Today on Be a Better Lawyer we’re smoothing rough edges in your law practice causing you to waste time and money.
We're streamlining.
There's 4 things that can block us from streamlining:
Ignorance. You just don’t know what you don’t know. There’s no way to change something you haven’t even thought about changing.
Inertia. If you’ve been practicing any length of time, you’ve had mentors or someone who told you how to do things. And then you just kept doing them.
Isolation. You haven’t had exposure to new ideas or you haven’t had someone to talk through different areas of your practice, so you don’t even see there’s an issue.
Impulse. Maybe you try something new, and it works at first, but at the first sign of it not “working” you give up and go back to the old system. You really haven’t given the new way a chance or evaluated how it could be altered to make it work. Your first impulse is just to go back to the old habit.
So today I want to shine a light on areas you may not have looked at before.
There are an infinite amount of areas we could talk about, but I’ve chosen three areas for today’s episode.
1️⃣ How you track and follow up on leads (and become more profitable)
2️⃣ Potential areas of your practice you can consolidate to save time (and become more profitable)
3️⃣ How to move cases along faster in your practice (and become more profitable)
As we go along, I give you questions to ask yourself, so even if your issues aren’t exactly like the ones I’m sharing, you can ask yourself how you can use this information to help streamline your own practice.
Listen in to start smoothing those rough edges, getting your time back, and making your firm more profitable than ever before.
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Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.
Streamline Your Law Practice
When I look at a lawyer’s practice, I look for three things:
- what are their immediate pain points
- What can we clean up first that will be the biggest domino to knock over and will have the biggest impact on making their life easier
- I’m keeping my ears perked for areas they’ve been ignoring that we can sort out to expand the impact to their energetic and financial resources.
This episode will help you start looking for some of those areas and cleaning them up to get back your own resources.
Hey hey. Hope your week is going well. This has been a fun week for me because I’ve been dishing up some plans that I’m going to share with you in just a little bit. Whenever I’m creating something new, it really lights me up.
It’s also a week where I’ve been maxing myself out to get work done.
I share this with you not as a complaint but as a reality check.
Sometimes we hear people on podcasts and watch people on social media, and we see only the highlights, so I want to share that I work my butt off. I create as much harmony between the work and my personal life to maintain my well-being, so I’m not killing myself. But there hasn’t been a whole lot of down time this week because I wanted to get some projects moving.
I planned it that way, so it wasn’t a surprise. But I wanted to let you know that sometimes there are weeks where you plan more on your calendar than usual and that’s okay.
It’s a great reminder that we can consciously choose how we spend our time. I could have pushed back my plans, but I decided that I wanted to follow through with my timetable for the year, and that just means that some weeks I’ll have more on my calendar than others.
I hope that gave you a little peek into my life, so you can see that I’m always working to consciously choose how I spend my time. And sometimes there will be more rest than others. As long as we’re making our choices consciously and not letting our businesses or practices run our life, I’d say we’re winning.
Okay, today we’re talking about shining a light on areas of your practice that may be draining you energetically or even financially.
Why is it so hard to see these areas?
There’s a few reasons. I call them the four “I”s —
- Ignorance. You just don’t know what you don’t know. There’s no way to change something you haven’t even thought about changing.
- Inertia. If you’ve been practicing any length of time, you’ve had mentors or someone who told you how to do things. And then you just kept doing them.
- Isolation. You haven’t had exposure to new ideas or you haven’t had someone to talk through different areas of your practice, so you don’t even see there’s an issue.
- Impulse. Maybe you try something new, and it works at first, but at the first sign of it not “working” you give up and go back to the old system. You really haven’t given the new way a chance or evaluated how it could be altered to make it work. Your first impulse is just to go back to the old habit.
So today I want to partner with you to shine a light on areas maybe you haven’t looked at before.
There are an infinite amount of areas we could talk about, but I’ve chosen three areas for today’s episode.
- How you track and follow up on leads
- Potential areas of your practice you can consolidate to save time and become more profitable
- How to move cases along faster in your practice
As we go along, I’ll be giving you questions to ask yourself in your own practice to answer, so even if your issues aren’t exactly like the ones I’m sharing in this episode, you can ask yourself how you can use this information to help you streamline your own practice.
