Your Perfect Legal Practice

When I left legal practice it took some time to create a profitable business (as I am sure many of you remember if you started your own legal practice). About three years into launching my business my kitchen was falling apart. The cupboard doors were falling off, handles had been stuck on so many times that they had lost the will to live, and we really could not wait to lose the white floor tiles – white, in a kitchen!). It was time to bite the bullet and buy a new kitchen.

We do not have a massive kitchen by any means, but we had some very specific requirements when we started. We wanted:

  • To have a place where friends could sit, drink and chat whilst a meal was being prepared;
  • Patio doors into the garden;
  • The cooker on the right hand wall as you walked in (so that the vent could go straight outside – the cooker was previously on the inside wall); and
  • These ideas were immovable.

We ended up with:

  • A place where friends could sit, drink and chat whilst a meal was being prepared;
  • No patio doors
  • Cooker on the left hand side

As the song nearly says, ‘one out of three ain’t bad’ (sorry Meat Loaf). You see as we saw more and more kitchen companies, our ideas changed. We were told the patio doors would not work in our kitchen as they would create a walk-through right through the centre of the kitchen (not safe and very frustrating if cooking and children are running in and out). We were also told that the cooker simply could not fit on the right hand wall, so it had to go on the left.

When the kitchen was installed the granite surfaces marked whenever you left anything wet on them. This was very stressful, more so because the granite man had no answers. Our perfect kitchen was far from perfect, until the granite man stripped the granite down and retreated it! Then it was absolutely fine, and still is some years later. We now have our perfect kitchen, it is just a very different one from the one we had planned.

The similarity between my now ‘Perfect Kitchen’ and your ‘Perfect Legal Practice’ are several fold:

  • You have to begin with the end in mind: what does your ‘Perfect Legal Practice’ look like – if you do not know what you want it to be, how will you know when you have arrived?
  • You have to change and modify your plans as you progress along the path to your legal practice. New obstacles will appear (your patio doors will be the Legal Services Act and new competitors (along with other things we can’t even think of yet)). You have to modify your plans to suit the changing market.
  • Your perfect practice will appear one day, but it will take time and effort to make it happen and it probably won’t quite look like the one you had planned.
  • Please don’t give up too soon.

To run a ‘Perfect Legal Practice’ now does takes more time and effort. Whereas clients used to stroll through your door because you were there, you now have to give them reasons to choose you. A client welcome letter and closing letter is not enough to generate a client for life. You have to provide your clients with reasons to use you every single month of their lives. The reason is simple, if you do not the time will arrive when they need a new solicitor and they will forget that it was you they used last time. Instead they will hop along to your competitor who has been talking to them for some months now.

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Law Firm Marketing

Case Study

Beating the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget

We focus on accident claims, and it’s vital for us to have a strong web presence, which we didn’t have before Nick got involved.

As a result we had to buy in leads from other sources, reducing our profit margins and making us reliant on other companies to generate revenue.

We did have a company working on our Adwords and website, but the truth of the matter is that they weren’t getting the results we needed them to get – we only had a handful of clients coming in from those efforts, making us highly reliant on buying in the leads from elsewhere.

And then I came across one of Nick’s books, was impressed by what I read and got in touch with him.

The rest – as they say – is history.

We started working together with a clear brief: Nick’s job was to help us bring in more self-generated work, so we could stop relying on buying leads.

He started by working on our website, making it more accessible and easier to navigate.

Next he overhauled our Google Adwords, which the previous company had been running fairly unsuccessfully.

Adwords is hugely challenging in our sector, with some very big players bidding on some of the most common keywords, making it very difficult for any smaller firms to get a look in, and I’ve got to be honest and say that I didn’t know how Nick was going to make it work.

But he did, by analysing very closely what people were looking for and tailoring our Adwords efforts towards them.

It worked! We were competing with the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget, and the amount of work we got in was tremendous – we jumped from just a handful of leads and clients a month to 500 leads and 150 clients, every single month, all from our online efforts.

Nick didn’t just work on the lead generation side of things either – he helped us with the client conversion process too, training our team, making our sales calls better and improving our onboarding process to avoid drop-offs due to ‘cooling off’.

Now we don’t buy in any work at all, our pay-per-click efforts do a sterling job, and the large client database that Nick has helped us build has allowed us to increase the amount of work we do by a factor of ten, in just three years.

I’m one extremely satisfied client, and despite the dramatic differences Nick has been able to make in the time we’ve been working together, things are still improving thanks to his guidance and support.