Category Archives: Law Practice Management

Tiger Tactics is a modern take on how to have a successful law practice: extreme candor from five lawyers sharing their successes and failures in detail. They share nuggets from their journeys of what they did to successfully tackle things like intake and marketing, but they also share what they did wrong, as a cautionary tale.

What keeps law firms from having a great sales and intake process, and how do we fix it? This article, taken from a conference talk, breaks down sales for lawyers.

How effective are lawyers at practicing law? And what do consumers of legal services value? This report - providing comprehensive data on the legal industry - breaks down these questions and more. It covers everything from efficiency ("How much of the day do lawyers spend on billable work that gets collected?") to client expectations ("What do clients value most in their prospective lawyers?") to practice areas and rates ("What cities and practice areas generate the highest value cases?"). Here, we share some of the interesting takeaways.

What advice do I have this Friday to help you better run a law firm? None. Today, the advice isn’t from me. It’s from 20 of the leading voices in the legal industry today, with proven tips to help you run a better, more effective and profitable law firm.

The Q&A platform Quora, is a popular place to go online when you have a question. And if you have a legal or legal industry-related question, chances are your question was answered by Jennifer Ellis. With several thousand questions answered, she is probably the most prolific lawyer on the platform. And we just had to speak with her to learn more about what drew her to Quora and why she does it. We were surprised to hear about her experience.

If your law firm is calling its partners "shareholders" or "members", clients don't know what it is that you do. Clients, and potential clients, only understand lawyers in the context of being a "partner" or an "associate". You do not and should not complicate things.

Of all the cyber threats facing businesses this year, ransomware has become the most prevalent. The FBI estimates that the spread of ransomware has reached an all-time high in 2016, costing businesses over $209 million in the first three months alone. No industry is immune to the threat of ransomware, including the legal industry. A […]

The biggest challenges for today’s law firms are adding more billable work and offloading the tasks of management and operations that have nothing to do with practicing law. The goal is not to get those done. The goal is to have a healthy, steadily growing practice that has systems in place so you can choose for yourself what you want your firm and your work to be. As long as you are in reaction-mode, that type of systematic growth will never take place. So what does this have to do with bookkeeping? With sights set on systematic growth, we can take a look at how modern bookkeeping helps take a huge jump forward toward a healthy business.

Many of the decisions I have made relating to technology have been sound, but many others haven’t been. I have often chosen technology platforms that are more robust (and more expensive), than needed because I didn’t first take the time to test and analyze, using real data, what I actually needed. I’m advocating the use of restraint when implementing technology, not because we face ethical boundaries to adopting technology, but because we don’t understand, or haven’t found, an actual business model of lawyering that works today.

Last month, I looked closely at the new clients my firm had generated in 2014 and 2015. The question on my mind was: how did we get these clients, and what does that say about where our attorneys should focus their business development efforts in 2016? Like most firms of our size, virtually all of our business comes by referral. But from where? This analysis yielded some interesting and useful data.