Before great achievements can be made, great goals have to be set. Goal setting may seem simple, but the wrong approach can lead to setbacks, disappointments, and an inability to follow through.

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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.

Last week, we talked about the importance of balancing urgency vs importance and recommended that you set goals for your practice for the next 12 months. But not all goals are created equal. Today, we’ll show you a method for selecting goals that are more likely to succeed. Set SMART goals.

To increase your chances of success, use the popular SMART method of goal setting. That means your goals should be:

• Specific,
• Measurable,
• Attainable,
• Relevant, and
• Time-based

Specificity means that you should avoid vague or broad goals such as “make more money.” What counts as money: retainers or paid invoices? Will you make that money by attracting new clients, increasing rates, or by improving your collection efforts?

Making your goal measurable ensures that you can clearly determine when you’ve met your target. For example, “earn $100” is easier to measure than “make more money.”

Goals should be attainable or achievable. Setting unrealistic goals is demoralizing, so make sure your goals are things you can actually accomplish…but are still challenging enough to inspire you and keep you working hard to achieve them. 

For the same reason, goals need to be relevant. You should be able to tie your goal to your business plan or to your firm’s vision or mission or you’ll end up feeling like you’re working in vain.

Finally, goals need to be time-based and the timing needs to make sense.

Here’s an example of what we mean:

Your Not-So-Smart goal might be: Increase the firm’s online marketing activities to 10x our website views.

But a SMART goal would be: Improve the firm’s online visibility by establishing a blog on or before June 30 and publishing 1 post per week in Q3 and Q4.

The SMART goal is specific about the activity that will be done. The frequency of posts allows you to measure success. The goal of establishing and maintaining a blog is attainable and there are no grandiose expectations of traffic (which should ideally be a separate goal). The goal is relevant because it ties into a larger desire to improve visibility. Finally, the goal is defined by time-based limitations.

After you’ve determined your bigger, SMART goals, it’s time to break them down into actionable tasks. These smaller tasks should also be time-based and represent milestones on your implementation journey. Next week, we’ll talk about setting timelines for these smaller tasks and how you can use Matter Management Boards to streamline the implementation process.

So this week’s tip is to set SMART goals before you start thinking about implementation. If you’re working in a team, allow team members to be a part of the goal setting process. This will also increase your likelihood of success. 

Legal professionals who set SMART goals 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 professionals.

And that’s it. Join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice.

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Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.