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Forecasting isn’t only for your local weatherman—it’s an essential legal process too. Fortunately, forecasting income and expenses isn’t as complex as predicting where the next hurricane will hit or when the first freeze of the year will occur. But, when you’re juggling all the tasks of running a law firm, the forecasting and budgeting process can seem both challenging and overwhelming.
Law school courses don’t teach you the practical aspects of running a business, even though they come up every day in real-life practice at a small firm, especially for solo practitioners.
Creating a solid budget and getting your law firm’s finances in order are imperative. This is the only way to stay competitive in the legal market.
The good news is that with the right strategy and management tools, your firm will be off and running. Let’s take a look at these critical processes and what steps you can take to create a budgeting plan.
A budget is an estimate of revenue and expenditures for a specific time period. Basically, it’s your law firm’s plan for sustainable financial success, and budgeting is the process of creating that plan.
Budgeting provides your law firm with a measuring stick for periodic review throughout the next year. If your law firm is hitting its goals, maybe it’s time for an office party! If it’s missing your desired milestones, it’s probably time to re-evaluate and adjust. Creating a comprehensive budget is the best way to proactively manage your law firm’s finances.
A good budget is thoughtful and aligns anticipated revenue and expenses with goals.
What to include in your law firm budget will depend on the size of your firm, how long it’s been in operation, and what practice areas it specializes in. However, there are a few constants for all practices that you should consider when drafting your firm’s budget. Ask yourself these questions.
Don’t start your budget planning in a vacuum. Instead, start by thinking about your firm’s mandatory expenses.
· What is required of the legal professionals at your firm?
· What is the cost of bar association dues?
· What do their CLE expenses look like for the year?
· Does your firm maintain malpractice insurance?
· What is the yearly premium?
· What about subscriptions?
Additionally, think about staffing. If firm leadership is planning to add more employees to the firm, you’ll need to know whether your firm will have money to cash flow that addition. You’ll also want to consider the tangibles: the cost of office space, hardware, and legal and accounting software. What about upgrading to new technology? Or the cost of business cards? Note that some of these expenses will be incurred yearly, some monthly, and some only once.
Once expenses and other overhead costs have been itemized, your next step is to consider profitability (and to do so realistically).
Revenue is the money your firm receives from clients for legal services rendered. When you subtract expenses and overhead costs from revenue, you have net profit (otherwise known as the bottom line).
Think about net profitability in real terms: how many clients will your firm need to service over the next quarter (the next two quarters? the next year?) to bring in the desired level of revenue? Are your firm’s rates high enough to support the practice? What is the required cash flow to keep the lights on? Can improving your invoicing practices improve that cash flow? What about accepting alternative payment methods like credit cards?
If your law firm is hitting revenue milestones without increasing net profit, it means you might need to cut expenses and overhead costs. Be sure to consider seasonality when it comes to revenue. If you’re a tax firm, you’re likely booming in April and slow in July. With awareness, your firm can account for these patterns and set aside capital accordingly so that the necessary funds are still available during less profitable months.
Keeping track of your law firm budget can be time-consuming and stressful. Many new law firms will opt for Excel spreadsheets or budgeting templates to get started with tracking planned expenses and revenue. However, when your law firm grows and its workflow increases, keeping track of your law office budget on those tools might prove even more time-consuming and stressful. The right legal reporting software puts a host of budgeting and financial reports at your fingertips, each of which will help your law firm organize your finances, optimize your practice, and help you strengthen client relationships.
When it comes to how often to review your budgeting process, we recommend assessing your budget each month. This regularity will provide your law firm with a good idea of whether you need to make any adjustments. Additionally, your firm should review its budget yearly to adjust for goals, new practice areas, or unforeseen circumstances (like a market crash or, say, a global pandemic).
While budgeting will look different for each firm, we suggest a couple of tools of the trade to get you started on creating or rethinking your law firm budget.
Setting your law firm goals is one of the first steps in creating a workable budget. Goals are a benchmark to help you determine where to put capital and where to cut costs.
We recommend classifying your goals into the following categories: (1) short-term goals that you can reach in the first six months of your fiscal year, (2) mid-term goals that can be reached by the end of your fiscal year, and (3) long-term goals that will take your firm longer than a year to reach. Also make sure that each set of goals is specifically laid out, measurable, and realistic.
Using the right tools and legal tech can transform a firm’s profitability and law practice management. While it may seem like just another line item expense, technology can actually help keep your costs low through workflow and document automation, which frees up your lawyers and staff to work on billable matters (i.e., tasks that pay).
The right legal tech will help your firm simplify nonbillable tasks like client intake, practice management, billing and collections, and time tracking. With more time for billable work, your firm can raise its revenues. And with the right tech that offers a streamlined experience and integrations, your firm will minimize its use of subscription services and administrative time and thus minimize your overhead costs. The result is the perfect recipe for increased profitability.
We aren’t yet out of uncertain times, and keeping a pulse on what’s to come is important when setting your budget. If your law firm hasn’t yet undergone a full return to the office, your budget may need to include capital for the transition. Or, if your law firm has stayed committed to a hybrid workplace, you might still need to budget for increased tech costs and stipends to employees.
Additionally, many law firms are amplifying their marketing strategies. It’s likely worthwhile to consider how marketing efforts can fit into your budget and increase awareness and thus revenue.
Budgeting and forecasting are both helpful tools that your law firm can and should use to establish a financial plan. As discussed throughout this article, budgeting is the game plan for where firm management wants to take the firm.
Essentially, your budget is an outline of financial expectations and goals. Forecasting, on the other hand, is interpreting whether that plan is working and whether the firm is moving in the right direction by estimating revenue, costs, and ultimately profit that will be achieved at a future date. Generally, forecasting looks at historical data (like last year’s or last quarter’s profits) and then anticipates future outcomes based on it. It’s like a crystal ball, but only better because it’s filled with cash.
Forecasting helps firm management make needed adjustments in practice areas by hiring in anticipation of a boom and, more generally, helps you develop an informed business plan. You can then take that informed business plan into consideration when developing a budget.
With some critical thinking and the right tools, your firm will be ready for the coming year. Remember that no budget is perfect, but by having one in place and monitoring it regularly, your law firm can forecast big changes and adjust as needed.
Whether you’re about to write a memo or a brief, it’s hard to stare at a blank page. Now, it’s even harder if that blank page is the website for your law firm.
When you’re starting to plan your website, there are countless things to consider: whether to outsource the work, what website tools to use, and what your budget should be, to name a few.
But it doesn’t always have to be that hard. If you choose a template for your website design, especially one that has built-in flexibility, you can get up and running much more quickly than if you were to design your website from scratch. Depending on the template you choose, it can not only make creating your website easier but also ensure that you have a consistent, clear brand.
It’s a lot to consider! So, in this article, we’ll help you get started. We’ll introduce what makes a good attorney website template and what to look for when selecting one for your law firm.
You want your law firm website to help clients discover and then choose your law firm. We’ve waxed poetic about the importance of a good legal website. If you’re new to online marketing, getting started is as simple as selecting the right template.
Your choice of template will impact a client’s first impression of your firm. The right template for your firm depends on what your law firm wants to achieve with its website (e.g., selling the abilities of your lawyers or getting prospective clients to fill out a contact form).
When selecting lawyer website templates, we recommend keeping three rules of thumb in mind.
Use a website builder and template that feel intuitive to you. Many templates may claim to have all the bells and whistles, but when it comes down to it, they’re just impossible to actually use. (And some of them might cost you an arm and a leg if you want to customize them.) Others might be too simplistic and won’t allow you to create an engaging or attractive lawyer website.
The key is to find the right balance for your firm and reap the benefits of more leads and potential clients. If you’re handling the creation of the website yourself, consider starting with a law firm WordPress theme or a drag-and-drop page builder.
Use a website builder and template that allow your firm to personalize your website’s pages. There may be features that are important to your firm, such as the ability to book appointments online, the capacity to host a live chat, or the ability to support a chatbot. It’s important to figure out which personalized components are important to your firm and then ensure that the template selected can support them. Functionality is key!
Personalization of your selected template through either built-in features or third-party plugins (e.g., widgets, Elementor page builder, Visual Composer, WooCommerce, WPML, or other lawyer WordPress theme plugins) is key to setting your website apart from the competition and showcasing your firm’s uniqueness.
Consider, for example, Bootstrap, a free, open-source, front-end development framework that can be used to create a legal website. As a framework, Bootstrap includes all your basics for a responsive design and is built on HTML, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
Whether your firm specializes in ecommerce or personal injury law, an optimized website will help it attract new clients. Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your law firm’s website to boost its online visibility in search engines. For instance, Google search results rank the responses to a user’s inquiry based on the content of webpages. Thus, the more relevant your content is to the search terms entered, the more likely that your content will appear at the top of a search page.
Your selected template and website builder should have the right SEO tools to optimize your website. For optimal results, pick a template that allows you to update each page’s metadata, including the page’s meta description, and use keywords. We also recommend using a website builder and template that provides a sitemap to specific search engines.
Many law firms choose to outsource the legwork of SEO and site design to web design experts who know the ins and outs of web and template design. These experts take the headaches of web work away so you can focus on helping clients while they find ways to attract a pipeline of future business for your firm.
The user experience of your law firm’s website is critical: you want visitors to stay put, engage with your content, and then hopefully get in contact with your law office. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of your law firm's website. A thoughtful website design will keep web visitors engaged while also guiding them along in selecting your firm for legal services. However, a cluttered homepage filled with moving banners, animations, and endless pop-ups won’t convey your firm’s capabilities and might even cost you possible leads.
We recommend that your web design and layout be multipurpose: functional, accessible, and interesting. Ask yourself the following question as you make decisions: will this design and layout help potential clients find and then choose my law firm? Select the template with that question in mind. The goal is to convert leads into paying clients (and to get folks down to your legal offices).
As you focus on how to get the most out of your template, consider the following elements.
