Lawyers make ad hoc decisions about business management, all the time. But, those decisions are often wrong – because they’re built on false assumptions about how the business works. Attorneys often overestimate how much money they make, and underestimate how much money they pay out, in terms of case expenses and overhead. That leads to a lot of disappointment, as you might imagine.

It’s always been important for law firms to archive the entire set of communications between attorneys, staff and clients (and leads).

And, that’s become easier to do, over time, as technology has advanced.

Hiring is rough right now. And, that turned around in a heartbeat. Over the course of a single quarter, the employer’s market become an employee’s market – with no signs of slowing down. It’s got law firms everywhere rethinking how and why they hire.

In the last post of this short series, we discussed how important it is for law firms to be focused on engaging potential clients. That’s how you bait the hook, but there’s still the matter of reeling in those leads – and to accomplish that you’ll need a way for clients, following an initial engagement to take a next step in order to advance the process. That’s where many law firms fall down because they haven’t set up any kind of system and don’t know what the next step is themselves or because they don’t have a simple and convenient option for clients to move the ball forward. 

Lawyers often focus on their own expectations when it comes to client intake. They assume a lot about legal consumers preferences without actually investigating what those preferences really are. In that situation, it usually ends up that law firms construct intake programs that don’t reflect relevant trends respecting legal consumers and that are created for the ease of use of the law firm - not for the ease of use of the consumer. 

Many attorneys will try to rush through the drafting and explanation of a fee agreement. The job, as they see it, is to get the fee out there and to define the scope of legal services, as quickly as possible – so that the client will sign off and so that the lawyer can go back to what they really want to do, which is to practice substantive law. 

This is kind of a trick question. It’s one that initiates the lawyer’s go-to response: It depends. 

But, in reality, the choice of who answers your phone when clients and potential clients call has a lot of layers to it, not unlike an onion. And, this is reflective of the many choices now available to attorneys.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before; but, COVID protocols are coming down everywhere across the world, as we cross into the Spring, and hopefully move from pandemic to endemic stage. 

The notion of a ‘factory practice’ gets a bad name among lawyers who retain a burning desire to exist as white tower intellectuals. Conversations about revenue and efficiency only get in the way of a good conversation about Supreme Court cases from the late 1880s. Ah, the Gilded Age, indeed. 

But, really, it’s the law firms that can accommodate the most work, that make the most money. 

Small law firms generally have it pretty good, in that they’ve mostly had to compete only against other small law firms, that aren’t particularly innovative either and that also don’t spend money aggressively to build their businesses. However, over the course of time, cracks have been made in that armor.