Law Firm Marketing – £10,000 extra fee income per month

Most solicitors, wait, nearly all solicitors, track the wrong numbers.

Talking of tracks, if you were managing a schedule for a train, if you wanted your train to arrive at a station would you leave at the time that you wanted it to arrive, or would you take your arrival time, deduct the usual journey time, add a few minutes for delays (leaves on lines, unicorns jumping across the track etc) and then take that as your leaving time?

Hopefully, it would be the latter. So if you wanted to arrive at 10am and the journey took 2 hours,  adding some time for delays you might leave at 7.45am.

That is logical isn’t it?

In which case, if solicitors want to bill £10,000 per fee earner each month, where should they start?

The £10,000 figure is the end destination of the journey, so they need to start with the beginning of that journey, then add some time for delays.

What is the beginning of the £10,000 per month billing?

The answer is the number of files opened each month (the leaving time), plus some allowance for some clients dropping off (the delays).

Let’s say that your average bill per file is £1,000 (there is always an average), then clearly you need 10 filesLaw Firm Marketing - £10,000 extra fee income per month opened to, in time, produce your £10,000 billing per month. Add an extra two files for the drop off, and you now know that you must be opening 12 files every month to achieve your targets.

The great news about this is that once you know this number, you can sit down with yourself or each fee earner with this target every week and ask them if they opened 3 files last week. If they didn’t, you need to do one of two things:

1.    Generate more enquiries for them; and/or
2.    Ensure that they convert the enquiries coming into your firm better than they are currently doing so.

When I have a More Clients Strategy call with a solicitor, they rarely know these numbers. They know the billing target that they are looking to achieve, but they have no idea how many enquiries they need or receive each month or how many files they need to open to achieve their billing target.

Going back to the train journey, they know their arrival time but they have no idea when they need to leave.

If you don’t know your leaving time, I advise you to find it out pretty quickly.

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Case Study

Now I’ve got eight staff and two offices, and we’ve never been busier.

I’ve been working with Nick for the last six years, and in that time he’s had a significant impact on my business.

We first start working together when I worked at an employment law practice, and when I left there to set up on my own, Nick was one of the first people I called.

I knew that one of the key pieces to get right was the website – in this day and age it’s impossible to run a successful firm without one – and with Nick’s advice, help and guidance, we created our own marketing-focused site that has proven to be the backbone of all the sales and marketing that has followed.

But a good website means nothing unless people see it, and that’s why we turned to Nick to run our Google Adwords, which quickly became a primary source of leads.

In addition to running the traffic, Nick held our hand through every element of the client attraction process, from how to communicate with leads, to how to close sales, and the impact that had on our business cannot be understated.

And that’s why I will always recommend Nick to anyone who needs help with marketing – particularly legal firms: his breadth of knowledge about everything to do with sales and marketing means that he can (and does) help with every part of the picture, resulting in a stronger business than you could have imagined.

Since we’ve been working with Nick, we’ve grown quickly – back in 2013 it was just myself and my wife, and she was part-time.

Now I’ve got eight staff and two offices, and we’ve never been busier.

And if our lead numbers are anything to go by, it’s only going to get better – 2015-2016 saw us get 800 good quality leads in employment law, and that figure more than doubled last year. I can only look forward to more exciting times, working hand-in-hand with Nick to grow my practice and enjoy the fruits that come with that growth.

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