The last couple of years have presented serious challenges for all businesses, including law firms. The pandemic forced many firms to revisit how their teams work and how they can navigate a sluggish and unpredictable economy.
Moving forward after the turbulence of 2020 and 2021 will undoubtedly present more challenges to law firms, a reality that’s reflected in the most recent small law firm business leaders report from Thomson Reuters.
The survey polled chief officers, executive directors, firm administrators, and finance managers at small law firms (with 50 or fewer attorneys) to get a sense of their concerns in the current economic climate.
Not surprisingly, outside economic circumstances topped the list, but law firm professionals are also concerned about internal issues and their firms’ abilities to properly leverage technology.
The overall state of the U.S. economy is clearly a concern for many business professionals at small law firms. General economic pressures topped the list of perceived risks to law firm profitability, with nearly one-third of respondents citing it as a high risk and 55% citing it as a medium risk.
However, it’s not just overall economic trends small law firms are worried about. Sluggish local economies, litigation costs, and business occupancy costs are considered high or medium risk by at least two-thirds of survey respondents.
The second-highest risk for law firm profitability cited by respondents was underperforming lawyers. Twenty-seven percent of respondents considered this a high risk, and another 39% categorized it as a medium risk.
Lawyer recruitment and retention along with overall employee productivity were cited as either high or medium risk by more than half of respondents. Law firms are also concerned about the economic situations of clients, with late payments and client credit risks specifically listed as a high or medium risk for the business professionals polled.
Insufficient leverage of technology was only listed as a high risk for 9% of those surveyed, but 39% considered it a medium risk to profitability. It’s not surprising that 82% of small law firms plan to increase the use of technology to manage their overall costs.
The reasons respondents said they hoped to better leverage technology included cutting costs, reducing time to complete tasks, providing competitive advantage, and reducing human error.
At backdocket, we know how beneficial the right technologies can be for law firms’ bottom lines. Firms that don’t fully utilize technologies to be more efficient and provide the best service possible are putting themselves at a major disadvantage.
Large law firms might be able to withstand economic ups and downs without adopting new technologies, but it’s clear that small- to mid-size firms don’t have that luxury. They need every advantage possible to compete and grow.
At backdocket, we work closely with growing law firms to make sure our practice management software is improving the way they work. If you’d like to learn more about the many benefits of using backdocket, don’t hesitate to contact our team today to schedule a free demonstration.
Busy personal injury law firms often find themselves in reactive states, especially when communicating with clients. Instead of reaching out proactively to their clients, they’re constantly responding to client calls.
This can lead to clients feeling like they’re their own case manager, and it creates productivity bottlenecks for team members who respond to client calls.
At backdocket, we believe there’s a better way: consistently calling your clients to touch base on their medical treatment and developments in their cases. This simple but often overlooked process can save your firm time and lead to happier, healthier clients.
We’ve created a free guide to establishing a consistent client contact process at your firm.
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Backdocket is a practice management software specifically designed to meet the needs of small- to mid-size law firms. When you’re growing a firm, efficiency and organization are essential, which is why backdocket offers tools to help law firms overcome the challenges they’re facing.
If you’d like to learn more about the many benefits of using backdocket, contact our team today and schedule a free demonstration.
Regardless of a law firm’s staff size or caseload, task management is a vital part of ensuring that cases are handled efficiently, and clients stay happy.
If your law firm already has a process to manage your team’s tasks, it’s always helpful to review it periodically to ensure optimal performance. And if your firm has never even thought about this process, then it’s time to get started.
Staying organized is essential when you’re handling a client’s claim. The last thing your law firm wants is to be the one slowing down the case. When you have a fleshed-out task management system in place, you won’t be struggling to keep up; instead, you’ll be the one leading the way—as it should be!
At backdocket, we’ve worked with many law firms to ensure their tasks are easily accessible and tracked through our practice management software. We’ve based our customizable dashboards on the needs of our clients, which is why they’re so beneficial right out of the box.
