What does it mean to have an international deposition? This simply means that the witness will be in a foreign country. However, in this new virtual reality we're in, there are new challenges and components that we didn't have to deal with before. Between juggling the complexities of international depositions, paired with the logistical and tactical struggles of video conferencing, you will have a lot on your plate.

As you begin navigating this process, there are some basic steps you should be taking that will hopefully make your depositions run as smoothly as possible. Let's check them out.

Steps to Conduct an International Deposition

Step 1

Leading up to an international deposition, it is recommended that 4-6 weeks prior to the deposition date, you determine whether the witness is even willing to be deposed and immediately begin coordinating with the opposing counsel. 

Cooperative Opposing Counsel 

If you have a good working relationship with the opposing counsel, the first thing you should be trying to check off your list is a mutual stipulation with the opposing counsel so that the depositions can move forward. You should be stipulating that:

1. The deposition will move forward remotely
2. The witness can be sworn in by a court reporter as long as both parties stipulate on the record and the court reporter agrees

This is extremely important because court reporters only operate in the country and or state where they are certified and registered, even domestically.

Uncooperative Opposing Counsel 

What happens if opposing counsel is not cooperative? There are a number of options that we will touch on at a high-level:

1. The Consulate Office may have to administer the oath for the witness. This means that the US Consulate and whatever country the witness may be in has granted status to administer the oath as it was taking place on US soil.  
2. The other option is to hire a local notary. This will always be contingent on the country’s laws and rules.
3. There are a few other judicial remedies where the judge by motion or otherwise decides to order that the deposition moves forward. This completely depends on the country where the witness will be.

Step 2

Now that you have talked to opposing counsel, hopefully, they are cooperative, the next step is to decide what country the deposition is going to take place in. There are a few red flags we want to draw your attention to with this.

The UK and Hong Kong are the most common locations for international depositions, but if you hear countries like Germany and Japan, those are extremely difficult to operate through and if you hear countries like Brazil or Russia, they do not allow US depositions to take place. A lot of the European countries that are in the EU are underneath the Hague Convention and generally follow the same rules. Please do your due diligence here because these rules do apply differently to citizens of those countries, versus non-citizens.

Remember that Covid considerations do apply to all depositions and meetings. Check out Our World in Data for up-to-date information on which countries are open, which countries will allow your team, opposing counsel, and or the court reporter to travel.

Step 3

Now that you have your country, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel regarding all the logistics surrounding the deposition, you must then determine where specifically the deposition will take place.

Much like a remote deposition here in the US, you have to decide the following:

• Do you want the witness physcially with the court reporter?
• Are you going to do this in a hotel, conference room, at the witnesses home?
• Does it have to be at the Consulate Office for the purpose of swearing in the witness?

If the deposition must take place at the Consulate, it is recommended to start making those arrangements at least 6 weeks out. 

With remote depositions, even domestically, regardless of where the witness will be during that deposition, you must test the equipment they will be using on the day of the deposition. And to go one step further, you need to make sure they have a working and reliable internet connection. 

Whatever video conferencing platform you choose to use, your team needs to ensure that it has the capability to incorporate international phone numbers. This is important because if the internet connection is poor, and the bandwidth cannot sustain the meeting, the witness must have an option to call in and have video only. 

Any video remote depositions do require a certain internet bandwidth speed, so again, please conduct your tech tests and be prepared.

Step 4

At this point, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel, you know the country, you’ve pinpointed an exact location of where your witness will be, you have all your equipment tested, next, you need to know what deposition services will be required. 

To start, you need a court reporter, as mentioned previously, are you going to stipulate with opposing counsel that the court reporter be the one to swear in the witness remotely? 

Will you have a videographer? Now, there is a common misperception with this element. Most online conferencing platforms have the ability to record meetings. But if that recording is taken on your own, it is not certified. Not to mention opposing counsel may not approve or allow it. So if you’d like the deposition recorded, you do need a certified videographer who can do the video recording remotely. This is a highly encouraged practice for international depositions and locally-based ones as well.

Do you need an interpreter? If so, what language(s) do they need to be able to speak, do they have all the necessary and properly tested equipment?

Next, you need to think about your exhibits. What exhibit platform are you going to use? Are you going to show your exhibits by sharing your screen? Some conferencing platforms will let you share you exhibits by chat, so is that something you would consider using? Additionally, how, when, and to who will you submit your exhibits to? Take time to get all these answers organized.

Following these considerations, the next step for your team is to prepare and send your deposition notice with all the assets and people you’re requesting for the deposition. It’s best practice to always indicate that this will be remote and by video conference. You also may want to take this opportunity to identify any other unique aspects of the deposition.

Step 5

It is important to send out your notice to the agency you are going to use to arrange your court reporter, as soon as possible. If there is an issue in terms of stipulations, you may need, for example, a notary in that country and that process takes time to coordinate. Any logistics internationally presume will take at least a week longer than in the states.

Step 6

It’s deposition time! Make sure you have the time correctly marked in your calendar, and everyone is on the same page in terms of time zones. 

When it begins, it will flow like a normal domestic deposition, just keep in mind any other additional considerations or international rules that you have to follow. 

The Takeaway

Whether you’re working with an agency that specializes in international depositions or not, be prepared and do your homework. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to schedule and coordinate everything so that you have time to make adjustments if need be. 

Today’s reality looks something like this: we wake up slightly later because the longest commute we now face is walking from our bathrooms to the kitchen.  Dogs barking in the background, kids running in the background, and a home office set-up that would make Office Depot proud. 

Working from home is our reality and although we have quickly adapted to this change, some industries face hurdles that far outweigh others. 

Unfortunately, the legal industry is not exempt from the hardships that work from home has caused. Sure we have telephones and Slack and other means of communication, but by removing the element of face-to-face interactions, we have also removed a certain element of humanity. Your clients are stressed more often than not and now that we are forced apart, how do we bridge that connectivity gap? How do we create an environment of togetherness and empathy even if we are miles away from each other? 

This dilemma carries into the courtroom as well. And arguably, it is harder to get away with the virtual nature of the work you conduct because a courtroom relies on this element of connectivity. But if you exchange your courtroom nuances with that of a screen, what do you get? Will the results be the same as they would if you were there in person? The goal is for that answer to be yes. And we are here to help. 

So let’s talk about one dilemma that many attorneys face and that is “how do we manage exhibits in a virtual courtroom?” 

Going to court looks different and because of this, the processes and procedures we may have followed at one point now have changed.

In this virtual world, there are some steps you should follow when moving an exhibit in. Take a look:

1. Know Your Court’s Requirements

Each court and each judge has different requirements when it comes to how, when, and to whom you need to submit your exhibits.

Most still require you to submit your exhibits to the clerk, but you can guarantee that they will be required to be sent in a virtual format by a specific deadline prior to your hearing or trial. 

Some require a courtesy copy of those exhibits to be sent to the judge through the JA. So you want to make sure you know and understand where the exhibits need to go and in what format they need to be in. Do they need to be in a PDF format, do photos need to be JPEGs? You have to make sure you are understanding the requirements.

Some require the exhibits to be submitted through an online portal. Ultimately, you want to make sure that the first thing you know and understand is “how,” to submit exhibits, what format those exhibits are expected to be submitted in, and to whom those exhibits need to be submitted to. 

This should go without saying, but do not miss your deadline. If this happens, that could result in a delay of your hearing or trial.

Once you have this covered, guess what? The rest of it is almost the same! 

2. Moving an Exhibit In

If you know how to move an exhibit in court, you know how to move an exhibit in on Zoom. That doesn’t change. The medium does not change the process for moving in an exhibit. Your exhibit still has to be relevant, related, and right. 

Your exhibit needs to be relevant, meaning it proves or disproves a fact of consequence.

They have to be reliable, meaning they are either not hearsay, or there is an applicable hearsay exception.

And they have to be right, meaning as in not prejudicial.

Once those three things exist, you’re going to go through the same “do,” “how,” “what” process. 

Do you recognize it? How do you recognize it? What is it?

And then the remainder of the predicate depends on what type of exhibit you are moving in. However, in this virtual world, there are some things you do have to do differently.

3. Verbal Communication Differences

You no longer have to say “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense exhibit A for identification purposes.” Why? Because you’re not actually making that movement in the courtroom where you’d need the court reporter to document it. 

What you do need to say is “I’m putting up on the screen, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes,” so that your court reporter still can take down the exhibit and make sure that it is a part of your record. 

When you are doing the logistics of moving the exhibit in, you also do not have to ask to approach the witness. This sounds fundamental, but you will be surprised. Because you have been doing it for so long in a certain manner over and over again, the first time you have to do it in this virtual setting can feel very weird. You’re going to want to say, “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes. Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” You don’t have to do any of that. But you do still want to make it clear for your record, what you’re doing and what exhibit you're handling. You can ask the witness to go to what’s been marked as Exhibit A, and they can now pull it up in whatever format it is that they have it in. 

4. Formatting

When it comes to formatting for your witness, your judge, or even the opposing council, we suggest using a PDF document that you can bookmark. And you bookmark it in the order you want to proceed in. In an ideal world, your exhibit list matches the order you intend to introduce your exhibits in trial.  

No one lives in that type of ideal world. It almost always gets reordered once you do your trial notebook, and you start doing your questions. 

So what you want to do is make sure your final PDF is bookmarked in the order you want to introduce the exhibits in. Doing this will make it easier for your client who is going to be your witness. It also makes it easier for the judge to follow because when it is a bookmarked PDF, the judge can just click on the bookmark and it automatically takes them to that exhibit. It is also recommended to put the exhibit letter, or a virtual exhibit sticker on the appropriate PDF pages themselves to keep them organized. Some ways you can do this include inserting a footer or by using the bate stamps feature that is in PDF.

