The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Despite changes to advertising rules, lawyers have marketed themselves in much the same way for generations.  You find an office space, you go out and network, you do good work, and more work comes in.  But, as consumers have become more discerning, and as law firm choices continue to proliferate, lawyers continue to stick with the same marketing strategy they always have.  There is, however, a cost. As more and more potential law firm clients look for lawyers online, lawyers ignoring that medium risk decreased intake, and consequently decreased revenue.  This is not to say that attorneys don’t understand that the internet is a thing.  To the contrary, lawyers want to access more leads online.  But two roadblocks stand in their way: (1) they don’t know how to do it; and, (2) they think it costs too much.  Fortunately, content marketing solves for both problems. As a lawyer, you’re an expert in what you do.  You talk about it all th...

Modern law firm consumers are an entirely new breed.  They have more law firm options than ever before, and aren’t afraid to use them.  They are committed to mobile search.  They are more cost-sensitive than any consumer base in modern history.  Absent a near-instantaneous response from a potential lawyer hire, they will immediately move on to the next attorney on their list. This can be frustrating for law firms, whose billing practices tend to be antiquated.  Hourly billing, without a cap, is perhaps the scariest consumer pricing arrangement there is.  Put yourself in the shoes of your potential client, and ask how appealing it would be to sign an agreement undefined in length, and with a high hourly rate attached.  Furthermore, if you’re asking for retainers, consider whether you’d be able to draw that cashier’s check on your own bank account, on short notice. The good news is that these two obvious roadblocks to client engagement fo...

Do you reuse the same passwords over and over again?  Or, do you find yourself creating  ever  simpler passwords, so they’re easier to remember?   Do you instead use really complicated passwords that you keep on sticky notes around the office?   In the short run, th ese are  easy solution s  to password management; but, in the long term, it’s  a security loophole that’s bound to come back to bite you.   The intersection between personal convenience and data security is a password manager.  With a password management tool ,  you select a master password for your account, then choose passwords for each of your othe r  accounts -- and the password manager will prefill all of those other passwords for  you ,  which will  allow you to create passwords that are hypercomplex, without the necessity for memorizing them.  For example, if you’ve logged into your password manager, when you navigate...

Law firms depend on their websites to generate clients.  For most law firms, if the website is not the primary driver of referrals, it’s confirmation to your potential clients that you’re an invested business owner, and is perhaps the first avenue through which you begin to build trust with consumers.   But, if you didn’t update your website this Summer, there’s something you should know.   Since July, Google has been penalizing websites that do  not  feature SSL (secure socket layer) certificates .  This is  a  change in Google’s approach to this point, which had been to provide a slight rankings bump to websites that were secure.   You’re probably asking yourself three questions:   What is an SSL certificate?   Basically, it’s encryption for data transfers made via your website.  You can read more detail  here .  This issue is actually probably more important for attorneys than i...

Law practice management consulting is, essentially, business management consulting for law firms.   That may sound basic, but law practice management consulting is a highly specific genre, that contemplates the special components related to law firm management that do not attach to running other small business, including the ethics rules that lawyers must adhere to. Why Does Your Law Firm Need Business Management Consulting? There are at least a couple of major reasons that it’s helpful for lawyers to access business management consulting.   The first relates to their educational background.   Only recently have law schools begun to focus on teaching law students about business management -- and, even now that practice is only just beginning to gain acceptance.   That means that the vast majority of lawyers who have started law firms did so with no formal business training whatsoever.   The second reason why business management consulting is help...