Recent topics about how to leverage your business, increase sales, and make your first million are attracting a lot of attention online. However, many lawyers don’t pursue these strategies, believing they’re too far removed from their field. What these professionals don’t realize is that there’s a way to adapt them, allowing them to create growth strategies for law firms that ensure business success. In this article, virtual assistant for attorneys will share some strategies for how to grow a law firm. Let’s dive in!
What are the biggest challenges in growing law firm
Because they don’t fit into the traditional corporate mold, many lawyers have limited hours and billing, as they don’t fully understand how to scale their services.
With the instability of future fees, it’s nearly impossible for a firm to maintain a cash flow that’s constantly growing. Therefore, to mitigate these effects, many firms turn to full-service and consulting services, which, while generating more predictable revenue, increase personnel costs from a different perspective.
Furthermore, most lawyers face a huge barrier to promoting their services, making it more difficult to increase revenue.
Other issues that end up harming growth strategies for law firms are the lack of prioritization of internal management , the constant resizing of costs, wasting specialized staff on administrative demands, and missed opportunities.
Growth Strategies for Law Firms in 5 Steps
In this article, we explore different growth strategies for law firms, highlighting how internal demands can be adjusted to help increase profitability in the legal profession.
We also discuss how technology can be an ally in this growth. We also analyze how to manage assets and liabilities by reallocating internal demands, and much more! Continue reading the topics below to learn more.
1. Redistribution of activities within the team
One of the growing pains of many law firms is staff overload. Activities are often poorly organized and performed entirely manually. Thus, not only is the demand already high, but these organizational and facilitation issues make everything even more costly and complex.
For this reason, we recommend redistributing team activities and using productivity tools for lawyers.
Not to mention the various methods currently available on the market, such as 5W2H, Kanban, SCRUM, and others.
After choosing a methodology, you should map out all the tasks to be completed and who is responsible for them. This makes it easier to identify whether someone is over- or under-performing, and you can redistribute tasks accordingly.
Additionally, you should create a map of each activity, including the tasks it requires. This way, they can be broken down into smaller parts, allowing for a more detailed and timely assessment of delivery.
As for using organizational systems, Trello is an excellent Kanban tool, as are Asana, Notion, and others.
As for specific technologies for lawyers, we’ll discuss them in more detail later. The same applies to other types of task distribution.
The second step to boosting your law firm’s growth is legal marketing. Marketing is a growth strategy for law firms that’s still largely unexplored in the legal world.
Firstly, until very recently, the code of ethics defined very strict rules regarding this practice.
However, with Provision 205/2021 , the rules were relaxed and, every day, especially in the digital environment, we can see legal professionals who have dedicated themselves to this activity, aiming to increase their profitability in the legal profession.
3. Customer experience
It’s been said for a long time that word of mouth is the best advertising. Even in the digital world, consumers tend to behave in a similar way: when searching for a product or service, they seek opinions from others who have already purchased that service. Thus, word of mouth remains the same today, only in the digital world.
For this reason, one of the most widely used and talked about growth strategies for law firms today is focusing on the client experience.
Good service is no longer enough. Therefore, ways to speed up their requests, inform them about their case, and seek maximum resolution are essential in the legal profession.
Therefore, it is important to outline the process step by step, provide a good explanation of each step, and allow the client to make inquiries on their own and explain what may happen in their case. This is already a very effective strategy.
Also try to calm him down as much as possible, after all, those who seek a lawyer are generally feeling raw.
As for speed and communication, there are some ways that can help in this regard, but we’ll talk about them in the next topics!
4. Assignment of credits from legal proceedings
We’re now accustomed to treating equity capital—a company’s capital and potential to generate profit—as something unusual or limited to companies. However, when we look at it from the perspective of a law firm, we understand that lawyers work with a very valuable asset that generates significant value in the US: lawsuits.
