Consulting Services for Law Firms
The process of growing and managing a law firm can be a complex and difficult one. Hiring a law firm consultant can help take some of that pressure off of you. Handing over the responsibility for analyzing options and identifying strategies for improving your businesses performance gives you more time to focus on generating revenue through billable hours. This is particularly true if you are running a smaller law firm. The investment in hiring a law firm consulting agency can pay off in a big way over the long term. An experienced consultant can successfully help you build your law firm, steering your business toward new opportunities and helping improve your return on investment.
Clients of law firm consultants have reported both significant cost savings as well as increased revenue after engaging a consulting firm. In some reported cases, revenue has increased as much as 40%!
Most good law firm consulting agencies offer a range of services. These services can be tailored to fit the specific areas of your business that need the most attention. Growing a business isn’t easy, but with the right help and support from experienced professionals it can be a much smoother ride and get you better results.
What Can a Law Firm Consultant Offer You?
Engaging the services of a professional law firm business consultant can offer a number of advantages for the growth, development, and long-term sustainability of a small to medium sized law firm. There are four main areas that most law firm consulting services focus on; strategic planning, process improvement, digital advertising, accounting services, and interim executive assignments.
These are broad categories, and you may find that the particular needs of your business actually require parts of the services offered in multiple categories. Consultations are custom and there is no one size fits all system. Whatever your law firm’s situation, size, and needs, the services offered by consultants to law firms should easily adjust to fit your needs. Let us take a look at exactly what each of these categories of law firm consultant services consists of, and what you might be able to get out of them, depending on the situation and details of your particular law firm.
Strategic Planning
One of the biggest advantages you can get from engaging the services of a law firm consultant is a sustained long-term advantage over your competitors, and that is where strategic planning comes in. It is easy to get lost in the minute details of short-term advantages and temporary boosts to success, efficiency, or revenue, but there are far more significant benefits available with a long term thinking and strategic planning.
Strategic planning focuses on examining and assessing the competitive market in which your law firm is currently operating and finding the best route forward that will enable you to achieve whatever your specific goals may be over both the short and long-term. That means that you can be sure that your long-term plan takes into account both the unique value of your business and the landscape in which your business operates, ensuring that every possible variable is fully considered before you commit to a new plan.
Every law firm has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and if you know your marketplace well enough, even your weaknesses can become strengths, allowing you to gain a sustained edge over your competitors. Strategic planning is the best way to develop this sort of long -erm business plan and marketplace analysis in order to perfect your strategy and ensure its effectiveness.
Process Improvement
No matter how much care and thought you might have put into your working processes and practices, there is always room for improvement and refinement. Hiring a consultant that specializes in law firms will help you find those opportunities to refine your processes. A fresh pair of eyes and an expert with experience in spotting inefficiencies can find flaws in a law firms’ operations that can be impossible to see from within the business. Inefficiencies can be costing your firm money, time and clients. Don’t get caught off guard by simply letting things run the way they always have been.
A good consultant for law firms can usually find a large number of small process improvements within your firm that when fixed, can create a collective larger positive impact. Helping you to trim out any inefficiencies and streamline the process as much as possible. Handing this responsibility over to a law firm consultant means that you don’t have to spend all of your time and attention on trying to identify small improvements. Instead you can use that time to focus on bigger concerns, while secure in the knowledge that those refinements will be taken care of efficiently and effectively. You will be able to move forward with your business plan, building it on a foundation of the most efficient and streamlined working processes possible. Forming a stable and reliable base for your long-term operations. With the help of process improvement consultations, your law firm can trim down to the leanest and meanest processes possible.
Some of the processes a law firm consultant can assist with are looking at your intake system, your billing processes, administrative communications and even your case management flows. A law firm consultant can also help you assess your current use of technology and make recommendations for how to more fully optimize those systems. And recommendations aren’t enough! Good consultants tell you what to do, even better consultants implement those ideas and train your team so you are experiencing a white glove service that you gained the benefits of without requiring much of your time!
Business Consulting
Business consulting is a large umbrella term that covers a wide range of different elements of consulting for law firms. In most cases, this will consist of looking at your day to day operations, your business key performance indicators and the workflow of your company and suggesting improvements based on how things currently work for your business as well as the shape of the marketplace in which you are working. Consulting might also include coaching for key leaders on how to be more effective in their role. Sometimes we even step into a fractional executive role to run certain functions for you! The on-going consulting tends to be less of a focus and instead looks at what you can do to get immediate results and increase your revenue efficiently. There are many different elements to this type of consulting, and typically you will probably want a few different features in combination with other areas of consulting for law firms to create a custom package tailored perfectly for your particular needs and the specific environment of your legal firm.
Conclusion
If you are looking to streamline the operations of your small to medium-sized law firm or to create a long-term strategic business plan, or even just to identify how best to take advantage of your firm’s specific strengths and weaknesses, then engaging the services of a law firm consultant can make the process far easier and more effective. With the help of a good consultant, you can shoulder less of the load of improvements yourself, freeing you up to take on more important projects and serve your clients better. No matter what your needs may be, a law firm consultant with a depth and breadth of experience can offer the perfect consulting package for your particular firm that will hopefully get you far better results than you ever pay the consultant in fees.
