Law Practice Management Blog

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.

Every offline transaction you utilize in your law practice, can be shifted to an online transaction.  And, if you’re not making those moves now, the question is when will you? 

Step 1 – Generate maximum efficiency; Step 2 – Hire.  If you do it in that order, you’ll also have a much better handle on what you can expect from your staff, in terms of revenue generation.

If your clients want documents because they cost less than legal services . . . then, sell them documents.  There are lots of technology products that can produce intake tools for populating template documents. 

If cases aren’t closing as quickly as you want, or for as much as you want, make changes.  If you’re hitting your metrics, try to do better. 

If every time you change locations, you’re forwarding email from one inbox to the other, the cloud is your answer.

There are a lot of reasons why law firms remain unresponsive to these obvious revenue opportunities.  But, there is one simple step that law firms can take, that will inevitably improve their responsiveness to leads.

If you don’t use, or haven’t optimized for, web directories, you’re missing out on a fantastic way to build your online brand.