Are you looking for repeatable law firm processes? Strategies are important to keep your law firm afloat. This comes along with maintaining and ensuring there are repeat clients. However, some firms fail to retain clients as they forget to understand the demand, and/or potential clients are unaware of the services they offer.
Understanding the demands or needs of your prospective clients is important to see the opportunities available both for the firm and the client. This could also help your firm catch a glimpse of what services are unknown to possible clients.
There are easy ways to ensure that these risks and threats are avoided by a law firm. Here are some steps on how to do it:
Come up with an Effective Law Firm Strategy
Coming up with an effective strategy is essential to maintaining your business. This includes marketing and competitive research to understand what your target clients need.
Knowing your Purpose
Identifying your firm’s purpose is the key factor for a repeatable law firm process. Without knowing your purpose, it would be difficult to set goals and your firm may be unable to go forward with its day-to-day operations.
Think of the results you want to achieve. Creating SMARTER goals is an effective way to recognize if it aligns with the purpose of your firm:
Specific – setting clear objectives/purpose
Measurable – identifying how the success of your goals will be measured
Attainable – ensuring that goals are achievable
Realistic – designing goals that are relevant to your purpose
Time-bound – having a clear deadline as to when these goals must be achieved
Evaluated – taking time to evaluate the progress for each goal
Reviewed – recording of the goals achieved as reference
Benchmarking
After knowing your purpose and goals for the firm, it is also important to check the market of your competitors. Some areas that could be benchmarked are the following:
- Exploring your market
- Client communications
- Implementation of marketing strategies
- Development of legal services and products
Offering Effective and Valuable Services
Current and potential clients need to know that the products and services you offer are practical and of value to them. Your clients recognize you as an expert and rely on your services to get the right legal representation. There should be a system necessary and a reliable team to help your firm and your client meet what is expected.
Making your Law Firm Appealing
Part of your strategy is to ensure continued support from your current clients. With that being said, it is essential that they like your firm. This could also help spread the word, attracting more clients in the future.
Oftentimes, people already have a preconceived idea that lawyers are serious and always about business. This can change by showing your “human” side by remembering the little things such as their family and other personal details. Building personal rapport is essential to make your firm likable.
Improve Processes
The next step to having a repeatable law firm is documentation to improve your processes—may it be new or existing. Clear documentation of processes leads to an optimized and efficient firm. This would also guide your firm as to how your goals can be achieved.
Identifying and writing down important processes can lay out which steps are irrelevant and redundant.
Trimming Down Processes
Taking a shortcut does not mean your firm is inefficient. There are unavoidable delays which are caused by a heavy line of procedures. This can be prevented by trimming down some processes to 20%.
An example could be the use of technology to simplify your firm’s process. This may improve the following for your firm:
- Cost/cash flow
- Time management
- Communication
- Employee productivity
Manage Clients and People
After improving your firm’s processes, it is crucial for you to manage the people in and out of your firm to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
The field of legal business is a business relationship and it relies heavily on active management for the relationship to thrive. Satisfied customers are likely to refer your business to interested clients.
Understanding the Client
Understanding the needs of your clients can lead to a more proactive approach. For example, Harrell & Harrell made a commitment to prioritize their client’s needs which allowed them to grow into one of the largest personal injury firms.
Communicating with Clients
Having an honest approach and open communication lines are ways to communicate effectively with your clients. In this modern age, having an online contact form will allow open communication with clients easily. Keep in mind that these online contact forms should be promptly responded to have an effective communication tool with the clients
Discussing Issues and Opportunities for Clients
Reviewing issues and opportunities for and with your client is key to maintaining clients. This shows how much you value your client with their best interest on your mind. Identifying issues and opportunities will allow both of you to take a step forward and decide on the best course of action.
Getting your Team
Apart from managing clients, managing people within your firm plays a vital role in achieving the goals of the business. Having the right people on your team would greatly benefit the success of your firm. Ensuring that the right people would entail:
- Career planning – securing personal and professional growth within the firm
- Internal communications – having a clear understanding of the tasks that need to be completed
- Employee development programs and training – continuous learning process to further enhance your employees
Having the Right People
Efficiency and effectiveness of the right people within the firm can increase the opportunity to draw in more clients which leads to more billable hours. Managing the right people with positive reinforcement will always lead to the firm’s goals.
Business Development
Now that you have established an understanding of your clients and team members, you must keep in mind that continuous improvement is essential to any business, especially law firms. Improving the dynamics is always crucial to pursuing growth within the firm.
Having Specific Practice Areas
With the growing competition in the legal field, it is vital that Continuing Legal Education (CLE) certifications are maintained. Having specialization in different legal aspects can also help your firm stay relevant to your current and potential clients.
When clients are aware of your specialization, this can help you develop a reputation in a specific legal area which, in turn, could make your firm more profitable for that certain expertise.
Final Take
Being a repeatable law firm takes hard work. Knowing and having a great strategy with a streamlined process, and putting your clients’ best interests in mind are the main key factors to keeping the business afloat.
Getting the right people to work with, alongside continuous improvement for them will greatly increase the achievement of your firm’s goals. Having them on your team, with their specific areas of expertise could assist in having greater potential clients leading to a repeatable firm.
We hope you found these repeatable law firm processes helpful!