These five primary steps to successful task management help the law firms that use backdocket be more efficient and collaborative with their teammates:
Having the ability to assign a task to specific team members and sort tasks by the specific case ensures that you’ll always know the status of a claim. You can easily identify bottlenecks and help overwhelmed team members get the help they need.
It’s important to know exactly what you need to accomplish on a given day, so you can stay on top of your to-do list. At backdocket, we accomplish this by sending a daily digest email with a list of tasks that need to be completed.
If other team members aren’t notified of new tasks or when a task is reassigned to them, your firm risks falling behind in moving a case along. This is where notifications can make all the difference. As soon as a team member’s portion of the task is complete, the person responsible for the next portion of the task should be notified.
So many of us rely on Outlook or Google to stay on top of our responsibilities. This is why your task management process should be integrated with these platforms. At backdocket, we give users the opportunity to sync tasks to and from Outlook and Google.
Sometimes, you just need a snapshot of a claim’s progress. This is where status tracking is invaluable for law firms. When you use backdocket, you can quickly see whether a task is pending, in progress, completed, or behind schedule.
If you’re looking for a solution to your law firm’s growing pains, then backdocket is here to help. Powerful task management tools are just one of many reasons why our clients become more efficient and communicative at work.
At backdocket, we help our clients by giving them a platform that tracks contacts, intake, claim management, calendars, check approvals, merge templates, lead management, and so much more.
Learn more about our customizable dashboards and how backdocket can grow your firm by contacting our team for a free demonstration.
Law firms have a reputation for being difficult work environments. Because it’s such a competitive industry, attorneys and other team members feel pressure to be as productive as possible, but that pressure can easily turn into stress and burnout.
That’s why it’s essential for law firm leadership to recognize these challenges and do everything possible to mitigate them. Focusing on creating a strong work culture will make your team happier, more productive, and more likely to stay at your firm for years to come.
Strategies for creating a better work culture are nearly endless. But knowing just a few of the most effective methods will help you make an immediate impact at your firm.
A strong, productive work culture is one guided by a vision for what the firm stands for and what team members want to accomplish. Your firm’s work culture can value and even reward hard work, but it must also facilitate the personal growth and well-being of every team member, from the managing partners to the newly hired legal assistant.
Strong work cultures give everyone on the team a stake in the business. That doesn’t necessarily mean a financial stake, but rather a place where all concerns are heard and every idea, no matter where or who it comes from, is considered to help improve the firm.
If you and your coworkers don’t understand what you stand for, then you’ll have no frame of reference for your firm’s best practices. Establishing your law firm’s mission and core values is a collaborative process that requires reflection and deliberation by you and all your fellow team members.
No organization is without inefficiencies and shortcomings. Everyone at a firm, whether they’re a partner or an intern, has a unique vantage point of the firm’s processes.
They should all have the ability to voice their thoughts about what works and what doesn’t. Providing channels for all team members to provide anonymous feedback to leadership is a best practice for creating a strong law firm work culture.
Increasing efficiency and productivity at your law firm requires working collaboratively with everyone on staff and maintaining open communication. At backdocket, we’ve made collaboration and communication a central feature of our practice management software. If you currently don’t have a system in place to facilitate collaboration on client outreach and case management, we suggest you contact us for a free demonstration.
Having a diverse team with a wide range of backgrounds makes your team better by giving you a collective wealth of experience to draw from. Law firms work with many people from many different nations, races, and backgrounds. The more diverse and inclusive you are in your hiring practices, the better prepared your team will be to understand and assist your clientele.
Any organization risks falling prey to a hierarchical allocation of respect. It’s natural, even if it is counterproductive, for respect to flow up the chain of command. This is why firms should make sure that everyone on the team feels included, respected, and heard.
Sharing details about the innerworkings of your firm can embolden all team members to work toward a common goal and work together to tackle challenges. Whether you’re involving more team members when interviewing new hires or sharing regular updates about your firm’s finances, you’ll find that opening the door to more team members allows everyone to feel invested in the firm’s progress.
Few environments are as demanding as a busy law firm. It’s important for everyone working at your firm to offset being overextended and burned out by setting clear boundaries. This means, whenever possible, restricting team communication to office hours, offering company-wide vacation days, and ensuring that each team member can occasionally unplug from work.
