Resources

Red Cave Law Firm Consulting's Technology Blog Series (from CEO Jared D. Correia, Esq.)

2022 Quarter 4

December 19, 2022: Double Up: Why You Should Have Two Email Accounts

Mixed-use work and personal email accounts can quickly become ultra-confusing.  And yet, many lawyers still utilize the setup, ostensibly (and, ironically) for ease-of-use/simplicity.

Modern law firms need to specialize in efficiency, more than any specific practice area.  To that end, your email should be mission-critical to your business.  That messages in your inbox should be from your clients, from referral sources and colleagues, maybe from organizations you belong to (those should be pushed to a subfolder, so you can them on your time) and maybe from your staff (though, you should consider a separate communications tool, like Slack, for that).  Anything else is static, including your personal emails, because it’s going to distract you from running your business.

That means that you need to push your personal email to another account.  The good news is that it’s not going to cost you anything, and will take less than 5 minutes to set up.  Just create a Gmail account, and you’ll be able to talk with your friends and family via a separate medium, and in a way that won’t distract you from your work.

December 16, 2022: Drive Safe: Cloud Data Storage Is Not Backup

As much as I advocate for the use of cloud software by law firms, sometimes there can develop an over reliance on such tools by lawyers.

Take, for example, cloud document storage.  If you’re a law firm, and you’ve recently moved to a paperless office, adding your document files to a cloud drive system (like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox) may seem like the solution to all of your problems.  It’s certainly a huge step in the right direction; but, remember that a cloud drive does not a data backup make.

Storing your files online does not create a data backup.  If you think of a data backup as a redundancy = another place where your information is stored, solely using a cloud drive for document storage does not answer for that.  You still need to backup up your cloud drive data somewhere else.  And, this isn’t about Google or Microsoft or Amazon’s server architecture going down in flames -- if that happens, we’ve all got real problems -- it’s more about creating an alternate pathway to your data.  What if you need a particular file when your document servers are offline for maintenance?  What if there’s an extended power outage, and you can’t get to your files on the web?

Ideally, you would add multiple backups for your data: a cloud backup pointed at your cloud storage system (look at Carbonite, BackBlaze, CrashPlan), as well as a harddrive you can access offline, and that you update regularly (ioSafe has great haddrives).

These days, backup is not just about getting back what you’ve lost, it’s also about having various channels to access your client data, as the situation dictates.

December 04, 2022: The Best of What's Around: How Distributed Workforce Models Deliver Talent Like Nothing Else

Law firm managers have always preferred to have staff onsite; and, ever since the pandemic hit in March 2020, that’s been less likely to actually occur.  Even now, many law offices are either entirely remote or adhering to hybrid arrangements, where attorneys and staff are sometime in the office, and sometimes at home.  Now, that may not be likely to change, even as the majority of the population is vaccinated against the coronavirus.

In many cases, law firms view this as a hassle, and something to overcome.  But, even if few law firms see an obvious upside to the arrangement, there is a significant one; and, it involves simple math being applied to the notion of a talent pool.

It works like this: If your law office is able to hire in-person talent from a specific location (i.e. – within driving distance of your physical office or accessible via commuter transport options), that is a finite geographic area, and necessarily limits your talent pool, from which you can hire.  Now, if you’re offering positions that aren’t geography-centric, you’re in a position to hire from a larger talent pool.  For staff, that means you can hire anyone in the world.  For attorneys, you can access people in far-flung locations, across the state, or in other states, depending on licensure status.  It’s simple math that the larger your hiring pool, the more and better candidates you can access.

Plus, your next employees, millennials, prefer the flexibility that work from home provides.

So, if you want the best people to work for your law firm, take advantage of the current opportunity to intentionally craft the distributed workforce you want.

November 30, 2022: Bouncing Around the (Zoom) Room: Taking Advantage of Online Networking Opportunities

Lawyers who relied totally on networking and the personal referrals generating therefrom have taken a hit of late, as many of those in-person marketing opportunities have dried up, or been significantly reduced, following the pandemic.

It’s not the end of networking as we know it, even if it feels that way.

A lot of those networking opportunities have moved online, and lawyers can now take advantage of broader marketing options via the web.  In fact, all of those in-person networking opportunities you’ve so heavily relied on are still around: they’ve just moved to the web.  And, if you play your cards right, that can actually mean that your reach is expanded, rather than diminished.  That’s because many traditionally localized groups are opening up their chapters to visitors.

So, if you were tired of seeing the same old faces, in the same old coffee shops for regularly scheduled marketing meetings, you can expand your horizons.

Getting to know business owners in the next town over, or the next county, or the next continent. is now easier than ever.

You’ve still got marketing chops; you’re a pro!  This is just a different medium.

It’s time to stop waiting for things to go back to normal; it’s time to dive in to the present tense!

