Legal finance events in the UK: costs conferences, legal cashiering and accounts rules training, billing and funding sessions for law firm finance teams.
Hosted by Institute of Legal Finance & Management
Up to six hours of CPD for COFAs, legal cashiers, practice managers and financial controllers, arriving as the SRA reshapes client money rules and the COLP/COFA regime.
Hosted by Association of Costs Lawyers
The Association of Costs Lawyers' annual northern conference on costs budgeting, fixed recoverable costs, funding and the direction of costs reform. Members only.
Legal finance events serve the people who keep law firms solvent and compliant: finance directors, legal cashiers, costs lawyers, COFAs and the practice managers who end up holding the accounts function in smaller firms. It is a technical corner of the conference market and, for the people who work in it, one of the most useful.
Two themes run through almost every legal finance conference at the moment. The first is client money. High-profile firm collapses have pushed the SRA Accounts Rules, reconciliations, residual balances and the wider question of whether firms should hold client money at all to the top of the agenda. If your firm is reviewing its accounts function, a legal cashiering conference is the fastest way to hear how peers are handling third-party managed accounts, reconciliation frequency and internal controls.
The second is costs. Fixed recoverable costs, costs budgeting, guideline hourly rates and the direction of costs reform affect the economics of every litigation department in England and Wales. Costs conferences run by the profession's own bodies bring together costs lawyers, draftsmen and litigators to work through what the latest decisions and consultations actually mean for recovery, and they are frequently the first place practitioners hear how judges are applying new rules in practice.
Pricing sits between the two. More firms are moving away from pure hourly billing towards fixed fees, capped fees and outcome-based pricing, and legal finance events increasingly include sessions on how to price profitably rather than defensively. That means understanding matter-level cost, realisation rates, write-offs and the difference between a busy department and a profitable one.
Funding and cash flow round out most agendas: litigation funding, disbursement funding, invoice finance, lock-up reduction and the practical business of getting bills out and paid. Lock-up in particular remains the quiet drag on profitability in a large number of firms, and the sessions on billing discipline and credit control tend to be the ones delegates take straight back to the office.
These events are usually one-day conferences in London or Manchester, with a growing number of online updates and half-day training sessions. Many are run by professional bodies and carry CPD value, and some are members-only, so check the organiser's booking terms before planning travel. Suppliers of legal accounting software, outsourced cashiering and payment services attend in numbers, which makes them a practical shortlisting opportunity too.
Our diary lists upcoming legal finance events across England and Wales, with dates, locations, attendance mode, organiser and price notes where they have been published. Listings are free, and if you run a legal finance conference or training session that should be here, you can tell us about it.
Send us the details and we'll consider it for the diary — listings are free.