Integrity Marketing

Law Firm Economics: Is Your Practice Profitable?

How does your estate planning law firm make money? We hope you know the answer in detail, unless you went into practice with social services in mind. The nice thing about estate planning law and Elder Law is that you get to do good work and practice in a helping profession and, if you are doing it right, enjoying the benefits. Once upon a time, lawyers didn’t dirty their hands with things like cash flow or accounting. Those days are gone.

Define what you need to earn to turn a profit and set goals. This is where we find most small firms come up short. They know what they would like to earn annually, what fixed costs and salaries are, but they don’t connect the dots. Work backwards. How many new clients do you need to see every week to make the numbers work? How many new clients do you have this week? And what changes are you willing to make to get to your goals?

Share the data. Your partners, associates and even paralegals need to understand that the business requires a steady stream of new clients. They need to know that if cash flow suffers, the practice is at risk. Every single one of your employees needs to be vested in the success of the practice.

What business are you in? First and foremost, your practice provides a service. Depending on your practice model, you either charge by time or you set a fixed fee based on the amount of time you expect will be needed to provide your services. And unless you’ve moved into a practice model that centers on regular updates, yours is a one-time transaction. That’s very limiting when it comes to cash flow, but that’s how most estate planning attorneys work.

Are you charging enough for your services? This is more and more of a challenge for estate planning attorneys and why many practices don’t make it. Striking a balance between what the market will bear, what you need to cover your costs and generating a profit is not as easy as it was. Competition is coming at you from all sides. Sit down with your accountant, your time management data and figure out the numbers based on hard data.

Do you have enough clients coming in the door? You do if you are using all the tools that IMS offers. Your marketing should be as automated as possible, your blogs should be updated at least twice a week and your email newsletters should go out on a regular basis. If something is not working, submit a support ticket and let’s find out where the problem is. By the way, please don’t wait until you are staring at an empty appointment book to contact us. Even if all you do is have a chat and explore some ideas, it will be time well spent.

Are you spending money unnecessarily? If your rent is out of control or your expensive car lease is taking too big a chunk out of your income, make some changes to bring costs in line with economic reality.

With the number of boomers turning 65 every day and realizing that they need an estate plan, or at the very least, a will, there is no lack of opportunity in the estate planning and Elder Law practice areas. But to succeed in the face of massive competition and market forces takes more than hanging a sign and launching a website.

Is the Entire Legal Profession Really in Crisis?

Substitute “disruption” for “crisis.” Yes, the legal profession is feeling the same winds of change that have transformed so many other businesses in recent years. And yes, the law is probably the slowest sector when it comes to change. But change is here, now, and you can transform your practice into a powerhouse by being an early adapter.

Push back on fee structures. This is certainly not new to law firms, but it is intensifying. If someone can go online and get a will from an online legal system, you’ll have to demonstrate real value to compete. Most of this comes through client education, to make sure that clients understand the value of having an experienced lawyer who knows the law in their state and can plan for their specific needs. Best way for you to undertake client education? Automate your marketing processes.

Convenience factor. Could you take a client through your entire process without ever meeting face-to-face? Before you say no, consider your options. If your intake process is automated using our CLIP^SM system, you will be able to get pretty far along without an in-person meeting. Do you currently offer video conferencing, via Skype, GoToMeeting or FaceTime? No, it’s not our first choice for you either, but if you have a client and they can’t get to you, and if you can’t get to them, it’s worth considering.

Competition for jobs is one bright spot. Law schools are graduating many students, most with crushing debt. Regardless of the challenges of hiring and managing millennials and Gen Xers, you should be able to pick and choose from among a wide group of talented and ambitious young attorneys. Remember: every associate should be a profit center.

Another bright spot: Boomer retirement. Every single day, upwards of 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65.They are ripe for estate plans, wills and everything you do. The numbers are there, BUT you have to go after them. That means ramping up your marketing. IMS has an amazing selection of marketing tools, from websites that work to our E2-CRM to CLIP^SM.

Things are changing, but the opportunities have never been better. Call James Campbell at 877-352-2021 x 80 and we’ll show you how you can survive and thrive.

