Law Practice Management Blog

The news surrounding data breaches is always big, national or international in scale, involving lots and lots of money and big names and big companies.  Of course, smaller data breaches happen everyday to unknown and unnamed victims.  Some of those victims are law firms.

But, what if you had a staff person who was a tech all-star, was great at troubleshooting, willing to help others, and held an intimate understanding of law firm technology.  Wouldn’t it be better to leverage that person more aggressively? 

Even if you don’t have an update to make, your clients will feel cared for, because most attorneys only contact their clients if they want something, including more money. It’s a small effort, that goes a long way.

lawyers may be overpaying for technology, and it’s largely because they’re buying new stuff without looking harder at what they already have.

Arizona has recently stricken the rule barring non-lawyer ownership in law firms from its professional ethics code.  Utah is creating a sandbox environment to explore the same option.  Mixed ownership law firms are called “alternative business structures,” and they already exist in other parts of the world, most notably the United Kingdom.  It’s only a matter of time before the traditional lawyer monopoly is broken.

If a general niche (like family law) works to reduce competition, a more specific niche (like estate planning), even further reduces competition.  Take that to its logical extreme, and the deeper your niche, the less competition you have. 

Selecting new law firm software can be a daunting prospect. Follow these tips!

These are relatively simple, inexpensive steps any lawyer could take, to look better online.

If you’re looking to build a modern law firm, you need to stop flying by the seat of your pants, and invest in systems for the long haul.

Consider the fact that law firm rates barely keep up with inflation, and the massive changes that the rise of the convenience economy has wrought, and there’s probably no better time to reconsider your rates than right now.

The point is that attorneys can lean into their hobbies to meet like-minded individuals.  And those like-minded individuals can become referrals sources.  Just making yourself visible within a group, without even selling anything directly, can lead to the generation of new clients and referrals. 

The upshot is that, as a law firm, you should automate as many of the rote processes of practicing law as you can.  The high-touch aspect of professional services should be reserved for the most compelling parts of the representation, when the attorney is offering the most value.

The plain fact is that lawyers tend to write like lawyers, regardless of the audience.  That means they use 2-dollar words, legal terms of art and lots of Latin.  Now, that works when the audience is other attorneys who eat that stuff up.  But when trying to craft content for legal consumers, attorneys should take a different approach.

Conducting a ‘vanity search’ on Google, however, is only the first step in anteing up to table stakes for online marketing.  You can learn a lot about your website’s performance in search using two free Google tools: Search Console and Analytics.

It’s likely that you already have a task management system in place – in fact, pretty much every productivity (email) software, or law practice management system has one built in.  But, you may find those lacking in terms of the task functionality.  If you do, there are a lot of great task management tools that focus on that one operation which you could look to.

Automated time trackers manage your time across devices, and prompt you to add time manually when you have been away from your devices for an extended period of time.

If you don’t have a list of red flags for potential clients, you may end up stepping in it down the road.  Maybe you think those red flags are so obvious, they’re not even worth writing down.  But, they are – if for no other reason than that they speak to your client vetting process, and will keep you in line on close cases. 

Attorneys hate to think of themselves as “salespeople,” but if you’re a law firm owner/manager, you’re selling things the same way everyone else who owns a business is selling things. Though, you might not be selling what you think you are . . . Legal consumers are not like you: They don’t know as many […]

It’s not the only solution available, but one method for dramatically increasing your collections is to adopt an evergreen retainer model.  The way it works is: the law firm sets a retainer amount for an initial client payment; and then, moving forward, it’s the client’s job to ‘top off’ that amount, on a recurring basis, when it falls below a predetermined threshold. 

The most efficient law firms make the most money, because they move through cases quicker; consequently, they can bring in new cases faster.  That’s pretty simple math.  But, making the equation work is hard.