Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

Clients who pay their bills quickly & fully:  PRICELESS.

This is probably review for long time readers but I was “tickled” again last night regarding the simple but oh-so-important matter of including a self-addressed-stamped envelope along with your monthly client billing statements. Here & here are past posts where I set forth a broader overview of my Firm’s collection policy. It’s the most important process of a law firm and something I will be taking a full examination of here at the end/start of the year again.

And it’s really a difference maker…speaking from first hand experience in my practice. I was reminded of it again last night related to my exciting new responsibility as Treasurer of my condominium association. I’ve been in the practice of condo law off and on for much of my career so I really shouldn’t have been too surprised but what I’ve been discovering is that the Treasurer position is the only board slot that actually has a lot of work to do. Among which is paying various monthly bills to service providers from phone, plumbing, landscaping, utilities, water, etc. So last night I had my stack of 8 invoices and was writing checks and noticed there’s quite a continuum between the providers in their “making it easy to pay.”

• A couple places did not include an envelope for my payment (and obviously not a stamp either).
• The majority actually included an envelope but no postage. This seems to be the norm for the super-huge providers, AT&T and the like where that amount of postage would likely be quite large.
• 1-2 providers included self-addressed & stamped envelopes.

And it just got me to thinking that some clients must be thinking the same things I’m thinking when I’m going through the stack of bills. I’m supposed to pay you/provider some decent $$ and yet I’m having to pullout a label, envelope, and my own postage. I have to “pay” just to pay (more time too). And that ignores the delays that would occur if I’m out of stamps or envelopes. If you’re anything like me with 25-50 client invoices being sent on a monthly basis, don’t be thrifty if it means delayed income.

MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CLIENTS TO PAY YOU!

Or not?

I’m admittedly piggy-backing off this article I saw over at The Wall Street Journal, Why Your Adviser Should Make House Calls. Note the perspective of the article is focused on financial planners and estate planning attorneys. Several estate planning attorneys are quoted in the article with their reasons FOR making house calls summarized by the following:

• It personalizes the relationship.
• Simple geography.
• It helps information gathering. You see a car or art collection that might not otherwise have been raised.

All very good points I suppose. I do find it curious as someone who does SOME estate planning & someone who also works with a handful of non-attorney estate planners that it’s the norm for non-attorney estate planners to make house calls. Conversely, in my experience it’s the norm for estate planning attorneys NOT to make house calls.

Is my experience different than yours? Is there a good reason for this distinction?

I make occasional house calls with client age/mobility typically being the primary motivating factor. I think this can be an easy way for you to distinguish yourself and an example of great customer service. Specific to estate planning lawyers, oftentimes when you’re preparing an estate plan there will be one informational meeting up front and then a final document execution meeting at the end. Maybe you do 1 & 1…the informational meeting at a client’s home and the document execution meeting at your office because then it’s nice to have easy access to office staff to serve as witnesses and copy machines handy.

And in many legal fields the advice is likely never make house calls. In some of the areas where personal safety and mental imbalance are common in clientele I want to keep the relationship as formally lawyer-client as possible. In these sorts of matters the general line of thinking is…clients are not my friends!

As a Chicagoan during our current election season I equate “Before it’s too Late” with the 1983 Chicago mayoral election between Bernie Epton and Harold Washington. It was one of Epton’s campaign slogans with more than a hint of racial undertones…actually a very fascinating campaign to review for you political scientists out there. But SIC is a small firm lawyer blog all about Growing Your (Our) Practice so…

I’ve had a rash of new clients lately who have retained us TOO LATE! Not too late to help them (we wouldn’t take their money if we couldn’t help them) but surely later than would be ideal. Do you have this problem too? And what’s the solution because this is more of an ‘identify a problem’ post than a ‘give readers a solution’ post.

Here are the personal examples I’m talking about, such as people who don’t have representation when dealing with parentage decisions (I don’t mean the sex). Meaning people are committing themselves to legal parentage before knowing the ramifications. Or, father’s in parentage cases who ignore the retroactive child support issue and then just “take” a $10k judgment against them that could have been avoided. Or, people who let the other parent go to another state with kids and kill their parental rights. And each of these examples involve people who became clients of ours to help with subsequent issues but HUGE ISSUES had already be given away due to their actions before I was their attorney.

Why do people consistently make this mistake & how can we help clients to stop making it?

I suppose at some level this is a general “inertia problem” like anyone with a ‘To Do’ list that gets done slowly, but, the ramifications can be far more severe in the context of legal matters. Further, this can be the downside to DIY (Do-It-Yourself) or to invoke my favorite Rumsfeldian quote there’s that category of things “we don’t know that we don’t know.”  I just retained a client who hurt his case greatly because when he was pro-se he consulted Dorothy Brown’s Website (Court Clerk of Cook County, Illinois) regarding how to serve process and 5 months later his son and the child’s mother are halfway across the country despite the fact that she “needs” to get leave of court to leave Illinois w/ the child.

