Are you cheating yourself?

The business cycle consists of three elements:  marketing to get the new client and retain the old client; production to produce and deliver the legal service, advice and/or documents; and finance to collect your billings and operate your firm.  The first two tend to be the focus of most lawyers.  Billings and collections tend to be ignored or given short shrift or delegated to a staff member with less interest and skill.

One statistic shows that sole practitioners spend 40% of their time in non-billing tasks, such as marketing, billing, collections and other aspects of running the law practice.  In firms of 11 to 20 lawyers, the percent falls dramatically to 8%.  Hence, the larger firm earns more money.  They produce more effort; they bill more; and, even with poor collection efforts, they will likely collect more revenue than their solo counterparts.

Perhaps you should engage personnel to deal with some of the non-billing tasks, whether internally or outsourced and/or perhaps you should consider practice management software as your assistant.  Failure to attain the appropriate resources to enhance your production efforts and non-billing needs is cheating yourself.  Coaching will help you understand how to address these issues.

Categorized in: Cash Flow - Finances, Coaching, Management