Index

This year, the theme for our Lawyer’s Guide is building. To illustrate this theme, allow this author a bit of a personal anecdote.

Long ago, in the pre-COVID times, I renovated a home with my dad. I saw first-hand the hard work, leadership, and dedication it took to direct teams of workers to gut a whole building and rebuild everything but the outer walls and structural supports, all while ensuring adherence to local building codes.

Since then, I’ve often been struck by how similar that experience is to running a law firm. A law firm leader conducts staff across several different projects, all toward the goal of ensuring the best possible results for the client. Even if you’re a true solo, your concrete contractors and tile installation experts are your legal software tools. In order to build a better law firm, you have to make sure your workflow is finely tuned to what you want to accomplish.

In this part of our lawyer’s guide, we’ll be talking about how to build an efficient, tech-forward law firm that makes serving your clients and scaling your business as easy as it's ever been.

Jump-Starting Your Firm’s Growth With Software

Keao Caindec, CEO and co-founder of Clarra, joins us as our first guest this year. As the co-founder of a legal CMS company, he has plenty to say about the way lawyers are using their tech. Below, he’ll jump-start our Lawyer’s Guide with some advice for firms looking to grow, urging them to stick with software that will grow with them.

Identifying Software Growing Pains

Early on in the life of a law firm, you’ll have to make decisions that are aimed at short-term growth. After all, if you’re building a successful law firm, you have to have a solid foundation! Sometimes, however, those decisions can inhibit growth later on. In our second clip, Keao Caindec discusses identifying software that will scale with your firm.

Treating Growing Pains With Tech

If there’s an expert qualified to tell us about how to solve problems with legal tech solutions, it’s our next legal tech guest, Dorna Moini. A former practicing attorney and now CEO of legal productization and automation platform Gavel, Dorna describes what problems law firms looking to scale their practice might be able to solve with the right tech tool. See what she had to say in the following clip:

Staying On Task With Intra-Firm Communication Tools

As a firm grows, it encounters problems that wouldn’t have happened without that growth. For example, if you started your firm with just a handful of attorneys, communication was probably straightforward. Once you expand your firm, however, communication becomes a hurdle that must be overcome.

In our next clip, Keao Caindec discusses the key properties to look for in your intra-firm communication tools.

Making Billing Easy

Of course, your firm can’t grow if you don’t get paid!

Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report found that law firms were paid for 91 percent of the work they invoiced industry-wide.

The good news is, that number is up since last year! The bad news? It only went up one percent.

If you want to make sure you’re getting paid for the work you’re doing, you’re in luck. Below, Keao Caindec answers the question: how can tech help you get paid?

Building Good Automation Protocols

In order to build an efficient law firm, you have to be able to automate. Before AI, automation was the legal tech buzzword that had the whole industry reorganizing their software to better serve firms looking to automate repetitive tasks.

In the clip below, Dorna Moini talks about best practices for establishing and maintaining great automation protocols.

Maximizing Your Tech Tools

It’s safe to say that most law firms are using some kind of legal software in their firm. But are they using them to their full potential? Survey says: not really!

Over 80 percent of law firms use some kind of CRM, but only 20 percent would call that CRM “effective”.

There’s a lot to getting the most out of your legal tech, but often, you might be missing out on some key features in software you’re already using! In our next clip, Allison Johs, president of LegalEase Consulting, discusses ways you can use the tools you already have to manage your time better.

Enhancing Your Client Experience With Technology

Of course, you’re in the service business. You have to keep your clients happy. How can technology help?

Well, as Keao Caindec will lay out in our next clip, the secret is in your case management system. When you need to provide a client with an update, you want to be able to do so quickly. When you need to make sure work is getting done on a certain matter, you’re going to need to be able to tell at a glance. Check out his advice below:

Transforming The Way You Interact With Clients

Technology hasn’t just changed the way you run your law firm; it’s changed the way humans communicate. And communicating with your clients is no different.

In their 2021 Legal Trends Report, Clio’s survey revealed that 79 percent of clients are looking for remote options when searching for legal help.

Steve Fretzin, bizdev coach for lawyers and host of the BE THAT LAWYER podcast, has some tips on how you can use technology to enhance your client communication, and some of the skills you should develop in order to do so. Check them out in the following clip:

Learning About Legal Productization

Even with all the computing power the human species has amassed, it’s still impossible to predict the future. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from asking our experts to do it anyway!

In the clip below, Dorna Moini discusses a trend she sees heavily impacting the future of the legal industry: legal productization. If you want to know what productization is and what it can do for you, look no further!

Looking At The Future Of AI Automation For Attorneys

It has now been two years since ChatGPT was released to the public, and since then generative AI has been the talk of the legal tech town. Many software tools that were already using algorithmic generation have begun touting their AI-powered features more prominently, and new legal tech offerings seem to arrive every month that use the power of large language models to speed up some new part of a lawyer’s life.

Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report found that 74 percent of law firm tasks are automatable by AI tools already in existence or soon to come.

Of course, as many AI evangelists often say, the tools right now are the worst they’re ever going to be. That means AI-powered automation is only going to grow in the coming years. In the clip below, Dorna Moini will discuss just a few ways AI will transform the world of legal tech and change the way lawyers automate their firms.