And the solution?

• Client education marketing. I’m going to include a short video on this topic in the context of parentage cases in our October client newsletter as a first step.
• Summons alert. Can greater alerts be included on the summons and initial documents a litigant receives?
• Remove “case bias.” This is the public policy problem that I’d like to work to change…the bias in favor of child support obligors often at the expense of an involved and intact family. Or the defendant bias that seems to exists in mortgage and landlord-tenant cases. Note that many of my personal examples surely come from the disfavored party in Parentage Act cases.

Chrometa (a Greek word for accurate time-tracking). Because time management is critical to “Grow(ing) Your Practice.” And they’ve got to be doing something right if they had mentions in both The Economist & The Connected Lawyer.

Howtomanageasmalllawfirm.com…because I’m getting a tad tired of being a good lawyer who doesn’t maximize my profits. Checkout Rjon Robins October 15, 2010 in Seattle at the King County Bar Association.

Nothing quite says Chicagoland fall like warm temperatures, pretty leaves changing colors, and my first jaunt to lovely Markham in 7 years…happy Friday!

Any Big Ten football fans out there?

It’s not the SEC grant you but as a Midwesterner I do watch a little Big 10/11/12 football. Plus, I’m married to a Michigan State graduate so I have a mild rooting interest for Sparty and have been following their progress as their head coach Mark Dantonio recovers from a heart attack suffered after another (ho-hum) win over Notre Dame. I really appreciate sports teams who can overcome the loss of a coach or a player’s injury because it really speaks to the overall core strength of the team.

But it’s not merely a sports issue. Here’s a great example from American History that I wrote about last year. And it’s an issue for your law practice too. Because what if you’re flat on your back violently ill starting tomorrow for 2 weeks?

What & Who’s Your Back-up??

Now, your longer-term solution should be a practice that “runs itself” meaning a business wholly separate from 1 single individual, but that may not be realistic in the early years. But even in the early years as a sole practitioner you must take necessary steps to protect yourself in the event of your involuntary absence.

Here are 4 Back-up Measures to Consider:

1. Your Back-up Buddy. This is an absolute MUST, particularly if yours is a court-based practice much like mine. The court dates just keep on tick’in, tick’in, tick’in regardless of where or how you are. And for me this is almost a 3-fold trap on *vacations, *day-to-day conflicts where I have multiple court dates in different locations, and if *I’m really ill or out for an extended period of time. I solved this one via a bar association mentor-ship program where I have a great friend who has served me in many ways with practice back-up being one of those ways.
2. Centralized Case List. I keep a spreadsheet list of all my active cases with case status notes and court dates listed. As much as anything this serves as a self-organization and reminder tool for myself. However, an assistant and my back-up attorney need to know where this file is located too because this does give an easy snapshot of all my active cases.
3. Thorough Calendering. Obviously some organized calendaring system is key or you’ll be missing a lot of things which I wrote about here. But I think thoroughness is my point of emphasis too particularly in the event of you as lawyer’s incapacity. Currently on our calendar we list a case name, courthouse/courtroom, and a brief description of what the case is set for. I think we can do a much better job of specifying what a case is set for so that a 3rd-person with zero knowledge of the case can view the calendar and have a pretty good idea of what’s up in court on a particular day. Also, why not list an opposing lawyer/party with contact information. What else would be useful?
4. Case Logs for ALL CASES. This is an expansion on item #2 that I’ve used with real estate transactions since my very first job out of law school. For our real estate transactions this is the “one-stop-shop” where anyone who is working on a deal can look and see the current status of the transaction. If anyone does anything related to the transaction they make updated notes into the log. These are helpful in residential real estate because you typically have several people working on the same transaction and there’s a good amount of coordinating logistics. I don’t currently use logs for non-real estate cases but shouldn’t I? My case list in #2 gives some case background but it’s not nearly thorough enough where another lawyer taking over say an involved child custody case could really be ready to dive-in and be effective as the client’s “new” attorney.

Finally, the over-arching issue is the creation of a legal services business that de-emphasizes any single individual. The above tips are critical sort of “fire insurance” that are still a bit reactionary in nature. Plan your firm’s long-term growth and fight the ego mind-set of placing everything on yourself that may heighten your perceived importance but in reality does not serve your clientele or staff.

I attend a weekly business marketing group where every member gives a little 1-minute marketing spiel each week about themselves and their businesses and oftentimes this one guy says something to the effect of when you call such-and-such business you’re really calling me John Smith a business of one. I know he intends to mean that you’ll get very personalized service but I cringe and think to myself what if you’re incapacitated for several weeks…then what happens to me as your customer? Don’t let that be you!