Maine Law Practice Management

The majority of business owners have a very difficult time price setting.  However, much of that effort (meant to define the value for what a professional does ) is most often undone by those same professionals.  This is especially true of lawyers, who don’t like to talk with clients about money, and are more than willing to discount their services at the slightest provocation.   This becomes a significant problem, as attorneys reduce their effective rates via the method of death by a thousand cuts.  Law firms usually bleed revenue in fits and starts, until they begin to hemorrhage it; and, constantly discounting in an inconsistent manner is where it starts.  Plus, clients and referral sources talk about how a particular lawyer can be a soft touch ; so, not only does this issue exist in a vacuum, it most often mushrooms over time.  Law firms that staunch the bleeding, tend to make more money overall, and per hour.     The best way to preserve the value of your fees is to utilize and

Efficient law firms return the most revenue, by a wide margin.  Yet, much of what law firms do cuts against efficiency: Attorneys tend to avoid modern technology.  Attorney like to do things themselves, and so they avoid effective delegation.  Attorneys want manual processes, which they feel they have more control over.  Of course, this is not the way to practice at the top of your law license: billing at your highest rates, or acquiring more work that you can bill at your highest rates.     Too often, lawyers are trying to pilot the plane, and hand out the pretzels.   While it’s true that delegation is a proven method for driving efficiency, law firms need not always delegate from managing attorneys to associate attorneys or staff.  Automation of rote tasks and processes is often more effective.  Consider the chain of events reflecting on law firm lead intake: scheduling, emails, contact forms, chat or text communications, contracting, ecommerce . . . Any or all of those components of

Believe it or not, the most important part of law firm branding is something that law firms often ignore, or throw away.      A business logo offers its owner a distinctive mark, a visual interpretation of the business’ purpose and meaning, that resonates with consumers.  Think of Coca-Colo or Ford or Apple or Target, and you immediately think of distinctive logos .     But, how many law firms have you ever seen with a really compelling logo, that wasn’t using a blue, whit e and gray color scheme, and that didn’t feature columns, scales of justice, a gavel or the attorney’s initial s .   Law firms that conceive of compelling logos separate themselves from the morass of their competitors in a meaningful way.  Those law firms choose a unique color scheme, and let it set the design elements for everything else they do: business cards, letterhead, website, etc.  Those law firms that choose a unique avatar for their logo (like a bird, or a constellation) have a better story to tell.  Th

It can’t happen to you until it does.     I’m talking about the business disaster that could strike your law firm at any moment: flood, fire, data breach, device breakdown, smoke damage, truck carrying 30000 pounds of bananas careening out of control . . . Well, you get the picture.     Because any law firm could be struck by disaster, every law firm should develop and maintain a disaster recovery program.  And, the primary component of any disaster recovery program in a cloud-based world is an effective data backup program .   So, here’s what you need:     -an encrypted, physical backup drive (harddrive, thumbdrive, whatever ; ioSafe is amazing )   -an online, incremental backup system (like Carbonite , BackBlaze or CrashPlan )     And, you’ll need both, in case one fails.     Make sure to test your backup, as well.  You don’t want to be trying to recover your data for the first time in an actual disaster .     This podcast offers a wealth of information on data recovery: https:/