Making Sure Your Software Plays Nice

Throughout this section, we’ve discussed many of the ways legal technology can help you build a better law firm. But perhaps the most important thing we haven’t mentioned is that all of your legal technology needs to be able to work together. Silos and dead-ends in your workflow and tech stack can lead to huge inefficiencies that will leak time and money from your firm.

In the clip below, Dorna Moini discusses just how important integration between your new tools and your existing systems and processes really is.

Bringing Inbound Calls Into Your Tech Stack

Under normal circumstances, when a prospective client calls in, your receptionist or intake specialist (or maybe even you, the attorney!) will take down the caller’s contact information, perform a legal intake, and take any other message the caller may have. If you’re doing it right, your staff will be directly entering that information into your CRM, but if you’re old school you might be taking written notes that then have to be transcribed into your database.

Integrating your CRM with a legal answering service changes all of that. In addition to everything we mentioned above, you can say goodbye to data entry. The intakes and messages your virtual receptionists take will be automatically added to your CRM as they get delivered to you. You’ll be able to review all of your leads in one place, and follow up with them as fits your schedule.

Of course, that’s not all an integration with your CRM will bring you. As Dorna Moini pointed out above, automation is a key to scaling your practice. Automating your intake with a legal answering service will not only make your lead capturing more effective, but your whole practice as a whole more efficient.

Most legal CRMs have workflows and automations you can customize as fit your firm’s flow. With your inbound phone leads integrated into your CRM, you can make sure every new client gets the same treatment. You can send automatic appointment reminders, educational materials, and even representation agreements, all based on certain criteria you establish beforehand. You won’t have to lift a finger once everything is set up, other than to call the client and seal the deal yourself.

Bring Answering Legal Onto Your Tech Team

If you’re looking for a legal answering service, Answering Legal is your best bet. Our virtual receptionists train for months, and they only answer for lawyers. Your clients will get the best possible service, every time they call in.

And, of course, we also integrate with top law firm software. You’ll be able to combine the power of our 24/7 legal intake with your tech stack, allowing you to automate your firm from first contact all the way to end of matter. And, we have our own mobile app, so you can check up on your messages from anywhere with just a few taps on your phone.

Bring your phone answering into the 21st century. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.

Of course, while a law firm is a business like any other, a law firm owner isn’t quite like other business owners. Most business owners and CEOs run their business as their only role. There are exceptions, certainly; many mechanics, for example, still work on cars while they run their shop. But you don’t see Apple CEO Tim Cook building iPhones!

Law firm owners are one of those exceptions. While the managing partners and even CEOs of some mid-sized and larger firms are much more like Tim Cook, the vast majority of law firm owners are a lot more like the mechanic in the example above: running a business and working for it at the same time.

That puts law firm leaders at a disadvantage. For other kinds of leaders, learning and developing leadership skills and instincts is part of their job. Attorneys, on the other hand, need to handle legal matters as well as develop leadership skills, and that can lead the latter to fall by the wayside.

As a law firm leader, you are one of the foundations of your firm. That means developing your leadership skills and keeping yourself healthy are important parts of your job, too. Below, we’ll dive into many different ways to handle both sides of that role.

Identifying Your Priorities

Dena Lefkowitz, lawyer coach at Achievement By Design and award-winning author of Winning In Your Own Court, draws from her experience both as a coach and as a former practicing attorney in guiding her clients through career challenges and toward their goals.

One of the things she often stresses is that you have to budget time as if it were money. Your calendar is like your checkbook and it should be cared for in the same way. In the clip below, Dena will give some tips on how to identify where you should be spending that time.

Following Through On Your Prioritization

Of course, it’s one thing to identify your priorities; another entirely to actually go after them. While it’s not easy to truly identify the things you want, it’s even harder to commit to achieving them! In the following clip, Dena Lefkowitz has some advice to help make your actions fit your values.

Recognizing Challenges To Growth

The legal world moves quickly, and it can be hard to keep up. Economic and industry-wide shifts in trends and technology can affect even the smallest firms, but firms looking to grow might be most susceptible to these kinds of shifts.

In the clip below, Allison Johs lays out the three biggest challenges facing lawyers looking to grow their firms in 2025 and beyond, and solutions you can be on the lookout for.

Managing The Distractions Of Remote Work

Remote work is changing the way everyone is working around the globe, and lawyers are no exception.

Fewer than 30 percent of lawyers work exclusively from the office.

One of the challenges of this shift can be the distractions that come with remote or hybrid work. That’s not to say there aren’t distractions in an office environment, just that they are different kinds of distractions! Here to discuss how best to stay on task when working from home is Allison Johs.

Establishing Boundaries

Of the many distractions attorneys face, the communications of clients are both the hardest to manage and the most under your control. It’s easy to say you should set boundaries with your clients, but much harder to pull off. After all, you’re in the legal service business; ignoring your clients comes at the peril of your job and your duty to them!

That makes building those boundaries difficult, but it also makes them crucial to your success. In our next clip, Dena Lefkowitz describes the value of these boundaries, and how to best enforce them.

