Same Old, Same Old: How to Get Referrals from Attorneys in Your Practice Area
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.
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: Lead Tracking Can Be for Anything Now
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.
Dual Threat: Why You Need a Backup Attorney
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.
Activate: How to Streamline Law Firm Billing
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.
Phone It In: How Do You Get Calls Answered?
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.”
Window Dressing: A Client Portal Is the Next Step in Attorney-Client Relations
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.
Price Rise: Slow and Steady Wins the Race
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.
Profit Center: How to Feel More Confident About New Hires
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.
Writing in the Margins: Just How Much Does Your Overhead Cut Into Your Revenue?
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.
Depth Perception: Don’t Overvolunteer
You can’t be everywhere, all at once – so, stop trying to be.
Visual Aid: Workflow Management Can Be Different Now
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.
Would Recommend: Attorney Recommendations Can Complement Client Reviews
Generally speaking, it’s less unwieldy to get another lawyer to write something nice about, especially if you do the same for them, or if the two of you regularly pass referrals back and forth.
Service Charge: Your Law Firm Isn’t a Bank, So Stop Acting Like It Is
Law firms have traditionally extended credit to clients by billing in arrears. This is, in fact, the most common way for law firms using an hourly billing model to invoice their clients.
Change the Narrative: Your Invoices Probably Need Better Billing Descriptions
There’s actually no better place to solidify that relationship than through your invoicing. It’s a continuous, repetitive option for reminding your client of what you’ve done for them.
We Can Work It Out: Standalone Task Management Software
If your case management software or your productivity software isn’t packing the punch you hoped in terms of task management, there are a lot of standalone tools that might be a better fit for you, including: Notion, Trello, Asana and Taskade.
Anniversary Date: You Should Replace Your Hardware Devices on a Schedule
It actually makes more sense (and, it’s cheaper for a whole host of reasons) to replace your hardware more often and on a regular schedule – and, this is a lot easier (and less expensive) to do in an environment where law firms are using less and less hardware, given the adoption of cloud software.
Hero’s Journey: Law Firm Intake, Part 2 – Advance
Many law firms fall down because they haven’t set up any kind of system and don’t know what the next step is themselves, or because they don’t have a simple and convenient option for clients to move the ball forward.
Melting Pot: Should Law Firms Start Hiring More Non-Lawyers?
One trend that is manifesting is that attorneys are beginning to expand their vision of who can and should be hired by a law firm by looking at non-traditional roles within the law firm.
Hero’s Journey: Law Firm Intake, Part 1 – Engage
Every aspect of the intake process should address engagement because 90% of the time, the law firm that effectively engages a new lead, closes that lead.
Ringer: Who Should Answer the Phone at Your Law Firm?
The last thing you want is to let a call get to voicemail. Just a hair over 35% of law firm voicemails are ever returned, and once a lead or client gets voicemail, it’s no guarantee that they will even leave a message – and, the next move is definitely to call your competition.