Your organization is what becomes key in this virtual setting. And as we mentioned before, moving the exhibit in and the trial skills associated have not changed, the process has. Your clerk, your witnesses, and the judge all need to know what you’re talking about, so this organization is paramount.

5. Using the Exhibit

When you are getting ready to use the exhibit, you’re going to have to share your screen. Prior to doing so, you have to ask the judge’s permission to do that. In some cases, the judge will explicitly say that the council has permission to share their screen when necessary. 

When getting ready to share your screen, your exhibits should still satisfy the “Billboard Test.” There are a number of ways to be able to use exhibits and do presentations in this virtual setting. Powerpoint is going to be the most common default presentation application for most attorneys. If you choose to operate from PowerPoint, you do not want a million words on each slide. You want to satisfy the Billboard Test. What is the Billboard Test you may ask? When you’re driving down the street and you see a billboard, it has all the information you need, in large print with no clutter. You can understand who the billboard is about, what the contact information is and you’re able to digest that information in the 2.5 seconds you have to look at that billboard. 

You want to apply this same test to your exhibits and your presentations. If you’re using your PowerPoint for your opening, or closing statements, or any other kind of demonstrative situation, make sure it is clear. Make sure they can read it, and don’t put any overwhelming amount of information on it. Er on the side of having more slides with fewer words than condensing the quantity and packing everything you have to say on three slides. If the people on the other side of the presentation cannot quickly read or understand what is on the screen, you’re going to lose them. 

Because we are in a virtual environment, you must be able to convey the information that you need to convey in a clear and concise manner. When dealing with an actual exhibit, and in this hypothetical case let’s go with medical records. When you are using these documents, unless you need the entire document, it is suggested to do a call-out. This call-out would work similarly to the way you normally would do a call-out if you were standing at trial in person.

Using this call-out draws the attention to wherever it is you need it to be. You still have to use the entire document in order to get it authenticated and introduced, but when you get ready to actually use the actual exhibit, use the pertinent parts! This will work to cut down clutter, and the person not being able to see or understand where it is you’re coming from.

6. Tangible Exhibits

When it comes to physical and tangible exhibits, you need to submit all physical items to the clerk in order to get it entered. Have a photograph of it, so you can use it and talk about it and everyone can see what you’re talking about. If for whatever reason, the court lets you keep this physical exhibit (they really shouldn’t because if you’re entering this piece as evidence, it needs to go into the court’s virtual file), you should still have photos taken of the item to share electronically throughout the Zoom presentation.  

Takeaways

Although our world has changed slightly, life still moves forward, even if not in a way we imagined. 

When it comes to your exhibits, make sure they are clearly marked and organized and are being presented in a clear and concise manner. Remember, you should be handling them the same way you would handle them in physical court, you’re merely adjusting how you submit and introduce them.

Everyone handles their email inbox differently. Some people have to clear every unread message out at the end of each day, while others let their unread email notifications pile up until there’s no going back. But one thing is for certain, our inboxes today are significantly more overwhelming than they were even just a few years ago.

Before we jump into email management and everything therein, we are going to take a moment to talk about a psychological philosophy called Flow. Essentially, Flow is a state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity. While this is a mental state, it is deeply influenced by psychological, environmental, creative, and social responses.

Your chances of reaching this Flow state are greater when you can first focus on single tasks, as opposed to jumping back and forth between activities. Additionally, having clear goals and immediate feedback play into your ability to reach Flow. 

Now you may be asking why we are bringing this up now when we’re supposed to be talking about emails. And we will tell you… Emails are huge disrupters to our Flow state because each email we receive acts as a distraction from our current task. Not only are we interrupted to either respond or read the email, but we are given yet one more thing to focus on. Emails are inevitable. They are a great means to communicate, but if unmanaged, they can quickly spin out of control. 

Now that you have a brief background on Flow, everything we discuss moving forward is to help you achieve this level of clarity and productivity through your inbox. 

To kick this off, let’s look at some numbers. Did you know that the average office worker receives around 121 emails every workday? Roughly 2.5 hours a day are spent on email, which adds up to about 30% of your workweek! That is insane… Nowhere in your job description does it say you have to spend 30% of your time on email, but this is where we are today.

Three things are significantly impacted by our time spent on email: our mood, our focus, and our to-do list. These three things are both negatively and positively impacted by not only the quantity of virtual mail we receive in a day but the quality as well. 

The Science Behind Attention

For the past few decades, a lot of studies and work have gone into the science of attention. And because our inbox holds so much of our attention during the day, there are many parallels that can be drawn between our inbox and our phycological response to how we interact with that inbox. Part of why so much our of time is devoted to checking and looking at our email can be attributed to what science calls the Fixed reward vs. the Variable reward system. 

Hear us out, this is interesting…

In 1948, a behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner studied what he coined “schedules of reinforcement.” At the time, what Skinner was studying was the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). During this study, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times — say 20 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. So for example, if the rat pressed the level 5 times he would get a reward, and sometimes it would take pressing the lever 150 times to get the reward. 

Obviously, the predominant difference between the two schedules of reinforcement was this aspect of predictability. Prior to the conclusion of the study, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, what Skinner found was that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats that were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a considerable time longer.

So, what do food pellets have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like trying to get the pellet rewards. Most of it is junk and the equivalent of pulling the lever and getting nothing in return, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news, some watercooler talk, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or maybe just an important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. See where we are going?

We are feeling science-y today, so along the lines of this psychological response also comes what is called completion bias. By spending a third of our time on email, it feels like we are being productive, after all, it is our “work-inbox.” Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. We convince ourselves that we are being productive by checking this work-inbox but really we aren’t producing anything at all, instead, we are being reactive- responding to the needs of whatever the senders are requesting of you. As a result, we spend a tremendous amount of time on short-term priorities that get in the way of completing the bigger tasks on our lists. All of this has resulted in one thing: multitasking. As professionals, we have gotten good at multitasking, which if you think about it, is somewhat of an oxymoron because no one is truly good at multitasking. 

Research shows that when we are deeply engrossed in an activity, even minor distractions, like an email, can have a profound effect. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes! And that’s after only one interruption… you get where are going with this. 

The Three Email Rules

1. Email is like Tetris

No matter how good you are at playing Tetris, blocks will continue to come, and they will speed up over time. No one has ever won a game of Tetris, and email is the same way, no matter how good you are at clearing the messages, they will not only continue to come, but they will also increase in frequency year after year.  

The Solution: You have to change your mindset. You have to use the right tools to be able to consistently keep your emails at a manageable level and you have to set limits and boundaries around when you choose to interact and not interact with your inbox.

2. Email is not the default priority

For way too many of us, email has become this default, number 1 priority. You wake up and check your inbox. You get to the office and check your inbox. And the problem with this is that your email acts as a to-do list that other people add to. So what happens is other people’s priorities become your own. 

The Solution: Scan your inbox for important and or otherwise urgent emails, then close your inbox. You can do this first thing in the morning, or really any time you want, but the key is to scan and then get out. Next, block a 30-60 minute appointment slot every day for “email time.” This is time you designate to spend in your inbox because you say so, not because someone else is requesting something from you. Now depending on the number of emails you receive every day, that time can fluctuate, but the point is that you are setting the time, it shouldn’t be dictated by anyone else. When you get sucked into your inbox, take a minute and ask yourself, is this the best use of your time? Most of the time, it isn’t, so give yourself that moment to decide for yourself. 

3. Not all emails are created equal

Each email commands the same real estate in your inbox, whether it is from the CEO or spam. There are really three types of emails, the unimportant noise, the important and urgent emails, and the important but not urgent emails. 

The Solution: Delete and archive all the noise in bulk, handle the important and urgent emails in the moment, and then defer the important but non-urgent emails to your designated email time. 

Reaching Inbox Zero 

Inbox zero is a method for continually getting to zero emails in your inbox every day. How you can do this is by categorizing your emails into five action buckets. 

• Delete/archive
• Defer
• Delegate
• Respond
• Do

All the noise: newsletters, updates, weekly emails, should be deleted in bulk. You should be giving very minimal time to these emails. The quick fix emails, emails that can be taken care of in 2 minutes or less, can fall into the three middle categories of deferring, delegate, and responding.  

When you defer, that simply means moving it out of your inbox into a separate folder. You can create a folder, whether you call it a deferred folder or your snoozed folder, the idea is to just move emails out of your main inbox. Delegating an email(s) simply means you’re forwarding it to someone else on your team who is more suited to answer the specific question or request, and to respond, is well, you respond.

The last bucket, “Do,” are the emails that require more of your time and attention. They are emails that need work or are related to various projects you have on your plate. These are the emails that should be remaining in your inbox that should be worked on throughout your day until a resolution is met. You can prioritize them further by flagging or starring them to ensure they don’t get overlooked.

Email Hacks

Bold Key Phrases

If your email is on the longer side, highlight keywords or sentences in bold. This will make your reader’s job easier and you’ll be a more efficient communicator. It is important here to not bold too much and don’t use all caps because people associate that with yelling.

Don’t Get Hacked

You deal with more sensitive information than most professional people do. Because of this, the legal industry is hit with a lot of security breaches that leave lasting impacts on not only your clients but your firm. 

If you’re using the same password for multiple online services, if one of those services gets hacked, that means there’s a good chance that all of them have been compromised. The solution to this is to use individual passwords that are not associated with anything in your day-to-day life. And we know that can be tough to keep up with, so utilize services like 1Password to help you create and then store all your passwords for each of your accounts. 