Finding Balance

One of the reasons to insist on those boundaries is to ensure that whatever your version of work/life balance is, you can consistently achieve it. Here to help us narrow down what “work/life balance” means and how to work to achieve it is Emily Hirsekorn, former practicing attorney and current career leadership coach for lawyers. In the clip below, she’ll offer some advice on how to identify your own personal version of work/life balance.

Overcoming Demands On Your Time

Later in this guide, Steve Fretzin will point out that the biggest barrier to growth for lawyers is not having (or not thinking you have) the time for business development and marketing management. In the clip below, he gives some advice on how to overcome that challenge on your time.

Maximizing Your Time As A Solo Attorney

Of course, solo attorneys aren’t off the hook when it comes to managing their time better! While they may have a smaller administrative load, solo attorneys also have fewer (if any) extra hands to handle their administrative tasks.

In the clip below, Allison Johs discusses time management tips specifically for solos.

Understanding Your Delegation Process

Rounding out our selection of law firm management experts is law firm leadership coach Doug Brown, J.D. Doug has years of experience helping lawyers achieve their goals, whether those goals are revenue- or career-focused.

Below, Doug addresses people who are averse to delegation and lays out how he convinces lawyers that delegation is essential. After all, lawyers are experts, and train for years to get there. So in some ways, it makes sense that lawyers hesitate to delegate. But it certainly doesn’t help them run a better law firm! Check out the clip below to learn the mindset changes that can help you get your delegation process right.

Making Your Law Firm More Efficient

Even though alternative fee arrangements are on the rise, the vast majority of law firms still bill by the hour. That means time is literally money; finding ways to save time on non-billable tasks will mean you get to spend more time making money!

In this next clip, Doug Brown, J.D. discusses how to find more time in your workday to get things done, beyond delegating tasks.

Delegating The Right Way

One of the reasons lawyers may be hesitant to delegate is because their past efforts in delegation might not have ended well. You might have gotten an inferior product than you would have produced yourself, or it may have taken much longer than it should have. In the clip below, Allison Johs gives some tips on how to avoid those outcomes and make sure you’re delegating effectively.

Adjusting Your Career Goals

Do you have trouble working up the motivation to work? Does it feel like you’re just going through the motions? There’s a lot of reasons why that might be, but a big one is career dissatisfaction.

In the clip below, Emily Hirsekorn discusses the value of regular career goal check-ins, and how you can tell if you really do need to take a look at where you are in your career.

Spotting Career Dissatisfaction Before It Develops

Of course, you’re not alone if you are dissatisfied with your career.

According to Law360’s Pulse Satisfaction Survey, one-third of lawyers were dissatisfied with their careers.

Stress and burnout can contribute to career dissatisfaction, of course, but they’re also ills in their own right, and might result from dissatisfaction with career progress. In the clip below, Doug Brown, J.D. shares what kinds of dissatisfaction are most common in his experience, and how to deal with that dissatisfaction.

Developing Your Leadership Skills

Whether you’re a law firm leader, a team leader, or just an aspiring leader, the truth is that leadership is a skill, and it’s not one taught in law school (or, quite frankly, many schools). Developing your leadership skills is going to require a lot of work, but it will be worth it for many reasons. In our next clip, Emily Hirsekorn discusses how working on your leadership skills will improve your personal development, and vice versa.

Identifying Leadership Skills You Can Improve

You know the skills needed to become an attorney, especially in hindsight. But do you know what you need to work on to become a better leader? We can talk about leadership skills all throughout this guide, but unless you’re able to identify where you might be lacking, how can you make a change? In this next clip, Emily Hirsekorn will point out a few key skills to focus on.

Cultivating Confidence In Your Leadership

One of the key qualities of a great leader is confidence. Not just confidence in their work or themselves, but confidence in their leadership and decision-making.

Building that confidence isn’t easy, because lawyers are often obsessed with being the best. When you’re not the best, it’s easy to convince yourself you’re not good enough. In this clip, Emily Hirsekorn will offer some advice on how you can grow your confidence in your own leadership.

Knowing When To Make A Change

In this section so far, we’ve covered 16 different tips from five different experts. It’s a lot to process! Not all of this advice will be relevant to your specific needs, of course, but there’s definitely some advice in this guide that attorneys are more likely to ignore than to heed. It’s easy to recognize a problem industry-wide, and much harder to see how that problem is reflected in your own firm.

In our next clip, Dena Lefkowitz has some advice on how to recognize when it’s time to make a change.

Tracking Changes To Your Career And Life

Human beings are complex, but at the end of the day, many of us share common traits. One of those traits is pattern recognition. We love to look for patterns in our lives and in the world around us and draw inferences from them.

This pattern recognition is key to problem-solving, but it can also present some problems itself. For example, when making some of the changes mentioned in this section of our guide, your brain will look for patterns breaking and trick you into thinking you need to swing for the fences, make sweeping changes so that they’re actually detectable.

And that is terrible advice. No matter how many changes you’re going to make to your life and law firm in the year to come, the best way to start is a little at a time. Dena Lefkowitz, in the clip to come, will describe how you should tackle making big changes like we’ve discussed in this section, and how to track your progress toward your goals so your pattern-recognizing brain detects the changes you’re making.

