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What does it mean to have an international deposition? This simply means that the witness will be in a foreign country. However, in this new virtual reality we're in, there are new challenges and components that we didn't have to deal with before. Between juggling the complexities of international depositions, paired with the logistical and tactical struggles of video conferencing, you will have a lot on your plate.
As you begin navigating this process, there are some basic steps you should be taking that will hopefully make your depositions run as smoothly as possible. Let's check them out.
Leading up to an international deposition, it is recommended that 4-6 weeks prior to the deposition date, you determine whether the witness is even willing to be deposed and immediately begin coordinating with the opposing counsel.
If you have a good working relationship with the opposing counsel, the first thing you should be trying to check off your list is a mutual stipulation with the opposing counsel so that the depositions can move forward. You should be stipulating that:
This is extremely important because court reporters only operate in the country and or state where they are certified and registered, even domestically.
What happens if opposing counsel is not cooperative? There are a number of options that we will touch on at a high-level:
Now that you have talked to opposing counsel, hopefully, they are cooperative, the next step is to decide what country the deposition is going to take place in. There are a few red flags we want to draw your attention to with this.
The UK and Hong Kong are the most common locations for international depositions, but if you hear countries like Germany and Japan, those are extremely difficult to operate through and if you hear countries like Brazil or Russia, they do not allow US depositions to take place. A lot of the European countries that are in the EU are underneath the Hague Convention and generally follow the same rules. Please do your due diligence here because these rules do apply differently to citizens of those countries, versus non-citizens.
Remember that Covid considerations do apply to all depositions and meetings. Check out Our World in Data for up-to-date information on which countries are open, which countries will allow your team, opposing counsel, and or the court reporter to travel.
Now that you have your country, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel regarding all the logistics surrounding the deposition, you must then determine where specifically the deposition will take place.
Much like a remote deposition here in the US, you have to decide the following:
If the deposition must take place at the Consulate, it is recommended to start making those arrangements at least 6 weeks out.
With remote depositions, even domestically, regardless of where the witness will be during that deposition, you must test the equipment they will be using on the day of the deposition. And to go one step further, you need to make sure they have a working and reliable internet connection.
Whatever video conferencing platform you choose to use, your team needs to ensure that it has the capability to incorporate international phone numbers. This is important because if the internet connection is poor, and the bandwidth cannot sustain the meeting, the witness must have an option to call in and have video only.
Any video remote depositions do require a certain internet bandwidth speed, so again, please conduct your tech tests and be prepared.
At this point, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel, you know the country, you’ve pinpointed an exact location of where your witness will be, you have all your equipment tested, next, you need to know what deposition services will be required.
To start, you need a court reporter, as mentioned previously, are you going to stipulate with opposing counsel that the court reporter be the one to swear in the witness remotely?
Will you have a videographer? Now, there is a common misperception with this element. Most online conferencing platforms have the ability to record meetings. But if that recording is taken on your own, it is not certified. Not to mention opposing counsel may not approve or allow it. So if you’d like the deposition recorded, you do need a certified videographer who can do the video recording remotely. This is a highly encouraged practice for international depositions and locally-based ones as well.
Do you need an interpreter? If so, what language(s) do they need to be able to speak, do they have all the necessary and properly tested equipment?
Next, you need to think about your exhibits. What exhibit platform are you going to use? Are you going to show your exhibits by sharing your screen? Some conferencing platforms will let you share you exhibits by chat, so is that something you would consider using? Additionally, how, when, and to who will you submit your exhibits to? Take time to get all these answers organized.
Following these considerations, the next step for your team is to prepare and send your deposition notice with all the assets and people you’re requesting for the deposition. It’s best practice to always indicate that this will be remote and by video conference. You also may want to take this opportunity to identify any other unique aspects of the deposition.
It is important to send out your notice to the agency you are going to use to arrange your court reporter, as soon as possible. If there is an issue in terms of stipulations, you may need, for example, a notary in that country and that process takes time to coordinate. Any logistics internationally presume will take at least a week longer than in the states.
It’s deposition time! Make sure you have the time correctly marked in your calendar, and everyone is on the same page in terms of time zones.
When it begins, it will flow like a normal domestic deposition, just keep in mind any other additional considerations or international rules that you have to follow.
Whether you’re working with an agency that specializes in international depositions or not, be prepared and do your homework. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to schedule and coordinate everything so that you have time to make adjustments if need be.
Today’s reality looks something like this: we wake up slightly later because the longest commute we now face is walking from our bathrooms to the kitchen. Dogs barking in the background, kids running in the background, and a home office set-up that would make Office Depot proud.
Working from home is our reality and although we have quickly adapted to this change, some industries face hurdles that far outweigh others.
Unfortunately, the legal industry is not exempt from the hardships that work from home has caused. Sure we have telephones and Slack and other means of communication, but by removing the element of face-to-face interactions, we have also removed a certain element of humanity. Your clients are stressed more often than not and now that we are forced apart, how do we bridge that connectivity gap? How do we create an environment of togetherness and empathy even if we are miles away from each other?
This dilemma carries into the courtroom as well. And arguably, it is harder to get away with the virtual nature of the work you conduct because a courtroom relies on this element of connectivity. But if you exchange your courtroom nuances with that of a screen, what do you get? Will the results be the same as they would if you were there in person? The goal is for that answer to be yes. And we are here to help.
So let’s talk about one dilemma that many attorneys face and that is “how do we manage exhibits in a virtual courtroom?”
Going to court looks different and because of this, the processes and procedures we may have followed at one point now have changed.
In this virtual world, there are some steps you should follow when moving an exhibit in. Take a look:
Each court and each judge has different requirements when it comes to how, when, and to whom you need to submit your exhibits.
Most still require you to submit your exhibits to the clerk, but you can guarantee that they will be required to be sent in a virtual format by a specific deadline prior to your hearing or trial.
Some require a courtesy copy of those exhibits to be sent to the judge through the JA. So you want to make sure you know and understand where the exhibits need to go and in what format they need to be in. Do they need to be in a PDF format, do photos need to be JPEGs? You have to make sure you are understanding the requirements.
Some require the exhibits to be submitted through an online portal. Ultimately, you want to make sure that the first thing you know and understand is “how,” to submit exhibits, what format those exhibits are expected to be submitted in, and to whom those exhibits need to be submitted to.
This should go without saying, but do not miss your deadline. If this happens, that could result in a delay of your hearing or trial.
Once you have this covered, guess what? The rest of it is almost the same!
If you know how to move an exhibit in court, you know how to move an exhibit in on Zoom. That doesn’t change. The medium does not change the process for moving in an exhibit. Your exhibit still has to be relevant, related, and right.
Your exhibit needs to be relevant, meaning it proves or disproves a fact of consequence.
They have to be reliable, meaning they are either not hearsay, or there is an applicable hearsay exception.
And they have to be right, meaning as in not prejudicial.
Once those three things exist, you’re going to go through the same “do,” “how,” “what” process.
Do you recognize it? How do you recognize it? What is it?
And then the remainder of the predicate depends on what type of exhibit you are moving in. However, in this virtual world, there are some things you do have to do differently.
You no longer have to say “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense exhibit A for identification purposes.” Why? Because you’re not actually making that movement in the courtroom where you’d need the court reporter to document it.
What you do need to say is “I’m putting up on the screen, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes,” so that your court reporter still can take down the exhibit and make sure that it is a part of your record.
When you are doing the logistics of moving the exhibit in, you also do not have to ask to approach the witness. This sounds fundamental, but you will be surprised. Because you have been doing it for so long in a certain manner over and over again, the first time you have to do it in this virtual setting can feel very weird. You’re going to want to say, “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes. Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” You don’t have to do any of that. But you do still want to make it clear for your record, what you’re doing and what exhibit you're handling. You can ask the witness to go to what’s been marked as Exhibit A, and they can now pull it up in whatever format it is that they have it in.
When it comes to formatting for your witness, your judge, or even the opposing council, we suggest using a PDF document that you can bookmark. And you bookmark it in the order you want to proceed in. In an ideal world, your exhibit list matches the order you intend to introduce your exhibits in trial.
No one lives in that type of ideal world. It almost always gets reordered once you do your trial notebook, and you start doing your questions.
