In a series of short excerpts from a new book, Dan Warburton shares his insight on how law firm owners and senior managers can increase their profits by being better at delegating their workload. Over the course of the next three weeks Today’s Family Lawyer is serialising Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits with a weekly extract providing practical advice and guidance for firms.
In our first extract Dan sets the scene and his experience of working professional service firms.
Over many years of working with law firm partners and owners to help them effectively grow their firm’s profits (while achieving greater time freedom), I’ve identified one clear trap that most law firm partners fall into – indeed, never break free of. I call it The Law Technician’s Valley of Doom.
It’s where partners are all burned out from working long hours and cannot see how to increase their firms’ profits without working even longer hours.
They cannot stop working, and they cannot take breaks to recharge their batteries very often. They take holidays infrequently because their firms rely on them so much to keep operating.
The solution that set my clients free of this trap, the law technician’s valley of doom, was learning what I call profitable delegation. It’s the skill that my book centres around.
Note how I say ‘profitable delegation’ and not just ‘delegation’. It’s easy to delegate work away ineffectively: to have teams deliver terrible work, miss deadlines and operate half-heartedly. It’s a very different skill to delegate work away and have it handled to a high standard whilst gaining a great reputation and making a firm reliably profitable.
Once a law firm owner masters how to profitably delegate their workload, doors open to new levels of financial and lifestyle success. Instead of primarily sitting at their desks – trying to hit their billing targets – they can focus on building and leading teams of 10, 50, 100 or more fee earners. Each of these individuals can focus on their own billing targets, whether these be fixed value-based or billable hours. Whatever the case, their firms will become more profitable than ever.
In the book, I cite numerous examples of law firm owners I have worked with. They were all under constant, heavy stress and could only see two options (selling their firms wasn’t viable because they still relied on them far too much operationally). The only two options they had were to either continue working exhaustively long hours (as they had done for many years to keep their firms running) or simply walk away from businesses they had worked so hard to build (losing everything).
But change is achievable. In the early days, one of my first law firm owners was a lawyer who provided workplace and employment law solutions. In 12 months, she went from being an unhealthy, overworked law firm owner to increasing her average monthly revenue by 310%. She gained an extra £192,041 in revenue in 12 months, employed her first team members, and reduced her work hours by 41%. She not only increased her profits but had the time to get fit and healthy.
Another project saw one law firm partner generate an 89% increase in his firm’s profits (USD $707,794 extra profit) in less than six months while working half the previous hours.
Another went from working over 80 hours per week to less than 40, while taking her law firm’s revenue from £13K per month to over £90K in less than a year.
Okay, I think you get the point!
Next Week… A law firm owner who succeeds in building a highly profitable business – while having the free time to focus on what matters to them – implements proactive management, not reactive management.
So, what is the difference between proactive and reactive management?
Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits is published by Hawskmoor Publishing
How can law firm owners bill fewer hours but make bigger profits? How can they grow their businesses with reliable team members and take well-earned breaks without worrying their firm will fall apart? The answer is effective and profitable delegation.
About the author
Dan Warburton has spent more than 25 years developing and implementing advanced leadership and management strategies and helping business owners achieve new levels of success. Since 2020, Dan has specialised in guiding law firm owners on how to use delegation skills to gain extraordinary results in their firms. It is not uncommon for Dan’s clients to gain a revenue increase of more than 100% in less than a year while more than halving their workloads. In Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits, Dan brings those decades of expertise together in a must-read, practical book.