Hiring And Keeping The Right Talent

As Allison Johs pointed out earlier in this section of the guide, hiring and retaining talent is one of the biggest challenges facing attorneys looking to grow their firms in the near future. The labor market has been unpredictable this decade, and trying to find out who to hire and when is a problem all its own.

As Doug Brown, J.D. points out in this next clip, one of the reasons it’s such a problem is that law firm leaders often don’t consider how to hire staff. Luckily, he has some great tips on how to make sure you attract the best talent and keep them once you have them.

Maintaining Boundaries Without Neglecting Clients

It’s one thing to say you need better boundaries with your clients, but it’s another entirely to not personally answer clients when they call. There are some things working to your advantage, however. To start with, if you bill by the hour, there’s already a barrier between you and your clients: the one-tenth of an hour you might charge them if they call with a question.

That means when they do call, they’re expecting service. But that doesn’t mean you have to drop everything to deal with their issue! Always being available is not a great way to lead a life, even if it makes the client happy. Instead, you have to understand what they’re calling about and how to make them happy while keeping your boundaries intact.

First of all, when an existing client calls you, it’s likely because they need an update, have a question, or have a document or some other information you requested. They’re not necessarily looking to talk to you, the attorney, unless they have a question. Usually, they’re looking to make sure the ball is rolling on their respective legal matters, and are asking about it because they’re anxious or because, as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Most of the time, these clients don’t actually need to speak on the phone; often, you can give them what they want via email or text message.

In 2021, over 60 percent of clients surveyed said they would be happy communicating with lawyers via text or email.

Here’s what will help, however: having a live virtual receptionist answer their call. After speaking to a live person, they’ll feel a lot more willing to wait, knowing that your firm is on top of whatever it is they need. A virtual receptionist for lawyers will take a message and let your client know that you’ll get back to them as soon as possible.

From there, you can handle the follow-up. Does the client have a salient legal strategy question? Then it may be appropriate to find time in your schedule to call them and bill them for that discussion. If they just need an update, or have some documents to deliver, then a text message or email might be enough.

Let Answering Legal Be Your Front Office

We mentioned that it can be difficult to enforce and respect your own boundaries with clients. If you hire Answering Legal, we’ll enforce them for you!

Our virtual receptionists are highly-trained legal intake experts, and our system is 100 percent customizable. You can set up protocols by call type to make sure every kind of caller gets what they need! We’ll even transfer calls to you if they meet certain criteria.

In addition, it’s never been easier to stay on top of your calls. With our mobile app, you can track who’s calling and why from the palm of your hand, and follow up with just the press of a button.

Make sure you’re only taking the most important calls. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.

We’ve discussed the ways technology can help you build a growing law firm, and the leadership and other management skills you’ll need to keep building. But, of course, in order to build bigger, you need to have the client base to support that kind of scaling.

Enter legal marketing. With the right investments, website, landing pages, and operational infrastructure, you can expand your client base so that you can scale your business. Sounds complicated, right?

Like many of the topics we’ve discussed in this guide, marketing is not a skill most lawyers have developed. And yet it’s a vital skill to running a successful business! Our expert guests in this section will help you navigate the worlds of SEO, social media, digital marketing, and even billboards and TV!

Building Business Development Skills

Throughout this guide, we’ll be discussing marketing tips aimed at lawyers like you, whether you’re running their own marketing campaigns or hiring expert marketing agencies. Most of our advice will work for either plan. But there are some parts of growing a law firm that only you, the law firm owner, can handle. Business development is one of those.

In this next clip, Steve Fretzin has three quick tips on how to develop your bizdev skills so you can handle those parts of growing your business more effectively.

Identifying 2025’s Biggest Bizdev Challenges

The biggest business development challenge lawyers face, according to Steve Fretzin, is exacerbated by the billable hour.

According to the 2022 Legal Trends Report, 97 percent of firms still bill by the hour.

When time is money, it can be hard to justify investing time into business development. In this clip, Steve Fretzin discusses this roadblock, among others lawyers will face in the coming year.

Developing A Plan For Your Networking Efforts

Steve Fretzin’s advice is deceptively simple: make a plan! You might not be an expert marketer, but you don’t have to improvise everything.

Of course, in order to develop an effective networking plan, you need to know who to target. In the clip below, Steve goes into how to identify the kinds of people you need to connect with in order to build your business network.

Enhancing Your Referral Networks

Referrals represent a huge revenue source for many law firms. Usually, that business is a result of hard work and networking:

The 2018 Legal Trends Report found that on average, lawyers spent 1.4 hours a day building referral resources.

In this clip, Steve Fretzin discusses the importance of making sure your referral network isn’t just wide, but deep, full of meaningful relationships you’re constantly working to build.

Helping Your Website Stand Out

When clients come your way, regardless of where they come from, most often the first information they’ll have about you will come from your website. You have to put your best foot forward, both to a prospective client and to the search engine algorithms.

Here to discuss just how to do that is Emily Brady, director of SEO at Omnizant. Emily has specialized in digital marketing and SEO for law firms for 12 years, and in the next clip, she’ll demonstrate that expertise in discussing how to make your website stand out from the crowd and appeal to search engine algorithms.

