Law Practice Management Blog

Add a task in your calendar at the end of every month for sending out your invoices.  And, put a tickler on it, so you know it’s coming up.

Teachers have been keeping students honest with homework for centuries.  Lawyers can use the same trick.

Attorneys should consider new and interesting ways to create unique sales propositions, especially relevant to their customers.

The job for modern lawyers is to meet and exceed client expectations.  So, if you know (now you do) that clients want to know the total cost of representation before engaging a law firm, how do you provide for that?

The best way forward, in implementing new software, is to first test it out in a sandbox environment, before launching it, in full.  And, that’s true whether you’re a solo, small firm attorney or large law firm owner. 

VoIP stands for ‘voice over internet protocol’; it is, essentially, a cloud-based phone system.  Hardline phones are connected via PBX (‘public branch exchange’), which makes those systems cost more than VoIP, and forces business phone systems to be anchored to a particular place.

Many law firms still operate with pen-and-paper time and billing systems, but that’s like a recipe for losing money.  Of course there’s no time like the present to change your ways and recapture more of the money you make.

Every offline transaction you utilize in your law practice, can be shifted to an online transaction.  And, if you’re not making those moves now, the question is when will you? 

Step 1 – Generate maximum efficiency; Step 2 – Hire.  If you do it in that order, you’ll also have a much better handle on what you can expect from your staff, in terms of revenue generation.

If your clients want documents because they cost less than legal services . . . then, sell them documents.  There are lots of technology products that can produce intake tools for populating template documents. 

If cases aren’t closing as quickly as you want, or for as much as you want, make changes.  If you’re hitting your metrics, try to do better. 

If every time you change locations, you’re forwarding email from one inbox to the other, the cloud is your answer.

There are a lot of reasons why law firms remain unresponsive to these obvious revenue opportunities.  But, there is one simple step that law firms can take, that will inevitably improve their responsiveness to leads.

If you don’t use, or haven’t optimized for, web directories, you’re missing out on a fantastic way to build your online brand.

Since cloud software is accessed by a web browser, rather than through a premise-based desktop program, that means that you can access the same software, with the same information, anywhere you have a secure internet connection. 

Law firms put themselves through some interesting gymnastics in order to reconcile trust accounting, well or poorly – mostly poorly. 

For consumers who are used to paying low monthly rates for high-value services (think Disney+ or Netflix), paying lots of money per hour for a lawyer, with no discernable end point — so, no notion of the total cost of engagement — seems like a pretty risky proposition.  It’s the rare consumer who will confidently enter such an open-ended arrangement these days.

By now, the vast majority of law firms want to run paperless offices; the problem is often figuring out the logistics — especially for law firms with decades of history (and files) behind them.  The most daunting question is often how to get started.

Legal consumer habits are shifting under the feet of attorneys, and law firms, rooted in tradition, are feeling the pressure to reduce prices and overhead while increasing service. 

Workflows are simply aggregations of tasks, strung together.  What workflow tools allow you to do is to create groups of tasks at the same time, rather than task-by-task.