Law Practice Management Blog

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. 

Law firms cite to a lot of things, like cases.  But, when it comes to modernizing business management tactics, law firms cite traditional barriers, like cost and effort. 

There’s a prevailing argument in legal tech circles over whether lawyers should be coders.  This argument is often misconstrued to mean that lawyers should be developing their own software.  And, that’s an entirely different thing.

When thinking about how to market a law firm effectively, the question of frequency is important, especially as it relates to content marketing: get as much of your stuff out there into the world, as often as you can, and people are bound to pay attention to you.

For my money, unless you have actually been a real-life, honest-to-goodness website designer at some point in your career, and if you’re a lawyer, it’s never a good idea to design and maintain your own website.

Many lawyers view client communications as bothersome–an interruption from the important work of lawyering.  Of course, that work is being done for clients; so, it’s important that they know what’s going on, right?  But, this isn’t just a one way street.  In fact, lawyers derive lots of benefits from staying in touch with their clients.  So, let’s address three of those . . .

This is the year you turn your law firm into a high performance machine.  You’re currently driving a Chevrolet Chevette; by the end of next year, I want you to be rolling up in a Ford Mustang. 

Lawyers have always billed clients the same way: by the hour.  (Yawn.) While that option is good for law firms (hello: uncapped billings), clients often chafe at the model, because $— x however many hours the lawyer decides to work is a little bit more of an investment than, say, a Netflix subscription. But, there’s a reason why subscription services like Netflix flourish: it’s because of the low level of investment, and the high value of return. 

Law firms work vigorously to convert leads: to get those leads to pay retainers and sign engagement agreements.  That all makes sense: winning business is essential for any organization.  However, once law firms convert clients, there is often a dry spell before the new clients hear from their new law firms again; and, because many cases start with potentially significant periods before anything of note actually happens, new clients may go for months, or even a year, before they hear from their lawyer again.

With so much competition for clients, law firms are seeking any edge they can find.  Even so, many attorneys remain camera shy.  Despite the fact that video is a unique way to market a modern small business, small law firm websites that feature video remain few and far between.

For law firms, just like for any other business, change starts small; and, it’s the same thing when it comes to better managing your productivity. There are some immediate changes you can make to your law firm that will incur massive incremental value.

Everything you do in marketing your law firm is centered around getting return on calls to actions you’ve carefully crafted as part of your marketing plan.  It doesn’t make sense to go through all of that effort and expense, and then drop the ball at the goal line.

Every business needs to back up its electronic data, but the imperative is even more important for law firms, which have ethical and fiduciary duties tied to their client relationships.  Despite the warnings, many law firms subsist on remarkably thin data backup systems. 

Most lawyers have a general understanding of what encryption does. Nevertheless, most attorneys don’t feel like they have a comprehensive plan for managing encryption in their law firms, when it comes to sending secure files to clients and colleagues.  That leaves a lot of law firms feeling a little insecure.  But, there’s a simple strategy for managing encryption in law firms, that’s entirely based on the volume of files you need to encrypt.