Preparing for 2016

Gyi Tsakalakis
December 14, 2015

The end of the year is a great time for preparing and prognosticating. Unfortunately, this also tends to be an exceptionally busy time of year. This tends to result in a failure by most lawyers to properly plan for the coming year. Don't be like most lawyers.

The first step in preparing for 2016 is to reflect on what happened in 2015. Did you set goals for 2015? Did you meet them? Were they the right goals? What worked? What failed?

I can't tell you how many business owners, including lawyers, don't spend time analyzing what they're doing. Believe me, I'm sympathetic. It's easy to get lost in all of those things that need to get done working in one's business.

However, failing to assess whether those are the right things to be doing, and expecting different results, well that's just not smart.

Goals

What's your vision for your law practice in 2016? Stay the course? Grow? Move? Same clients? Different clients? Hire? Merge? Sell?

Before you chart a course, you have to know where you're going.

Since growing law firms is what we do, I'm going to focus on client development here.

To me, all client development goals begin with providing better client service. Your current and past clients' perception of you is likely to play a critical role in your ability to earn your next client. Therefore, you might consider setting a goal of improving client Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Too many lawyers tend to focus on the goal of getting more clients. But before you add that to your list, be sure that it's the right goal for your practice.

More clients doesn't necessarily mean a better outcome for your practice. For example, are you equipped to handle the additional workload? Will you be able to maintain excellent service? Can you afford the additional costs associated with acquiring more clients?

If you're convinced that adding more clients is a worthy goal, I would encourage you to qualify the goal with:

  • More of the right kind of clients.
  • A target cost per acquisition.

Spending money to earn clients that aren't the right fit will result in losses for both you and your clients. Spending more money to acquire clients than they will generate in fees will eventually lead to shuddering your doors.

Charting a Course

Once you've identified your goals for 2016, it's time to figure out how you're going to make it happen. Part of this process requires tying inputs to target outputs. I'm partial to the OKR methodology. As Rick Klau puts it:

OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals.

Obviously, if you're a solo, you're solely responsible for achieving your goals. The key is identifying what specifically needs to be done and measured to achieve those goals.

Perhaps you've identified that improving the number of inquiries you receive from potential clients correlates well with achieving your objective of earning new clients. If this is the case, you might set specific targets for growing qualified potential client inquiries.

If you're looking for ideas for growing inquiries from the web, here are 100 tips.

Adjusting Your Course

We all know what happens to even the best laid plans. The hardest part is deciding when to try something different. I'm convinced that quarterly evaluations are usually a good rule of thumb. Evaluating client development on shorter periods generally isn't sufficient to get a sense of performance. On the other hand, if you're not getting some positive feedback after several months, you'll probably need to make some changes.

For example, if you're spending money on advertising, three months ought to be sufficient to get a sense of performance. That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll realize a return on ad spend in this time. For many practice areas, particularly plaintiff firms, it's unlikely that you'll generate an inquiry and a fee in the same quarter. However, you should certainly expect to get qualified inquiries. In many cases, if you go three months without a single qualified inquiry from a potential client, you should consider cutting the program. Remember, this is a guideline, not a hard and fast rule.

I can't tell you how many lawyers will go years without assessing the performance of their advertising and marketing. Don't be like them.

My Crystal Ball

Finally, a few predictions for the coming year. The location-based consequences of the mobile revolution will become a priority. The journey of the legal services consumer will continue to fragment. Firms that win will embrace potential client micro-moments. The lines separating offline reputation and relationships will continue to blur. More and more, your next clients will expect to find information about you online that helps them determine that you're even worth contacting, let alone, hiring.

Here's to a great 2016!

Get Weekly Legal Marketing Tips for 2016:

* indicates required



Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram