We are now well into the dog days of August. The usually bustling New York Supreme Court building down on Centre Street has taken on a peaceful air (more typical of a sleepy rural courthouse) and for the next few weeks there will hardly be a single judge left sitting on the bench. And we hope that means most of our clients have temporarily traded in their pinstripe suits for tennis whites, golf slacks or other suitable vacation-wear.
But wherever you happen to be spending your summer holiday this year, in addition to hoping that it’s warm and sunny, we wanted to take a moment to remind you that the downtime of a few weeks away from the office presents a great opportunity to take stock of how your law firm is doing. With distance from the daily grind, you now actually have a chance to do some thinking about what can steps can be taken in order to really improve your practice, so you don’t feel like you’re always playing catch-up or working from behind the eight ball.
You Can’t Teach Hungry…Creating The Multimillion Dollar Law Firm by John Morgan is a great book about law practice management. It’s certainly not as entertaining as Grisham or Patterson’s latest best-seller, but it is sure to provide a trial attorney with better ROI than virtually any other beach reading material out there. Essentially, it provides a blueprint for how you can build a more profitable, powerful and effective law firm. Brian and I frequently recommend this book to our friends and clients and the response we hear back is almost always the same – I wish I had read this book years ago when I was first setting up my practice.
Let’s face it. We trial lawyers are often procrastinators when it comes to attending to basic business issues relating to our practice – not by choice so much as by necessity. Faced with all the daily pressures and deadlines from our case files, we always seem to lack the bandwidth to address those all-important question of how we can work more effectively. As John Morgan puts it: “One of the most depressing things is often the fact that years have gone by before you have made the changes that are necessary to build the sustainable and profitable law firm.”
But as Mr. Morgan goes on to add: “The Best Time To Plant A Tree Was Twenty Years Ago. The Next Best Time To Plant A Tree Is Today.”
At ESS Settlement Services we very much believe in this this better late than never approach to law practice management. Working with injured parties and lawyers, we are committed to going “ABOVE AND BEYOND” for our clients, by delivering a range of services, tools, resources and advice that can prove instrumental in helping you build a more successful legal practice.
So today we make this simple suggestion. We hope you will take time over the course of this August to read John Morgan’s book. To be sustainable and successful, every law firm needs a plan, and You Can’t Teach Hungry is a great way to begin developing such a plan for your law practice. Get started by planting a few seeds today, and we at ESS look forward to helping you grow the trees in the months and years to come.
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