So what you want to do is make sure your final PDF is bookmarked in the order you want to introduce the exhibits in. Doing this will make it easier for your client who is going to be your witness. It also makes it easier for the judge to follow because when it is a bookmarked PDF, the judge can just click on the bookmark and it automatically takes them to that exhibit. It is also recommended to put the exhibit letter, or a virtual exhibit sticker on the appropriate PDF pages themselves to keep them organized. Some ways you can do this include inserting a footer or by using the bate stamps feature that is in PDF.
Your organization is what becomes key in this virtual setting. And as we mentioned before, moving the exhibit in and the trial skills associated have not changed, the process has. Your clerk, your witnesses, and the judge all need to know what you’re talking about, so this organization is paramount.
When you are getting ready to use the exhibit, you’re going to have to share your screen. Prior to doing so, you have to ask the judge’s permission to do that. In some cases, the judge will explicitly say that the council has permission to share their screen when necessary.
When getting ready to share your screen, your exhibits should still satisfy the “Billboard Test.” There are a number of ways to be able to use exhibits and do presentations in this virtual setting. Powerpoint is going to be the most common default presentation application for most attorneys. If you choose to operate from PowerPoint, you do not want a million words on each slide. You want to satisfy the Billboard Test. What is the Billboard Test you may ask? When you’re driving down the street and you see a billboard, it has all the information you need, in large print with no clutter. You can understand who the billboard is about, what the contact information is and you’re able to digest that information in the 2.5 seconds you have to look at that billboard.
You want to apply this same test to your exhibits and your presentations. If you’re using your PowerPoint for your opening, or closing statements, or any other kind of demonstrative situation, make sure it is clear. Make sure they can read it, and don’t put any overwhelming amount of information on it. Er on the side of having more slides with fewer words than condensing the quantity and packing everything you have to say on three slides. If the people on the other side of the presentation cannot quickly read or understand what is on the screen, you’re going to lose them.
Because we are in a virtual environment, you must be able to convey the information that you need to convey in a clear and concise manner. When dealing with an actual exhibit, and in this hypothetical case let’s go with medical records. When you are using these documents, unless you need the entire document, it is suggested to do a call-out. This call-out would work similarly to the way you normally would do a call-out if you were standing at trial in person.
Using this call-out draws the attention to wherever it is you need it to be. You still have to use the entire document in order to get it authenticated and introduced, but when you get ready to actually use the actual exhibit, use the pertinent parts! This will work to cut down clutter, and the person not being able to see or understand where it is you’re coming from.
When it comes to physical and tangible exhibits, you need to submit all physical items to the clerk in order to get it entered. Have a photograph of it, so you can use it and talk about it and everyone can see what you’re talking about. If for whatever reason, the court lets you keep this physical exhibit (they really shouldn’t because if you’re entering this piece as evidence, it needs to go into the court’s virtual file), you should still have photos taken of the item to share electronically throughout the Zoom presentation.
Although our world has changed slightly, life still moves forward, even if not in a way we imagined.
When it comes to your exhibits, make sure they are clearly marked and organized and are being presented in a clear and concise manner. Remember, you should be handling them the same way you would handle them in physical court, you’re merely adjusting how you submit and introduce them.
In, Accounting 101 for Law Firms we discussed how when firms are asked, “How do you want to define growth?” The leading response is always through revenue.
That is great, right?! “Revenue.” We all love this word, it’s great a great way to track performance, but how do you actually track revenue? Is it as easy as simply counting the dollars that come through your door? We wish.
The first thing you need to do is start utilizing KPIs. Your key performance indicators will be your best friends and the figures you need in order to answer the question, “how do I track my firm’s revenue?” It is important to note that these indicators are merely that, indicators. You should use them as a guide and lean on customized reports to really gain valuable insight into the productivity and performance of your firm.
At the end of the day, your firm is a business, so although you have spent 10,000+ hours honing your craft as an attorney or legal professional, you still have to be able to wear that business hat to keep the lights on.
That may sound dreadful, but don’t let the idea of numbers discourage you! These metrics can be used to help you make real-time business decisions that are going to greatly impact the future of your firm.
To jump right in, let’s talk about profit margins. That is how many cents on the dollar are you able to push into your pocket at the end of the day. If it is 35%, that means you get $0.35 of every dollar at the end of the day. Your profit margin can be looked at as your net income divided by your revenue.
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Next, think about how much your time is actually worth, or rather, your average rate billed per hour. This can be calculated over multiple time frames, but make sure the time frames you choose are always the same. So if you’re looking at the total hours billed for the month, don’t divide it by the total hours billed for the quarter. All of your time frames must match, otherwise, you’re comparing apples to oranges. You can calculate this amount by dividing the total hours billed for whatever time period you’re looking at, by the total dollars billed in that same period.
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The next KPI is important: your collection percentage. You work hard week in and week out, and although you may know how many hours you billed each week, do you know how many of those hours you’re actually getting paid on? It is easy to rattle off those initial billable numbers, but the numbers you have to dig for below the surface are much more valuable. So when you’re thinking about your collection percentage, take the total cash you have collected in a time period and divide it by the total dollar amount billed in that time period.
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Some more advanced ratios include things like how much do you spend per timekeeper at your firm? This is very important to look at. All you need to do here is take your total operating expense that you would get from your Profit and Loss statement and divide it by the number of timekeepers at your firm. This is going to give you a really great insight into how much it costs to actually run your business.
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Where it gets interesting is where you can use the figure you calculated from the operating expense per timekeeper to determine if you and your team are working on profitable clients. Profitability by client is huge because as you start to unpack this, you can quickly determine which of your clients truly brings your firm more revenue and which are just eating up your time. Everyone has a few clients where it costs you more to serve them, even though you may have higher billing rates. The problem with this is that most firms do not pinpoint these clients until the work is already done. So, to determine your profitability by client, simply take the fees generated by the client and subtract that estimated cost per timekeeper per hour worked.
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Lastly, are you hitting your targets? Your firm’s utilization is important because the more informed you can be about your productivity, the easier it will be to make decisions on matters like staff expansion. Is an extra timekeeper necessary for your growth or can you manage by simply shifting staff around? How do you determine what the right thing to do is? To calculate this utilization percentage, divide the total billable hours of a timekeeper by their total working hours. This percent may fluctuate throughout the year based on caseload, so it is important to keep your external factors in mind when making considerations for your staff.
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There are many KPIs and reports you can generate and use to monitor and track your firm’s revenue. You don’t have to be a finance buff or accounting expert to do this math, and once you start incorporating it into your weekly or monthly routine, it will become second nature! Until that time, we have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to get a handle on your numbers, so we have created a KPI calculator that you can access here to get you started!
Everyone handles their email inbox differently. Some people have to clear every unread message out at the end of each day, while others let their unread email notifications pile up until there’s no going back. But one thing is for certain, our inboxes today are significantly more overwhelming than they were even just a few years ago.
Before we jump into email management and everything therein, we are going to take a moment to talk about a psychological philosophy called Flow. Essentially, Flow is a state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity. While this is a mental state, it is deeply influenced by psychological, environmental, creative, and social responses.
Your chances of reaching this Flow state are greater when you can first focus on single tasks, as opposed to jumping back and forth between activities. Additionally, having clear goals and immediate feedback play into your ability to reach Flow.
Now you may be asking why we are bringing this up now when we’re supposed to be talking about emails. And we will tell you… Emails are huge disrupters to our Flow state because each email we receive acts as a distraction from our current task. Not only are we interrupted to either respond or read the email, but we are given yet one more thing to focus on. Emails are inevitable. They are a great means to communicate, but if unmanaged, they can quickly spin out of control.
Now that you have a brief background on Flow, everything we discuss moving forward is to help you achieve this level of clarity and productivity through your inbox.
To kick this off, let’s look at some numbers. Did you know that the average office worker receives around 121 emails every workday? Roughly 2.5 hours a day are spent on email, which adds up to about 30% of your workweek! That is insane… Nowhere in your job description does it say you have to spend 30% of your time on email, but this is where we are today.
Three things are significantly impacted by our time spent on email: our mood, our focus, and our to-do list. These three things are both negatively and positively impacted by not only the quantity of virtual mail we receive in a day but the quality as well.
