Becoming more efficient with your time and boosting productivity will not only benefit your bottom line but can have positive effects on how much you love your life and law practice.
A fantastic place to start looking at how you can become more productive lies within the activities of managing a small firm that take up a significant portion of your time, but keep you from doing your actual job, lawyering, as a teacher and counselor to your clients.
Here's Three Outsourcing, Technology, and Systems Tips for How To Manage a Small Law Firm More Efficiently
To begin, identify which of your administrative tasks can be automated—or delegated—to maximize your productivity in the long run.
Then, examine your effectiveness of handling repeatable tasks within various aspects of managing your practice such as marketing, client intake, and client service. Do you have standard processes in place to make these repeating tasks as efficient as possible?
Taking some time to identify the tasks that are not the best use of your time and remedy those gaps in efficiency will make managing your law firm more productive, profitable, and enable your practice to thrive.
Use these three tips for how to manage a small law firm more efficiently and effectively, starting today.
1. Determine What Can Be Outsourced or Delegated
Track everything you do related to managing your firm within one week. Take a look at this list and determine the following:
- What tasks are taking up most of your time?
- What tasks are the ones you don’t enjoy doing that can be delegated?
- What tasks can be systematized?
Out of the tasks that fall into these three categories, are there any that you could outsource or delegate to someone else?
For example, we support our members to outsource their estate plan document drafting, and if this is a task on your list, read this article to see the time and money differentials for a solo lawyer—with and without outsourcing drafting documents.
If you don’t currently have help in the office, consider getting immediate support with answering your phones and handling the intake of new prospects. Intake is a repeatable process that you can train someone else to handle that will free up your time considerably.
The truth is, there is a limit to just how much you can do on your own, and if you are hitting that limit, you’ll be working all hours of the day and night to get it all done—and there will be a cap to the income you are able to earn in the process.
Conversely, when you invest in hiring support, you will increase your capacity to serve more clients, earn more revenue, and gain control over your schedule. This is why we provide personalized, step-by-step guidance for our members around hiring and training support staff, and what is needed to feel confident that their law practice will thrive financially while doing so.
2. How to Manage a Small Law Firm Better Utilizing Technology
While you’ll want to keep the human touch in the way you counsel your clients, you can embrace and leverage technology to improve efficiency and create a better experience for your clients overall.
When you take a look at your weekly worklist from above, see if there are tasks that can be accomplished by a technology system rather than a person. There are a lot of great programs and apps available to help you in the office.
Are you frustrated with the difficulty or speed of locating client information? Utilizing a content management system will resolve the issue. Are you overwhelmed by the creation and maintenance of too many paper files? Consider moving toward a paperless office to free up employee time (and yours!).
Harnessing the power of technology can boost productivity and support long-term growth. Here are some easy areas to start with:
- Digital dictation and speech recognition (since you’ll never be able to type as fast as you can talk, this can be an instant productivity booster)
- A mobility app
- Document automation and assembly
- Document management
- Lead follow up (where most lawyers are missing the boat with their marketing)
At New Law Business Model, we have created an all-in-one automated marketing and practice management technology for our Personal Family Lawyer and Family Business Lawyer members. We’ve harnessed the power of technology to streamline areas such as follow-up after networking, online lead generation, and intake and enrollment systems.
This technology also builds in automated 'raving fan' client service after engagement, plus long-term membership with recurring revenue and helps to build relationships that truly serve the clients for life. Want to learn more about how that could fit into your practice? Book a call to speak with one of our Law Business Advisors here.
3. Implement Set Processes for Routine Tasks
Take a good look at how your firm is operating. Have you implemented standard processes and systems to make the repeating tasks in your firm as efficient as possible? If not, it’s easy to continually “reinvent the wheel” with certain aspects of how to manage a small law firm, causing you to lose valuable time and much potential income.
Take, for example, client intake and consultation. If you have an ineffective engagement process for potential clients, a very expensive snowball effect happens. You lose clients at the intake stage as well as the actual consultation stage.
Having set processes in place for routine tasks cuts down the time spent on them by half (if not more), provides more consistent results in terms of the number of prospects that you can serve, and allows you to most effectively serve their needs.
How about the ways you are handling other areas such as marketing, client service, client retention, or even the hiring and training of your team?
Ultimately, having standard processes in place in every area not only frees you up to more comprehensively serve your clients, but to have time to be with your family, contribute to your community, and enjoy your life.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Book your call with a Law Business Advisor today and find out how you can use New Law Business Model’s proven training programs, systems, and guidance to serve families and business owners as a true trusted advisor, boost your productivity and build a thriving law practice.
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