At backdocket, we’re passionate about helping firms grow, and that means improving their communication, making them more efficient, and catering our software to meet their needs.
If you’d like to learn how we help firms work smarter and not harder, contact us today to schedule a free demonstration of backdocket.
For growing law firms, new leads are the most precious currency. To bring in more cases, law firms invest in marketing, encourage word-of-mouth referrals, and, of course, do great work for clients once they sign them.
Few firms reach sustained growth without knowing how they’re actually getting leads, and this is why attribution is essential. When you know how to attribute the source of your leads—for example, did they come from specific marketing channels or other attorneys—you can make smarter choices and double down on what works.
When you know where leads are coming from, you can determine whether a marketing campaign is bringing in clients or if word-of-mouth is the biggest driver of new clients to your firm. This empowers you to make smarter choices when planning future client outreach campaigns.
Conversely, if you know that certain outreach efforts like paid online advertising or print ads aren’t bringing in leads, you can invest that budget in more lucrative channels. This ensures you’re getting more mileage out of the time and effort you spend bringing in new business.
One of the easiest ways to find out how your clients heard about you is to ask them. This should be a common practice in your firm. It’s simple and free, and it can immediately lead to actionable insights.
If you just have one number that people can use to call your firm, and you don’t have any type of call tracking in place, you could be missing valuable data about how people find your firm. By using call tracking platforms, you can easily determine which marketing campaign prompted them to call you.
For example, if you have an advertisement in a local publication, you can generate a unique phone number that then forwards calls to your firm. You will then be able to attribute any calls using that specific number to that advertisement.
You likely already have tools for tracking website activities. For example, if you have a website, you either have a tool like Google Analytics installed or you can easily install it for free. With this and similar tools, you can track the channels people use to contact your firm.
If you also decide to track website activity for even more insights, you can look to additional cost-effective tools. You can see how users behave on your site with screen recordings, where users spend most of their time with heatmaps of webpages, or determine whether stronger calls-to-action bring in more leads with A/B testing.
At backdocket, we’re passionate about helping firms grow, and our practice management software can help you better organize a lead’s status, whether they’re a prospect, conversion, or a current client.
With backdocket, you can also improve your firm’s efficiency and communication. If you’d like to learn more about our practice management software, contact us for a free demonstration.
Thinking like an attorney and thinking like a businessperson aren’t always the same thing. In fact, these two mindsets can sometimes be at odds. For example, if a solo practitioner doggedly pursues personal injury cases, they might do exceptional work but still find themselves losing money if all the cases they take have low recovery potential.
This type of conflict can be especially common in firms with no operations manager and firms where partners are juggling dual responsibilities through casework and business management. The following tips can help attorneys who are hoping to change how they see the business side of their law firms.
Thinking like an entrepreneur means always looking for opportunities. This could mean spotting a trend of certain case types coming to your firm. Or it could mean identifying types of cases that other lawyers in your market don’t accept. Opportunities also come in the form of referral sources, community outreach programs, and marketing channels.
You’ll ultimately want to adopt a mindset of looking for chances to spread the word about your firm’s services and how you can fill unmet needs in your market. Once you start to see things in this way, you’ll notice many untapped opportunities for growth.
Great lawyers can sometimes make bad business decisions. If your firm isn’t billing the right amount for your services, it won’t matter how great you are at practicing law. Similarly, if you’re investing too much time doing casework without monitoring your revenue and overhead, you could be setting your firm up for failure.
If you’re struggling to make a profit, it’s time to reevaluate your business practices. Designate a few hours each week to look at your operation from a business perspective instead of a legal one.
When a sound business approach isn’t implemented at a law firm, a lot of potential can be squandered. This is why it’s so important for law firms to have someone in charge of thinking about the bottom line.
If you have a passion or even an inclination for the business side of your practice, then it might be time to consider allocating more of your time to operations and marketing, leaving other attorneys to handle casework. However, if you love practicing law and business acumen isn’t your strong suit, then consider designating someone else at your firm with the business management role. If no such person currently exists at your firm, then you could start looking for someone who fits the bill and bring them on.