For the past few decades, a lot of studies and work have gone into the science of attention. And because our inbox holds so much of our attention during the day, there are many parallels that can be drawn between our inbox and our phycological response to how we interact with that inbox. Part of why so much our of time is devoted to checking and looking at our email can be attributed to what science calls the Fixed reward vs. the Variable reward system.
Hear us out, this is interesting…
In 1948, a behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner studied what he coined “schedules of reinforcement.” At the time, what Skinner was studying was the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). During this study, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times — say 20 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. So for example, if the rat pressed the level 5 times he would get a reward, and sometimes it would take pressing the lever 150 times to get the reward.
Obviously, the predominant difference between the two schedules of reinforcement was this aspect of predictability. Prior to the conclusion of the study, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, what Skinner found was that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats that were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a considerable time longer.
So, what do food pellets have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like trying to get the pellet rewards. Most of it is junk and the equivalent of pulling the lever and getting nothing in return, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news, some watercooler talk, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or maybe just an important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. See where we are going?
We are feeling science-y today, so along the lines of this psychological response also comes what is called completion bias. By spending a third of our time on email, it feels like we are being productive, after all, it is our “work-inbox.” Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. We convince ourselves that we are being productive by checking this work-inbox but really we aren’t producing anything at all, instead, we are being reactive- responding to the needs of whatever the senders are requesting of you. As a result, we spend a tremendous amount of time on short-term priorities that get in the way of completing the bigger tasks on our lists. All of this has resulted in one thing: multitasking. As professionals, we have gotten good at multitasking, which if you think about it, is somewhat of an oxymoron because no one is truly good at multitasking.
Research shows that when we are deeply engrossed in an activity, even minor distractions, like an email, can have a profound effect. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes! And that’s after only one interruption… you get where are going with this.
No matter how good you are at playing Tetris, blocks will continue to come, and they will speed up over time. No one has ever won a game of Tetris, and email is the same way, no matter how good you are at clearing the messages, they will not only continue to come, but they will also increase in frequency year after year.
The Solution: You have to change your mindset. You have to use the right tools to be able to consistently keep your emails at a manageable level and you have to set limits and boundaries around when you choose to interact and not interact with your inbox.
For way too many of us, email has become this default, number 1 priority. You wake up and check your inbox. You get to the office and check your inbox. And the problem with this is that your email acts as a to-do list that other people add to. So what happens is other people’s priorities become your own.
The Solution: Scan your inbox for important and or otherwise urgent emails, then close your inbox. You can do this first thing in the morning, or really any time you want, but the key is to scan and then get out. Next, block a 30-60 minute appointment slot every day for “email time.” This is time you designate to spend in your inbox because you say so, not because someone else is requesting something from you. Now depending on the number of emails you receive every day, that time can fluctuate, but the point is that you are setting the time, it shouldn’t be dictated by anyone else. When you get sucked into your inbox, take a minute and ask yourself, is this the best use of your time? Most of the time, it isn’t, so give yourself that moment to decide for yourself.
Each email commands the same real estate in your inbox, whether it is from the CEO or spam. There are really three types of emails, the unimportant noise, the important and urgent emails, and the important but not urgent emails.
The Solution: Delete and archive all the noise in bulk, handle the important and urgent emails in the moment, and then defer the important but non-urgent emails to your designated email time.
Inbox zero is a method for continually getting to zero emails in your inbox every day. How you can do this is by categorizing your emails into five action buckets.
All the noise: newsletters, updates, weekly emails, should be deleted in bulk. You should be giving very minimal time to these emails. The quick fix emails, emails that can be taken care of in 2 minutes or less, can fall into the three middle categories of deferring, delegate, and responding.
When you defer, that simply means moving it out of your inbox into a separate folder. You can create a folder, whether you call it a deferred folder or your snoozed folder, the idea is to just move emails out of your main inbox. Delegating an email(s) simply means you’re forwarding it to someone else on your team who is more suited to answer the specific question or request, and to respond, is well, you respond.
The last bucket, “Do,” are the emails that require more of your time and attention. They are emails that need work or are related to various projects you have on your plate. These are the emails that should be remaining in your inbox that should be worked on throughout your day until a resolution is met. You can prioritize them further by flagging or starring them to ensure they don’t get overlooked.
If your email is on the longer side, highlight keywords or sentences in bold. This will make your reader’s job easier and you’ll be a more efficient communicator. It is important here to not bold too much and don’t use all caps because people associate that with yelling.
You deal with more sensitive information than most professional people do. Because of this, the legal industry is hit with a lot of security breaches that leave lasting impacts on not only your clients but your firm.
If you’re using the same password for multiple online services, if one of those services gets hacked, that means there’s a good chance that all of them have been compromised. The solution to this is to use individual passwords that are not associated with anything in your day-to-day life. And we know that can be tough to keep up with, so utilize services like 1Password to help you create and then store all your passwords for each of your accounts.
Mistakes happen! Wrong email addresses can be attached, misspelled names or titles, etc. Give yourself a chance to proof-read the email prior to hitting that send button. Every email interface typically works from the top-down. You fill out the recipient, then the subject, message, and any related attachments. Instead of working this way, try the reverse. Add your attachments first, then write your message, fill in your subject line, and then once all of this is complete add your recipient(s). Doing this will help mitigate some of those human errors that we are all prone to make!
Putting a call to action in your subject line will not only get your email read faster, but there is a greater chance the recipient will interact with it. Additionally, the more specific your subject line is, the easier it will be to search for it later on.
Often times, it becomes a reflex to unsubscribe from emails that are either spam or considered irrelevant and otherwise unnecessary for you to be receiving. What happens if you unsubscribe from senders with compromised integrity, is you’ve exposed yourself as 1. Being human, and 2. A human who cares about their inbox. This is a spammer’s best-case scenario. Instead, either move these to a designated spam folder or bulk delete them.
Email is a great medium for close-ended questions, not open-ended ones. Emails ending with, “Thoughts?” Is a strong signal that that email should either be a phone conversation or even an in-person one. Knowing what is appropriate to send via email and what is not will save you time during your day and will keep those email distractions to a minimum. Conversely, email is great for unambiguous communication, where decisive answers or choices can be made.
If you’re working with a practice management software, some platforms will let you save emails directly to matters from Microsoft Outlook, or let you find emails based on any email property including subject, sent/received date, or email content. With the ability to connect your email correspondence directly to the appropriate matter, you are keeping all your communications matter centric. Having all your communication related to particular matters in one place helps keep your team efficient, in sync, and organized.
Sometimes it is easy to forget that emails constitute billable time. If you are working, responding, and communicating with your clients, you should be getting paid for that. Technology is advanced enough today to allow you to automatically create a billing entry every time you send an email to your client or create billing entries from your inbox as you’re reviewing emails. Not every software allows you to do this, but the technology is available and with reason- it will help you make and collect the money you deserve!
Phase 1: The Declutter Phase
Creating folders that are labeled for old mail and dragging everything into those folders on a regular basis. Train unwanted emails to go into that folder and if you have time, delete those old emails and make sure relevant emails correspond to the matters they relate to. Delegate emails when necessary and don’t get distracted with the longer, more project-based requests.
Phase 2: The Organization Phase
This is where you figure out how much time you’re going to give yourself and set limits and boundaries on how much time you are willing and able to spend going through your inbox. Avoid mindlessly checking your email when you’re not in a dedicated place to respond or think about next steps. The best way to fall behind with your inbox is to start checking your email while you’re in line at a grocery store, get distracted by the cashier, and then completely forget about that email entirely. So stop doing that! Set numeric goals of how many emails you want left in your inbox at the end of the day. Inbox zero may not always be possible for everyone, so set goals to keep you on track and accountable.
Phase 3: Email Zen and Flow Phase
You now have a clear set of rules to follow, you don’t leave your email open, you don’t get distracted with emails outside of your designated email time, and you’re able to put more focused time back into your day for billable activities.
If your firm doesn’t have a proper intake process, you could be losing a lot of billable time working on administrative and organizational tasks. In, Business Development 101: Online Communication Strategies to Increase Your Billable Hours we discussed how properly utilizing the various communication forms (phone, email, text, and website) can make a huge impact on your productivity and future revenue generation.