Don’t Fill Out The Recipient’s Address Right Away

Mistakes happen! Wrong email addresses can be attached, misspelled names or titles, etc. Give yourself a chance to proof-read the email prior to hitting that send button. Every email interface typically works from the top-down. You fill out the recipient, then the subject, message, and any related attachments. Instead of working this way, try the reverse. Add your attachments first, then write your message, fill in your subject line, and then once all of this is complete add your recipient(s). Doing this will help mitigate some of those human errors that we are all prone to make!

Choose Your Subject Wisely

Putting a call to action in your subject line will not only get your email read faster, but there is a greater chance the recipient will interact with it. Additionally, the more specific your subject line is, the easier it will be to search for it later on. 

Don’t Unsubscribe from Suspicious Emails

Often times, it becomes a reflex to unsubscribe from emails that are either spam or considered irrelevant and otherwise unnecessary for you to be receiving. What happens if you unsubscribe from senders with compromised integrity, is you’ve exposed yourself as 1. Being human, and 2. A human who cares about their inbox. This is a spammer’s best-case scenario. Instead, either move these to a designated spam folder or bulk delete them.

Avoid Open-Ended Questions

Email is a great medium for close-ended questions, not open-ended ones. Emails ending with, “Thoughts?” Is a strong signal that that email should either be a phone conversation or even an in-person one. Knowing what is appropriate to send via email and what is not will save you time during your day and will keep those email distractions to a minimum. Conversely, email is great for unambiguous communication, where decisive answers or choices can be made.

Matter-Centric Emails

If you’re working with a practice management software, some platforms will let you save emails directly to matters from Microsoft Outlook, or let you find emails based on any email property including subject, sent/received date, or email content. With the ability to connect your email correspondence directly to the appropriate matter, you are keeping all your communications matter centric. Having all your communication related to particular matters in one place helps keep your team efficient, in sync, and organized. 

Email Smarter

Sometimes it is easy to forget that emails constitute billable time. If you are working, responding, and communicating with your clients, you should be getting paid for that. Technology is advanced enough today to allow you to automatically create a billing entry every time you send an email to your client or create billing entries from your inbox as you’re reviewing emails. Not every software allows you to do this, but the technology is available and with reason- it will help you make and collect the money you deserve! 

The Takeaway

Email Zen to Optimize Our Flow State

Phase 1: The Declutter Phase

Creating folders that are labeled for old mail and dragging everything into those folders on a regular basis. Train unwanted emails to go into that folder and if you have time, delete those old emails and make sure relevant emails correspond to the matters they relate to. Delegate emails when necessary and don’t get distracted with the longer, more project-based requests.

Phase 2: The Organization Phase

This is where you figure out how much time you’re going to give yourself and set limits and boundaries on how much time you are willing and able to spend going through your inbox. Avoid mindlessly checking your email when you’re not in a dedicated place to respond or think about next steps. The best way to fall behind with your inbox is to start checking your email while you’re in line at a grocery store, get distracted by the cashier, and then completely forget about that email entirely. So stop doing that! Set numeric goals of how many emails you want left in your inbox at the end of the day. Inbox zero may not always be possible for everyone, so set goals to keep you on track and accountable. 

Phase 3: Email Zen and Flow Phase

You now have a clear set of rules to follow, you don’t leave your email open, you don’t get distracted with emails outside of your designated email time, and you’re able to put more focused time back into your day for billable activities.

If your firm doesn’t have a proper intake process, you could be losing a lot of billable time working on administrative and organizational tasks. In, Business Development 101: Online Communication Strategies to Increase Your Billable Hours we discussed how properly utilizing the various communication forms (phone, email, text, and website) can make a huge impact on your productivity and future revenue generation. 

Today, we are going to dive deeper into the client intake process and learn how you can not only improve your process but retain better clients. 

To start, let’s do a little refresher on how potential new clients are handled.  

How To Handle PNCs

Potential clients can be handled by you and your in-house staff or through remote and virtual services like paralegals, bookkeepers, and receptionists. 

With software, you have access to resources like call routing and tracking, client intake automation, and calendaring management. All of these tools exist for you to reach as many people as possible with the least amount of leg work.

Responsiveness Through Form and Function

When you think about the form and function of the content and materials that you use to draw in PNCs, you need a combination of human and machine intelligence. 

For the human intelligence side, ask yourself these questions:

• What goes into your lead nurturing drips?
• What does the copy (the actual words on the page) look and sound like?
• What are your lead-qualifying questions and intake-form compositions?
• What is your caller greeting?
• What does your email content look like? (From appointment confirmation to lead conversion drips)
• How do you handle 'bad' leads?

How you handle these questions all contribute to your firm’s brand. Not to mention the answers also set the tone for the initial impression you give a PNC.

On the other hand, machine intelligence is necessary to take care of the monotonous, orgnizational tasks. Consider these questions:

• Where is your client intake form hosted/located?
• How are leads and clients recorded and tracked?
• What happens after intake?
• What happens if a lead doesn’t convert?

Where the human intelligence is used to capture emotion and connection, the machine intelligence is used to speed up your back end logistics and take away some of the manual labor involved in capturing new leads. 

Combined effectively, you will achieve fast, friendly, and accurate responses from PNCs which will lead to more qualified leads and a better experience for new clients. If you can keep them happy off the bat, you’re one step ahead of the game. Not to mention, if your current clients are satisfied, they are more likely to refer friends and family.

Lead Conversion Flow 

Now that you have a firmer grasp on contact methods, let’s take a look at lead sources. Referrals make up a large source of new clients for firms, but what about cold leads? Where are those people coming from? Let’s take a look:

• Reviews
• Local listings
• PPC
• Social media
• Content & Freebies (downloadable pdfs, advice, forms, calculators, etc)
• Technical SEO to increase the visibility of your firm in search results
• Link building with other businesses 

Now, once a lead has contacted you, spoken to whomever you have in charge of the response methods (whether the response is via a receptionist service, in-house, or directly from an attorney), you qualify that the lead is ready for a consultation, your next step should be scheduling a meeting to collect more information. 

This process looks different for firm-to-firm, but at its core, you need to be able to track data efficiently and access it whenever you need it from wherever you are. We have created a great downloadable checklist attached to this blog for you to use as a guide, however, here is a high-level framework outlining what you should be tracking (at a minimum):

1. Getting started: When a PNC first makes contact with your firm
2. Confirm the PNCs basic details
3. Screen the PNC and do a conflict check
4. Approval: Initial consultation granted or denied
5. Gather pre-consult information (if you didn’t have enough information prior to do to conduct a conflict check do so now)
6. Consult
7. Organize post-consult information 
8. Send a over a new client agreement
9. Gather necessary documents

Now if you decide this person is not a good potential client, are you making referrals systematically? Referring out clients who are not a good fit with your firm not only highlights your good will, but it also gives you an opportunity to inform people of what your firm does so that in the future they can call reconnect with you. Additionally, if you refer clients to other firms in your area, they will be more likely to reciprocate that business when a PNC who isn’t a great fit for them walks through their doors. Huge takeaway here - don’t underestimate the power of a good first impression.

How to Leave a Good First Impression

Step 1 - Professionally and intelligently manage calls

Set up your phone so you’re not using your personal cell phone number. A huge push back for texting clients is the lack of privacy. Although you would like to be available for your clients 24/7, you don’t necessarily want to give them access to your personal information.  

Some software offer services where they will provide you with your own private number. Through this you will have the ability to track text and call communications that will automatically be converted into billable events for you. 

Once you have a private work number set up and ready, make sure you establish a professional greeting and menu. If a PNC calls you and wants to leave a message, that voice recording is the first form of communication they will experience with you. Don’t set a bad tone with an unreputable sounding recording. 

Next, consider blocking spam calls. In today’s age where solicitors are around every virtual corner, it is important to protect your number as much as possible. You have no idea when or off what number PNCs will call you from, so if you have spam calls blowing up your phone in between client calls, this is a problem. 

Keep in mind that PNCs have no boundaries when it comes to respecting your time. So make sure your phone is routed during holidays, vacations, schedule adjustments, and any times throughout the day when you are not available. You will miss out on PNCs if you do not have an action plan to capture their calls or messages when you are unavailable. Also consider having a separate after hours voicemail. For these messages, ask for more specific information and give them a time frame for when you will get back to them. This will encourage a relationship versus a one-off missed call. But, if you promise a call back during a specific window you better keep your word. Nothing will lose you a new client faster than unreliability. 

Lastly, track performance! Where did the calls originate from? Did the source yield high quality leads? This information may not seem important in the immediate, but it is. Track this information so you know where your clients are coming from. Having this information will help you determine where to spend your advertising and marketing dollars. The best way to increase non referral based leads is to hone in on target demographic and geographic information. Additionally, know how many answered and missed calls you have. Monitor the number of rings it takes to pick up and keep note of the duration of your calls. It is also important that you have call recordings for performance monitoring. Track what goes well and things that don’t. Your first job is to be an attorney, but your second has to be a business person. 

Step 2 - Automate lead capture and qualification

The very first step here, and this is incredibly important, is to have your criteria identified. First think about who the potential clients are that you really want and maybe also the clients you have worked with in the past that you want to avoid. Additionally, who are the clients you missed? Who are the PNCs that you wished you had captured sooner or the people who may have not experienced your best foot forward. 

Use this thought process to identify the criteria and systematically put in place either a form or a list of questions which you can then use to screen PNCs. When you determine if the PNC will make a good fit, implement workflows for qualified leads and incorporate new-client call-back or appointment procedures. Think about what form these call-backs will take place in, do you prefer phone call or email, and will you have a template for what you say that will encourage these people to use the most detail in their response?

