In an increasingly competitive legal market, Gould & Ratner has distinguished itself by pairing disciplined financial management with a forward-looking growth strategy.
By leveraging SurePoint Legal Insights and SurePoint Finance Enterprise, the firm has transformed how it recruits talent, evaluates profitability, and makes strategic decisions, enabling sustainable expansion without adding operational complexity.
Gould & Ratner At-a-Glance
- Practice Focus: Full-service business law firm
- Attorneys: ~55
- Employees with SurePoint access: ~110
- Offices: Chicago and Denver
Driving Firm Performance at Gould & Ratner
For Gould & Ratner, firm performance is measured by more than revenue growth alone. Leadership places a premium on data transparency, long-term profitability, and the ability to make proactive decisions grounded in real-time financial insight.
According to Michael Hill, Chief Financial Officer, having immediate access to accurate data has fundamentally changed how the firm operates and competes in the market.
“Our data is one of our biggest differentiators. It is a huge part of how we win talent against much larger firms.”
Rather than relying solely on historical financial statements, the firm now uses real-time dashboards and reporting to guide hiring, practice mix, and geographic expansion. This approach enables leadership to assess not only where the firm has been, but where it can grow profitably.
The Challenge: Limited Visibility and Manual Reporting
Before adopting SurePoint, Gould & Ratner began to outgrow the capabilities of its legacy financial system. While the firm’s software provided basic functionality, it required significant manual effort from the accounting team and limited access to information across the firm.
Key Challenges Included:
- No real-time dashboards or self-service reporting for attorneys
- Heavy reliance on the accounting team for ad hoc and recurring reports
- Constant, rolling reporting that diverted time from higher-value work
- Inefficient billing and reporting workflows that did not scale with firm growth
As the firm continued to grow, these limitations made it increasingly difficult to operate efficiently and proactively. To support long-term growth and improve visibility across finance and operations, Gould & Ratner migrated to SurePoint in 2015.
Expanding Capabilities with Legal Insights
As Gould & Ratner’s growth ambitions accelerated, the firm also recognized the need to modernize its approach to talent acquisition. Historically, the firm relied heavily on third-party recruiters and generalized tools such as LinkedIn, which limited the ability to target candidates with precision.
To address this, Gould & Ratner adopted SurePoint Legal Insights, empowering its internal recruiting function with market intelligence tailored specifically to the legal industry.
“We were looking for something beyond LinkedIn, and Legal Insights completely changed what was possible.” — Daniel Minjock, Director of Talent Acquisition
Despite having no prior experience with the platform, Minjock was able to adopt Legal Insights quickly and begin applying its capabilities to active searches.
Transforming Talent Acquisition with Legal Insights
Today, Gould & Ratner’s talent acquisition strategy is a clear example of how data-driven tools can deliver outsized impact. Because legal recruiting depends so heavily on relationship building, each search is exceptionally time-intensive. With Legal Insights, Minjock can now manage multiple concurrent searches—something the firm could not do previously.
Legal Insights enables highly targeted candidate searches based not only on general practice areas, but also on specific case experience and skill sets. This precision allows the firm to tailor outreach and identify candidates who are more likely to succeed long-term.
“Legal recruiting is one of the highest-touch recruiting environments there is, and Legal Insights saves me an incredible amount of time.”
The financial impact has been equally significant.
Prior to building its internal recruiting capability, Gould & Ratner relied heavily on third-party recruiting, resulting in significant annual fees. Today, those costs have dropped by 68%, even as the firm hires more attorneys than ever before.
Beyond financial savings, Legal Insights has helped Gould & Ratner identify the perfect match for their openings and tailor the firm’s value proposition individually to each and every candidate.
Improved hiring precision has also driven measurable gains in retention. Nearly all attorney hires from the past two years remain with the firm, reversing earlier trends and supporting long-term succession planning.
Finance as a Growth Engine
SurePoint Finance Enterprise has transformed how Gould & Ratner evaluates the financial impact of growth decisions. The firm now uses real-time profitability modeling to assess hires by role, practice area, and origination structure, ensuring every decision aligns with both current performance and long-term financial goals.
