As a committed law firm owner, you likely know better than anyone how much work goes into making your practice successful — and you likely know about how complicated it can be to make sure everything (and everyone) keeps moving in the right direction.
While law school taught you many things about practicing law, it didn’t necessarily equip you with the tools needed to run your law firm like the business it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to fix that?
Now, there is.
In this exclusive guide, we’re going to show you how to keep track of all the moving parts in your growing practice like a pro. Before you know it, every aspect of your firm will be in the right place, overseen by the right people, and working efficiently and effectively.
Get ready to learn about:
1. The Challenge of Growing Complexity in Your Law Firm
Though every law firm is different, most typically grow in a similar pattern when it comes to its departments. Staying organized and on top of each of them isn’t easy, but here are a few things to consider when separating the moving parts of your growing practice.
Intake Challenges
One of a law firm’s most critical moving parts is answering and converting new client calls. From the moment a client or potential client calls your office, you want to make them feel welcomed and cared for — if they don’t, they’ll call another firm immediately.
When someone needs a lawyer’s help, they usually need it as soon as possible — and they need it at all hours of the day, including nights and weekends.
If your potential clients are stuck waiting to be answered, forced to leave a message, or greeted by unprofessional and inconsistent call centers when they’re at their most vulnerable, their first impression of your office is starting off on a negative note.
What happens if they can’t get your help right away? They’ll simply move onto the next law firm they can find — one that will help them instantly.
Some of the common types of phone calls that a law firm’s intake department must field each day include calls from:
- Existing clients looking for updates
- Clients with complaints regarding their case
- Clients seeking to schedule a meeting
- New clients calling about a potential new case
- Clients who need to make payments
In an industry that requires so much phone communication, handling intake with efficiency, grace, and effective management skills are essential. How your team handles your law firm’s phone calls — and organizes the corresponding data — determines the overall client experience, which ultimately determines how successful your law firm will or won’t be.
Clients have increasingly high expectations, and every law firm owner should prioritize solutions to standardize and keep track of all moving parts related to law firm intake. These include call systems, call tracking, contact records, intake forms/questionnaires, follow-up status, open loops, and more.
Case Management Challenges
Case management is an integral part of every law firm. Undoubtedly, efficiently managing cases effectively directly impacts their outcomes, ultimately determining your ability to attract and retain clients.
Industry data reveals that, on average, a lawyer manages between 20 to 30 cases in a year — and in many markets and practice areas, this number can be higher. Whether your attorneys are managing these cases on their own or with the help of paralegals, your team must prioritize becoming efficient, organized, and precise.
Some of the crucial case management moving parts to organize and track include:
- Document preparation
- Filing with the court
- Inquiries from opposing counsel
- Client communications and case updates
- Follow-up status on outstanding matters
- And more
Managing and tracking all these complexities requires carrying out several consistent, repeatable tasks. With so many things to do, it is crucial to implement the right solutions that make it easy to prioritize your tasks by case, assign tasks, track progress, and make effective follow-ups.
Marketing Challenges
Effective marketing is crucial to growing law firms, and luckily for you, there are many different ways to market your firm, from social media to email to events and beyond. To start equipping your team to truly become legal marketing experts, check out this comprehensive guide to content marketing for law firms.
Marketing a law firm involves several foundational strategies, such as clarifying your law firm’s Unique Value Perspective (UVP), defining your target market, and planning and implementing campaigns. Ideally, you need to track several moving parts related to implementing each of these strategies.
Law firm marketing complexity and moving parts can include:
- Marketing content ideas
- Asset production (graphics, videos, written, etc.)
- Editorial calendar
- Brand account information (social media, etc.)
- Lead tracking
- Audience engagement efforts
Finance Challenges
As a lawyer, understanding and streamlining the critical tenets of financial management can help put your firm on a solid path to sustainable revenue growth.
Generally, law firm financial management comprises planning, organizing, and controlling all the financial operations of your practice. This includes:
- Tracking and managing bookkeeping
- Invoicing clients
- Processing payments of all kinds
- Reconciling credit card charges
- Preparing financial statements
- Business tax matters
Operations Challenges
If one of your biggest challenges is not knowing what operations encompass, we’re here to help. The operations of your law firm manages the business’s inner workings so it runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible. There are many aspects that fall under the operations umbrella, and it’s important to make sure they’re all accounted for as your law firm grows.
For starters, be sure to establish strategic feedback loops. Feedback is one of the most helpful factors to incorporate into your firm as it helps you grow as a leader and an organization.
In addition to feedback, recording key metrics will help your firm grow year over year as you’ll always have a baseline to reference to help you make accurate business forecasts. Metrics are measures of quantitative assessment commonly used for assessing, comparing, and tracking performance or production.
All human resources functions also fall under the operations umbrella, and everything from a structured hiring process to an effective onboarding process and clearly defined KPIs for every team member add to the growing list of operational challenges as your law firm grows.
Here are some additional operational areas that can get particularly complex as a law firm grows:
- Hiring needs assessments
- Job descriptions and listings
- Candidates applying for open roles
- Interview schedules
- Career paths for existing team members
- Team member performance measurement and reviews, such as consistently hitting their KPIs
- Promotions and disciplinary actions
- Processes, procedures, and standard documentation
- Data integrity, including a database of client contact information and potential client lists
- And so much more
2. Keeping Track of Moving Parts in Your Law Firm
Now that you’re familiar with all the complexities and moves you have to keep track of in your law firm, you can start the process of organizing and streamlining them all — and it will be easier than you think. Keep reading to get started on options to solve your biggest growing pains and business challenges.
