CO: consistently the highest average invoice ($2,414 Q4 2024 avg; $3,127 in Jan 2026, $479 above its 16-month average).
MD: second highest average invoice ($2,213 in Q4 2024); swingy month to month (+35% Sep 2025, -14% Oct 2025).
GA: lowest average invoice ($1,055 in Q4 2024) and highest share of invoices under $500 (46.4%), but most consistent state on volume; big +43.4% avg invoice pop in Oct 2025.
PA: the volume engine; its avg invoice moves tend to drive the firmwide number (July 2025 firm increase driven by PA +$92).
NJ: steadiest avg invoice; only state to increase in May 2025.
Jun 2026: every state's average invoice came in above its own long-run average, the broadest-based month on record.
Last month's billed total is the single best predictor of this month's. The trend persists: strong months cluster (Mar to Apr 2026, Sep to Oct 2025) and soft months cluster. Plan capacity off the 3-month trend, not off any single month.
The dollars pulled from trust this month lead next month's billed total. Cash actually collected funds the work that gets billed next. The PFA percentage, by contrast, has essentially zero predictive power on next-month billed. Watch the dollars, not the ratio.
Avg invoice moves with billed in the same month, so it is a great same-month health check, but it does not lead. In fact, a jump in avg invoice tends to partially give back the following month (Oct 2025 $2,022 then Nov $1,733; Mar 2026 $1,972 then Apr $1,784). Do not extrapolate a spike.
| Metric in month N | Same month (lag 0) | Billed N+1 (lag 1) | Billed N+2 (lag 2) | Read |
|---|
Note: with roughly 13 to 19 usable month pairs, treat |r| above 0.5 as meaningful and anything under 0.3 as noise. PFA % lag-1 r is near zero: PFA is a collections health metric, not a billing forecaster.
| Month | Billed | MoM | YoY | PFA % | MoM pts | Trust Draw | Avg Invoice | MoM | Atty ≥65% |
|---|