Goals aren’t an option—they’re your edge. That’s true for litigation support service providers whether they’ve been in the game since carbon copies were cutting-edge or are just opening their doors. In 2025, the providers that make it a legendary year will be those that map out their goals with precision and purpose, so we’re offering this checklist to help define where you want your operation to go and lead it to its best year ever.
1. Why You Should Develop Goals for Your Litigation Support Business
Goals do far more than simply pointing the way forward. For most organizations well-engineered goals also:
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- Motivate employees
- Enable performance measurement
- Encourage teamwork
- Hold stakeholders accountable
By providing a specific target to focus on, goals unite your team members around a common aim and drive the company’s overall success.
It’s as true in sports as it is in business: The goalposts, nets, or cones—show the direction you need to go, requires teamwork to get there, and provides a way to keep score so you can track your progress.
| ✅ | Action item: Craft well-defined 2025 goals that provide focus, motivate our team, and drive sustainable growth. |
2. How to Develop Goals for Your Litigation Support Business
The ability to define and express the goal you want to reach is nearly as important as setting the goal itself. Unfortunately, many business owners and managers struggle to develop goals that are clear to communicate and understand.
Vague goals are the handmaiden of failed goals.
SMART goals, however, provide a goal-setting tool supported by research that leaders and managers with any level of experience can use. At the heart of SMART goals are five criteria that evaluate every goal by asking whether the goal is:
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- Specific – clearly defined?
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- Measurable – trackable?
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- Achievable – attainable?
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- Relevant – aligned with larger objectives or the firm’s mission/vision?
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- Time-bound – has a set deadline for completion?
If you’re wondering how SMART goals are applied in the real world, let’s compare an ambiguous goal with a clear one:
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- Ambiguous Goal: “I want to grow my business.”
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- SMART Goal: “I want to increase my customer base 20% by December 2025.”
To see how each dimension of the SMART goal framework transforms an ambiguous goal into a well-defined goal, check out the table below:
| SMART Goal Framework | Example |
| Specific | Increase client base |
| Measurable | 20% |
| Achievable | Yes |
| Relevant | Yes |
| Timebound | By December 2025 |
What makes SMART goals so effective is how they naturally weave specificity to any goal—requiring at least some objective data such as dates, percentages, or dollar amounts to be included in the description.
This objective data makes it easy to measure progress and maintain accountability as time goes by.
Some examples of how legal support service providers might use objective data to define SMART goals specific to their industry:
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- Set a revenue target: “Increase quarterly process serving revenue to $500,000 by Q4 2025.”
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- Define operational improvements: “Reduce eFiling rejections by 15%.”
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- Focus on customer metrics: “Gain 300 new law firm customers by the end of Q2, 2025.”
By including quantifiable measures such as financial figures, percentages, and dates, each goal is clear about what it aims to achieve.
Keep an ACE Up Your Sleeve
Another useful goal-setting framework is the ACES method (achieve, conserve, eliminate, steer clear).
The ACES method differs from SMART goals in that its four principles are designed to navigate your business away from problems.
Here’s how each principle works:
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- Achieve: What milestones do you want to reach?
Example: “Achieve a 95% client satisfaction rate.” - Conserve: What strengths or resources do you want to maintain?
Example: “Maintain strong relationships with existing law firm clients.” - Eliminate: What inefficiencies or pain points need to go?
Example: “Reduce payment issues by 90%.” - Steer Clear: What potential pitfalls do you want to avoid?
Example: “Steer clear of overextending my team during peak filing periods.”
- Achieve: What milestones do you want to reach?
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Used together, the ACES method and SMART goals can cover all the bases you’ll need to set goals that promote achievement and prevent problems.
| ✅ | Action Item: Apply the SMART and ACES frameworks to create clear, actionable, and effective goals. |
Need Inspiration for Your Goals?
There’s no reason to spend hours creating your goals from scratch. We’ve hand-picked resources from four areas common to attorney service businesses to jumpstart your planning. Click on the links below and start brainstorming!
