When it comes to enhancing law firm profitability, the key lies in implementing strategies that are not only effective but also feasible. In this guide, we’ll unveil four actionable methods to not only boost your law firm’s profitability but also elevate your revenue streams.
The Difference Between Revenue Vs. Profitability
Despite the common misconception, revenue and profitability are not interchangeable terms. Revenue is the money your firm makes by selling your legal services, while profit is the net income left over after your firm covers all expenses, debts, and operation costs. Law firms earn a profit only when they bring in more money than they spend on overhead costs.
Law firm profitability is essential to your practice’s financial health and long-term success. To consistently bring in positive financial outcomes, your firm should measure revenue and profitability. Knowing these metrics can help boost profitability, allowing your firm to maximize revenue and minimize spending.
Your firm may find it useful to track its profitability metrics by using legal practice management software. Resources like law practice management technology could benefit your firm by streamlining the legal billing process, tracking billable hours, and generating expense reports.
In this blog, we’ll discuss four strategies to improve law firm profitability and how you can use them to remain profitable.
Reduce the Number of Non-Billable Hours and Rack Up on Billable Hours
One way to improve your law firm’s profitability is to focus your time and energy on tasks that earn you money.
Non-Billable Hours vs. Billable Hours
Non-billable hours are hours you work that your clients won’t pay you for. Spending too much of your week on non-billable tasks such as client intake, invoicing, legal billing, accounting, scheduling, and other administrative tasks is not the most profitable use of your time.
Instead, you want to focus your energy on the billable hours that clients are paying you for. Actively working on cases, joining client meetings, and attending court appearances helps your firm continue making money.
Automation
Using law practice management technology to automate non-billable tasks allows your firm to put more work into revenue-generating legal matters. More law firms are leveraging legal technology’s automation features to increase billable hours. According to one study, 48% of law firms have started using automation-based technology in recent years.
For example, you can run multiple timers to track all of your billable hours with PracticePanther’s time-tracking. It converts tracked time into billable hours in just a few clicks, so you won’t have to manually track how much time you spend on a case. Your employees can create entries from calendar events, tasks, emails, notes, text messages, or phone calls, so you won’t miss billable hours.
Another way to maximize your billable hours is by automating your invoicing process. PracticePanther’s invoicing feature enables firms to easily generate invoices with custom fields, making the invoicing process easier and faster. You can also create customized your invoice templates with your firm’s logo and add client information to make transactions professional and trustworthy.
Create a Marketing Strategy
Attract new clients and maintain law firm profits with legal marketing. Before implementing a new law firm marketing strategy, consider taking PracticePanther’s law firm growth quiz to determine your firm’s current growth status and make actionable decisions to improve your law firm marketing efforts.
You can remain competitive, secure qualified leads, and increase profits with a strong marketing strategy. Marketing tactics to consider include the following:
- Start a blog and contribute to publications: Blogging and writing for publications help establish your firm as an industry expert. You can showcase your knowledge, sell your services, and drive SEO results by adding content to your website’s blog.
- Send newsletters: Promote your legal services and gather leads through email newsletters. Share industry updates and news specific to your firm to keep clients interested.
- Speak at events: Attending and speaking at networking events is a great way to get your firm’s name out there. You may gain new customers, build connections with other firms, and establish your firm as a community leader.
- Create a social media schedule: Marketing on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can help your firm build an online community and easily connect with clients.
- Gather reviews and testimonials: Satisfied customers can help promote your firm. They’ll recommend you through word of mouth to people they know, and you can ask them to leave a review on your website.
- Create a website with SEO best practices: Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your firm rank on platforms like Google. If you aren’t sure how to improve your firm’s SEO strategy, PracticePanther’s SEO checklist may be useful. It allows firms to optimize their online presence to increase website traffic and brand awareness.
Provide Conveniences to Clients
Maintain your law firm’s profitability by making it easy for clients to work with you. Deciding to pursue a legal case is already complex enough for most clients. You can make the legal process easier by providing the following conveniences with legal technology:
Online Payments
Clients prefer to work with law firms that offer online payments, and letting your clients pay you online may benefit your firm’s profitability. According to data the American Bar Association (ABA) cites, law firms that offer flexible payment methods save about three billable hours a day and increase their profitability by 10%.
Legal technology like PantherPayments makes it easy for clients to pay online using credit cards, ACH, or eChecks. Additionally, PracticePanther’s Onelink allows your firm to send clients unique payment links to complete their transactions.
Texting Clients
Texting is a popular way to communicate with clients. You won’t need to wait for an email response or risk missing phone calls when integrating two-way business texting into your client communications strategy.
Texting for law firms allows you to instantly reach clients right through their phones. This can streamline client communications and make the case process faster to increase profitability.
Use Automated Intake Forms
Creating intake forms is a time-consuming process, and you could miss leads if you forget to reach out to them. By automating your intake forms, your firm can improve efficiency and accessibility.
With PracticePanther’s client intake software, your firm can create a seamless client intake process by embedding intake forms into your website, email signatures, or Google My Business page. This makes it easy for clients to get in touch with your firm.
Track Key Metrics Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly
Regularly tracking your firm’s performance is just as important as implementing any marketing or revenue-generating tactics. You’ll need to know how your firm is performing to determine areas where you can improve.
Understanding performance data can be confusing, and you shouldn’t have to waste your time creating reports that could be generated automatically. PracticePanther’s custom reports allow you to view your firm’s overall financial performance. With custom reports, you can see how much time your firm spends on billable hours to remain efficient and profitable.
A Recap on Increasing Your Law Firm’s Profitability
Your firm can increase profitability by reducing the number of non-billable hours, creating a marketing strategy, providing convenience to clients, and regularly tracking key metrics.
Your firm must remain competitive to stay profitable. This means keeping up with marketing best practices and using new tools to your advantage. Legal technology can boost law firm profitability and make it easier to reduce the time you spend on non-billable tasks.
PracticePanther makes law practice management more straightforward. Automated features can help you and your employees get more work done faster, allowing you to generate revenue and ultimately boost profits.
Achieving justice and maintaining law firm profitability are two essential functions of a successful business. The goal of justice for clients must be put at the forefront of all operations, but in order to do this, a law firm must be operating efficiently and with a substantial profit, allowing attorneys to provide exceptional legal services.
Whether you’re running a solo practice, an LLC, or an LLP, there are things you can do to increase profitability and in turn, provide a far better experience for your clients. Let’s take a look at some fool-proof techniques to increase law firm profitability.
