You probably know most of what I am about to tell you, but knowing something doesn’t mean you’re doing it or that you can’t do it better. So consider this a helpful reminder to regularly examine these five areas of your practice:
1) Marketing
Marketing is everything you do to get and keep good clients, and it should be your top priority. Examine the marketing activities you now do and see how you can do them better. Look at other strategies you can implement. Look for ways to expand what’s working and minimize or eliminate what’s not.
2) Systems
Every practice should set up and maintain manuals that detail every aspect of work flow and office management. Detailed checklists, forms and templates, and the like, help you do what you do more quickly and efficiently, train new hires and temps, reduce mistakes, save money, and increase profits.
3) Personal Development
Everyone associated with the practice needs to continually re-fresh and improve their professional and personal skills. These include staying current on law and procedure, learning how to use technology, and improving their writing, speaking, salesmanship, marketing, and productivity skills and habits.
4) Human Resources
Hiring and outsourcing are an important part of improving profitability. You need to regularly review who’s working for you, what they’re doing, what else you can assign them, training, scheduling, and incentives. You should also consider when to hire additional staff or replace the ones who aren’t doing a good job.
5) Infrastructure/expense management
Every dollar saved is a dollar earned. This category includes offices, leases, service contracts, technology, library, supplies, repairs, insurance, etc. Can you get it for less elsewhere or by buying in bulk? Can you negotiate? Can you eliminate it? Also look for ways to make the work environment safer, more compliant, and more pleasant for staff and clients.
Of these five categories, most lawyers should focus 70-80% of their time and resources on marketing. When you bring in more clients, bigger cases, or higher fees, the rest of the things on this list will be relatively easy. When you don’t, the rest don’t matter.
Marketing plan for growing a law practice: Go here
