Are you letting “the way you’ve always done it,” hide the inefficiency in your law practice?

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Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

Earlier this month we defined efficiency in its simplest terms: accomplishing more with less effort. To truly maximize the efficiency of your practice, you need to improve your activity-to-output ratio. You need more output for the same or less effort.

A few tweaks may be all it takes to improve this ratio. Let’s say you vacuum before you dust, not realizing that as you dust, bits of dirt will fall to the freshly-vacuumed floor. By simply switching the order of the tasks, you improve your efficiency AND get a better result. But the problems caused by your current approach can easily go unnoticed if you aren’t thinking about how you clean, if vacuuming first is just the way you’ve always done it.

There are many ways to improve efficiency - automation, delegation, elimination, a change in how you work - but you have to identify the inefficiency first. 

Are you missing opportunities for efficiency in your practice because you aren’t looking hard enough at your habits? Use our free guide to the 8 Ways You’re Losing Time & Money in Your Practice to help you spot the problem areas. Share the guide with your team members and ask them which tasks they find most annoying, tedious, or time-consuming. Armed with this information, you can implement strategies to improve your efficiency and operations. 

So this week’s tip? Go on a fact-finding mission to identify the sources of inefficiency in your practice. Think long and hard about the habits and rituals in your office and ask yourself—and your team—whether you’re missing important opportunities for greater efficiency. 

Legal professionals who improve their activity-to-output ratio will consistently deliver more value for themselves, for their firm and, most importantly, for their clients. Put simply, they’re much more likely to be recognized as true value-driven legal professionals.

And that’s it. Join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice. If you want information like this once a week, sign up below so you never miss a Tip of the Week.

Thanks a lot everybody! We’ll see you next week.