Better to be a disruptor than be disrupted!

What’s Your Law Firm Leadership Skill Set When Problems Arise?

Want your team actively engaged in the success of your estate planning firm, not just in being worker bees intent on getting work done? Lead with transparency and data. Give them high level information about the firm. If they are not billing enough hours to cover their salary, show them the numbers. If you collect client reviews and they are not fantastic, focus on getting to great. Share what information you have about your competitors, both online legal services and other firms in your community, and why your firm is at risk.

How do you lead when there’s a problem?

The last thing that your estate planning clients want to hear about is that something has gone wrong. You don’t want to hear about it either, because you rely on your trusted team to get the job done right. And you care about your estate planning clients, the reputation of your firm and the consequences of those mistakes: lost clients, lawsuits, malpractice charges, bar censure.

But we all know that things do go wrong. They should not, but they do. What’s your recovery plan?

Clients. How you handle client errors depends on the severity of the error, the impact that it will have, and knowing your client’s personality and tolerance level. First and foremost is taking full responsibility. Your name is on the door, so you take the blame.

Repercussions to the person who made the mistake. What happens to the person who made the mistake is not your client’s concern. They need to know that the problem has been fixed, immediately, and that any problems created by the mistake will be handled, also immediately, by your firm. No excuses or explanations. If they insist, keep it brief.

Why internal matters should be kept internal. Your role as a leader in the firm is to know the skills, strengths and weaknesses of your team. If you have a bad paralegal or associate (or worse, partner!), it is your responsibility to get rid of that person BEFORE they do something that harms a client. Not after. Your reputation and your practice is on the line. If you need help with leadership skills, we can help.

Team building, team break-down. Champagne and cheese doodle parties are a regular feature at one estate planning firm that believes in celebrating victories large and small. Yes, it’s silly, but that’s the point. A law firm leader balances positives and negatives. The happier your team is, the better the quality of their work.

Do you have underperformers? Address the issue. Far too many people leave law firms because other employees are not held accountable for poor performance. Good employees will only tolerate what they see as an unfair situation for so long. Don’t lose a great employee for a slacker!

What’s Your Estate Planning Law Firm’s Response Time to New Leads?

The right answer is instantly, with a productive and useful auto responder that lets them know their contact form has been received and gives them a reason—a form, a survey, something—that moves their “conversation” with you along. And the other answer is, within five minutes they should get a phone call, unless you are using an automated intake system.

If they don’t hear from you within 24 hours, consider it a lost lead.

And in case you are wondering, yes, you did once have a bigger window in which to respond. Before the entire world lived online, a reasonable person searching for an estate planning law firm would find your website, fill out a form, and if the firm responded within a day or two, everyone was happy. That’s no longer the case.

Today this is an entire science of marketing called “Lead Response Management.” There are a multitude of studies and reports on lead response management, but let’s just cut to the chase. Your office has to respond faster now than ever before to leads that come in from the website. If you respond within five minutes, you have a 90% chance of making an appointment with the person. Wait 30 minutes, and the numbers take a dive. Wait more than a day, and you’re out.

What can you do to ensure that you aren’t losing leads?

Automate as much of the process as possible. We devoted a great deal of time to creating the E2 CRM and CLIP^SM system in order to make this a seamless part of your estate planning law practice.

Assign one person to be responsible for processing web leads. Make someone in your organization, whether a paralegal, assistant or associate, responsible for handling all incoming web leads, including making phone calls to prospects within a set time frame. If it is not someone’s priority, it will not get the attention it needs.

Create a step-by-step process. If your intake has been automated, you don’t have to do this. But if not, establish a formal process to ensure that leads are responded to fast, that information is entered into your system accurately and that follow-up takes place in a timely manner.

Measure and test your intake process. We know you have a J.D. and not an MBA. But you also have a for-profit professional service firm to run, and that means measuring and testing processes. If you implement a new process for intake and you have more clients, that’s great. But you need to know why it is working. Perhaps there are other areas that can be improved. While we hope that you are seriously considering adopting the use of the E2 CRM, but if you are not, at the very least create a means of measuring what is happening in your office from the moment someone clicks on your website to the minute they are sitting in the office signing a retainer agreement.

