Scaling a law firm is no easy feat. Trying to get from one office to five or more is incredibly competitive, especially considering the amount of attorneys that have an established internet presence and are a dominant competitor in their field.
Depending on your practice area, it can either be easier or more difficult to scale faster. For example, personal injury is an area that would have more difficult market expansion, as compared to a more niche area of law such as intellectual property and copyright claims.
On the other hand, it’s also crucial to focus on strategic expansion at the same time. So how can you scale your law firm from one to multiple locations? Let’s find out.
Assess Your Readiness and Client Demand
Making the leap to scale your firm is similar to taking a leap of faith. You never know what’s going to happen, but you chose to take the leap since you believe in yourself.
There might be some financial stability issues, especially if you may be going from the guaranteed security of your one law firm to going to multiple, especially if the success may not be guaranteed.
You also need to assess your personal readiness, along with client demand. Are you ready to put in the work that it takes to oversee the expansion of multiple offices? Are you available to sacrifice important things in your life for a time? Are you able to focus on normal workload while trying to scale?
Think about those things.
You also need to assess how you’re going to get new clients in these markets. There are a number of ways to do this, but you need to have a plan in place to get clients to sign up for your legal services.
Set Clear Goals & Objectives
When attempting to scale your law firm, there needs to be clear objectives and goals in place for your firm.
For example, if you are a practicing Los Angeles family lawyer who wants to expand to Sonoma County, you need to think about expanding your service offerings. The divorce rate is 12.5% in Sonoma County and there is high financial stability among the population there, meaning that most of your potential clients in the area would likely have the budget to pay for a divorce.
Therefore, you can think about tailoring your service offerings to not just divorce, but you could expand to complex division of assets and high-net worth separation.
Beyond just the types of cases you want to get in specific cities, you need to expand your market reach. Some options include hiring sales people to get more clients, do the marketing work on your own, or outsourcing to a marketing agency to do the work for you.
For example, you could run a billboard or television campaigns to start building awareness that your firm is expanding to the area and to get clients to sign on.
Every objective and strategy depends on your specific firm’s needs, so there is never one clear-cut solution or strategy for market expansion. However, many of the same principles apply when you do the work.
Do Proper Market Research
The most important part of expanding your offices is to do proper market research.
Be sure to look at the demographics of the city, along with the investment that you will need to make. You should also take note of the competition in the area. For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney that wants to expand to Los Angeles, California, your rate of competition is going to be extremely high. Therefore, you need to invest a significant amount of time, money, and resources.
Think about it, you will be going against established and trusted attorneys that have multi-million dollar marketing budgets and billboards across the city, and you need to have an effective strategy to beat out your competition.
Select the Right Team and Foster The Right Company Culture
The most important part of law firm expansion is hiring employees. And now, the consequences of a bad or inexperienced hire can be more devastating than ever.
According to the United States Department of Labor, a bad hire can cost your business 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings.
Furthermore, let’s say you hire an attorney that doesn’t have the right experience, is not really a culture fit, and is continually missing important deadlines, the problems that can come from that can be catastrophic.
Due to these issues, you now have to terminate that employee, you have a poor client experience and a bad review on Yelp. Additionally, if you fail to have proper documentation of this employee’s performance, that can open your business up to wrongful termination lawsuits, costing your firm potentially thousands or millions of dollars on litigation.
With more employees demanding a more flexible work schedule, higher salaries, better benefits, and a strong company culture that aligns with their values, finding the right hire is now more difficult than ever.
Due to these factors, you need to make your law firm stand out as the best place to work and grow, while also minimizing your firm’s turnover rate.
With that being said, you need to pay your employees what they are worth, offer outstanding benefits, and foster a strong company culture to help your firm stand out.
So, if you plan on expanding, focus on your pay and benefits, rather than pizza parties and free soda.
Focus On Operational Efficiency
As a law firm expanding to a new office, there needs to be consistent procedures in place for your law firm to be efficient.
Every employee you hire needs to have clear guidelines of what is expected of them, along with a clear understanding of what your firm requires.
For example, if your firm invests a large chunk of their marketing budget into an extensive billboard and TV campaign, there’s going to be an influx of calls for a time.
With that plan in place, you need to have a team of case managers or legal intake specialists to analyze the facts and circumstances of the case and determine if this is a suitable case for the attorneys to take on.
If you’re also leading the operation of the office, there also needs to be a clear guideline of what types of cases the attorneys want to take on.
For instance, if you’re a personal injury law firm that doesn’t take on medical malpractice cases, you need to make that expectation clear. The same principle can even apply if you run a criminal defense law firm, but the lawyers don’t take on cases related to DUIs or armed robbery.
Scaling A Law Firm Isn’t Easy, But It Can Be Rewarding
In summary, scaling your law firm includes the following steps:
- Assessing your readiness and client demand
- Setting clear goals and objectives
- Doing proper market research
- Selecting the right team for expansion
- Focusing on operational efficiency
By following the above steps, you can have a higher chance of scaling your law firm quicker and with more ease. Remember that it’s not impossible to scale your business properly, but with hard work and determination, you can make it happen.
