How To Manage A Small Law Firm: 5 Tips For Growing Your Practice Without Spending A Ton

The internet can be a great resource for lawyers, as there is plenty of content available for viewing, offering great ideas and promising easy solutions for growing your firm. However, the problem with a large number of these blog posts and videos that have been shared online, is that they fail to account for the limited budget of a growing firm. Sure if money was no issue, running a successful law business would be easy. But, for most of you reading this, money is unfortunately always a concern.

If you’re looking to keep overhead low, but still have aspirations of growing your firm this year, you’ll need to start working smarter. In this blog post we’ll offer five actionable tips for better managing your law office, that should ultimately lead to your practice getting more accomplished, while keeping expenses low.

1. Hire Great People And Delegate

No one can run a growing practice completely on their own. Attempt to do so, and you’re likely drive it and yourself directly into the ground. In order to have a successful firm, you’ll need at least a few trusted employees to lean on. So when it comes to hiring new staff, don’t rush the process. Make sure you’re bringing on intelligent, capable and reliable individuals, that can help take a good portion of the administrative workload off your shoulders, and just as importantly, help keep you sane.

To be clear, we’re not recommending you add to the number of people in your staff and drastically increase your payroll. We’re telling you to focus on surrounding yourself with the right people. Hard working, hungry and fast-learning individuals, who will be ready to grow with you and your firm.

The ability to hand off administrative tasks and other in-office duties to staff members is crucially important, as it allows you to focus on what you do best. That is of course practicing law and getting billable case work done that will actually make you money. The ability to delegate tasks will save you a tremendous amount of stress and aggravation.

Related: Don’t believe us? Hear about the power of delegation from award-winning entrepreneur Dina Eisenberg!

2. Automate Your Firm

In order to keep up with consumer expectations in the digital age, solo and small law practices must maintain a high level of efficiency. One of the best ways to improve your firm’s efficiency is to invest in great automation tools, such as a legal software.

Using a legal software to automate your firm has three primary benefits:

1. It will help your firm stay more organized, and make it easier to get your entire staff on the same page in accomplishing goals.
2. Working through digital software programs will allow administrative tasks to get done faster and more accurately.
3. You’ll be able to provide a better customer service experience for your clients, as you engage with them in a more efficient fashion.

Now as we stated at the beginning of this piece, money is always an issue for growing firms, and there will of course be some legal softwares that will be too pricey for smaller law practices. But, the good news is that there are many affordable legal software options for attorneys to explore.

Which Softwares Do I Choose?

For handling client payments, you’ll want to turn to LawPay, an easy-to-use online payment technology, developed specifically to help lawyers get paid. Another top example of a quality software that will be affordable for most firms, is Lexicata. The program helps lawyers organize their contacts, track potential clients, and make the process of signing up with their firm online significantly easier.

You’ll have to invest a small amount of time into learn how to properly use a legal software, but in the long run you’ll be happy you did.

Related: View more affordable legal softwares here!

3. Be Smarter With Your Marketing

Legal marketing has changed a lot as we’ve progressed deeper into the digital age. In the past, marketing was largely done in-person, over the phone and through print advertising. Today, much of your marketing success is dependent on the size and quality of the online presence you develop for your firm. Data shows that 76 percent of consumers now turn to the internet when looking for a lawyer to hire, so rising to the top of online search results should be a top goal for your practice.

While many attorneys will look for paid shortcuts to rank higher in search results for relevant keyword phrases, spending money isn’t always the best way to get seen in search results. Google takes into account the quality of the content you provide when placing ads, so a high advertising budget alone won’t guarantee results. By engaging in search engine optimization, lawyers can bring more traffic to their website, improve their firm’s online credibility, and gain sustainable high rankings in more relevant search results.

Related: Learn how to get started with SEO here!

Don’t Forget About Social!

Social media is another marketing avenue lawyers must be not afraid to walk down. Getting consistent engagement on social networks will usually require at least a small investment of money towards promoting your posts, but with so much of the audience you’re trying to reach already on platforms like Facebook and Twitter every single day, it’s just too good to pass up on.

Finding social media success typically involves posting on an almost daily basis, something most busy attorneys won’t have time for. One practice every small firm lawyer should know about is batching. Batching is a time management process, which involves the grouping of similar tasks that require similar resources in order to streamline their completion.

By engaging in batching, your firm can be active on social media five days a week, with you only having to set up posts for your social platforms once a month. Attorneys would be wise to pay the small monthly cost of a Hootsuite account. Hootsuite is an online platform that will allow lawyers to schedule out posts to their social media channels at any future date and time they desire. This allows attorneys to maintain an active social presence that will help gain them new clients, while only actually putting aside a few hours each month on social posting.

Related: For more best practices on creating social content, click here!

4. Create High Quality Content

It may sound overly simple, but creating things like blog posts, videos and infographics remain some of the best low-cost ways to bring eyeballs to your web pages. The key is of course not creating content for the sake of just creating content. Your focus should be developing high quality content, that will bring value to the online users you’re looking to connect with.

What do we mean by value exactly? Well ideally you’ll want your content to either inform, teach, or entertain online viewers. Examples may include writing a blog post that covers a recent news development in your field of law, or sharing a video in which you tell potential clients what they should do when faced with a particular legal situation. By consistently providing value to your online audience, you’ll have an easier time gaining their trust, and make it more likely that they’ll want to actually hire you.

Having high quality content on your website, will also get it ranked higher by Google search engines. And having great content to share is of course one of the best ways to get your social pages booming.

Related: Check out three types of content anyone can create!

5. Convert More Leads With An Answering Service

A lot goes into building a law practice. You need to hire the right people, learn how to work at an efficient pace, generate online interest and build the trust of an online audience. Of course there’s one last step, that is all too often executed poorly by small firms, and that’s capturing leads.

While many of your leads may be developed online, most of them will still end up calling your office by phone. In fact, statistics say 74% of online prospects will end up trying to contact you by phone call. This tells us that the biggest key to capturing leads is proper call handling.

Why Does Call Handling Matter So Much?

If you’re thinking right now, “How hard is it really to answer a phone call?”, you’re likely not paying close enough attention to how your client calls are being handled. Legal conversations from first-time callers, are much different than the average business call with a new client. They often cover delicate matters, and involve highly important personal and case details being extracted from clients through a process known as legal intake. Needless to say, you need a trained professional handling that call.

If your current phone answering staff is not trained in performing legal intakes, or your office could just use some affordable call handling help, we recommend trying out Answering Legal. Our receptionist team works 24/7/365, meaning we’ll be able to answer and perform proper intake on every single one of your callers, should you need it. Not only will our receptionist staff give you phone answering coverage during normal office hours, but we can help you capture after hours callers as well.

Related: Hear about how Answering Legal has helped other small firm attorneys grow their firm here!