The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Efficient law firms return the most revenue, by a wide margin.  Yet, much of what law firms do cuts against efficiency: Attorneys tend to avoid modern technology.  Attorney like to do things themselves, and so they avoid effective delegation.  Attorneys want manual processes, which they feel they have more control over.   Of course, this is not the way to practice at the top of your law license: billing at your highest rates, or acquiring more work that you can  bill  at your highest rates.   Too often, lawyers are trying to pilot the plane, and hand out the pretzels.   While it’s true that delegation is a proven method for driving efficiency, law firms need not always delegate from managing attorneys to associate attorneys or staff.  Automation of rote tasks and processes is often more effective.  Consider the chain of events reflecting on law firm lead intake: scheduling, emails, contact forms, chat or text com...

The 2019 Clio Legal Trends Report (download link  here ) , which is a longitudinal study of law firm data across a variety of categories, including internal efficiencies and external relationships with clients.  It’s a fascinating read every year; and, that includes 2019.   The 2019 study focused on  what the functional difference between growing firms (law firms that grew revenue by over 100% across a 5-year period) and shrinking firms (law firms that lost over 50% of their revenue over a 5-year period)  was.  Perhaps surprisingly, the driver for revenue growth was not what you might expect.  It wasn’t pricing.  And, it wasn’t marketing spend.  It wasn’t attorney experience.  And, it wasn’t total case intake.  It was utilization rate.   If you’re not familiar with utilization rate, it  represents  amount of total hours you could bill in a day  versus what you actually bill .  For example...

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...

You’ve heard the phrase often from busy lawyers, law firm owners particularly: ‘If only I could clone myself’.  It’s wishful thinking; but, it gets to the heart of the one barrier to law firm expansion that you can’t fake: In order to grow your business, to scale it . . . you  have to  hire.   Of course, that’s a hard thing to do, especially for solos, who’ve never had an employee before, or who have only used contractors previously.   Lawyers, even lawyers who have started their own businesses, tend to be highly risk-averse.  They crave safety, surety, over all else.  But, there’s not a whole lot of surety in expanding a business.  And, that’s mainly why it’s so difficult for attorneys to move forward on this score.   Since most law firms bill on an hourly basis, the only way to increase your revenue beyond a certain point is to increase the numbers of hours you can bill, and there are only two ways to do that: become more effi...

For my money, unless you have actually been a real-life, honest-to-goodness website designer at some point in your career,  and  if you're a lawyer, it's never a good idea to design and maintain your own website.  It's kind of like performing open heart surgery on yourself, and it can have the same negative effects on your business that it would on your body -- including the potential for flat-lining.  Even otherwise traditional law firms are drawing more and more business from the web; and so, the law firm website, as the online hub for your business, continues to be vital to generating law firm revenue.   So, let's start at the beginning, and I'll tell you three things to watch out for when you're choosing a website design firm:   (1)  Own your Own Domain.   The cheesiest website design scam is when the vendor buys your domain name  for you  and sells it back to you for an exorbitant rate before the vendor will release you from ...