November 23, 2022: Lead and Follow(up): What Do You Do with Potential Clients Who Don't Convert

What happens when you don’t convert a lead?  For most law firms, the answer is a resounding: absolutely nothing.

But, just because a potential client doesn’t convert immediately, that doesn’t mean that you’ve lost that opportunity forever.  Legal consumers who reach out to law firms aren’t always ready to sign up right away, for a number of reasons.  That doesn’t mean that those folks will never want to use your legal services -- even if most attorneys treat that as a final answer.  Even if lawyers would like another crack at those non-converting clients, they don’t do anything about it; most will never contact that lead again.

In order to give yourself another bite at the apple for leads who don’t convert the first time, you need to be able to develop a remarketing strategy.  There is significant value in someone’s willingness to provide you with their contact information, and if you don’t access it, you’re leaving that value on the table.  Even if that potential client never ends up converting, there may still be the opportunity to access referrals from those leads.

There are any number of ways you can remarket to leads, but probably the easiest is by building an email marketing program.  Get your contact list together, and upload it to a service like MailChimp or ConstantContact, add the new leads to that system, and push a client alert or enewsletter every month or quarter.  Simply by getting touches on those contacts, you remind them of what you do, and of your availability as a service provider.  If you’d like, you can segment those contacts, so that you can differentiate your messaging to lost leads versus former clients versus referral sources.

November 14, 2022: Lost Highway: Modern Law Firms Require Revised Intake Systems

More than 60% of law firm do not return voicemails. 

It takes an average of 8 emails to schedule an appointment with an attorney.

Legal consumers, like all consumers, prize convenience, speed and responsiveness.  Law firms often strike out in trying to meet that three-part requirement.  In fact, most law firms don’t have an intake system at all.  And, it’s costing them money.

If you want to prevail in the modern, convenience economy (which was here before the pandemic, but which has been accelerated by it), you may have a lot of work to do.  So, of course it’s tempting to try to course-correct all at once, by launching a ‘client journey’ in full.  But, it’s important not to voluntarily overwhelm yourself.  As with any business management reform, you’ll want to take this one step-by-step.

And, this starts out by being thoughtful about your intake process.  Therefore, before you do anything else, you should begin by designing an ‘intake roadmap’.  It doesn’t matter if you put that down on the back of a napkin, or build it in a workflow software.  Determine all your lead types, consider how they become clients now, and try to button that process up.  Create a followup structure, automate it where you can, and determine where you will preserve data, and how you will analyze it.

From there, you’ll match your preferences to the people and technology you need.

November 07, 2022: Thinking Outside the Inbox: Email Tips

Email drives business; yet, it also drives most of us crazy.

If this is the year you want to take control of your email, here are some steps you can take:

-Consider using a non-email program for in-office communications, like Slack.  This will mean that your inbox can become ‘mission-critical’, where you receive only messages from clients and colleagues, while your staff and associate messages filter to another media.  Slack is free.

-Use ‘rules’ to push less important email out of sight.  Set up email rules that will filter advertisements to a subfolder, that you can look at when you’re ready, so that those message don’t invade your inbox.  Gmail, for example, has a built-in ‘Promotions’ inbox.  You can also utilize your junk email filter to better manage unwanted messages.

-Use a law practice management software, that will integrate with your productivity software, to archive your emails.  That way. you won’t have to save everything in a bursting inbox -- or strain your PST file, if you’re still using premise-based software.

-Try an email management add-on, like Sanebox, which offers more features for organization than come out of the box in standard email clients.

-Think about applying an email management system, like GTD, so you can make quick decisions in your inbox, keep it uncluttered and turn response management into a task list.

October 31, 2022: Awards Season: Lawyer Superlatives Are Great and All, But You Need More Than That to Convince Clients

Lawyers are great at bragging on themselves via their websites.  And, a significant number of attorneys supplement that with ‘superlatives’.  You know, those lawyer awards, like ‘Super Lawyers’, that you can apply for and/or purchase.  Those specific awards, and the general superlatives of your own resume, go a long way to convince leads to become your clients -- but, those don’t get you the whole way there.

You see, while legal consumers do want to know that you’re a ‘good’ lawyer, generally speaking -- they also want to know that you can help them with their specific cases.  Legal consumers know they have a legal problem, but don’t understand the legal process.  Those consumers who want to hire a lawyer -- they really, really want to hire a lawyer.  They need a guide; they need to understand that you, the lawyer, understand (and can walk them through) a legal process they just don’t get.

If you’re a ‘Super Lawyer’, a legal consumer understands that that’s probably better than hiring an average lawyer; but, that doesn’t tell the legal consumer anything at all about whether you can handle their case.  To that end, you’ll also need to generate some information about your practice niche: what you focus on, the results you’ve gotten, how the legal process plays out in that practice area.  All that will be valuable for your potential client, as they review your information via the web.

Laying out your specialty, in addition to your more common bona fides, will generate more leads and more conversions.