For initial meetings, determine the policy on consultations. How long will they be? Twenty minutes? An hour? Will you charge for them? What format would you like to host them in? All of these details should be ironed out prior to speaking with anyone. Obviously customer service is important so if you have to make a special accommodation for someone, make it happen! You have no idea who they could be connected to or who they know, so always lead with kindness and consideration. It is important to note here that everyone has a different comfort level, video is very intimate, but not everyone is comfortable with it. Also keep in mind that some video software requires the users to download the app (like Skype). That is not always convenient for people who are either not very tech savvy or who simply don’t want to download it. If you are to conduct in-person consults, consider the time you will lose in the commute and any potential traffic delays or last minute schedule conflicts that could occur.

We all know that attorneys charge for a finite number of billable hours each day, so ensure you’re utilizing your time by automating the monotonous outbound tasks. For example, if you have people completing a contact form on your website, you can automatically forward those to the appropriate team members so that the call-back communication happens immediately. Set up workflows to make data collection and tracking easier for you. 

Step 3 - New Client Intake

Following lead capture, begin completing the client intake process. Before you begin, it would be prudent of you to ask them how they heard about you or your firm. This is valuable data! Don’t overlook it. (Your marketing team can thank us later)

Depending on your firm, your intake process may occur before or after booking your first appointment. And similarly to Step 2, identify the required questions you will ask and standardize this process across your firm. Aim for 5-10 questions and make it easy for these individuals to fill out the information. 

Some software today will allow you to customize your intake form and when a PNC fills it out and submits it, the information will automatically populate in your system. Not only is this process efficient, but it is professional and allows you to capture the specific information that is pertinent to your firm.

Step 4 - Streamline Appointments 

The most efficient and effective way to book appointments is by having a public-facing booking page directly on your website. The idea is to remove the amount of barriers between when a PNC first reaches out to you and when they become a client. Integrate this calendar with your own and make sure once a client submits a time that you are sending them the subsequent next-step information that they need. The sooner you can get this information to the client after they hit “schedule,” the more likely it is that they will not only be on time, but that they will come prepared. 

Utilize technology to also trigger workflows for your staff. Once a PNC requests a booking time, what does that mean for your staff? What needs to be done in preparation and who will be involved? 

As mentioned in Step 2, consider whether or not you’re going to charge a PNC for the consultation. The upsides to a paid consult include: reduced no shows and more guarantee that the person is a fit for your firm. However, some people see the cost and may raise an eyebrow. These are all things for your firm to consider, there is no right answer!

Step 5 - Bad Leads Out, Good Leads In

If you generate a list of PNCs who are not a great fit for you, but could be for another firm, utilize that to your advantage! However, some state Bar rules will not allow you to monetize referrals, so make sure you review the rules before getting started. 

Your firm should have an implemented process for “bad” leads. Think back to potential client qualification criteria and use that to identify unqualified leads to save your time. Make a list of all attorneys and firms you recommend by practice area and share that list with your staff or receptionist service including instructions for identifying the correct firm to recommend to the “bad” leads. This could be based on location, practice area or cost. Think of referring “bad” leads as a service. Systematically earn good will in the community and educate future potential clients and referral sources.

Step 6 - Record, Record, Record

As much as possible, integrate as many of your communications into your existing practice management software as possible. Every text and call should be logged with pre and post consult notes. Activity logs on new appointments need to be documented, and triggered workflows should be assigned as action steps for your staff as a PNC flows through your intake process. 

Use project and document management tools to integrate your emails and documents into your system seamlessly and automatically. With some software, you have the ability to build out document templates that can be automatically populated with new PNC information. This not only saves you time but reduces human error as well.

Having robust records of everyone you talk to will not only allow your firm to improve your intake strategy, but pinpoint what is working well for you so that you can continue capitalizing on it. 

So What’s Next?

Now that you have all this information, utilize the attached outline to start solidifying and building your intake process. Define what will be standardized across your firm and make it as easy as possible for PNCs to retain your firm!

In Calendaring Best Practices: Seems Simple, but Is It? we talked about calendaring best practices, and establishing a workflow. Today, we will connect some dots and focus on the dreaded missed deadline, bad habits, and improving inefficiencies. Calendaring is critical to your day-to-day operations so don’t take it lightly! If you don’t believe us, keep reading.

The Dreaded Missed Deadline

Did you know that lawyers have a 17% chance of being sued for malpractice every year? 

Addressing the #1 Cause of Malpractice Claims

According to the American Bar Association, nearly a quarter of all legal malpractice claims are based on lawyers procrastinating or failing to calendar.

• 6% of legal malpractice claims are based on the lawyer’s failure to file documents.
• 7% are based on the lawyer’s failure to calendar.
• 9% are based on the lawyer’s procrastination.
• 8% are based on the lawyer’s failure to react to the calendar.

Crazy, right?! 

If you look at all of these statistics, you will see that they are predominantly related to bad habits and inefficiencies. Let’s take a look at some of the bad habits plaguing the attorneys who are getting hit malpractice suits.

Waiting to schedule deadlines
If you’re not tracking and recording these deadlines as soon as they come in, you could be leaving yourself at risk for malpractice. 

Missing centralized calendars
If someone at your firm loses their calendar, or cannot see deadlines the rest of the firm is trying to meet, the more likely a misstep will occur. A rule of thumb to successful calendaring is transparency and visibility.

Lack of research
If you’re practicing in a new jurisdiction, you need to know the local rules or any rule changes. Even if you’re a new attorney, brush up on the regulations and make sure your bases are covered.

Failure to plan
If you do not have a plan of attack as to how you’re going to meet your deadlines, you will be leaving room to not only procrastinate but to forget about what you have due entirely.

Deadline reassignment
If your staff changes or someone gets sick, those court deadlines won’t change. Your clients should not be on the receiving end of your firms' disorganization when life happens. Always be prepared, and have a backup plan in case your team faces a disruption.

Entering deadlines
It is very inefficient to enter deadlines on a calendar one-by-one. If you have a high volume practice and one person is in charge of entering deadlines, it may take them a few days to enter everything in accordingly. And at that point, you are now a few days into a 10-day timeline, or whatever the timeframe may be. 

Potential Attorney Missteps

There are many things that can go wrong in the span of one case. Many of these things are out of your control, but some are not. Let’s go through some of those examples:

• Notice of Removal of Federal Court - This is a prominent trap because if you don’t file that notice you can incur attorney’s fees and a whole host of other consequences. 
• The Certificate of Review (or Professionals in some jurisdictions) - The case can be dismissed without prejudice, and if the statute of limitations expired, you cannot refile.
• Inadequate or late fact disclosures - This is what it sounds like. You can lose the ability to use evidence at trial if the evidence you’re providing is either past due or insufficient.
• Hiring an expert - If you hire an expert too late they will either not be allowed on the stand or they will come severely unprepared. You should try your best to prepare to disclose your expert at least 60-90 days prior so that they have a sufficient amount of time to prepare to the best of their ability. 
• Missing Summary Judgement deadlines - This is really huge. If you miss a deadline, you may be subjected to writing-off a ton of time or worse, a prejudice against your client's case. It should also be noted that your firm's failure to respond to a motion for summary judgment within the time required by Rule 56 cannot be forgiven by reliance on excusable neglect.
• Notice of Appeal - If you miss this deadline then you miss it. Now you can file a motion to extend the deadline, but doing so also requires you to act in a specific window of time.  

All of these examples severely impact your client. It is worth taking the time to modify and ensure that your calendaring practices are not only accurate but are standardized across the firm. 

Ideal Calendaring Workflow

1. Calculate your deadlines as soon as they are evident and available
2. Have another member of the team verify that calculations are done correctly. This initially may seem redundant, but human errors happen.
3. Schedule deadlines and corresponding reminders at the appropriate intervals and assign those to a second set of eyes 

You may have read those three steps and sighed. That’s a lot of work! But it doesn’t have to be.

Instead of researching deadlines and inputting dates manually, there are ways to automate this process so that you are not only spending less time on it, but you are remaining more accurate and consistent as well.

Practice Management Software

There are a considerable amount of advantages that come with using a practice management software, let’s take a look:

• You have a centralized calendar that is backed up and will allow you to utilize multiple views along with a matter centric view. 
• You can sync this calendar with Outlook, Apple, and Google Calendar.
• Workflows and task management are built into this, so all of the tasks associated with meeting those deadlines can be configured into customizable matter templates that can get layered on depending on what the deadline is. 
• Organized matters and matter streams that will help you keep track of your last activity. You will have a better idea of when a document has been prepared when tasks have been completed, and you can subscribe to a specific matter feed to get alerts for all things pertaining to that matter. This is great for firms that are collaborative or for firms who have a heavy workload and need help juggling a multitude of tasks.

How to Keep Your Calendaring Head On Straight

Aside from having to meet court and document deadlines, you have regular tasks and everyday to-dos that you have to keep up with. Whether that includes client consultations, new client intakes, progress reports, managing your staff, and not to mention being able to go home and turn off your work brain for a little and enjoy your personal life. All it takes is a plan, and we encourage you to try to implement one of these calendar tips today. 

Take 5-10 minutes at the end of each day to plan out your next day. 

Make sure all your appointments are filled in, check your upcoming deadlines, and ensure you have blocks of time reserved to be able to work towards those deadlines and begin crossing things off your list of to-dos. Also, be thinking about the top 2-3 activities that you can accomplish for that day. You don’t need to write this down, but take mental note of what went well that day, what you're grateful and blessed to have, and what you appreciate. It may seem insignificant, but in this fast-paced, high-stressed industry, it is important to take a moment to acknowledge the good. 