Working on the portfolio of legal cases is essential for lawyers, after all, it is this portfolio that has the potential for future assets and receivables, in addition to their consulting and advisory contracts that bring more immediate and predictable gains.
Therefore, to generate profit for your offices and operations, we will consider the main lawsuit profiles that we can classify in our portfolio using the BCG reference matrix.
This is a strategic decision-making methodology that compares products and business units, with market share and growth. It is worth noting that the application of this matrix, in general, is different from what we will propose here, but it will be useful for an important graphical visualization at this stage of the analysis.
Classifying legal proceedings from the perspective of their potential profit-generating potential:
- These processes that are already recognized as specialties of your office.
- Processes that contain new theses, with the potential to add value to your personal/professional brand.
- Cases from old clients, but isolated outside the firm’s specialty and with no profit potential.
- These are cases involving well-known market arguments, but they take a long time to reach single clients. This is particularly the case with arguments against states and social security agencies.
Clearly, those cases in which the lawyer has expertise require less time to complete and are typically something that yields immediate and attractive returns, as they are already recognized in the market. Therefore, we won’t elaborate here.
While potential processes and theses are excellent for opening your participation in new markets, they require internal investment from the lawyer and their team, which leads to the topic of this thread:
Opening new markets, products or areas of activity requires investment and availability of human capital, therefore, the lawyer must now make this financial contribution through new hires or by freeing up time for the internal team, in another way.
To achieve this, the firm can utilize one of the most effective growth strategies for law firms when it comes to increasing productivity and profitability: the assignment of legal debts.
This means that the lawyer can sell lawsuits that have low liquidity but are subject to transfer, especially those that are not his specialty, or that have become final and binding, with settled amounts, but that are awaiting long payment periods.
Especially in the latter case, the lawyer has often already received recognition from his client and possibly recommended him to friends and acquaintances, therefore, the delay in payment by a state body ends up leaving the client dissatisfied.
A lawyer doesn’t need more people on the team to grow; he needs to optimize the professionals he already has, keeping them only in profitable activities.
5. Legal technologies
We understand your portfolio above, and now, as a way to make it even more efficient in generating income, it’s important to work on the concept of technology and learn how to use it as one of your growth strategies for law firms.
The technology analyzed here plays a crucial role in assisting legal activities, especially as a data facilitator and basic service indicators.
This technology, taught and used by lawyers, serves the lawyer, including basic data capture activities, automatic data entry within the management system, the management system itself, the preparation of petitions containing their arguments and requests, the indication of arguments based on jurimetric analysis, the use of a system for filing petitions in various courts, among others.
We understand that technology has an allied and administrative function, but without the conditions to fulfill the cognitive/critical role of the lawyer, hence the increasingly latent need for this understanding of business and management, regardless of the area of ​​specialization, as it is he who will create the connections, solutions, identify problems that until then were considered usual and practiced administratively.
When we work on the concept of technology and reinventing the legal profession, it’s not necessary for lawyers to become programmers—far from it. There are qualified professionals in the market for this. But it’s important for lawyers to understand how to use technology in their legal practice.
This means understanding the basics of management software and ensuring it’s fully populated with all required fields. The data in the software will provide you with a holistic view of the office, which can help with office management and decision-making.
Frequently asked questions
How to grow a law firm?
To grow a law firm, it’s important to create growth strategies using techniques and planning that help with activity organization, financial organization, client acquisition, client satisfaction, and alternative revenue streams, such as the assignment of legal debts, full-service consulting, and consulting.
How to attract clients to the law firm?
The most effective ways to attract clients in the legal profession are through marketing strategies and the implementation of a client success culture and areas.
Effective marketing can attract new clients and potential clients interested in your law firm’s services. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, ensures word-of-mouth marketing.
What is a judicial credit assignment?
Assignment of judicial credits refers to the sale of legal proceedings. It is a way for lawyers to ensure payment for their cases by transferring their rights to third parties (assignees).
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