The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

I feel like I can safely say that – even though I have no idea what your rates are .  In my experience, most law firm rates are far too low .  That’s especially true if you bill hourly .  Hourly rates for attorneys don’t even keep up with inflation.   But, maybe you already knew that .  And, perhaps you may even really want to raise your hourly rates .   Though, you may also be thinking: I haven’t done that in quite some time , so I have to make a huge change , in order to make up for that .  And, that is where you would be wrong.     Smaller, incremental increases to hourly rates, can be massively impactful – plus, they won’t send up alarm bells for legal consumers (including your existing clients, if you don’t want to grandfather them in) .     So, let’s say you raise your rates by just $25/hour .  If you ca n bill & collect 1500 hours each year, you just created $37,500 in new revenue, literally out o...

Artificial intelligence has fast become a fact of modern life – as it has perhaps been adopted more widely, more quickly, than any previous technology .  Yet, lots of attorneys still haven’t had any substantive experiences with AI, to date .  But, the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of use cases for AI, in law practice; so, it may be easier to get started, than you think.   One such use case, that artificial intelligence tools excel at, is project management .  Lots of business owners, including law firm owner s, tend to struggle with managing large projects – whether that’s building an administrative process, or optimizing a case workflow .  Now, if that is an issue for you, in your law practice: AI may offer a solution point.     If you want to build out step-by -step work flows , simply ask a generative AI tool (like ChatGPT, or Google Gemini, or Claude), to do it for you .  Make your request in natural language .  The...

According to a new report from Legal.io, law firm mergers are on the upswing, in 2024 .   The interesting part of that report, is just how many small firms are involved in the merger conversation.  All me rgers were up 24% for Q1 of 2024; but, fully 65% of those mergers involved law firms with between 5-20 attorneys.  Anecdotally, of late, I have myself been involved in helping to move forward mergers between small firms, including those where 2 solo lawyers have joined forces to form a small law firm.  This indicates both that, maybe those solo and small firms have more value, than is generally thought ; but also, there is more action happening downstream, in terms of law firm movement, than anyone suspected.     Now, if you currently are a solo attorney, or own a small law firm – you may have more options for that asset than you thought; you just have to start view ing your law firm as an asset, to make better decisions about the future of your wor...

All new leads in a law firm should ultimately filter through a single, universal intake form .  This form will gather contact information, identify a case type and allow the lead to provide some basic information about her case .  That’s whether the lead is completing a form on your website, or providing this information to a staffperson of yours over the phone (who is filling out a form on her behalf) , or whether a staffperson in your office is adding the information to the form from a direct email query.   There are a whole host of reasons why this strategy works well .  First, it is a form that gathers all the necessary initial information, without pestering the client for m or e extraneous detail .  Second, it gathers all the primary information, which can then be directly added to a customer relationship management software, and tagged appropriately .  Third, because you’re asking for a case type, you can automatically start the intake p...