Most lawyers are still serving their clients in a traditional way.
They’re serving their clients by exchanging time for money.
They’re also serving a range of different clients, and offering those clients a range of different services.
The challenge around that is, when you’re serving so many different types of clients with so many different services, there’s a lot going on.
There’s a lot of different systems, processes, team members, laws that you need to keep on top of, documents you need to use and keep up to date…there’s so much you have to be across.
All of that combined really just leads to an overwhelming feeling of being constantly overworked.
But there is an answer to that.
The answer is creating an online legal solution for your law firm.
What is an online legal solution?
It’s where you take a traditional legal service and package it in a way that is really attractive to a particular client, and then market it, sell it and deliver it online.
The beauty of an online legal solution is that it doesn’t rely on you as the law firm owner, which alleviates a lot of that overwhelming feeling because you can provide a legal service without having to spend lots of time doing it.
Online legal solutions can come in all different shapes and sizes but there are five key things they must have in order to be a scalable solution for your law firm.
I’ll get into those in a sec, but before I do, I want to share a few examples of online legal solutions that are working really well.
The first one is my own.
When I had my law firm, I had an online legal solution that I used to scale my law firm to seven figures.
It was a conveyancing service for first home buyers, and we offered it New Zealand-wide.
It worked really well because we were able to market online through Google Ads. We were able to convert people coming to our website into clients using a variety of marketing techniques, including webinars.
Once those people had become clients, we were able to deliver the conveyancing service online through a combination of technology, automation, really good systems and processes, and a well-trained team.
Another example of a really great online legal solution is Australian legal entrepreneur, Christina Salvo.
Christina has an online legal solution called Simple Separation.
She helps people who are going through separations in an amicable way to sort out their separation settlement.
She markets, sells and delivers that solution online.
Another really good example is Sian Wingate who is a legal entrepreneur here in New Zealand.
Sian has a business called Tradie Terms that helps tradies get paid faster.
She comes in and helps them with the contracting process, and instead of getting paid late, they get paid weekly and on time.
She does all of that through an online legal solution.
These are a few examples for you to start thinking about how you could create an online legal solution for your law firm.
To help you do that, I wanna share with you the five things that your online legal solution must have for it to be scalable, so it can grow your law firm’s revenue and profit.
#1: You’ve gotta love it
You’ve gotta be really passionate about the ideal client that the online legal solution is for.
You’ve also gotta be passionate about the problem you’re solving with your online legal solution as well.
There are two main reasons for that.
The first is, when you’re automating and systematising the delivery of an online legal solution, it is a process.
It’s not something you can sort out in a week or a month. It’s something that happens incrementally over time.
To stick with that and do it in a way that is really client-focused, you need to be super passionate about the problem you’re solving.
Otherwise you won’t stick with it, and you won’t do it in a way the client loves.
When you’re creating the delivery of a legal solution, you’ve gotta do it in a way that your ideal clients will love so they rave about it to people they know, which will help you get even more clients.
The other reason why you’ve gotta love it is that when it comes to marketing an online legal solution, digital marketing is an important part of what you need to do.
An important part of digital marketing is you as the law firm owner showing your face and explaining why you’re passionate about the problem you’re solving, so you can attract new clients.
If you’re not passionate, or you don’t love what it is that you’re doing, then that’s going to come across in your marketing.
Whereas if it’s something you’re passionate about, even if you’re scared of putting yourself out there, that passion will come through in your marketing and make it so much more appealing to your ideal clients.
#2: It has to make a promise
When it comes to an online legal solution, you need to have a simple message.
Your online legal solution needs to be for a specific, ideal client who has a specific problem, and you lead them through a transformation to get a specific result.
A really great example of that is Sian, who I mentioned before.
Her clients have a specific problem, which is that they run into cash flow issues because their customers don’t pay them regularly enough, or they don’t pay them on time.
So Sian takes them on a journey where she reviews the contracting process, their terms of business and all those sorts of things, and the result is that they’re paid on time, which improves cash flow, and means they can pay their bills on time.