To create a compelling visual design, you’ll need forethought. Consider how visual content like lawyer headshots, videos, and graphics will appear on your website. The template that you select should not just support but also highlight this important content (think parallax display and retina-ready images). Many attorney WordPress themes have these features built in.
For example, your homepage announces who your firm is and why clients hire you. It’s also the first impression that you’ll make to prospective clients. Be sure that your law firm template complements any images you intend to display on your homepage, including in the header. Your chosen template should support (and not clash with) your firm’s logo design and color scheme. When picking a template, consider where your logo and other visual content might appear and adjust accordingly.
Additionally, the best web design is built on a responsive template. That means your website should adapt and look good on all devices (cell phones, tablets, and computers) and on all browser types (Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox). Friendliness and ease of use are also important and will make navigation easier. The right template selection and design will ensure a positive user experience with your legal website.
When selecting your website template, give thought to the content that will be displayed on each page. For example, consider the template that you’ll use for your firm overview page as opposed to your lawyer and staff bio page. You’ll also want to carefully choose the right font for your legal website. This decision requires balancing readability, messaging, and authority.
The copy on your firm overview page should explain clearly what your firm does. Ask questions like these:
For your firm overview page, you’ll likely want a simple template with a singular focus on your firm’s core messaging.
In contrast, your lawyer and staff bio pages are intended to help potential clients get to know the folks who keep your firm running. This page will contain more information than your firm overview page, so the template for this page will be different.
We recommend a template that offers tabs for various aspects of a lawyer’s bio: law school attended, bar admissions, practice area expertise, and even client testimonials or case studies. You’ll also want your website to be able to link to secondary content, like your firm’s social media pages.
The website builder that you use should provide data on your website’s analytics. Without this valuable information regarding your potential clients’ behavior, it’s hard to track web traffic to certain landing pages and even harder to optimize your overall marketing strategy.
Your firm’s brand is critical, and your online presence is an essential part of your brand. The template that your law firm chooses for each aspect of its professional services can either reinforce or hurt your brand.
Before you choose a template, consider the basics outlined in this article. And, if you have any questions or decide that you’re in over your head, online marketing experts are ready to help you.
Your law firm needs a marketing strategy to compete. While it’s easy to defer developing a smart marketing strategy because your firm is busy, we promise that it’s time well spent. Without it, your firm will be relying on word-of-mouth referrals and stunting its growth. To best grow and sustain itself, your law firm needs to attract new business. Having a concrete marketing strategy is the most effective and efficient way to build a pipeline of new leads.
In this article, we’ll cover best practices for building a marketing strategy and offer tips on how to market your law firm. Let’s get started!
Law firm marketing is used to attract (and hopefully convert) potential clients to your firm. It’s an important part of developing successful strategies to grow and sustain your legal practice. And it’s not only for big law firms! Small firms, boutiques, and solo practitioners alike can all benefit from a marketing strategy. Basically, developing a marketing strategy requires putting thought into your firm’s needs and mapping out actionable steps to meet those needs and build your roster of clients.
Your law firm runs because of one thing: a continuous stream of paying clients. But maintaining a profitable level of client activity is a real struggle for many small firms and solo practitioners. Acquiring new, paying clients is not an easy process, especially when your firm is just starting out. A successful law firm marketing strategy can help fix this. By marketing your law firm efficiently, your firm will generate new leads and increase its opportunities to acquire new clients. New clients mean more billable hours, which means more profit. All of this starts with a good law firm marketing strategy.
Creating and then enacting a good law firm marketing strategy is a multi-step process. The key steps are knowing your law firm, identifying your target audience, considering your competition, defining your goals, and then executing the strategy.
Patience is also key in this process. It’s unlikely that your law firm will get it all right on the first try. Your marketing strategy will require adjustment to reflect shifting needs and priorities. The best law firm marketing strategy is flexible, so just know that whatever your firm decides upon now is not set in stone.
Why does your law firm exist? The first and most important step in developing your law firm’s marketing strategy is to figure out your firm’s core message and positioning.
Your firm’s core message is what you want clients to know about your law firm. It should address your current and aspirational clientele and emphasize your firm’s strengths. The clearer your idea of your firm’s core message, the easier it is to determine its trajectory.
As you consider these things, your firm may find it helpful to outline the types of legal services that it offers. Questions to start with should include these:
· What type of clients does your law firm usually serve?
· How many clients do you serve per year?
· What practice area does your firm specialize in?
· What are your law firm’s strengths?
· What are your law firm’s weaknesses?
The answers to these questions will help your firm begin to craft its lawyer marketing strategy.
Without identifying the folks who might need your law firm’s services, it’s hard to know how to tailor your firm’s marketing activities. A steady understanding of your firm’s target audience is the best way to determine the focus of your law firm’s marketing efforts.
Important factors to consider regarding your target audience include geographical location, age, gender, income, and occupation. If businesses are your law firm’s main clientele, consider your typical client’s size, geographical location, and industry. By knowing your target audience and considering them when making marketing decisions, your law firm will optimize its efforts and reach people most in need of its services and thus most likely to turn into paying clients.
The legal market is competitive. One way to stay ahead is by analyzing the market and considering your competition. Conduct a market analysis by evaluating your target audience, the size of business opportunity in your area to serve that audience, and possible practice area expansions. Think about the level of competition in your practice area and location when creating your law firm marketing tactics.
For example, your tactics will differ if your firm specializes in executive compensation in a competitive market like New York City or if you’re a solo practitioner in a small New England town. The best law firm marketing strategy considers market opportunity and possible market share.
What do you want your law firm’s marketing strategy to achieve? Think in three-, six-, and twelve-month increments. We recommend setting SMART goals for each timeframe and re-evaluating them regularly.
The key factors to consider when defining your law firm marketing strategy goals include the number of new clients your firm wants to acquire, the number of clients you expect to retain, the firm’s projected and current revenue, the firm’s practice area expertise, and the number of team members you plan to hire and retain. To best envision your goals, your law firm should consider questions like these:
· Is generating new leads your main focus?
· Does your firm want to expand into new regions or practice areas?
· How much of a concern is your firm’s bottom line?
· Is your firm in major growth mode?
Once you’ve determined your law firm’s marketing strategy goals, you can decide where to focus your firm’s efforts and how to get the most out of the capital that you spend on marketing.
When creating or revamping your law firm’s marketing strategy, consider early on who at the firm will be the head of marketing and who will make up the larger marketing team. We cannot stress enough the benefits of outsourcing the legwork to marketing agency experts who can help you devise and implement your legal marketing strategy (and who won’t blow your budget).
Remember to keep your target audience top of mind when devising what marketing channels your firm will pursue. For example, if you practice in trusts and estates, a Twitter campaign might not be the most fruitful use of your firm’s marketing funds. However, if your firm practices in tech mergers and acquisitions, a LinkedIn campaign might be the right place to advertise.
Though they sound similar, your marketing strategy and marketing plan are distinct. Your law firm's marketing strategy is the connective tissue between your law firm's goals and your firm’s ongoing marketing efforts. Your strategy is based on the theoretical, focusing on the why behind your decisions. Why this marketing goal? Why this target audience? Why these legal services?
A law firm's marketing plan defines the specific actions that your law firm is going to take to execute its strategy. Just as you might outline a business plan, your law firm's marketing plan should be well-structured and detailed. Your marketing plan will include specific actions like digital marketing, the creation of a law firm website, content marketing, email marketing, or enhanced search engine optimization.
Having a sound law firm marketing strategy plus an actionable law firm marketing plan is key to keeping your firm top of mind for potential clients. But because marketing is outside the skill set of the typical legal professional, many law firms choose to work with outside expert marketing strategists who know the ins and outs of law firm marketing.
Your firm’s marketing strategy should be primarily digital. Sure, you can plaster your firm’s name on a billboard, but you’ll likely get more bang for your buck with online advertising on targeted websites. More now than ever, life is happening digitally. By focusing your efforts on digital marketing like increased search engine optimization (SEO), blogs, newsletters, and ads, you’ll ensure that your law firm reaches a wider but curated audience.
Another important component to consider is your marketing budget. What is it? To figure this out, your law firm will need to identify its goals and determine the revenue you need to achieve those goals. It’s important to be realistic here and to know that as your firm begins to reap benefits from its marketing strategy in the form of new clients, revenue will increase, and, in turn, your firm’s marketing budget can increase too. Once you’ve created a budget, try to stick to it, re-evaluating it as necessary.
Your legal marketing strategy is an essential part of your firm’s growth. As with any important matter, there are some must-haves that your firm should include in its marketing strategy.
Your law firm's website is the most important marketing investment you’ll make, and grabbing the attention of leads and prospective clients is its primary goal. The design of your legal website should be functional, interesting, and accessible. You only get one opportunity to make a first impression. We recommend asking yourself the following question during the design process: will this web design help potential clients find and then choose my law firm? Your design decision-making should revolve around that question.
Your Law Firm Website Design Inspiration 101 - Centerbase must be simple, clear, and uncluttered. A website visitor should know what it is that your law firm does. We recommend that the most important content appear “above the fold,” meaning that a visitor can see it without having to scroll. Use high-quality photographs, an aesthetically appealing color scheme, a well-thought-out font, and enough white space to entice visitors to linger on your page. Consider how certain content, like lawyer bios and video marketing, will appear when laying out your website. The best legal website permits content to be interacted with on all devices — cell phones, tablets, and computers — and on all browser types. A positive user experience is critical.
We also recommend that your website include call to action (CTA) buttons. Your CTAs should encourage visitors to take action, whether that’s reading more of your website or giving your firm a call for a free consultation. Prominently place your contact information, including your phone number and email, in several places on your website. This is the best way to get web visitors to convert into potential clients and build your legal directories.
You want your marketing strategy to help your law firm generate new leads, engage possible clients, and boost your firm’s SEO. SEO improves your law firm’s website by increasing its visibility in search engine results.
