Running an estate planning law firm can be stressful.

On top of dealing with your clients’ potentially life-changing legal issues and helping them manage their fortunes, you'll be responsible for staying on top of the operations and development of your own estate planning practice.

If you don't have much experience running an estate planning practice, it can be overwhelming at times, especially if you've reached the point where you're ready to start growing.

Growing an estate planning law firm can help you earn more clients, make more money, and ultimately make a bigger impact in the legal community.

But how exactly are you supposed to manage this when you're already juggling so much?

The Challenges of Growing an Estate Planning Law Firm

There are three main challenges of growing an estate planning practice that we're going to address in this guide.

·       Resources. Many estate planning lawyers never end up growing their practice simply because they don't have the resources to do it. Marketing and advertising require an investment of capital, and almost any growth strategy requires an investment of time. If you're so overwhelmed with day-to-day responsibilities that you can barely think about growth, it may seem like growing your law firm is an impossibility.

·       Pace. We also need to think about effective pacing. If you grow too quickly, hiring a ton of new people before you can support them, it could cause your entire operation to collapse. Conversely, if you grow too slowly, you may not be able to achieve the goals you want.

·       Consistency of growth. Finally, we need to address the problem of growth consistency. Estate planning attorneys are often perfectly capable of growing their estate planning law practice to the point where they're able to attract and retain more estate planning clients, but then they reach a plateau and the growth stops. What can you do to make sure you continue growing indefinitely?

Starting Off: Save Time and Money With Legal AI

Let's start by focusing on the resource part of the equation. You need to find a way to gain some extra money and some extra time that you can invest in your estate planning law firm's growth. Fortunately, you don't need an extreme abundance of either time or money, but you will need to find strategies that can help you save time and money so that you can apply them in new endeavors.

Legal AI is one of the best ways to do this. Legal AI is an advanced technology that can help you with countless tasks, including:

·       Estate document production. Wills, powers of attorney, and other estate planning documents become easy once you learn how to use generative AI to your advantage. You'll still need to review them with a fine-toothed comb, but you can save hours of time every week by allowing your AI engine to deal with the brunt of the document drafting process.

·       Legal research. Generative AI is also extremely useful for legal research, streamlining the process and giving you more relevant results faster. Because it's so conversational and easy to use, many lawyers prefer it to more traditional tools.

·       Editing, proofreading, and review. In estate planning, a single mistake could jeopardize everything. Legal AI isn't perfect, but it can help catch mistakes and complement your existing editing, proofreading, and review systems. It's also much faster at reviewing paperwork than your human colleagues. Just make sure a human being gives all your most important documents a final review.

·       Automation. Many legal AI tools incorporate simple task automation to make your life easier. While it's unlikely that this can save you more than a few minutes on each individual task, this time adds up. Given enough repetition over a long enough time, you can save many hours of work.

·       Database management and organization. Legal AI is also tuned for database management and organization, which is especially helpful for estate planning lawyers who need to keep track of documents for potentially hundreds of estate planning clients. No longer will you lose countless hours to tedious database cleanup or archival document management.

Overall, it should spare you from tedious and redundant efforts, it should save you time, it should unburden some of your employees, and it can even help you save money by reducing the number of people you need to hire. If you incorporate legal AI with a couple of other strategies, you should be able to save enough time and money to pursue your growth aspirations.

Create an Iterative Plan

Once you have a system to secure the resources necessary to grow your estate planning firm, you should create a plan for how you're going to grow. Identify the pace of growth you want to achieve, set some specific goals, and loosely draft the needs of your expansion as you begin to see momentum. For example, how many clients can you reasonably take on with your given infrastructure? If you grow by 20 percent, will you need to hire some new people?

It's a good idea to take things one step at a time, so focus on only the first phase of your growth at first. It's fine to speculate about future phases, but keep these plans malleable in case things change.

Earn More Referrals

One of your best options for growing an estate planning law firm is to earn more referrals, which you can earn through several different channels and outlets.

·       Colleagues. Reach out to other lawyers you know and develop your relationships with them. If you encounter anyone who needs their services, send them over. If they encounter anyone who needs your estate planning services, ask them to do the same. Depending on your comfort level and familiarity, you may want to put a formal referral system in place or you may want to keep things loose and informal.

·       Past clients. Your past clients should also be great sources of referrals. If you aren't already doing so, make it clear to all your clients that you're interested in growing your law firm and that you would appreciate referrals to acquire new prospective clients. If you've done good work for them, they'll be more than happy to recommend you to someone else.