Use 30 minutes on a Friday to plan out the following week.

In addition to looking at your calendar and mentally taking note of everything you have on your plate, try to solidify 3-4 concrete action items or tasks to complete for your work, your relationships, and your personal life. If you already know this, then bear with us for those who don’t. Your work productivity, happiness, and satisfaction with your life are influenced by your relationships and personal life outside of work. 

For relationships, this could be anything from calling your parents to check-in, or writing back to an old friend or old co-worker. Little things like this make a difference and they do matter. For your personal life, this could be as simple as scheduling yourself a lunch. Often times, attorneys and legal teams will get so busy they forget to eat. We aren’t scientists here, but glucose level and productivity go hand in hand. All these things may feel like a distraction at times, but your motivation and the type of work results you produce will correlate in some shape or form with how the rest of your life is going. So take a minute to incorporate those elements into your calendar because they are important.

Create a firm-wide process for scheduling and set boundaries for your time

Sometimes when people have access to a firm-wide calendar, there is a tendency to grab any time they want and book you for things without asking first. All this does is throw you off. If you spent Friday planning out your week and then you find that come Monday there are multiple chunks of your day booked out already without you knowing, you will have to completely adjust what you had planned to do. How do you fix this? You set verbal and transparent boundaries. For example, set specific days for allotted activities. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays are when you do your inbound consultations and client calls. So when someone calls your staff requesting your time, they will know to slot them in on either Tuesday or Thursday.

The Pomodoro technique 

The Pomodoro is a proven and popular time management technique. The premise here is that you work in blocks that typically last 25 minutes that are called Pomodoro sessions. You work for 25 minutes straight, focusing on your work with zero distractions then you follow that up with a 5 minute period of rest or a break. The result of this is productivity and higher management of distractions. Now after 4 Pomodoro sessions, you’re supposed to take a longer, 20-minute break to step away from your work, catch your breath and clear your mind. 

Delegate

Delegate where appropriate and have dedicated time to review with staff. If you’re using practice management software, you will have a way to manage projects at a glance and also get really granular insights into the work your team is doing. This will enhance your firm's productivity overall and the quality of service you are able to provide to your clients. 

If your scheduling regular dates to review your matters and you have specific staff assigned to those matters, pull up the calendar and go through everything that you expect needs to be done or completed by that person. The earlier and more often you do this, the easier it will be to catch mistakes and avoid missed deadlines. Additionally, give these staff members the opportunity to talk about their workload, and give them feedback on the quality of their work. Also, use this time to offer support and constructive feedback; if you don’t like how something is being handled, let them know, or if you are happy with something you should express that as well. 

Takeaways

Calendaring is important. If you walk away with only one thing, it should be that. You may not be able to implement everything we just talked about overnight, but if you can start today, you will only improve company morale, ensure that no task is being forgotten, and you will help foster a system of efficiency and excellence within your firm.

Technology is a driving force behind trends that significantly impacts the way your clients consume and interact with data. Ditching old habits can be hard, there is no argument there, but the benefits of adopting these new tech-driven changes will be the difference makers between profitable and unprofitable firms. 

Calendaring. It seems so simple and trivial, but there is nothing more critical to your day-to-day operations than an accurate and up-to-date calendar. It is really important to evaluate and understand what types of calendars each attorney is using. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we must be able to effectively utilize distributed workspaces; so if your calendar is a paper planner zipped up in your briefcase, staff working remotely will most certainly not be able to access it.

This blog will be broken up into two parts, part one today will focus on best practices, and establishing a workflow, and part two will focus on the dreaded missed deadline, bad habits and inefficiencies, and how to achieve calendar zen. 

Let’s jump in.

Calendaring Best Practices 

1. Office-wide calendar 

An office-wide master calendar is a really good rule of thumb. Having one place where all of your dates are listed across the firm, regardless of the attorney that’s working on it, is a really good thing to have. Having a redundant calendar is important. If you’re using Outlook 365, that needs to sync to your practice management system. Transparency and visibility cannot be sacrificed.  

2. Recurring matter review date

You should set one review date for every matter to ensure they are being kept on track. What does this mean? You don’t want to have 200 matters in your system and then realize in 6 months that you’ve only touched 40% of them. Having a recurring date to review your matters on a regular basis gives you time to see where each case is, to check in with your clients, and most importantly just keep everything organized and up-to-date. 

The longer your case stays in your office, the less profitable it becomes. Take in cases, wrap them up efficiently, get them out the door, and collect your payment. The tighter you can make this process, the more money you will make. 

3. Enter deadlines as soon as possible

Enter your deadlines as soon as you’re aware of them with spaced out reminder dates. As soon as you know that a deadline is apparent, whether you’ve been served with discovery from opposing counsel, or a trial date has been scheduled, you want to make sure you get those dates into your calendar so that you do not forget about them. Having a tiered system to enter dates is also a smart thing to implement. Setting a reminder date to notify you that a deadline is coming up, an urgent date to alert you that you must take action now, and lastly a warning date right before the actual due date. By creating this tiered level of reminders, you will be able to stay more organized, and file motions for extensions if need be. 

4. Staff accountability

Make sure all attorney and non-attorney staff are held accountable. Everyone should know what their role or responsibilities are when it comes to deadlines. Whether they are in charge of entering the activity, drafting paperwork corresponding to the event, editing, filing etc. Everyone should know what they are responsible for. If one person drops the ball and misses a deadline, there should be no reason why anyone else attached to that activity misses the deadline.

5. Be realistic 

Give yourself enough time to investigate and work towards a deadline. Some dates are pretty clear cut. But there are other rules that are slightly more ambiguous and may require more research. An example of this could be if you’re taking on a case in a new jurisdiction. Give yourself enough time to investigate and work towards those deadlines. 

6. Analyze Procrastination   

Failure to react to the calendar is another field the ABA takes into account when they look at reasons for malpractice. So even with the best technology and minimal human error, if you’re avoiding or dismissing deadlines, there may be a bigger problem. For example, if you’re practicing law in an area you are not 100% familiar with, or if you’re working for a client you don’t particularly like, you need to figure out if you can find ways to combat those issues directly because if you cannot meet the deadlines, you need to remove yourself from the case. 

What Goes Into A Good Master Calendar?

A good master calendar is crucial for firm-wide visibility, collaboration, and accountability. Many attorneys have the ability to manage their workload in their own way, this includes managing their own court calendar. However, every firm should still have a master calendar that is managed by a well-trained member of the team that can constantly keep it updated. If events are not updated, attorneys assisting on matters may be more prone to miss key dates or information. 

Firms should also consider different viewing formats or filters. Your calendar must be agile and flexible enough to provide you with filtering options. In most cases, there are many filtering options that you can utilize, but it is best practice to explore which filters work best for specific teams. If your firm has different geographical locations you can filter by a specific area, or if you only want to view some members of the team over others, you can filter by that criteria as well. 

A good master calendar should be backed up regularly, either offsite or in the cloud. Depending on what you’re doing, if you have an on-prem system you are going to want to have a backup copy of that calendar in another location that is not your physical office. This is for reasons like natural disasters, break-ins, server malfunctions, etc. There are so many things that could happen and you have to be prepared for them. Cloud-based backups are very easy to implement. If you’re already paying for cloud services, your cloud provider should be doing most backups for you automatically. 

Your master calendar should also flow to and from matter-centric calendars. If you’re using practice management software, you want anyone who has privileges to access a matter in your system to be able to see the relevant dates and information for that matter. Additionally, this calendar should be accessible from your mobile device. Attorneys are on the go more often than not, so it is crucial that this information is available wherever they are. Make sure you turn on push notifications and reminders so that when you are using your mobile device for calendering, you are alerted to what is due and when just like you would be on your computer. 

Workflow Processes and Holding Your Staff Accountable 

The roles and responsibilities for everyone involved with calendaring should be clear. Who enters the dates when activities are made clear? Is there someone who is going to be responsible for double-checking those calculations for deadlines? Have tasks been assigned according to the upcoming deadline so everyone knows what their responsibilities are in order to meet them? 

Your calendaring process should be standardized across the firm to ensure continuity if staff changes. If that staff change does occur, then will you be able to easily train them on your process? Or if someone is out of the office, or they’re sick, you don’t want to have to call them with an emergency because the people who are available are not trained on how to read and operate the calendar. 

Proper calendaring using case management should also funnel into easy billing. Why you may ask? It is part of productivity. You want to make sure that if you are putting in the work to make sure you are meeting those deadlines, then you also want to make sure that you’re billing for it too. Some practice management software today have the capability to allow you to bill on the go, or enter time from the programs you’re already working in. For example, you can record your time as you save documents in Word or when you send client emails from Outlook.

Nobody should be able to opt-out of using a calendar because you want to maintain that accurate centralized firm calendar that is used not only consistently but in a uniform and standardized way. The workflow for each matter should allow everyone to know what step needs to be taken and when. This will lead to a higher level of firm efficiency, a higher level of communication, and as a result, higher client satisfaction. 

What To Walk Away With

Calendaring seems simple, and in part it is. But it also can be the difference between a malpractice suit and a profitable law firm. It is important to learn and train your team on best practices because although calendaring seems like a no brainer, you’d be surprised about how many firms struggle to keep their schedules buttoned up and organized. 

To learn more about Centerbase's calendar, schedule a free no-obligation product demo!

In the unpredictable world we live in, it isn’t uncommon for you to wonder if your firm is charging too much or too little. Are your billable rates in line with your competitors? Is it best to bill by the hour? By flat fee, subscription?  It's no question that there are a lot of options. So with all this in mind, how do you determine your firm's profitability? How can you make decisions that will be in the best interest of both your firm and your clients? Let's take a look.

