Reboot Your Law Practice: Boost Profits, Restore Work-life Balance and Make Clients Happy in a Changing Legal Landscape
| Publication year | 2018 |
| Author | Erin Levine |
Erin Levine
Erin Levine is a Certified Family Law Specialist and managing attorney of Levine Family Law Group, based in Emeryville. She is also the founder and CEO of Hello Divorce, a platform that empowers users with moderately contested divorces to access the tools, resources, articles and unbundled services they need to manage the California divorce process. Erin and her husband have two daughters, Zoe (age 6) and Mia (age 3).
Have you stopped lately to notice just how much technology and culture are changing around us? You may have noticed the change in your personal life but maybe not your professional life. As lawyers, we're too busy trying to navigate the declarations, legal memoranda, and client consultations that somehow always need to be done today. Why would we need to think about anything other than our work when law practice today is still a seller's market? Two reasons:
- Relevance. If we do not stay relevant in a rapidly changing economy, we risk losing our footing (and therefore our revenue) down the line; and
- Joy. If all we do is bury ourselves in bettering other people's lives, we risk missing out on our own joyful experiences, we fail to modernize our systems, and we remain overburdened with work, which all leads us to lose track of our vision: our ultimate goal for our practice and our life.
Are you seeking a fuller life but with more ease? Read on for several easy ways to modernize your practice, thereby increasing profits and freeing up more of your precious time. But first, let's look at how the millennial generation is impacting the way we run our law practices.
The world is changing rapidly from one dominated by baby boomers to one dominated by millennials—generally, those people born between 1981 and 2000. With this new generation comes new ways of thinking, being and interacting in the world. One might call it the "millennial mindset"— a mindset that puts great emphasis on communications, media, and digital technologies. It's a mindset that is impacting just about every facet of the economy in one way or another, including the legal industry.
The previous generation, "Gen Xers," have largely followed in the footsteps that the legal industry laid out for us fifty years ago. They have accepted the established norms and have willingly played by those rules. But millennials? Not so much. Some of us employ millennials in our legal practices and you probably can relate when I say that they value the ability to question, clear expectations, and transparency. Legal market analyst and blogger Jordan Furlong describes how millennials are changing the very nature of law practices: "The market is changing from a dormant, low-tech, individualistic system to a dynamic, high-tech, collaborative one . . . Millennial lawyers are going to rewrite the DNA of law firms."1
But just as our employees are changing, so are our millennial clients. More and more are marrying, cohabiting (and pooling assets), and having children. There's plenty of evidence that millennial consumers are beginning to use their influence to change the industry to be more in line with their values. Just look to the rise of websites like LegalZoom, Avvo Legal Services, Rocket Lawyer, and now Prenupta, as well as lead-generating sites that connect consumers to limited scope attorneys who have transparent pricing (e.g., www. unbundledattorney.com). These websites may be growing in number, but they are not going to replace lawyers. People will always need real-life problem solvers with emotional intelligence. These websites, however, do give us insight into the millennial mindset—the desire for efficiency, transparent information and billing, streamlined services, and flexible representation. Lawyer and law professor Mark A. Cohen discusses the role of emotional intelligence in law and how lawyers will always be relevant to many consumers: "Legal practice is 'the persuasion business'—whether the lawyer engages in litigation or commercial transactions. Lawyers 'persuade' clients to retain them, opposing counsel that they are highly capable, and tribunals that they are well-versed, and zealous, ethical advocates. This requires a combination of IQ and EQ."2 However, California legal ethics attorney Megan Zavieh offers a word of caution:
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"With the fact that technology and society are evolving far faster than the ethics rules, running a modern firm requires us to keep abreast of more than the ethics rules. We need to pay attention to the discussions happening with regulators...
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