Demonstrating Your Expertise

In order to stand out from your competition, you need to present yourself as an expert, both for your prospective clients and for search engine algorithms. Some law firms have agencies that handle this for them, but many don’t, and those lawyers will be asking “How?”

Here to answer the question is Tanner Jones, VP of Business Development at ConsultWebs and host of the LAWsome podcast. In the clip below, he’ll discuss how to best present your website as an expert source, and how to stay involved in the process.

Creating Content For Your Website

When you’re filling out your website, you need to make sure that the actual potential clients who will be using it will be getting the most from it, but you also need to make sure that it’s attractive to search engines as well! How can you make sure you’re doing both?

In the following clip, Emily Brady will answer that question, and go into detail about how to make sure your SEO is on point.

Changing The SEO Landscape With AI

AI has its fingerprints over the whole of the legal world. It’s changing the ways lawyers practice the law and run their firms. It’s changing the way people search for legal help and the way search engines display that information. Should it change the way lawyers conduct their SEO strategy?

In the clip below, Tanner Jones will argue that yes, you should change your strategy to account for AI’s changing the landscape of SEO, and discusses the do’s and don’ts of marketing with AI.

Building Your Firm’s Brand

Branding is a kind of storytelling. You’re telling prospective clients who you are and why it matters to them. But it can be tough to distinguish the parts of your firm you have in common with your competitors and the parts that make you stand out.

Luckily, we have a great guest on all things branding and digital advertising, because If there’s anyone who knows branding, it’s Andrew Nasrinpay, partner at MeanPug Digital. MeanPug Digital has built brands and run digital marketing for law firms since 2020, and Andrew himself is a veteran of digital law firm marketing as former Director of Paid Digital and Advertising for Morgan & Morgan.

Maybe you’re just starting out, or looking to take control of your branding. But you’re probably asking yourself: How do I build my brand? The question you should be asking yourself instead is: What is my law firm’s story? In our next clip, Andrew has some advice on how to answer that question.

Finding Your Niche And Making It Your Brand

As Andrew Nasrinpay mentioned in the clip above, being all things to all people is not an effective branding strategy. It might not be the best business strategy for your law firm, either. In the following clip, we asked Andrew the question: How can firms niching down build that niche into their brand?

Harnessing The Power Of Digital Marketing

There are advantages and disadvantages to all forms of marketing. A billboard can grow your brand, but people are unlikely to call your phone number while they’re driving, for example.

What’s the advantage of digital marketing? Well, according to Emily Brady, it’s simple: your leads are in legal trouble. That means they’re very likely to look for help, and very likely to turn to a search engine to do their looking. Watch Emily lay it all out here:

Choosing Social Media Platforms To Target

One of the places people go looking for legal help, especially young people, is on social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok. Advertising on these platforms can build your brand and net you clients, but you have to make sure you’re looking in the right place.

In our next clip, Emily Brady gives some tips on how to identify which social media platforms are right for your firm.

Succeeding on Social Media

Once you know what platform you want to target, you can develop a strategy for developing and posting content to those social media platforms. In the clip below, Emily Brady lays out what kinds of content work best for attracting clients on social media.

Targeting Local Clients

While most law firms specialize in the ins and outs of their practice area within their local area, growing firms often expand their practice into other cities and states in search of more business. This comes with a risk, however, because legal consumers prefer to shop local.

Despite increases in virtual meetings with legal professionals, clients still prefer attorneys in their local area.

That means your marketing needs to target people local to your office (or offices, or home office!) who need legal help. Tanner Jones has some advice about how best to ensure your firm’s online presence is attracting local clients.

Attracting The Right Clients

The first step in any successful marketing campaign is identifying your client profile. Often, however, finding out your most likely clients isn’t the only thing you need. If you want your firm to succeed, sometimes you need to know what kinds of clients are the right fit for your business in more ways than just buying intent.

In the clip below, Doug Brown, J.D. gives a few tips on identifying and attracting the right clients for your firm.

Marketing For Small Law Firms

If you’re a solo, or running a smaller law firm, you might be handling your marketing yourself. Maybe you’ve got some experience, or this is all Greek to you; either way, advice for small law firms can be different from the advice for mid-sized and larger firms.

The key first step in building a marketing strategy, as Andrew Nasrinpay will lay out in the following clip, is to figure out what kind of a law firm you want to be. From there, you’ll build your marketing strategy to hit that goal.

Refining Your Marketing Strategy

We’ve all been there; sometimes, a marketing campaign just doesn’t produce the results you’re looking for. But how do you know when to stick it out, when to adjust a campaign, or when to call it quits? In the clip below, Tanner Jones has some signs to look out for when you’re deciding what to do with a campaign you think might be underperforming.

Analyzing Your Marketing Data

Of course, if you’re going to be making marketing decisions, you need to have the right data. As Andrew Nasrinpay points out in the following, without good analytics, you’ll never know which decisions you’ve made have been successful. What makes for good analytics? Well, Andrew has some advice on that front too!

Taking Risks In Your Marketing

Sometimes, however, you don’t have the right data, or the data shows that you need to step out of your comfort zone if you really want to bring in the business. Risk can be daunting, of course., but it’s an integral part of entrepreneurship, and risk assessment is an important skill to master.

