Law Practice Management Blog

The majority of business owners have a very difficult time price setting.  However, much of that effort (meant to define the value for what a professional does) is most often undone by those same professionals.  This is especially true of lawyers, who don’t like to talk with clients about money, and are more than willing to discount their services at the slightest provocation.

Efficient law firms return the most revenue by a wide margin.  Yet, much of what law firms do cuts against efficiency.

All I’m saying is: ignore logo design/creation/recreation at your own peril. In a hypercompetitive environment for small law firms, you need to show distinct differences between your firm and your competitor firms, to draw and convert client interest.

Because any law firm could be struck by disaster, every law firm should develop and maintain a disaster recovery program.  And, the primary component of any disaster recovery program in a cloud-based world is an effective data backup program.

89% of lawyers surveyed believed that their law firms followed up with potential clients within 24 hours; 62% of law firms actually never follow up with leads at all.

If you’re not familiar with utilization rate, it represents the amount of total hours you could bill in a day versus what you actually bill.  For example, if you set aside 8 hours to work on any given day, billing for all 8 hours would represent a 100% utilization rate.

Because lawyers manage law firms, change within those law firms happens at a glacial pace.  Yet, while law firms cling to the status quo, upstarts in other industries redefine life and culture.  Not that law firm managers need to be out to change the world, writ large.  They just need to change their own worlds, just a little bit.

Password management is no sweat these days — with tools like LastPass, a master password unlocks all doors.  Not only will such a service obviate the need for memorizing any passwords, it will also automatically creates secure passwords for you.  No fuss, no muss.

Every lawyer I’ve ever met wants to do everything on his own.  In other words, every lawyer secretly desires to be a solo attorney.  Of course, there comes a time when your business grows to the point that you need some real help; and, since you can’t clone yourself, it’s necessary to hire.

If you can collect more, more quickly, and can also automate payments via electronic payment processing systems, it will reduce or eliminate your accounts receivable — and, backlogged accounts receivable are a long-standing problem for law firms.

The law firms that become early adopters of new and improved technology should be able to add further efficiencies, in order to create a significant competitive advantage as against law firms that linger in older technology stacks.

So, if you’re operating without a succession plan, or a wind-down program, for your law firm, you’re potentially driving your grieving family members into years of taxing and fatiguing work.  No law firm closure I have ever seen that has been managed by family members of the lawyers has been easy, or gone well.

Have ever had trouble finding information in your law firm?  Probably, right?  Because looking for something is like the lawyer default mode.  The vast majority of law firms I consult with have their client information all over the place.

How tech competent are you and your law firm? Do you reach the reasonable level of competency that the comment requires? If not, it’s time to get up to speed.

So, if you’re looking to get a better handle on your inbox, here are a few tools you can apply.

Attorneys are very good at creating specific documents for clients from existing templates.  But, when they run through that process, they’re often using antiquated tools, like ‘find and replace’, or making edits by hand.  That’s one of the reasons that legal services are so expensive, is that lawyers’ old school methods make it that way.

Don’t know what a call to action is?  Here’s the only thing you need to know: if you look at a piece of marketing, and you can’t discern what to do next, then you’ve failed as a marketer because there is no ‘call to action’, no invitation to take the next step.

When you can effectively create engagement points for law firm intake, you’ll close more clients, and make more money.

Marketing is often more subtle than people think.  It’s usually more about creating and maintaining subtle methods for extending brand awareness than anything else.  If you can stay ‘top of mind’, by figuring out ways to regularly disseminate information to potentially interested parties, then it becomes more likely that potential clients will find you, and existing clients and referral sources will send new clients your way. 

Lawyers start their own law firms for any number of reasons.  There isn’t a wrong one. Despite that, most lawyers starting law firms tend to make the same mistakes.