Lawyers tend to congregate together. This is as much a fact of lawyer life, as it is a fact of professional life. Once you’re embedded in a career, you start to develop friends who do the same work that you do, and you generally prefer quality hang with colleagues, since you speak the same language.

You’ve heard the phrase often from busy lawyers, law firm owners particularly: ‘If only I could clone myself’. It’s wishful thinking; but, it gets to the heart of the one barrier to law firm expansion that you can’t fake: In order to grow your business, to scale it . . . you have to hire.

A decade ago, lawyers had just one option for office space: a traditional lease.  That’s a costly option, of course, and can be a barrier to entry, especially for young lawyers, looking to start new law firms. 

Google Voice allows you to ‘mask’ your personal phone number, while still receiving calls at your personal phone.  It’s free; and, it takes less than a minute to set up. 

Attorneys seeking inspiration or advice on reconfiguring or revising their business practices often seek out colleagues or friends for advice.  Most attorneys maintain other attorneys as colleagues and friends.  So, when they’re seeking business advice, they’re getting it from other attorneys. There are a couple of problems with relying on that strategy, however. 

Fortunately, for law firms owners, there are more staffing options now, than you can shake a stick, even if you’re not ready to make the move to hiring an employee.

Review some law firm logos and you’ll probably find similar characteristics: prominent use of gavels and/or columns; the logo design will likely be based on the first letters of the last names of the name partners; and, the color scheme will probably be blue/white or gray.  What I’m trying to say is that pretty much every law firm logo is the same.

A modern law firm should base its software program on three primary tools: productivity software (email + calendar, document storage), law practice management or case management software (a relational database to organize everything in one place) and an accounting program.

Lawyers who know their overhead are empowered because they have a baseline idea of what they need to make to keep the lights on, and what they need to make over and above that to earn a comfortable living.

Lawyers are funny in that they sometimes treat cloud technology vendors like visitors from another planet, featuring a mixture of awe and fear.