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- Customer Service Goals
Antidotes for Resolving Customer Complaints
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- Operational Goals
4 Things Successful Litigation Support Service Providers Do
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- Revenue and Pricing Goals
The Price is Right: How to Set Strategic Pricing for Your Litigation Support Business
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- Expansion Goals
How to Become an eFiling Service Provider in California and Texas
3. How to Prioritize Your Business Goals
Once you begin talking about goals, they can stack up quickly. As a business owner or manager, you already know you need to manage them, but where to begin?
If you’re unsure about how to prioritize your goals, it may help to stack rank them using these three measures:
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- Business value
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- Customer value
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- Estimated level of effort
Let’s learn more about each one.
1. Business Value: What’s Important to Your Customers?
Let’s say you’re choosing between setting up an ecommerce system or implementing a self-service customer portal. Both are important, but the ecommerce system may have a more immediate impact by speeding up payments.
It’s a clear winner in terms of business value because it will improve cash flow—quickly.
Check it out!
The LegalConnect platform includes both ecommerce capabilities and a self-service customer portal to optimize cash flow and efficiency.
2. Customer Value: How Will This Benefit Your Clients?
Imagine you’re deciding between providing real-time status updates for process serving or adding a new member to your support team. Real-time updates would immediately help your customers track their service of process orders and keep them in the loop.
Customers are the heartbeat of your business, and since this would directly improve the customer experience, it should take priority.
Check it out!
The LegalConnect platform provides real-time process serving status updates right out of the box, giving your customers convenience and peace of mind.
3. Estimated Level of Effort: How Much Work Does This Goal Require?
Perhaps you’re looking at two goals: (1.) automating all of your eFiling orders by migrating them to a customer portal and (2.) launching a new marketing campaign to attract mid-size law firms.
The marketing campaign could be a huge project that requires outside contractors and a budget, whereas the eFiling migration could be managed with the flip of a switch.
If time and money are an issue, moving eFiling to a customer portal is the better choice, since it requires less work to implement.
| ✅ | Action Item: Evaluate your goals according to business value, customer value, and level of effort to prioritize what matters most. |
4. How to Stay Committed to Your Litigation Support Business Goals
Tie Goals to Your Vision and Mission Statement
Your vision and mission statement should manifest throughout your business. They define your greater aspirations as well as the day-to-day value you provide. By aligning goals with your vision and mission, you ensure that your goals remain relevant and meaningful.
For instance, if your mission is to “provide efficient and reliable service”, your goals should reflect that.
But how?
Two possible answers are:
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- Reduce fulfillment times for all levels of process serving by 20% by the end of the year.
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- By Q1, be able to respond to any customer support email within 5 minutes of receiving the email.
Once you’ve tied together your goals, stress test them using the SMART goals framework.
To track the results of your new goals and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs); use tools like dashboards, spreadsheets, or project management software. Some of the measures you’ll likely want to watch include revenue, customer retention rates, and turnaround times.
Recognize Progress and Reward Success
Celebrating milestones—big and small—is a good way to sustain motivation for your team. Acknowledge achievements such as hitting a revenue goal, onboarding a major client, or reaching a new level of operational efficiency.
Rewards don’t need to be extravagant, but they should match the size of the milestone. For example:
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- Small wins: A team lunch or public recognition in a meeting.
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- Major wins: Bonuses, extra time off, or even a company-wide celebration.
| ✅ | Action Item: Use the SMART framework to create trackable goals that are aligned with your business’s vision and mission. Celebrate wins of all sizes. |
Success Starts Here
As you move into the new year, use this checklist to create clear, actionable goals that align with your business’s mission and vision. Remember, goals aren’t just about checking boxes—they’re about driving meaningful progress.
LegalConnect can help. Find out how the LegalConnect platform and our industry expertise can support your goals for 2025. Take the next step now by calling (800) 909-6859 to request a demo.