Small Law Firm

Would you like a practice that's profitable and easy to manage? Ernest Svenson has a well-defined 12-step process for leveraging technology to create one.

In “Why Lawyers Really Struggle with Work-Life Balance,” I gave six steps to building a practice that runs smoothly and allows you to have a life. Here we’ll discuss the fourth step, building better teams.

Making the decision to start a law firm is difficult. It’s nothing but nerve-wracking until you press start and you’re into it — without a safety net, and too busy to care about hypotheticals anymore. The choice to move forward with launching is ...

While there are many factors that will influence the selling price, these five will get you started in evaluating — and increasing — your practice's value.

According to the International Legal Technology Association, almost half of all legal purchases of imaging, scanning or optical character recognition is made by small law firms.* If you’re among them, congratulate yourself for making a smart ...

There are myriad reasons to run an efficient, sound, organized law practice. Here are two great ones, from an ethics standpoint: First, it helps lawyers avoid making the costly errors that lead to ethics trouble. Second, when lawyers receive a ...

Back in January 2017, I was having breakfast with a local lawyer when he said, “I think I need to raise my rates this year. I am just not making enough money, and raising my rates should make the year more profitable.” This led me to ask, "Do ...

In previous columns, I have talked about the concept of tribes and building a network to support you when your practice takes off in a major way and you need extra help. But have you thought about ways to broaden the scope of your community to ...

Straight out of law school, I joined a small law practice. I didn’t start out as an associate with a large salary and plenty of document review projects to hit my hours. I had to eat what I killed and immediately begin bringing in clients. If ...

In my December post, “A Pre-Year-End Checklist for Solos and Small Firms,” we ran through the major systems of a law practice and took stock of concerns to attend to in the new year. (If you missed it, be sure to go back and get the downloadable ...