Series: "A Firm Foundation"
To get from the idea of starting a law practice to owning a thriving law firm there are many decisions and challenges. This series is written to help attorneys navigate the journey as they start or build their firms.I’ve been a lawyer since 1998 and I am admitted to practice law in Arizona and Washington State. I built successful practices in both states and have tried more than 100 cases to verdict. I created LawLytics to empower lawyers to build their practices without having to depend on marketing agencies or struggle with website software that’s not built for them.
– Dan Jaffe, Attorney and LawLytics CEO
The Single Biggest Factor for a Successful Solo Law Practice
December 29, 2021 To solo or not to solo? That is the question weighing on the minds and hearts of tens of thousands of attorneys. This existential question gets amplified around the new year. And, as we begin 2022, in the midst of a seemingly interminable pandemic...
Your Law Firm’s Most Important Marketing Metric – Quality Of Leads
For attorneys, the quality of leads that they get from their marketing is the most important thing, bar none.
To Position Your Law Firm Effectively, Think Like Your Clients
Today I recorded a brief video blog post about positing your law firm in your clients minds. I hope you enjoy, and please let me know what you think.
June and July 2021 SEO Updates: Hype vs. Reality
I’m here to tell you that I have never once seen attorneys (who follow Google Webmaster Guidelines and that have the proper infrastructure to their site) suffer from a Google algorithm update. It just doesn’t happen if you’re doing the fundamentals.
Attorneys Will Need Tech to Pivot Faster in a Post-COVID World
In this video blog post, I talk about how LawLytics members used the platform to pivot quickly during COVID, and how technology that empowers small firms and solos to pivot on a dime will be even more important in the tech-accelerated, post-COVID world.
A Quick, Easy Content Creation Idea For Lawyers
In this video blog post I share a quick and easy way that attorneys can use video, talk about what they already know and talk with clients about regularly, and create content that is more effective than any content that a marketing agency could create for them in short order.
Using Your Law Firm’s Website for Client Expectation Management
5.24.2021 – I recorded this short video blog post about using your law firm’s website to help you deliver and enforce expectation management at scale. It’s something that will make your life as a solo practitioner or small law firm owner easier — and your clients will appreciate it, too.
How Your Law Firm’s Website Can Be Sold As An Asset When You’re Done Practicing Law
If you’re an attorney looking to build value that you can harvest, and assets that another attorney will be grateful to own, when it’s time to retire or otherwise move on from the daily practice of law, I hope that this video blog post helps spark ideas about how you can use your firm’s website to simultaneously create revenue for your practice today, and build transferrable equity to you or your family can harvest down the road.
When Law Firms Benefit From Multiple Websites
Why do some law firms have or need multiple websites instead of just one. In this video blog post, I answer that question. For most small firms, a single website is all they will will ever need.
The Mindset For Starting A Solo Law Practice
In this video blog post I talk about the conversations that I have frequently had with lawyers who are thinking about starting their own law firms. These conversations happen with lawyers with a wide range of experience, from just out of law school, to leaving medium to large firms, or government employment one, two or even three decades into their legal careers.
Hiring My Fiancée – Part V – Hiring My Law Firm’s First Employees
Today I’m concluding my story about hiring my first law firm employees with the final part of this chapter… hiring my fiancée. Before I talk about why having my fiancée work for me didn’t work out, here’s how I skillfully deployed impulsive thinking disguised as genius to justify the hire.
Why We Don’t Alter Jobs To Fit Applicants – And Why Lawyers Shouldn’t Either
Today I’m going to pause my story about hiring my first law firm employees to address something unexpected.
On Wednesday, I wrote something that turned out to touch more of a nerve (and was more controversial) than I had imagined or intended. In a blog post about my early experiences hiring law firm employees,
My First Legal Assistant – Part IV – Hiring My Law Firm’s First Employees
Today we’ll talk about my next hire, my first true experienced law legal assistant, and how that made my life and my practice so much more scalable, but also, as a solo practitioner made me vulnerable.
Hiring My Law Firm’s First Employees – Part III – First Associate Attorney
As a frazzled attorney with the burden of seemingly more weighty things (my next trial, keeping my clients out of jail, and saving their families and careers) it was easy to engage in magical but flawed thinking. I believed saying “You’re hired” would solve my problems and wouldn’t create new ones.
My First Employees – Part II – Fractional Employee and First Job Post
I had clients and revenue. My practice was growing rapidly. I had a real office (not a starter office closet) and a building with parking occupied by lawyers. The building provided a shared receptionist. She answered my phones, which were routed through a rats nest of analogue wires that somehow connected the right lines to the right rooms.
My Story – Hiring My Law Firm’s First Employees – Part I
What I really needed was to start thinking like a business owner rather than a solo operator. Businesses hire employees, and I would need to do so if I wanted to sustain what I had built, let alone grow.
My Early Lessons In Solo Law Practice Growth
In this post, I’m going to talk about how I weathered the learning curve of being a suddenly very busy attorney while trying to build my firm for the long term. They call it the “practice” of law for a reason. Every lawyer has a lifelong learning curve about not just law and procedure, but about the “soft skills” listed above and many others. As a solo lawyer, you need to know every aspect of your business, and often need to competently execute every bit of it yourself.
My Solo Law Practice Story: Discovering Online Legal Marketing
This is the seventh post in my blog series about how to start and build a solo law practice. This will be roughly a year-long series that will cover everything a lawyer needs to know about creating and growing a thriving law practice. In these early posts I’m taking...
My Solo Law Practice Story: How I Survived Until I Got My First Clients
In this post I’m going to talk about how I survived in the early months before I had a client base of my own, as well as cover some early legal marketing experiments.
My Story – Starting My First Law Firm
This is the fifth post in my blog series about how to start and build a solo law practice. At the beginning of the series I’m taking the time to tell my story, which I hope will frame the advice and opinions that I give in future posts. In the last post I covered the...