Now, at this point you may be saying, this is beautiful, I need this.
I can start here, but how do think about my practice holistically? How do I prioritize how to achieve my larger goals in my practice? And where might these pieces you’re giving me fit in?
If that’s you, I have some exciting news.
I’ve created a course that will help you with that.
“Precision Planning for Law Firm Growth: Your Step-by-Step Planning Process to Create Your Most Profitable and Peaceful Year in the Law Yet”
The problem most law firm owners make is they set themselves up for failure from the start. In this course I’ll give you the framework and other tools you need to increase the likelihood of achieving your goals even before you start taking action.
It’s coming out at the end of February, but I’ve created a waitlist that you’ll want to get on right now.
When you do, you’ll be the first to know about special bonuses I’m creating to introduce this course.
When my one-on-one clients went through this program, they got energized to take action.
One said she’d never thought about planning and strategizing achieving goals in this way before.
Another said it made her feel excited about her practice again.
Precision Planning for Law Firm Growth gives you actionable steps you can take to grow your practice without over-working yourself to the point of exhaustion.
To get on the waitlist and ensure you’re the first to know about all the surprises I have in store, go to dinacataldo.com/2024. That’s dinacataldo.com/2024
I can’t wait to bring this to you in just a few short weeks.
Alright, let’s dig into this episode.
When I look at a lawyer’s practice, I look for three things:
- what are their immediate pain points
- What can we clean up first that will be the biggest domino to knock over and will have the biggest impact on making their life easier
- I’m keeping my ears perked for areas they’ve been ignoring that we can sort out to expand the impact to their energetic and financial resources.
Those areas that have become so old hat, that they haven’t thought twice about them. Or they may have noticed them, but they draw a blank when they think about another way of doing things.
Quick example, just this week I was talking to an estate planning client who made a side remark, and my ears perked up. I asked some questions, and learned she has been charging for consults, but then she would tell potential clients that if they hired her then that consult fee would be wrapped up in the package they purchased.
This was causing a few issues like no-shows at consults taking a spot someone else could have taken. But one of the biggest issues I keyed into is she was short-changing herself. When we looked at the numbers, the time and energy she was investing with the client was more than what she was being paid.
In just a few minutes we talked through numbers that made sense and she created a system where her receptionist would not only schedule a consult but would also take payment over the phone before the consult to reserve their spot.
The consult would be separate from her planning package, so there was no confusion.
When we make decisions like this, it can feel scary because it’s new, and that’s where mindset work comes in to ease the transition, but you can see how these little tweaks can make a powerful impact. With this teak alone she has the ability to make an additional $60,000 in her practice this year and save so much time and aggravation for no-shows. Pretty amazing when you start looking for these little areas to tweak, right?
Imagine what you would do with an extra $60,000? Go on a fancier vacation? Invest in another employee? Take more time off? It’s a big deal when you find these areas to clean up.
I told you the three areas we’re going to cover today, so let’s start with the first one:
- How you track and follow up on leads
If you’re like a lot of my clients, their first contact with a new person is through a phone call and it’s usually a referral.
But do you have a way to track and follow-up with leads?
Maybe you do a consult and the person walks out the door and you never hear from them again.
Maybe you get a phone call, and the potential client asks a question, but you don’t get their number or email to follow-up.
Maybe you talk to someone at the grocery store who’s interested and you just given them your card instead of asking them for their email or their phone number.
If this sounds like you, how much could not following up be costing you?
$5,000? $10,000? $20,000? More?
It sounds so simple when I say it here, but creating an Excel spreadsheet with the date of contact, name of the person, contact info, notes about your conversation, and how and when you followed up can really make a difference here.
These are things we often just don’t think about. It’s pure ignorance because it’s never crossed our radar before. We’re so busy doing other things, it doesn’t occur to us.
This one tweak will really make an impact if you’re not collecting the names and contact numbers of people you have consults with, conversations with and then following up. You can even have an assistant follow up.
What’s one thing you can do this week that will help you begin tracking your potential clients and then following up with them?
Alright, now let’s move on to…
- Potential areas of your practice you can consolidate to save time and become more profitable
Consolidating smaller tasks into one discrete task can feel liberating. It’s easy to get caught up doing a little here and a little there but not really feeling like you’re making much progress.
