Instead of following that traditional pathway, have your clients sign a credit card payment authorization.  Once you have the client credit card information and authorization to run payment on it, just charge it yourself. 

Now, high-touch has its place. Sure, spend extra time with leads in the initial consultation meeting.  And follow up directly with your clients on a recurring basis, even when nothing is going on.  Definitely prep your client aggressively for mediation or hearing. But don’t make your leads and clients spend extra time running around doing administrative tasks, simply because you equate any time spent with quality time.

Maybe the most important activity that you can engage as a business owner is to convert leads into clients — without that process being successful, you don’t really have a business . . . what you’ve got is a hobby. 

The more you know about your actual and potential clients, the better you’ll be as a marketer and as an attorney.  And, it’s all available for you to analyze and leverage.

Most attorneys should probably be ruled by their calendars with law practices running on deadlines.  That’s especially true for litigation firms, which take direction from court rules and judges about when and how things get done. 

Attorneys are slowly starting to access data about their law firms so they can make more informed decisions about what they will do to manage their businesses. And each day, data is being aggregated around your law practice, which means the information pile from which you have to pull continues to increase.

So now you can adopt a trade name anywhere.  But should you?  Probably.  Unless your law firm is winding up, then don’t waste your time.  Otherwise, do it.  I would also argue that, even if your law firm has existed with one name for quite some time, it may be worth rebranding.