What Happens if Your Succession Plan Doesn’t Succeed?

Could it be that the same estate planning lawyer who advises owners of privately held businesses about the need for a succession plan as part of their estate plan is the same person who does not have a succession plan of her own? Ironic, we know. But irony won’t help if your estate planning law practice isn’t robust enough to either pass on to an heir or sell. What you need comes in two parts: first, you’ve got to have a thriving practice that retains its value and then you need a succession plan.

We can’t help you with a succession plan, but we sure can help you boost your practice, re-build a sagging practice or create a new practice by harnessing the power of digital marketing.

We know firsthand that many estate planning law firms are led by boomers who are starting to consider retirement and succession. For some, this is a real challenge, because they truly love what they do, and the idea of handing over the reins is not an easy thing to imagine. For others, who are more focused on the business side, it’s more of a business transaction and less of a lifestyle consideration.

Whichever camp you fall into, you want to have a law practice that is worth selling or passing down. If selling your practice is on your horizon, now is the time to go full speed ahead to ensure that your years of building the practice don’t evaporate into thin air.

If you are doing the bare minimum, now is actually the time to step up your marketing and business development. If you were selling a building, would you let it fall into disrepair before putting it on the market? If you do, don’t expect it to be worth much.

What’s the health and well-being of your marketing list? The most valuable marketing list is the one that you have grown over the years. But if yours is loaded with simple errors ([email protected], rather than [email protected], for instance), you have a list of missed opportunities. Ditto if you haven’t bothered keeping it up to date. Email and client information list maintenance is an important marketing task. No, you should not be doing it—but someone in your firm should. If you were using our automated E2 CRM system, this would be already done!

What would happen if you were suddenly incapacitated? You have these conversations with clients all the time, but have you ever given thought to what would happen if the unthinkable happened to you? Do you have a plan in place so that clients will continue to be taken care of, so that your partners know what they need to do to keep the practice going?

On a more pleasant note, what if you just wanted to start the retirement process by picking and choosing the clients you work with, and let other attorneys handle other work?

Bottom line: to have a successful succession plan, you need a profitable estate planning practice.

Could an Algorithm Really Replace Your Years of Experience and Knowledge in a Law Office?

Think automating your legal marketing is too much technology? Here’s a wake-up call: computational law that makes an automated legal marketing system look like a walk in the park. One of the leaders in computational law is Stanford University’s CODEX–the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. The best and the brightest researchers, lawyers, technologists and entrepreneurs are moving the frontiers of legal technology at light speed.

Today’s automated legal marketing systems, like the E2 CRM and CLIP® (Client Intake Process) systems developed by IMS, are frankly going to make the difference between the estate planning law firms that survive and those that struggle. Online legal services companies, from Legal Zoom to Nolo and countless others are already incorporating some of this bleeding edge technology. Think it won’t impact your estate planning law firm?

An affluent millennial couple wanted to set up an estate plan following the birth of their second child. Their first thought: Legal Zoom. They order groceries, electronics and all of their baby supplies online. Why not an estate plan? The wife started with Legal Zoom, entering in the family information and the system—not a person, but the system—automatically determined that their needs were too complex for the simple estate plan offered on the website. It offered a phone call with a staff person, who offered to refer the family to a prepaid legal plan option.

If you think that the nature of an estate planning practice is too personal to become automated, consider the enormous amount of programming now underway to create self-driving, autonomous cars. Could legal reasoning be far behind? Why not a highly sophisticated program that can draw on a vast database of documents, case law, statutes and regulations?

That’s why estate planning law firms need to become more fully automated: so that the time you do spend with clients is as personal and informed as possible and so that there is as little time wasted, both for you and for your clients.

It’s also about presentation: so that your human clients know that you have made a commitment to keeping your professional practice as up-to-date with the technology they have become accustomed to seeing at their doctor’s office, in the retail environment and yes, in the online world where they spend more and more of their time.

