Solo-Style Spring Cleaning Tips

Megan Zavieh’s spring cleanups can add polish to your solo law practice and help your firm turn a tidy profit, too.

Top 10 Spring Cleaning Tips

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. But if the first weeks of the year got away from you, spring is also a great time to clean up your practice. From updating your fee agreements, reviewing your marketing plan, reconnecting with your professional network, checking your CLE status, and taking a refresher course in your practice area — here are some great ideas for kicking off your spring cleaning binge.

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.

6. Check Up on Your Technology Spend

This is a great time to take stock of where you are spending your precious dollars on technology. This goes for personal and business expenses. In today’s world of subscription technology services, it is easy to forget that you signed up for a plan with an app that turned out not to work so well for you, or one you haven’t used as much as expected. Even if you are balancing your checkbook every month, if these expenses get billed to a credit card, you may not realize how much you are paying.

Take a month of bank and credit card statements and list out everything you are paying for. There are likely some apps you never use, or others you could cut out. The total spend will likely surprise you.

Related: “Legal Technology Spending: Biggest Money-Wasters”

7. Evaluate Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media is habit-forming, as we well know. It is useful to periodically evaluate whether the platforms sucking your time are actually the best ones for your business. Perhaps you set your law firm up on LinkedIn and routinely share content there. But have your clients migrated over to TikTok or Threads?

Learning to use a new platform is daunting, but wasting time on a platform that is not helping your solo law practice grow is a poor business decision. If you are using paid ads, then this is all the more important.

Related: “Tips for Effectively Using LinkedIn to Attract Clients” by Annette Choti

8. Check Your Ad Spend

Speaking of paid social media ads, exactly where and how much are you spending on your advertising efforts? Consider taking stock of this number now.

Your advertising budget is not just how much you spend to run paid ads. It should also include how much you are paying marketing consultants, writers or related assistants. It also includes the platforms you pay for photos or other content. You should also factor in your own time on marketing efforts, such as time spent writing or speaking.

If you are not already measuring the return on your investment in advertising, start doing so to maximize your ad spend.

9. Pick a KPI to Track

Outside of the legal profession, businesses routinely track KPIs, and yet law firms seem to struggle to implement tracking systems. This spring, pick one metric to begin tracking. If you are already tracking KPIs, evaluate which metrics are actually useful to you and add some new ones.

KPIs critical to a solo law practice include ROI for marketing (mentioned above), potential client inquiries, consultations booked, representations obtained, and average client spend. There are many good resources to get started on your KPI journey, including Mary Juetten’s book “Small Law Firm KPIs: How to Measure Your Way to Greater Profits.”

It is intimidating to get started tracking data, but it does not have to be complicated.  Pick a metric that is important to you, create an Excel spreadsheet where you will track it, and get started. It can get addicting, and soon you will likely be tracking more than you ever imagined.

Add Google Analytics to your website if it is not already installed, and start tracking website data. If you had it installed all along but never used it, use this spring cleaning tip to pull the historical data and work on interpreting it.

When you get further into KPI tracking, you can get more complex with your system, automating some of the tracking along the way. But don’t let the possibilities for a complex system fool you; a startup system can be extremely simple.

Related: “Track These Performance Metrics to Improve Client Relations” by Jeremy Richter

10. Plan Something Big for This Year

Spring is a time of awakening from the dark cold of winter and a launching-off point for the rest of the year.

There is no better time to refresh your practice by evaluating your spending, focusing on where you apply your energy, getting on track with tracking data, and planning to do something new with the active balance of the year ahead.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com.

Updated April 2026.