Right now, there are close to 1.1 million law firms in the United States. If you run a firm of any type, you need to make sure that you can overcome your competition by managing yours the right way.
This is a matter of experience, good decision making, and putting the right team into place.
The tips below will help you when you want to learn how to manage a small law firm more effectively.
Have a Vision for Your Firm
Without vision, your law firm won’t last long. Since there are so many firms in existence, you can’t have any confusion about what you do best and who you serve.
Having a specialty and sticking to it is what separates the best firms, because this lets you carve out your own share of the market. Revisit your business plan and create a master plan for the next 5 years to a decade.
Know your overarching goals and make sure that every aspect of your firm lives up to it. This level of intention and organization will help you do what’s best for your firm and make sure that it’s run effectively each day.
Empower Your Leadership
Your company needs to be run strongly from the top down. To make sure of this, the leadership in your firm should be ironclad. Regardless of how many attorneys you employee, the names on the building are the ones that the public will identify with and hold accountable.
Because of this, your top lawyers need to be high performers who continue their education and communicate their standards effectively. The rest of the firm will follow suit and your clients will benefit the most.
Hire a Law Firm Manager
Aside from the talent, you need quality law firm management for your firm to succeed. These are the professionals that set the direction of your law firm by keeping it on track, assessing your finances, managing schedules, and keeping all of the moving parts in order.
These are the professionals who understand how to manage a law firm, and can show you marked improvement quarter after quarter and year after year.
Staff Your Firm Effectively
Your law practice also depends on all-star attorneys to carry the load. Set a strong criteria for the legal professionals that you want to have working in your firm, and make sure that you’re always seeking the best candidates.
You’ll need a mixture of seasoned attorneys who have built their resumes and brand new lawyers that you can groom from the ground up. You can use legal temp agencies to staff your law practice more effectively.
Hire interns that you believe in and create a pipeline for them to have an increasingly significant place in your firm. Provide training opportunities and different means of advancement, and you will have high retention rates in your building.
This leads to continuity and will give you the chance to better serve the public while investing in the professionals that will lead the charge.
Have a Strong Human Resources Team
It’s also important that you take great care of your employees so that their needs are met, and they enjoy coming to work. Having a strong Human Resources (HR) team is a big part of this process.
Your HR team will handle things like making sure people get paid on time, facilitating health insurance and benefits packages, taking care of sick days and vacation time, and more.
It takes strong HR professionals to assist you when you’re learning how to manage a small law firm, because it keeps the workplace transparent and honest. Your attorneys need an impartial third-party that they can turn to for any workplace issues, and this is yet another piece that improves work experience and retention.
Market Your Law Firm
No matter what, you always need a flow of new clients. Good marketing will help you with that.
Manage all aspects of your law firm marketing, big and small, to make sure that you’re never worried about how you can bring in new clients. Start by building a great law firm site and make sure that you have a blog that you’re updating frequently.
You might choose to write your own blog posts or you may want to outsource your content to writers, search engine optimization professionals and multimedia experts that can help you. A marketing firm can also help you by purchasing targeted ads that help you win the clients who are looking for what you offer.
Make your marketing plans strong and consistent, and you can keep scaling your firm.
Organize Your Files Effectively
More than anything, running a law firm is about organization. Attorneys read a lot of case law and have to manage the most meticulous details to win cases and settlements.
This means developing a file system that is organized and that can easily be researched and archived. Come up with a system, stick to it, and always manage and store your files effectively.
Learn How to Manage a Small Law Firm
These tips are helpful when you’re figuring out how to manage a small law firm. It’s all about quality leadership, advocacy, communication, and making your firm better tomorrow than it was today.
If you can master the tips in this article, your firm will have a fighting chance against competition and will remain a positive and productive place to work.
Bookmark our site and use it when you need to learn ways to manage and build your business.
