How solo firms can prioritize work-life balance and still remain profitable
Attracting a steady stream of ideal clients is the dream of many solo attorneys who lack the resources to do so. If it were possible to develop such a pipeline, your practice would flourish — plus you could spend more time practicing law or being present for your friends and family.
Such a situation is possible, but — we won’t sugarcoat it — can take a lot of work to get up and running. If you’re a solo attorney, you’re undoubtedly hard-working and motivated, but you’re human, too. You deserve to have a life outside of work. If it’s been hard for you to balance professional effort with personal fulfillment, you’re not alone.
Luckily, the infamously workaholic legal industry might be warming up to the idea that life outside of work can matter just as much as what you do when you’re on the clock. In the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2023 State of Small Law Firms report, 84% of respondents say they view work-life balance as a measure of success as it relates to their law firms. That’s a 3% increase from the previous year, and an indication that we are seeing slow but positive change.
If you’re a solo attorney who wants to achieve better work-life balance but isn’t quite sure how to start, here are five tips to try:
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Let AI do some lifting for you
Remember your clients need all of you
1. Prioritize prioritizing
Fighting a battle on multiple fronts is a good way to wind up with burnout. Let’s take marketing, for example: It wouldn’t be a smart plan to launch a blog, new website, and revamped social media presence the same month you attend a bar association get-together or try to go to a family reunion. That’s too much for any one person to handle, and you won’t have anything left over after the workday ends.
Instead, a better approach would be to decide what’s most important — is it that big conference? Getting a new headshot? Updating your printed materials? — and spend what time and effort you have for marketing tasks on that. Once that’s done, you can move down the list (and along the way, calibrate your sense of “available time and effort.”) You can’t do it all at once, and you’ll achieve more if you’re thoughtful and intentional about what’s Priority Number One.
2. Work smarter, not harder
Take some time to think about the elements of your practice where you are most successful — that can mean the matters that are most profitable or the cases you find the most fulfilling. Set concrete goals to work on that and provide you and your firm with specific action items, like the goals outlined in this SMART rubric:
- Specific: Ensure your goals are clear and well-defined
- Measurable: Set metrics so you know when you’ve achieved your goal
- Achievable: Consider whether this goal is possible. Can you realistically attain it?
- Relevant: Determine if this goal is important to your purpose
- Time-bound: Include a starting date and target date to generate urgency
How can you recalibrate your time and energy so you spend more time on things that are successful? It’s not an easy question, and it may take a long time to answer. But if you can realign how you apply yourself, you’ll end up happier in your career and more satisfied overall.
3. Let AI do some lifting for you
Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) can’t do your job for you, but it can make your day-to-day workload easier. Combined with your legal expertise, AI tools can assist you when your creativity is at a low ebb or when you’re overwhelmed with time-consuming tasks.
There are strong indications that the legal industry is opening up to the saved time and effort promised by AI. Data from the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2024 shows AI could free up additional work time at a pace of four hours a week in the next year, with 59% of respondents hoping the time savings would lead to an increased focus on work-life balance.
Additionally, in the Thomson Reuters Institute 2024 Generative AI in Professional Services report, a majority of respondents (44%) said they were hopeful or excited about GenAI’s introduction into their industry due to increased efficiency and productivity. This was especially true for legal industry respondents, who cited efficiency 40% and 38% of the time when hopeful and excited, respectively.
Though there is still a healthy level of hesitancy around GenAI adoption among legal professionals, it’s becoming clear that GenAI tools can trim away low-value, time intensive work — leaving you with more time to spend on intellectually challenging tasks, along with your own needs.
4. Delegate where appropriate
It’s the nature of solo attorneys to think they have to do every single thing themselves. There are parts of running your practice that you can delegate, though, and doing so might free you up to concentrate on more important aspects of your business or areas of your personal life that could use a little more of your attention.
Integrated marketing may not be your strong suit, so you could work with an experienced digital legal marketing vendor to handle a lot of it for you. Then, you could take the time you would have spent on marketing and use it for more important work or time with your loved ones. The investment of resources is a big hurdle for some solo attorneys to get over, but many find that it’s a strategic outlay of capital that is ultimately well worth it.
5. Remember your clients need all of you
You can’t be a good attorney and provide your clients with the service and advocacy they need if you’re stressed out, low on energy, and otherwise frazzled. Of course, many of your clients only know you in your capacity as a lawyer, and hired you for your skills and abilities.
But don’t forget that you can’t deliver what they want if you haven’t taken proper care of yourself. In order to be the best lawyer you can be, you need to make sure you’re attending to your needs as a human, too. Only then can you offer your highest performance, best effort, and top-quality work product. It’s easy to lose sight of that sometimes, but it’s never untrue.
Every attorney needs new clients, and the law firm marketing experts at FindLaw are here to help you make a living so you can have a life. Get started by scheduling a free consultation today.
Originally published on March 8, 2023.