Today, we are going to dive deeper into the client intake process and learn how you can not only improve your process but retain better clients.
To start, let’s do a little refresher on how potential new clients are handled.
Potential clients can be handled by you and your in-house staff or through remote and virtual services like paralegals, bookkeepers, and receptionists.
With software, you have access to resources like call routing and tracking, client intake automation, and calendaring management. All of these tools exist for you to reach as many people as possible with the least amount of leg work.
When you think about the form and function of the content and materials that you use to draw in PNCs, you need a combination of human and machine intelligence.
For the human intelligence side, ask yourself these questions:
How you handle these questions all contribute to your firm’s brand. Not to mention the answers also set the tone for the initial impression you give a PNC.
On the other hand, machine intelligence is necessary to take care of the monotonous, orgnizational tasks. Consider these questions:
Where the human intelligence is used to capture emotion and connection, the machine intelligence is used to speed up your back end logistics and take away some of the manual labor involved in capturing new leads.
Combined effectively, you will achieve fast, friendly, and accurate responses from PNCs which will lead to more qualified leads and a better experience for new clients. If you can keep them happy off the bat, you’re one step ahead of the game. Not to mention, if your current clients are satisfied, they are more likely to refer friends and family.
Now that you have a firmer grasp on contact methods, let’s take a look at lead sources. Referrals make up a large source of new clients for firms, but what about cold leads? Where are those people coming from? Let’s take a look:
Now, once a lead has contacted you, spoken to whomever you have in charge of the response methods (whether the response is via a receptionist service, in-house, or directly from an attorney), you qualify that the lead is ready for a consultation, your next step should be scheduling a meeting to collect more information.
This process looks different for firm-to-firm, but at its core, you need to be able to track data efficiently and access it whenever you need it from wherever you are. We have created a great downloadable checklist attached to this blog for you to use as a guide, however, here is a high-level framework outlining what you should be tracking (at a minimum):
Now if you decide this person is not a good potential client, are you making referrals systematically? Referring out clients who are not a good fit with your firm not only highlights your good will, but it also gives you an opportunity to inform people of what your firm does so that in the future they can call reconnect with you. Additionally, if you refer clients to other firms in your area, they will be more likely to reciprocate that business when a PNC who isn’t a great fit for them walks through their doors. Huge takeaway here - don’t underestimate the power of a good first impression.
Set up your phone so you’re not using your personal cell phone number. A huge push back for texting clients is the lack of privacy. Although you would like to be available for your clients 24/7, you don’t necessarily want to give them access to your personal information.
Some software offer services where they will provide you with your own private number. Through this you will have the ability to track text and call communications that will automatically be converted into billable events for you.
Once you have a private work number set up and ready, make sure you establish a professional greeting and menu. If a PNC calls you and wants to leave a message, that voice recording is the first form of communication they will experience with you. Don’t set a bad tone with an unreputable sounding recording.
Next, consider blocking spam calls. In today’s age where solicitors are around every virtual corner, it is important to protect your number as much as possible. You have no idea when or off what number PNCs will call you from, so if you have spam calls blowing up your phone in between client calls, this is a problem.
Keep in mind that PNCs have no boundaries when it comes to respecting your time. So make sure your phone is routed during holidays, vacations, schedule adjustments, and any times throughout the day when you are not available. You will miss out on PNCs if you do not have an action plan to capture their calls or messages when you are unavailable. Also consider having a separate after hours voicemail. For these messages, ask for more specific information and give them a time frame for when you will get back to them. This will encourage a relationship versus a one-off missed call. But, if you promise a call back during a specific window you better keep your word. Nothing will lose you a new client faster than unreliability.
Lastly, track performance! Where did the calls originate from? Did the source yield high quality leads? This information may not seem important in the immediate, but it is. Track this information so you know where your clients are coming from. Having this information will help you determine where to spend your advertising and marketing dollars. The best way to increase non referral based leads is to hone in on target demographic and geographic information. Additionally, know how many answered and missed calls you have. Monitor the number of rings it takes to pick up and keep note of the duration of your calls. It is also important that you have call recordings for performance monitoring. Track what goes well and things that don’t. Your first job is to be an attorney, but your second has to be a business person.
The very first step here, and this is incredibly important, is to have your criteria identified. First think about who the potential clients are that you really want and maybe also the clients you have worked with in the past that you want to avoid. Additionally, who are the clients you missed? Who are the PNCs that you wished you had captured sooner or the people who may have not experienced your best foot forward.
Use this thought process to identify the criteria and systematically put in place either a form or a list of questions which you can then use to screen PNCs. When you determine if the PNC will make a good fit, implement workflows for qualified leads and incorporate new-client call-back or appointment procedures. Think about what form these call-backs will take place in, do you prefer phone call or email, and will you have a template for what you say that will encourage these people to use the most detail in their response?
For initial meetings, determine the policy on consultations. How long will they be? Twenty minutes? An hour? Will you charge for them? What format would you like to host them in? All of these details should be ironed out prior to speaking with anyone. Obviously customer service is important so if you have to make a special accommodation for someone, make it happen! You have no idea who they could be connected to or who they know, so always lead with kindness and consideration. It is important to note here that everyone has a different comfort level, video is very intimate, but not everyone is comfortable with it. Also keep in mind that some video software requires the users to download the app (like Skype). That is not always convenient for people who are either not very tech savvy or who simply don’t want to download it. If you are to conduct in-person consults, consider the time you will lose in the commute and any potential traffic delays or last minute schedule conflicts that could occur.
We all know that attorneys charge for a finite number of billable hours each day, so ensure you’re utilizing your time by automating the monotonous outbound tasks. For example, if you have people completing a contact form on your website, you can automatically forward those to the appropriate team members so that the call-back communication happens immediately. Set up workflows to make data collection and tracking easier for you.
Following lead capture, begin completing the client intake process. Before you begin, it would be prudent of you to ask them how they heard about you or your firm. This is valuable data! Don’t overlook it. (Your marketing team can thank us later)
Depending on your firm, your intake process may occur before or after booking your first appointment. And similarly to Step 2, identify the required questions you will ask and standardize this process across your firm. Aim for 5-10 questions and make it easy for these individuals to fill out the information.
Some software today will allow you to customize your intake form and when a PNC fills it out and submits it, the information will automatically populate in your system. Not only is this process efficient, but it is professional and allows you to capture the specific information that is pertinent to your firm.
The most efficient and effective way to book appointments is by having a public-facing booking page directly on your website. The idea is to remove the amount of barriers between when a PNC first reaches out to you and when they become a client. Integrate this calendar with your own and make sure once a client submits a time that you are sending them the subsequent next-step information that they need. The sooner you can get this information to the client after they hit “schedule,” the more likely it is that they will not only be on time, but that they will come prepared.
Utilize technology to also trigger workflows for your staff. Once a PNC requests a booking time, what does that mean for your staff? What needs to be done in preparation and who will be involved?
As mentioned in Step 2, consider whether or not you’re going to charge a PNC for the consultation. The upsides to a paid consult include: reduced no shows and more guarantee that the person is a fit for your firm. However, some people see the cost and may raise an eyebrow. These are all things for your firm to consider, there is no right answer!
If you generate a list of PNCs who are not a great fit for you, but could be for another firm, utilize that to your advantage! However, some state Bar rules will not allow you to monetize referrals, so make sure you review the rules before getting started.
Your firm should have an implemented process for “bad” leads. Think back to potential client qualification criteria and use that to identify unqualified leads to save your time. Make a list of all attorneys and firms you recommend by practice area and share that list with your staff or receptionist service including instructions for identifying the correct firm to recommend to the “bad” leads. This could be based on location, practice area or cost. Think of referring “bad” leads as a service. Systematically earn good will in the community and educate future potential clients and referral sources.
As much as possible, integrate as many of your communications into your existing practice management software as possible. Every text and call should be logged with pre and post consult notes. Activity logs on new appointments need to be documented, and triggered workflows should be assigned as action steps for your staff as a PNC flows through your intake process.