Here’s how it works. Google search engine results rank the responses to a user’s inquiry based on the content of web pages. Thus, the more relevant your content is to the search terms entered by the online searcher, the more likely that your content and thus your firm’s website will appear at the top of a results page. We recommend conducting keyword research to figure out what words your target audience is searching for.
SEO is also measured by the quality of your law firm’s web page. That means metrics such as web design, readability, the quantity of website traffic, and backlinks matter. Improving these important SEO metrics will increase your overall law firm SEO, leading to increased searchability and visibility (and hopefully new clients in the process).
Local SEO is another important aspect of your legal website’s overall SEO. Your law firm can optimize its geographic reach through local SEO, helping to establish your firm as the go-to in your community. To begin maximizing your local SEO, think about topics that will appeal to clients in your target geography. For example, you might write an article explaining contributory negligence in North Carolina or a blog post about tortious interference with contracts in New York.
If an organic search leading to your firm’s website isn’t generating the results your marketing team had hoped for, paid search marketing campaigns are another marketing tool to consider. We’ll cover the basics of the three main types of digital ads: pay per click, pay per lead, and Google’s Local Services ads.
· Pay per click: With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, your firm only pays for the number of “clicks” it receives from online users. For example, your firm’s ad is featured on a given platform (a website, social media, a search engine), an online user clicks on the ad, and then your law firm pays for that click. It seems like a simple process, but optimization requires strategic thinking and regular re-evaluation. As with SEO, research is important here. Your law firm will need to conduct research on keywords, organize those keywords into logical groupings, and then link to the correct landing page of your website to hook the lead as quickly as possible. PPC is a great tool to get your law firm out there, but to best optimize your results, we recommend working with marketing experts.
· Pay per lead. With pay-per-lead (PPL) advertising, the amount that your firm will pay for an advertisement depends on the number of leads acquired. Typically, your law firm will be able to define what constitutes a lead and thus only pay when those requirements are met. An example of a PPL arrangement is one where a firm pays by the number of leads who provide their contact information. A PPL arrangement is a great option for small law firms or solo practitioners who want their law practice to grow but don’t yet have the capacity for dozens of new clients.
· Google’s Local Services ads. With Google Local Services ads, your law firm can connect with people who search on Google for services that your firm offers. It works like this: your firm’s advertisement will show up for customers in your geographic area who search for legal services related to your firm. Similar to standard PPL, your law firm will only pay if the lead calls or messages directly through the advertisement. These Google ads are relatively new and require multistep verification and an otherwise fairly rigorous process. As with other advertisement strategies, Local Services ads should be optimized to showcase your law firm’s expertise. Relatedly, we also recommend Facebook ads as a route to grow your firm’s online visibility.
In connection with each paid advertisement method, you’ll also want to set up landing pages where clients who click on your ad can get more specific information about your firm. To be most effective, the content on your landing page should be both persuasive and centered around getting your visitor to take that next step of getting in touch with your firm.
· Content strategy. Your law firm’s content strategy is an important component of its marketing strategy. Any content created should be high quality, showcasing your firm’s excellent work, practice areas, and attorneys on staff. If your law firm is after a long-lasting online presence, integrating content marketing into its overall marketing strategy is key. To begin, consider what questions your target audience might have. Does your firm mostly service parents in custody disputes? Folks suffering from injuries in connection with personal injury claims? Businesses trying to best protect their trademarks? Once your firm has considered these topics, it should create regular content addressing them, such as blog posts, social media posts, white papers, webinars, and even a podcast or two.
Social media marketing is an effective and low-cost marketing tactic for your law firm, and it should be included in your overall strategy. Get started with Facebook, Google Business Profiles or Google My Business, Yelp, and LinkedIn. Your law firm’s online presence should be friendly, and you should post regularly. Your overall strategy should be to create ties with the community as well as to establish your firm as an authority in your practice areas. While there are many marketing services, we recommend the services of an A+ marketing team to get your firm started on its social media campaign.
An email marketing strategy is another cost-effective tool to consider and one that allows for regular contact and follow-up with clients. We recommend beginning by building an emailing list, which your firm can achieve by offering free resources (think newsletters or relevant white papers). Your firm will be able to collect email addresses from prospective clients this way while also staying in contact with current clients (or even past clients). Another avenue is to build lead magnets that online visitors can download directly from your firm’s website. Lead magnets are a free service or resource that you give away to collect potential clients’ contact information (emails, phone numbers, etc.). Once your firm has acquired a robust emailing list, you can begin effective email marketing. We recommend showcasing your firm’s expertise through positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, and other helpful resources that show how your firm can make life easier for clients. Positive client reviews are one of your best marketing tools.
By implementing the digital marketing strategy and tools highlighted above, your law firm will be well on its way to creating or strengthening its online presence. Online marketing strategies include a well-designed and aesthetically pleasing website, using SEO techniques to optimize searchability, content marketing, social media, paid search campaigns, and email marketing. The goal is to get your firm out there and to start bringing clients in. With a good marketing strategy, these goals are achievable.
Your law firm’s online presence can be a determining factor in clients choosing to do business with you. Thankfully, the quality of your site is also completely within your control. The only question is how to find the time and resources to develop a thoughtful website and content marketing plan — without breaking the bank.
This article will cover the basics of good content generation and website optimization, integration, and design. We’ll discuss how to think about your target audience and capitalize on new website visitors. These considerations are key in developing the best legal website and ensuring that your law firm puts its best foot forward.
What is “good content” for your firm depends on what you’re trying to achieve by producing new content and who you’re producing it for. Is your law firm trying to catch the eye of new clients? Building a reputation as the go-to authority for a certain practice area? Trying to grow your presence on search engines?
Before your law firm begins to invest in building or recreating a legal website, it’s important to understand the purpose of the content being produced.
The same goes for defining the target audience for your website content. Without first identifying the folks who might need your law firm’s services, it’s difficult to tailor your content production. What’s good content differs for a law firm focused on elder law and a law firm of transactional lawyers focused on intellectual property law.
Important factors to consider regarding your target audience include geographical location, age, gender, income, and occupation. If businesses are your law firm’s bread and butter, consider your typical client’s size, geographical location, and industry. You can use these details to create a persona for each segment of your audience. You can then personalize your content for each persona.
We highly recommend working with an expert who can help you craft and implement content to best serve your target audience and purpose for content creation.
Every law firm website needs to communicate who you are, what services you offer, and why you’re the best choice for prospective clients. To accomplish these goals, attorney websites typically need the following content elements:
· Homepage: A homepage announces who you are and why clients should hire you. You should include easy-to-read, SEO-optimized headings that establish your credibility and set forth a clear organization for your site. Be sure to use attractive images that encourage visitors to stay on the page. Additionally, your homepage should prominently announce the best ways to contact your firm, preferably at the top of your site.
· A firm overview: This page should explain more about what your firm does. What’s your firm’s story? How long have you been around, and how have you evolved? What is important for clients to know about how you operate and what clients you help?
· Practice area descriptions: Every practice area should have a page describing your experience. Explain the types of matters you handle and give a list of representative cases so clients understand that you have been there and done that.
· Lawyer and staff bios: Help prospects get to know who is behind the words on the page with enticing stories about who works for the firm. Each bio should tell the lawyer’s story in terms that would resonate with a client — not with another lawyer. So while it’s impressive that you were on law review, what may be more meaningful to a client is work you’ve done that’s similar to what they are searching for. Depending on your audience and your type of practice, consider whether to highlight your approach to cases or something in your background that will make you stand out to a prospect. If your firm is smaller and staff will be interacting with clients and prospects, it makes sense to include a bio for them as well.
· Resources: This is the area that clients can visit to have their questions answered. You may include blogs, news about your firm, white papers, or ebooks and other downloadable content that will convince visitors that you are an authority in your practice area. Another popular item to include is frequently asked questions (FAQs). Not only will FAQs help you land higher in the search engines when clients type legal questions in the search bar, but they also give you a chance to show off your knowledge in your field.
· Contact page: Take the friction out of client contact by putting all the information that clients need to reach you in one place, including your phone number and email address. You should also include a fillable contact form that makes it easy for clients to reach out to you. Don’t forget to include links to your social media accounts.
· Testimonials and case studies: If your practice has online reviews, you can highlight the best ones here. This can help you build credibility with prospects. You might also share case studies that show what results you’ve achieved for clients. To personalize case studies and testimonials, ask clients to share a photo or record a short video about how you helped them. (You can repurpose these photos and videos on your social media channels too.)
As with the rest of your law firm’s website, the user experience is critical: you want visitors to stay put and engage with your content. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of how content is displayed on your law firm website. The design should be functional, accessible, and interesting. Continue to ask yourself the following question as you make web design decisions: will this content design help potential clients find and then choose my law firm?
Picking the right font for your legal content is an art and requires balancing readability, messaging, and authority. Creating compelling visual content also involves other important decisions. Consider how content, like lawyer bios and white papers, will appear when laying out your lawyer website. The best legal website allows content to be interacted with on all devices — think cell phones, tablets, and computers — and on all browser types. A piece of content should also be laid out intuitively. Friendliness and ease of use are also important and will increase the user experience by making navigation easier.
When creating content, we recommend keeping the rules of thumb below in mind. Without them, all the great content you’ve created may go to waste.
· Keep it readable. The written content featured on your law firm website should be easy to understand. Avoid legal jargon, and try to keep sentences under 25 words and paragraphs no longer than four or five sentences.
· Keep it scannable. Content should be broken up with meaningful headings and subheadings. Adding white space gives readers a mental break and improves comprehension.
· Keep it visual. When possible, reinforce key concepts with interesting graphics. By using images to convey information, your law firm content will better engage users. Think about how much faster and easier it is to review a chart or infographic than to read dense paragraphs.
Good legal content can put your law firm on the map. At a minimum, good content will get your firm’s name out there. When you optimize that content, you can raise your firms ranking in the search engines, build its reputation, and establish it as an authority in the legal space.
Awareness is a top priority here. We don’t need to tell you how competitive the legal industry is. Creating high-quality content and doing it regularly is the best way to build prospective clients’ brand awareness of your law firm and get potential clients talking.
