Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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And Now, the Tricky Part:  Naming Your Business. We’ve written about the ethical issues related to law firm naming in the past here but it still seems to me that there’s a real dearth of creativity when it comes to the law firm names that I see.   Quick, how many firms do you know that don’t simply include some lame/uncreative use only of a practitioner’s or various partners’ last names? I think I know two, other than the gentleman profiled in the WSJ article. The piece includes 12 examples of different companies and their strategy in company naming. I’d suggest that is an area ripe for innovation and an instant marketing advantage for someone starting a practice.

Divorce lawyers:  Facebook tops in online evidence. Not a bad place to start if you have a dicey case particularly with child custody issues.  Good old social media! The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years. I have. Some examples from the piece:

– Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.

– Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his “write something about yourself” section: “If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

– Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook’s Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.

– Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

How to get more business:  20 tips on marketing the small law firm (page 10). Plenty of ideas, pick a couple and implement now. A couple easy ones:  *Get out of the office & *Get your newsletter on track on a consistent basis (at least quarterly).

Taking the Leap to Self-Employment. Good piece really taking a hard look at the challenges of self-employment. You must be motivated to sell a product or service for which there’s demand & the business idea should be based on expertise you already have. Good teaching point for lawyers, you’ve got to be marketing like crazy early in the history of your practice and can’t be learning your business idea from scratch at the same time. The light at the end of the tunnel:  Even in the face of failure, most entrepreneurs are not willing to give up. “Once they taste having more control over their lives,” he said, “they almost never go back.”

In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That. And finally a mildly humorous story from our current, touch economic climate (perhaps I need to take a look at my law school transcript)…

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.

But it’s not because they are all working harder.

The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

Not to get too Freudian on you all, but, sometimes one of the upsides to blogging and I suppose a lot of writing in general is that it encourages a degree of self-analysis and introspection. This last post (and perhaps some quiet time last week in the UP) and specifically the notion of a law practice broken down into thirds has got me thinking about two sort of macro-level viewpoints that often hold me back from greater success as a small law firm manager. And I’m guessing I’m not alone.

First is the pull or conflict between the “worker bee” mindset versus the business owner/rainmaker/CEO mindset. I’m nearing the 5 year mark of my own firm’s existence and I have not yet fully conquered the “worker bee” syndrome. Meaning I still have a twinge of guilt when I’m NOT getting very specific, currently profitable, legal work done. And what results is that the 1/3-1/3-1/3 model gets out-of-whack big time because I feel like I must be spending more time on the substantive legal work “third.” Inevitably what happens is my breakdown becomes something like 70% substantive legal and probably 15% each for marketing and business administration. Thus I’m too focused on present legal work versus creating future legal work & creating a better legal services business in the future. This is a big deal. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with the “worker bee” syndrome in general but if you know that’s kind of who you are then your/my place might be as another firm’s associate being the ultimate 2200 billable hour worker bee…ouch, that stings.

Second, and less specific to lawyerland, is the old ACTIVITY versus ACCOMPLISHMENT struggle given emphasis by the late Peter Drucker. This is rather self-explanatory but can be particularly challenging for the small firm attorney depending on your staff constraints. I currently utilize one, part-time legal assistant so on the days that she’s working most of my “activities” get shifted off of my plate…scheduling, logistics, reminder telephone calls, buying office supplies, simple banking, mail sorting, etc., etc. I’d include checking e-mail more than say 2-3 times a day in the category of “activity” w/o any substantive accomplishment too. And lets be clear, what I’m labeling as activities are different than sort of utter time wasting procrastination. The things I list above are things that must be done, however, they are not profitable accomplishments that are putting dollars in my pocket…they’re sort of tangential. A typical error would be me putting off spending several hours on drafting some critical legal document for a client and instead spending that time doing non-substantive activity-like busy work. Some easy fixes are proper delegation of work to staff and limiting your e-mail usage each day. The bigger mindset change is developing the mental discpline to differentiate between the important and the urgent. Or like former (future?) Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz used to preach using the W.I.N. acronym:

What’s
Important
Now

Career Advice: Find one of the most obscure, yet important government agencies to work for coming out of law school and then once you’ve gotten 5-10 years of experience at that entity flip sides and use those relationships and knowledge to build a great law practice representing people before that agency/commission. I stole that nugget from Wheaton attorney Irene Bahr who was part of my CLE panel this last Saturday. Note that she first worked for the Illinois State Liquor Commission and now she exclusively represents prominent companies before it as a sole practitioner.

