Law firm management is the part of a firm’s operations that encompasses essential activities for carrying out the work, such as strategic planning, delegation and monitoring of tasks, financial control, and client relations. Its focus is on optimizing resources and growing the business.
Being responsible for managing your business shouldn’t be the easiest part of your routine, right? It demands time and organization, and as your firm grows, it becomes more complicated to fulfill this role. Mainly because most lawyers don’t enter the market prepared to deal with this type of activity.
In this process of much learning and practice, it is natural to make mistakes – often they can be the first and most important step towards development. In some cases, law firms hire virtual assistant for lawyers that provide legal assistant services.
However, to help you prevent errors in the management of your law firm, we have highlighted in this content common situations of errors committed by managers. For each of them, we also provide practical tips and possible solutions. Check out what we have prepared.
How to manage a law firm well
The constant concern about meeting deadlines, the difficulty in maintaining efficient communication with clients and employees, and the lack of financial organization are some common symptoms that arise from failures in strategic legal management.
To help you visualize possible gaps and avoid potential failures in the organization of your business, we have prepared these solutions for law firm management:
5 Solutions for Law Firm Management
1. How not to waste time on repetitive activities
Repetitive tasks are part of any lawyer’s routine. Searching for updates on court websites, copying and pasting case progress, drafting documents based on legal document templates, creating reports, and filling spreadsheets such as cash flow.
Many of these activities are part of your daily work routine and are essential for the smooth running of the office, right? Therefore, not doing them is not an option, by any means.
Yes, it’s all true.
But have you ever noticed that manual activities often take more time than they should and are at high risk of human error? What happens if, for example, an intern loses an important document or pastes the status of a case into the wrong client’s history? If you imagined the beginning of a small chaos, perhaps it’s time to rethink the way you manage your law firm. We can help!
Possible solutions
Nowadays, it is possible to automate a large part of the office routine, keeping the day-to-day organized and much more productive. Drafting legal documents, searching and updating processes, receiving and controlling deadlines. All of this can be done with quality by a complete legal software!
Searching for processes and cases, for example, is a fundamental step in law firm management that no longer needs to take up so much time from interns or employees. A system for lawyers can simplify this activity efficiently. Just enter the case number, select the court and that’s it: your case is registered with all the information you need.
Oh, and by choosing the best legal software for your office, the routine of checking summons and checking court websites every day can be replaced by automatic notifications within the system, via the mobile app and via email whenever there is movement in the process.
This way, you can be aware of all the progress of your process without having to check it all the time or designate a person exclusively for this task. In addition to saving time, legal automation significantly reduces the chances of human error!
2. How to have control over what happens in the office
Not having knowledge and control over what happens in the office can be a sign that more tasks will fall into your lap. After all, if a document is not completed by the due date, you will need to fix it or delegate the task to someone else.
A law firm management mistake like this happens every now and then. And that’s okay. But what happens when, in addition to not knowing what your team is working on, you also have difficulty managing your own tasks ? Not to mention the fact that, with so many things out of your control and so many urgent demands, you no longer have any focus!
When these behaviors are recurrent and you can no longer distinguish what is a failure and what is the work process in your office, there is a real reason for concern.
Possible solutions
If you believe that productivity directly influences a business’s profit, you must have already realized the importance of this subject. So, it is worth noting that it is only possible to be productive when there is mastery of the office’s activities and awareness of what has already been done and what still needs to be done!
To maintain control and have a results-focused law firm management, it is essential to professionalize task management and teamwork. Having a solution that allows the manager to see the firm’s activities and also facilitates the delegation of tasks is very important to ensure that all activities are completed on time, in the best possible way.
Lawyer software lets you see who is doing what, what part of the task they are on, and if they have any impediments. This way, in addition to knowing everything your employees are doing without having to leave your desk, it also makes the process of assigning tasks more practical.
3. How not to lose money and have good financial management
Good financial organization is the basis for running a successful law firm. If you have no idea of the fixed costs of your business, no idea what your profit margin is on each transaction, or don’t know what percentage of your legal fees you will use to cover client expenses and legal costs, you could be losing money – and, even worse, paying to work.
But this isn’t the only obstacle for entrepreneurial lawyers when it comes to managing a law firm. If you use Excel or Google spreadsheets to manage your finances, you may end up encountering a very common flaw: the difficulty of updating this spreadsheet as your firm grows.
In addition to this obstacle, there is also the fear of trusting someone else to do the control. Or, the possibility of outsourcing the task and leaving room for human error, as we discussed in the first topic on this list.
Possible solutions
If your firm does not yet have clear guidelines for charging legal fees, this should be the first step in establishing a balanced financial organization.