Your firm’s legal expertise is truly what it all comes down to for potential clients. So, the content on your website should showcase your law firm’s knowledge and provide examples and evidence of your firm’s expertise and successes.
Start creating law firm website content by asking what questions your target audience might have. Address those questions as you create content. Also write about current developments in the law and how your firm can help clients handle them. These pieces show that your firm can both talk the talk and walk the walk. Creating high-quality content is how you’ll build your law firm’s credibility and expand its market reach.
Keep in mind that building authority doesn’t necessarily mean having a domineering tone. The best way to build authority for your law firm is to know your target audience and address them specifically. By knowing your audience and putting them first in your content creation plan, your law firm will prove both its authority and competency. The tone and presentation of the content created should also be in-depth and expertly written. The goal is to establish your law firm as both client-centric and approachable.
To build a successful online presence, your law firm needs to have a robust content creation plan. Without it, your firm won’t reach its growth potential. Below are some common website content strategies your law firm can use to get started.
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your law firm’s website to boost its online visibility in search engines. For example, Google search results rank the responses to a user’s inquiry based on the content of webpages. Thus, the more relevant your content is to the search terms entered, the more likely that your content will appear at the top of a search page. You’ll need to do some keyword research to figure out what words your prospective audience is searching for.
Importantly, SEO is also measured by the quality of your law firm’s website. That means metrics such as your website’s layout, accessibility, keywords, quantity of web traffic, and backlinks matter. Yes, this means the internet is judging your readability, grammar, and syntax. Improving these important SEO metrics will increase your law firm’s overall SEO, leading to increased searchability and visibility and therefore increasing your market reach.
Local SEO is also something to keep in mind when creating a piece of content. Your firm likely works in a specific geographical region, and that’s your sweet spot for prospecting. By optimizing your firm’s content creation to target these areas, you can establish your firm as the go-to in your community.
To start optimizing your content for local prospects, we recommend creating content with a local angle. For example, you might write a blog post on who’s at fault in connection with a slip and fall under South Carolina law or an article on how the state of New York handles worker’s compensation claims.
Good legal web content and a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy will help your firm boost its search engine rankings, thus increasing its market reach and landing new clients.
In tandem with optimizing your law firm website is creating ways to capitalize on new traffic. New website visitors are great, but what your firm is really looking for is to turn those visitors into paying clients.
We recommend dynamic and relevant call to action (CTA) buttons on your website to make it simple for prospective clients to become paying ones. CTAs are intended to make it easy for website visitors to get more information or get in touch with your firm through a contact form. Essentially, they entice folks to take the next step by providing their contact information. CTAs typically come in the form of phrases that encourage website readers to “contact us now” or “click here for more information.”
Your law firm should also build landing pages on its website for certain content. Landing pages are web pages created for specific law firm marketing campaigns and have a single goal: converting visitors into prospects.
A visitor arrives at a landing page most often after they click on a link in an email or in an ad from a search engine or social media. To be most effective, the content on your landing page has to be both persuasive and centered around getting your visitor to take that next step. For example, your firm could advertise your lawyers’ family law expertise by offering a downloadable guide explaining the steps that should be taken in connection with a custody dispute on your child custody practice page.
Many law firms choose to work with outside experts to build their brand with web designers and legal marketing agencies that know the ins and outs of web and template design and can help you build an impactful law firm website.
We discussed content design briefly above, but it is so important that it deserves another mention. The best law firm website is design-forward, features usable content, and provides a positive user experience by anticipating needs. Accessibility is key — it’s critical to ensuring that online visitors stay on your website long enough to engage with your content and learn about the excellent legal services your firm has to offer.
We recommend a streamlined and clean website. No one likes a cluttered homepage filled with moving banners, animations, blindingly bright graphics, and endless pop-ups. To keep visitors on your firm’s homepage, it should feature a concise statement about what you do, your firm’s logo, a contact page, and clear navigation to additional pages that explain your firm’s expertise and knowledge. The typography, color scheme, and symbols of your website and law firm logo can convey a lot about your firm by saying a little. A smart choice of font can convey seriousness or help build casual rapport.
Whether you’re a small personal injury law firm or a litigation boutique, we highly recommend outsourcing the legwork to the website and content creation experts to help build your firm a new website or revamp your current one.
Creating content is a critical strategy for building awareness and establishing your law firm as knowledgeable and reputable. Key takeaways to maximize include improving your law firm’s search rankings through search engine optimization and developing an interesting and user-friendly website design. By boosting the ways that your firm can be discovered through quality content generation, you’ll reap the benefits in both the short and long term.
What’s your law firm’s most important marketing tool? Aside from great service that sparks referrals, we’re talking about your firm’s website, of course.
The legal space is only growing more competitive, and a good law firm website is an important weapon in the battle for clients. A good law firm website can make or break your chances of reaching and capitalizing on leads and turning a prospective client into a paying client. And the best law firm websites help grow your firm and increase its value.
Because your firm’s website is likely to make your first impression on future clients, it’s important to get it right. That means it’s no one-and-done endeavor: you have to keep your website fresh by updating its design and content regularly. So, content generation, optimization, integration, and design are all important aspects of a law firm website.
Now, let’s get into the details of what you can do to up your website game.
When considering different frameworks to achieve the advertising goals for your website, we recommend going with a simple one. There’s an art to the best legal website, and we recommend the services of a leading legal marketing team to get your law firm started on building or revamping its website.
No matter how you go about it, your law firm’s website should explain how your firm can serve clients, and it should do this in a user-friendly way, with an appealing visual design and an intuitive flow. To achieve these goals, you should focus on three key elements in designing your website: subject-matter expertise, optimization, and functionality.
Your law firm’s subject matter expertise is truly what it all comes down to for potential clients. So, your website should showcase your law firm’s authority and knowledge.
By providing examples and evidence of your law firm’s expertise and successes, you’ll build your law firm’s credibility and expand your market reach. The best way to build trust with prospective clients is by generating quality content (and doing it regularly) that shows how you walk the talk on your website. In addition to writing pieces about current developments in the law and how your firm can help clients handle them, you can also include client case studies and success stories.
You already know that best practices for a law firm marketing strategy include a content creation strategy. As applied to your law firm’s website, your goal with content creation should be to showcase your law firm’s work, practice areas, and lawyers. To build a long-lasting online presence and solid website, your firm needs to integrate content marketing into its overall online tactics.
To get started, ask what questions your target audience and leads might have. Consider questions like these:
We then recommend answering those questions by creating legal content such as blog posts, social media posts, videos, webinars, and even white papers. By adding relevant legal content, your law firm website will generate new visitors and build a strong reputation.
By including client success stories on your law firm’s website, you demonstrate how capable your law firm is and give future clients information regarding your firm’s positive results. A client success story tells your website visitors that your law firm solves issues and that your firm can solve their issue too. Reviews and testimonials add trustworthiness and social proof to your firm, making website visitors feel more comfortable reaching out to get more information or for a free consultation.
Your website should first and foremost emphasize that your law firm is client-centric and ready to help. So, we recommend including both your high-profile cases and some smaller ones with direct quotes, if possible, from clients who enjoyed working with your law firm. These success stories should be uplifting and positive. You’ll get extra points if these stories address the questions you’re also answering in your content creation strategy. News snippets, badges, and certificates will also go a long way in building a positive reputation for your law firm.
Boosting your website’s online visibility is important to attracting new clients and building your firm’s book of business. To do this, you have to engage in search engine optimization (SEO), which is the practice of optimizing a website to improve online visibility.
To raise your website’s visibility, you must make it relevant to users’ searches. This means your website content has to reflect the terms that users type into the Google search bar. The more relevant your content is to a user’s search terms, the more likely it is that your content will appear at the top of a Google search page. Your law firm website will best find and engage prospective clients if you boost your SEO.
SEO is also measured by the quality of your firm’s website. We’ll discuss functionality in more detail below, but for now, when assessing the quality of your attorney website, consider its layout, font, keywords used, quality and quantity of traffic, and even the quality of written content.
For SEO optimization, your firm’s website should feature a clean and interesting web design, high-quality photos and content, and contact details for your law office (including your address, email, and phone number). Local SEO is also essential to optimizing your law firm’s website. Optimizing your firm’s presence on Google Maps, Google My Business, and Yelp can help establish your firm as the reputable, go-to law firm in the community.
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of how information is displayed on your law firm website. Your law firm website design should be functional and accessible. Every design decision you make should ask the following question: will this help potential clients find and then choose my law firm?
We’ve already discussed picking the right font for your law firm website at length. Creating a compelling visual design also involves other important choices. Consider how content, like webinars and lawyer bios, will appear when laying out your website. The best legal websites can be interacted with on all devices (think cell phones, tablets, computers, etc.) and on all browsers. Your law firm website should also be laid out intuitively and be friendly and easy to use and navigate. Without these things, all the great content you’ve created may go to waste.
Lawyer websites should also include dynamic and relevant call to action (CTA) buttons to make it simple for prospective clients to become paying clients. CTAs encourage website readers to fill out a contact form to provide their contact information. Many law firms choose to work with outside experts to build their brand with web designers and marketing strategists who know the ins and outs of web and template design and can help you build a clean, impactful law firm website.
A good law firm website is design-forward and features usable content. Your law firm web design should provide a positive user experience by anticipating needs and providing thoughtful solutions.
As noted above, your law group’s website should be accessible, and potential clients should be able to contact your law firm quickly and easily. The user experience on your firm’s website and homepage is critical to ensuring that online visitors stay on the website long enough to engage with your content and learn about the exceptional legal services your firm has to offer.
Follow these three tips to create the optimal law firm website design so your law firm stands out and keeps visitors on your site.
We recommend a streamlined, clean website and homepage. A cluttered home page filled with moving banners, animations, and endless pop-ups doesn’t scream professionalism. After all, you don’t want to lose the potential client before they even get to the name of your firm. Your homepage should feature a direct and concise firm statement, your firm’s logo as a header, a contact page, and clear navigation to additional pages that explain your firm’s expertise and knowledge.
