Once the last piece of confetti is cleaned up off the floor, the countdown really begins…only 365 days to the next year. You may have already asked yourself: What are my goals for the year? What changes would I like to make? Do I still have that gym membership?
And the questions shouldn’t stop with you—a new year should also be a time of reflection for your personal injury law practice. While you probably have many goals in mind for your practice (e.g., land prospective clients, maintain a diverse portfolio of personal injury cases, get a new coffee maker), the number one goal should always be to increase your personal injury practice’s profitability…after all, if you don’t have a profitable law firm, you don’t have a law firm.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get you signed up for our profits gym now—so you can strengthen your balance sheet and beef up your bottom line. Follow our personal injury “workout plan” (outlined below) starting now and by Q4 your transformation from in the red to in the black should be complete. Here’s what you need to do…
1. Warm up by attracting the right clients
Everything starts with clients—you can’t be profitable without them. Attracting the perfect clients for your firm starts with marketing. You should market to your strengths and you will attract clients that are looking for your particular skill set, and there are a variety of ways you can achieve this.
If you’re looking for fast results, pay-per-click advertising is a great option, but there are cheaper alternatives in house: invest time in creating an attractive homepage (it’s often prospective clients’ first impression of your firm and the easiest place to control your narrative); and there’s nothing better than word-of-mouth—provide superior service to your existing clients so you can encourage them to sing your praises through personal recommendations and social media.
2. Choose modern “equipment”
Workout equipment has evolved dramatically over the years, as fitness enthusiasts have moved past the ThighMaster and on to modern tech that gets better results. And the same goes for modern legal tech…except for one major difference: state-of-the-art legal technology needs no equipment at all (and it doesn’t require a large investment in software, staff, or overhead either). In fact, with cloud-based personal injury case management software, all you need is a laptop and internet to get going—which allows you to burn costs (leading to increased profits), faster than you can burn calories.
3. Start running
A huge hurdle to increased profitability is decreased productivity, and you can’t be productive if you can’t work. A huge portion of work today occurs outside the office—it’s important you can bring your work with you wherever you go, instead of being stuck on a metaphorical treadmill until you can get back to the office. Cloud-based legal software lets you work from anywhere, at any time, and on any device—so you can take on more work, take on more clients, and take on more profits.
4. Put down the weights:
And by weights, we mean heavy, dusty Bankers Boxes. Going paperless (by moving to the cloud) saves you time (easy doc search and retrieval), money (no physical storage costs), and heartache (files no longer prone to destruction, loss, or theft)…all leading to increased profitability for your personal injury law firm. In other words, every day in the personal injury gym is wallet day.
5. Track your health
Any bodybuilder will tell you that you have to analyze your workouts so you can see where you can take on more and where you need improvement—and the same goes for your personal injury firm’s workload. Ignore flashy stats like claimed amounts and focus on more reliable measures of success like key performance indicators (“KPIs”) that zero in on efficiency (e.g., closed matters per month, stalled matters, matters per attorney, lead conversion rate, etc.).
Your legal tech should give you access to analytics, such as KPIs, so you can decide where to allocate or scale back your office resources and make your personal injury law firm more profitable.
And if you’re serious about getting your personal injury practice in shape, there’s no time to cool down. Get your firm on the treadmill of profitability now by signing up for a free demo of CloudLex—the Next-Gen Legal Cloud®️—so you can start shedding costs and stacking gains right away.