Another aspect of law firm management that should be taken into account is the tools you use for financial control. If your business has an accounting department, one suggestion is to use systems designed exclusively for financial control.
However, if you want to have your financial management aligned with the information on your cases, processes and clients, the best solution is to rely on software for lawyers that offers this functionality. Being able to manage your firm’s finances with your legal software is a great time and money saver.
4. How to maintain quality as your office grows
The greater the number of clients and the number of people per team in the office, the more difficult it is to ensure standardization in service and work processes. It is true that each professional has their own personality and way of working, but have you ever thought about how this reflects on your client?
Imagine if each person in your office adopted different criteria for preparing legal documents and reports. And if there was no training for those who answer calls? Your client probably wouldn’t have the same confidence in your team’s work.
And what does this have to do with law firm management? Absolutely everything. If a firm with five lawyers does not have a well-defined quality standard, what will happen when that number increases to 20?
So, this type of care should indeed be part of the firm’s routine. After all, no one wants to lose a client because one person on the team failed to provide service, right?
Possible solutions
Establishing standards of excellence in law firm management and communicating them to the team is a necessary path for those who want to grow in a scalable and organized way without losing quality.
If you’re into technology for lawyers, you’ve probably already abandoned physical folders and stacks of documents in boxes. It’s possible that you initially migrated all of that to online spreadsheets, right?
However, as your firm grows, it becomes more difficult to keep documents organized and easily accessible to your staff. A good system for lawyers solves this problem by storing all documents in an organized manner. To ensure that nothing is lost or improperly altered, it is possible to restrict access to sensitive information about deadlines or clients.
5. How to improve customer relationships
A disorganized routine ends up driving clients away. After all, when you can’t balance time between managing a law firm and the practical and intellectual activities of law, tasks that generate immediate or urgent effects take priority (usually important activities that have been delayed).
With a complicated dynamic full of bottlenecks, the client does not know what is happening in their process. Furthermore, when customer service is not a priority in the management of a law firm, quality tends to decline and the human connection, so important for any practice of winning over and retaining customers, is lost.
Not to mention the classic mistakes of not recording customer contact information (or recording it in a place where it could be lost, such as diaries and notebooks) and not following up .
Possible solutions
Quality service can be your firm’s biggest competitive advantage. Therefore, you need to prioritize strategic actions so that the firm’s growth does not negatively affect this fundamental stage of your business.
Another important aspect to consider is follow-up as a way to keep the lawyer-client relationship active. A good legal program can help you with this step by concentrating all of your client’s data and the history of the case and process in one place. This way, whenever you need to get back in touch with them, everything you need to know will be just a few clicks away.
We know that clients can be anxious and even a little impatient to know the status of their processes or cases, right? Giving them this feedback constantly manually may not be very productive.
That’s also why there are legal software programs that allow you to grant restricted access to updates so that they can consult them whenever they want. Or, even more practical, they allow you to automatically send an email to your client every time there is any progress in the process. This way, they can rest easy, and you have more time to dedicate to the activities that will make the law firm grow.
What are the Fundamental pillars to boost your advocacy in managing a law firm?
Commercial sector
This sector aims to attract, win over, and convert customers. Sales is essential to creating a strategy that looks at the beginning of the customer’s relationship with your business. Therefore, to begin the attraction stage, it is important that your office defines an action plan, which can range from content production to the creation of landing pages (pages to capture leads) and others.
Then, to win over the client, it is important to insert each person into a nurturing process where they will learn more about what you can offer them.
The sales department will work until the person is converted, which is effective when the fee agreement is signed. This is the milestone where the person stops being a potential client and becomes an actual client.
Execution sector
After the client is converted to the sales department, the execution team will be responsible for executing everything that was sold by the sales department. This includes conducting research, coordinating demands, providing feedback, and everything that involves the progress of the delivery that was offered to the client.
Financial sector
This sector goes beyond payments, receiving bills, and issuing invoices. The finance department is responsible for pricing strategy, billing, and data analysis. For example, is receiving fees in installments effective? This is where the strategic analysis of this team comes in, which is essential.
Structure sector
The structure department is responsible for different functions, all related to the maintenance of the physical space and also online, such as hiring software.
This is because, among the responsibilities, are internal and external communication and knowledge of the entire operation of the office to identify improvements and hiring.
Furthermore, Mariana also presented the possibility of branching out from these four sectors. These branches are created by other sectors, such as marketing, customer success, and others, all of this according to the growth, needs, and strategy of your business!
Put your law firm management into practice
If, after reading this text, you realized that you could act differently to have a more efficient law firm management , don’t despair or worry. Understanding the flaws is always the first step to correcting them.
It may seem like a lot to put into practice, but believe me, good strategic planning, a handful of determination, and focused actions will get the job done.