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Your Bankruptcy Practice, And Defining Success

July 23, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Your bankruptcy practice may be successful and you may not know it. Or it may be a failure and that may elude you. How can you tell?

To some people, success is filing the most bankruptcy cases. To others, it’s having the largest staff or nicest offices. But in order to attain success, you need to define what success means to you.

I used to think that success was having a good staff with a specific number of new clients coming through the door each month with money in their hands. And for a long time, that worked for me. Until I realized that this wasn’t the definition of success – it was a road to lead me to some pre-conceived notion of what success would feel like.

To be in demand is an ego boost, to be sure. But at a certain point that demand becomes overwhelming. Too many clients to see in a day, too much work to do, and too many staff members required in order to get that work done.

In the words of the esteemed business consultant, Notorious B.I.G.:

I don’t know what, they want from me
It’s like the more money we come across
The more problems we see

Sure, you’ve got more clients. More money. More staff members buzzing around the hive. But you’re saying goodnight to your kids from the cell phone as you drive home, exhausted and beaten down. You can’t remember the last time you didn’t have to work on the weekend.

Success Has A Price, But It Is Pre-Set

You need to realize this one going in. There’s a cost associated with more clients – in fact, a number of them. More demands on your time. More overhead. Less time for your family and friends. Less of an ability to concentrate on a particular legal issue before you need to move onto the next client file.

I’m not saying it’s a bad price, but it’s one you need to know before you set yourself onto a particular path. We each get 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. Into that narrow space we must fit everything, work and personal lives inclusive. The space does not contract, nor does it expand. When the time runs out, it’s gone.

For some, the larger practice is the way to go. It provides a sense of comfort and accomplishment, of safety in numbers. Take in 3 fewer clients this month and it’s not a big deal.

But for others, the choice is a smaller practice with fewer clients. This enables the lawyer to focus on a single client’s issues more closely, to investigate every angle, and to work with less overhead. The loss of a single client may be more disruptive, but chances are that the work thrown off by the others will compensate adequately.

Haggle First – Or Feel Like A Rube Later

You know the price of success at each level, and you know that in order to scale you’ve got to incur a cost. It’s best to sit down and haggle with yourself to figure out what you’re willing to pay in exchange to attain your goals. And once you do, it’s purely an arms-length transactions with yourself.

That’s easier said than done, though. You may not realize the true costs until you’re hip deep in the process of attaining your defined goals. In that case, remember not to go into debt to yourself. You’ve agreed to pay up to a certain price, and you’ve got nothing left to play with past that point. It’s time to scale back until you balance the books.

So tell me – what’s your definition of success? And what price do you pay in pursuit of that goal?

Photo credit: Jeff Hester (flickr).

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: bankruptcy, cell phones, consideration, define, define success, defining, economics, goals, marketing, more bankruptcy, practice, success, successful

4 Microsoft Outlook Hacks to De-Stress Your Law Practice

July 13, 2010 By Deborah Savadra

Law Firm Microsoft Outlook Hacks Just looking at your overflowing Microsoft Outlook inbox gives you a headache, doesn’t it? But the good news is, a little inbox management can go a long way toward decreasing your email-related stress. Here are four tricks (for Outlook versions 2002 through 2010) to get you some relief:

Use subfolders. The easiest way to de-stress your inbox? Move already processed emails from the inbox to appropriate subfolders. Your subfolders can be based on client, matter, project, or whatever organizational scheme makes the most sense for your practice.

To create a subfolder, make sure your Inbox is selected, then click on the File menu and select Folder, then New Folder. Name the folder and click OK to finish.

Flag emails for follow-up. Don’t let yourself forget to reply to or re-read that important email! Use flags to remind you to follow up.

You can either right-click on the message in version 2002 and 2003 and choose Follow-Up (the resulting dialog box will allow you to choose from a list of appropriate actions, like Follow-Up, Read, or Forward), or click the Quick Flag on the right-hand column of the message (versions 2007 and 2010) and choose when you want to be reminded with a pop-up.

Managing The Bankruptcy Practice – Does It Scale?

