It’s a tradition to make a resolution on New Year’s Day. Many choose to try to lose weight, exercise more often, or be friendly to those around them. Have you ever considered making a resolution to improve your legal practice? January is a great time of the year to evaluate how you did in months prior and what can be improved upon. Here are three resolutions you may want to try at your law firm.
1. Use Math
Math is more than just crunching numbers – it allows your firm to objectively evaluate financial decisions your office makes. One important metric for law firms to always consider is “cost per case,” or CPC.
Cost per case is easy to calculate. You simply look at your total spend with a particular marketing source and divide that total spend by the number of cases you’ve retained through that source.
Take a Social Security disability advocate or attorney for example. SSD representatives can expect at most $6000.00 in fees from one case, as the vast majority of Social Security legal fees are capped. Nationally, the payout for a successful SSD case was around $3,100.00 in 2017. It wouldn’t make sense to spend $1,000 to sign new Social Security clients via a billboard campaign, as the high costs won’t leave a firm with enough revenue left to pay employees salaries and benefits or overhead costs.
eGeneration recommends keeping an SSD firm’s cost per case around $250-$350. Of course, lower CPCs will leave you more room for profit on each case.
Firms with higher settlements will have more “wiggle room” when it comes to evaluating CPC and determining if an effort is profitable. Personal injury firms usually earn higher revenue from a successful case, so these firms might be able to spend more per case in marketing, assuming they still achieve an acceptable ROI from each case generated. A good rule of thumb is to try to have your CPC be 15% or less of your expected revenue from a case.
2. Invest in Employee Health
More offices across the country are offering employees options to promote their health. These options range from compensated gym memberships to healthy snack options paid for by the company.
Keeping up with work place compensation trends is important to employee retention, but investing in employee’s health can also have benefits beyond keeping your staff content in their roles.
According to Harvard Business Review, wellness programs have saved Johnson & Johnson $250 million on health care costs over a decades’ time. While most law firms are smaller than J&J, a similar type of savings could be experienced for your office. Even adding a few of pieces of gym equipment in an unused office space can do a world of good for your employees’ health and job satisfaction.
3. Stop Wasting Time
You know more than anyone how valuable your time is—how much time has your staff spent filling out redundant paperwork? If your office is still taking the time to fill out the same document manually each day, you’re missing out on time that could be spent resolving leads or preparing for hearings.
Most legal software offer the ability to generate auto-fill documents that will automatically place client information in to the appropriate fields. Common fields include your firm’s name and address, a client’s name, phone number, Social Security number, and more.
Rather than tediously filling out paperwork, you could have your staff devote more time to essential tasks that utilize their talents. eGeneration offers eLuminate, an easy to use software that includes a document generation and auto-fill component, as a complimentary tool for all of our clients.
Resolve to Sign More Cases Today!
One New Year’s Resolution every firm wants to make is to sign more clients and earn more this year. An easy way to do so is by working with a lead provider. eGeneration currently offers high-quality legal leads in four areas of law: Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ compensation, and employment law.
To discuss our lead pricing and availability, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.