Your Law Firm is a Business. Take it to the Next Level

Today, we’re doing our second-ever episode of answering listener questions! We received many questions since our last Q & A episode and today we’re answering three of them. 

Some of the topics we cover today include cybersecurity, hiring virtual help, and how to manage your virtual assistant well. Tune in to get all of your questions answered in these areas of business.

If you have more questions after listening through this episode, you can always send us one of your own as well. Email us or Tweet us through the links below. We can’t wait to answer more in our next Q & A episode!

Show Highlights:

• Little things you can do to protect your cybersecurity as a solopreneur.
• Why you have to be wary of hackers even if you have a small business.
• Where to find virtual help.
• What kind of qualities to look for in a team member.
• How to determine pay for team members.
• How to make sure your virtual assistants aren’t taking advantage of you without micromanaging them.
• Red flags in virtual assistants.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Email us: [email protected]

Next Level Legal on Twitter

ACTION STEPS:

When you’re done listening today, hop back into your podcast app, grab the episode that we mentioned today that caught your attention, and give it a listen to take your firm to the Next Level.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Last week, we began our SEO series. We dove into the foundations of SEO like what it actually means, how to start thinking about it, and why it’s important in the first place. Now that we’re all on the same page, we can start to dive into the weeds a bit on SEO.

We’ll start with keyword research. This is another foundational topic when it comes to marketing and SEO. Each of the other components that we will discuss in this series depends on keyword research being done first.

Tune in and we’ll teach you what keywords are, why they’re worth caring about, some fast and free keyword research techniques, and even some advanced keyword research tools.

Show Highlights:

• What a keyword is.
• Why Google cares about keywords.
• Branded vs. unbranded keywords.
• Why deciphering your ideal client is so important.
• Some fast and free keyword research techniques.
• Tools that can help with keyword research.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Answer the Public

WordStream

Ubersuggest

Google Search Console

Semrush

ACTION STEPS:

1. Come up with an initial list of things you help people solve - not just your practice area names.
2. Share with your team, friends, and family and ask them how they would describe how you help people.
3. Take some of these initial ideas and enter them into Google to look for related searches or “people also ask” to get more ideas.
4. Using a spreadsheet, I would like you to build out an initial list of 30-50 keyword phrases and group them by topics (practice areas, practice area sub-topics).
5. If you have already done an exercise like this, maybe use one of the advanced tools like SEMRush or at a minimum look at Google Search Console for your website and see what keywords people have typed into Google that got them to your website.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

SEO has become a bit of a buzzword in marketing lately. Many law firms are talking about it, but most don’t understand precisely what it means. We may not even all be talking about the same thing!

The day has finally come when we’re going to talk all about SEO here on the podcast. There are so many different aspects of it and deep dives we could do. Because of this, we decided to break it down over multiple episodes. 

Today, we’re going to do an overview. We’re just going to get everyone on the same page regarding this complex topic. Tune in to learn what SEO stands for, what it looks like for law firms, the basics of it, and why it exists in the first place. 

Show Highlights:

• What SEO stands for
• Why we even need to optimize for search engines
• What a SERP is
• How many people are looking for legal services and information on Google
• Why it’s important to get on the first page of Google
• A little bit about how Google operates
• An overview of keyword research, onsite SEO, offsite SEO, and local SEO

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

ACTION STEPS:

Not a lot of action steps today because this was more of an overview. But I would challenge you to think about the following:

• Next time you do a search, notice the little words at the top that say HOW MANY results Google found.
• Take a look at the returns on the first page. Do those seem like valid returns? Can you see a couple types of returns as Google wasn’t sure what you were looking for? 
• To warm up, some extra credit: if you can, think about the questions most people have when they call your firm or chat with you during a first meeting or consultation. Look at what comes up when you type those in Google.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Did they stay or did they go? That is the question we have been asking over the past couple of episodes. What this boils down to is whether or not we make a sale. Our purpose with this series is to increase those odds in your firm.

This week, we want to hone in on the area of follow-up. You might be the kind of attorney who, like Melanie, has tried the “sticky note system” for follow-up. The truth is, that doesn’t work. Follow-up just doesn’t happen with that kind of system.

Instead, we want to automate our follow-up process. We want to make the best use of software and delegation to streamline our follow-up and increase our chances of making that sale. This is important because, without follow-up, you’re leaving it up to the client to remember you and take action.

