Growing your practice is a worthy goal, but you need a plan of attack and a consistent approach to achieve it. Business development is an ongoing process, so your law firm may hit a plateau if you’re not continually assessing its position, strategies, and opportunities. With the right tactics, you can build the foundation for consistent growth and success and turn your firm into a profit-generating powerhouse.

5 Ways to Grow Your Law Firm

Figuring out how to grow your law firm is a process that impacts your client base and income generation. The work you do to generate more business will also lay a foundation for streamlined and efficient law firm operations and communications. This, in turn, impacts both your profitability and scalability.

1. Get Help from Your Current Clients

Lawyers often forget to tap one of the easiest markets for new clients. Existing clients are using your services for a reason, and if they’re happy with your work, they’re likely to refer new customers to you. It might only take asking the right question to get a referral.

Keeping an ongoing list of referral sources and periodically scheduling time to reach out will help you proactively and consistently generate new business. 

2. Use Email Marketing

To grow your law firm, you’ll want to build marketing strategies beyond word-of-mouth referrals. Nurturing your community of clients, industry partners, and other professionals through an email marketing list will boost your reputation and generate more business. 

Email blasts and newsletters can promote specific services, announce events, and provide educational resources. Email marketing has proven to be one of the highest returns on investment of all marketing tactics. In fact, for every dollar spent, email marketing generates a $38 return, according to Campaign Monitor. With that ROI, email marketing belongs in every firm’s growth plan.

3. Create Efficiencies

Streamlining workflows and using automation where possible frees up time for everyone to focus on high-level tasks rather than recurring ones. Before hiring more staff, try optimizing your existing workflows. Technology for law firms simplifies everything from scheduling to forms, accounting, legally binding e-signatures, and client payments. These tools are often cheaper than hiring personnel.

Standardizing processes also helps you streamline and strengthen each function. An efficient workflow could mean parsing out the different stages of the client journey to relevant staff based on the required time and skill level and then automating aspects like creating intake forms and getting signatures. Creating a standardized process enables everyone to know what they’re responsible for and the status of each task so that nothing falls through the cracks.

4. Get Active on Social Media

Social media offers the ability to reach large audiences with little investment other than time. Being visible on social media also helps grow your lead generation. The first step to attracting leads is increasing awareness of your firm and services. Social media lets you market your services while building relationships with your audience. 

LinkedIn is an especially effective tool for maintaining a referral network. Because LinkedIn is a professional platform focused more on business than other social media tools, attorneys can batch-create marketing messages and send them to large lists of connections, reducing the need to contact people individually.

Creating social media content that is helpful to your audience will drive the most impact for your firm. Content like thought leadership pieces, videos, infographics, FAQs, or downloadable guides related to legal topics will generate interest in your practice and demonstrate your expertise.

Authenticity and value speak volumes online, so no matter what your content looks like, your marketing efforts should be consistent, reflect your firm’s personality, and reinforce your commitment to your clients.

5. Take an Authentic Approach

When planning how to grow a law firm through different business development initiatives, you can easily get buried in a mountain of tasks you don’t want to do.

Instead, a better approach is to focus on what you enjoy and build your growth plan around those areas. As mentioned above, authenticity is one of the surest paths to success. While you’ll always have to do tasks you don’t enjoy, that doesn’t mean your entire plan must be defined by them.

Schedule more networking meetings and attend more events if you enjoy speaking with people face-to-face. If you miss writing something other than legal briefs, commit to publishing and promoting a batch of thought leadership articles each month. If you love talking about what you do, look for more in-person speaking opportunities.

Set Yourself up for Success

There is more to being a lawyer than practicing law. Building your business requires a range of skills and can take many paths, but using these techniques can lay the groundwork for a thorough growth strategy. You don’t have to use every tactic, but gradually testing and implementing these strategies for how to grow a law firm will bring you closer to more clients, revenue, and long-term business viability.