Seasonality

I don’t know how interesting this may be to my readers, but recently I’ve looked into the seasonailty of my business.

My business is bound to be more seasonal than most divorce lawyers. Most divorce lawyers will have to go to hearings and such, and will do discovery, and they’ll earn their money over a much longer period of time. My fees are generally earned when I’m hired, in part so as to remove an incentive for me to drag the case out.

I’m surprised by how erratic my business is. I expected gentle seasonal variations in my business. For instance, I expected that November and December would be a little lower than January, because folks would postpone their divorce until the holidays are over. Then I expected that summer would generally be a little higher, or a little lower than the spring.

To find out, I took the last four years’ data for my revenue, broken out by half month. So, I had January 1-15 for 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Then I had January 16-31 for those same years. And so forth. Then I plotted a typical year, with the average January 1-15, the average of January 16-31, and so forth for a year. I found the data jumped all over the graph.

I redid the data, this time throwing out the high and low figures for each period, and averaging the two in-between figures. But the data was still all over the map. So, the data says what the data says.

I found no gentle seasonal variations. I saw huge spikes and valleys from one 2-week period to the next. My worst half month (March 1-15) is 40% of average, and my best (January 16-31) is 160% of average. And I generally don’t see a trend from period to period. A really good fortnight may have a terrible one right before it, and an average one just after it.

A little of it makes sense to me. It’s not surprising that four of my worst periods are early November, late November, late December, and early January, as folks are delaying their divorces until after the holidays. And, it makes sense that late January would be among the busiest, for the same reason. But, some of it makes no sense whatsoever: someone explain to me why early March is the worst half month of all, but the half months on either side of it are 120% of normal.

If you have any explanation for the huge variations in when people file for divorce, I’d like to know about it.

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