When your firm experiences a burst of growth, the initial excitement can quickly turn into frustration if your current systems become overwhelmed and unable to handle the increased workload. To scale your law firm, while avoiding burnout, it is crucial to implement systems designed to support and sustain growth while maintaining a balanced workload.

Today’s Tip: Set Up the Systems You Need to Grow

Welcome to the first in our series on how to set up systems for growth (a version of this article was first published in Attorney at Work)

What do we mean by systems?

You may be thinking legal tech, but systems are so much more than technology. For our purposes, systems are optimized combinations of people, processes and technology that allow you to accomplish tasks in your practice efficiently and effectively.

In this series, we’ll cover what you need to prepare your practice for the growth you want, starting with this article on how systems fuel growth and why you need to invest time creating them — even when you’re busy.

Preparing for Growth … Even When You’re Busy

You can’t scale your law firm business without systems, but when you’re working all hours, you may feel like it’s not worth investing time to create those systems.

But it is, and here’s why.

Systems Save Time

If you don’t have a system or process for something you do more than once, you’re wasting time and leaving money on the table.

Without a system, tasks take longer than they should. You may not remember exactly how you did it last time, so you waste time trying to remember or you make a mistake and have to start over. You may try to delegate it to others, but without a process to follow, it takes too long to explain what to do. People interrupt you with questions or return low-quality work, so you spend time correcting it. All of that is time, energy and effort you could put to better use (like business development, higher-value work or just going home earlier).

Systems Increase Efficiency

Efficiency is having the right people doing the right work the right way with the right tools.

Systems empower you and your team to complete work faster and make fewer mistakes because work is standardized and everyone knows exactly what to do next. Systems also make delegation possible. How? Because a good system includes clear standard operating procedures, or SOPs, that provide people with everything they need to complete a task correctly on their own, without interrupting you with questions or returning low-quality work.

Systems Allow You to Grow and Scale

Systems make growth possible.

Many lawyers spend less than half of each day on billable work. The rest is spent mired in unbillable administrative work. When you experience that growth spurt you’ve been working toward, having systems in place that streamline the administrative tasks will ensure you’ve got more time for the new billable work coming in. And when you’re ready to expand your team, having clear processes and SOPs for your business tasks and your legal work will ensure you can quickly onboard and train new team members, so you’ll be able to effectively delegate legal and business tasks.

All of this will free you up to do more of the high-value work and still have time to develop new business. You’ll finally be able to break free of the feast or famine cycle.

But back to the elephant in the room: You’re already overworked, and creating systems takes time. Is the investment going to be worth it?

The short answer is yes.

Here’s a great table that comes from XKCD.com that sets out how much time you can invest, across five years, on improving your process:

When you’re busy, the key is to start small. As James Clear says in “Atomic Habits,” aim to make your practice just 1% better every day.

Coming Up Next

In the next articles in our series, we’re going to cover:

• Easy ways to create processes and SOPs for your practice.
• What you should delegate and to whom.
• Tips for automating key workflows in your firm.

If you want a head start, download our checklist 22 Processes You Need in Your Law Firm, and do a process audit. Then stay tuned for our next article and learn how to create missing processes from scratch or improve the ones you’ve got.

Today’s Action Item: If you want a head start, download our checklist 22 Processes You Need in Your Law Firm, and do a process audit. 

Join us next week for the next in our series on scaling your law practice. Sign up so you don’t miss it.