You can see that journey from Sian’s clients’ perspective, and see how attractive that is for them.
That’s what your online solution has to do; it has to make that promise.
Often lawyers are worried about talking about specific results, because you can’t promise the same result to every client.
But there will be a way you can do this, you might just have to get creative with it.
It might be something you want to brainstorm with some other innovative, entrepreneurial law firm owners about how you could make a promise around your online legal solution in a way that helps you get more clients.
You’ll find that it also really helps you to explain what it is you do as well.
#3: It has to have a decent price tag
When we talk about an online legal solution, often lawyers think it has to be cheap.
I find that interesting, because I used to think the exact same thing.
When I first launched my online legal service, it was really cheap.
I thought that just because it was online, people wouldn’t pay the normal price for it, and they’d expect it to be cheaper.
But actually, what I learned was that people really valued being able to do it online, and they would pay a premium for that.
Over the years, we gradually increased our price, to the point where we had probably the most expensive conveyancing pricing in New Zealand.
But people were willing to pay for it, because they saw value in not having to get in their car and drive to the other side of town and see a lawyer who intimidates them, who they don’t really wanna talk to anyway.
You can start to see that people will pay for value.
You can base the price of your online legal solution on the value that you are providing for your client.
Think about step two, and the result that you are getting for your clients, and think about what the value of that is to them.
The other reason it needs a decent price tag is just simple maths.
If your law firm is budgeting for earnings of $50,000 this month, and your online legal solution is priced at $500, then you’ve got to sell that to 100 clients in order to make your target for the month.
Whereas if your online legal solution is priced at $5,000, then you only need to sell it to 10 clients to make your $50,000 revenue for the month.
Plainly, selling to 10 clients is a lot easier than selling to 100 clients.
You can start to see why having a decent price tag makes it easier for your firm to scale, because you don’t need to sell as many in order to make your monthly revenue target.
#4: It must be scalable
This really means that you must be able to deliver, market and sell the solution without you as the law firm owner being involved.
It’s all about using a combination of online marketing, sales and delivery techniques.
You do that with technology, automation, people and systems that allow you to step out of the day-to-day running of the legal services in your firm.
Then you can step into really being the leader of your firm and improving all those things and working with your team.
I always say, your job as the leader is to build the team, and then it’s the team that builds the business.
Once you get your online legal solution working, you can begin to step back from the day-to-day running of your law firm, become the leader who builds the team, and let your team build the business.
#5: Clients can buy your online legal solution at any time
There are a couple of things here…
The first is that it can’t just be available sometimes. It needs to be available all the time, on an ongoing basis.
Sometimes people will create an online legal solution that’s available every few months, and that’s really interesting to me.
It can actually work really well, but it probably won’t help you to scale your law firm to seven figures
It needs to be something that’s available for purchase all the time if it’s going to make that kind of serious impact on you and your firm.
The other thing is that clients need to be able to sign up for your online legal solution without them meeting you.
When I talk to lawyers about how they convert a potential client into a paying client, usually the client meets with them, whether that’s face-to-face or via a Zoom call.
See, lawyers have such a high conversion rate – I’m pretty sure it’s higher than any other industry.
People will say to me, “If a potential client comes and talks to me, 80% of the time that person will become a paying client.”
That’s a super high conversion rate.
But most law firm owners that I work with are initially afraid of stopping those meetings.
Because if they’re not doing those meetings, and converting those potential clients into paying clients, then they’re worried they won’t get as many new clients.
But those meetings are not what your clients are paying for. They are paying for the solution that you provide to them.
Not the process that gets them there, and especially not an awkward meeting with a lawyer they’ve never met before who they have to spell out all their problems to.
Being able to sell your online legal solution all the time is just about finding a way for you to sell your services without you having to do those initial consultations or meetings with potential clients.
If you’re interested in scaling a law firm, or building, designing and selling online legal solutions and learning about how to do the marketing around that, then there’s plenty more for you to discover over in my Savvy Lawyers Facebook group.
