Law Practice Management Blog

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.

Internal communications platforms, like Slack and Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, offer an alternative space for colleagues to communicate – so that those messages never even hit your email inbox. 

Scheduling tools and customer relationship management softwares are beginning to incorporate scheduling and payment into a single process, or unified workflow, such that booking requires initial payment.  This makes the whole process seamless for both the potential clients and their potential lawyers.

A lot of those potential document assembly users get caught in the starting blocks because they don’t know to prepare toward the launch of a document assembly software.  If that sounds like you, here’s how to proceed.

Law firms have not necessarily used data to their advantage, like other businesses.  But you know what they say: better late than never!  And, if you haven’t tried launching and managing KPIs in your law firm, there’s no time like the present for doing just that.

You have to be more public about the work experience in your law firm so that it’s easier for potential employees to access that information.

If you’re looking for a new way of taking notes, you’ve now got some options with which to proceed.

If you just have passwords for your technology applications without any additional factors of authentication, it’s probably past time to start looking at solutions in that space to better secure your confidential data. 

Legaltech software vendors are racing to add artificial intelligence features to their products as demand has grown for tools built for law practices – so that attorneys can shift from attempting to utilize (or attempting to avoid) general use products like ChatGPT.

The crux of any time management program centers on the ability to retain focus by refusing to try to multitask and to limit distractions.

Running a business is not practicing law.  It’s okay to make mistakes – in fact, it’s encouraged.  So if you’re a lawyer trying to run a business, you almost need to bifurcate your risk-averse and risk-taking sides between the roles of lawyer and business owner. 

But the best part about subscriptions and flat fees is that, generally speaking, law firms make more money doing work in that way than they do on traditional billing – as much as 20-30% more, in fact.

In the current job market, it’s actually harder to get good attorneys than it is to get good clients.  Believe it or not, good clients are far more plentiful right now.  Now, this may turn around at some point, but there are no signs (at least currently) that this will again become an employer’s market as it did during the start of the pandemic.

Most law firms rely on ad hoc bonuses for their employees, but that’s a bad idea.  One reason that’s the case is because those sorts of bonuses come at random times for random reasons.  That creates an expectation that they’ll come along again but without grounding for how or when.

Contingency firms scratch a bunch of lottery tickets and sometimes get a (big) hit.  I mean, it’s a little better than the lottery because there is some skill involved. But, it is a lottery.