“Our bar for success has risen. We are hiring for long-term growth now, not just short-term revenue.” — Michael Hill, Chief Financial Officer
This level of insight allows firm leadership to move quickly and confidently. Compensation scenarios, profitability analyses, and counteroffers that once took days to assemble can now be modeled in minutes, supporting faster, more informed hiring and growth decisions.
“If we did not have this level of profitability insight, we would struggle to understand the true impact of every hire.”
Just as importantly, Gould & Ratner has scaled without expanding its finance and accounting headcount. As the firm has grown, the finance team has maintained its current size, supported by SurePoint’s efficient workflows, standardized reporting, and immediate access to trusted financial data.
SurePoint Finance Enterprise enables Gould & Ratner’s finance team to function as a strategic partner to firm leadership, recruiting, and business development. The team provides timely insight that informs hiring, practice mix, and geographic expansion decisions, allowing the firm to remain nimble, growth-oriented, and operationally efficient as it continues to scale.
Proven Results with SurePoint
- 68% reduction in third-party recruiting fees driven by SurePoint Legal Insights
- Finance team supports firm-wide growth without adding headcount, despite expansion into new markets
- Minutes—not days—to model compensation, profitability, and counteroffers using real-time data from Finance Enterprise
- 2 billers seamlessly share workload through standardized, accessible billing workflows
- Financial modeling confirmed that the Denver office became profitable 2-3 years ahead of forecast
Data as a Competitive Advantage in Hiring
Gould & Ratner leverages its financial data not only to manage the business, but to actively win talent in a highly competitive recruiting market. When competing against larger firms with more recognizable names and higher initial compensation packages, the firm differentiates itself through transparency.
Using Finance Enterprise, the firm can clearly demonstrate how individual attorneys contribute to profitability today and what their long-term financial future could look like as partners. This level of visibility allows candidates to see beyond base compensation and understand the full value of joining the firm.
Additionally, the finance team can model compensation scenarios, profitability, and counteroffers in real time, often turning around responses within minutes. This agility enables Gould & Ratner to remain competitive against larger firms while maintaining discipline and confidence in every hiring decision.
Hill notes that the firm often gains the advantage by presenting the data, showing candidates that Gould & Ratner’s compensation package is designed to deliver stronger long-term value. This transparency has become a powerful recruiting tool and a meaningful differentiator in attracting attorneys from larger firms.
Data-Driven Expansion: Opening the Denver Office
One of the most visible outcomes of Gould & Ratner’s data-driven approach is the successful expansion into Denver. The firm initially hired a single remote attorney in the market, closely tracking performance and profitability through SurePoint Finance Enterprise.
The same financial clarity that supports day-to-day operations also enabled Gould & Ratner to pursue growth opportunities with confidence.
Just one year later, the Denver office is generating positive profit, reaching profitability two to three years ahead of original projections. All Denver hires remain with the firm, and leadership is now exploring plans to significantly expand the office.
“There is no way we would have opened the Denver office without the financial data to back it up.” — Michael Hill, Chief Financial Officer
Looking Ahead
With a strong foundation in place, Gould & Ratner continues to explore new ways to leverage SurePoint’s solutions. Planned initiatives include deeper use of Legal Insights for proactive market intelligence and expanded use of financial data to optimize practice mix and evaluate future opportunities, including potential acquisitions.
Hill concludes, “Now that we have this data, the question is how much more proactive and strategic can we be with it?”
Building on this foundation, Gould & Ratner has extended its data-driven approach into business development. The firm leverages data surfaced by SurePoint to identify where its largest clients have significant legal needs, comparing those patterns against past services and the firm’s most profitable practice areas. This enables the team to proactively identify gaps and opportunities—re-engaging clients or introducing capabilities where Gould & Ratner has deep, proven strength.
By combining transparent financial insight with targeted talent intelligence, Gould & Ratner has positioned itself for continued, profitable growth—supported by SurePoint as a long-term strategic partner.
Driving Firmwide Value Across Roles
- Managing Partners gain confidence in strategic growth decisions backed by real-time data.
- Attorneys benefit from self-service access to financial and matter-level insights.
- Finance & Accounting secures real-time financial visibility, profitability analysis, and billing transparency that supports hiring, expansion, and long-term planning without increasing staff.
- Talent Acquisition delivers higher-quality hires while dramatically reducing costs.
- Business Development gains visibility into growth trends and practice performance.
