How Mid-Size Law Firms Can Accelerate Revenue Without Adding Headcount

For mid-size law firms, revenue growth can create an operational paradox.

More matters mean more invoices. More invoices mean more follow-up. More clients introduce more billing requirements, payment preferences and exceptions. But the finance and technology teams responsible for managing that complexity don’t necessarily grow at the same pace.

That makes efficiency particularly important. The question isn’t simply whether the firm is generating enough revenue. It’s whether existing teams, processes and technology can move that revenue from worked → billed → cash without creating more manual work along the way.

At ILTACON 2026, Zebraworks brought together leaders from firms ranging from roughly 60 to 130 attorneys for a candid conversation inside the Zebraworks Exceptions Lab:

• Mark Manoukian, IT Director, Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter

• Chris Schwaab, Accounting Manager, Kimball, Tirey & St. John LLP

They shared how their firms have approached billing, collections, payments, technology and automation, and what those changes have meant for their teams.

The conversation revealed an important lesson for mid-size firms: you don’t need a bigger team or a new financial management system to create a more sophisticated revenue operation. You need to find the places where revenue gets stuck and remove the work that shouldn’t require a person in the first place.

The panel covers billing speed, collections automation, payment experience, technology implementation and the foundation firms need before AI can deliver meaningful financial intelligence. Watch the full conversation below, or keep reading for the biggest takeaways.

Key Takeaways

1. Billing speed is a cash-flow issue

One of the clearest examples from the panel came from Kimball, Tirey & St. John.

The firm has approximately 130 attorneys but runs a particularly high-volume practice, generating roughly 750 to 800 new invoices every day. When Schwaab joined, he said it routinely took seven to ten business days between billing authorization and an invoice actually reaching the client.

Today, the firm delivers those invoices the next day.

That difference matters. A seven-day billing delay isn’t simply an administrative inconvenience — it’s seven additional days before the client can begin its own payment process. And as clients increasingly stretch payment terms, every unnecessary day at the start of the cycle compounds the problem.

As Schwaab explained, automating invoice distribution meant the firm could execute its daily billing with virtually no human interaction, instead of requiring someone to manually pull and email invoices.

For a mid-size firm, that’s the kind of operational improvement that scales.

The goal isn’t to make the billing team work faster.

It’s to eliminate the work that was slowing them down.

2. A small team can manage a sophisticated collections operation

Collections provides an even more dramatic example.

Before implementing Zebraworks, Schwaab described his firm’s follow-up process as completely manual. The A/R team had to run reports, identify accounts requiring attention, pull invoices, build emails and send each communication. On a good day, the team might reach out on roughly 100 invoices.

Today, automated follow-up can reach every outstanding invoice that meets the firm’s criteria — whether that’s 200 or 1,000 in a given cycle.

The scale becomes clearer when you look at the whole operation. Schwaab said the firm can have 15,000 to 16,000 outstanding invoices on a given day, managed by two people. He estimated that producing a comparable volume of outbound collection activity manually could require seven or eight.

That’s an important distinction for mid-size firms. Automation isn’t necessarily about reducing staff — Schwaab specifically noted that the firm didn’t eliminate positions.

Instead, automation prevented the need to keep allocating additional resources to repetitive work as volume increased.

It also frees the people already on the team to spend more time on the exceptions that actually require human involvement.

3. Revenue acceleration doesn’t have to mean replacing your financial system

For many mid-size firms, replacing the financial management system is a massive undertaking.

Manoukian’s firm, Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter, has approximately 60 attorneys and operates on Aderant. His comments captured a reality familiar to many firms: the core financial system performs an essential function, even when parts of the experience surrounding it leave room for improvement.

The answer doesn’t always have to be ripping it out.

Manoukian described Zebraworks as an opportunity to enhance the firm’s existing environment — improving collections, payments and user experience while continuing to rely on the underlying financial system for the work it does well.

That approach also allowed the firm to move away from parts of its previous collections environment without forcing a broader financial-system migration.