Use project and document management tools to integrate your emails and documents into your system seamlessly and automatically. With some software, you have the ability to build out document templates that can be automatically populated with new PNC information. This not only saves you time but reduces human error as well.
Having robust records of everyone you talk to will not only allow your firm to improve your intake strategy, but pinpoint what is working well for you so that you can continue capitalizing on it.
Now that you have all this information, utilize the attached outline to start solidifying and building your intake process. Define what will be standardized across your firm and make it as easy as possible for PNCs to retain your firm!
When firms are asked, “How do you want to define growth,” the leading response is always through revenue. This response consistently outranks growing a larger client base, expanding staff or hiring more attorneys, and adding more practice areas or geographical locations.
However, not every firm is growing. Today, there are three groups of law firms in the industry that are actively working on open matters. Those are firms that are growing, firms that are stable, and firms that are shrinking. The biggest hurdle that solo, small, and even medium firms are facing is finding billable work. In a typical 8 hr workday, most law firms have trouble billing more than 2.5 hours of work per day (we call this utilization rate, this is important for later). And even then, once the actual bill goes out, firms are only collecting about 1.7 hours worth of billed time. So, not only are firms having a hard time finding and focusing on billable work, but they’re having a hard time collecting on the time they do bill.
A firm’s utilization rate is calculated by dividing the number of billable hours by the number of hours in your workday day. So for example, if you’re billing 4.3 hours of work in an 8-hour workday, your utilization rate is 54%. When we look at the utilization rates of each of the three types of firms, this is what we see: stable firm’s utilization rates stay very similar throughout the course of time. Growing firms are experiencing increased utilization rates, meaning they are finding more time they can bill for, while conversely shrinking firms face lower and lower percentages over the course of time. The takeaway here is there’s a paradox that is happening between law firms and growth, and it’s something the industry needs to figure out how to tackle.
Before we jump in, it is important to note that you’re not supposed to know everything we cover in this blog. If you do great! But if not, that is okay, you’re lawyers, not accountants. However, as a business owner or as someone heavily involved with the revenue projections and future evaluations, it is important that you have a foundational concept to improve your firm.
A third of an average attorneys day is spent doing what makes them money. So that means a whole ⅔ is spent on tasks that don’t bring in money, really think about that. The problem with this is that the industry has seemed to settle. These rates have become normal and standard and because of that, we have seen little change. But the real problem stems from the fact that we cannot manage what we do not measure.
Let’s go through some basic accounting terms that everyone should be familiar with:
Some common questions that come up include:
Financial statements are typically structured by columns and rows, with comparative periods, and the overarching reason we use them is to tell better stories. The accuracy to which you can tell your firm’s story relies solely on your record keeping. Your chart of accounts is a list of categories to record business transactions. The transactions recorded within these categories are listed in detail on your general ledger. Financial statements summarize those details entered in your general ledger. The basic elements of a chart of accounts is the account name, account number (if used), the account type, and balance. The right chart of accounts is so vital because it will provide a picture on your financial statements of your firm’s financial health.
Now that you have all this information, the next question you may be asking is why is this important to me and my firm? Why do we even need these things?
Of course, law firm’s are businesses, and financial statements provide the best way to manage a business. Oftentimes, we see firms who do not have heavy experience with accounting or finances turn a blind eye to the numbers because they simply do not know how to use them. And with accounting particularly, it is second nature for people to shift the ownership of the task versus jumping head first into doing it. If your firm’s number one priority is to grow revenue, how are you tracking that? Are you setting targets? How are you measuring your progress?
Your profit margin essentially illustrates (by percentage) how many cents on the dollar are being generated for your business. And this can be determined by dividing your net income (income after taxes) by your income.
If you have multiple practice areas within your firm, you may be tempted to blend your profit margins together. It is best practice to keep these margins separate between practice types to provide you with a better picture. Bad numbers have incredible power to give you bad advice. You could have one practice area that is considerably underperforming, but if you’re blending your margins, it would be unlikely that you would be able to see that. Without that information, you would have no idea where to best shift your resources to either continue bolstering your more profitable areas of practice, supplement the areas that are falling behind, or even eliminate an area that continues to be unprofitable.
This data on your balance sheet shows the assets, liabilities and owner’s equity at a specific point in time for your firm.
Types of assets include:
Liabilities include:
Lastly, equity is synonymous with net worth. It is the ownership interest in a business. It includes:
When all is said and done, your assets must equal your liabilities plus the ownership’s equity. If they don’t there is something wrong.
It is important to note that although equity and debt are ways to fund your business, both are vastly different in the way they affect your business’ financial health. When using equity, you are either giving away future earnings or purchasing future earnings of the business. When using debt, your business borrows from another party, with the condition that it is to be paid back, usually with interest, at a later date. When taking on debt, you are assuming that you will be able to pay it back within a certain period of time, but you are also taking on the risk of default.
By looking at the balance sheet, you can quickly identify your current cash on hand, as well as what your firm currently owes to its creditors.
On your balance sheet, your IOLTA cash is represented both as an asset (IOLTA bank account) and a liability (client retainer liability). These funds belong to your clients and should never touch your operating account or profit and loss statement until you actually earn that money. IOLTA accounts are heavily regulated and the misuse of these funds could potentially cause a multitude of problems for you and your firm, up to and including disbarment. Because of this, IOLTA accounts and the balancing client retainer liability accounts have a unique place on the balance sheet.
This is incredibly unique to law firms. So much so that it is advisable that when you are hiring an accountant or expanding the team who controls your bookkeeping, you ensure that they are very familiar with law firm accounting.
If you believe you may be running into issues with your trust accounting, review your current balance sheet. Your IOLTA bank account balance should always be the same as your client retainer liability account balance. If it is not, first determine if your trust account has been reconciled with your bank statements. During reconciliation, you can very often identify a missing transfer or other transaction that will bring your accounts back into balance. If that doesn’t rectify the problem, then a deeper dive into your billing and accounting transactions may be necessary.
Trust accounting is the most critical part of bookkeeping for firms. If we were going to explain it to a 5-year-old, we would say that money that is given to you in trust is money that is not yours. So, you should keep all money that isn’t yours in a separate account. Simple as that. These accounts are governed state-by-state and are an incredibly high-risk area for your firm.
One of the harder things about trust accounting is the 3-way reconciliation. First, your balance sheet, trust asset account, and trust liability account balances must match each other. Next, the trust asset account (or IOLTA bank account) must balance back to your bank statement. And lastly, if you have multiple clients for whom you are holding funds, you will need to have a way to determine whose money is whose.
A sub-ledger that details all trust transactions by client or matter is necessary to provide an accurate current balance of the trust funds being held for each client at all times. The total of all the client trust balances should balance back to your trust liability account. That is a 3-way reconciliation.
There is risk around firms getting paid by their clients. In most service industries, you do the work but money must leave your hands to ensure that timekeepers and other vendors get paid to properly provide services to your client. Next the client is billed, but it takes time to collect on those bills. Cash outflow occurs first, then the cash inflows come next, if you’re lucky enough to collect on them. So immediately out of the gate, you’re spending money before the guarantee of being paid back on it.
This is where trust accounting comes in. It helps to mitigate the collection risk by taking funds (retainers) upfront from your clients. By doing so, you have the ability to match the cash-out and in flow. Trusts do require more work on the front end, but they can really improve your cash flow through this process. Additionally, you can better filter out the clients in your book of business who will reliably pay you versus those who will short change or delay paying you.
The first thing you should do if you’re not already doing this is take a step back and look at it holistically. Is trust accounting right for your practice type? Is this something necessary for you to do? If the answer is yes, then your step 1 should start by putting in place the proper internal processes. Think about what happens when a client walks through your door and hands you a check for $10,000 to do work across a 3-month period. What then does your firm do? How would you handle that? Step 2 should be making sure you have a proper separate trust account. And lastly, don’t do everything all at once. Start small, ask for one new client to pay half your estimated bill upfront.
Today, it isn’t enough to just be an expert attorney. You need to have some business savvy too.
But that doesn’t need to be a huge hurdle. By familiarizing yourself with what we discussed in this blog and ensuring that your trust accounts are set up properly and accurately, you will move your firm from the static stage to the growth stage. Sustaining profitability is no easy feat, but with the proper tools and accounting skillset, you are one step closer to making that a reality for your firm.