Determining Your Profitability 

There are five critical steps you should be taking when you're considering how to price or re-evaluate your legal services.

1. Think about the products you’re offering
2. Identify your revenue model
3. Consider your customer acquisition costs (CAC)
4. Determine your case value and customer lifetime value (LTV)
5. Understand your fixed costs

Product Offering 

Yes, you are delivering legal services, but that is not your quote-on-quote product. Take the time to evaluate your niche and your unique value proposition. 

Whether you’re a software company or a law firm, you are ultimately selling a product. There are millions of products in the world, so being able to narrow down and pin-point your offering is crucial to making you stand out. Are you a real-estate attorney with subject matter expertise in environmental liability issues? Are you a family law attorney who has expertise in same-sex couple adoption? As you begin to look at your profitability metrics, it is important to narrow down what your firm specializes in and use those case numbers to more accurately reflect how lucrative your firm is. Drilling down on what makes your firm unique will only bolster your client experience, but your profitability as well. 

Revenue Model 

When you look at your revenue model and you’re considering how you want to bill your clients, the first place you need to be looking at and research are the market demands. Analyze what your potential clients want, what they are looking for, and what they’re demanding. Are you serving small business owners who may want to pay for services as work pops up? Or perhaps you’re serving primarily start-ups with small budgets who prefer to see all costs upfront? No two clients are the same, so it is important to understand what they’re looking for and how you can best meet those expectations. Additionally, you must also take into consideration the operational requirements needed to manage those clients. For example, if you’re billing hourly, then the operational requirements to successfully do this would require a software that allows you to capture and track your time. 

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

The truth of any business is that it costs money to acquire new clients. Customer acquisition costs represent the time, money, and effort required to get leads and then convert those leads into paying customers. 

Look at the data you have available. It is best to go over things in increments of 6, 9, and then 12 months to ensure you’re getting the most accurate information. When you’re considering your sales and marketing costs for your firm, the first thing you should think about is your time. This could be the time spent on business development, networking events, anything that takes time out of your day to pursue in the effort to expand your book of business. Next, tabulate any additional money spent on digital advertisement, or direct mailings. These hard costs will be the foundation for determining your customer acquisition cost. Your costs to close a lead are incurred through the bottom of the funnel activities that take up your time like consultations or meetings.   

Let’s go through a fictitious example utilizing 12 months of made up data:

In this example, we took the estimated cost of your time plus the amount you spent on marketing and targeted campaigns to determine a total sales and marketing figure. We then took that figure and divided it by the total number of clients you work with throughout a given year. With that number, you subtract the final estimated costs associated to close that specific lead, and what is left is your total cost to acquire that particular client.

So going forward when you consider growing your business, this type of easy calculation will be able to help you understand that if you invest X amount of dollars, you will be able to attain X amount of new clients. By adding some predictability into your equation, you will be less surprised at the end of the road if things don't go your way.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer LTV represents the amount of business value or gross margin that is received over the course of a client’s lifetime. When that client first steps through your door, you must begin to evaluate how much revenue you are gaining from your client on a case-by-case basis.

Let’s go through a fictitious example of an attorney who bills by the hour utilizing 12 months of made-up data:

In this example, we took the number of hours this fictitious attorney was spending on Client X’s matter and multiplied it by their billable rate. Next, we took a look at how much money the attorney was spending to do that work. In this case, 25 hours of work resulted in 17 billable hours, which converts to a little over 70% profit margin. And lastly, we multiplied that total profit margin number by the total number of matters Client X typically brings to this attorney in a 12 month period. This resulted in an LTV around $14,400. A customer’s lifetime value is important to calculate because it will highlight to you which clients bring you repeat business without you having to spend those marketing and sales dollars to get them through the door.

Understanding how to calculate LTV in this easier scenario will allow you to replicate this information when you start looking at multiple fee arrangements. Like discussed earlier, if the market is demanding subscription billing, or consolidated billing (to just name two), you and your firm need to be able to meet these needs in order to remain competitive. Your customer experience will make or break your business, and how your clients want to be billed needs to be met with “yes we can make that happen,” not “sorry, we cannot accommodate that billing arrangement.”

Fixed Costs

At this point, you have figured out what expertise and skill set you have that sets you apart, you have determined what specific product you’re offering, how your want to set up your billing structure, how much money it costs for you to get clients in the door, and how much margin you can generate from that client in a given period of time. The last step now is to understand your fixed costs. Fixed costs represent the amount of money you are spending to support your law firm as a whole. On an annual basis, how much money are you spending to pay the firms office rent, support staff, legal technology, annual license fees, etc? These are your fixed costs.

What Does All This Mean?

The things that are really important when you look at customer acquisition costs and lifetime value are the scalability of your law firm and whether or not you can be sustainable in the long term. 

The first thing you can do when you have these numbers is to look at how long it takes you to recoup your customer acquisition cost. To do this, you take your total $627 CAC cost and divide it by how much profit you generate, which in our fictitious example was $4,800. So, what this means is that you recoup your CAC by the time you are 13% of the way through your first case with that client. A general rule of thumb is that you recoup your customer acquisition costs within that first year of starting the particular matter. This low percentage indicates that you have a little more room to spend on acquiring new clients if you so choose.  

The second thing you must do is ensure you’re making money over a customer’s lifetime. If you take the $14,400 LTV we calculated in the fictitious example (profit per case multiplied by the number of cases that client brings to you in a year) and divide that amount by the $627 CAC cost, that’s roughly a 22.3x return on investment per client. This is a huge number! This indicates that you could lower your billable rate to get clients through the door and still make a decent size profit. Do your research and determine where the market stands and then evaluate if you have room to adjust.

Scalable Business Model

Your CAC and LTV are what we describe as unit economics. In the long term, if what we calculated are your unit economics, can your firm ultimately make money? The answer would be yes. From a business perspective, there are always things you can do in the short-term that will get you by, but those bandaids will eventually come off to reveal a less than favorable result. Let’s do some quick calculations. If you’re generating $6,800 in revenue per case (determined from our LTV example), and you’re taking on about 50 cases per year, that’s about S340,000 in annual revenue. Now let’s say your direct costs total around $95,000 a year to serve that revenue, you’re left with a gross margin of around $245,000. Now, after your fixed costs, and sales and marketing expenses (for this hypothetical example, let’s say those total up to $50,000), your total income before tax comes to $195,000. If you can make these calculations each year, you will be able to determine if you can serve your clients profitably, while also saving enough cash for future growth.

All of this leads to what you should walk away with… without favorable unit economics, you will not have a sustainable law firm in the long run. Understanding how much it takes to bring new clients in and how much money those clients bring to your firm over the course of their lifetime will ultimately tell you how successful your firm will be in the future. There are levers you can pull after you understand this data. These levers are either revenue or pricing driven like billable hour vs. flat fee, or whether you’re above market or below market. You can adjust these metrics accordingly. The other thing you can do is adjust your service levels. If you’re spending too much time serving one client then you need to either keep your service level the same and bump up your rate, or if your rate is already in line with your competition, then keep your rate the same and spend less time performing that work. 

The goal is to understand your data at the customer level to determine whether or not you’ll be successful in the long term with your entire book of business.

If you had to guess what one emotion is elicited when lawyers are faced with the ability to adopt new technology, what would you guess?

If you guessed hesitancy then you’d be right. When it comes to advancements in new technologies, that emotional resistance has become almost an expected response for the legal industry, and it isn’t without justification. The importance and sensitive nature of matters handled by attorneys prove reason enough to proceed with caution before diving headfirst into the unfamiliar tech waters. 

However, whether firms want to believe it or not, the water is warm and because technology has transformed the capabilities of attorneys in rendering legal services, attorneys and firms that fail to embrace new developments risk depriving their clients of the most effective representation possible. With the level of competition we are seeing today, firms have no choice but to modernize the way they practice. 

The Legal Landscape Today 

If you take a stand back and look at the legal landscape and where it has evolved from, there are undeniable trends that in some ways, have pushed firms into modernization (whether they were initially willing or not). The explosion of legal technology and improved service delivery models have evolved our use of big data and have led to the digitalization of billing, the automation of client intake and matter management, and ultimately has increased firm's ability to close out cases at a much faster rate. However, demand is rising faster than available resources can accommodate, and firms are faced with a level of strain they haven’t seen before. Automation, workflow management, and legal software are easing the pressure, but the adoption of these resources is still slow to catch on. The boundaries of many legal functions within a firm are expanding, and these trends are calling for a few things: new processes, new skills, and new approaches. Unfortunately, fewer attorneys are equipped to thrive in this environment, which is resulting in the isolation of many traditional law firms. 

Before we dive deeper into how firms can combat the modernization of the legal industry, it is important to understand what is driving these trends. In one word, it’s data. 10 years ago the driver was globalization, but now with the proliferation of information consumers have access to, it’s clear that data rules. These quantifiable metrics have no boundaries and they certainly transcend jurisdictions. We’re in a consumer-centric world now, and the only way to keep up with the people you serve is by knowing what they want. And you do that by looking at the numbers.   

An Introduction to Modern Law Firms

So what exactly is a modern law firm? Why are they different? Do they really embrace new strategies and methods? Let’s find out.  

