How to answer the phone in your law office

August 31, 2012 by
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If you want to be more productive and deliver a higher level of service (aka “earn more income”), every element of your law office operations should be planned in advance. Put it in a checklist, template, form, or script, so that everyone knows what to do, they do it right, and they do it that way every single time.

A good place to start is how you want the phone to be answered. Here’s how:

  1. Greeting (“Good Morning,” etc.)
  2. Lawyer/Firm Name (“Mr. Jones’ office,” “Jones & Michaels”)
  3. Name (“This is Sally speaking,”)
  4. “How may I help you?” (or, “How may I direct your call?”)

This lets the caller know they have reached the right place and that you are organized, professional, friendly, and ready to help. Ending with a question (“How may I help you?”) gets the caller focused on stating his or her business.

You should also have a standing instruction that no caller should be put on hold for more than 29 seconds. 30 seconds is too long. The receptionist should come back on the line, tell the caller why they are still on hold, and ask if they would like to continue to hold or be put through to voicemail (or take a message).

This is far more important than you might imagine. Clients, prospects, opposing counsel, and everyone else, judge you on these things.

Do yourself a favor, call your office right now and listen to how the phone is answered. If it’s not exactly the way you want it, write down what you want and make sure everyone who answers the phones has a copy and practices it.

Including you.

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Filed Under: Client relations, Communication, Image, Law office management, Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to clean up your messy desk or messy mind

August 29, 2012 by
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I was reading an article, “10 Simple Steps to Conquering Your Messy Desk,” and there are some good tips in it. Things like, “Use your walls” (cork board or white board), “Lose the paper trail” (scan paper documents and trash the original), and “Schedule daily maintenance” (10 minutes at the end of the day to tidy up).

My favorite is,”Files are your friend: If it’s a completed or upcoming project, file it away. . .If it’s ancient or obsolete, trash it. If it’s something you’re actively working on that day, it can stay in a file folder on top of your desk.”

It occurred to me that our desks get messy the same way our minds get messy–we’re trying to keep track of too many things.

I’ve written before about why people have messy desks:

Un-piling your desk isn’t difficult. I think the hard part for some people is the notion that if they file something away, they won’t remember a task they need to do or they won’t remember where they filed something they need. Ironically, that’s exactly what their mess of a desk does.

The solution is to have a system that (a) allows you to remember what you need to do, and (b) lets you quickly find what you have filed when you need it.”

The path to a clean desk (or digital desktop) and a “mind like water” is to put everything away, out of sight and out of mind, and trust your system. Focus on the one thing you have decided to do next, and nothing else:

  • Take out the one thing you have decided to work on, and nothing else.
  • Work on this task until it is done, if possible, or as far as you can go if it is not.
  • If the task is done, cross it off your list. If a project is complete, file it away in an archive.
  • If the task or project is not done, put the documents away and make a note regarding the next step. Put a reminder on your calendar or in your tickler system or keep it on your list and review that list during your weekly review or daily planning session.
  • Take out the next thing you’re going to work on.
  • And so on.

Do you have some tips for conquering a messy desk or messy mind? Please post them in the comments.

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Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to grow your law practice by establishing routines

August 17, 2012 by
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Lifehack has a post today on improving productivity by turning important tasks into routines. The idea is that you are more likely to do something when it’s part of a regular routine, just like you do, for example, every morning when you get ready for work.

How might this be applied to marketing?

We know it’s important to regularly reach out to clients and former clients, via email, regular mail, phone (and possibly, social media). The return on your investment of time, in terms of repeat business and referrals, is tremendous. A few minutes a day spent connecting like this could bring you thousands of dollars in additional revenue every month.

Arguably, there is nothing more important to the growth of your practice.

It’s important, you know it’s important, you WANT to do it, but somehow, you’re not doing it. Life keeps getting in the way.

What if you established a new routine whereby every day at lunchtime, before you eat or before you leave for a lunch meeting, you take ten minutes to connect? You send out ten emails, make three phone calls, or write and mail a handwritten note.

Easy stuff. And because it’s your part of your daily routine, you do it.

At first, you schedule this ten minutes on your calendar. You see it there every day, reminding you to take action. You have an app send you an alarm. Later, when you’ve been doing it for a month or three, when it has become a habit, you won’t need to be reminded. It’s as much a part of lunchtime as eating.