Lawyers are spread thin, and a lot of time is spent on laboring tasks and not on as many billable tasks. In fact, on average, lawyers only bill for 2.3 hours of their time. After factoring in realization and collection rates, the average lawyer only collects about 1.6 hours of billable time per day. And to go a step further, about 33% of an average lawyer’s time is spent on business development.
If you recall, in Standing Out in Today’s World: How Communication and Branding Can Make or Break Your Firm, we talked about the fact that 2 out of 3 potential clients say their decision to hire is most influenced by a lawyer’s responsiveness to their first call or email.
The problem here is, these interruptions, emails, calls, not only take time away from you, but there is a recovery time that results in a 2 hours time loss per day. If you’re getting these intake calls, they may not always result in good clients, so at that point, you would have just wasted your time. And without an effective process, you’re losing money. It’s as simple as that.
Before we jump in, it’s important to be able to pinpoint some of the prominent dilemma’s firms face when trying to correct the effects of productivity delays or an overall loss in billable hours.
Interruptions kill your productivity - You want to minimize interruptions.
But;
Potential clients demand quick response times - You want to maximize responsiveness.
Invoicing and chasing down late payments drain your time - You want to minimize time-consuming billing tasks.
But;
You need to get paid. And not after a collections agency takes a 30-50% cut - You want to maximize revenue.
Technology (software and services) makes you more efficient - You want to automate and sync tasks, processes, and data.
But;
If you’re with a smaller practice, you may not have or are limited with your IT/admin support. You can’t spend all day learning and configuring technology. You want simple, intelligent tools.
They say there's a solution for everything. And we agree. They may take some time to implement, but if you can adopt cost-effective and efficient software for the following things, your firm will be solving a lot of the aforementioned dilemmas.
To improve efficiency, decrease interruptions, and increase the reliability of solid PNCs, your firm should have a system that includes:
And on a holistic level, your firm should be considering these factors when researching systems to implement:
Now you may be thinking, this is all great, but if I cannot get clients through the door, none of those efficiencies will matter. Well, the first step you should be taking is to understand your target audience and their entire journey leading up to signing on that dotted line. You cannot expect to prospect successfully if you don’t understand how people are trying to connect with you. So your next logical question should be...
If you can understand how potential clients can reach you, you will not only be able to respond to them more often but maximize your time while doing so. The most common forms of communication between a PNC and a firm are typically through:
With this information in mind, let’s talk about how each of these communication platforms work in the context of a law practice.
Pros - Landlines can be bundled with internet service, they’re independent of power grids, and typically result in fewer dropped calls.
Cons - You really have minimal mobility, the carriers are limited, hardware is required for set-up, and you need contracts. The most detrimental factor of relying on a landline is simply the lack of availability outside of the office. And unless you know how to reroute your calls, they won’t magically appear on your mobile device.
Pros - You will have mobile and texting access and because there is more competition from a wide variety of providers, your costs will be reduced, you don’t have to bundle, it is scalable, and you’re not tied down to contracts.
Cons - Your calls will depend largely on the internet quality. If your wifi goes down, you could be in for some trouble.
Pros - Your computer and tablet can now function like a phone.
Cons - The cost associated is in addition to cloud phone service.
When you’re thinking about phone service, there are different ways to route and track calls with priority so that you can be more efficient in handling them. And when you think about these services, you need to think about them from both the automation side and the outsourcing side. In other words, what services can be done through workflow triggers and minimal human intervention, versus paying outside vendors to handle the relationship.
Call routing/interactive voice response (IVR) allows you to set up certain prompts and greetings that are automated. This handsfree process is incredibly streamlined and you know exactly what you’re going to get upfront because you are the one to program it.
This service can not only make your business sound more professional, but it can help save time by assisting with delegation and routing of calls to the appropriate staff or team member.
The obvious drawback is that these scripted services are only able to handle point-blank calls. They cannot handle discretionary conversations.
To start, are you using a service that is abroad or domestic? If you’re using call centers that are not based in the US, be sure that their business norms and practices align exactly with that of your firms.
If you’re a smaller firm and someone from overseas answers a PNCs call, will they know right away that you do not have someone in-house doing client intake? Will there be a language or cultural barrier? These are all things to consider.
Is the staff working the phone lines dedicated or distributed?
With a dedicated team, you have a few staff members who are assigned to your matters and are trained on your accounts. So while they know how to specifically handle clients' needs, they become a bottleneck if they’re ever sick or out of the office.
Additionally, if you have a marketing campaign that’s ramping up, you will need to make sure you’re prepared for the influx in call volume. If your dedicated team doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage those inbound inquiries, don’t waste money on a large marketing campaign.
A distributed service is composed of the entire team where everyone is trained to answer calls. Because of this, the volume of calls per staff lessens because you have more people available to answer the phone.
Watch for these common complaints and problems that impact leads and clients:
You may hear the phone ring once, but what the person is hearing on the other line is multiple rings before they hear you pick up. People are impatient, so this leaves the door open for these PNCs to hang up before you even hear your phone go off. With some systems, a client will experience up to 8 rings before it actually rings on your end. The best thing to do in this situation is audit your phone system. Have someone else from the firm call and check to make sure that one ring on your end is one ring on the caller’s end.
If you run marketing campaigns, you have to be able to track who is calling and who is converting from those calls.
Did they convert? And if so, off which source? Were all your marketing channels working for you or did you have some that were underperforming? Were the leads high quality? Did they end up hiring you? You cannot sustain successful campaigns if you don’t track this information from the beginning. You have to be able to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t so you can make adjustments as you move forward.
Receptionist services can have a limited impact and a higher cost if you’re only using them for answering, transferring, or taking messages.
Look at services that can do the lead qualification, that can do the basic intake automation, and lead capture so that you are more informed and not faced with a bunch of decisions at the end of the day as you face each recorded message. Set your criteria and know when to refer bad leads out, and when to begin setting appointments with clients you can and do want to represent.
We are all pretty familiar with email systems, however, the best piece of advice we can give you is to make sure your email is connected to and integrated with your practice management software so they are securely logged and easily pulled for reference.
The perk of this integration is that some practice management software has time tracking apps that allow you to directly bill for the time you spend emailing and corresponding with clients.
Additionally, you can build templates and workflows through third-party vendors that automatically trigger your emails to send out to whomever you want. With this type of automation, it is important that it is standardized and made uniform across the firm. You should not have one group of attorneys sending and tracking emails in one way and another group doing something completely different.
Someone going through a divorce is probably shopping for the right firm that fits their needs. In this case, when multiple firms are in the picture, you want to be able to build trust. To provide expertise without being overbearing and what you can do after a call or consultation is to follow up with them on an automated basis, without your individual input.
Being able to communicate with your clients whenever, and wherever you are is crucial. In fact, if you’re not already texting your clients, you are falling behind the curve because that is where the rest of the industry is going. “Why you may ask?” Because that is what clients are growing to expect. Don’t believe us, check out, Everything You Need to Know About Communicating With Your Clients Via Text: The Good and the Bad.
Your clients are texting other businesses. Whether they’re messaging their accountant or plumber, it’s becoming the norm, so don’t resist this inevitable movement. Think of it this way… you work hard to meet your client's needs financially and even emotionally. Why not do the same when it comes to communication?
The largest push back we hear regarding text messages is the lack of privacy. How do you communicate with clients the way they expect without sacrificing your personal number? Well, let us tell you…
There are some practice management solutions that will provide you with your own designated cell phone number. This number not only masks your personal line but works via phone, computer or tablet. And the best part? There are timekeeping features within this solution that will track the length of your conversation and automatically create a billable event for you. So, not only are you speeding up communication, you are increasing your earnings too. If that isn’t a win-win, then I don’t know what is.
Put simply, a webchat is an internet online chat system that allows people to communicate in real-time using easily accessible web interfaces. Web chats are commonly used because of their simplicity and accessibility to users who do not wish to take the time to install and learn to use specialized chat software.
These web chat systems can come in many forms. Whether this communication option is on your firm's website, or your Facebook page, anywhere you have an opportunity to connect with a PNC should be capitalized on. Here are three potential options for you to consider.
