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All industries change from time to time — even relatively stable ones like law practice.
If you fail to stay with or ahead of the curve, you will likely find that your firm — and your profits — might begin to lag behind competitors, which can pose a threat to your professional and personal well-being.
Whether you’re starting a new practice or looking to enhance an existing one, you can benefit tremendously from embracing new strategies and refining time-tested techniques. You will reinvent not only your practice’s methodology but also how clients interact with you and procure your services.
Here are three tips to increase your revenue and make your operation the most-trusted practice around.
- Analyze Your Billing Model
- Embrace the Use of Technology
- Streamline Your Staff
1. Analyze Your Billing Model
Pricing models vary depending on the services you offer, but one thing has remained relatively consistent throughout history: Law practices live and die by how they handle their billable hours.
Many firms still manually track the hours they provide to their clients, which can often result in discrepancies that eventually develop into adverse outcomes. If you end up overcharging people, they might form negative impressions about your integrity and seek more accurate, affordable options.
If you undercharge people, you run the risk of operating at a net deficit, which can wreak havoc on your payroll and other aspects of your business.
Technology has also played a role in how practices approach billable hours, as it can increase accuracy and efficiency.
In recent years, firms have begun to experiment with different billing models, such as discounting their hours, fixing their fees depending on the services and accepting a flat fee to handle all issues related to a specific matter. Some firms are also experimenting with the idea of selling pre-purchased blocks of time.
By deconstructing your current model’s positives and negatives, and comparing them with your competitors, you can adjust it accordingly.
2. Embrace the Use of Technology
Technology can benefit not just your billing model, but all aspects of your practice.
Research, discovery and document preparation are all vital for the success of your services. By expanding your databases and document creation templates, which are both commercially available and proprietary, you can focus on offering more detailed services at a quicker rate.
You can also use technology to cut down on overhead fees significantly. Virtual portals offer a way to eliminate the need for an office or building, as you can provide services to clients online through a secure portal.
You can communicate with them, send them bills and schedule events, among other tasks. With case management software, you can also share up-to-date details on how their cases are progressing.
If you want to keep the personal element of lawyering intact, you can also implement hybrid models. Portals allow you to handle the minutia with increased efficiency, which means you can devote more energy toward essential meetings and discussions.
On top of it all, you can establish your marketing presence online by using different social media accounts to promote your services, prices and other information. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and even Snapchat are all useful sites that offer business versions.
You can also invest in greater broadband and network connectivity to ensure fast speeds and better infrastructure integrity.
3. Streamline Your Staff
Nobody likes losing full-time staff members, but sometimes a deep dive into your business’ modus operandi can expose redundancies that are harmful to your practice’s revenue stream.
Competent employees are invaluable, but they can also be expensive. Full salaries, payroll taxes, benefits related to health care and retirement and insurance all factor largely in your budget’s construction. Sick leave and vacation days can also leave a considerable dent.
When you need to hire new people to handle different responsibilities around your firm, you might consider part-time employees. You can pay them by the hour based on the amount of time they spend at the office, and you can forgo some of the benefits that full-timers usually expect. Having multiple part-time employees also increases your flexibility, as people can cover each other’s shifts to ensure you always have a helping hand, which you can’t always say for a full-time assistant.
Alternatively, you might also find that your practice has full-time employees who have responsibilities that others can cover. Eliminating administrative positions, while not ideal, will save a great deal of money you would’ve otherwise spent on salaries.
You can replace that productivity by having your other, higher-level employees handle those tasks — if they are willing — or outsourcing specific responsibilities on a case-by-case basis.
How Can You Utilize Mobile Notaries?
While notaries can’t provide legal expertise or advice — as that would count as unauthorized practice of law — they can perform lower-level administrative tasks for a fraction of the cost.
You can send some common documents back and forth through online emails and portal connections, but many important ones often require physical, legitimized copies that you need to take care of.
Mobile notary services allow firms to quickly reach their clients, which cuts down turnaround times and makes your practice more efficient. The more clients you serve, the more money you’ll pull in.
Superior Notary Services can assist a vast range of law practices. We will ensure unambiguous, straight-forward filings for divorces, bills of sale, mesothelioma litigation, power of attorney and much more.
Contact Superior Notary for Help With Document Preparation and Delivery
The digitization of the modern age has positively affected numerous aspects of law practice, but notarizing and delivering essential physical documents remains a crucial aspect. The little details always matter in the realm of law, and by partnering with a skilled middleman like us, you can cut out wasted money and gradually increase your firm’s revenue.
We are incredibly flexible, which allows us to meet your requirements as necessary. You can set up your meeting with one of our mobile agents at a time, date and place of your choosing.
Overall, we have more than 34,000 affiliates located in many major U.S. cities, which ensures accessibility.
With more than 20 years of experience, contact us today to see how our pioneering service can assist you. We fill requests 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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Increasing Revenue For Your Private Law Practice