Category Archive for: Lab Insights

How to stop competing on price

The pressure to discount rates has never been greater. Yet studies of complex sales like legal show that less than 10 percent of decisions are based on the value-to-price ratio: So why has price become the cornerstone of so many conversations between lawyers and their clients? There is no question that legal budgets have become…

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Why Relationships Aren’t Enough to Build Your Law Practice

Referrals are the primary source of business, but a strong network and the ability to build great relationships will not be enough to build your book in the coming years. The buying behavior of those who purchase legal services has changed and the way lawyers pursue new business must change too. For any lawyer that…

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Building a $1-million Law Practice

Do you have what it takes to build a $1 million law practice? As law firms become more business focused in response to economic, technological and other market forces impacting the practice of law, the ability to generate business is increasingly important. Whether it’s $1 million, $10 million, or $250,000, most of us have a…

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Taking the Guesswork out of Marketing and Business Development

The legal industry is famous for lookie-loo marketing. They watch what their neighbor does and say we should do that too. The problem with this approach is multifold. First, there are only a handful of firms that see the return on marketing investment time and resources that they want. Second, it assumes all firms have…

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Using Competitive Intelligence Effectively

Despite the financial downturn and increased competition, it continues to surprise me how few lawyers effectively use competitive intelligence to evaluate market opportunities. Lawyers instead look for opportunities where they have found them in the past, wait for opportunities to find them, or engage in random acts of marketing without clearly identifying who they are…

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The LVS Law Firm Performance Index

As a follow up to my Moneyball and the Law series addressing whether statistical data is a better measure of law firm performance than subjective insight, I’m introducing a new framework that tests this hypothesis. The Law Firm Performance Index™ To achieve the highest level of performance, law firms need to understand the outward-facing factors…

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Moneyball and the Law: Understanding the market

Part 3 of a 5-part series By Debra Baker “I do not start with the numbers any more than a mechanic starts with a monkey wrench. I start with the game, with the things that I see there and the things that people say there. And I ask:Is it true? Can you validate it? Can…

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Moneyball and The Law: Measuring Art

Part 2 of a 5-part series By Debra Baker “Baseball was theater. But it could not be artful unless its performances could be properly understood. The meaning of these performances depended on the clarity of the statistics that measure them.” – Michael Lewis, Moneyball Like baseball, the legal profession is as much art as it…

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Moneyball and the Law

The first of a five-part series. By Debra Baker Competition for a share of the legal services market has never been greater. Most firms struggle to identify how best to use limited marketing and business development time and dollars. Too often firms use subjective criteria when making decisions. They do what they’ve always done without…

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Why Vision Matters to Practice Groups

It’s December. The time you stop and wonder where the year went. I’ve been fortunate to have been extremely busy this year, but that is not an excuse to lose sight of my long-term goals. With winter just around the corner, now is the opportunity to refocus on priorities and develop a plan for the…

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