The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Running a business, really, is conducting one big experiment .  You’re continually testing hypotheses, and seeing whether they work .  You need to make frequent adjustments, to tweak things , for the better .  You could say that a business owner is like a scientist – perhaps a less glamorous analogy would be that it’s like owning an old car, that you constantly have to fix.     In any event, no successful business owner has a perfect record .  Though, that’s not a bad thing , necessarily .  Making mistakes, iterating on them, and improving – is basically what business owners do.   Of course, that can be a difficult thing for law firm business owners to get their heads around .  That’s because most of them are lawyers – and lawyers are trained to be perfect, to never make mistakes, with the ever-present threat of an ethics claim hanging over their heads .  But, running a business is not practicing law .  It’s okay to make...

Law firms continue to experiment with different payment models, in a post-COVID environment; and, that includes subscriptions .  Subscriptions are popular, because it’s consistent recurring revenue – which everyone is looking for .  That’s one of the reasons why technology companies are so valuable .  And, if’s the same reason why lots of professional service providers (like law firms, but also like IT providers) are moving to subscription pricing .  One of the biggest challenges to implementing a subscription system is building out the inclusions .  That’s harder than setting the price point, frankly .  But , the best part about subscriptions and flat fees is that , generally speaking, law firms make more money doing work in that way, than they do on traditional billing – as much as 20-30% more , in fact .   But, back to the main question: How do you set up a subscription option ?  Think of it as stacking services, and constructing an...

I was talking to a friend of mine, who runs a highly successful law firm, the other day .  And, he told me ‘clients aren’t the problem, I need to hire good lawyers’ .  And, I thought to myself: ‘You know what – I have been hearing that a lot lately ’.   Now, that makes for an interesting inflection point in the marketplace – because, I think that, if you asked lawyers what they need more, the answer would be ‘client s , I can never have enough clients’ .  But, in the current job market, it’s actually harder to get good attorneys, than it is to get good clients.  Believe it or not , good clients are far more plentiful right now .  Now, this may turn around, at some point; but, there are no signs (at least currently ) , that this will again become an employer’s market, as it did during the start of the pandemic.     So, if you’ve got a growing firm, and you’re putting significant effort in, and stretching yourself in any direction – it’s ...