Every new year, there’s always lots of talk about how to start the year off right. For solo and small firm lawyers, that can mean many things. One of my attorney-clients begins the new year by revisiting her retainer agreement and reading the evidence code cover to cover. Those are great ideas.
But if the first weeks of the year got away from you, spring is also a great time to clean up your practice.
Top Five Spring Cleaning Tasks
Here are my top five spring cleanups for solo lawyers.
1. Update your fee agreements. My client’s mentor was right. You should periodically review and revise your fee agreement. Check to make sure you are still in compliance with your jurisdiction’s ethics rules. Pull your state’s model fee agreement and compare it to yours. Is any critical piece missing? Do any of your terms hopelessly conflict with the bar’s model?
Perhaps something has changed in the way you practice that needs to be added to your fee agreement, such as forms of payment or your file destruction policies. (See “What Exactly Is the File?”) If you now take credit cards, make sure you include that in your fee agreement. You may want to include an automatic replenishment of the deposits on credit cards. (Check your state’s rules before adding this provision.) As for file destruction, if you don’t have a policy on it spelled out in your fee agreement, this is a great time to add one.
2. Consider your marketing plan. Your practice needs a marketing plan, no matter how simple your advertising and business development efforts may be. Look into technology that can help, such as automated social media schedulers that allow you to spend a day writing posts and schedule them to publish throughout the month. Include a budget in your plan for paid advertising too.
3. Connect with your network. This is a good time of the year to renew connections with your network because your message won’t get lost in a crush of holiday cards and email wishes. Just say hello and happy spring in an email or a voice mail — it does not have to be complicated.
4. Check your CLE status. Many of us are caught off-guard when compliance reporting comes around. Even if your deadline seems far off, check on your status. If your state requires reporting of all courses, send in your certificates now. If you are in a self-reporting state, make sure your set of certificates is complete in case you are audited. Go through your emails and pull all of those certificates so you don’t miss any. If you need more credits, check out as many CLE sources as you can. Many courses are free, but it is hard to get a large number of free classes all at once. Some vendors conduct monthly free seminars. Sign up so you can take one every month until your deadline.
5. Refresh substantive practice area knowledge. It may not be the evidence code for you, but each of us has some piece of the library that is critical to our practice. As an ethics lawyer, for me, it is the rules of professional conduct. Take a couple of hours and read the latest information to make sure you are on top of your game.
Five More Ways to Come Clean
Inspired for thorough spring cleaning? Read my follow-up post, “Solo Style Spring Cleaning Tips” for a few things to add to your practice’s spring cleaning list — like giving your subscriptions a good scrub.
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
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