The typography, color scheme, and symbols of your website and law firm logo can convey a lot about your firm by saying a little. Is your firm classic and traditional with a rich history? Or is your firm more modern and cutting-edge?
A smart choice of font can convey seriousness or help build casual rapport. The same goes for your law firm logo design and graphic choices, which offer the opportunity for some creativity. Choosing a unique, eye-catching design can set your law firm’s website apart from all the lookalike pages on the internet and stop possible clients from scrolling on by. Use real photos rather than stock photos when possible to give clients a sense of who you are.
Of course, keep in mind that you don’t want to go overboard here. Clients may perceive a crowded, brightly colored website as unprofessional.
The best law firm sites consist of more than a homepage. Your law firm website should have individual landing pages for each legal service that you offer. You should also include pages for engaging attorney biographies and pages that detail your expertise and case studies. Depending on your practice areas, an FAQ page may also be a good idea.
Whether you’re a small estate planning law firm or a big business law firm, we highly recommend outsourcing the legwork to the marketing experts to help build you a new website or revamp your current one.
As lawyers, you know that authority is important. We’ve discussed how to build authority with your legal website throughout this article, but given its importance, we’re mentioning it again here.
Building authority does not necessarily mean having an authoritative tone. The best way to build authority for your law firm is to know your target audience and to address them specifically. By understanding who your law firm is generating content for, you’ll better know what type of content to create and the tone in which to create it. For example, if your law firm focuses on business law, you’ll likely want to present your website’s content in a formal business tone. This will convey knowledge and competence, and your law firm’s blogs, webinars, white papers, and other similar content should be drafted in a similar tone.
However, if you work in juvenile or family law, the tone of your website, and thus the authority that you build, will be different. Potential clients will seek out your firm during periods of stress, and your firm’s website and related content should recognize that. The tone of relevant content should be softer and more human to convey your firm’s competency, both emotionally and legally.
By knowing your audience and putting them first, your law firm will prove both its authority and competency. The tone and presentation of the content created should also be backed up by in-depth, expertly written content. By focusing on your target audience with your firm’s website, you’ll establish your law firm as both client-centric and approachable.
As with fashion, the best law firm web design changes each year. We recommend working with marketing professionals to stay on top of the trends and ensure that your website is competing.
The following are legal websites that achieve the framework discussed above. Each website highlighted below establishes the law firm as a reputable business and helps the firm reach a larger audience and therefore generate more leads.
Paul Benson Law Firm is a law firm specializing in personal injury law, including car accidents, slips and falls, and pedestrian accidents.
The site’s homepage is clean and concise. It features the attorney’s succinct firm statement as well as links to landing pages showcasing the firm’s expertise in personal injury law. It is client-centric, written in an appropriate, authoritative tone, and features a “get in touch” CTA. We also note that the firm logo is distinct and interesting but still professional.
Collin County Law Group is a law firm specializing in criminal defense, juvenile law, and family law.
The firm’s homepage includes clear information regarding the firm’s specialties as well as multiple avenues to contact the law firm for more information or a consultation. The website features multiple landing pages regarding the firm’s recent positive case results and client testimonials regarding the firm’s superb service. Moreover, its pages are easy to read and navigate.
The firm’s homepage is approachable and clean and features the firm’s various accolades and badges suggesting the firm’s reputation to visitors. The website also features a compelling attorney biography page with easily accessible contact information, which humanizes the firm and improves its SEO.
Denning and Marker and Crannell have created helpful pages for visitors to access additional information regarding each firm’s expertise.
Denning’s blog is updated regularly with information and resources related to its practice areas, helping clients understand their need for legal counsel and support.
Crannell’s website features an extensive FAQ page that asks questions to showcase its lawyers’ legal acumen and provide resources to potential clients. These websites achieve their goal of establishing their law firms as leaders in their respective practice areas.
Following the tips mentioned above can accelerate the performance of your law firm’s website. By using tactics that enhance your site’s visibility, including increasing your website traffic by implementing SEO and improving your content generation, your firm will be optimized for new leads and prospective clients. The right tools, solutions, and marketing experts will help you create a website that builds awareness about your law firm as well as a more profitable client list.
If you’re a family lawyer, it’s a constant challenge to demonstrate what sets you apart from the competition. This is especially true where law firm marketing efforts are concerned.
Legal marketing for family law firms usually is more formulaic than creative. But strategic legal marketing is instrumental in helping you realize your full potential as a family law attorney: building your brand recognition, growing your business, and solidifying your reputation with new clients.
Coming up with an effective marketing strategy for family law practice areas can be a challenge for even the most experienced marketing professionals. However, a viable marketing plan is the foundation for successful outreach to new clients.
Whether your firm is well known or just starting out, it’s important to consider what marketing tools to include in your next legal marketing campaign. In this post, we’ll outline key family law marketing ideas that will help you breathe new life into your internet marketing strategies.
Before assessing what marketing services will work best for your law firm, let’s consider how marketing for family law firms differs from marketing for law firms with more general legal services.
As a family law lawyer, you’ll often assist people through some of the most challenging moments of their lives. So, your marketing needs to be tailored to show that your firm is a go-to resource for individuals with family law legal issues or questions. And your marketing has to be human: clients in these delicate situations need more than just a lawyer at times. They need someone in their corner they can trust.
Marketing for other legal practices usually emphasizes a firm’s accomplishments or seeks to attract potential clients based on a lawyer’s recent successes. For example, with personal injury law firms, potential clients want to know about how many cases a lawyer has handled and how much money they’ve helped plaintiffs recover. While these cases can be emotional, they’re often not tied up in relationships; they often involve a company or person your client doesn’t know on the other side of the case.
But family law marketing differs from other legal marketing because it’s so personal. So, when hiring a lawyer, it’s important for clients to make an authentic, empathetic connection with their lawyer. Showcasing that your firm is willing to build trust with its clients communicates your intent to help your clients in their time of need.
To build a connection before you ever meet a client, focus on pinpointing your firm’s personality and culture. Your messaging should explain to prospective clients how they’ll feel when they walk into your office and meet you for the first time. What is your approach to family law disputes? Do you want to be known as an aggressive divorce lawyer? Or do you want to be seen as a more approachable lawyer focused on bringing families together after a dispute? As they say, different strokes will resonate with different folks, depending on their feelings about their case and spouse or partner.
Successful family law marketing also depends on how well you’ve structured the information on your website. When prospective clients are looking for a law firm, they’re likely to gravitate to a website that answers their most pressing questions about topics including divorce and child custody and support. The better and clearer your answers to those questions, the more likely you are to get hired.
That also means that your website needs to be primed for its spot on the web. Here are eight marketing tactics that can help.
It’s critical to market your firm in an honest, transparent way given the level of emotional investment often present in family law cases. Following these six family law marketing strategies can pay dividends when advertising your practice.
When prospective clients come to your website, it’s important to grab their attention. But you have to attract clients in the right way.
That means you need to have a simple, clear website that’s not cluttered and that immediately makes it clear who you are and what you do. The most important content should appear “above the fold,” meaning that a visitor can see it without having to scroll. Use high-quality photographs, an appealing color scheme, a simple font, and enough white space to entice visitors to linger on your page.
It’s also important to include a call to action (CTA) at the bottom of the page. Your CTA should encourage visitors to take action, whether that’s reading more of your site or giving your firm a call for a free consultation. Prominently place your contact information, including your phone number, in several places on your website.
Above all else, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Many clients will be scrolling through your website from their phones. Consider whether to minimize some elements or menus to make it easier for visitors to scan your site on a small screen.
With so many law firms in the market and so many potential clients starting their search for a lawyer online, a strong digital presence is more important now than ever before. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one way to help drive your target audience to your website. When SEO is done well, a family law website will appear toward the top of Google search rankings.
Table stakes for on-page SEO are using the right keywords in the right places, such as in your page title, meta description, headings, image alt tags, and more. And there’s an art to content-related SEO as well as a science. You want your content to sound like it was written by and for humans, not as if you stuffed a keyword in every other sentence. Save the stuffing for teddy bears and turduckens.
Another key for family law practices is to make the most of local SEO efforts. That means you’re optimizing search for potential clients in your area. Typically, clients will search for “family law lawyer” plus a city, such as Chicago or Dallas. Make sure you include local identifiers and other important keywords that clients will be searching for in the content you add to your site.
Google My Business is also an important part of your local marketing toolkit. When you update your Google My Business listing, you’ll show up in search results with a map to your practice along with details about your firm, including its website and online reviews. Make sure you choose the right category for your law firm (e.g., family law attorney), and then start seeking Google reviews (more on this below).
Your content is what will attract new clients to your firm. The content on your website will influence clients’ first impression of your family law practice and give prospects the confidence that you are their ideal legal resource.
Today, law firms create and share high-quality content in a variety of ways. Whether your content takes the form of blogs, articles, ebooks, interviews, podcasts, videos, interviews, or another format, it’s critical to select content that will resonate with your audience. Think about the questions family law clients might have if they’re struggling with a divorce, separation, or child support. Use those questions to structure the content on your family law firm website.
Speaking of structure, organize your content in a way that’s intuitive for first-time visitors. In addition to pages that describe the family law services that you offer, include resource pages that explain complicated legal concepts, such as alimony and support calculations. Use your site navigation to pull people through your website.
And keep your clients at the center of your content: it should always be about how you can help them, not promoting you and your firm. That means you must remember that you’re writing for humans going through a personal struggle — and not to impress other lawyers. Include definitions for legal terminology and write in simple language that doesn’t scare off prospects.
When searching online for a family law lawyer, people often consider lawyers listed in law firm directories, such as Avvo, Martindale, Lawyers.com, and more. Many of these directories include free as well as paid listings.
As with every online presence for your firm, it’s essential to optimize your profile. Stronger profiles get more attention. So fill out your profile with your name, practice area, location, years of practice, contact information, and a brief overview that explains your experience and services.