In the clip below, Tanner Jones talks about the importance of taking risks in your marketing, and how to tell when to take that risk.

Handling Incoming Leads

Finally, let’s say you take all of the advice in this section and run with it. You build successful marketing campaigns and you reap the benefits; your phone is ringing off the hook! Here’s our question: How equipped are you to handle this influx of new business?

In the clip below, Andrew Nasrinpay talks about making sure your operational infrastructure is ready for the growth you’re about to undergo when making a big marketing investment.

Making The Most Of Your Marketing

Effective legal marketing agencies often brag that they create intake problems for their customers. As Andrew Nasrinpay pointed out in our last clip in this guide, once your phone is ringing off the hook, you’ve got another problem: how are you going to handle all these new leads? Well, first and foremost, you need to answer every call that comes your way. It should be obvious how important this is, but we’ll do some math to prove it just in case.

Let’s say you’re running a digital marketing campaign, and its cost per acquisition is $500. Of course, that CPA is just an average, and it’s a number we picked because it makes the math easy. On average, ten new clients will cost you $5000 dollars. Their cases are likely worth much more than that to you, obviously. For the sake of easy math, again, let’s say their cases are worth ten times that, $5,000 each. You stand to net $45,000 from these ten leads, but only if you’re able to secure them!

Here is where the value of 24/7 legal intake comes in. It’s long been held that 80 percent of consumers don’t leave voicemail messages when calling a business. That number comes from a Forbes study from 2018; in the six years since then, voicemail has only become less reliable as a lead capturing resource, but let’s stick with 80 percent.

If you, like many law firms, only answer half of your phone calls, the other half will go to voicemail. 80 percent of those callers won’t leave a voicemail; they’ll just call your competition. Let’s assume you secure every caller you get into contact with, six out of your ten leads. Your net profit from your marketing campaign drops from $45,000 to just $25,000, a full 56 percent decrease in revenue!

We’re not going to say that a legal answering service has a 100 percent lead capture rate, because 100 percent success is statistically impossible when dealing with human beings. But when those five missed calls reach a live virtual receptionist and undergo a legal intake, their likelihood to stick with your firm is much closer to 100 percent than 20, and your revenue will be much closer to that ideal $45,000.

Answering Legal’s Operations Are Top-Notch

We’ve established that missing calls while you’re spending money on advertising is just a waste of your marketing budget. And, if you read the recommendations from our law office management experts, you know that 24/7 availability is a one-way ticket to burnout and stress. Where does that leave you?

You’re looking to grow your law firm. We’re looking to help law firms grow. That’s what makes Answering Legal the best fit to solve your operational problems. Our receptionists only answer for lawyers, which gives us the time to train them for months before handling your calls.

Make sure your firm can handle marketing success. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.

No matter what kind of entertainment you’re into, it seems like there’s just more and more of it every day. The legal world is no exception! Every year new conferences and networking opportunities, podcasts and

Legal Industry Events You Won’t Want To Miss

As Steve Fretzin emphasized above, networking and building relationships is key to business development, and there’s no better place to do that than at a legal conference. At the events below, you’ll meet fellow attorneys, legal technology experts, and representatives of other parts of the legal field and hopefully build relationships that will last.

• Institute For Well-Being In Law Conference – January 21-22, 2025, Virtual

• Trial Lawyers Summit – January 26-30, 2025, Miami Beach, FL

• Legalweek – March 24-27, 2025, New York, NY

• ABA Tech Show – April 2-5, 2025, Chicago, IL

• Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference – April 23-25, 2025, Washington, D.C.

• PILMMA Summit April 29, 2025 – May 2, 2025, Denver, CO

• AILA Annual Conference On Immigration Law – June 18-21, 2025, Denver, CO

• ILTACON 2024– Aug 10-14, 2025, National Harbor, MD

• 2025 World Technology Law Conference – May 14-16, 2025, Washington, D.C.

• LEX Summit (Filevine User Conference) – September 28 - October 1 2025, Salt Lake City, UT

• Clio Cloud Conference – October 16-17, Boston, MA

• AIPLA Annual Meeting –October 30 - November 1, 2025, Washington, D.C.

• The Summit (National Solo & Small Law Firm Conference) – Not yet scheduled

Also be on the lookout for Answering Legal’s annual Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp event, which is held virtually during the months of July and August. Reach out to [email protected] for more details about attending the camp.

Podcasts Every Lawyer Should Listen To In 2025

We love podcasts. So much so that we host our own podcast network! We’ll talk more about our own podcasts later, of course, but in this section we’re going to talk about other podcasts we can’t get enough of.

Lawyers are always on the go, which is one of the many reasons why there are so many legal podcasts. It’s easy to hit play on one of these on your way to the office, while out for lunch, or while taking a break! Absorbing information about how to better run your law firm is possible no matter where you are.

The Managing Partners Podcast

Kevin Daisey, founder at Array Digital, interviews a law firm leader every week to get the inside scoop on developing and growing a successful law firm. Featuring guests such as Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert, Christopher Earley, and Craig Goldenfarb, among others, The Managing Partners Podcast is a can’t-miss show for lawyers looking to hear from other attorneys at the top of their field.