Intake Tracking Solutions
“Your brand is your promise to your potential clients. Live up to it by answering the call when they need you.” – Michael Mogill
Introducing CaptureNow, the legal industry’s first and only automated, interactive response solution that ensures every call to your law firm is immediately answered 24/7/365. Here’s what you need to know:
Based on a study of 1,000 of the fastest-growing small and mid-sized law firms across the country, the missed call percentage without CaptureNow was 14 percent, and the average wait time until the call was answered was 56 seconds.
With CaptureNow, 100 percent of calls will be answered, and the wait time for incoming callers will be zero seconds.
Give your intake team the edge they need with these incredible features that come along with CaptureNow:
- Calls Answered 24/7/365
- Intelligent Automation
- Speech-to-Text Transmission
- Simple Self-Service Setup
- Prioritized Qualification Call Routing
- Dedicated Website Portal
- Case-Specific Email Alerts
- Automatic Call Recording
You made a commitment to help those in need, and if you aren’t answering the phone when they call, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and them. CaptureNow will help your firm attract and retain valuable cases you never even knew you were missing.
Case Management Solutions
For your law firm’s case management department, an effective set of standard operating procedures best covers the complete case process, from initial intake and case selection to handling legal documents, court appearances, and other milestone tasks. An effective SOP should also document client expectations and your law firm’s preferred workflow.
As a legal professional, you understand the value of meeting deadlines. Any lapse in case management can result in missed deadlines, damaging your reputation. The right legal case management software is another essential option to help you manage deadlines and improve file organization.
A case management system can also facilitate seamless team collaborations to allow all members quickly access information and communicate via a single interface. This results in increased employee productivity and improved work efficiency, and that’s something you can’t miss out on in the highly saturated legal market.
Some of the top legal case management software to consider include:
- Clio
- Filevine
- SmartAdvocate
- PracticePanther
- CASEpeer
- MyCase
- Smokeball
- And many more
Determine what software is the best fit for the needs of your law firm and use it to your advantage to keep track of moving case management parts.
Marketing Solutions
Leading law firms use innovative marketing solutions to automate and track repetitive tasks and improve the effectiveness of online marketing, including email, websites, social media, and published content.
Top-notch marketing software saves time, reduces errors, and increases audience engagement while boosting the ROI of your firm’s marketing efforts. You may also need other tracking and management software such as project management software, editorial calendar software, and file storage/sharing systems.
Some effective marketing automation and delegation solutions for law firms include:
- Mailchimp: This is an email marketing platform that you can use to automate email campaigns and manage your email lists — and there are plenty of other options out there too.
- Canva: This is a graphic design platform that you can use to create graphics for social media, websites, business cards, and much more — without being a master at Adobe Photoshop.
- Sprout Social: You can use Sprout Social or similar social media management platform to automate and schedule your social media posting. It also helps you track trends to better resonate with your audience.
- Fiverr: This is one of many online marketplaces for freelancers. If you need graphic designers, copywriters, data managers, or practically any other kind of creative or technical service your firm may need, there is someone on a freelance marketplace that can do it for you for a fraction of the average cost.
- Dropbox: This is a file hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software — just one of many such tools. Other options include Google Drive, Box, iCloud Drive, and more.
Do your own research, and try a few of them out and see which ones work well with your volume of business, number of clients, and unique way of doing things.
Finance Solutions
You cannot have a successful law practice without detailed knowledge of where money is spent — and where it comes in, where it may be missing, and so on. However, tracking and managing a law firm’s finances is challenging for many lawyers. Lawyers are generally not trained in finance in law schools, and poor financial management is often the biggest threat to law firm profitability.
If this sounds like you, don’t start worrying — there’s always a solution.
A law firm’s finance team is responsible for managing accounts receivable and accounts payable, handling credit card payments, preparing financial statements and reports, and maintaining accurate records of all financial transactions.
Here are a few finance platforms to consider leveraging in your own law firm:
- LawPay
- TimeSolv
- FreshBooks
- Accounting Girl
- And more
Creating SOPs for finance-related tasks can also help streamline the workflow in your office, saving you time and money. When you standardize these processes, you will start to create consistency across the board while ensuring accuracy when managing your law firm’s finances.
Operations Solutions
To begin streamlining your law firm’s operations, ask yourself this: Does your law firm have a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for every team member and every task? If the answer is no, there is room for numerous solutions in your law firm’s operations.
SOPs are step-by-step instructions put together by an organization to help team members carry out routine operations correctly and efficiently. Without them, no one would know where to begin, what to do, or how to do it the right way.
In addition to SOPs for every repeatable process across law firm departments, hiring and human resources are an area that require strategic solutions as more moving parts are introduced. Here are a few ways to keep track of them:
- Develop a structured hiring process that is the same for every applicant
- Leverage hiring platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Recruitee, or others to source and recruit top talent
- Invest in an HR platform like Rippling, Gusto, ADP, BambooHR, or others to consolidate and professionalize your people
- management, including payroll and benefits
- Document processes and procedures for every role and department
By putting solutions like these in place, you can ensure smooth operations and guarantee scalability without compromising your firm’s values and culture.
Final Thoughts
It is not easy running a law firm today. Clients expect more from their attorneys than ever before, and keeping up with these demands while staying on top of the many moving parts that come with a growing business takes a lot of organization and advanced planning.
Luckily for you, that’s where you set your firm up for success going forward. When you find a way to bring together all of the moving parts in your growing business and align them to move in the same direction, you’ll begin to see some serious transformation. These solutions can help you streamline various departments and run an efficient, profitable law firm that meets the changing needs of your clients.
Ready for more life-changing insights like these? Join Crisp Coach to learn more about law firm management solutions, and surround yourself with like-minded law firm owners who are ready to take their firms to the next level.
2023 is your year… Seize it.
