Crocker Law Firm Business Model Canvas

I work at Crocker Law Firm, a small(ish) personal injury law firm in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  As both the case manager and business manager, I have access to and knowledge of much of the information required for this Business Model Canvas assignment.

Crocker Law takes three primary types of cases: motor vehicle accidents (MVA), Workers' Compensation claims, and Social Security Disability (SSD) claims.  For the purposes of this assignment, I broke MVA into two different segments: claims that settle and claims that go through litigation.  The types of claims that settle are typically much lower value than the types of claims that end up in litigation.

In order to come up with the amount of potential clients, I read state reports about how many people were injured in car accidents each year, how many people qualify for SSD each year, and how many people were injured at work each year.  I reduced those amounts by 1/3 to compensate for the geographic territory my firm typically covers, and then I further reduced that amount (by gut estimation really) to compensate for injuries small enough and accident circumstances that would result in our firm not wanting the case.

In general, I can see how this tool would be useful for providing a realistic assessment of most business models, but I do think that with the business model of my firm, I need to take the analysis with a grain of salt.  There aren't set prices for any of our services, so I can't say that if we take in the "right" number cases that we'll be profitable. For the purposes of this assignment, I took averages of each case type and input that as the price, but in reality we never know how much any cases is worth until it is resolved.  A personal injury firm can sign up a case worth $1,000 and a case worth $1,000,000 in the same day, and there is no way to estimate when those cases will come in.

The business model canvas can help point out flaws in a basic business model, but what it points out to me is what I noticed more in setting up the model than evaluating the results: there is NOTHING certain- we can't even set our own prices to cover rising costs.  Our firm has to learn to be extra aware of being smart with cash flow when we're "in the money" because there is very little estimation far ahead of time of when the dry months will be.