·       Networks. Networking can help almost any conceivable professional, but it’s fundamentally important for lawyers. Dedicate at least some time every week to meeting new people in new places so you can earn more name recognition, broaden your network, and discover new opportunities for growth.

Double Down on Marketing and Advertising

Estate planning marketing and advertising are arguably the most reliable way to build your business, since you'll be able to earn more visibility and traffic based on what you invest in them.

To start, you'll need to carve out a niche for yourself. Yes, you're an estate planning law firm that operates in a given region. But what makes you unique? Why should someone work with you rather than another law firm? Work on polishing your brand identity if you haven't already done so.

Your effectiveness is also going to be limited by your ability to reach a specific target demographic and appeal to them. Who are you trying to serve? What are their needs? What are their values? What types of messages and persuasive appeals are going to speak to them?

You also need to think about your competition. You're probably not the only estate planning lawyer in town, so who else is practicing and how are they presenting themselves? How can you distinguish yourself and stand out in various channels?

With those foundational pillars in mind, there are several marketing and advertising approaches that could work for your estate planning law firm:

·       Legal directories. If you haven't already, consider listing your name and your business in multiple legal directories. These days, most people find lawyers by searching online (if they don't have a referral), and legal directories are typically at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). It does cost a bit of money to be featured in these listings, and you'll have to spend even more to promote yourself above your rivals. However, for many lawyers and estate planning law firms in particular, this is more than worth the investment, as even a relatively small amount of leads could justify the costs. Legal directories are also a great source of links pointed to your website, which can be valuable for other effective marketing strategies as well. Try to fully capitalize on your visibility and legal directories by showing off your greatest accomplishments, fully fleshing out your bio, and including a good headshot (whenever you're afforded one).

·       Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization (SEO) is another commonly utilized marketing strategy in the legal space, since so many people search for lawyers online. If you're not familiar, this strategy is all about increasing your organic rankings in search results so that you can generate more organic traffic to your website. To accomplish this, you'll need to choose strategically valuable keywords, develop relevant onsite content, and build backlinks pointing to your website. It's a strategy that demands significant investment and takes time to pay off, but it's also extremely valuable when it comes to generating organic traffic that's relevant to your business. Competition can sometimes be a problem, but if you focus on local SEO, you should be able to mitigate the problematic aspects by limiting your competition.

·       Pay per click (PPC) ads. Pay per click (PPC) ads allow you to promote yourself while only paying for traffic you actually generate. Using Google, Bing, Facebook, or another platform of your choosing, you can place your ads in front of your specific target audience and practically guarantee new traffic to your website. It's a bit more expensive than some of the other strategies on this list, but you'll have precise control over how much you spend and what type of traffic you generate.

·       Social media marketing. Some lawyers also take advantage of social media marketing, promoting themselves and their business by sharing valuable information across social media channels. LinkedIn is great for networking, Instagram allows you to reach a massive audience with visual content, and Facebook makes it easy to create and manage a business page; almost every social media platform has something to offer lawyers interested in promoting themselves. Note that you can pay for advertising, but most social media platforms have free options for businesses as well; this makes social media especially attractive to lawyers trying to grow their estate planning firm on a budget.

·       Email marketing. We also need to give a quick shout out to email marketing, which is arguably the cheapest estate planning marketing strategy on this list. Cultivating an email list organically is difficult, but once you have one, it can be an excellent opportunity to deepen your existing relationships and generate new leads.

Start Fleshing Out Your Team as Needed

As you begin to grow your estate planning law firm, you'll gradually come to need more people to support you. Try to stay as lean as possible to avoid growing too quickly or overspending, but do be ready to hire people when you need them. You can mitigate the tension between bigger workloads and existing infrastructure with some types of technologies and tools, but at a certain point, you'll need more lawyers and paralegals to assist with your needs.

Analyze and Adapt

Make sure you measure and analyze your marketing efforts in all these areas. Soon, you'll recognize that some of your estate planning marketing strategies are paying off more than others, and through experimentation, you'll gradually learn what types of tactics work best for your target demographics.

The iterative process of analysis and adaptation is the only way to preserve your law firm’s growth indefinitely. Anytime you feel like you're reaching a plateau, look at the data to see if you can figure out why you stagnated. And if you want to accelerate your growth even further, consider investing more in whichever strategy seems to be paying off the most right now.

Are you eager to start growing your estate planning law firm with AI tools and technologies?

Or do you have pressing questions about how to achieve the best results?

We’re here to help. Contact us for a free consultation today!