess the effectiveness of your debt recovery processes, the clarity of your initial terms of business, and the use of funds held in the client account to settle office bills.
• Cultural Accountability: We help you design KPIs and reward structures that incentivise fee earners for cash collected, rather than just time recorded.

Measurable cash flow improvements

By benchmarking your current lock-up days against industry standards, we can quantify exactly how much cash is needlessly trapped in your business. We provide you with a revised credit control framework and the internal policies required to drive those numbers down.

Fixed-fee lock-up projects

We provide our Lock-up Reviews on a fixed-fee basis. This investment is highly cost-effective, as the cash unlocked from your WIP and debtors following our recommendations typically dwarfs the cost of the review within the first billing quarter.