How to Successfully Grow Your Law Firm

When a partner decides it is time to expand their law firm, it can be difficult to distinguish what steps to take next to begin working at that goal. Here is everything a partner needs to know about how to successfully grow their law firm.

Whether it is a newly opened legal firm or one that has been operating for years, finding how to grow a firm’s business is a unique process for each partner and their company. Before a plan for growth of the firm can be formulated, the partner(s) of the firm must first establish what goals they want their firm to achieve. Setting these personalized objectives will help create a clear and concise plan of how to grow their law firm in respect to their goals.

Setting Growth Goals for Your Law Firm

Each law firm will have different objectives that they wish to achieve with expansion. There are several ways a law firm can grow and become more successful.

A law firm can expand in the number of lawyers hired to the firm. This is a common goal of law firms, because usually the more attorneys at the firm will result in an increased number of clients they are able to help, and therefore more business for the firm. Additionally, another regular goal of law firms is to grow in the types of legal services they offer. A law firm may want to offer more legal services than they already provide, such as consultations and preparations for court, resulting in more types of business the firm can operate in. Finally, a firm can look at growing geographically and moving into more than just one location. This can mean anything from another smaller office to an entirely new building for the firm, but both would generally be in the interest of increasing business for the firm.

For a partner trying to grow their firm, it is crucial that they distinguish which types of ways they are looking to expand so they can correctly set a plan to achieve it.

Tips on How to Grow a Law Firm

After setting individualized goals and creating a plan for the firm, a partner can follow these steps to begin working towards expanding their firm. Here are some steps a partner can implement to grow their firm.

1. Delegating for Efficiency

As a partner, it is likely that running the firm and handling the normal caseload of an attorney will be extremely time-consuming. This is why it is important for a partner and other attorneys to focus on delegating tasks to other employees as much as they can without compromising the task itself.

Delegating tasks that can be completed by other employees in the firm will allow the partner and the attorneys to maximize their time on the work specified for their position.

2. Establish Efficient Systems

To maintain a productive and swift workflow, creating an individualized system for how the workplace should function is an excellent tool for a partner. A partner wishing to maximize efficiency in their firm should prioritize creating a workflow plan for their staff to follow after obtaining a client. Every staff member should be educated in the procedure so they can perform their assigned role correctly and the system can function efficiently.

3. Time-Sensitive Hiring

A growing law firm will have more clients coming in for assistance. A partner needs to be conscious of how many clients their firm is obtaining and correlate that to the appropriate amount of attorneys necessary to provide this help. This means being aware of how many attorneys their specific firm needs in order to handle a certain number of clients and adjusting accordingly as the firm grows.

4. Outsourcing

Although delegating tasks is still crucial for a partner and attorneys, there may be instances where more staff is needed to handle the linguistic work that cannot be delegated. Legal process outsourcing is a great resource that a partner can use to complete tasks that may be too much for their attorneys and other staff. Legal process outsourcing can be to freelance lawyers or to other qualified professionals to handle things such as reviewing and scanning documents that their staff may not have time for.

5. Technology for Tasks

Repetitive tasks in a firm can be tedious and time-consuming for a staff member to complete, the opposite of what a growing firm pushing for efficiency needs. Technology offers a solution to this, as the advancement of technology has created programs that will do the lengthy work for us.

Some programs used in law firms to promote efficiency are Clio Payments, Clio Grow, and Virtual Receptionists which help in payment data entry, client intake process, and answering client calls respectively.

6. Make Marketing a Priority

Marketing the firm is necessary to attract more clients to the business. A partner should seriously consider investing in marketing or branding their firm to get the word out to more possible clients. This can be done by either hiring a marketing manager for the firm or manually through additional branding strategies like websites, commercials, etc.

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