Law Practice Management Blog

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.

Last week in this space, we addressed the fact that law firms have really low net promoter scores, with an NPS equal to about the average airline provider.  As we discussed, that means that your clients like you about as much as they like Spirit Airlines.  You can do better.

Did you know that law firms have a really poor net promoter score? Wait, wait.  Let’s backtrack for a second.  Do you know what a ‘net promoter score’ is? 

As in-person networking begins to make a comeback, business cards are returning to the fore, as well. For lawyers, business cards remain the coin of the realm.  Even so, everybody’s business cards look the same.  Y’all went to Staples, too, right?

If you haven’t examined your budget lately, I bet I can nevertheless predict how you can eliminate a good deal of your overhead.  And, it’s a pretty simple solution: Convert to cloud services wherever you can.

I remember having a conversation with a lawyer who told me that his marketing goal was to have lunch with another business professional every day.  I asked him to track how many referrals he got from that.  A month later, I asked him how things were going, and he said, ‘Well, I guess I was just having lunch.’