If you’re planning on devoting more of your time thinking about your firm’s business potential, then the best way to get started is by reading—a lot. Sit down with classics like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People and more modern business-centric books like Kevin D. Johnson’s The Entrepreneur Mind.
You’ll also find great reading suggestions through online communities, podcasts, newsletters, or by simply asking other businesspeople in your life which books they’ve found most valuable.
Many of the ways that law firms grow can be facilitated by the right practice management software, like backdocket. Our software improves law firms’ efficiencies, communications, and client relations.
In some cases, law firms find that the right software can make teams so efficient that they can hit the pause button on hiring new team members. If you want to grow your firm, look no further than backdocket. Contact us today to schedule your free demonstration.
As you’ve probably noticed, many law firms publish blogs on their websites. If you’ve wondered why, then you’ve come to the right place.
When done properly, blogging can offer many benefits to law firms, including building your brand and educating people facing legal issues.
First, a quick note that in this blog, we’ll be talking a lot about your “audience.” When we talk about audiences, we are referring to the people you want to communicate with, which can include your physical community (the region you serve), your professional community, or simply visitors to your website.
Not every law firm has the desire or resources to blog, and that’s okay. If you have a solid website and social platforms, then you can have a strong web presence without having a legal blog.
However, for law firms that want to go the extra mile for their audiences, blogs offer many benefits. Here are just three examples of the rewards you could reap by having a legal blog.
Through your blog, you can answer questions you commonly hear from your clients to educate people who visit your site. You can also share important or entertaining messages about your law firm, team members, or services.
Offering your expertise through a blog is a great way to demonstrate your value and authority in legal matters related to your practice. If a potential client is seeking an answer to a general question about their legal issue and you provide the answer in your blog, they’ll be more likely to trust your firm when it comes time to hire an attorney.
You can also use your blog to share your thoughts and opinions about legal issues. Your blog can be your voice to both potential clients and your colleagues in the legal field. This can help you generate business through new clients and referrals.
Blogs can help drive traffic from search engines to your website, thus making them a viable tool for search engine optimization (SEO). Typically, blogs that are popular on search engines are those that answer questions people commonly ask online.
If you’re hoping to boost your SEO through blogs, we suggest you first make sure your website is well optimized for search engines. You can learn all about the best practices by reading our free guide for law firm SEO to get started.
As you can see, we have a blog here at backdocket. We blog because we work closely with many law firms, and we wanted the opportunity to share important insights with legal professionals.
We blog because it contributes to our overall mission: Helping law firms grow.
Of course, the primary way we achieve this goal is through our practice management software, which is designed to help small- to mid-size law firms become more efficient, effective, and—ultimately—more profitable.
If you’d like to learn how backdocket can give your law firm an edge, contact our team to schedule a free demonstration of our practice management software.
It’s important for attorneys and law firms to have a strong presence on social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer law firms a chance to connect with their communities and potential clients in personable ways.
However, no platform offers lawyers the opportunity to connect and network with their peers like LinkedIn. Let’s look at what makes this platform so unique, and what you should be doing to improve your presence on LinkedIn.
Though other platforms are great for client outreach, LinkedIn has an added benefit of being a professional networking tool. For attorneys, that could help build a referral network with peers, which could generate new cases or additional revenue from cases you refer to others.
Simply creating a LinkedIn profile and never looking at it won’t do the trick. To get the most out of LinkedIn, you’ll need to create an impressive profile, share valuable content, and engage with others.
When creating your LinkedIn profile, you have the opportunity to make a good impression quickly. Follow these tips to get started.
If you are a thought leader in the legal field, here’s your chance to share your insights with connections. You can write posts, blog entries, or share videos to your feed to engage your community. Or you can simply share interesting content you’ve found elsewhere.
Being active on your LinkedIn account shows that you take your job and industry seriously. It also shows that you want to share your enthusiasm and ideas with your colleagues, which sends a signal that you’re open to exchanging interesting ideas with others.
