The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has changed many of lawyers’ closely-held beliefs about how to run a law practice.  Not a single aspect of law firm business management is being left unexamined.  And, as law firm concerns over revenue grow, cost - cutting measure s  begin to intercede.  At this point, a number of law firms have furloughed staff; but, many have held onto the second largest office expense: the office itself.   That may change, however, as social distancing requirements linger.  If no one, or fewer people, are at the office, your law firm won’t require as much office space.  And, it’s likely that you and your employees are becoming far more proficient in working at home.   If those trends continue, it’s the smart business decision to reduce office space, and so your monthly rental nut.     Of course, that was the smart move before you ever even heard of the coronavirus; but, you were probably too afraid to pull the tri...

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the global health and economic infrastructure.  The legal field is still reeling; and, law firms are adjusting to a new world.  For modern law firms to succeed, it’s clear that providing virtual services is now a requirement; it’s no longer optional.  But, taking  the  ‘e’ out of things like  epayments  and  esignature , and normalizing those items as  ‘ just ’  payments or signatures is going to take a significant mindset change for the vast majority of lawyers.   Every law firm is going to have to adjust to virtual practice in a compressed time frame, in order to modernize for a  clientbase  that will require it.  It’s not the best-case scenario, of course, that it took a major pandemic to usher a new age of technology into the law firm environment.   But,  the change will ultimately benefit lawyers, too.  Now, it’s a question of how rapidly your law firm can a...

Remember  that scene from the ‘Wizard of Oz’, where the guard at the gates of  the  Emerald City is very reticent to let Dorothy and her friends in, until he realizes who they are, and changes his tune ?  Well, consider yourself the green- moustachioed  guard, and your law firm clients  Dorothy Gale .  The only problem is, by the time you figure out who’s at your gates, and when you’re ready to help them, they’re already long gone.   The point is that most law firms unconsciously set up barriers between themselves and their clients.  Lawyers don’t like to pick up the phone, and talk to existing clients, let alone potential clients, thereby driving a wedge between them and their business.  Clunky contact forms at law firm websites   don’t always work.  Well, that’s another barrier.  Believe it or not, voicemail is a barrier.  Anything that stands between you and engagement with a potential client is a barrier.  And, more than anything else...

Lawyers are often so head - down on substantive work that they spend very little time considering their ‘ sales cycle ’, which every business has.  Whereas software companies consider metrics like ‘ cost  of  acquisition ’, law firms merely send out cadres of attorneys to network, with the fervent hope that that activity generates business, at some  undetermined  point in the future.     I remember having a conversation with a lawyer who told me that his marketing goal was to have lunch with a nother  business professional every day.  I asked him to track how many referrals he got from that.  A month later, I asked him how things were going, and he said, ‘Well, I guess I was just having lunch .’   The point is that, while marketing seems inscrutable, the results of your efforts are predictable, to a large degree.  If you track your intake, you too can figure out your own cost of acquisition, best sources for ref...

When most lawyers think about niche practice, their notion is that of a practice limited to one, or a few, practice areas.   And, that’s one of the chief reasons that attorneys approach the notion of a niche practice with s ome combination of trepidation and dread.  Because selling out on one or a few practice areas brings with it risk.   It could work out famously -- or, not so much -- which would necessitate a shift in the entire practice to resolve.  Of course, that’s not the only way to get niched.   If you work in a community with comparatively few lawyers -- not necessarily a ‘rural’ practice. just a practice operating as the sole, or one of a few providers in, a local community -- you can effectively create a niche as ‘the local attorney’.  Now, the nature of that locality  is almost entirely dependent on whether you can generate enough clients from it to support a practice.  Even so, the options are perhaps wider than...