AI-powered robots are low-cost alternatives with lightning-fast responses. You can program frequently asked questions with defined answers and you can stem some of those recurring, inbound phone calls and emails (the ones that seem to suck the most time out of your day) with pre-programmed responses. By doing this, you can hopefully reduce the number of interruptions you experience from having to answer them.
Additionally, you can allow PNCs to schedule appointments, interact with links to more information, and form fills, and you can forward direct messages or inquiries to specific members of the team. The goal is to eliminate the extra step it would take for someone to manually sift and sort through messages.
You can also route escalated issues to the appropriate party or offer extensions for the PNC to leave a message.
With chat robots, you’re paying for the access and ability to program the chat. You can have the chatbox appear on specific pages to reduce the cost associated with having one on every page or you can have a box populate on any page a user visits. Chatbots can be very valuable if used correctly and offer a great, friction-free point of connection between your target audience and your firm.
Costs associated with human labor varies depending on whether your internal team monitors the chat or if you outsource the labor. When you add in the element of human interaction, you can capture much more data, and more directly determine if the PNC is worth your time or not. You have much more control over the conversation and can offer more descriptive responses.
However, watch out for the “self-staffed but unattended” trap. This is a very common problem and what happens is a PNC will message what they think is a monitored channel and they will be left unanswered and unhappy. Your chat box should not become just another “contact” form.
Add a disclaimer before the chat starts stating that the communication held via the web chat does not constitute a client-attorney relationship, legal advice, and is simply there to help direct a PNC to where they need to be.
Staff with live agents, and choose “patient” active engagement.
Serve as a “gatekeeper” to an online calendar for consultations to reduce no-shows and cancellations.
Identify leads with your custom criteria and schedule callbacks and appointments with new qualified leads. Also, refer out bad leads as quickly as you can to save time and improve efficiencies.
Attorneys spend a lot of time managing the communication and business development efforts of PNCs. There are so many communication tools out there to improve this process, but if you do not know how to use them you will not only be creating inefficiencies for yourself, but you will be losing billable hours too.
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In late December 2020, Congress approved an additional COVID-19 relief package as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. Included in the $900 billion aid package is funding intended to provide a second round of relief for small businesses that are still struggling in the wake of the worldwide pandemic. A key piece of this legislation is funding earmarked for a second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, or, colloquially, PPP2.
The PPP Second Draw legislation is sure to be met with mixed feelings by small to mid-sized law firms across the country. Many of them are still weary from the first round of PPP; a poorly executed program that was full of uncertainties, constantly changing regulations, and a mixture of dread and uneasiness over the ramifications of improperly complying with rules that were released irregularly and without clear guidance. In fact, up until late December, one of the largest areas of concern – the tax treatment of the funds – left many law firms with cash-based, calendar-year financials with little time to plan or to react.
So now the question on law firm leaders’ minds is, understandably, “Should I even apply for PPP2?” Followed closely by, “If so, what’s in it for me?”
Here’s a quick rundown of what can be expected:
In order to be eligible to receive a Second Draw PPP loan, your firm must have experienced a revenue reduction of 25% or greater in 2020 relative to 2019.
This reduction can be calculated by comparing either one individual quarter from 2019 to the same quarter from 2020 or by comparing the calendar year 2019 to the calendar year 2020.
So, for example, if your gross revenue in the 2nd quarter of 2019 was $500,000 your gross revenue in the 2nd quarter of 2020 would need to be less than $375,000.
By giving firms the flexibility to compare one quarter versus another, even if you ended 2020 without a significant revenue reduction compared to 2019, you may still be eligible based on the performance of a single quarter.
Please also note that the maximum amount of any loan is $2 million and loans less than $150,000 will have easier paths to approval.
While there have been a few changes there are a few unique terms of PPP2 which many law firms will find very favorable.
So, while you may not be ready to tackle this “beast” again, it could provide very favorable funding options as you march your firm into 2021.
And we know this process can be daunting, so we have tried to make it a little easier for you to keep your firm organized. Download this prep-list and stay one step ahead!
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As an attorney or managing partner, you know what’s needed to practice law – that much is undeniable. However, law firm management is much more than just showing up to court. It’s about staying profitable and keeping legal operations efficient and within the confines of your practicing areas of law. How do you ensure client satisfaction while also maintaining proper recordkeeping? How do you overcome some of the biggest challenges around timing and tasks that aren’t bringing in profit? Covering your tasks well so you can focus on profitability versus tedious admin to-dos is key to improving your day-to-day law firm management. It’ll also keep your staff happy and feeling motivated toward a common goal.
In this blog, we’ll cover the best ways to improve your law firm management – so you can boost profitability and make the most of your operations.
The short answer is finding the sweet spot between profitability and quality of client cases. A great law firm can deliver results and resolve cases in a clear, concise, and equitable manner. That said, a good firm also needs a well-structured, organized system that acts as an ecosystem, working together to solve cases. In 2021, you don’t get that without law firm management that’s driven by communication and constant vigilance and upkeep. With how fast things are changing digitally, and how competitive legal services have become, you can’t afford to be complacent. A great law firm must adapt to the changing times, and be willing to constantly improve procedures and processes.
Depending on the size of your firm, there are basic building blocks you’ll need to have in order to start creating these processes. Always work from the top to bottom, with high-level essentials that will be easier to implement and more impactful in the long term.
Having visibility into your funds between accounts and trust funds is a necessity for proper management in your law firm. This happens with proper scheduling and a practice management system that doesn’t follow a “lite,” or freemium trap that nickel and dimes you for every additional feature. The ability to run reports regularly, and with customization options, provide agility and insight when you need it most.
No one wants to write checks anymore or wait the processing period in the bank for the funds to clear. Offering ways to pay instantly such as credit cards through a secure practice management system means you get paid faster, and easier.
Making sure clients feel heard is a big part of dealing with legal cases. This is a collective effort that must be followed by your entire staff, in a systematic and human way. Most people are distressed and uncertain during a legal matter, so practice compassion and be prepared to explain the steps of the case at any point. For larger firms, hiring someone whose sole job is focusing on clients can be a surefire way to keep them heard and informed.
Part of law firm management is knowing what duties are attributed to what department. While these lines can certainly blur in a smaller firm, having a handbook that details these can help be a point of reference in the event things become problematic or missed. It also ensures alignment between everyone, as a collaborative environment is essential.
The below hierarchy gives you a structure for staying organized – but additionally, you’ll want to have procedures that are attributed to each role. Creating an accountability chart will help you delegate appropriately will save you headaches and issues with “too many cooks” later.
Equally important to your human management is how you store files and client matters. To drive efficient law firm management, utilizing software that has easy data retrieval and organization can save many headaches down the line. While it’s still almost impossible to go completely paperless, there are many digital tools that ease the paper load considerably. Some tips and tricks that you can look out to improve are:
Most law firm management software includes a secure mobile app that clients can access information regarding their case. They’re also able to view invoices and pay any outstanding bills – making it an agile asset in your toolkit. Even better, your attorneys can actively track time on the go so all billable hours are accounted for.
Cloud-based software keeps your information secure and tiered based on staff permissions assigned. The worst thing that could happen with on-premise hardware – which was largely the standard up until recent years – is losing mission-critical information and documents attributed to a client’s case. As you know, all the digital notes and scanned paperwork must be kept available for a certain amount of time after a case is resolved. Don’t take the risk; have a system that runs daily backups so no power surge or natural disaster puts you in a bind.
If you’re in the neighborhood for law firm software, having an ambassador who can work with you to use it to its fullest potential will be a big boon moving forward with matters. Having a go-to expert for software, while being able to train everyone else, ensures procedures are followed and there’ll never be any ambiguity when it comes to filing retrieval or recordkeeping. Standardizing simplifies, and saves time, even if it takes a while to adopt across your firm.
Some of the above-summarized methods to save time, but there are more ways to build on these solutions to help your staff feel more empowered and give minutes and hours back in their day.
A mobile app or software like mentioned previously that can automatically track the length of time for certain entries and matter tasks. This will let you know what cases are most profitable for you, so you can make the big picture decisions on which ones you should prioritize. More than not, a more quality case versus taking lots of smaller ones can be more profitable – and easier on your staff.
