Law Practice Management Blog

Law firm accounts receivable can be gnarly – sometimes extending into the six figures. Now, there are a couple of responses to that.  The preferred option is to eliminate accounts receivable altogether, which can be done using epayment options and potentially evergreen retainers combined with stop work orders.

Even if you’re not technically misinterpreting the law, because you’re updating for statutory and case law changes, you may not be implementing best practices in document drafting at all times if your editing process only comes around every decade or half-decade, potentially via one of the forcing functions described above.

When lawyers get excited about content marketing prospects, they get really keyed up to add social channels.  And that’s a great idea because it’s true that the more social channels you have, the better – since the more places your profile and content exists, the broader your reach becomes.

That being said, you don’t need to add social channels for the sake of adding social channels.

Law firms don’t often have partnership agreements.  Especially small firms. Which is kind of shocking, right?

The cool thing about working in 2024 is that everybody has more flexibility than ever before — especially about where they want to work.  That’s awesome and as it always should have been. 

It’s 2024 and everybody is still kind of bad with passwords.  Many passwords, in fact, still contain the word . . . password!  That can’t be good.

Does your paralegal need access to your financial data?  Must your bookkeeper have full access to your case files?  For screening purposes, should certain lawyers be barred from viewing certain case files?

If you want to drive revenue within your law firm, it makes sense to look at bonusing attorneys and staff in ways that will incentivize your employees to generate or close more cases for the firm, which will lead to additional revenue.

Speed of response and engagement is essential for starting legal consumers on the client journey.  If you don’t get to your leads quickly, you won’t have a chance to close them. 

Estate planning attorneys can refer cases if one takes taxable estate work and the other does not.  Personal injury attorneys can refer cases to each other if one doesn’t litigate. 

With the ubiquity of cloud software and sophistication in legal marketing on the rise, there is not a single thing you can’t track as a law firm when it comes to marketing.

So, if you feel like you can’t go on vacation because you’re worried about court coverage or getting documents signed, you just need another attorney, who can step in, and do those things for you.

Effective billing, like learning any skill, requires repetition. If you can use the same process for billing every time, it makes it much easier to repeat that process, including for collection purposes.

Law firms only answer 1 of 3 phone calls they receive, on average.  Couple that with the fact that 64% of law firm voicemails are not returned, and there isn’t much “service” left in law firm “customer service.”

For the law firms, this is an effective and easy way to gather and share data with clients.  But it’s also inherently more secure than using email for the same purpose, because that data never leaves the law practice management system.

Law firms don’t do price rises nearly enough.  Law firm pricing barely keeps up with inflation as it is.  And with the current rate of inflation, law firm pricing is likely being lapped.  That means that, even if your gross law firm revenue is rising year over year, the purchasing power you accrue from that revenue is declining.

So it makes sense to perform, at least, a basic financial analysis before making a new hire.  For attorney hires, this can be simpler than for staff hires, since staff persons may not bill directly. 

So, if you want to get to the bottom of how much you’re making these days, you have to pay more attention to your budget, including attributing expenses at a much deeper level than you are right now – because more sophisticated calculations require more specific data inputs.

You can’t be everywhere, all at once – so, stop trying to be.

Now, most people are visual learners.  And the text-based model for workflow management doesn’t work for everybody. Fine, okay.  But, what’s the alternative? Video is a good option: it’s the most visual of formats.