Bankruptcy lawyers are currently experiencing a boom in business such as has not been seen in years. Small practitioners are finding themselves flooded with new work, and new lawyers are entering the field faster than ever before. The economy is in the toilet, and consumers need help.
To some extent, the main concern is how to get the work done without losing your mind. The phone rings off the hook, new clients pour in the door (assuming you’re marketing with any degree of effectiveness), and the court calendar fills up fast.
How the heck do you get all the work done and manage the staff effectively? My answer for the past number of years has been:
The Best Way To Staff A Bankruptcy Practice Is One Dollar At A Time.
What this means is that whenever you’re taking on a new client or task, opening up a new office or hiring a new staffer (real or virtual), your first inquiry needs to be one of how much much it will cost to accomplish the task versus how much money it will make to do so.
This is, after all, a business. Make money and you live to fight another day. Break even or lose money, and it’s curtain time.
Turning down a new client or working without that new legal assistant can be tough to do, though. We bankruptcy lawyers tend to run on a treadmill like little gerbils, always sprinting to catch that next client for fear the phones will go dead next month.
But think of it this way. If you take on 3 new clients this month above what your staff can reliably handle, you’re going to need to either pay overtime or hire someone new. That costs more money than the additional income from those three cases. Maybe you “cheap out” and decide to just work everyone that much harder. What happens then? Reduced productivity, sloppier work product, and a downward spiral into the abyss.
One simple way of managing your practice one dollar at a time is to plan ahead whenever possible. If you see that things are growing by leaps and bounds, take the time to sit down with your existing staff and find out how much more they can reasonably be expected to handle. If they’re close to the breaking point, start looking for a virtual assistant to take on some of the well-defined tasks while you determine if it’s just a blip or a long-term growth pattern.
If you’re experiencing a long-term growth pattern, watch for a few months to see where it goes. If you have a virtual assistant who is handling the overflow more cost-effectively than a staff member then “keep on, keepin’ on,” as they say. But if you can see the tipping point (financially) coming in short order, start looking for an in-house staffer now.
By beginning the search before it’s an emergency, you won’t feel the pressure to hire the first person who crosses your threshold. Take the time to interview wisely so that you minimize your chances of making a bad hiring decision.
In taking care to keep the costs of personnel in balance, you can keep more dollars in your pocket while maintaining a consistently high quality of work product.
Photo courtesy of pfala.
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