Staying profitable as your practice expands isn’t a given. It requires investing in systems and technology that will scale to support your growth. Here are six places to start.
Some years ago, I knew a lawyer who had started and grown his firm. The firm had expanded to about 10 lawyers before shrinking back down to just him and one other person. When I met him, he was in the process of building his firm back to its previous size.
Since I was a young lawyer interested in practice management, he shared his theory on firm growth:
“Once you get big enough that everybody can’t fit in the car to go to lunch together, it’s the beginning of the end.”
It was said tongue-and-cheek, but there’s a kernal of truth.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
To grow, your tools, skills and management practices must evolve.
Law firms grow because the founder is good at several different competencies (marketing, legal work, financial discipline and so on). As the firm grows, the founder gets stretched further and further until, at some point, she can no longer personally do all the things she did to make the firm a success.
At that point, she either finds a way to change the way things get done or, like the lawyer I had lunch with, she finds herself at the beginning of the end.
Staying profitable as you build your firm is all about systems and scale. It’s about making sure you have the right tools to support growth, the right processes and procedures, a scalable client acquisition strategy, and a plan for expanding and managing your team.
Here are some of the tools you will want to consider adding as you prepare to grow your firm.
1. Practice Management Software
I’m going to assume that many of you already have practice management and time and billing software. If you don’t use practice management software in your firm, that needs to be your first step.
There are lots of great options available, but here are a few tips to help you decide:
- Think of your practice management software as a platform, the central hub for your firm’s technology that will hook into your other critical tools. Look not just for features included in the software but for integrations and interoperability.
- Think about your practice management software as a 10-plus-year investment.
- Kick the tires hard on reporting options — no firm is going to scale effectively without a robust set of reporting features so you can keep tabs on your growing enterprise.
- If you are already in a practice management software and it works, stick with it. There is a huge tendency to peer over the fence at greener grass. Resist.
- If you are already in a practice management software and it legitimately is not getting the job done (or is being wound down and lacks support, etc.), I strongly urge you to find an implementation partner before you choose a new software. Changing tires while the bus is rolling is significantly more complicated, and it will not be money wasted on finding a consultant to make the process smoother and easier.
2. Intake and CRM
For many firms, the intake process is a growth bottleneck. You have worked hard to develop your reputation and secure valuable referrals. When those referrals take the step to contact your firm, they need to be wrapped into a well-designed and managed system that treats them well and doesn’t let them slip through the cracks.
As you prepare to be less hands-on in every single part of running your firm, you need systems in place that reduce friction, create standards and delight potential clients. Many practice management software programs have a fully integrated intake feature or the ability to add it as a module. It’s worth doing. Also, intake capabilities combined with practice management software become your CRM (customer relations software). As you start to button down your intake and sales process, keeping good data about calls, consultations, retention rates and so on will make it much easier to engage in rational, data-driven decision-making.
(Related: Read “Tech Tips: Best Advice for Improving Client Intake”)
3. Document Automation
Once your firm has taken the time to set up and use practice management and intake software, you will have client data that is (hopefully) only being entered (typed) into the database once. Each time you add additional information to the client’s file, that additional data represents the opportunity to save labor and reduce errors in producing documents. The way to do this is via document assembly or automation.
Again, several of the major practice management software programs include document assembly tools. If yours does not, it can be worth engaging a legal technology consultant to help you build your library of fillable forms and connect them to your practice management software.
Document assembly will help your team get more done in less time with fewer mistakes. It’s a lot of work to put together the fillable forms and train the team on the system, but once you do, it can be a win for clients, your team and the firm.
4. Asynchronous Communications
One of the lessons of the pandemic is that business can be interrupted, substantially and for long periods of time. Smart law firms have retooled in the years since to maintain strong business continuity plans, so if need be, all the professionals can work from anywhere they have a laptop and an internet connection. That’s been a great change in some ways, but it has created some challenges in maintaining team culture.
Similarly, law firm growth often makes it harder to maintain the firm culture. Interactions that happen effortlessly with a small team need to be proactively created and maintained as you grow. A Slack or Teams channel for the firm with several side discussion channels for discussing cases, blowing off steam, discussing weekend plans and so on can be a great way to build team culture asynchronously and from a distance.
(Related: Top Personal Productivity Apps for Lawyersrs)
5. Process Documentation — SOPs
In the dark ages of law firm management, it was common to find, somewhere deep in the dusty crevices of a law firm’s back room, an overstuffed and underused binder marked “Firm Standard Operating Procedures.” Don’t get me wrong; I am not against establishing and recording procedures and processes. On the contrary, it’s an essential part of growing a law firm. Without well-established and documented procedures, your firm will never achieve any uniformity or consistency in its service.
Happily, the world has moved on a bit past giant SOP binders. There’s a lot of process documentation software out there now. Sweet Process and Process Street are two strong contenders worth considering.
(Related: Read “Ready to Scale: Add More SOPs Before You Add More People” by Karen and David Skinner)
6. A Delegation Mindset
This last item is not necessarily a tool for law firm growth but more of a mindset change: To grow, you have to accept that you can no longer do everything yourself. Some pieces of the operation must be delegated.
The more your firm grows, the more your competencies need to evolve from “getting it all done” to “getting work done through others.”
This is a big change for a lot of lawyer-entrepreneurs and, frankly, a challenging one. But it’s essential if you want to grow your firm.
Or you could just try taking a really big car to lunch.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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