Marketing Ideas For Small Law Firms – When you own and operate your own law firm, it’s not enough to be a great lawyer – you also need financial, marketing, management, HR and sales skills to run a successful small firm like business. If you want to intimately understand how to grow a law firm, it’s important that you keep the right relationships, legal techniques and practices in place. Unless you can get a business degree en route to your J.D., there’s a lot you need to brush up to successfully scale your law firm.
There’s plenty of merit in figuring things out as you go along, but when your growing law firm is at stake, it’s imperative that you do everything in your power to avoid costly mistakes and minimize your firm’s liability. From conducting market and financial research to protecting yourself from potential lawsuits and compliance violations, we’ve covered the basics you need to start planning your law firm’s expansion.
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Before you take any decisive steps toward expansion, you need to gather information to ensure that your growth strategy can sustain your business.
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Your law firm’s growth plan should be like a business plan. This means having similar sections covering your mission and objectives, analysis of the market, financial projections, organizational overview, and business development or marketing plan.
Even if you’ve made it through your company’s initial launch without a business plan, it’s worth pausing to create one before trying to scale. According to a 2010 study by Palo Alto Software and the University of Oregon (the most recent on the topic), 64% of entrepreneurs with a business plan were able to grow their business, compared to only 43% of those without.
Furthermore, in a McKinsey & Company survey of nearly 800 executives, among respondents who were happy with their companies’ strategic development, 79% expressed their satisfaction with the company’s use of a formal planning process. More than half of those whose company did not have a formal plan said they were dissatisfied with the resulting strategy.
In addition to improving success, a formal business growth plan can also help you avoid common growth pitfalls. A well-planned strategy can prevent mistakes such as:
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Finally, a business plan can significantly improve a company’s ability to obtain outside funding, which is often needed to pay the upfront costs of a major expansion effort. According to the same study by Palo Alto and the University of Oregon, startups with a business plan were 2.5 times more successful in raising investment capital than those without one.
Whether you are updating your existing business plan or creating a new growth plan from scratch, these are the key elements to include in your business growth plan:
In a business plan, an executive summary describes the company’s history, its key founders, the company’s primary mission and goals, and its unique service offerings relative to the similar services market in your area.
In your growth plan, your executive summary serves as a “snapshot” of your organization’s current iteration, along with how you got here and plan to take the organization to its next stage of growth.
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You need to make sure there is enough demand for your services in your target market to support the growth of your law firm. Market analysis, whether part of a business plan or a growth plan, helps a business owner survey the landscape of their industry, identify business opportunities, and create a strategy to capture market share.
In the initial launch plan, financial projections are used to demonstrate how the company will make a profit, how much it will cost to run the business, and how the profits will be reinvested for future growth.
When writing the financial projections for your growth plan, the financial justifications for growth are similar to those used to justify starting a business.
Many law firms are fortunate to have a steady flow of clients without much activity in the practice. That said, going into expansion without a proactive strategy to find and convert new clients is unwise.
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“Business development” is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of client acquisition and management efforts, including marketing, advertising and sales. We break down the key elements of a successful law firm business development strategy further below.
Whether you choose to write an executive summary or you choose a more general format, setting topline goals for your company’s growth is the first step in planning your expansion.
Along with a brief summary of your company’s history and key stakeholders, your executive summary should provide a general description of your company’s mission, values, and your plans for future growth. Everything you mention in this section will be detailed in the body of the plan, so the executive summary can act as an elevator pitch for your growing company.
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When determining the mission and goals you have for your company, take the time to assess what you want to achieve on a personal level by expanding your company.
Many of these goals will not be achieved as your company grows – for example, most employers handle at least some administrative tasks until their company is large enough to justify hiring an office manager. Having a clear sense of your personal ideals will help you create a plan that not only serves your company, but also your goals as an employer.
To confidently invest in your expansion, you need a clear picture of your advantages, disadvantages, constraints and opportunities. Market analysis is the place to gather all this research and interpret it in a way that can be turned into strategy.
Companies without advance planning grow like villages; You want to grow into a well-planned, well-designed city with a clear grid system and plenty of room for future expansion. Small adjustments to your initial growth can help you keep your organization’s future open-ended and ensure that your processes and systems are capable of expanding along with your company.
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Growth-minded employers approach hiring differently than those whose goal is only to fill a position. For example, hiring an assistant with administrative skills but no management ability will be a challenge when it comes time to expand your non-legal departments.
It is essential to hire people who have the opportunity to grow and develop. Periods of rapid growth often bring obstacles and unpredictability that require employees to be good problem solvers and competent leaders, even if they are not in traditional leadership roles. To scale effectively, you need employees who can step into new roles as both they and the company grow.
Thinking ahead about what your company structure will look like at five, ten, twenty, and fifty employees will help you lay the foundation for seamless transitions in your growth. By planning a management structure that is balanced across all sizes, you can avoid having to reorganize and reassign managers and responsibilities every time your organization grows in size.
See our section on Defining and Managing Roles for more advice on how to create a management blueprint for your growing organization.
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Not all systems are suitable for companies of every size. For example, manually calculating all employee and company expenses each month may work when you only have a few employees, but an expense management platform that can perform audits and generate reports automatically can be a viable system in your company’s growth.
Again, thinking ahead about what systems your organization needs at different sizes will help you develop processes that can easily adjust to your company’s growth. In addition to improved efficiency and reduced friction, leveraging systems can also help your bottom line: Clio’s 2020 Legal Trends report found that in 2019, law firms that used client portals charged $16,556 more per attorney than firms that did not have an online client management system. .
Management structures differ from company to company, but most organizations’ organizational charts follow the same basic format of dividing the organization into legal, non-legal, and part-time or contract departments.
As you hire, pay attention to the balance of your organizational chart and be aware of the imbalance that can occur when you hire too many people in one area without getting the mutual support needed in other areas of the organization. When any particular contract or part-time department is too large, crunch the numbers to see if it might be wise to bring the department in-house and pay someone to run it full-time.
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Your legal department consists of lawyers and paralegals. As your firm grows, you may want to divide this department into different practice areas to avoid any confusion regarding case coverage among attorneys.
The key is to make sure someone can see the organizational chart to identify each employee’s manager, direct reports, and area.
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