Make a list of marketing activities you do, or know you need to do. Look for ways to make them routine.

Marketing is easy. The hardest part is remembering to do it.

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Filed Under: Client loyalty, Client relations, Increase your income, Law office management, Marketing legal services, Personal development, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Start where you are with what you have

August 13, 2012 by
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I think we can agree that most attorneys are analytical. We wouldn’t be much use to our clients if we weren’t.

But many attorneys are overly analytical. They get caught up in crunching the numbers and sifting through the facts. They can’t stop saying “what if” and “on the other hand”.

At some point, decisions must be made and advice must be given. And ultimately, it is. The attorney delivers their recommendations.

They are able to do this because they are accountable to their clients or employer. They are paid for their advice so advice they must deliver.

But what happens when an overly analytical attorney has to make decisions about marketing or the management of their practice? When there is no client to answer to, very often they can’t decide.

They procrastinate. They defer. They make no decision and take no action.

This is one reason why many attorneys stagnate and struggle to find success.

There have many times in my business and professional life where I have found myself fighting this very tendency. Most of my bigger projects would still be on the drawing board had I not found some solutions.

If you find yourself holding back because you’re uncomfortable with moving forward, here are three things that can help:

  1. Give yourself permission to do it badly.You’re the only one who will see it for now. You’ll have time to make it better. You can edit a bad first draft, and turn it into something great, but only if you have a first draft. When I wrote my first marketing course, I was afraid it wouldn’t be any good. Instead of fighting my fears and trying to talk myself out of them, I acknowledged those fears. “Yep, it’s gonna be bad, but I’ll make it better,” I told myself. Of course when I read the first draft it wasn’t bad, it was actually quite good. My fears and doubts had lied to me.
  2. Focus on activity, not outcome.You can’t control your results, only your activities. If you do the activities, you are successful. The results will come. If you focus on results, however, your ego gets in the way. If the results aren’t what you want, you may become discouraged and give up too soon. “Progress, not perfection,” is the byword. I wrote about this in this post about how to stop procrastinating.
  3. Start with easy. Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview, “I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” I wrote about this before:

Many people who start a business project, myself included, tend to focus on the hardest parts first. My thinking has been, “I can always do the easy things, I need to conquer the toughest challenges first because if I can’t lick those, this project will never get off the ground.”

How about you? Do you start with the easy things or, like me, do you first jump into the deep end of the pool?

Perhaps we equate “easy” with “having less value,” but in the practical sense, that isn’t true. The things we can do without a lot of thought or effort are often of greater value because they allow us to get started and getting started is the most important part.

Most business projects never see completion because they never get started.

When you start with the easy things, you have started. You’re on your way.

I think these three tips for moving forward are effectively summed up by something Theodore Roosevelt once said: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Do you find yourself procrastinating on projects? What have you done to move forward?

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Filed Under: Personal development, Productivity Tagged With: ,

Get rid of what’s not working in your law practice

August 1, 2012 by
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The military periodically schedules a day or a week to “stand down” from normal operations and review everything they’re doing to make sure it’s still necessary and working at peak efficiency. They fix or get rid of anything that’s not working and make room for new or better ideas.

Anita Campbell, Founder of Small Business Trends, suggests we do something similar with our businesses. She says,

What if we approached innovation from the opposite direction – by getting rid of what isn’t working before we try to come up with something that works.

This is good advice for any law practice. Strip things down to the essentials, lighten the load and add back only what is necessary. Make room for new ideas, tools, and procedures by getting rid of anything that isn’t working:

  • Legal services you no longer sell or are no longer consistent with your long term plans
  • Inefficient processes (forms, letters)
  • Employee functions that are no longer necessary or can be assigned to someone else; employees who no longer carry their weight
  • Furniture, equipment, technology that no longer works
  • Office space that is not being used
  • Closed files you no longer need to retain
  • Ads that no longer pull or cost too much relative to the alternatives
  • Subscriptions you no longer read; books you haven’t referred to in over a year
  • Groups you no longer participate in

Campbell says,

Like cleaning out your garage and tossing unused belongings, jettisoning old processes or products can give your business a whole new start. You’ll be surprised how much space you suddenly find in your mind, and how free you and your team will feel to create something new without all that clutter clogging up your brain.

