How Can My Law Firm Achieve Sustainable Growth?
According to Krystal and Beth, one of the foremost challenges law firms face as they try to grow is that law school doesn’t prepare attorneys for the business management side of law practice. As a result, lawyers struggle with where to turn their attention and how to define success using key performance indicators (KPIs).
To help law firms clarify their goals and find the right metrics to assess progress, Beth tends to ask attorneys questions like:
- Why did you go to law school, and what did you hope to achieve afterwards?
- How do you see your firm as a brand?
- What’s your message?
- What are your superpowers? (What do you well already?)
- What challenges have you encountered so far?
- What’s holding you back right now?
While it might sound simple, Beth says this process involves a lot of conversation and often leads to an epiphany for the law firm. Using the answers to these questions, Krystal can work with Beth to go back and fill in the pieces the firm needs help with.
The Three Ps of Growth
When devising solutions to address law firms’ challenges, Krystal tends to focus on the “three Ps”:
- People: Overhead is high while recruiting. If you don’t hire the right people and place them in the right roles, you’ll consistently encounter problems.
- Processes: Often, growing firms end up in a situation where everyone is handling important tasks a different way. Standardizing processes helps with reporting and analysis, which in turn enables improvements. A good case management system is one of the first pieces Krystal and Beth usually recommend for a firm.
- Profit: The bottom line is important, but once people and processes are in place, profits tend to follow.
Sometimes, Your Problems Aren’t What You Think They Are
Krystal shares the story of a small law firm who believed they needed help getting more leads. The firm planned to spend more money on marketing to improve lead generation. After working with the firm’s consult team, Krystal and Beth analyzed their processes and found a number of issues, including:
- Calls getting dropped and never followed up on
- Consultation appointments being set unnecessarily far in the future
- Lack of closing attempts during consultation appointments
Sound familiar? If your firm doesn’t have effective lead follow-up systems in place, then getting more leads shouldn’t be your first priority. In this case, after only a few weeks of consulting work with RJH, the firm’s conversion rate on phone calls soared from 30% to 85%. (That’s when you start investing in marketing to generate more leads!)