February 16, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

When you’re setting out to manage your law firm, the one thing you need to ask is whether a particular process or procedure scales. That is, whether the management process you put in place today will still be valid when you’re pushing out 30, 40, 50 or more cases each month. Whether your Chapter 13 case management procedures will still work if you’re doing more above-median income cases (or below-median ones, as the case may be).

For most bankruptcy lawyers, the answer would be a resounding no – their case management system doesn’t exist because they don’t see a need for it to do so. And that’s something that spells potential ruin for your ability to manage your bankruptcy practice as it grows.

When I first started practicing bankruptcy law my case management system was … somewhat extreme in the eyes of the casual onlooker. I instituted a (then) complex filing system with file numbers for all client matters, colored subfolders and forms for action items (mind you, this was before everything could be managed online). My intern (yes, I had an intern even before I had a lot of clients) thought I’d lost my mind – why do so much work if there were only four clients in the entire office?

My logic, however, was simple. If I put the system together before I needed it, it would function when I did need it.

Three years later I was working on 30 bankruptcy cases a month and there was no early way for me to remember everything I needed to recall. The crush of information was too great. But with my system, all went smoothly.

So here’s the thing – when you look at a file, ask yourself whether you can possible remember every aspect of it when you’ve got 100 or more just like it. If the answer is no (and it will be), you need to formulate a way to document the nuances. Intake documents, checklists, cross-referencing and tagging play an important role in keeping the system scalable.

We each have our way of organizing our thoughts, so yours will likely be different from anyone else’s system. Regardless, you need to take action now – before things get out of control.

Photo courtesy of picknjim.

Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: bankruptcy, bankruptcy law firms, business, filing systems, law, managing, practice

Starting A Bankruptcy Law Practice – What’s The First Step?

March 13, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Lots of lawyers are thinking about starting a bankruptcy law practice. After all, the news keeps telling us how the economy’s in free fall and that people are in worse shape than ever before (at least, worse than they’ve been in a long, long while).

But what’s the first step?

Do you need to know bankruptcy law? The best computer software? The right organizations to join? The perfect books to buy?

Sure, that’s all important – but it isn’t the very first thing to do.

The first thing – absolute, positive Step One – is to make sure you’re cut out for it when thinking about starting a bankruptcy practice. Know thyself and all that.

You need to know how to market your bankruptcy practice. Because if you’ve got all the knowledge but no clients then it’s all an academic exercise. And I’m morally opposed to exercise (though I’m starting to go to the gym, it’s because I feel the creaks in my bones and not because I’m so in love with it).

You can put up an ad, a website, produce a fancy TV and radio commercial, dress up in a suit and play the part. But unless you attain an understanding of your own motives those legal marketing efforts will ring hollow with your prospects. And if it isn’t genuine, it isn’t going to work.

Let’s take a step back.

Have you ever gone into a store and been approached by a really good salesperson? He knows all about the product, the specs, the bells-and-whistles. He gives you his speech, works out the price, and pretty much does everything right. Yet when it comes time to open your wallet you stop and decide against it.

Something just isn’t right. The sales pitch is good, but you’re just not feeling it. You can sniff the bulls**t, and accordingly take a step back.

Other times, you can walk into a store and meet a salesperson who may not do everything right – he may not know everything about the product, maybe his pricing is a little high, his tie is undone, whatever. But there’s SOMETHING about this salesperson that just . . . clicks.

He gets you. He understands your needs, and seems genuinely interested in getting you what you want. Bingo, he gets the sale.

Same thing here. If you start a bankruptcy law practice but don’t personally believe in using bankruptcy as a solution and a tool for financial rehabilitation, you’re not going to be genuine. You may talk the talk well enough, but you’re not going to be able to walk the walk.

Maybe you’ll do OK for awhile, but your prospects will smell it – just like a dog smells fear. Your marketing will fail at that core level, and your consultations won’t ring true. They may not be able to put their finger on it, but they’ll know something isn’t right. And you’ll lose the client to someone else.

Don’t be a bankruptcy lawyer for the money. Don’t be a bankruptcy lawyer because it’s the latest, hottest trend. Don’t do it because the bottom fell out of your real estate practice, or because your business has dried up.

Sounds all “new age, touchy-feely,” I know. But if you can’t get behind something 100%, if your heart isn’t in it, all the other stuff won’t save you.