See how Centerbase can speed up your billing cycle by 30% every month
A team works best and saves time if they’re aligned and communicating on what the biggest priorities are. While billing needs to get done at a certain time, perhaps a legal assistant can help with filing or report retrieval so one of your accountants can focus on getting invoices out on time. Having a team that works closely together will improve management and drive the efficiency of your operations.
There are a few things you can examine to manage a firm that’s more successful overall:
We hope this was a helpful resource for you to reference as you continue to explore law firm management. It’s never a “one and done” duty, and iterative improvements will always need to be made over time. If you’re looking for a way to instantly help streamline processes and payments, consider looking into practice management software that simplifies day-to-day processes and helps keep everyone aligned.
In Reviews & Millennials Part 1: How Your Online Presence Can Make or Break Your Firm, we discussed how the habits, preferences, and overall style of millennials impact not only the legal industry but your firm as a whole.
Today, we are going to take a look at how you can use your online web presence to protect and gain referrals, how you can utilize the power that is Google, and how to begin thinking about social media as a point of leverage, not as a pain point.
Millennials and other consumers, in general, are looking for third-party validation. They want to see information about your firm that is written from other people outside of your organization for the obvious reason: The reviews will be the God's honest truth. Today, these websites, or directories, are mostly viewed online through sites like State Bar websites, lawyers.com, BBB.com, Google, or even social media (to name a few).
When you think about why you would want to be listed in all of those places, you should be thinking about two things.
In both of these cases, there is an element of control that you have power over. Is all your information listed correctly? Is the appropriate phone number available? Is your list of attorneys up to date? For all of these details, it is critically important that you make sure they are accurate because many times, it’s the first thing a person will see. Sometimes, these directories will auto-create a review page for you. In these instances, it is your responsibility to check and make sure the information is correct and how you want it to be displayed.
The most important point to walk away with here is that having a presence on as many directories as possible, with good reviews, is crucial.
The internet is crazy. If you put a piece of information in one place, another site or directory may pull from that without warning.
We know, this chart looks crazy but how it can be broken down is simple. The sites boxed in red are comparable to travel sites like Experian. They will pull information about your business, and mind you, this information comes from all different sources (be it business listings you file with the state, yellow page, etc), and they will pull it all together to create what they believe is the true picture for your business.
The yellow boxes represent search engines that smaller sites use to collect data from. For example, Alexa and Siri use a lot of Yelp data, so once Yelp aggregates what they need about your firm, Alexa and Siri will pull what they need from it. If you can stay on top of these four search engines, you will be on top of the game. The idea is to contain and control the information that is at the top so when it is dispersed down the pyramid, you know exactly what is being written.
So now you have all this information and you may be feeling overwhelmed. Don’t start sweating yet. Here is what you need to do…
Google added the Knowledge Graph a few years ago and uses algorithms to determine which search result most accurately reflects the searcher's intent (this graph is presented to users as an infobox on the right side of page one. It is used by Google and its services to enhance its search engine's results with information gathered from a variety of sources).
As Google gets more extensive and complex, they continue to add more and more information to it. In one infobox, you have:
This is a lot of information! Control what you can control and make sure your basic information is correct because it matters.
This feature in the Knowledge Graph is relatively new, google searchers can pose a question in this box, and your firm has a chance to respond to their questions. The worst thing you can do for yourself here is to leave the question unanswered. Even if it is a general inquiry or something your firm does not specifically handle, good customer service goes a long way. Also remember, that future PNCs can see these questions and responses too. So if you leave someone unanswered, that will leave a bad taste in other people’s mouths.
Anyone with a Google account can ask a question on your Google My Business listing and the kicker is someone else can answer. So what should you do? Monitor it! You can set your notifications to be alerted in real-time as inquiries come in. Regardless of whoever is in charge of this platform at your firm, responding as quickly as possible is the best practice. Taking charge of inbound conversations or questions will help you lead where the discussion goes.
With your Google My Business account, it is easy to either overlook the data you can collect from it, or you may just not know that it is available for you to use.
Google My Business insights come with every account. However, this information does not show up in your Google analytics or whatever analytical tool you use, because this information is not on your website.
What will this information show, you ask? Well to start, these analytics will show how often your firm is shown or brought to attention in various searches, how many people click on the maps, if it led anyone directly to your website, and if it resulted in phone calls. For a free resource, this data does a great job helping you gauge your conversion rate and will indicate to you whether or not you need to pivot your strategy.
Your firm’s website should still be the center of your web presence. Your website should be on brand and should accurately represent your firm. In many cases, this is the first impression PNCs will get of your firm, so make it a good one!
As for the basics, if you do not have these four things readily available for PNCs to view, you need to take the time to fix that as soon as possible.
All of these points should be displayed prominently on the first page. The first place your eye goes is to the header of a page, so keep it simple and keep it direct.
The second or third most visited page on a law firm website is the attorney profile. Treat this page as a mini-website that features you. Don’t lead with where you went to school, or what you did prior to law school, because for most people, especially millennials, will not care. Today, people want to know how you can help them, and why you will be the best person for the job.
Also, consider having different pages for each attorney at your firm. That supports the branded search and referrals, and if you have all your attorneys on one page, it will be much harder for one person to show up at the top of that search page. Additionally, consider including client-facing, non-attorneys on your site as well. People like to know who they will be dealing with, and a smiling face never hurts.
We will keep this short and sweet, you should have some form of disclaimer on your site, on every page. And if your site is bilingual, you need to make sure that disclaimer is in the second language as well.
On average, millennials spend 3.7 hours a day on their mobile devices - the equivalent of 22.4 hours (almost a whole day) every week. We don’t know what you’re morning routine looks like, but for 24% of millennials, they’re turning on their smartphone as soon as they open their eyes, and then that percentage hikes to 52% after being awake for 5 minutes. That is a lot of screen time… which means there is a ton of time for you to capitalize on being in front of these people.
In a report done by Custom Legal Marketing, they concluded that mobile visitors to law firm’s websites are ahead of the global average by 2%. Over 25% of visitors on lawyers’ websites use a mobile device to search for information. Mobile is definitely on the rise for lawyers and do you know why that is? You guessed it, millennials and the younger generations are always on their phones. So make sure your site is mobile friendly and easy to navigate.
In this day and age, you can order pizza from Alexa, change your plane ticket on Twitter, and book appointments at the best rates in a matter of seconds. It is all about removing the friction. How can you use the technology and resources available to you today to seamlessly guide clients to your firm? When it comes down to it, you have to be able to support a generation that has this expectation. An example of this is how they can contact you through their website. Remember, millennials don’t always like picking up the phone, so a Live Chat, or messaging system solves that problem, reduces friction, and increases efficiency.
If you have this Live Chat service, you can update your listing to available 24/7, which will open the door for new leads who don't have time to contact you when you're listed as open. Google is also now allowing potential leads to text message attorneys via Google Adwords.
It is no secret that millennials are tied to the satisfaction they receive from the engagement that is created through their social media presence.
And although the legal industry has come a long way, it is also not a secret that most firms and attorneys prefer to maintain a professional standard. In other words, this professional standard means no social media.
This is merely a blog, we can’t tell you what to do, BUT, as far as unsolicited advice goes, don’t turn your back on millions of people on social media who will need legal services one day.
Instead of viewing Instagram and TikTok as channels for the immodest youth, view it as an opportunity to reach an untapped audience. And if you read that and thought to yourself, “I’m not interesting,” or “What would I post about?” look no further than this attorney who has built a following from merely being himself:
@ethenostrofflaw My introduction to Tik Tok. Please ask me any legal questions you may have. #e40 #tydollaignfeate40 #lawadvice #law #lawyer #injury
♬ Choices (Yup) - E-40
Right now, attorneys (your competitors) are taking business away from you because they are engaging in the practices that the young professionals are active on. Remember, if you can speak the language of the people who are looking for representation, you have already won half the battle.
Here are our tips about how you should engage with millennials on social media:
That was a lot of information thrown your way. You don’t have to become a millennial expert overnight, but you should consider taking these steps. They may seem like extra work now but they will be incredibly rewarding for you and your firm in the future.
