Here are five ways you can tidy up your solo or small law firm this spring apart from literally dusting your law office.
Solo and small law firm lawyers should take advantage of this wonderful time of year to get organized and make improvements by spring cleaning their business’.
Spring cleaning your practice can show you what processes need improvement, help you streamline everyday operations, and give your law firm a fresh start to tackle the rest of the year.
Here are five ways you can freshen things up at your solo or small law firm apart from literally dusting or vacuuming your law office.
1. Update Your Website
It’s no secret that your small or solo law firm’s website is essential to growing and evolving your practice. But if you let much-needed changes fall through the cracks, your website can easily collect dust and damage your firm’s brand.
Chances are, your practice has grown or changed during the last year. You might have revised your mission or added a new practice area to your skillset. Maybe you updated your logo, business address, or color scheme. Either way, you should take time to scour your website for things that don’t line up with your current brand, are simply incorrect or out of date.
Look for old content on your website that needs to be rewritten or refreshed to match the current state of your practice. Or, maybe your website just looks outdated and needs a little TLC. Noticing and updating those little details can make a huge difference.
2. Tidy Up Your Books
Your solo or small law firm’s books are the lifeblood of your business’s transactions and financial records. Without them, you can’t make smart decisions about your finances or future.
As the law firm owner, you must take time every year to deep clean your practice’s books. This means reviewing files and accounts, sort receipts, cancel unused or redundant subscriptions and digitize what you can.
Consider using accounting software to track transactions and make spring cleaning your books a simple and less time-consuming task. Thus, your books stay more organized throughout the year too!
3. Review Your Goals And Business Plan
Now is the perfect time to dust off your business plan, revisit your goals, create new ones, and set your practice up for continued growth.
Your law firm is going to constantly develop and change, and because of this your business plan and goals must do the same.
Set aside time each year to reflect on the past year. Did you add or remove practice areas or associates/partners? Did you add a new office and start to serve a new area? If so, were any of these changes or additions in your plans? If not, then there is no time like the present to add them.
Your business plan is the foundation of your practice and essential to the continued success of your firm. Take the time to revisit it each year.
4. Review Your Marketing Strategies
There is no better time than the spring to take a step back to examine and freshen up your marketing strategies. Taking some time to focus on working on your practice versus in your practice. Like your practice, marketing tactics and best practices are constantly developing and whatever worked last year might not be the best strategy now.
Spend some time revisiting and reviewing up your marketing strategies by:
- Researching new marketing trends
- Updating and reviewing your social media profiles
- Rewriting and reviewing your automated and canned emails
- Research keywords and SEO procedures to ensure good search results
- Revisiting your brand, images, and videos on your website
- Analyzing last year’s marketing analytics and KPI’s
5. Clean Up Your Inbox
As a busy solo or small law firm owner, it isn’t hard to imagine that your inbox will constantly be clogged up with client responses, files, documents, and people trying to sell you things!
When you’re constantly working on client work it’s easy to become disorganized and let your inbox run wild. It happens to all of us all but you can use this time to steady the ship and set things right.
It is definitely a time-consuming process, but you’ll be thanking yourself as soon as you see that empty and organized inbox.
While you’re clearing out your inbox, you can also do some other digital spring cleaning. Go through old files on your computer and delete unnecessary documents and folders. Or use a pc or mac digital cleaning software/program that can sort and declutter old files that might be slowing up your entire computer.
