As your client base grows, it’s essential that your law firm can scale up and streamline operations to work efficiently. When your firm moves from its first initial clients to a fully-fledged legal team, you need solid infrastructure and workflows to ensure your team can meet demand. This article will share the advice and tips you need to scale up your law firm today.
Hire Legal Virtual Receptionists
Legal virtual receptionists can help you streamline client onboarding, essential if you manage multiple clients for class action lawsuits or large volumes of confidential data. Even if you’re not yet at total capacity, pairing with an agency that provides legal virtual receptionists can help you scale up operations when you need. Legal receptionists can help you get assistance with bilingual chat and call services, data collection, and client management.
Be Clear On Your Future Goals
Defining your legal firm’s goals and vision can help you identify when you are moving towards times of business growth. Decide which areas of specialism you might move into at a future date and how many attorneys you must hire to meet this need. Be clear about the goals of your business and how this will translate to outgoing costs and incoming profits.
Identify Your Client
Once you are clear on your specialisms and goals, you should identify the type of client you want to work with. Are you looking for high-end clients or to support more vulnerable individuals in the community? Build up a target demographic based on who looks at your website.
Discover:
- Demographic (age, income, etc.)
- Which pages do they interact with the most?
- What matters to them?
- What are their challenges?
You can gain insight into page engagement through sites like Google Analytics and then do some research to find out what appeals to that demographic. Use the data to feed back into your messaging and the content you host on your site.
Identify Your Ideal Team
Before hiring contract lawyers or associates, you must consider who will best complement your business. Do you need to bring in an attorney with a particular specialism? You need to consider a person’s employment history and whether they will share the same goals and vision as you. Create an ideal candidate’s profile before hiring to clarify what you want from a team.
Consider Hiring Contract Lawyers
Contract lawyers can help you increase your caseload for lower overheads than associate lawyers. They can either be paid a flat rate or by caseload, meaning you will need to give them a percentage of each case they work on. This can also be useful if you are a solo attorney looking to scale up their capabilities, as you could try them on a contract role before you decide if they are a good fit for your law firm.
Setting Up New Partners
Setting up partners in a law firm only works if they share your vision, ambition and goals. It works best if you have collaborated with them before or if they come highly recommended by someone you trust. To manage this, a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) can protect you by ensuring you are only liable for the amount you put into the business.
Invest In Legal Technologies
Investing in legal technologies can help you automate how you take payments, draft documents, and manage your client relationships. Streamlining these administrative elements can help you carve back critical time to focus on clients. Platforms like HighQ can help automate contract management, workflows, and secure data management elements.
Cloud-based software is another essential technology you should leverage when scaling up your law firm. This will provide a secure online hub for all your billing, account information, contracts, and other systems. This will enable you to scale up your offering so that when you need to hire virtual receptionists, new hires, or onboard clients, it’s all ready to go from a central location.
Final Thoughts
You need to be ready to scale up your law firm operations before your client base increases, and you cannot meet client demand. Be clear on the vision of your law firm, what your specialties will be, and who will help you meet that need. You might hire a team of legal virtual receptionists and contract lawyers, or you might want to onboard a new partner to increase the scope of your business.
Remember, cloud-based systems and automated software can help you create a streamlined infrastructure that scales as your team and business grows.