Three Lessons from The Pandemic – how to cut overhead and not feel the sting

Ah the pandemic.  It taught us so many lessons that we never knew before.  There is a black market for toilet paper.  Sourdough starter takes almost as much care as a newborn.  How to make hand sanitizer (because was sold out too).  And every business owner learned new acronyms, PPP, EIDL, and ERC, just to name a few.

But if we were watching, there were some great lessons that law firm owners could learn that will help their firms grow and be more profitable in the future.  Here are the three that I believe can have the most impact.

1.  Remote Works

Technology has come a long way in the past few years, and COVID was an opportunity for us to all explore it.  Zoom gained traction and even became its own verb.  But I think the biggest fear when we moved to a work from home situation was that employees would become less productive.  The opposite is actually true.  A study coming out of Stanford found that productivity went up 13%.  The same study found attrition rates dropped by 50%.  And that is huge – the cost to your company of replacing white collar educated employees can be anywhere from 50% to 2 times their ANNUAL SALARY.

Another survey found that when working from home, employees cut out 30 minutes of socializing a day.  If you do that math, 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year for an attorney billing out at $350 an hour translates into $40,250.  And all of that goes straight to the bottom line.

Who doesn’t want their billable people to turn over 50% less and contribute 40K more to the bottom line?  Increasing productivity does not mean increasing costs so all that increase goes straight into your pocket.  So unless you have to have clients come to your office, consider getting rid of it or downsizing.  That is a huge expense you can get off your books.

2.  Better Talent Better Price

The second lesson we learned is we have better access to talent.  Right now everybody’s talking how hard it is to find good people.  But I’m telling you that there are excellent people widely available and possibly at a lower price than what you are currently paying.

The response I often get to this is, “Hey Brooke – how is that possible?”

The key here is that we are no longer limited by geography.  When you start recruiting on a national level, you have access to employees who live in remote parts of the US with a lower cost of living than the big cities most of you are in.  A lot of our clients are working staffing companies who specialize in offshore employees for the legal industry.

By hiring remotely, firms are not limited by geography and can hire people with great skills in smaller towns with a significantly lower cost of living so lower salary needs.  We also found that employees are very interested in remote work and will take lower pay to work remotely than if they had to go into an office.

3.  Upgrade Your Client Experience for Less

The last lesson we learned is that we can upgrade the client experience through technology.

Here is something that people knew but didn’t have a solution for before.

·         As long as an employee is doing something there will be errors.

·         As long as an employee is doing something there will be procrastination and possible complaining.

·         As long as an employee is doing something there is a salary involved.  And that is takes money straight out of your pocket.

Clients used to push back against doing everything online.  But since the pandemic, even my almost 80-year-old mother has become much more comfortable with technology.  Clients are no longer annoyed at communicating through email and on the web – in fact, it is the opposite.  They are embracing it.

And this is great news for you.

By automating communication, you can be more accurate, more dependable, and use fewer people.  A CRM program is more accurate, never procrastinates, and is less expensive than an employee.

What can you automate (think of document collection or getting standard questions answered by a new client) that used to be done by an employee?  And once that employee is gone, their former salary goes straight into your pocket.

If you look at all three of these things, remote work, better talent, and upgraded client experience, you will see a theme.  And that theme is quality of life.  The pandemic forced us to slow down, take stock, and make changes to the way we all live.  Generally, this took the form of wanting more “work life balance” or being able to do things on our own terms at our own time.  Embrace these changes as they can create happier employees, happier clients, and less overhead.

So see, there were some good things to come out of the pandemic besides all the new puppies.

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