Three Law Office Management Takeaways From This Year’s Summer Reboot Camp

This summer, we held our third annual Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp! We gathered experts from around the legal world and brought them together in panels to dispense their expertise. It was a huge success, and our attendees came away from it with a ton of great advice to boost their law firms in the latter half of 2024 and beyond.

We usually like to keep this advice to the camp, and its recasts. This year, however, as the leaves turn and the weather gets cooler in October, we’re going to step back to the sweltering summer. This month, our blog will go in-depth on some important takeaways from this year’s camp.

Below, as the first installment in our October theme for the Answering Legal blog, we’ll tackle three law office management takeaways and look at them from the perspectives of developing leadership, creating better hiring practices, and developing a better work/life balance.

Adapting Your Mindset For Success And Failure

Throughout the camp, something that was stressed across panels was that it’s impossible for anyone to get everything right. While yes, that’s true of your staff, it’s also true of you, the law firm owner. And accepting that is an important step to unlocking a better, more efficient law firm.

After all, you’re the firm’s leader, and how you deal with both success and failure is going to dictate how the firm will handle them. Your mindset when it comes to setbacks will have a big impact on your firm’s effectiveness and culture. Let’s look at how it affects different parts of your firm.

Building A Better Leadership Mindset

The key to good leadership is confidence, but it’s easy to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing or making things up as you go along. The solution to that, obviously, is to plan, but also to let yourself know that you’re not alone. You can rely on your staff, and building confidence in your staff will help you build confidence in yourself.

The other secret to confidence is to remember that you probably aren’t the first attorney to struggle with whatever issue you’re dealing with. People just as qualified as you have solved this same problem, and you can turn to them for advice if you need to!

How A Strong Mindset Can Change Your Hiring Practices

As far as hiring goes, the biggest advice given throughout the camp was about making sure you understand your core values. Whatever it is that guides your firm, having a clear understanding of them will make it easier to hire the right people. In order to find those, you need to be looking at your firm clearly.

With that comes understanding your firm’s strengths and weaknesses. After all, to know the best people to hire, you need to know what you need and what you’re good at! You want to find staff who compliment what you’re good at while also filling a hole in your firm, and a good mindset will help you honestly analyze your firm to find those things.

Mindset And Work/Life Balance

It feels like almost all of our experts would agree that “work/life balance” is a myth. There is no ideal balance, there’s just what works best for you! But barring a better term, we’ll say that improving your mindset can benefit your work/life balance immensely.

Acknowledging that you’re not perfect, that failure is both possible and not always catastrophic, for example, frees you to take some time off. Everything isn’t going to fall apart if you leave, and if things do fall apart, it will be because setbacks are inevitable, not because you didn’t give 80 hours a week to your firm. Thinking this way will help to reduce the stigma against addressing mental health issues throughout the legal world, one step at a time.

Actively Listening For Law Firm Development

Stressed throughout the camp, in all of our panels, was the value of active listening for law firm leaders. When you’re speaking with someone, no matter who it is, you should be listening to respond to what they’re saying.

It sounds simple, right? Well, think about it this way: when you talk to someone, do you spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to say next? If you do, you may not be listening actively. By listening and then responding, rather than queuing up your response, you will be setting yourself up for success in multiple arenas.

Developing Leadership Skills

Active listening is a key skill for a leader. Making sure your staff gives it their all necessitates encouraging ownership and investment in their jobs. If they feel like they’re not contributing, or that their contributions are rote or busy-work, they won’t be invested. A sure-fire way to make them feel that way is to not actively listen to their concerns.

As a leader, you need to lead by example. If you’re training team leads, for example, they need to be able to look to you when they’re unsure of where they’re going, and maybe even ask for help. By making sure you represent the culture you’re looking to develop for your law firm, you’ll be able to create it for yourself and for those who look to you for leadership.

Developing Better Hiring Practices

The leader of a law firm guides the ship. Even if you aren’t involved in hiring directly, ultimately your staff is a reflection of you as a law firm leader, and investing some time and energy into improving your hiring practices will go a long way.

You should always make sure that you’re actively listening when conducting staffing interviews. Be able to put a little pressure on a prospective employee’s answers; don’t just listen for what you want to hear. That way, when someone says something that might be a red flag, you’re able to push back on it and either disqualify the candidate or relieve that worry.

