Launching your own law firm is one of the most challenging ventures you can undertake. It’s an entirely different ballgame when the weight of growing a legal practice rests on your shoulders. Your livelihood depends on your ability to attract clients, win cases, build relationships, and build a viable company infrastructure, but the rewards are well worth it all.
One of the most important steps to building a successful practice is setting goals to facilitate the expansion of your business. You have to be able to set company objectives and have the discipline to stick to them if you want your firm to stand the test of time.
Continue reading to get some goal-setting tips that will help your practice to grow and flourish.
1. Your goals should center around growing your client base
Not all goals can impact your company equally. Indeed, a lot of companies waste their efforts by setting goals that make no real difference in the company’s operations, customer base, or profit margins. Setting effective goals means having company objectives that align with your revenue and potential clients.
Marketing is something that a lot of startups and small businesses struggle with, but you have to use every opportunity you have to increase your brand awareness. Most law offices have pocket folders, business presentation folders, business cards, pens, and other office supplies bearing the name of the company or the company’s logo. Simply placing your logo in the right places is a great way to embed your firm into the subconscious of potential consumers.
These days, digital marketing is the best way for small business owners to grow their target audience. Not only is digital marketing much cheaper than traditional advertising methods, but it’s also a more effective way to reach various market segments. The greater your online visibility is, the greater your pool of potential clients will be.
The goal of marketing is to meet people in their own spaces, and social media networks are now the most popular hangouts all across the United States. Building a social media following also means building a potential client base for your new legal practice. Whether you’re a work injury attorney in Chicago or senior counsel for an investment firm in New York, leveraging social media to build your online presence must be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
2. You need to set measurable goals
You must set metrics for achievement when setting goals for your company. Your team members need to be able to gauge their progress as they work toward the objectives you set, and that means they need a guideline to serve as a measuring stick for their efforts.
With OKR objective and key results software, you can employ machine learning algorithms that use your company and individual employee performance data to give you insights into your company’s operations. Whether you want to measure business goals or performance at the individual level, Workboard’s OKR software can help you to maximize your company objectives. With measurable goals, you can use key performance indicators to fine-tune your business strategy for achieving your goals.
Many law firms have had to work remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and they used virtual spaces like Slack and Monday to manage their virtual legal team. OKR software allowed them to align all of their team members toward common goals. Utilizing OKR software allows you to create a robust goal-setting framework capable of supporting your biggest visions for your legal practice.
3. Benchmarks keep team members engaged
You can’t achieve your company goals without employee engagement at all levels. Good OKR best practices will help you measure employee engagement and help you develop techniques to get all hands on deck and in alignment with measurable goals.
If there’s one thing Malliha Wilson has mastered during her illustrious legal career, it’s the art of promoting employee engagement. She’s a founding partner and senior counsel for her law firm Nava Wilson LLP, and she’ll be the first to tell you she couldn’t have built her practice without her dedicated team members.
When you have a team of great attorneys with years of experience, you don’t have to micromanage every minute detail. In fact, the tighter you hold the reins, the more you’ll stifle the creativity and effectiveness of your team members.
The way to get your entire organization in alignment with company goals is to include them in the goal-setting process. Everyone who works for your organization has an idea of how they could perform their job better, and it’s up to you to empower them to be their best by seeking their feedback.
When you give your team members performance reviews, you should allow them to give company reviews, so you can gauge how they feel about the company culture and the direction of the company. Furthermore, when you implement their feedback in the goal-setting process, it will show them you value their input and give them more incentive to act on the new initiatives.
4. Use data analytics to set informed business goals
If you want to set effective goals, you need to have data to help determine where your company’s efforts would be best spent. If you don’t have an overview of your market, industry best practices, your own operations, and customer experience, you have no foundation for your goal-setting initiatives. Furthermore, without critical business intelligence and customer data, you could even say that you’re blindly setting goals.
With big data analytics, you can grow your customer base, expand your operations, enhance employee and team performance, and even find new markets to penetrate. Implementing data analytics into your goal-setting framework is the best way to get the maximum benefits of your objectives.
If you want to grow your new firm into the type of practice that’s always on the tips of people’s tongues whenever they need legal services, it starts with setting effective goals. Your goals need to directly impact your target audience, be measurable, keep employees engaged, and be informed to achieve the desired key results.
Cover photo credit: Sora Shimazaki / Pexels