On LinkedIn, you can ‘like’ your connections’ content, make comments, and endorse the skills they list on their profiles. It’s an easy thing to do, and it goes a long way in cultivating relationships with other lawyers. Be supportive and engaging online, and you’ll be shocked at how well that translates to your relationships with those colleagues offline.
If you’re reading this blog, chances are good you’re passionate about your job and you want to grow your firm to new heights. At backdocket, we share your passion and your goal.
Our practice management software helps law firms work smarter, not harder. We help small- to mid-size law firms grow by making them more efficient, communicative, and better equipped to offer the best service possible.
Contact the team at backdocket today to schedule a free demonstration!
Law firms have so many strategies available to generate more business that it can be difficult to know where to start or where to focus your marketing dollars. Fortunately, the methods discussed here have already been tried and tested by countless law firms, and a select few have proven to be the most reliable lead generation strategies.
To help you better understand your options, we’ve created this free guide to learn lead generation strategies for law firms. The guide covers:
If you need help growing your law firm, backdocket has your back! Our practice management software will make your firm more efficient, help your team communicate better, and keep your clients thrilled with your service.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help, simply contact our team today to schedule your free demonstration.
When attorneys think about how to provide the best legal service possible to clients, they probably think about the results they achieve in the courtroom or the hours of research and preparation they do on a given case.
Though these aspects of your firm’s services are crucial, they have very little to do with one of the most important of your team’s offerings: communication. When you don’t communicate effectively, all the hard work you do will only go so far.
Communication is a blind spot for so many attorneys and law firms. Often, firms aren’t even aware of their clients’ frustrations. The good news is that, in most cases, the fixes are easy.
Here are four client communication problems you might not even realize your firm has—and how to fix them!
The worst feeling a client can have is feeling like they’re their own case manager. Even if you are working hard on a case and doing everything possible for the client, they’ll never know if you don’t communicate that to them.
It’s often true that a case sits idle for many reasons that have nothing to do with the lawyer who is handling it. In those situations, it’s best to promptly communicate delays to the client and let them know their case is still on the top of your mind.
Fixing these problems means communicating frequently with a client. That will alleviate any uncertainty they’re feeling and demonstrate your value as their advocate.
For your client, their case is potentially one of the most important events in their life. Imagine their frustration when they reach out to the person they’ve trusted to handle it and hear nothing in return.
Client messages should never go unaddressed, and the sooner you respond, the better. Even if the client’s question doesn’t have an answer, letting them know that will help put their mind at ease.
Create a policy at your law firm that someone should respond to the client’s message on the same business day if possible and no later than 24 hours. This will prevent a backlog of unreturned messages.
It’s likely that daily updates on your client’s case would be unreasonable. After all, you and your team are busy, and there isn’t enough happening with the case that would warrant that much correspondence with a client.
However, it’s possible that your client doesn’t realize this. It’s a law firm’s job to communicate and set expectations very early on in the relationship. Failing to do could result in an unnecessarily disappointed client.
When you first accept a case, or even before, discuss with your client how frequently you’ll be in touch and what you’ll be communicating when you reach out. This could entail communicating milestones and a broad estimate of when those milestones are likely to occur.
Attorneys are often so familiar with the law and the details of a client’s case that they tend to do more talking and explaining than listening. This is a big mistake, as your client’s needs go well beyond receiving information.
The time you invest in listening to what your client is experiencing will reap dividends when it comes to client satisfaction and generating more business. Practicing empathy is a soft skill that receives far too little attention in law school and ongoing education.
Fortunately, the solution is simple. When you call or meet with your clients, carve out time to ask them questions and listen thoroughly to what they’re saying.
At backdocket, we’re passionate about helping small- to mid-size law firms do the best work possible for their clients. Our practice management software uses automation, dashboards, and centralized documentation to make sure team members excel at client communication.
One of the most common pieces of feedback we hear from our customers is how backdocket dramatically improved their relationships with clients. By having reminders in front of you and notes from previous calls on hand, you can pick up conversations where you left off. Your client will feel like your team is always having meetings about their case. If you’d like to learn more about how backdocket can help you and your team work smarter, contact us today to schedule a free demonstration.