Developing A Better Relationship To Work

As for wellbeing, this is another place where you as a law firm owner can lead by example. If you’re unconcerned with your own wellbeing, your staff is going to be just as dedicated to taking care of themselves as you are!

This might sound like a good thing; after all, if you’re putting in 60+ hour weeks and inspiring your staff to do the same, you’re going to get a lot done! But burning the candle at both ends means that you’ll have less “candle” to go around when you need it.

Leading by example in wellbeing means making sure you’re taking care of yourself and taking time off. Your staff will do the same, and you’ll actually end up being more productive over time, as you’ll have far less turnover. Make sure you’re listening to your staff, and encouraging them to follow your example if you think they’re overworked.

Setting Expectations For You And Your Firm

Our final law office management takeaway from this year’s Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp is the value of setting expectations. You’re the leader of your firm, after all; the expectations you set will be universal throughout your firm. Holding everyone accountable to those expectations after communicating them clearly is key to running a successful law firm.

We don’t just mean setting expectations for your staff, either. You should be establishing boundaries with your clients and yourself, and making sure you’re holding them and yourself accountable. Bending the rules for yourself sets a bad precedent for your staff, and letting your clients break those boundaries negates the value of having them at all.

Establishing Leadership Expectations

As a law firm leader, you’re not just leading the firm. You’re often training other leaders. As your firm grows, you’ll need to delegate even some management responsibilities to qualified people, and often they’ll have learned to lead from you.

Therefore, setting good expectations for yourself is incredibly valuable. Be accountable to yourself; if you need to get a task done, put it on your calendar. Make sure you respect the expectations you set for others, and hold them accountable to those as well. But, as Paul Llewelyn said, your job and the jobs of those who work for you are hard. Remember not to make it harder by being unkind.

Using The Hiring Process To Set Expectations

Often, the hiring process establishes in a prospective employee’s mind expectations of what the job will be like. You can use that to your advantage to communicate your values to prospective employees and find the ones that resonate the most with them. For example, if you want to make sure your prospective employees know that their time will be valued at your firm, you could pay them for their time during the interview process.

As Allison Harrison noted, late in the hiring process, if you use an assessment to evaluate someone’s legal skills, you could pay them for the half-hour they spend on it. This will send the message that your firm is a great place to work, and that they’ll be team members first and employees second. Any candidate you choose who has that impression of your firm is going to be more motivated as they go into work.

Creating And Respecting Boundaries

Finally, if you’re going to both run a successful law firm and have a life outside it, you need to set boundaries with yourself and with your clients. You can’t always be available, or you’ll never have the time you need to mentally reset and give your best every day. Think about why you’re working as hard as you are. For many attorneys, it’s to provide a good life for their families. If you’re doing this for your family, but not spending much time with them, is what you’re doing worth it?

Also, make sure that you are delegating and hiring when you could use the help, not when you can’t survive without it. The realization that you would benefit from and can afford to hire help can come months before you are forced to by circumstance or workload. Follow that first instinct and start hiring early, and you’ll free yourself to bring in more work for your firm and live your life to the fullest.

Answering Legal Will Take Your Firm To The Next Level

Here’s our law office management tip: you’re spending too much time on the phone!

Studies have shown that the average attorney spends 1.1 hours a day talking to clients on the phone.

Now, some of that time is billable, but much of it isn’t! And this statistic is just counting time spent talking to clients; time spent fielding calls is going to be far above that for most attorneys.

Our expert guests suggest that you should not be available 24/7. Dena Lefkowitz pointed out that if your family is expecting a child and your OB/GYN is on vacation, they aren’t going to fly back from the ski slopes to deliver the baby; the hospital will find another doctor to do it. Ask yourself: is your work as urgent as delivering a baby?

If the answer is no, you need to set boundaries with your clients, and the best way to do that is to stop handling calls yourself when possible. A receptionist, or team of receptionists, handling calls 24/7 will get you what you need. Hiring, however, is an expensive and complex process, as we’ve discussed in this blog and in many before it.

Answering Legal can act as your front office for a fraction of the cost of hiring staff while delivering in-house level quality legal intake and phone handling. Our virtual receptionists answer exclusively for lawyers, and train for months to do just that. In addition, we integrate with top legal software and have a mobile app that lets you run your firm from your phone.

Next week, we’ll be tackling legal tech advice our guest experts provided during this year’s Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp. Stay tuned to hear all about tech implementation, tips, and, of course, generative AI!

Set your firm up with the best phone handling and legal intake in the business. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.