Earlier this year, my wife and I did an extensive spring cleaning at home. We got rid of a ton of stuff and simplified our lives. I guess it’s time to do the same for the business.

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Filed Under: Law office management, Personal development, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Why attorneys need to brag (and how to do it without opening your mouth)

July 25, 2012 by
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One of the primary objectives for any attorney interested in attracting clients is to show the world why they are a better choice. One way to do that is by bragging about your achievements.

Unfortunately, nobody likes a braggart.

The obvious alternative is to let others brag about you. That’s what word of mouth is all about. Happy clients telling others. Your task, then, is to make sure your clients and contacts know about your achievements and have an easy way to share them with others.

You need a “brag book”.

What is a brag book?

A brag book is a place to collect laudatory information about you. It’s a physical notebook, or the digital equivalent, with pages of clips and stories and information about you and your accomplishments.

Those clips and stories show people what you have done for others and suggest that you can do the same for them. The book is filled with third party validation, proving that you are experienced and knowledgeable and trustworthy.

What’s in a brag book?

Your brag book can have a variety of content:

  • Testimonials
  • Endorsements
  • Awards
  • Thank you letters
  • Articles about you, your cases
  • Articles by you, especially if they appear in an important publication
  • Photos of you with happy clients
  • Photos of you with important people
  • Photos of you helping a charity or important cause
  • Photos of you speaking from stage
  • A photo tour of your office
  • Success stories about your clients/cases
  • Stories about big/important verdicts
  • Press releases
  • Your CV or bio
  • Client survey results
  • FAQ’s that show how and why you are different/better

How do I use my brag book?

Use the contents of your brag book whenever you create a new marketing document. Having this information and these documents and photos in one place will make it easier for you or your copywriter to put together new brochures, seminar slides, web pages, or other documents.

You can also put together an entire book that can be shown to clients and prospects, meeting planners, publishers, and others you want to impress.

Use your brag book, or mini-versions thereof:

  • On the table in your waiting room
  • Framed on the wall in your office
  • As a page your web site; link to it from your “About” page
  • As a handout at seminars, networking events
  • As your “firm brochure”
  • In your “new client kit”
  • Send it to prospects who inquire about your services

How do I start a brag book?

Start by collecting these documents and putting them in one location. If you have paper documents, scan them. You could set up a separate notebook in Evernote for this purpose, or simply add a tag (i.e., “bragbook”) to any note that contains brag-worthy information or documents.

As your collection of items grows, you’ll be prompted to seek out additional documents to add to your book. You might ask more clients to provide a testimonial, for example, or make a point of saving copies of photos you have been tagged in on Facebook.

Once you have started your book, it will remind you to fill it, and use it.

Do you have a brag book? Are you going to start one? How will you use it?

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Filed Under: Communication, Law office management, Marketing legal services, Presentations, Productivity, Referrals Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Marketing legal services: Do one thing and do it well

July 18, 2012 by
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Unix is a forty year old computer operating system that owes its longevity, in part, to its simplicity.

Simple and powerful. Or perhaps, simple IS powerful.

Unix programmers speak of the Unix philosophy approach to writing software. They say, “Write programs that do one thing and do it well.”

I immediately saw the parallel to success in the practice of law.

If you’re trying to do too many things in your practice, you’re certainly finding it harder to do everything well. Success is more likely when you keep things simple. One practice area. One niche market.

Do one thing and do it well.

The same is true of marketing legal services. If you’re trying to do too many things at the same time, or what you are doing is anything but simple, you’re much less likely to do it well enough, or long enough, to get good results.

I’ve seen great practices built with one or two marketing techniques. The key is to have a simple strategy (program) so that you can execute it well.

Simplicity is also key to success in the area of productivity. I get more done, and more important things done, when I keep things simple. I don’t use two apps when one will do. I look for ways to eliminate options because too much of a good thing usually isn’t a good thing.

Forget complicated. Keep it simple. Do one thing and do it well.

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Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services, Personal development, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Take inventory of your marketing to save time, save money, and improve results

July 11, 2012 by
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Taking inventory of your marketing can help you gain clarity about where you are and make it easier to get to where you want to go.

