The legal profession can be a very profitable business, but there’s always room for improvement. If your law office is struggling in any way, boosting efficiency can make it easier to generate revenue by saving time and money. Even if your law office is already doing well, knowing the five ways your it can work more efficiently will still enhance your firm.
5 Steps Towards Better Law Office Efficiency
You can take quite a few different steps towards more efficiency in your law firm, but it’s easier to start when you only use five above all else. Consider these possibilities:
1. Cater to Younger Attorneys
Eventually, you need new lawyers. That’s either to replace those who move on or retire, or you hire them because your business is booming. As time goes on, chances are better that your new hires will be among the younger generations. Know how they work and what they prefer so you can make your practice more attractive as a place of employment.
2. Get a Marketing Professional
Whether you outsource or hire an internal professional, having a marketing specialist at hand frees up everyone else to focus on billable hours. It should also lead to an increase in client intake that opens up more streams of revenue. The right marketing specialist can probably be more effective at marketing than someone without that background, and they’ll do it more efficiently, too.
3. Improve Your Conversion Rate
Your law office might actually be incredibly efficient at everything except client intake. At the very least, put intake forms online so people can start filling them out even before they talk to you. Website chat features can also make it easy to communicate with prospects visiting your website, which most potential clients will do at some point.
4. Know When It’s Time to Grow
Even the best attorneys might spend more time managing their daily operations than actually practising law. If you’re doing so much of this that it’s impacting your availability for clients, then it might not be a good time to take on new clients. Time-tracking among all your professionals can help you distinguish billable hours from non-billables, and you can see whether you need more clients or simply more staff.
5. Let Your People Rest
The average attorney handles 1,800 billable hours each year. That’s 35 hours each week without factoring in vacations or non-billable hours. Over half of the professionals in this field report levels of exhaustion, and that can hurt productivity and morale among your team.
Turn to the Cloud
Working to integrate a law firm cloud can do wonders for your office’s efficiency. Keep current with modern technology to serve your clients better and make work easier for your employees. Using cloud services can help you streamline and optimize your operations in ways that sustain your growth patterns, help you stay relevant in a competitive market, and boost productivity.
Specific uses for cloud options for your law firm include note-taking, time-tracking, document and file storage, payment processing, and even customer relationship management. From general management to specific low-level enhancements, cloud solutions for your law firm can have a huge impact on the office’s bottom line.
Utilize Metrics
As Forbes points out, increasing efficiency is ultimately about increasing profitability. In order to do that, your law office needs to establish specific metrics that matter in regard to generating more revenue and keeping operating costs down. Measuring those metrics will tell you where your office stands right now, and the data should also illustrate the steps you can take moving forward to get the numbers where you would like them to be. Ascertain key performance indicators, also known as KPIs, and generate routine reports measuring them for key stakeholders to analyze and adjust as need be.
Conclusion
Boosting efficiency in your law office has many advantages. The faster you serve clients, the more of them you might be able to take on. Less stress and streamlined operations should also improve employee morale, and that can be crucial to attracting and retaining the top legal talent in your market.
Also, read:Â Run a Successful Business? 4 Ways to Make It More Efficient
Author: Stephanie Caroline Snyder
Stephanie Caroline Snyder is a 27-year-old who graduated from The University of Florida in 2018. She majored in Communications with a minor in mass media. Currently, she is an Author and Writer. She was born and raised in Panama City, Florida, where her family still lives.