The definition of ‘modern’ is to relate to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past. As new technologies are released and new things are discovered, firms have to be willing and able to grow and adapt to these changes. A firm's vision and objective must be clear in order to overcome challenges that will prevent you from keeping up with the rest of the world. And more importantly, how your clients expect your services to be rendered. As the pace of society continues to speed up, and expectations are increased, younger attorneys don’t have time to waste on processes that could be simplified and made easier. Today, it is about more than hard work, it’s about innovation, creativity, and providing a level of top-notch service that cannot be found anywhere else. To be a modern firm, you must rely on data and technology because that is the best way to serve your employees and clients in this new world.

The generational gap

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was quoted by Plato as noting that “everything changes and nothing stands still.” From one generation to the next, we continue to see a divergence from what used to be popular in culture and technology to the “next best thing” or trend. What was once a gold standard business procedure for Baby Boomers or even Millennials, is now obsolete or antiquated to Gen X-ers. This age gap can lead to misunderstandings and disconnect between younger associates and more senior attorneys. Recruitment is a top priority for firms, but it is also one of the biggest pain points. If management can’t understand the technologies the talent they are trying to recruit is using, or if they won’t come to terms with the reality of these differences, newer attorneys will find a firm that will. Understanding and taking steps to adopt these technologies will not only bridge this gap but will make your firm more agile and lean.

Culture of open communication

Poor communication is often cited as the biggest factor that leads to client complaints. Similarly, a lack of communication within your law firm is just as detrimental, not only for efficiency but for accuracy as well. Innovation, collaboration, and calculated risk are paramount to a successful firm, and with the prevalence of conferences, virtual meetings, and online and in-person communities, firms have started to recognize the benefit of coming together to share real data. As the industry continues to evolve, these communication channels need to stay open and attorneys need to make use of their time and their client's time. In a world that is always on the go, clients expect fast responses to their questions and routine updates on their cases. There are now technologies that let you privately send and receive texts and calls from your phone while simultaneously tracking and billing for that time automatically. Software like this function to make your life easier. Not to mention it helps you make more money. It’s a no-brainer, and although adoption and technology training may seem like an uphill battle, the benefits of utilizing it at your firm far outweigh those initial burdens.

Artificial intelligence

There is a significant gap today between companies that have adopted (and understand) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential advantages and those who do not. 

Savvy law firms are also savvy businesses. They embrace AI to perform repeatable tasks and to process data that is essential for their business campaigns or strategy. Firms also adopt AI to streamline existing business processes, and they have established solid management support for each AI initiative. For example, you can automate your case management to get your bills sent out faster. By creating a workflow, software can automatically assign or complete tasks for you. This should be a no brainer! Letting traditional ways (looking at you paper people!) go is hard, but if you have a smartphone (as 81% of Americans do), then I bet you adjusted to that technological jump in 07’ just fine! 

Despite high expectations of AI, statistics show only 23% of businesses have incorporated it into their processes, product, and service offerings. The AI industry and technology involved are surely new, but it is crucial for any business or firm that wants to do better now and in the future to look into it.

Your online presence 

When you think of marketing and online presence, law firms, or even the legal industry as a whole, probably don’t come to mind. Due to the nature of your work, there has never really been a need for a heavy emphasis on brand positioning. But as we enter this new digital society filled with digitized and remote work, that is beginning to change. We are in an age where everything is and can be found online. Because of this, it is essential that your firm meets the needs of clients who are moving to online resources to help craft their decision making. Everything from your website, your blog, and your social media profiles are essential for the modernization of your company. With the internet, your website is probably the first contact between your audience and your firm. And if we’ve learned anything from our days sitting across that oak desk at law school entrance interviews... First impressions are everything. 

Website design

Every element of a well-designed website is carefully planned, executed, and updated when need be. A modern firm knows that their clients are on the internet, which means if you’re not, you’re behind. At the end of the day, if your site doesn’t accurately reflect your firm, it might be time to take additional steps. The clients you will one day serve are the millennials who are currently fully immersed in technology. To win their business you must be aligned with their needs.

Implementing these strategies will not happen overnight. They will require time, resources, and commitment. But, if you want to stay competitive, you must make it a priority to modernize your business, otherwise, your days of competitive advantage will soon be over. It is only a matter of time. 

 

The Increase In Remote Work

In this world of “new normal,” remote work is here to stay – so the question is, how do we effectively manage this new way of working moving forward? While there are considerable advantages to working from home, there are also disadvantages of remote working for legal professionals that need to be addressed. In this pandemic, and moving forward, some degree of remote work will become commonplace, so it’s time to get ahead on managing performance and balancing the pros and cons that will inevitably crop up.

In this blog, we’ll be providing insights on some of these disadvantages and how you can better integrate fixes that are both actionable and effective toward maintaining your level of day-to-day efficiency.

Disadvantages of Remote Working and How to Fix It for Legal Professionals

Difficulty With Time Tracking

The Disadvantage: For a firm depending on billable hours to maintain profitability with client work, getting accurate hours from your workers can be a big challenge when working remotely. Time may feel different for people at home, and keeping track of billable tasks can easily get lost in the shuffle of other distractions.

The Fix: Time Tracking Software

Without the constant flux of in-person client visits and immediate office distractions, many law firm workers of all departments have an opportunity to divide up their day accordingly. By using project management software that effectively gathers time spent on matters takes the headache out of manually inputting it every day. This also keeps communication clear on the status without the need for constant status updates or pesky emails that clog the inbox and stunt productivity flow.

Centerbase offers automatic time tracking, so you can capture every billable hour spent on client-based calls and interactions. Your billing department and your bottom line will thank you.

Blurred Work and Personal Lines

The Disadvantage: Without a clear separation between work and home, blurred lines can create rapid burnout in remote employees. This can result in lowered performance, inaccurately recorded working hours, and poor time management that affects day-to-day duties. Since you aren’t able to monitor their habits and what goes on, how do you appropriately measure time worked in comparison to hours off?

The Fix: Communicate processes and benefits

With everything around people working remotely still feeling new and unfamiliar, it’s important to take that extra mile to communicate and clarify processes and resources available to everyone. Reiterate what hours everyone needs to be available, and reassure that they don’t have to be connected to their computers all hours of the evening. Many are juggling between being a full-time worker, parent, and teacher right now, so a little understanding also goes a long way.

Due to the pandemic, many healthcare providers have lifted some of their restrictions on telehealth appointments. Check what your benefits packages are offering, and consider adding a telehealth option for employees to get appointments easier and help maintain mental health during this turbulent change. This may not reflect immediately, but employees will have an extra layer of resources to help in case things become too blurred. Not to mention the benefit of additional help from experts to better manage their day-to-day routine. That trust and investment in their well-being will definitely pay off in their productivity in the long run.

Increased Risk for Miscommunication and Document Management

The Disadvantage: Less face-to-face interaction means more chances for miscommunication or no communication entirely from staff. This can create confusion and perpetuate uncertainty that mounts with every email that goes un-replied or client followup that’s ignored. Or worse, the possibility of technology failure. If a VPN doesn’t allow access to all areas of a matter, and staff are stuck having to circumvent the system or store sensitive information where it’s not safe

With remote work, your staff needs to communicate like a well-oiled machine – even more so than they did while in the office. You’ll need a system and a communication model that works for everyone and runs efficiently without detracting from everyday duties.

The Fix: Document management from anywhere

By easing the ability for workers to document matter updates – whether they’re at home, or even on their phone in line at the grocery store on their lunch break – you’ll help continue the open communication culture you had in an office environment. Ensuring you provide updated permissions for remote workers to add notes to files and safely access key information in real-time will make a huge difference in keeping everyone aligned. Also, plan daily huddles and a longer weekly meeting to check the pulse of everyone’s workload and pace. Are things harder for them now? Is something stopping them from doing their jobs from a software or operations standpoint? Open up the floor and listen.

Centerbase’s document management lets everyone retrieve and share documents easily through programs you use all the time, such as Microsoft Word and your own web browser.

The Risk of Decreased Client-Facing Work

The Disadvantage: Lack of client contact can be problematic for some – especially those who may need to be in-person for legal proceedings or prefer face-to-face updates regarding their case. Some of that client-facing work can bolster the attorney-client relationship and keep confidence high regarding their case. This can be especially taxing for attorneys accustomed to more traditional office meetings and client interactions.

The Fix: Use a client portal

Old software depends on cumbersome intake forms and notes that have to be manually uploaded to a digital format. Even worse, much of the client conversation could be in a paralegal's mind, but the interaction could be recorded or notated incorrectly in the file.

With a speedy, 24/7 client contact with the Centerbase mobile or web app, our versatile client portal gives clients everything they need, when they need it. This can be a gamechanger for remote work, especially since you can keep conversations and notes directly tied to a client’s account so you’ll always remember where you last left off on their case.

Reduced Collaboration and Networking Opportunities

The Disadvantage: An unfortunate pitfall around the disadvantages of remote working can be a decrease in referrals or new sources to find clients. And without in-person events and community networking, you may find collaboration between colleagues screech to a halt, which can hit incoming business hard.

The Fix: Online events and weekly team meetings

One of the nice things with remote work is, on some level, everyone can stay connected and informed through social media channels. If your firm has a Facebook or Instagram page, consider holding live sessions where you answer commonly asked questions and provide legal advice with a few attorneys in quick, bite-size sessions.

Appoint a legal assistant on your team to help manage the page and arrange times where attorneys and their colleagues from other firms can also participate. For example, if you’ve got a personal injury firm, you can collaborate with someone from another area of law like family or criminal to have a wider scope of knowledge to answer questions. By tagging each other, you can repurpose this content into blogs and other resources and create backlinks to help flesh out a content library for people searching and asking online for legal help.

Increased Home Office Distractions

The Disadvantage: Between children crying, laundry going off, video games, and phone notifications, the distractions are endless while working from home. While some can thrive in this environment, others struggle immensely and procrastinate on tasks by doing chores or finding their favorite comfy spot on the sofa. All of which leads to feeling unfocused and unmotivated.