Here’s how to do it:

Pick a period of time in the past. Six or 12 months will do. Write down how many new clients you took in during that period, who they are, and the amount of income those clients have or will generate for you.

So far, so good.

Next, look at the names of each of those new clients and write down where they came from. You need to know whether they were referrals (including self-referrals, aka repeat clients), or they came from some other source.

You can break this down any way that makes sense for your practice, but I suggest something like the following:

  1. Referrals from clients (including self-referrals)
  2. Referrals from professionals, others; networking
  3. Online (Blogging, SEO, social media, webinars, articles, etc.)
  4. Paid advertising (PPC, direct mail, display, radio, directory, ezine, banners, self-hosted seminars, etc.; if you do a lot of adverting, you should break this up into different categories)
  5. Other (Public speaking, publicity, writing (i.e., trade pubs), etc.)

Okay, now you know where the business is coming from. What now?

Here are my thoughts on how you can use this information:

  • Most of your clients should come from referrals. If they don’t, ask yourself why and what you can do about it
  • If you’re not getting business from some of your marketing activities, or they are too expensive relative to the business they bring you, consider eliminating those activities.  For example, if blogging and social media take up a lot of your time but you’re not getting the clients from it, why do it? Use that time for something that is producing.
  • There will be some cross-over or ambiguities. For example, blogging may not be producing a lot of traffic, inquiries, and new clients for you but it still has value as authoritative content you can show to prospects who come to you via referrals, or to add value for your clients.
  • If something is working for you, do more of it. You can find more time for networking, for example, by reducing or eliminating some or all of the time you spend on (whatever is not working). If advertising in trade publications regularly brings in new clients, increase your media buys in trade publications.
  • Before you cut anything, consider the “back end”. For example, you may be breaking even on advertising (or even losing money) but if you are able to get referrals from the new clients that are produced by that advertising, you’re still earning a profit.
  • If you aren’t in the habit of recording where your clients come from, you need to start. Instruct whoever answers the phone to ask everyone, “Where did you hear about us?” and add a line to your new client intake form.
  • Track these numbers going forward so that you can periodically take inventory and see where you are.

A friend of mine says, “You have to inspect what you expect”. He also says, “You have to slow down to speed up.” Take his advice. Once or twice a year, shut off the phones and email and take inventory. It will help you save time, save money, and improve your results.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogging, Increase your income, Law office management, Leverage, Marketing legal services, Networking, Productivity, Public Speaking, Referrals, Social media marketing, Time Management Tagged With: , , ,

How to be more productive by killing time

July 6, 2012 by
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Being more productive helps us earn more and work less (or waste less time). That’s why I use and write about the systems (e.g., GTD) and tools (e.g., Evernote) that improve productivity.

But I will be the first to admit that being productive is not the number one objective. It’s being happy.

We want to be more productive because doing so makes us feel good. Not just the results of being more productive but the feeling we get in the process of doing so. It feels good knowing that we are being effective (getting the right things done) and efficient (getting things done right).

But sometimes, “too much of a good thing is not a good thing”.

Most productivity experts advise us to make the best use of our time, all the time. If we’re at the doctor’s office and we have 15 minutes before our appointment, we should use that time to review a file or write notes for something we’re working on. On our way to and from court or an appointment we should make calls or dictate a letter or memo.

Don’t waste this time, they tell us. 15 minutes here, ten minutes there, and we could gain an additional hour or two of work time every day.

I don’t disagree with this. I do these things myself. But, as Leo Babauta’s thoughtful post, “Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin,” reminds us, “life is for living, not productivity”.

If you would enjoy reading the biking or travel magazine for 15 minutes in the doctor’s office, go ahead and do it. If doing some work would be even more enjoyable, you can do that instead.

The point is, you have a choice. You don’t have to work all the time. Do it because you want to, not because you believe you must. Do it because of the pleasure it gives you, not because it’s on your list.

Do you ever “call in sick” and spend the day at the beach or the movies? Just because you want to? You should. Yes, the work will be there when you get back and yes, you will be a day behind. But you’ll be a day ahead on life.

We aspire to be productive because it makes us feel good. Why not start with feeling good. You’ll wind up being more productive.

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Filed Under: Career satisfaction, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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