October 28, 2022: Preach What You Practice: Practice Area Pages are Essential to Law Firm Website Design

Lawyers like to practice law; they don’t like to create content.  Unfortunately, that’s a big deal when it comes to marketing.  Because it’s harder for content to resonate with potential clients when lawyers aren’t building it themselves, using their expertise.  Lawyers who focus on content, however, can crush their competition, in part by reducing marketing overhead significantly.

One place lawyers don’t put enough emphasis, in terms of content development, is in the design of website practice area pages.  Many lawyers draft super generic content.  But, realize that potential clients are coming to you because they want your expertise, and because they want to learn more about the legal process.  You can cement that early impression of you-as-the-expert by improving the practice area pages that your potential clients will gravitate to when they visit your website.  In order to increase your chances of converting clients, you should focus on making those practice area pages sing.

How do you do that?

-Create narrative descriptions.  Focus on telling the story of what you do, rather than building out a series of generic platitudes.

-Offer real information about how cases progress in your field, including timelines.  You’re not promising results, just offering potential clients an idea about what to expect.

-Answer some common questions that your leads will have.  You know the questions you get most regularly from new clients.  Add answers on your practice area pages.

-Consider search terms, keywords and keyphrases that potential clients will use to search for your practice online, to make your practice area pages more SEO-friendly.

-Add compelling imagery to your pages to increase engagement with your content.

October 20, 2022: Game On!  Motivate Your Team with Data

Lord knows we can all use some extra motivation these days.

Law firms still tend to make most decisions about practice management on an ad hoc basis: What does your gut tell you to do?  But, those attorneys who employ data-driven decisionmaking can gain a tremendous competitive advantage.  But, data isn’t just useful for decisionmaking.

If you keep track of the right data, and generate the right reports, you can use those to motivate your team.  Want people working faster?  Track how much time it takes on average to draft a specific document set, and then try to have your team bring the average time down.  (It’ll help to use document assembly software.)  Want to reduce your accounts receivable?  Track your collection rate, and try to top it each month.  Want more clients?  Monitor your lead close percentage, and try to improve it.  These are just a few examples; but, you can take almost any KPI and turn into a competitive challenge.

It’s called gamification, and it’s a real business principle.

October 14, 2022: The Secret Sauce Is There Is No Secret Sauce: Converting Your Sales Process for the Convenience Economy

There is likely a mentor in your past who told you to make sure that you don’t give away the farm when talking to potential clients.  The idea is to leave them wanting more.

That’s bad advice. 

If you leave legal consumers wanting more in 2022, they will go find another attorney.

The fact is, even without the emergence of the coronavirus, the convenience economy was coming in hot anyway.  In the convenience economy, a lack of information is just one more reason to find another service provider.

In the context of legal consumers, if a potential client is willing to have a conversation with you, that means that the lead wants to hire you: You just have to give them a reason to do so.  But, withholding will not help.  Legal consumers have very little idea about what lawyers actually do.  So, talking with potential clients about the legal process, and helping them to understand what the next steps would be in a representation are essential to converting clients.  In fact, it’s one of the most important things you can do with respect to your intake process.  And, it’s one of the reasons why lawyers focus so heavily on content marketing.  The notion that a lead will be dissuaded from using your services if you tell them too much doesn’t hold water.  What are they going to do – get a law degree and prosecute their own case?  In point of fact, the more you tell your potential clients, the harder it sounds to do what you do -- the more trust you’ll generate between you and your lead, and the more that potential client will buy into you being the right choice for providing legal services.

There are a bunch of so-called ‘truths’ about law practice management that just aren’t viable for a modern law practice – if they ever were.

October 04, 2022: Convenience Store: Why Your Law Firm Needs to Be Different Now

Even as the coronavirus, resultant lockdowns, and their after-effects continue to press every sector of society, lawyers continue to respond to what they hope is a blip.  Only, it’s not a blip.

But, that has very little to do with COVID-19.  The pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already occurring.  The ‘convenience economy’ has been accelerating for some time, but is raging now.  Think about all the things you can buy and do from the comfort of your own home.  There is a reason streaming services and home delivery have ratcheted up massively of late; and, consider that Amazon and Netflix have not been felled by demand for virtual options, as have so many other traditional institutions -- it’s because the infrastructure was already there, due to already-existing consumer demand.  Software design, launch and management is now about reducing steps and promoting automation, including via machine learning.

So, ask yourself: Does your law firm operate on the same principles?  Are your services ‘convenient’ for legal consumers to use?  Most attorneys can’t answer that question in the affirmative.  And, if your law firm is one of those, you should not be asking yourself how you can improve over what another attorney in town is doing, but how you can more closely align to what Amazon is doing.

. . .

If you’re searching for ways to deliver more convenient service options to your clients, we can help.

The Westchester Bar Association offers DISCOUNTED law practice management consulting services through Red Cave Law Firm Consulting.                                    

To access consulting services, visit this website, and start running your law firm like a business.