In the fast-paced world of legal practice, every minute counts. For attorneys at small- to medium-sized firms, maximizing billable hours is not just a goal—it's a necessity for sustaining and growing their practices.
And yet, amidst the demands of client representation, case preparation, and administrative duties, there's one often-overlooked drain on precious billable time… the free consultation call. While offering free consultations is a common practice aimed at attracting potential clients, the reality is that many of these calls do not result in billable work.
Instead, attorneys find themselves investing valuable hours into meetings that fail to convert into paying clients. This inefficiency not only eats away at billable hours but also disrupts their workflow and impacts morale.
Luckily, there's a solution on the horizon—virtual assistant services! By leveraging the support of skilled virtual assistants, attorneys can streamline their client intake processes, minimize time spent on unproductive consultation calls, and reclaim valuable billable hours for more profitable endeavors.
Here’s how:
Content Creation:
You want a strong digital footprint for your firm and for yourself as an attorney. You want to create a persona that is known and easily recognizable as an expert in your field of practice.
Creating free, ungated content—like blogs on your website or organic posts on your social media—is a good way to draw in a wider audience. By narrowing down what you write and post about, you can tailor your content to your ideal audience… People who would be good contenders to become paying clients.
Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing is where we take content creation to the next level. It’s time to start marketing yourself as an attorney who can and will solve problems for your clients.
Your knowledge and your time are valuable assets that aren’t to be wasted on tasks and free calls that won’t lead anywhere—and why waste those efforts on learning digital marketing from the ground up when you can instead work with people who do it for a living? That way, you can get the payoff while still focusing on your own work.
Digital marketing is great because, depending on your goals, it will reach a wider audience than those who are already connected to you on LinkedIn (although referrals are also a good way to find potential clients).
You can cast a wide net and target clicks to be the ones you want… those that will actually convert into paying clients for your firm.
Lead Generation:
When it comes to finding and nurturing leads, attorneys have historically not had many options other than the free consultation call. But when that goes nowhere, that’s an hour wasted with no payoff.
By entrusting lead generation to skilled professionals, you can tap into specialized expertise and resources dedicated solely to prospecting and qualifying potential clients. Lead generation assistants employ targeted strategies—like proactive outreach and relationship-building efforts—that build upon the digital footprint you’ve already established through digital marketing and content creation.
Through research and data analysis, these services can effectively filter out unqualified prospects and focus efforts on those most likely to convert into paying clients. That means efficiently filling your pipelines with high-quality leads.
Client Intake:
Efficient client intake processes are essential for attorneys to manage their caseload effectively and maximize billable hours. Outsourcing client intake tasks to virtual assistants means streamlining the process between converting a lead and beginning actual case work.
From the moment a potential client reaches out, a dedicated personal assistant can step in to manage communication, schedule consultations, and gather essential information. By acting as the initial point of contact, virtual assistants can prepare intake forms, gather relevant documents, and facilitate a productive discussion between the attorney and the potential client.
Then comes the follow up. It’s crucial to implement systems for tracking and follow-up to ensure that no leads fall through the cracks. By offloading these administrative tasks, you can devote more time and energy to providing personalized attention to clients, ultimately leading to higher client satisfaction and increased opportunities for billable work.
Administrative Tasks:
Gathering documents, sorting emails, and scheduling appointments are all things that would need to happen after making contact with a lead and converting that lead to a client.
These things can take time, especially if you have more than one new client coming on at once. So why not bring someone in who can handle that for you, saving you time (and money) by streamlining the process for you?
Supercharge Your Billable Hours:
With the help of a team of virtual assistants—each trained in a specific area of expertise—you can take back hours of your day that you would otherwise spend sorting, posting, clicking, and talking into the void just for it to not lead anywhere.
Now, you can guarantee results with no extra work on your own plate.
And most importantly, eliminate the need for the dreaded free consultation call.
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Written by Jordan McAndrew