Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

8 Resolutions To Start The New Year Fresh

Here are some recommendations for resolutions to get your practice ready for 2017.

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2017 legal tech technologySo we’ve taken a good-will draught for times long past and have moved on to 2017. Maybe you’re a celebrity obituary writer and you had a great year last year. Maybe you’re John Podesta and you had a bad year. Or maybe you’re a lawyer and are so caught up in the day-to-day that starting a new year doesn’t really mean much to you. Heck, few of us even keep paper calendars in our office anymore, so we don’t even have to make it a point to get a new calendar each year. With the time we save by not buying calendars, perhaps it would be useful to evaluate your practice and to make some decisions — you can even call them resolutions — as to some ways to best (or at least more favorably) position your practice for the new year.

Here are my recommendations for resolutions to get your practice ready for 2017:

  1. Resolve to raise your rates. The beginning of the year is the time to do it. If you try to do it in the middle of May, people will wonder what’s up. Whenever you do it, no one is going to be happy about it, but it’s somewhat expected at the beginning of the year. If you don’t do it now, you’ll likely have to wait another year. When your office lease renews, do you really think your rent isn’t going to go up?
  2. Resolve to splurge on one custom business suit.  If you’re going to be raising your rates, you have to look like you’re worth it.
  3. Resolve to get rid of clients who don’t pay. It’s easy to humor clients and let them string you along, particularly the ones who have a history of paying late — but have, in fact, always paid — but anyone who always pays late is a serious risk to eventually not pay at all, especially if the bill has continued to go up. The beginning of the year is a good time to put an end to that. Don’t let the bill get any higher. While you’re planning on sending the come-to-Jesus email, they’ll probably call you with something else to work on, and of course not mention the three-month-old invoice. Maybe you feel like the last thing you worked on for them wasn’t exactly perfect. Maybe you were a couple of days (or weeks) late or there were some errors that got through. Don’t let that stop you from insisting on a payment before doing any other work. Be strong. Say you have to get paid, and you should do it as soon as you pick up the phone and not after you’ve listened to the entirety of whatever it is they want you to do next. Otherwise, when you get to the “pay the bill” part, you’ll hear, “Oh yes, working on that, gotta go, don’t forget to rush on the thing I just talked to you about, bye bye!” Let old acquaintance be forgot.
  4. Resolve to read one “building a law practice” book this year. Maybe you think no one who has authored that kind of book has your kind of practice — and believe me, as a securities lawyer, I feel you — and maybe you’re right, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get absolutely nothing out of a book on running a practice. If you haven’t read both Carolyn Elefant’s Solo By Choice and Jay Foonberg’s How to Start & Build a Law Practice, then I recommend starting with whichever one you haven’t read. It’s been a few years since I started my practice and I’m no longer a solo, yet I still find useful nuggets in Carolyn’s book.
  5. Resolve to follow up with your contacts. I’m good at following up with people from networking events the next morning, but not so good at following up with people I knew years ago who could be helpful now. For most of last year, I had a list of over 20 contacts who I intended to follow up with, and I got so lost in the day-to-day I failed to email even a single person on the list. (I did, however, find the time to add about 10 names to the list during the year.) This year, I’ve pledged to email one person on that list each week. Sounds manageable, right? I’ll let you know next year if it was, but I did email the first person last night, so that’s a start.
  6. Resolve to take inventory of your time. What do you spend most of your time on? Answer this question for your billable and non-billable time. How is it working out for you? I’m not going to suggest dropping everything that doesn’t pay off in under a year, since some of the most valuable things — like building a reputation and a network — take time, but perhaps write down (or, more likely, hope to remember) the things taking up most of your time and take a hard look at whether the time investment continues to make sense. Do you have a lot of small matters that are keeping you from landing larger matters? Can you keep telling yourself you practice a certain kind of law, such as fashion law, if after a year of going to fashion shows you’ve yet to land a significant client? These are the types of questions to be asking yourself as you start the new year.
  7. Resolve to reach out to anyone you wronged last year. Maybe now would be a good time to mend fences so the person is out of your head. Send an email and hope the person is too busy but sends a nice response that he appreciates your reaching out. And if you actually have to meet with the person, well, sorry about that. That’s what you get for taking advice from strangers.
  8. Resolve to wrong some more people this year. You don’t want to get to this time next year without any regrets, right?

Have a great year.

gary-rossGary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.

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