Times are changing for the legal profession. You’ll want to keep up!

Is Your Estate Planning Practice at Risk?

The legal sector has always been slow to embrace change, and for a long time, that didn’t matter, but that’s no longer the case. At IMS, we work with estate planning and elder law firms across the country, and we see first-hand what happens when law firms can’t or won’t adapt to the new legal services model. Like it or not, being a good estate planning lawyer, or even a great estate planning lawyer, is not enough for your practice to survive.

Financial accountability. Yes, we’re saying it. Are you gathering data and analyzing billable hours versus salary and overhead costs? Are your associates earning their salaries plus covering overhead costs and generating profits? If your billing and accounting systems are set up properly, you should be able to see where you are profiting and where you are losing income. If your system isn’t set up to give you this information in a format that works for you, call your CPA and find a solution. No business owner can operate in the dark.

Automate your intake process. Attorneys need to join other professionals in moving away from paper-based intake systems. Clients and prospects see this in their own workplaces, in medical offices, schools and retail environment. A professional service firm that’s still paper-based is becoming the exception rather than the rule today.

Automate office procedures. Bookkeeping, billing and any data processing should be automated to make administrative time as cost-effective and efficient as possible.

Websites: up-to-date in design, content and functionality: You tell your clients they need to update their wills and estate plans. We tell our clients they need to update their websites. This is one of the key ways that your firm presents itself to prospects. If your site hasn’t had a fresh design in four or five years, legal services consumers will notice. Why wouldn’t you want to make it your most powerful marketing tool?

Lawyer videos: no more talking heads. Mike Campbell, Director of Videography Services at IMS recently earned his Remote Pilot Certification from the FAA, which is required by the FAA to operate drones. Our lawyer videos have always been good, but now we have added an amazing level of cinematic quality. Scroll down to “The Value of Heritage” video on this page. This is what we can do to help your firm stand out from the competition.

If you’ve worked hard to build your practice, don’t let your success get eaten away by inertia!

Are Defaults at Fault? Don’t Make These Basic Blunders

After years in your estate planning law practice, you’ve gotten good at anticipating questions from clients. The same thing happens at IMS, where we have a good idea of the kinds of questions that we’re going to hear. Often these questions have to do with default settings in social media, which is still new territory for some clients. Many concern timing, like the social media post that did not feed to linked accounts immediately (sometimes it may take up to 15 minutes for connected accounts to pull updates) and why business posts are showing up on your personal Facebook profile Let’s dig into these commonly-reported issues:

Privacy settings and reasonable expectations. You do have some degree over what content is seen by the world at large and by the people you connect with through social media. Each platform has a settings area that contains directions where you can determine who you want to have access. That includes keeping yourself from being tagged in posts or photos without your permission. Using timeline tag and review, you can also control what posts show up in your timeline. Go into the settings section for your social media platforms and make the necessary changes.

Nothing on social media is water-tight. You may not know that someone you know is friends with someone else, for example, and might be able to see your personal posts. Or perhaps you friended them months ago and forgot. Social media platforms also make changes to their privacy settings, so you’ll need to check settings every now and then.

Blogs not posting? Can’t access social media accounts? If you rebooted your computer, you will need to log in to your social media accounts. Any log ins that were automatically populated will need to be re-established. Can’t find your log in and/or password info? We covered that here.

Can’t log in because your password was changed? We’ve all done this. You couldn’t remember your password, so you reset it, and now you don’t remember what you reset it to. Take more care next time.

Why can’t I just use a photo from someone else’s website? IMS uses a reasonably priced stock photo source for images and photos. Scraping a photo from another website is property theft, plain and simple. Will you get caught? First consider whether or not it’s worth the hassle, when stock photos are so inexpensive. One image company sends out bots to scan the web, looking for companies that are using images without permission or paying for a license. The offending companies are hit with fees that run into the thousands of dollars.

Turn it off/on, check the connections, is the power on? Yes, these are basics, but as long as people still ask, we are going to tell you about it. Every IT department in the world fields calls from users when connecting plugs are loose or power cords get pulled out of power strips. A loose monitor cable can cause your monitors to stop displaying images. And yes, the power strip that gets turned off, sometimes by a cleaning person during the overnight, can cause the entire system to shut down.