In your profile, write about how you can help rather than about your experience on law review or your GPA. Because the first few lines of your profile are the ones that prospects will see and skim first, they have to be packed with meaningful information that grabs the reader’s attention. They should tell a prospective client enough to get them to click on your profile to read more.
To cement your first impression, always include a professional headshot. A casual crop of yourself on the beach or in another informal setting could make clients believe you won’t take their case seriously.
Many legal directories also include client reviews. Profiles with more reviews and higher ratings from former clients build trust in future clients. So be sure to ask clients to add a review to your profile.
Because of the personal nature of family law, your firm absolutely must have a social presence. Social media channels can help prospective clients get to know and trust you and your firm.
You can use your account to share important law firm information, including updates about your firm and profiles of your staff. You might highlight important decisions or legal developments that will affect your future clients’ cases. You might also answer frequently asked questions. Whatever the approach, the focus with social, as with content generally, is on the needs of clients seeking legal advice, not on you and your accomplishments.
You’ll also want to consider which channels to invest in. You’ll need to maintain a presence on LinkedIn to encourage referrals from other lawyers and professional groups. To reach prospective clients, however, you should spend time where they are, and that’s on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
Remember that you’ll need to have patience when engaging prospects on social media. Their decision-making tends to be more painstaking than other clients, and they’re likely to test the waters with several law firms before they choose a lawyer.
Email marketing can help keep your family law firm top of mind with your target audience. Not only does email marketing help you create personalized messaging for your clients, but it’s also instrumental in solidifying the relationships you may already have in place.
The advantage of email marketing lies in its capacity to help a family law practice maintain its professional legal network. By sending out mass emails, your firm can stay engaged with a vast number of clients and prospects. You can also segment your list into smaller groups, such as prospective clients and potential referral sources.
When conducting email marketing campaigns, communicate in an articulate, direct way. Having a clear message before writing the email helps focus your marketing. For example, your email could answer a common question or share a video. Or you might explain a recent decision of interest to your clients. You can also repurpose content from your website, including blogs. And you can make your content even more personal if you include video. Regardless of which vehicle you choose, the key is to deliver value to your recipients.
If organic traffic to your firm’s website isn’t generating the results your marketing team had hoped for, it may be time to consider paid search advertisements, including Google ads or other pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, to jump-start your firm’s web presence.
When people find themselves requiring family law services, they most likely turn to the internet to search for a lawyer who will address their concerns. PPC can bring your law firm right to the top of the search engine results. (Of course, some people skip over ads, so your best long-term bet for online visibility is to up your content game and invest in SEO).
Running a paid ad campaign will require you to think about the keywords that your clients are searching for and the zip codes where your clients are located. You’ll also need to set up a landing page where clients who click on your ad can get more information about your firm. If you spend time thinking through these elements of your advertising, you’re likely to pull in more qualified leads.
Word of mouth is a powerful marketing technique for family law firms. Firsthand accounts from clients who have worked with you in the past can have a remarkable impact. The voice of past clients has a level of authenticity that you often can’t capture in other forms of advertising. People trust the word of other people like them. Testimonials offer a firsthand perspective into what your firm does and how it operates.
You can also share client testimonials on your firm’s website and social media. Clients sitting on the fence about whether to work with your firm will consider these reviews, and they can be a powerful tipping point in your favor if your reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
It’s important to get reviews on lawyer directories like Avvo. But you should also ask clients to post reviews on Google, Facebook, and even Yelp. Given their prominence in search engine rankings, these sites are the first places that prospective clients will see reviews and look for referrals. So be sure to solicit positive reviews from your clients; ask your top clients to give you five stars and say a few words about how you helped them.
If you implement any (or all!) of the digital marketing tools highlighted above, your family law firm will start building a stronger presence. Online marketing strategies, including a well-designed website using SEO techniques, content marketing, social media, paid search, email marketing, reviews, and directories, are the tactics your law firm needs to implement to meet — and exceed — your marketing goals.
Readability is fundamental. That means even the font of your law firm’s website and legal documents matters.
Whether you’re working for a small law firm or BigLaw, using the right font can better engage your target audience and build your firm’s credibility and reputation for professionalism. It’s an important tool for creating your brand and getting your law firm’s name out there. (Just know that the right answer for a law firm font is never Comic Sans.)
As a lawyer, you’re regularly drafting. The font you choose, like the case law you research, is another tool to use to your advantage in persuading your audience. The font your firm uses on formal legal briefs and memoranda should differ from the one you use for casual communications. Which font to use for your law firm’s logo is an important question that deserves forethought, as is which to use for letterhead, business cards, and your firm’s web design. There is an art to it, we promise.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the basics of fonts for legal documents, including which to use and why, and then will get into details on different typographies and typefaces. Let’s get started.
Your choice of font impacts a potential client’s first impression of your firm. Is your firm classic and traditional, with a rich history? Or is your firm more modern and cutting-edge? A smart choice of font can convey seriousness or help build casual rapport. As you know, a solid law firm marketing strategy is key to staying at the top of the legal game, and font selection and consistency are important pieces of the marketing plan puzzle that can showcase your firm’s legal services.
There are a couple of overarching important things to keep in mind when choosing a font.
Readability and legibility are the two top priorities when selecting a font. Illegible and “artistic” fonts make your text difficult to read. You don’t want clients or prospects laboring to understand your message or read your law firm name. The best way to capture someone scrolling through social media is not by making your content harder to access. So, as more people choose to get work done from their mobile devices, it’s important to consider how a selected font reads on all screen sizes. Selecting the right legal font or typeface indicates good judgment, which we know your law firm has in abundance.
Consistency is also important. Your law firm should choose the legal font that can be used consistently across mediums, including on all lawyer websites, practice area pages, letterhead, business cards, and even T-shirts and office supplies. Thinking about your firm’s web design is especially important here. A unique and surprising law firm font can help set your firm apart and make it immediately recognizable to clients, a pivotal step in building brand identity.
What’s the moral of this story? The best law firm font is a consistent one.
The short answer is, of course! The font that you use for formal legal documents (say, in a U.S. Supreme Court brief or an IRS filing) can and should differ from the font used for your law firm logo or in your firm’s web design. Let’s take a look at which fonts you should use for which purpose.
Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, and Century family fonts are standard for legal documents. When it comes to drafting formal legal documents, your firm cannot go wrong with these typefaces. Many litigators already know that certain courts require them (and often other very specific formatting criteria, like italics over underlining). Check with your local jurisdiction for specific rules on typeface and font size before filing. Here, your firm’s style should take a back seat to your judge’s preferences.
The following legal document fonts should get you started on brainstorming and help you determine your law firm’s distinct style:
When it comes to your firm’s marketing materials, you have much more leeway in font selection. We recommend fonts that are clean and professional but still have a bit of edge. As noted above, you’ll want the font to be both readable and consistent.
There are two main classes of font styles: serif and sans serif. Which family of fonts should your firm choose? The answer to this question is a lawyer’s favorite: it depends.
Generally, serif fonts (think Times New Roman and Garamond) are about lineage and legacy. They’re classic and traditional, and we associate them with trustworthiness and reliability. They can also be seen as a little old school and are infrequently used by tech companies and startups.
Sans serif fonts (think Helvetica and Open Sans) convey newness, a modern outlook, and an emphasis on being cutting-edge. These fonts are minimal and simplistic, and we associate them with youth and freshness. Sans serif fonts lack the gravity and history of serif fonts.
Speaking more technically, serif fonts have a decorative flourish at both the beginning and end of the character. Sans serif (which means “without the serif”) fonts don’t have that flourish.
Which typography and font family to pick is entirely up to your law firm. Is your firm carrying on a family legacy? If so, a serif font might be most fitting. But if your firm is turning its legacy on its head and becoming more modern, a sans serif font might be the right choice.
When choosing a font, consider what image your firm is trying to convey and who you are. We understand that it’s a big question (and promise we’re not trying to derail your day with existentialism). Hopefully, it’s a fun question to consider! Your law firm is unique, and thinking about your clients and business is good for long-term growth and longevity.
This can be a tough decision, especially if you don’t have a background in branding and design. We recommend working with branding experts to get your firm started on everything from logo design to local SEO.
Your brand is important, and the fonts your law firm chooses for each aspect of its professional services create the brand. Remember to prioritize readability, legibility, and consistency.
Finding the right font is a critical step in refining your law firm’s brand and voice and executing on its vision. It’s time to get creative!
Standing out is hard to do in the legal industry. And it might seem impossible for your law firm, depending on your firm’s location, size, practice areas, and age.
This is where a legal marketing plan comes into play. A successful marketing plan, regardless of the size of your law firm, can help you stand out from the competition and help clients find you. A lawyer's marketing plan will serve as your law firm’s road map to long-term growth. By creating a plan, your law firm will build repeatable, consistent processes while eliminating guesswork regarding its developmental goals.
To properly visualize future growth, it’s critical that your law firm establish a marketing plan. A typical legal marketing plan covers topics like social media, blogging, SEO, and digital marketing and advertising. Of course, it can be tricky to decide where to invest your firm’s resources and money, especially if you’re just starting out. Keep in mind that your firm’s marketing plan will vary based on its budget, size, and stage in the business development process.
Whether your firm is new or old, big or small, we promise that developing a legal marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated or painful! This article will walk you through what you need to know to get your plan in motion.
Before we get too deep, you need to get the basics down pat. So, we recommend starting by reviewing this glossary of key marketing terms.
A CTA entices your lead to take the next step. CTAs typically come in the form of dynamic and relevant phrases or buttons that encourage website readers to “contact us now” or “click here for more information.” CTAs are intended to make it easy for website visitors and other leads to get more information or contact your firm.
At its core, your conversion rate helps evaluate the effectiveness of your law firm’s website. Your conversion rate is the ratio of people who visit your firm’s website (or click on an ad) to people who convert into a lead. With the right reporting tools, your law firm can track how long a visitor stays on the firm’s website, which pages they view the most, which pages have the highest bounce rates (visitors leaving the site), which visits result from organic searches, and how many visitors turn into leads.
