Law Practice Management Blog

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.

Instead of buying the same old stock photos from Getty, or using a free service like Unsplash, or even taking your own photos, why not try an AI image tool to generate fresh and interesting pictures?

Now you might assume that if clients find common billing practices to be annoying, they would be even more annoyed by more frequent billing.  But that’s not necessarily the case; in fact, lots of legal consumers appreciate recurrent billing like this because each payment is smaller.

Smart attorneys don’t just set prices; they have an understanding of the psychological components of pricing. Want to get a better handle about how the way you relay pricing information affects consumers?

If you’ve got 20 years’ experience, and have run your own firm for the last 10, you likely don’t know any attorneys with 3 years’ experience, or a newly-minted paralegal, or a recent college graduate who could become an administrative assistant at your firm. But you know who might know those sorts of people?  Your existing staff.

There’s just a lot more that you can manage with a job posting on social media than almost anywhere else.

Why would I ever use any legal software if it’s not as good as the alternatives?  Don’t I want to be using the best software?

The most obvious option for designing a website is doing it yourself (DIY). But let’s be real – even if you’re the best website designer in the world, you still don’t want to do it.

It can be really valuable for business owners, including lawyers, to get booked as guests on podcasts.  Not only are podcasts really popular, but it’s a great way to display your expertise as an attorney – which is all that clients and referral sources want to know about anyway.

It’s easy to say that law firms all act alike and look alike, but it’s difficult to really bring home that point, lacking a graphical interpretation. 

Have you ever had to write a client’s name over and over again – so many times that you mess it up? They really hate that. How about adding the last of five children to an estate plan?  Now, was her middle name Elise of Eliza?

Generally speaking, there are three types of reviews you’ll get online: great, middling and poor. You can (and perhaps should) respond to every last one, but each one requires a different level of tact.

Because lawyers try to do everything, and do everything perfectly, they’re also more prone than the general population to take on more work than they need to.  For example, they’re unwilling to delegate, including to paralegal and administrative staff, but also to other attorneys.

There is a significant subset of attorneys who still dictate communications.  Some lawyers will dictate to staff people while others use standalone technology, like Dragon Naturally Speaking, to manage the trick. But you don’t really need any substitute technology to dictate any longer. 

Some lawyers get burned hiring staff–whether it’s legal assistants, paralegals or other attorneys.  But just because you miss out once in trying to hire somebody, that doesn’t mean you should give up forever. 

You can ask ChatGPT to draft you a 250-word blog post on a specific topic.  And you can then tweak it (via additional prompts) as you see fit.  Even if what ChatGPT produces is not the final version, that’s okay – because if it gets you 90% of the way to the finish, you can polish it from there.