American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys - Law Practice Management - AAEPA

Law Practice Management


PLANNING & ORGANIZING LAW PRACTICE MANAGEMENT

  1. The fields most important to law practice management revolve around critical-delivery tasks such as area specialization, staffing, finances,communications with clients, time planning and physical plant properties.

    1. Planning for Law Practice Management Success – The planning for successful law practice management - including items such as a "Strategic Planning Approach", personal outside coaching, financial analysis, and employment of a marketing calendar system - requires an investment in both time and effort but the returns are well worth these.
    2. Strategic Staffing Management Guide – the Academy's Team Member Handbook Template and Employment Law Information for Your Firm provide invaluable law practice management direction as well as internal controls.
    3. Reception, Administrative Support and Telephone Procedures – The Academy's Training Guides for Front Desk and Law Office Administration give members the inside track to training staff and associates so that chaos becomes order and the confusion becomes production.
    4. Conducting Effective Meetings – Which meetings can you skip and which are absolutely necessary?  This often-puzzling question is solved by the Academy's law practice management tools, tips and techniques.  With a tool such as this, the thousands of staff hours alone that can be saved become a very persuasive reason for considering membership in the Academy.
    5. Office Set-Up Tips - Law Office Set-Up & Moving are skills that you, too, can learn to your great financial gain.  After more than 15 years of training lawyers how to maximize there turn on their law practice management skills, the Academy's members havethese often-difficult tasks "in the bag".

CREATING A CLIENT BASE

Often Marketing is thought of as the most important functionin law practice management because if you have nobody to talk with about your services, it doesn't matterhow much substantive knowledge you have, how many years of experience, howup-to-date your software and hardware is and how fabulous your office looks! It takes “marketing” to keep clients and consumers in your community abreast of changes in the law, as well as educating them about the importance of creatingor maintaining an estate plan.

The Academy's original law practice management model started with marketing support and training for estate planning law firms. The number of tools and programs along with the amount of advice and coaching available exclusively to Academy members is overwhelming. Much of the Academy's coaching is centered around which tools to start with, how to organize your approach and how to measure the results.

For a complete list of marketing materials and tools available to the Academy's members, contact our member information consultant.


BRINGING LAW PRACTICE MANAGEMENT TO LIFE

  • The following steps are crucial in any law practice management system and it is important that they be mastered in order to obtain the highest possible level of personal and practice success:

    1.   The Basics of Law Practice Management – The Academy provides its Member proprietary law practice management software called CounselPro which performs all of the basics of law offices management and does so in the following ways.


    NOTE: The functionality of CounselPro that supports our members in the most profound waysis difficult to summarize, please feel free to Contact the Academy for a moredetailed discussion about the benefits of using software this advanced!

    Members are thrilled to have the following database responsibilities covered in their practice:

    image from AAEPA technology page
    • 2.   Law Firm Management is Crucial if Your are "Suddenly Solo" – You've just graduated from law school, left your corporate position or you and your former partners have decided to part company. The first thing you do is organize your new practice for client development. The concepts and techniques are the same whether you are going solo or starting a new firm with one or more colleagues. In this sort of situation, the ABA says you should start with some easy and concrete tips and action items you can start using today to market to prospects and clients after you have found yourself "suddenly solo."   Following are some crucial law firm management tips and techniques when you find yourself "suddenly solo":

    • Prepare a strategic law firmbusiness plan - decide upon your objectives and the best way to reach them.

    • Prepare atraditional, paper or media-based, detailed marketing plan

    • Ensure that your strategic andmarketing plans are properly calendared

    • Prepare a website and optimize itfor excellent search engine placement in alignment with your objectives

    • Network with other lawyers, such asyou would find in organizations like the Academy

    • Get busy socializing and learn how to work a room

    • There are numerous additional items a suddenly sololawyer must attend to but, without doubt, the single most important item intoday's world is law office practice management software!  Please review the Academy'sCounselPro's awesome technology and how it can help you transition from"suddenly solo" to "suddenly happy and rich."

    • 3.   Law Firm Marketing Plan - The best way to create a profitable law firm marketing plan is to start with a detailed analysis of the many aspects lawyers must traditionally master in order to succeed. You will want to specifically identify major strategic development goals such as area of specialization, target client locations and characteristics and how to exploit your intended target markets carefully identifying the competitive environment. You must memorialize any "unique selling asset" you possess and then specify individually each target for your campaigns such as radio, newspaper, internet, professional groups, social groups, etc.  Then, a further specification process is required such as enumerating (for example) in the professional groups whether you are going to do such things as speak, write, found, etc. such groups.  The more detail the better!  And, remember, always, always calendar all of the important segments of each step.

    • 4.   Developing a Law Firm Strategic Business Plan - A "strategic plan" is a systematic process of envisioning a desired future and translating this vision into broadly defined goals, or objectives, and then developing a sequence of steps to achieve the goals.  As opposed to "long term planning" which starts from managing your current position so that an ultimate goal may be achieved, the strategic planner virtually ignores the present.  This "strategic" concept is very important in developing law practice management procedures because what a lawyer was, or did, is really not important.  What is important is, "what do I want to become" issues.  This is where the Academy is the strongest.  Not only can becoming a member of the Academy prepare you as a lawyer professionally, it can also bring in marketing, law practice management software, staff training, ever developing your internet presence



    • “Dennis Sandoval and Steve Hartnett are very patient when helping me understand complex concepts ... and they hang in there with me until I get it.”

    Randy H. — Utah Member