Landing pages are webpages created for specific marketing campaigns. These relatively simple pages have just one goal: converting visitors into leads. Generally, a visitor arrives at a landing page after they click on a link from a marketing email or an ad from a search engine or social media post. For this reason, landing pages are a powerful targeting tool.
Put simply, a lead is a potential client — someone who can benefit from your law firm’s expert legal advice and who is willing to pay for that advice. When we use the term “generate a lead,” we mean catching a potential client’s attention. For more details, see our lawyer’s guide to lead generation.
With PPC advertising, your law firm will pay for the number of clicks it receives. Generally, your law firm’s ad pops up, someone clicks it, and then your firm pays for the click. It seems simple, but getting the best results from PPC requires a sound strategy and regular re-evaluation of that strategy.
With PPL advertising, the amount your law firm pays for an ad depends on the number of leads acquired from the ad. Usually, with a PPL agreement, your law firm will set the parameters of what constitutes a lead and will pay only when those specific requirements are met.
ROI is a performance metric. When your law firm puts money into an investment (like a marketing plan), ROI helps your firm understand its profit or loss from that investment. A popular tool used in connection with calculating marketing ROI is Google Analytics. Many businesses use an ROI formula of subtracting marketing expenses from sales growth and then dividing the balance by marketing costs.
SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to boost its online visibility. To improve your visibility, you must make your website relevant to users’ searches. That means your website content has to reflect the terms that users type into the Google search bar. The more relevant your content is to a user’s search terms, the more likely it is that your content will appear at the top of a Google search page.
Although each law firm will differ based on its individual needs, you should keep in mind the following four steps to ensure that your law firm’s marketing plan is a successful one. (We’ll get into the nitty gritty of common marketing practices in the legal space later.)
The first step of developing a legal marketing plan is figuring out your law firm’s current positioning and core messaging. Your core messaging should address your clientele and emphasize your firm’s strengths. With a clearer idea of where your law firm stands, it’ll be easier to determine its trajectory.
As you get started, you may find it helpful to outline the types of legal services that your law firm offers, including its practice areas. Questions to begin with should include the following:
The answers to these questions will help you determine your lawyer marketing strategy.
Defining your target audience is pivotal to developing the foundation of your firm’s marketing plan. Without identifying the folks who might need your law firm’s services, it’s hard to know how to tailor your marketing activities. Having a good understanding of who they are will help focus your law firm’s marketing efforts.
Important factors to consider regarding your target clients include geographical location, age, gender, income, and occupation. If businesses are your law firm’s bread and butter, consider your typical client’s size, geographical location, and industry.
The key question to ask is what you want your law firm’s marketing plan to do. We recommend thinking in terms of three-, six-, and twelve-month increments. Set SMART goals for each of these timeframes.
Factors to consider when defining your goals include the number of new clients you want, the number of retained clients you expect, the firm’s projected and current revenue, the firm’s practice area expertise, and the number of team members you plan to hire and retain. To envision your goals, you should consider questions like these:
Once you’ve determined your law firm’s marketing goals, you can decide where to focus your efforts and how to get the most out of the capital that you spend on marketing.
When devising your firm’s legal marketing plan, consider who at your firm will be in charge of marketing and who will be on your marketing team. We highly recommend outsourcing the legwork to marketing agency experts who can help you craft and implement your legal marketing strategy (and who won’t blow your budget).
Remember to keep your target client in mind when determining the right marketing channels. For example, if you practice elder law, a Twitter campaign might not be the most fruitful channel. However, if your firm practices in the technology space, a LinkedIn campaign might be the right place to advertise.
Regardless of your firm’s marketing plan, it’s important to keep your eye on the prize (your marketing goal, that is). To do this, you’ll need to monitor certain data. Without doing so, your firm won’t be able to determine which of its efforts are winners and which might be losers. If some of your initiatives don’t achieve the desired outcomes, it’s okay to adjust! That’s the whole point of measuring. We’ll also note that you’ll likely be updating your marketing plan over time as you refine your law firm’s goals.
We recommend tracking and measuring the following marketing performance indicators. (Better yet, make them part of your law firm’s regular reporting process.)
Your law firm should track data about how newly acquired clients learned about the firm (e.g., from your firm’s website, social media, word of mouth, or referral). You can start by simply asking clients how they heard of you or including it in your client questionnaire at the start of the engagement. We recommend reviewing this data bimonthly and adjusting your cadence as needed.
Your law firm should also be tracking client retention and referrals specifically. By creating an internal system for tracking client retention and referral data, administrators gain valuable awareness of firm performance. Happy clients stay on, and they tell their friends.
As discussed above, your conversion rate is a key indicator of how well your firm’s website is performing. We recommend running this report three to four times a year so you can evaluate and adjust your firm’s website. Your firm’s website is an integral part of its marketing plan.
Your law firm’s revenue growth provides a look into the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. By comparing the amount of increased revenue with marketing costs, your administrators will feel empowered to make informed decisions about the firm’s marketing plan and tactics.
Note that it can be deceptive to directly attribute sales growth to a marketing campaign. However, by reviewing your ROI monthly, your firm can gain some helpful insight into a campaign’s success.
Your firm’s growth will be driven by your marketing plan. Below are a few marketing tactics to get your law firm started.
Content marketing is the process of creating quality content that showcases your law firm’s work, practice areas, and lawyers and sharing it with intention through multiple mediums. To build a long-lasting online presence, your firm needs to integrate content marketing into its overall marketing tactics.
To get started, we recommend asking what questions your target audience and leads might have. For example:
Then create regular content addressing these questions, such as blog posts, social media posts, videos, and even webinars. This content will grow your directories and gain your law firm new business.
Your law firm marketing strategy should also include building new landing pages. A landing page should be persuasive and move your visitor to take a specific action, like signing up for a newsletter highlighting positive past client testimonials and recent wins and case studies from particular law practices. We highly recommend outsourcing the legwork to the marketing experts.
The best content marketing strategy will generate new leads, engage prospective clients, and boost your law firm SEO. While the content your firm produces should, of course, be legally and factually correct, it should also be optimized for search engines. Your firm’s website should include dynamic and relevant CTA buttons to make it simple for prospective clients to become paying clients.
Boosting your website’s online visibility is a top priority. As we noted above, the more relevant your firm’s content is to a user’s search terms, the more likely that your content will appear at the top of search results.
SEO is also measured by the quality of your firm’s website. When assessing the quality of your site, consider its layout, accessibility, keywords used, quality and quantity of traffic, backlinks, and even the quality of written content. Overall, your firm’s website should feature a clean and interesting web design, high-quality photos and content, and information on how to get into contact and follow up with your law office (including your address, email, and phone number).
Local SEO is also an essential online marketing strategy. Your law firm likely practices in a specific geographical area where it wants to generate leads. Optimizing your firm’s Google Maps, Google My Business, and Yelp presence can help establish your firm as the reputable, go-to law firm in the community.
Social media is an effective and low-cost marketing tool for your law firm. We recommend starting with Facebook, a Google Business Profile, and LinkedIn. Through a friendly and robust social media presence, you’ll encourage prospective clients to get in contact with you by demystifying the legal process. In addition, with a solid social media presence, your law firm can engage directly with current clients and leads, marketing its expertise while building stronger community relationships.
Your firm can purchase paid advertisements like PPCs, PPLs, and Google ads or you can post organic advertisements on your firm’s social media page. As with your overall content strategy, your firm’s social media posts should be helpful, legally sound, visually appealing, and link directly to your firm’s website to capture any leads. While there are many marketing services, we recommend the services of an A+ marketing team to get your firm started on its social media campaign.
Email marketing is another cost-effective and useful tool to build your law firm’s online presence and portfolio. You’ll start by building an emailing list, which your firm can do by offering a free weekly or monthly newsletter. You can collect email addresses from prospective clients this way while also staying in contact with current clients (and updating them on how wonderful your law firm is).
Another way to start is to build lead magnets that visitors can download directly from your law firm’s website. Lead magnets are a free service or item given away to gather contact information (like emails and phone numbers). We recommend offering guidebooks, white papers, or webinars to entice website visitors.
Once your law firm has a solid email list, you can start effective email marketing. The emails sent out through this list should be targeted and positive. Showcase your firm’s expertise and how your lawyers make life easier for their clients.
With the tips mentioned above, your law firm should be on its way to creating and implementing a thoughtful legal marketing plan. Through marketing tactics intended to enhance your firm’s visibility, including increased website traffic by using SEO and improved content generation, your firm will be better prepared to hit your marketing goals. The right tools, solutions, and marketing experts will help your firm build awareness and, with it, a more profitable client list.
“Bills, bills, bills.” They’re top of mind for law firms with associates and partners struggling to hit their billable hours requirements. But most legal professionals dread tracking their time down to the minute. And law school doesn’t prepare you for just how much of the day lawyers spend breaking down their work into six-minute increments.
Your law firm likely bills its clients by the hour. Therefore, you’re probably familiar with the usual roadblocks to hitting billable hours targets. Typical problems throughout the workday include projects that take up non-billable time such as client development, career development and mentoring for younger lawyers, billing and time spent on administrative tasks, and slowdowns associated with outdated software and inefficient processes.
But maximizing your law firm’s billable hours is good for everyone in your firm. The only question is, how can you achieve this goal? Fortunately, you don’t have to be in a New York law firm to solve this problem). The right legal tech can make sure that no billable time spent on legal services goes uncaptured and that you’re billing clients accurately — whether you’re working for a big law firm or a public interest shop.
We’ll explain how to make the most of the long hours that your timekeepers bill using technology. But first, let’s talk about what is and isn’t billable.
A billable hour is an hour spent serving the client. It includes all the time that attorneys and paralegals spend actually thinking about or working on a matter or case.
Examples of billable time include revising a purchase agreement; drafting an employment agreement or other contract; writing a brief or appeal; strategizing, researching, and corresponding with clients; and attending hearings or meetings. Put simply, it’s time you spend on professional tasks that your law firm can and should charge to its client at a previously agreed-upon rate.
