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Message: Hi, I thought you might be interested in this article I found. Three Ways to Make More Money As A Lawyer Growing law firm revenue is one of the topics my clients love to discuss. The discussion usually begins with a simple question. A lawyer walks into my office and says: “How do I find more clients?” Finding more clients is only one way to grow your law firm. There are two other ways to boost your revenue. Focusing on just one of the revenue growth opportunities limits your ability to make more money. To grow your revenue you can: Find More Clients Do More Work with Existing Clients Raise Your Fees You can come up with other names for things you do to grow revenue but they all fit into one of these three categories. Law firm marketing strategy is about finding new ways to take advantage of each of these opportunities. Here are some discussion points to stimulate your thinking: More Clients Finding new clients is the most difficult revenue growth opportunity. New clients don’t know you, they have no relationship with you, and they do not trust you. Yet this is the area most lawyers focus on when they think about marketing. They want a greater number of clients. Finding new clients is critical to the success of any business. Client attraction is necessary but difficult and time consuming. For lawyers, the process of new client attraction begins with trust. This often means developing a relationship with the prospective client before he needs your services. It means communicating with him frequently. It means getting referrals from past clients or other lawyers. It means establishing systems that keep you on top of the mind of the people in your network. Finding new clients requires significant time and effort in both planning and execution. The reward can be great because once you have won the trust of the client, they can work with you for a lifetime. More Work With Existing Clients This is an easier revenue growth method than attracting new clients. You can start to introduce this concept at the outset of your initial engagement with the client. If you diagnose other areas of exposure during your initial interaction, you can recommend your firm to help solve those additional problems. This is a definite mindset shift from standard practices for most attorneys. In most cases, attorneys believe the relationship ends when the matter at hand is resolved. In reality, this is when the real relationship begins. There is a lifetime of opportunity waiting for you in your relationship with that client. He trusts you. Invite him to call you with any legal issue in the future. If he comes across something you cannot handle, you can develop your relationship with a referral source (another attorney) by referring your client out. Many attorneys in the consumer practice areas have a hard time with this growth method. Criminal attorneys will often respond to this point with the standard line: “That won’t work for me.” It is true that getting additional work from a person charged with a crime will be impractical (to say the least). But in Criminal Defense, Family Law, Probate (and other consumer driven practices) many of the new clients come from attorney referrals. This means that referral sources should be treated as clients from a marketing perspective. If your practice is consumer driven, you should focus on building the lifetime value of your referral sources. The key element in developing more business from existing clients is, once again, trust. You have to build up the trust the client has in you. If they trust you, the work will come. Raise Your Fees This is the easiest way to grow your law firm revenue yet it is the least used of the three methods. I guarantee you are currently undercharging your clients. If you provide value, your clients will pay for it. If you currently bill by the hour, estimate how many hours a matter will take, add ten percent to that number and offer the client a flat fee. If you are working on a matter that lends itself to charging a success fee, consider that alternative. If you do trial work, consider charging one fee up to the point of trial (if the case settles) and another fee if the matter proceeds. There are two critical elements to raising your fees without damaging the client relationship: 1). Your financial interests must be aligned with the interests of the client. 2). The client must feel as though he is getting a fantastic value. We have only scratched the surface of this complex topic. Look for more in the near future. Link: http://www.rainmakerlawyer.com/site/permalink/three_ways_to_make_more_money_as_a_lawyer/