Your Law Firm - Lee Rosen Of Rosen Institute

20% of our clients cause 80% of our misery. That's 100% accurate based on my observations obtained over thirty years of dealing with clients. Most clients are awesome. They're pleasant to talk to, they do what they're asked, they pay their bills, and they act like decent people. But, a few, just a few are absolutely miserable human beings. Get Rosen's Rules, our free course on the 10 critical rules all successful law firms follow.

When the opportunity presents itself, owning an office building is an enticing proposition for a lot of attorneys. I've asked Arizona attorney Scott Stewart to share the advice he's accumulated from purchasing and owning his own building. Get Rosen's Rules, our free course on the 10 critical rules all successful law firms follow.

Most of us find the standard financial reports unhelpful and difficult to comprehend. They leave us in the dark on knowing if the information means we're doing well or doing poorly. I can't blame you for hitting delete. Why are you paying for these horribly useless reports? Get Rosen's Rules, our free course on the 10 critical rules all successful law firms follow.

Mistakes we make in our practices can be pretty darn big. Not, "I left the clamp in the chest cavity of the dead guy" big but pretty big. Our mistakes usually cost somebody a big bucket of money. We'd love to fix them. We desperately wish the problem would go away. We'd do anything to solve the problem. If only we could fix it right now so the client would never know... Join the Friday File to get actionable advice about management, finance, marketing, and tech for your practice. It's how successful lawyers build law firms.

It's often not the amazing work that gets the review - it's something else. It's something small and personal. It's something that binds us to the client as one person to another. It's the little things.

Client dissatisfaction is much like a virus. It spreads. It infects everyone in close proximity. Your clients know people like themselves, which means they know potential clients, or maybe even other current clients. They talk to each other, then they go online to talk some more. They vent, they complain, and it lessens the chance of future referrals.

When business gets slow, it's easy to sink into that lethargic, stuck in place, tired feeling. There's a solution to that problem and it's going to take you making a commitment to yourself to do something. It takes action. Do one thing, the next thing, and another thing, and you're off and running. But, it's scary. Putting our heads in the sand feels warm, snug, safe, secure and comfortable. Fear is paralyzing. We avoid action when we feel fear. It's tempting to go back to bed.

Too many of us spend too much time studying the problem and procrastinating when it comes to implementing solutions. When the default approach is to simply add the problem to the task list for later consideration then your life and your business are mired in the muck.

Working remotely has become the norm over the last several months. But what about working really remotely - foreign country remotely? I've been doing it for years, and COVID has changed the landscape in terms of both the practicality and ethics of moving from place to place. Is working remotely (not just from home) still a viable option?

Back in the day, like six months ago, holiday events were a dime a dozen. You couldn't stand out from the crowd if you tried. Holiday parties were all pretty much the same. Not anymore.

Every firm needs a system for updating their systems. In a perfect world, system updating will happen spontaneously. The team is using the systems documentation to get the work done so they notice when things need adjusting due to a change. They pull up the documentation and update the text, or audio, or video. Just like that - things are back in working order.

It's entirely reasonable that a business built for one person breaks when it gets to three. It's even more reasonable that a business built for three people breaks when it gets to ten. It's obvious that it's going to happen once someone points it out. It's just tough to see it when it's your life and you're just trying to survive the day.

Maybe there was a time when hanging an "Attorney at Law" sign above your courthouse-adjacent office door worked to get clients. But, if there was such a time and place I missed it. I started practicing law a long time ago and even then we were beyond the hanging out a shingle days of yore. You need to take action if you want people to start looking for you, and no matter what you do to create awareness, it'll be more effective if you target your efforts at a small group of people. That's true because it takes a while for people to notice and remember you. They need more than one interaction. You're going to have to hammer your existence home by repeatedly interacting with the same group of humans.

If you're saying things in your marketing that another firm could say, you might as well not bother. Those things are invisible. Your pages filled with "excellent, experienced, and affordable" are blank to the reader. You might as well leave in the "lorem ipsum" text and stock photos that came with the theme. In fact, you might as well just leave in the fake address and "Business name here" in the title bar. There's no there there. They say nothing. They are erased in the minds of prospective clients.

Maybe I'm just paranoid because I travel constantly. I worry about our technology and data getting lost or stolen. I've spent considerable time thinking through what would happen if we left our things in a taxi or circumstances resulted in our losing our devices.

If a customer vomits in your restaurant, you'd better clean it up as fast as physically possible. There's zero chance you're selling another sushi platter until the sight, sound, and smell of the vomit are gone.

These publications aren't a scam. I don't think they lie to us or cheat us - they just prey on our egos. They're transparent about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and who they're doing it too. Super Lawyers is part of Thomson Reuters so I'm sure they've got great lawyers keeping them out scam territory and firmly in the poking lawyer egos into pulling out credit card territory. They take your money and they massage your ego. I like a good ego massage. It's like flying business class. The flight attendant knows my name, offers me slippers, and gives me hot nuts. What's not to like?

There are plenty of things partners can do together. They can each contribute to the hiring process providing candidate insight and observations. Some partners are better at supervising the accounting. Some are great with technology. Everyone should contribute, but the decision-maker should decide. Contributing is different than deciding.