The billable hour has been around for a long time. However, the legal industry has seen a movement toward a range of alternative billing structures. A few examples include flat-rate billing, subscription-based fees, contingency fees, limited scope representation, and sliding scale fees.
Regardless of what structure your law firm implements, the key is making sure that you’re tracking time accurately and getting paid promptly by clients for services you render.
Non-billable hours may be fun in the moment, but not when it comes to billing time. Associates don’t like recording them on their timesheets, and partners generally don’t enjoy seeing them either. But they’re essential work for the lifeblood of your law firm. The key is to minimize the time your associates have to spend on unnecessary non-billable work that doesn’t add value to your firm.
So, what is non-billable time? Non-billable hours are any hours that you can’t bill to a client. This includes time spent on administrative tasks (like billing and collections), wooing new clients and other business development activities, attending continuing legal education (CLE) seminars, participating in ABA and other bar association meetings, and schmoozing at networking events.
Non-billable work is important to your law firm. It keeps it organized, running, and growing. Issues arise, however, when lawyers spend needless amounts of time on administrative tasks that they could automate or delegate. By automating administrative workflows with legal technology, your law firm can decrease the time that its lawyers and paralegals spend on non-billable tasks and improve billing productivity.
Billable hours are tracked in different increments depending on your law firm’s preference. The usual suspects are the six-minute increment and the fifteen-minute increment (rounded up or down). Timekeepers must track their time accurately to bill clients properly. Accurate timekeeping also helps law firms set proper pricing strategies and billing metrics.
Most of the time, calculating your billable time is straightforward. You simply multiply the number of billable hours you worked by your hourly rate.
However, calculating the number of billable hours can get complicated if your law firm charges different fees to different clients, if it bills certain practice areas out at higher or lower rates, or if the rate you charge changes later in the fiscal year. All of these changes mean that manual spreadsheets just don’t cut it when it comes to tracking properly and getting paid.
To calculate your billable hours, we recommend the following best practices.
This requires forethought and analysis of your law firm’s finances (reporting is your best friend here). Questions to ask yourself when setting hourly rates include: What is the seniority level of the attorney being billed out? How specialized are the services being offered? What is the quality of the client relationship? What is the market saying? When determining hourly rates, we recommend that your law firm also consider and account for other expenses such as overhead costs, non-billable tasks associated with the matter, and other employee-related costs like vacation time.
You rely on your firm’s attorneys to accurately track and record their time. As discussed in more detail below, tech can help your attorneys both track and maximize their billable hours. We recommend tracking both billable and non-billable time spent on client matters. This will give your firm valuable data and help with project management. It will also help your firm evaluate whether the hourly rate charged is sufficient. When the billing cycle ends (usually monthly), your accounting department will add up all billable time and create an itemized list of services rendered.
This is the part where your law firm gets paid! But the billing process can become tricky if your firm charges different rates based upon the client, firm practice group, or lawyer seniority. Your firm will need to create a set of rate tables and apply those to different clients or matters.
We highly recommend using tech to ensure that your calculations and billing are correct. There are few things more embarrassing or worrying than a client questioning the accuracy or integrity of a bill.
Simplifying the time-tracking process and offering integrations is the best way to maximize billable time. Essentially, it helps your lawyers cut through administrative frustration and gives them more daylight hours to work on actual billable work. Other legal software can also save your lawyers and firm non-billable hours by automating routine tasks, such as billing and collections.
We recommend both encouraging your legal staff to record tasks as they are completed and setting an office-wide policy for when time-entry is past due. We understand how tough simultaneous tracking can be, especially when your attorneys are working on multiple matters for multiple clients and are in and out of the office all day for hearings and client meetings.
Mobile tracking (as discussed below) can help even your firm’s most forgetful attorneys track time throughout the day. Tracking and entering daily is just best practice. It ensures that you’re billing clients completely and accurately.
A firmwide policy for billing descriptions should also be a part of your policy governing time recording. No client wants to see a bill for something vague, like “attended meeting.” Training your lawyers on the front end will save your law firm endless time when revising client bills and invoices.
As you know, technology can help streamline your billing processes, and it can also help your lawyers draft templates with descriptions of tasks completed and billed that they can use for certain clients and matters.
Training lawyers on how to delegate non-billable tasks to support staff is another way to maximize billable time. Your law firm has support staff for a reason. To the extent possible, lawyers at your firm should be spending most of their day working on billable tasks. As we’ll discuss below, technology can help your law firm get there.
Legal tech can upgrade the way your firm’s lawyers track time, and a comprehensive, integrated tracking system is the best way to do it. An organized system will help to ensure that no billable hour goes untracked. What’s even better is that productivity tools remove the tedium out of billing, so your lawyers can spend less time writing descriptions and more time writing briefs.
Consider the following tools and features courtesy of tech.
Capturing time automatically through system integration will transform time tracking for your firm’s attorneys.
Mobile applications for tracking and entering time, which are available for iOS and Android mobile devices, provide enhanced flexibility for your legal team. Your firm’s lawyers can enter their time from the courthouse or at the opposing counsel’s office. The fewer barriers there are to time entry, the more accurate the timekeeping. The time-tracking features in this type of legal billing tool have also become increasingly invaluable during the pandemic to those who work from home.
If you’ve learned anything from this article, it’s that everyone hates tracking and entering time. Help your firm’s lawyers get to the important stuff by providing convenient, easy-to-use timesheet templates. No one should be using an Excel spreadsheet or handwritten diary (or law practice management, case management, or document management for that matter!).
Timers are a game-changer. They help your attorneys better track multiple clients and multiple matters. Providing software where your firm’s lawyers can create client-specific templates and prewritten narrative entries for larger matters will save everyone time and headaches.
By getting high-quality legal time management software in place, your lawyers will have more time for actual legal work. Your firm will reap the rewards of enhanced efficiency and optimization. And, not to mention, your lawyers and staff will be happier.
Implementation can be split into three separate buckets: data migration, setup and configuration, and training.
When it comes to implementation, vendors may make a wide range of promises. But what they are actually prepared to do for you may be more limited. You need to understand the different levels of detail offered with each facet of implementation when it comes time to determine what is best for your firm.
Data migration is the process of taking all of your client and firm data from your previous software and moving it to your new software. This can include everything from client data, calendars, and documents to billing and accounting data.
To help convince you to sign with them, some software vendors will try to entice you by offering a free basic data migration. This type of migration is performed using a preconfigured wizard and does not include custom fields or billing data. You won’t end up with all of your information in the new system and you will likely have to go back and clean up some data. But if you’re trying to save money and these drawbacks don’t bother you, this is a great option.
However, if you have over 10 employees and you’ll be billing out of your new software, there is a good chance you’ll need an advanced conversion that requires a conversion specialist.
The software company may offer advanced conversion in-house or may require a certified partner. An advanced conversion will include all of your client information along with some level of billing data, including billed time entries, billed expense entries, bills, payments, credits, and trust transactions.
The bottom line: You’ll want to get a feel from the vendor regarding the level of data conversion they’ll provide, and at what cost.
Setup and configuration costs depend on how much you’re trying to customize the software. Some legal practice management software programs offer in-depth customization while others limit you to more static offerings. Some customizable areas include form layouts, custom fields, reports, workflows, and bill layouts.
Unlike data migration, this is an area you can get away with spending less at first if you need to save money. You can always configure the software gradually as time goes on and needs arise. Take the time to map out your goals for your new software in order to figure out what needs to be done right away and what can wait.
Training is essential to successful adoption, end of the story. And you guessed it, good training usually comes with a price tag. When software vendors promise free training, it is extremely limited in nature. You won’t be able to choose when the trainer comes in and you may be stuck with the trainer even if they’re not a good fit for your team. The training may also be as basic as previously recorded training videos.
Approaching training the right way can help ensure you get the most out of your technology investment.
Change can be hard; that’s not a new fact. When it comes to new technology at your firm, change can trigger a whole host of negative feelings among staff, but it doesn’t have to be such a pain point.
One aspect of new technology that seems to be met with overwhelming resistance is training. If you can foster a mindset that training is one piece of a holistic project vs. an unavoidable burden, you can set your firm up for success on your new system. Proper training bridges the gap between the promise of a good purchase and the reality of successful integration.
Let’s look at five key elements of a training program that can help you get the most out of your technology investment.
First and foremost, the leaders in a firm need to be advocates for the training. Partners and firm administrators know exactly what they want to achieve with the software, and that information should always travel from the top down. Overall success can largely be controlled by the expectations that upper management sets early on.
Firms can choose to structure training sessions in a variety of ways. For firms looking to adopt best practices for a new cloud-based management system, instructor-led training and group discussion are both ideal types of training.
The hope for any training program is that your staff retains what they learn. Studies show that if a training session surpasses one hour, we retain less than half of the total information presented. The best way to combat this is to break your training into bite-sized sessions. Avoid trying to teach everything all at once or you can guarantee that your staff’s retention will be less than noteworthy.
Organize training sessions by content and associated roles. The best way to maximize engagement is to provide training material that is relevant to the work each person is expected to produce. Don’t force your administrative assistants to sit through training about accounting unless their roles involve that aspect of the software in some way.
A great strategy for keeping the information in your training relevant is to include your firm’s own data in the sessions. You can combat the foreign nature of the new software with the familiarity of known data. When new users see the information they already know in place, it supports their ability to grasp the concepts you’re teaching faster.
Once you get past the initial training sessions, you may be fooled into thinking the most important part is over. Alas, reinforcing that information is just as crucial to ensuring everyone is using the software correctly, avoiding bad habits, and maximizing the potential of your investment.
Simple steps – like hosting a Q&A session once a week or providing a resource library with videos and guides – will go a long way in preparing your team for issues down the road. Review best practices regularly and streamline supplemental sessions to focus on specific questions to improve adoption time and reduce instances of user error in the future.