Show Highlights:

• How to automate follow-up.
• How to provide value with your follow-up.
• How to build workflows that prompt your team to follow up.
• Best practices for post-representation.
• How much follow-up is too much.
• How to get an engagement agreement and collect money.
• What to do when you must decline representation.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

ACTION STEPS:

1. Look at how you’re currently doing intake and add one extra step, a follow-up email that someone on your team sends out if we don’t get the engagement letter back in two days. Bonus: if your intake already has a lot of follow-ups built-in, take a look at the work you do during your representation and find a place there to add a follow-up step
2. Add one automation to your current intake. If you’re not using digital signatures, start there. If you are, find someone on your team to figure out or outsource creating templates in your software to automatically create your engagement letters.
3. Write an email declining representation (or find one you’ve used in the past), add a link to the local bar association or another attorney referral resource, and give it to someone on your team to send out each time you decline representation.  

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

This is a continuation of our series on Discovering Your Intake Process. In this episode, we talk more about the consultation piece of the intake process. Even if you don’t typically do a consultation, stay tuned because these things don’t happen in a vacuum. Find out whether you need to do a consultation or not and what to charge for consults assuming you’re doing them. Finally, we discuss the collection of information.  

At the end of the day, you have to be very deliberate about the purpose of your consultation. So then you can decide if you're going to charge, how you're going to charge, who's going to do it, and all of the other factors that go into a consultation. 

The intake process is a sales process. If you're thinking of consultation from a sales perspective, always talk about the process that the potential client will go through because they want to know what the process is going to look like. Generally, you don't give advice while you're still trying to tell somebody that you're the right fit. Therefore, there are some things you need to consider when it comes to doing consultations.

Show Highlights:

• What is a consultation?
• Different purposes of a consultation 
• Who is doing the consultation
• Charging for consults: the pros and cons
• The collection of information 

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

ACTION STEPS:

1. Write down YOUR goals for YOUR firm’s consultations

• Are you selling?
• Are you providing information?
• Are you mapping out the process for the client?
• Are you charging?

2. If you’re not already, try charging the next potential client for the consultation (this is one of the easiest changes that you can make because chances are, they don’t know that this is something new or a change).

3. Analyze and redesign your forms for a better client experience

• Highlight the questions you need to determine IF you can help the client and HOW MUCH to charge them. Make those into a separate form to use before the consult and save the rest of the questions for AFTER they’ve hired you.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

This is a three-part series on Discovering Your Intake Process. Intake is where all of your marketing efforts are going to be given the opportunity to pay off. If you don’t have a consistent way of handling all of the leads that come in through marketing, you’re just wasting a lot of money on marketing! 

In this episode, we take a deep dive into why you need an intake procedure. Whether you have a written procedure, a rockstar paralegal signing up clients, or neither of those things, by default, you have an intake process. Either you’re bringing clients in or pushing clients away. You and your team are responding to potential new clients in some way – and that is your default intake procedure.

However, the problem with default intake procedures is that they are not consistent and, therefore, not reliable. They typically do not maximize your results or your conversion rates.  You shouldn’t be leaving the success of your sales and marketing to chance. Listen in as we help you discover and redesign your intake procedure! 

Show Highlights:

• What intake is and what intake is not
• How intake interacts with marketing
• The benefits of having an intake procedure
• Best practices when creating an intake procedure (what to include and what to skip)

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

http://www.bobaguard.com/nextlevel

Episode 007: Why Am I The Only Person Moving These Cases Forward?

Episode 015: Top 3 Systems/Procedures Law Firms Often Overlook but Have a Huge Impact

ACTION STEPS:

1. Re-listen to Episodes 7 and 15
2. Write out WHO does WHAT by WHEN
3. Share that with your team and/or find other resources to help you, VAs, call centers, software

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Are you keeping a gazillion tabs open on your web browser? Not only does this slow your computer down, but seeing all those tabs could also feel so overwhelming. But what if there was a way to avoid any of that?

In this episode, we discuss some tech hacks and ways to make your life easier and make your business run smoother. 

These are small things – from using apps and plug-ins to organizing your cords – that, when added up, make a big difference. You don't think about how the organization of your office or your desk area impacts your life until you organize it and realize it has been a load off of your mind.

