Practice Pointers
7 Steps for Boosting Productivity
January 18, 2022
Whether your New Year’s resolution is to earn more or work less, the key to achieving your goal involves spending more time lawyering and less time laboring, according to Maddy Martin of Smith.ai, a virtual receptionist and intake service.
A Lunch and Learn event held virtually on January 6 by the D.C. Bar Practice Management Advisory Service and led by Martin
— “Are You Lawyering or Laboring?” — laid out seven simple steps to refocus your legal practice to eliminate distractions and increase efficiency.
Step 1: Professionally and intelligently manage calls
New technologies and work arrangements have opened up a whole range of alternatives to the classic in-house secretary and landline phone systems that used to be standard practice at law firms. Digital phone lines and automated or remote answering and secretarial systems can be used to improve service or reduce costs. Email, texting, and website chat all provide options for communication that can organize or automate communications.
Step 2: Automate lead capture and qualification
Generate workflow charts for both successful and unsuccessful qualified leads, aiming for efficiency and accuracy. Consider points at which automation provides better efficiency. Standardize qualification to achieve a more rapid determination.
Step 3: Hand off new client intake
After lead capture, complete client intake with a mind to balancing comprehensiveness with cost/necessity. As elsewhere, the standardization and simplification of intake processes can improve clarity and consistency while reducing the need for the direct involvement of an attorney.
Step 4: Streamline appointment scheduling, reminders, and check-ins
Integrating scheduling online and outsourcing scheduling tasks and nonconfidential check-ins can help ensure predictability and reliability while reducing the unnecessary use of attorney time on rote tasks.
Step 5: Consistently collect payments
Ensure billing accuracy and fee collection by using technology to log time, by outsourcing payment collection, and by accepting online payments. According to Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends report, attorneys only collect 89 percent of the fees they earn. Providing a broad range of options for payment and regularly distributing billing statements and invoices can help improve this rate.
Step 6: Systemize referrals — “bad” leads out, “good” leads in
Within the rules in your jurisdiction regarding referrals and related fees, there may be opportunities to monetize unqualified leads. Referring out clients you can’t serve can generate income and goodwill, both from the attorney receiving the referral and from the referred individual.
Step 7: Integrate your communications into your existing systems
To monitor progress regarding business development, log all calls and texts in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. These applications can create CRM-related workflow that’s efficient for you and your clients, including customized online intake forms, instant document creation, and e-signatures.
To reevaluate your systems, Martin recommends that you track your time for a week, tagging all work as billable, leadership-related, or neither, using the information drawn from this exercise. Ensuring that you spend your time on the right activities can have a deep impact on your firm’s profitability.
