As you gain valuable experience in your law practice, the time will come to scale up your services to accommodate more clients and add more talented employees. But how do you work your way up to that moment? Here are a few tips and tricks to help you expand your practice.
Building a stellar reputation is critical. If you’re known in the area as a reputable firm, word will spread. Unfortunately, the same is true if you make empty promises to your clients and fail to deliver. It goes beyond simply winning cases, establishing a good rapport with other firms and local businesses is another vital piece to the puzzle. A good reputation can take years to build but just moments to destroy.
Closely monitoring the workload of your staff and being able to forecast a rise in cases and work is another important aspect of expanding your practice. While you may be tempted to wait on hiring additional staff, if you delay too long, you may be scrambling and end up settling for less than the best. That’s a recipe for disaster; as mentioned above, a stellar reputation is the foundation for eventually expanding your practice.
Networking by sponsoring events in your community is a great way to meet potential clients. You can even focus on specific conferences or seminars that align with the area of law you practice, especially if it’s a niche specialty such as nonprofit law. Getting to meet face to face is an excellent way to differentiate your firm from the others and help potential clients remember your name when the time comes that they need legal services.
In the age of technology, having a digital system for your employees to easily access documents remotely is vital. Steps need to be taken to ensure maximum data privacy when implementing a new system, but the benefits are many. Notably, if there is a secure, efficient document management system in place, it allows for the hire of fully remote employees—a trend that seems to be here to stay. However, this does allow you as the employer to scour nationally or even internationally for the best talent to propel the firm to new heights.
Lastly, working with a marketing firm can pay dividends when it comes to gaining brand awareness and exposure for the firm. Quality marketing can leverage many outlets to increase your firm’s exposure, notably through digital sources such as Google, using search engine optimization to ensure you appear toward the top of the list when people search for law firms in your city or your specialty area of law. They can also help you connect with an audience on social media, an important outlet where people share information and give recommendations.
The growth and evolution of a law firm is an excellent accomplishment. By following these tips, you’ll ensure the expansion of the firm goes smoothly and efficiently.