Are You Socially Adept, or Totally Co-Dependent?

If you needed to fix a social media post for your estate planning law firm right now, could you do it? Or would you have to track down your office manager or the associate who helps with your social media posts? Do you know the log in URLs, user names and passwords for your Facebook, Linked In and Twitter accounts? And have you seen your social media recently?

We’ve written in the past about “proof of life.” If you have a blog and haven’t posted a new blog in more than two months, you may have lost some prospects already. To the person searching the web for an estate planning attorney, an out of date blog or social platform shows that you (or your firm) is not paying attention to the details. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter. That’s what a web lead thinks.

Web leads want to see current activity. They are moving fast, looking at law firm websites and free online will websites. You probably know about Nolo, Rocket Lawyer and Legal Zoom. But do you know about:

• Willing
• Doyourownwillnow
• Lawdepot
• Wills4free
• Doityourselfdocuments

And that’s just the first page of Google. The universe of online wills and legal documents is growing at light speed. That means your competition is growing too. If your firm’s content is stale or out of date, they are on to the next source. Fast.

You can counter this with a reasonably healthy social media presence. You don’t have to post every single day, but you do have to post something relevant, intelligent and useful at least once a week. Visit your sites a few times during the course of the week to keep an eye on their progress.

And while we want you to be adept on social, a second or third person who can post will spread the workload. Make sure that all understand the overall goal of your posts, the focus and mission of your practice and assign this task to individuals who will be responsible and reliable so that no one will drop the ball.

Your practice is in the cross-hairs of competition like never before. A robust social media campaign paired with a powerhouse law firm website can keep your firm where you want it to be: profitable, enjoyable and busy.

Phishing Primer for Estate Planning Law Firms

The weakest link in email phishing is the intelligent person who is convinced that they are too smart to be phished. It happens to everyone. The only defense is awareness, recognizing it when it happens, and quickly taking action. If your estate planning and elder law firm has a lax attitude towards phishing emails, you are definitely at risk. Phishing has become more sophisticated and more effective, because it’s very profitable.

Phishing is the use of email messages that appears to come from legitimate sources and is designed to get people to panic and then, without thinking, provide private information or open links to websites that download malicious software.

But that’s just for starters. There’s also browser autofill phishing, when fields are hidden from the user but are filled out automatically by the browser form’s autofill feature. You didn’t mean to fill out those fields, but your browser does so automatically. This can happen in a Safari or Firefox browser too, although some sources report that Chrome is far more vulnerable.

Hackers exploit news trends. Hours after Trump won the election, hackers launched a wave of cyber attacks targeting think tanks, with headlines about the election. The emails were set to look like they came from prestigious educational institutions and were targeted (this is called “spear phishing”) to these types of organizations.

How can you and your law firm avoid becoming a victim of phishing?

Don’t panic, even if an email seems threatening. Your boss, the IRS or the court system (or any legitimate entity, for that matter) is not sending emails that require an immediate click on a link. If you receive such an email, open a new email and verify that the person has actually sent it. Business owners (and that includes law firm managing partners) are often spoofed because hackers know that employees/associates will respond quickly to an email that demands fast action. Don’t fall for it.

Don’t click on links embedded in an email unless you know the person sending the email. Better yet, even if you know the person sending the email, open a new tab in your browser and find the website that the link allegedly comes from. Don’t cut and paste the link from the email, even in a new browser tab. That will bring you to the same place.

If you receive an email from an entity you do business with (a bank or brokerage house) that seems phishy, consider the source, the tone/tenor of the email and if there is another way for you to contact the person. Bank emails have a long history of being phished; logos and typefaces are easily copied and it is easy to create an email that looks real.

If you have opened a link and realize that something is not right, don’t wait. Immediately contact the person in your firm responsible for technology or IT security (or the office manager, who is often the contact point between the firm and your IT provider). The faster you act, the faster they can protect the firm.