Buy your office: Two of four panelists from Saturday owned their office spaces and when I asked them what their best decisions were as small firm attorneys buying their office space was the answer. I don’t see this too much although my first office was as part of a lawyer suite owned by a lawyer. Probably more of an investment/portfolio planning issue almost than an attorney matter.

33.33333333……%. Andrea Buford was an impressive member of our panel as well Saturday. She heads an 8-attorney practice that was founded in 2001. And the 1/3 number is her breakdown of time spent between marketing/business administration/substantive legal work…one-third for each. I think a lot of us don’t get up to the third for marketing and business admin.

Legal work from the do-it-yourself crowd. Saw this nugget from Mattoon attorney Janet Grove in the Illinois Bar Journal. She makes a standing offer that she will spend up to 30 minutes reviewing anyone’s will free of charge tapping into that group of people who have tried to build an estate plan without a lawyer. Is there a way for you to play this trend? There’s gotta be one for me…just in the Daley law library yesterday and there are always people at the front desk getting the forms to likely improperly handle a dissolution of marriage.

And finally a Thanksgiving moment, one of the great scenes from one of my favorite television programs…our President Josiah Barlett talks turkey:

I just finished another re-read of Jim Collins’ Good to Great:  Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. With business books it’s kinda like movies for me, there aren’t too many I like so I re-watch and re-read the same 5-10 every couple years. But Good to Great is an excellent read because it’s not just some CEO spouting crap, it’s some 200 pages based on sound, academic research regarding Fortune 500 companies that either fit the criteria or they didn’t. Plus it makes 6 simple (not easy) points shared by the so-called “Great” companies:

1.  Level 5 Leadership;
2.  First Who…Then What;
3.  Confront the Brutal Facts;
4.  Hedgehog Concept;
5.  Culture of Discipline;
6.  Technology Accelerators.

Plus he makes several good triathlon references (looking forward to Lake Geneva on 9/12/09) including a story of multiple Hawaii Ironman Triathlon champion Dave Scott, who would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off to give him an edge.  But I digress…

The absolute golden takeaway point of the book is contained within the chapter entitled The Hedgehog Concept where Collins makes the analogy between great companies and those small, porcupine-like hedgehogs. The point being the “great” companies simplify their complex business world into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs aren’t pursuing several different ends and such, rather, they’re focused like a laser on their own, specific vision. 

And how to discover your “Hedgehog Concept”? Three questions:

• What are you deeply passionate about?
• What can you be the best in the world at?
• What drives your economic engine?

How ’bout applying those three questions or looking for the overlap in the “three circles” in your legal services business, as mentioned in the book.

When I apply the 3 circles to my practice I end up asking myself, why the heck am I representing anyone in residential real estate matters? I’m not particularly passionate about the subject matter and the economics of that practice area flat-out suck. Conversely when I think about elder/family/disability law I do consider those areas about which I am passionate, very accomplished in, and with pretty decent economics as the elderly and disabled populations sky rocket.

Maybe I need to pull a Cork Walgreen (he eliminated food service within Walgreens over a five year period) and just stop it with the residential real estate? I think so…but when?

I’ve enjoyed participating in Ed Poll’s new forum’s site here. Several discussion categories and a treasure trove of Ed’s writing from over the years. I think the forums are fairly new and just starting to generate significant activity. I’ve gotten some good advice directly from Ed myself, and no consulting fee.

Well, the headline’s mine but really Rjon Robins is being extremely generous with his time and advice…plus it’s here in CHICAGO.  But I’m not sure when he’s closing down registration so e-mail him now (To request an application send an email to MJ@HowToMANAGEaSmallLawFirm.com with the words “Mastermind Chicago” in the subject line). I’ll admit it, I’ve shirked away from some of the law office management crowd (likely to my own detriment) due to cost, but even I can’t use that excuse this time…I’ll see you there!

The Event:

So I will be returning to Chicago on July 26 & 27th to conduct a Mastermind Meeting & Coaching Strategy Session for a very limited number of solos & owners of small law firms.

This will be designed to help you identify previously-overlooked opportunities for growth & improvement of your small law firm both in terms of financial performance and to make it even more FUN for you to be a lawyer!

You will have the unique chance to have your law firm taken-apart and then see how we can put it all back together so as to:

• Increase your revenues
• Increase profits on those revenues
• Attract more clients
• Attract better clients
• Enhance your clients’ experience so you can enjoy premium fees
• Identify systems & procedures to reduce attorney-stress
• Squeeze-out profits from your website in ways that might surprise you
• Identify your ultimate “exit strategy”
• Leverage staff more effectively based on “best practices” in  other small law firms around the Country
• And just generally get a Totally Unfair Competitive Advantage in your local market & practice area.