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Strategies for small-firm success: implementing a solid business plan, including steps for marketing and managing profitability, can drastically improve a small firm's chances of making it.

Article Excerpt
Over half of all small and sole practitioner law firms fail--close up shop, go out of business. Read that sentence again if it did not sink in. That's a staggering failure rate.

Why? Are the successful firms run by better lawyers? More talented litigators? Attorneys who are better at persuading a judge or jury? Absolutely not. Small law firms fail because the lawyers at their helm ignore the cardinal rule of running a law firm: It's a business, first and foremost.

The business of law isn't taught in law school. It's rarely written about in the hundreds of legal publications, it's a minimally popular continuing legal education topic, and it's not passed down from mentor to protege. And yet it's by far one of the most important aspects of running a legal practice.

Modern businesses have become strictly value-based, and their new buzz-word is efficiency. Although this is excellent for the consumer, it applies a multitude of pressures on the business owner.

The only way to maintain efficiency in the new legal landscape is to have a strategy in place. As the famous adage states, "Failure to plan is planning to fail." An apt analogy is that running a successful law practice is similar to managing litigation: You start with strategy and follow it throughout the case.

Most, if not all, lawyers who start their own law practice focus solely on clients and cases. After all, clients and cases are why we became lawyers in the first place, and they pay the bills and keep the lights on.

But there's another aspect of our practice that we cannot ignore, something on which all law practices should be founded. It's the business plan--a holistic strategy detailing and organizing all aspects of running a successful law practice. These include serf-identification, marketing (not just what, but how), and managing profitability.

While there is no standard form for a business plan because each law practice is intrinsically different, all successful plans share certain characteristics. These features can provide a starting point for framing your firm's strategy.

Goals, strengths, and weaknesses

Any lawyer can hang out a shingle and wait for clients. When asked about business goals, however, it's likely he or she would be at a loss for words--a rare state for the average attorney.

"To make money" is not a good answer. It might be a personal goal, but you would be hard-pressed to find a small-firm lawyer or sole practitioner who doesn't have that personal goal. It is not a business goal.

Business goals are more specific. They range from serving a particular legal niche, whether topical or geographical, to increasing access to legal services for a particular...

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