For mid-size firms with limited IT resources, that matters.

Modernization can happen incrementally.

Keep the core. Fix the friction around it.

4. Make it easier for clients to give you money

Revenue operations can become so focused on internal efficiency that firms overlook one of the most important people in the process: the client trying to pay the bill.

Manoukian described previous payment experiences that required clients to navigate disconnected systems without clear invoice information. In some cases, the payment experience amounted to entering an amount and trusting that the firm would correctly determine what it was meant to pay.

His firm had even reached a point where it was taking payments over the phone exclusively, because of concerns about its previous online process.

After changing the experience, Manoukian said something important happened:

Credit-card payment volume went through the roof.

More importantly, he said clients liked the experience.

That’s the revenue lesson.

Payment technology isn’t simply a finance feature. It’s part of the client experience.

Every unnecessary field, phone call, disconnected portal or confusing instruction introduces friction at precisely the moment the client is trying to give the firm money.

Removing that friction is one of the simplest ways firms can improve the last stage of the revenue cycle.

5. Better visibility lets teams focus on the exceptions

Automation becomes particularly valuable when it changes what people spend their time looking at.

Schwaab described a previous A/R environment assembled from multiple pieces of software, each providing a different view of the firm’s receivables.

Now his team can begin the day by looking at outstanding work from the perspective that matters — by contact, client, region, attorney or, given the firm’s landlord-tenant practice, even by property.

Instead of manually assembling the picture, the team can focus on what in that picture requires attention.

That gets to the heart of the blind spot. A firm may know its total A/R. It may know its DSO. It may know how much it billed last month.

But those are outcomes.

The more valuable questions are operational: what’s stuck? Why is it stuck? What needs human attention? What can happen automatically?

For a mid-size firm with finite resources, answering those questions quickly can be far more valuable than producing another report about what already happened.

6. Get the automation right before chasing AI

The conversation eventually turned to AI, but the panel’s perspective was refreshingly practical.

Manoukian challenged the idea of simply applying a general-purpose AI tool across the firm’s entire technology ecosystem and expecting meaningful answers. His point was straightforward: what is the use case?

If the underlying data, processes and systems aren’t healthy, adding AI doesn’t make those problems disappear.

Bill Bice made the case for approaching the problem in the opposite order: establish strong core automation first, then apply AI to a well-understood financial dataset where it can solve specific problems.

For mid-size firms, that creates a much more manageable path to AI. Instead of trying to clean and govern every piece of information across the firm before doing anything useful, firms can start with a defined dataset, a defined workflow and a defined business problem.

As Manoukian described it, that turns AI data preparation into “bite-sized chunks.”

Start with the process. Get the data right. Automate what can be automated. Then use AI where intelligence can meaningfully improve what happens next.

Mid-size doesn’t have to mean less sophisticated

That may be the biggest takeaway from the entire conversation.

A 60-attorney firm doesn’t need the same technology organization as a 2,000-attorney firm.

A 130-attorney firm shouldn’t need seven or eight people manually sending collection emails just because its invoice volume has grown.

And neither firm should have to replace its entire financial technology stack simply to create a better billing, collections or payment experience.

Mid-size firms have an opportunity to be exceptionally agile precisely because they can identify a problem, improve the workflow and see the impact quickly.

The challenge is finding the exceptions hiding inside the revenue cycle.

An invoice that takes ten days to reach the client.

A collection reminder that depends on someone remembering to send it.

A payment experience that makes a client work harder to give the firm money.

A report that shows A/R without telling the team what needs attention next.

Individually, they’re operational inconveniences.

At scale, they’re working capital.

How much revenue is getting stuck between your systems?

You don’t need more people chasing the same problems. You need to know where revenue is slowing down, why it’s happening and which exceptions actually require someone’s attention.

Zebraworks connects the stages between worked → billed → cash, helping law firms automate repetitive work, surface the exceptions that matter and move revenue forward without simply adding headcount.