The Many Hats of the Solo Practitioner: Attorney, Salesman, Marketer, Webmaster, and Legal Answering Service!
By: Frank Cordeira Jr.
Tags: Law, Legal, Lawyers

When working as a solo practitioner, it’s important to also have the business acumen and people skills to sustain your legal practice. Not only will you be responsible for the actual casework as an attorney, you will be responsible for everything else, including marketing your practice, signing new clients, maintaining your website, and fielding phone calls. Some attorneys enjoy wearing all of these hats. Others find it overwhelming and make the mistake of waiting until they have too much work to handle to before they consider outsourcing reception duties, website maintenance, and marketing efforts. Before you start missing appointments and deadlines, here are some tips and tricks you can use to thrive as a sole practitioner attorney without getting overwhelmed.

Develop a Consistent Content Strategy

As a solo practitioner, you have enough to worry about without factoring in your web presence. You need to create a content strategy to market your practice — and stick to it. Ideally, you should craft one tweet per day, one Facebook post per day, and at least one blog post per week. You should also maintain and continually update a contact list of your clients and email them when you update your blog or website — once you ask for their permission, of course. If this sounds like too much work, consider hiring a content writing company or a social media administrator. They will be able to come up with great topics for posts and help you maintain your brand identity.

Ask Clients for Testimonials

Many people search Google to find an attorney, so it would behoove your marketing efforts to ask satisfied clients for a Google+ review. Before you do, however, ask them if there is anything you could have improved upon. If a client says he or she doesn’t have a Google+ account, ask for a handwritten testimonial that you can add to your website.

View Your Business as Something Independent from You

Becoming a successful solo practitioner attorney requires you to learn how to leverage people in an operational way. This means you need to start viewing your business as a separate entity from yourself and make sure that it continues to work for you even after you’ve gone home for the day. This of course requires an investment of knowledge, time and capital, and learning how to run a business without your constant presence. Until you are willing to make these investments, you will always find yourself frustrated by stress or lack of time from trying to fill every role yourself without the technical expertise and the knowledge to do so. You can earn a decent living as a solo practitioner, but until you turn your business into a real law firm and structure and support those who perform work for you, you’ll never find a great work life balance or be able to mitigate risk. This is an essential part of any solo practitioner attorney’s business and will help you greatly in the years to come.

Legal Answering Service

Employing Answering Legal can free you from your phone, allowing you to do the things you do best: practice law and perform for your clientele! In any circumstance where you might need to appear in court, meet with a client, or even sit down to write a blog post for your website, Answering Legal can answer the calls that you miss, ensuring that you never miss the potential new client caller! Our legal answering service is 24/7, so the days of no sleep are over. Wake up to new clients by employing Answering Legal and allowing us to perform the intake when a new client would normally have gone to voicemail. Don’t believe us? Try it out risk free!

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Nick Werker

Nick is the Head Content Strategist, Social Media Manager, PPC Campaign Manager, and the Executive Head Writer at Ring Savvy/Answering Legal, Inc. Nick’s talent for story-telling enables him to write and recognize the type of content users want to read.