The leading provider of practice management solutions to maximize opportunity and joy for Estate Planning attorneys
The leading provider of practice management solutions to maximize opportunity and joy for Estate Planning attorneys
Lawyers with Purpose Founder and CEO, David Zumpano, Esq. was a recent guest on the Profit with Law Podcast, hosted by Moshe Amsel. Together, they discuss the key aspects of growing a law firm, including tips from keeping a proper mindset to converting to value-based pricing.
One of the many benefits of being an LWP Member is the opportunity to interact with, and learn from, fellow Members in conjunction with the LWP team.
We created Member Power Hour to provide you with twice-weekly educational and mutual support events to help you grow your practice. It’s an open forum, a give and take, shaped by the following schedule:
What are your greatest challenges? Where have you found success? How did you do it? What, in short, is on your mind? Gain insight from your peers and the LWP team during Member Power Hour. Empowering success… together.
We can’t wait to see you every Tuesday and Thursday!
The LWP Team
Another powerful component of some software is the ability to do dynamic interviews. Let’s say John and Jane Sample want separate revocable living trusts and you collect the information needed to do each one. But what if they change their minds and want a joint revocable living trust? The software can help you make the adjustment. When you change the parameter the software then “knows” you are only creating a single joint trust for both John and Jane and it no longer requires you to ask questions for Jane’s individual trust, or enter that information, thereby saving time.
So just how much time can you save with the right software? With the simple click of a ‘Finish’ or similar button, all of a client’s relevant information will be assembled into customized WORD documents specifically tailored to meet your client’s needs. In effect, you’ll have turned 15 to 20 hours of document drafting into less than two hours of work.
Next time we’ll discuss how the proper software can enhance document accuracy and coordination.
Greater efficiency is one of the keys to greater profitability. As an estate planning and elder law attorney, if you want to become more profitable, your firm must be able to draft an asset protection plan more efficiently. The right software can help you accomplish this.
The improved workflow efficiency inherent in computer software is sometimes compared to the greater efficiency automation brings to manufacturing. Consider the automobile. Building a Rolls Royce, where many of the required tasks are completed by hand, requires six months. Compare this to a typical sedan. That process, which can be roughly divided into stamping, welding, assembly, painting, and inspection, takes less than 18 hours.
At this point you might say, “My firm is not a document mill, we design customized plans. Cookie cutter plans don’t work.” You’re right. Fortunately, using the proper software does not limit you to creating a Toyota Corolla-like plan, you can use it to produce the asset protection equivalent of a Rolls Royce. You’ll see how next time.
Blue time is the time you spend on lead generation and lead conversion (commonly referred to as marketing and sales). At Lawyers with Purpose, we call this Relationship Management and Client Enrollment.
Blue time involves all of the following:
To ensure your marketing and sales goals are met, you should be spending 40 percent of your week on blue time.
Color-coding allows you to efficiently track your weekly workload and quickly determine areas of your operation that need improvement.
Yellow time is the time you spend working on your law firm business. By “working on your law firm business” we do not mean creating a trust or crafting an asset protection plan for a client. Rather, we mean working on things that will help your firm, your business, move forward. You should devote 20 percent of your week to yellow time.
Yellow time can be broken down into Present Firm and Future Firm. Present Firm encompasses team meetings in which weekly progress is reviewed and discussed. This includes reviewing weekly reports, the firm’s marketing and sales efforts, work-in-progress, and firm revenue.
Future Firm involves working on what individuals and the team as a whole need to improve upon to ensure the firm’s revenue and other goals are met. Most firms do a rather poor job with respect to Future Firm. By working closely with your coach and implementation specialist, you can adopt a proactive approach to address unsatisfactory work performance before it becomes acute and detrimental to the firm.
LWP Implementation Specialist, Amanda “Mandy” Bossow explains how the workshop is the first key step in your prospect’s journey toward becoming your client.
When LWP members start putting their workshops together for the first time, they often think of them as a way to generate new clients, which is a key outcome. However, they tend to focus on the workshop solely as a lead generator, and this mindset falls severely short in terms of what workshops actually help you accomplish. The workshop should be considered part of your process, the education part. It is the part of the process that almost everyone needs, but they don’t think they do. The workshop helps participants see things they didn’t know, as well as things they didn’t even know they didn’t know; it provides them something new upon which to reflect. The workshop doesn’t just generate leads; it helps enroll qualified candidates into your firm for a Vision Meeting and helps you accomplish higher retention rates and higher average fees, adding to increased profitability. This article gives an overview of seven common workshop mistakes that will sabotage your success.
If you understand your role in the firm, and you have the “Whos” in place to fill the roles outlined in the Law Firm Success Model, you will be able to transform your practice.
The Law Firm Accountability Chart provides a proven framework for identifying the roles that must be filled to achieve the three levels of success.
