As we approach the end of 2022, you’ve likely been thinking about your New Year’s resolutions. While many people consider kicking a bad habit or pursuing a healthier lifestyle, resolutions often look different for businesses—and tend to go by a different name: goals.
One of the most common goals of family law firms is to secure more positive outcomes for their clients, from happy adoption finalizations to future-focused divorce agreements. But while client outcomes are vital to the success of your firm, the new year is also the time to plan for bigger-picture goals such as making operational changes, improving services, and growing your practice.
Each law firm has unique goals, but they all have one thing in common: they require a thoughtful strategy and deliberate execution to set and achieve those goals. Let’s take a look at some actionable steps you can take to achieve your law firm’s goals in 2023.
Goals for your family law firm
Every business is unique in the way it operates, its size, and its budget. Even the location of your firm can affect the goals you set. For that reason, it’s essential that you weigh what’s best for your business—what’s right for one family law firm may not be practical for another.
If you’re a small family law firm and it feels like you’ve maxed out your clientele for child custody cases, you might consider expanding the scope of your services to include a complementary practice area, like guardianship.
Alternatively, if you’re a firm that has grown more quickly than expected, you could find yourself overwhelmed by an excess of work. As a result, you might want to think about how you create a better work-life balance for yourself and your staff.
Additional family law firm goals for 2023 may include:
- Adding more clients in a specific practice area
- Improving client retention rates
- Expanding CLE opportunities for attorneys
- Increasing revenue
As you set goals, though, make sure they’re SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Otherwise, you may find yourself struggling to make progress, and losing time and money in the meantime.
Steps to achieving your 2023 goals
Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to come up with a strategy to achieve them. We recommend following the basic steps described here.
Identify clear KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to achieving your law firm goals. They allow you to better understand and measure your progress, as well as recalibrate strategy when necessary.
Your KPIs should be tailored to the goals you choose for your family law firm. For example, if you’re focused on increasing your revenue in 2023, you would want to monitor KPIs like:
- Monthly billed revenue
- Total firm debt
- Collection rate
- Length of accounts receivables
- Estimated current operating costs
- Estimated annual revenue
- Net overhead
Identify what tools you need to help achieve your goals
Setting and achieving goals isn’t an act of sheer determination. You need to use the right tools to keep you on track throughout the process. At a minimum, your law firm should consider using:
- Legal project management software
- Time and expense tracking tools
- Analytics and reporting tools
- Law Firm CRM
Because working toward goals can be complex, it helps to choose legal software solutions that integrate with one another. For example, TimeSolv integrates with the law firm client relationship management tools Law Ruler to assist with keeping your marketing efforts easy and your intake process seamless.
Track your progress on goals
Even the best-laid plans of law firms can quickly get buried underneath piles of paperwork or flooded inboxes. To avoid getting waylaid, consider implementing the following three measures.
Create detailed projects in your project management software
With its ability to create tasks, templates, workflows, and deadlines, project management tools facilitate progress on everything from daily tasks to big-picture initiatives—provided you use them.
Before you get started in 2023, make sure your goals are mapped out in your project management software. Whether you are making use of project management tools in your practice management software or built-in tools to time-trackers like TimeSolv, having a detailed roadmap to your goals makes them easier to accomplish.
Pro tip: use your project management software with built-in time-tracking to set time budgets. This will ensure you don’t go down a rabbit hole and spend hours on a task that should only take you 30 minutes.
Set up accountability check-ins
Just as project management tools help you stay on track, so do accountability partners. Whether you’re collaborating with a colleague on a particular goal or tackling a project on your own, create a standing appointment with a colleague or mentor to look at progress, troubleshoot issues, and assess your strategies.
As you share your progress with your accountability partner, make sure to:
- Share a tangible timeline for your goals
- Follow up on commitments to one another
- Keep an open mind when you get feedback
- Stay honest—and positive—in your input
If your accountability partner is a member of your practice, this can have additional benefits because they should also be using the same legal software. This gives you more transparency regarding your progress and also helps you both offer support and encouragement.
Make use of reporting features in your legal software
Reporting can be a secret weapon for setting goals. That’s because analyzing your reports on KPIs helps you understand whether you’re making progress on your goals.
Find ways to make time to work on goal-related projects
Legal professionals are busy enough as it is with family law matters. How do you find time to work toward goals, particularly when it comes to non-billable tasks?
While there is a lot to be said for efficient time management techniques and strategic delegation, task automation is another valuable tool you can take advantage of.
Automating tasks can save your law firm countless hours of busy work each week. What’s more, there are numerous legal tasks that are well suited to automation, such as:
- Client intake and onboarding
- Document management
- Meeting and appointment scheduling
- Client communications
- Email drip campaigns
- Task management
- And more!
One of the best things about automation? It can be entirely customized to the needs and workflows of your practice.
Learn more about how TimeSolv can help your family law firm meet 2023 goals
TimeSolv’s legal time-tracking and billing software can help you achieve a wide variety of goals for your family law firm going into 2023—whether you need to get paid faster, increase billable hours, or better organize your documents.
To learn more about how our industry-leading software can help your law firm, sign up for a demo or a free 30-day trial today.