The Fix: Flexible work times

For any children in e-learning, some workers may thrive when the kids are done with the day and can focus on tasks undisturbed while little ones watch their favorite show. Be prepared to ask workers if some added flexibility to their hours would help keep tasks on schedule to prepare for necessary matters deadlines and client updates. You’d be surprised how this model can help boost productivity during remote work, because everyone’s home lives are different.

Striking a Balance with Remote Work

The key to continuing business with working from home is to be aware of the disadvantages of remote working and find a harmonious balance. There’s no single clear-cut solution to remote working. Being aware that every firm is going to have a unique set of clients and matters means you’ll need to experiment and communicate with your staff to see how they’re managing and balancing home and work life.

Do they feel isolated from each other knowing their priorities? If so, how can you help bridge that gap in a way that drives culture and keeps drawbacks of remote working to a minimum? Remove those barriers, and you’ll find remote employees will feel better about communication and this new transition.

Another big part of counteracting the disadvantages of remote working can be ensuring their technological access is sound, and doesn’t inhibit them from completing tasks and updating matters.

Conclusion

There are clearly pros and cons to working from home, and it’s important to know how to best prepare your workforce as they transition between remote and in-office work. Although clear disadvantages to remote exist, we hope this was helpful on how you can ease the burden and create an environment that keeps your workers reassured and prepared to continue adapting.

Do you have any other questions about how to transition your workload to remote capabilities for legal professionals? Centerbase has adaptability and permission-based access, so everyone only sees what’s needed to do their jobs most effectively. Feel free to schedule a no-obligation demo and discern how our software can best help your needs going into this new world of remote work in law firms.

If you’ve heard of Lean management then you know its origins come from Toyota’s revolution of the manufacturing world. In the late ’80s and ’90s, Western manufacturing companies were getting crushed by their Japanese rivals, especially Toyota. At the time, it was no secret that the United States and Europe had lost their competitive edge. The pressure to regain their spots at the top was certainly on.

It was throughout this time that several improvement methodologies rose to existence. Those methodologies included: Total Quality Management, Theory of Constraints, Just-in-Time, and Six Sigma.

Now, fast forward to the emergence of two men by the names of Jim Womack and Dan Jones. They took the principles behind those methodologies and used their differences to create something new. What resulted was a monumental shift from copying specific practices to understanding the principles that made the whole system work.

That all sounds great right? But how do their Lean management principles translate into today’s market and how do you apply them to your firm?

Before we jump into that, let’s recap the seven types of waste that we discussed in Running a Lean Law Firm: How Eliminating Waste Can Drive Revenue. Remember, eliminating these waste types are fundamental to the ideology of Lean management.

Defects- This could range from filing errors, calculation errors, or even sending a client the wrong set of forms.

Over-Processing- Are you spending an excessive amount of time on a particular work item? If yes, you’re over-processing.

Motion- One word: ergonomics. If your work environment is not set up to allow you to move around efficiently and access what you need, you’re producing motion waste.

Waiting- It is what it sounds. Waiting breeds lost time and whether you’re waiting for an action item to be returned to you or you’re experiencing delays within other verticals of the firm, you’re waiting.

Inventory- Your matters or inactive files that have not been closed out or paid on.

Transportation- How much time do you estimate you waste driving to and from client meetings? Probably a lot. How much time do you end up wasting on excessive manual file movement? Also probably a lot.

Over-production- If one part of the firm produces more than others can handle, or if you’re doing too much of one thing, then you're over-producing.

Now that you’re refreshed, let’s jump in.

7 Principles of Today’s Lean

The claim could be made that one of the hardest challenges that businesses face today is the speed at which they must constantly be innovating to meet the pace of disruptive competition. Luckily, the Lean system that Womack and Jones ironed out can be applied to any business or any team because the applications of its principles were designed for exactly that.

The most common metaphor that is being used to describe Lean is fitness. It's the notion of building sustainable muscle and athletic stamina over merely cutting fat.

To start, it is true that if you’re overweight, the first thing you have to do is lose that weight. But once those pounds have been shed, you can’t stop there. Sure you can try to starve yourself to fitness, but inevitably the number on the scale will start to increase again. That, or you’ll just lose your mind in hunger. To become truly fit and sustain a healthy lifestyle, you have to create a system of healthy eating, a balanced workout program, a good night's sleep… you see where this is going. At the end of the day, you have to understand how your body works, what it needs, and how you can optimize your journey to becoming and staying fit. If you just look at each part of the process individually, you’ll be in for a rough ride.

Optimize the Whole

Depending on the size of your firm, you may be working with different partners and stakeholders across a variety of channels. Your goal, whether you’re a small or large firm, should be to create an ecosystem where all those parts could work both dependently as a collective whole and independently as standalone pieces. No one part should be more efficient than the rest.

The best and easiest way to create firm-wide optimization is by automating your processes with technology. From capabilities like centralizing your matter related information, Automatic Time Capture, and firm-wide calendar syncs, you’re going to be able to improve your efficiency and maximize profitability.

Lean law firms know that they must constantly review their services to ensure they’re bringing the most value to their clients. With automation, you will decrease human error and you will gain greater visibility into the operations of your business.

Eliminate Waste

We discussed the different waste types in Running a Lean Law Firm, but it is important to reiterate that although Lean isn’t only about cutting, it is important to be constantly improving.

Think of your waste as anything your clients wouldn’t willingly pay for if they saw it on their bill. Would they be okay with paying for the extra time it took for you to find documents in your file cabinet? Or an error made in the pre-bill approval process? Probably not. Your business fundamentally exists to serve your clients. If you do that poorly your business will fail.

Deliver Fast by Managing Flow

A finished matter is valuable for both you and your client. Until then, it isn’t.

In a world that expects results in an instant, it’s important to deliver those results as fast and seamlessly as possible.

Not only is extra work in progress (WIP) not valuable, it’s slowing you down. Your firm is a value stream that takes in raw materials of some sort, processes them through a series of steps, and delivers an end result. You may not own a physical factory, but you at least have a virtual one.

Somewhere along the line of that value stream is at least one bottleneck. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a fact. Some step in your process has a maximum capacity that’s lower than other stages before or after it. That constraint is the limiting factor for the delivery capability of your entire system. For example, if you’re a lobbyist in DC and have been hired by three large corporations who want to split your fee. What’re you going to do? Spend hours manually splitting each line item? No. Invest in a service that offers the capability of split billing and eBilling. Ultimately, the goal of a Lean firm is to balance the work in the system to the capacity of that constraint.

Build Quality Into the System

The goal of a Lean law firm is to create a system that is incapable of routine errors. In Japanese, this is described through two overlapping concepts: Poke Yoke and Autonomation. Poke Yoke is error proofing as you do new things and Autonomation is the automatic identification of errors in your operations. Both of these allow you to quickly intervene to solve specific problems instead of wasting your time monitoring for problems to happen. Make sense?

If you invest in legal software, your matters will be expedited, you will have more billable hours, and a reduction in human error throughout your pipeline. The bottom line is: your revenue will increase. End of story. Oh, and not to mention the continuous integration of code, automated unit and UI testing, and rigorous monitoring that are all hard at work so you can sleep peacefully at night.

Create Knowledge

A Lean law firm works to absorb knowledge about their field from the outside world. But knowledge, as it applies to innovation in your specific context, can’t be learned. It has to be created. You and your firm gain knowledge best by doing. And when you do something and fail, what happens? You learn. If you don't learn from your mistakes and figure out how to improve what went wrong, you’re wasting your time and your client's time too.

Much of what you learn will be tacit. You can and should invest in tools for documenting knowledge. But ultimately, your tools will function as a backstop for the experience of the rest of your team. If you can create policies and cadences that allow you to build upon what you’ve learned, you will retain high-quality employees and offer stability even through times of change.

Defer Commitment

This isn’t the greatest name for a principle, but don’t stop reading.

What this means is to keep your options open for as long as possible. By the time the decision needs to be made, there is a greater chance that you will know more about every possible option and every potential outcome. Essentially, you are providing yourself with the greatest opportunity to take the most optimal route. It also gives you time to explore different options in more depth and experiment with solutions that may help bring you to the best conclusion.

In areas of complexity or uncertainty, things are very likely to change. Give yourself the opportunity to make the best choice by deferring your commitment.

Respect People

One of the misconceptions of Lean is that it is mechanistic and impersonal. The painful realities that came with having to reduce waste through massive cost-cutting at the dawn of Lean in manufacturing didn't help with this misunderstanding.

But at its root, the waste that Lean truly aims at removing are the layers of overhead between the client and the people who are directly working on that product for the client. Lean firms recognize that the vast majority of the value generated in their organizations is by the people with their hands on the matter.

The best ideas for improving how you work and deliver value to customers come from the place where the work happens. This should go without saying but, treat people kindly, listen attentively, respond promptly, and most importantly, have empathy.

In Sum

The Challenge

Lean requires a culture change within the partners and the workforce. Because of this, leadership must be proactive in practicing and implementing the system. Support for the method must come from the top-down. If you’re investing in new legal software to begin this change, partner buy-in through training must be evident or adoption won’t happen. If you’re wondering how your firm can get the most out of your tech investment, check out this webinar.

The Opportunity

The benefits of adopting the Lean system are endless. Your firm may see dramatic reductions in cost through waste elimination, improvements in quality and consistency, and faster legal processes through the improvement of client services. And most importantly, your firm will see revenue-driving results, and a sustained culture of ongoing improvement and higher staff retention.