Legal technology products are supposed to help lawyers reduce the time they spend on certain tasks.
But I don’t believe a lot of these products are helping lawyers the way they’re supposed to.
I’ll tell you why I think that.
The first reason is, most legal tech products help lawyers to speed up a small portion of their workload, which is great.
However, you then have to spend lots of hours doing the rest of your legal work, which there are no products for as yet.
The second reason is, legal tech products generally don’t like to play nice with each other.
You may have noticed this: you’ll bring a few different legal tech products into your law firm and you realise they’re just not compatible with each other.
That creates all this extra work for you, creating processes and procedures to figure out some sellotape solution for it to all work together, but it’s not tidy and you have to spend a lot longer on it than you’d like.
The third reason is that legal tech products have been developed for the traditional business model of practicing law.
By that, I mean the way that law firms make money, which traditionally is by getting lawyers to exchange their time for money and then charging billable hours to clients.
I see a lot of law firms now doing innovative things around pricing and using fixed pricing or value pricing, but a lot still use billable hours for at least part of their service.
And that’s cool because that’s how it’s always been done and it’s easy, right?
But you have to work long hours to get paid more. So legal tech that supports that system is forcing you to work longer hours.
That’s a problem, because lawyers are starting to feel extremely dissatisfied with their work.
They’re seeing people in other industries working less and scaling their businesses, creating more freedom for themselves and earning more money.
But that’s not really coming into the legal industry, and part of the reason for that is most legal tech products are based on the traditional billable hours model.
Those lawyers who want more impact and freedom and money in their lives work more because that’s how they earn more…but that means less freedom and only slightly more impact.
So there’s a misalignment there, and the result is lawyers just feeling dissatisfied.
So we need to change the way we’re practicing law.
The billable hours model is not working.
We need to find a way to practice law where the revenue your law firm makes is not tied to the number of hours you work.
I believe the legal industry needs a revolution.
It’s desperate for a change where innovative, entrepreneurial lawyers start changing the way they practice law and create lasting, impactful change in the legal industry.
I don’t know about you, but I am so ready for a revolution.
I have a five step framework on how we do it.
I used this five step framework in my own law firm, and I completely changed the way we practiced law so our revenue grew considerably, and it wasn’t at all tied to the number of hours that I, as the law firm owner, was working.
I’ve taught this model to many law firm owners who are clients of mine, and they’re all scaling their law firms in a way that’s sustainable, and that gives them more impact, revenue and freedom in their lives.
Step one: Niche, and niche some more
If you’ve watched any of my other videos, you will know I’m all about the niche.
This is when, instead of serving all the clients with all the services, you focus on solving one problem for one particular type of client.
The reason why this will give you more freedom, money and impact is that, if you think about all the processes and systems that go into a law firm that serves lots of different clients, there’s a lot going on there.
There’s a lot of complexity. It’s actually pretty chaotic.
But you can cut through all that complexity by focusing on one ideal client who’s got one type of problem.
If you focus on only solving that one problem, a lot of the other complexity just goes away.
You bring technology into the mix, and now you’re using tech to help one type of client with one type of problem.
Doesn’t that seem a whole lot more manageable than using tech on all sorts of different services and clients?
That is why niching is so important.
Now, a lot of lawyers are initially worried about niching. They feel like if they stop serving all the clients, then their revenue will decrease.
In reality, the opposite is true.
I don’t know a single lawyer who has niched and had their revenue decrease as a result.
Everybody I know who has niched their law firm, including myself, the results have been amazing.
What you focus on really does expand because, instead of giving a little bit of attention to all these different types of clients and problems, you can put all your focus into one thing, and it really grows your law firm.
Step two: Know your client
Historically, lawyers haven’t really had to do a lot of marketing. Because of that, they haven’t needed to get to know their clients very well.
When you don’t have to market your services, and you just have clients turn up through referrals and things like that, you don’t really need to know what makes clients tick, or what they’re worried about, or what they’re frustrated about.
All you really need to know is that they turn up with a problem and you can solve it for them.
But when it comes to practicing law in a new way, the online space is very important.
More and more clients are expecting an online service. They’re looking for lawyers online, and they want to get their problems solved online.
So unless you’re able to meet them where they are – online – you’re gonna have a decline in your business.
Figuring out how to market to clients online is really important, and to do that, you need to know your client.
You need to know what they want, what they aspire to, what they’re worried about, what they’re fearful of. You need to know where they’re hanging out online – all of those things.
You need to know that for marketing, but also for the delivery of your legal service as well.
Knowing these kinds of things about your clients is just so important when it comes to marketing and delivering a legal service online.
Step three: Design a solution
Instead of having all these different services for all these different clients, create one solution that solves a real problem for your ideal client.
When you focus on that, and delivering an excellent result for one type of client, that client experience is going to be so much better because that’s all you’re dedicating yourself to.
So design one solution for one type of client.
What you do is, you get a piece of paper and put in bullet points what your service is, and how it solves a pain point for your ideal client.
That’s all it is – a series of bullet points clearly setting out what the solution is, and what you’ll do to solve your clients’ problem.
We’re not thinking about tech. We’re just thinking about what your solution is that will solve a problem for your clients.
Not only is that easier to market, but it’s also easier to start thinking about how you would build out the delivery of that legal solution.
Putting in legal tech, hiring people and all those things become a lot easier when you’ve just got this one thing to deliver.
Step four: Validate your solution
The way you validate your solution is, you do it before you finish it.
That’s important, because otherwise you can put all this time and money into building a solution, and you don’t know if anyone wants it or not.
So you have to validate it first.
To validate that solution, you just take that list of bullet points, put it in front of your ideal clients and ask them if they’d buy it.
If they do, that’s a great indication that your clients want what you’re selling, and you can then invest the time and energy and money into building it.
From there, you can even pre-sell it to them to raise the capital you need to make it happen.
Step five: Get the tech
By get the tech, I don’t mean go and get ALL the tech.
I mean, choose one part of your solution and get one tech product, or a suite of tech products that works nicely together, and automate that part.
Don’t try to automate all the things at once.
Choose one part to implement technology – I really recommend you look outside of the legal tech industry for this.
There are so many products out there that can help you to achieve what you’re wanting to achieve.
Now, if you’re a bit like me, you probably don’t know all the tech products out there, so how do you choose one?
This is what you do, OK. You go and talk to your entrepreneurial lawyer friends and ask them what they’re using.
If you don’t really have a network of entrepreneurial lawyer friends, I run a Facebook group called Savvy Lawyers.
There’s about 1,800 lawyers in there that share advice on different things, and they will be only too pleased to help you.
So those are my five steps for creating the legal revolution that this industry needs.
Before I wrap up, I just want to say that this whole video may sound a bit strange coming from me.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you will know that I am a legal technology founder.
I have a legal technology product. It’s a document automation product.
I am the first to admit that when I first built that product, a number of years ago now, it was based on creating efficiencies based on the billable hours model.
Having worked very closely with entrepreneurial lawyers over the last couple of years as part of my Scale Up programme, I can now see that creating legal tech products based on the billable hours system is not going to create the long-lasting, impactful change that the legal industry needs.
So I have recognised that, and that is why, since last year, we have been developing a new version of our product that will help to empower entrepreneurial law firm owners to practice law in a new way for more impact, money and freedom.
It’s still in development, but it’ll be finished soon, and I’ll let you know when that happens.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. For more tips and ideas on growing and scaling a modern, successful, seven figure law firm, sign up to my Savvy Lawyers Facebook group.
