Law Practice Management Blog

If you want the best people to work for your law firm, take advantage of the current opportunity to intentionally craft the distributed workforce you want.

A lot of those networking opportunities have moved online, and lawyers can now take advantage of broader marketing options via the web. 

In order to give yourself another bite at the apple for leads who don’t convert the first time, you need to be able to develop a remarketing strategy. 

More than 60% of law firm do not return voicemails. It takes an average of 8 emails to schedule an appointment with an attorney.

Email drives business; yet, it also drives most of us crazy. If this is the year you want to take control of your email, here are some steps you can take.

If you’re a ‘Super Lawyer’, a legal consumer understands that that’s probably better than hiring an average lawyer; but, that doesn’t tell the legal consumer anything at all about whether you can handle their case.

One place lawyers don’t put enough emphasis, in terms of content development, is in the design of website practice area pages.  Many lawyers draft super generic content.  But, realize that potential clients are coming to you because they want your expertise, and because they want to learn more about the legal process. 

Law firms still tend to make most decisions about practice management on an ad hoc basis: What does your gut tell you to do?  But, those attorneys who employ data-driven decision making can gain a tremendous competitive advantage. 

The fact is, even without the emergence of the coronavirus, the convenience economy was coming in hot anyway.  In the convenience economy, a lack of information is just one more reason to find another service provider.

If your accounts receivable are so high, it makes you sick, or if you won’t even look at them because you’re afraid to see the numbers, that probably means you aren’t billing with any kind of frequency. 

Are your services ‘convenient’ for legal consumers to use?  Most attorneys can’t answer that question in the affirmative.  And, if your law firm is one of those, you should not be asking yourself how you can improve over what another attorney in town is doing, but how you can more closely align to what Amazon is doing.

And, while most attorneys think that raising rates is a dangerous step, there are ways to manage it, without alienating new or existing clients. 

One of the best reasons to shift to cloud-based software (or, more cloud-based software) is that cloud systems, by means of a secure internet connection, can pass data back and forth. 

Add a task in your calendar at the end of every month for sending out your invoices.  And, put a tickler on it, so you know it’s coming up.

Teachers have been keeping students honest with homework for centuries.  Lawyers can use the same trick.

Attorneys should consider new and interesting ways to create unique sales propositions, especially relevant to their customers.

The job for modern lawyers is to meet and exceed client expectations.  So, if you know (now you do) that clients want to know the total cost of representation before engaging a law firm, how do you provide for that?

The best way forward, in implementing new software, is to first test it out in a sandbox environment, before launching it, in full.  And, that’s true whether you’re a solo, small firm attorney or large law firm owner. 

VoIP stands for ‘voice over internet protocol’; it is, essentially, a cloud-based phone system.  Hardline phones are connected via PBX (‘public branch exchange’), which makes those systems cost more than VoIP, and forces business phone systems to be anchored to a particular place.

Many law firms still operate with pen-and-paper time and billing systems, but that’s like a recipe for losing money.  Of course there’s no time like the present to change your ways and recapture more of the money you make.