In the interest of transparency, Answering Legal is a sponsor of The Managing Partners Podcast. However, you should take that as a sign of our wholehearted approval of Kevin’s mission: to educate attorneys by showing them what success looks like.

LAWsome Podcast

Hosted by one of our very own Lawyer’s Guide guests this year, Tanner Jones of ConsultWebs, the LAWsome Podcast presents weekly half-hour discussions with legal industry luminaries like Ken Hardison, Chris Dreyer, and Dave Thomas, all in the interest of entertaining and educating attorneys about topics from all over the legal world. Check out this episode featuring our very own Marketing Director Nick Werker here!

Lunch Hour Legal Marketing

Hosted by digital marketing experts Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing breaks down legal marketing weekly in less than 45 minutes. Even though Gyi and Conrad are marketing agency leaders, they are great at explaining and contextualizing marketing topics in ways that are easy to understand for non-marketers. On top of their expertise, Gyi and Conrad are some of the most entertaining voices in the legal marketing world, so you’re never going to regret throwing an episode of LHLM on during your drive to work.

Lawyerist Podcast

Featuring a rotating cast of hosts from around Laywerist’s office, the Lawyerist podcast is a great resource for any lawyer looking to step up their law office management game. By interviewing experts from all kinds of backgrounds within the legal space, the Lawyerist podcast is able to dive deep into a different topic for half an hour every week, exercising the flexibility of their multi-host format to get you the most information about the greatest number of topics.

Be That Lawyer Podcast

Hosted by none other than this year’s Lawyer’s Guide Bizdev expert Steve Fretzin, the Be That Lawyer Podcast is intended to help you, well, be that lawyer! With guests ranging from rainmakers, bizdev experts, marketing gurus, and other luminaries, Steve’s goal of making sure you always know what’s next for your firm’s growth is easily accomplished, if you tune in for his twice-weekly half-hour conversations.

The Answering Legal Podcast Network

Did we mention we love podcasts? We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own slate of podcasts, each of them brought to you by the production team at The Answering Legal Podcast Network.

Everything Except The Law

Our flagship podcast, Everything Except The Law features monthly conversations with expert guests across the legal sphere. Hosted by our marketing director, Nick Werker, the conversations on this show range from legal tech and marketing to lifestyle changes to KPI analysis! Nick will discuss anything and everything except the actual ins and outs of legal minutiae. Check out the latest episode featuring Doug Bradley, owner of Everest Legal Marketing, below.

Inside Answering Legal

Host Taryn Winter Brill gives you the inside scoop on Answering Legal’s virtual receptionist team on Inside Answering Legal. TWB interviews Answering Legal staff, customers, and partners in order to highlight what we do and how we do it. On the latest episode, TWB and Nick Werker talk to Blake Roberts, former director of partnerships at Lawmatics to discuss Answering Legal’s. Check it out below!

Law Firm Success Strategies with Doug Brown, J.D.

Doug Brown, J.D. brings his decades of experience both as an attorney and as a leadership coach to bear on Law Firm Success Strategies. Interviewing law firm leaders, marketing experts, and his fellow coaches, Doug highlights mindset changes, strategic decisions, and staff you can hire to make your career the one you’ve always wanted. In the latest episode, Doug interviews lawyer coach Leah Zimmerman and discusses how to have difficult conversations at your law firm.

The Earley Show

Christopher Earley is a natural interviewer. Taking a more personal approach to law firm management, Christopher gets his guests, who include some of the country’s most successful lawyers like John Morgan, to tell their stories, from humble beginnings to huge successes, and talk about how those experiences taught them the lessons they needed to get where they are today. In his latest episode, Christopher interviews Jason Hennessey of Hennessey Digital, discussing the value of masterminds, public speaking, and, of course, law firm SEO.

Books Every Lawyer Should Read In 2025

Of course, we don’t just love podcasts. Though you can get some of the books we’ll discuss below as audiobooks, sometimes there’s nothing better than unwinding with a good book (or e-book).

Books are important because there are some ideas that can’t be condensed into a size that can be consumed over a lunch break. If you’re in litigation, you understand; one has to build an argument in order for it to be effective. Below, you’ll find five great arguments for bettering your law firm.

Love Your Law Firm: A Roadmap to the Law Firm You Always Wanted by Jordan Ostroff

Love Your Law Firm is a success story, yes, but its teachings come from Ostroff’s setbacks when founding his law firm, first and foremost. He is upfront about why he struggled early on in his law firm’s life, and uses those struggles to teach you to learn from his mistakes. Jordan was our guest on an episode of Everything Except the Law earlier this year discussing his book. Check out the video below if you want to hear about it in his own words.

It Has to Hurt: Accepting Life’s Harsh Reality, Finding Yourself along the Way, and Actually Enjoying the Journey by Luis Scott, Jr.

Continuing on the theme of learning from adversity, Luis Scott, Jr.’s It Has To Hurt is all about developing resilience. Setbacks are inevitable; in Luis’s book, he discusses how to move forward without fear despite knowing that, and how to use those setbacks to fuel your successes. And, as Luis discusses in the episode of Everything Except the Law below, he is an avid reader himself, reading over 50 self-improvement books a year, so you know he knows what he’s writing about. Check out that episode below if you want to hear about his journey.