Let’s change that.
I have a client who has a very specialized real estate practice. Her habit over the years — and this habit has made her a lot of money, it just was taking a lot of her time — has been to talk to a prospective client on the phone who has a question, get back to them with an answer by email, maybe get on the phone with them again, maybe have a few more emails or calls, and then eventually they settle on whether they’ll work together. And she was keeping this all in her head. No tracking system.
Clearly, this has worked for her because she’s doing well. But she’s also scaling her practice. She has 13 employees and is growing. Managing a team like that requires she let go of old practices and try new ones that free up her time and her brain space.
This topic came up purely by me listening for those tiny sentences we say that indicate a frustration. It’s so tiny we wouldn’t register it on our own. We were talking about the numbers in her practice, and she mentioned the topic of calls as a side-note. I saw an opportunity to help her streamline this process, and I asked her if she’d be open to exploring it.
When we did, she realized she had an opportunity to turn this prolonged conversation into a consult that she could put on her calendar. It would be a discrete amount of time instead of doing a back-and-forth for days with a potential client and increasing the potential for abandoning a lead because she had a harder time tracking these interactions.
We brainstormed, and I suggested a test. Outline a process for certain matters coming into your office, where your receptionist would receive a call and set a consult on your calendar. The client would pay for that consult in advance. You would outline a document that walked the potential client step-by-step through what to expect before and during the consult and give them a checklist of what they needed to bring to the consult.
She could take 10 of these people and try it out for a month and see what happens. Then tweak the process from there if she liked it.
This strategy has the potential to help her manage her time and energy around talking to potential new clients and increasing her profitability since she’ll be charging for the work she’s already doing for free.
If you’re looking to free up time with small tasks, ask yourself this:
Where are you spending a lot of time piecemealing a project or process together in your practice, but you can condense those small steps into a more doable step?
How can you make it easier on yourself and your staff?
How much more time or profitability will you have by taking this step?
Alright, now let’s talk about…
- How to move cases along faster in your practice
If you struggle to get cases moving in your practice, this is one where you’ll want to pay attention to. Think about how this could apply to you.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from lawyers — all lawyers — is that they do the work, then they have to wait for their client to book an appointment before they can get paid. Or they have someone in the process that’s holding everything up.
This can feel defeating because we don’t think we have any control over the situation.
I want to put you back in the driver’s seat with this section.
Ask yourself these three questions about the cases you think are dragging:
- What do I think the problems are moving these cases?
- If I think someone or something else is the problem, where might I be contributing to that problem?
- What can I do differently to help move cases along?
See how these questions give you more empowerment?
I had an estate planning client who was in this exact situation where she had cases she wanted to move along, and it was incredibly frustrating for her to manage her workflow and her finances because of a wall she felt she hit.
So she saw two problems: 1) she wasn’t able to prioritize her time well, and 2) she wasn’t getting paid if the client wasn’t setting up a closing date.
Here’s the solution she devised:
Create a contract that clearly states that they will set a date certain for the closing date. She would put that date on her calendar while they were in the consult. Additionally, she would have a clause in her contract that said as soon as the work was completed that the money paid into the trust account would be released to her account.
Such a beautiful solution. Here’s where I put my lawyer hat on and say, “Check with your local rules to make sure you comply with them.”
Let’s cover what we went over today:
First, on’t let Ignorance, Inertia, Isolation, or Impulse be the reason you don’t create solutions for your practice. Talk to other lawyers, try new things, and get the help you need.
Second, keep your ears perked for how you talk about your practice. Are you verbalizing frustrations and then zooming past them or are you recognizing frustrations and doing something about them?
Third, if you haven’t created a simple tracking and follow-up system for leads, you can save yourself a lot of time, brain space, and profit by doing so.
Fourth, look for areas in your practice taking long amounts of time and see if you can consolidate them.
Finally, if you’re struggling moving cases along in your practice, ask yourself what you can do to control what you can control.
If you want to grow your practice, and you want a partner to talk through how to streamline your growth, give you your time back and make your life easier, I’m here for you.
Book a Strategy Session with me at dinacataldo.com/strategysession
We’ll work together to make your firm a finely tuned instrument that works in harmony with your life.
Remember, what you want matters, and it is 100% in your power to make it happen.