Show Highlights:

• Creating a new profile in Chrome
• Tab management hacks
• Tech hacks for organizing cords
• Using a password manager
• Recommended apps 
• How to use Alexa to make your life easier
• The value of time and using a location-based reminder
• Hacks and apps for saving money

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Episode 26: Meeting Cadences – Intentional Meetings Don’t Suck

OneTab

Auto Tab Discard

Forest app

Krisp.ai 

ACTION STEPS:

1. If you don’t have a password manager, start with that!  It will make your life easier
2.  If you do have a password manager, pick ONE of these that jumped out to you to implement - don’t succumb to shiny object syndrome
3. Schedule a time 3 months from now. Listen to this episode again and pick another hack to implement.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

You may not have any experience with a virtual assistant yet. And as things are becoming more virtual in our work lives these days, it's actually a great opportunity for you to explore. Hiring virtual assistants can be just one of the best business decisions you will ever have to make and there are a lot of benefits to it in terms of cost and productivity. But do you really need one?

In today’s episode, we discuss the basics of getting virtual assistants and how they can help you set yourself up for success. We also talk about the benefits of hiring VAs, where and how to find them, as well as some things you need to seriously consider before finally deciding to get one or more on board.

Hiring VAs is something that has worked for us because it has made our lives easier and more productive. You don’t have to dive in right away, and maybe taking some baby steps is all you need to do which includes listening to this podcast now!

Show Highlights:

• What is a virtual assistant?
• Our own experiences in using virtual assistants
• The benefits of hiring virtual assistants
• What you need to do to make it work
• Where and how to find a virtual assistant

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Outsource Access

Get Staffed Up

Upwork

Fancy Hands

Lawfecta

Virtual Gal Friday

http://www.bobaguard.com/nextlevel

ACTION STEPS:

When you’re done listening today, hop back into your podcast app and scroll through the episode list. Chances are you may have missed one, maybe even one we talked about today.  And hop on those Action Steps to take your firm to the Next Level.    

1. Pick one project.
2. Confirm that you have the resources you need available for the VA online, i.e. passwords, documents, email access, etc.
3. Pay for a service, and dive in!

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Getting hacked is the last thing you want in your law firm. But are you doing the right things to get yourself protected? In this episode, we talk about cybersecurity best practices that you need to start doing today! 

Founder of GlobalMac IT, Tom Lambotte, joins us to discuss cybersecurity best practices and some security strategies that you shouldn’t take lightly. GlobalMac provides legal technology services to Mac-Based law firms. Tom is also the founder of BobaGuard, which provides cybersecurity solutions built for solos and small law firms. Tom has 16 years of experience providing technology consulting management services to law firms.

As more and more law firms use technology, the cloud, and the internet, there's a growing importance of cybersecurity for law firms. That being said, cybersecurity is oftentimes misunderstood and taken for granted. And so, we're bringing in Tom to help separate the fear from the reality.

The pain of experiencing a security breach is unimaginable – it’s not only going to affect you but your clients as well. And so, making sure you have that added layer of protection will give you that added peace of mind.

Show Highlights:

• What multi-factor authentication is and why it’s important
• Utilizing a secured shared password vault for sensitive credentials
• Providing guidelines to employees when working remotely
• Using dark web scanning to know if your account has been compromised
• Using phishing simulation to identify security risks in your firm
• Why cybersecurity training needs to be mandatory for everyone
• A layered approach for strong cyber resilience
• Cybersecurity best practices and maintaining compliance

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

GlobalMac IT: https://www.globalmacit.com/ 

BobaGuard: https://www.bobaguard.com/ 

ACTION STEPS:

1. 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) - list your top 5 critical accounts and DO IT. Activate 2FA on your most critical accounts.
2. If you don’t have a password manager, get one. If you have one, learn how to use it to create unique passwords.
3. Grab the security checklist from http://www.bobaguard.com/nextlevel

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Today we’re answering listener questions! 

We can’t believe this podcast has already been going on for eight months. We’re so grateful for all of you who have not only stuck with us over the course of the show but who have also been invested enough to send in your questions. 

Throughout this episode, we go through many of the questions that you listeners have sent in over the first 31 episodes of Law Firm Next. From there, we’ll dive deeper into some of the discussions we’ve started in our episodes. We hope our answers clear things up for you and get you excited to keep taking your law firm to the next level. 

Show Highlights:

• The danger of comparing your firm to others’ firms.
• How to figure out the best use of your time.
• How to choose the automation software that’s best for your firm.
• When you should invest in a marketing firm.
• How to ease into going paperless in your law firm.
• How to own your leads.
• Bar association rules on marketing.

Supporting Resources

Email us your questions: [email protected]

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

ACTION STEPS:

1. When you’re done listening today, hop back into your podcast app and scroll through the episode list. Chances are you may have missed one, maybe even one we talked about today.  And hop on those Action Steps to take your firm to the Next Level.     

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com