Honest SEO: Demystifying the Google Algorithm To Help You Get More Traffic and Revenue

While Jason Hennessey’s book Honest SEO isn’t exclusively for lawyers, advice contained within will absolutely benefit you. Hennessey has been specializing in SEO for 20 years, and has spent most of that time optimizing lawyer’s websites. Therefore, while the advice might be general, it comes from doing SEO work for law firms, so it will absolutely be expert advice for your specific SEO needs. If you want to check Jason Hennessey’s bonafides, click below to see his recent appearance on Everything Except the Law!

The Future-Proof Lawyer: Leveraging Automation and Innovation for Long-Term Growth by Jasmine Gavigan

We wouldn’t be able to say every lawyer should read these books if we didn’t include a book about the rapidly-changing legal tech industry! It isn’t easy writing a book about such a moving target, but Jasmine Gavigan’s The Future-Proof Lawyer delivers on its promise of providing concrete and, for now, current tips on how to change the way your firm delivers to your clients. As AI technology continues to advance, automation is going to become more and more important for your firm; check out Gavigan’s book to make sure you’re on top of what’s to come.

Law Firm Growth Accelerator: The Proven Framework for Multiplying Your Impact, Profit, and Freedom by Andrew Stickel and Bill Hauser

Law Firm Growth Accelerator is more than a book. It’s a plan. Based on Stickel’s decade-plus years working growing law firms, Law Firm Growth Accelerator is a four-step blueprint to growing your law firm. It sounds too good to be true, we know, but Stickel is a proven expert. While there’s a good amount of “right place, right time” to success, Stickel’s advice will help you position your firm in the right place so that when the right time comes, you can rocket your way to success.

It’s been an eventful year for Answering Legal, and 2025 is looking to be even more exciting. Below, we’ll talk about just a few of the things that have been happening at your favorite legal answering service over the past year, and give a tease of what you can look forward to in the year to come.

Answering Legal Partnerships

This year, we’ve launched a new initiative at Answering Legal. As you can tell if you’ve read this far in our guide, we work with a lot of experts from around the legal industry. We’ve cultivated these friendships over the years, and we’re going to put them to work in the coming year with our partnerships program.

Our partnerships program will allow us to highlight the different things our friends bring to the table for a law firm. Need a new tech tool? We’ve got plenty to say about our technology partners. Looking to level up your marketing strategy? Our marketing partners have you covered.

Click here to learn more about our partners, and stay on the lookout for partnered initiatives coming your way soon!

We’re Always Leveling Up

You might have already noticed, but the site you’re reading this guide on isn’t the same Answering Legal website you might be used to. We’ve given our whole brand a facelift! Our new site is easier to read and has more information readily available to our visitors, both about our service and about the legal world in general. We’re committed to always staying one step ahead of our customer’s needs, and our updated website is just one part of that goal. Check out a few more below!

The Answering Legal App

First introduced last year, the Answering Legal App continues to transform the way our customers run their firms. We’re constantly adding new features, but its core purpose has remained the same: providing a single place for our customers to read, organize, and follow up on their messages. Click here to learn more about our app and how you can use it to run your firm from anywhere.

New Software Integrations

Part of our commitment to making lawyers’ lives easier involves joining up with other legal tech companies and making sure our software plays nice with theirs. After all, as Dorna Moini pointed out at the beginning of this guide, software integration is one of the most important things to look for when choosing a new tool for your law firm.

Well, look no further. Answering Legal integrates with the software you’re using, so if you want to add our team of virtual receptionists to your law firm’s toolbelt, you won’t have to change your CRM or anything else about your firm. Click here to check out our integrations and learn how we can help you build a fully-integrated law firm.

More Developments On The Way!

Our goal, as always, is to facilitate communication between lawyers and their clients. With Answering Legal on your team, you’ll always have an open line of communication with your new leads and existing clients, and it won’t take all of your time to maintain it!

There are a few developments coming in the next year that are going to make it even easier for you to communicate with your clients, whether they’ve been with you for years or have just discovered your firm. We’re not authorized to reveal them just yet, but stay tuned to our website to learn more about these projects when they’re revealed to the public!

Getting Started With Answering Legal

There’s a lot changing around here at Answering Legal, and the only way to take advantage of these changes is to be an Answering Legal customer. Luckily, one thing that hasn’t changed is how easy it is to do just that.

Click here to sign up for our 400-minute free trial. Once you’ve filled out the form and scheduled an appointment, our account executives will give you a quick rundown on our service and what you can expect. If it all sounds good to you, we’ll get your free trial started right away!

For the duration of your free trial, you’ll have access to all of our premium features, including customized intake, integrations, and our mobile app! You won’t have to sign a contract, and we won’t even need your credit card. Just click the link above and our setup team will take care of the rest. To learn more about how our free trial works, check out our tutorial here.

When your free trial is up, you’re of course free to go your own way. But we’re confident that once you see what your firm looks like with 24/7 legal intake, you won’t want to go back to the way you ran your firm before.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for coming along with us on this journey. Change can be scary, and more so than ever it seems every year brings big changes for the legal profession. Hopefully our experts can help guide you through those changes and make next year even better than this one. Here’s to a safe, happy, and prosperous 2025!