Attorney Bookkeeping: FAQ’s on Clio and Law Firm Accounting Workflows

Hey, I got my first one on my own. Referral system, which works very well. So that's another way in getting more law firm clients. But of course, all of these things that I'm mentioning, whether it's social media, LinkedIn, blog posts on your website, maybe your client is in the Facebook group. You want to look at the demographics and where are they sitting at night scrolling through. That's where you want your video to pop up, or that's where you want your article to pop up. Hi there, Linda Artisani from the Accountants Law Lab. Got a great question this week. And actually this one's not about Clio, but it's also a very good question that I think a lot of people struggle with as they start to build their accounting practice towards specialization and they choose working with attorneys and law firms as their specialty. So let me share my screen. I'm gonna show you the question. Where's the best place to advertise to the legal niche? Great question, right? Where is the best place that you can advertise and try to get more attorney clients? Well, logically, probably the first place you may think of is LinkedIn because it's a very professional social media channel and it's a place where you're going to find a lot of attorneys maybe communicate with each other or network. So it's where you want to go, right? You want to go where they are. So in that thought, you could really make a very professional LinkedIn page. And start to blast some social media there. If you have the ability to do LinkedIn Lives, you could do LinkedIn and start to show and share your knowledge, right? This is where marketing comes in. You need to share what you know so people see that you're the expert in their— in, in your field. So let me share my screen again and I'm going to show you my LinkedIn profile. So here we are on LinkedIn, and you can see that I've got Artesani Accounting Services. You don't have a lot of space here when you do this background, so you really want to make sure that you highlight very high-level things that you want to know about. I'm award-winning legal accountant and a professional speaker. So I do speaking engagements. I actually wrote a book that'll be coming out in January. Business owner. I wanna relate to the fact that I'm a business owner. So when an attorney lands on this page, they know right away that I'm a business owner. Data migration specialist for attorneys. So the word attorneys is in here, and that's important because you want to be able to have them know that you work with attorneys exclusively. And then they can come in here and kind of look and see. I actually have a page for Artesani Accounting as well, and the Proper Trust. I want them to see the Proper Trust 'cause that is the firm I actually spent a lot of time in. I'm sure I could do a lot more here. I have verified my government ID, some suggested for you sections, resources. I'm on creator mode, which turns on that ability to do that LinkedIn. And I've got an article here that was created with Intuit. So you can see that with Intuit, I've got this I have an article that shows me doing a data migration with Intuit and QuickBooks. You can see this is paid by QuickBooks and you can see that this is something I did and as an advertisement for them, which is pretty cool. It gives me some credibility, right? And then I have other articles like, are your books a mess? TikTok, the time never seems to be enough talking about billing software. I've got a lot of followers, which is really important. You start to build the followers. Now the one thing, and some of my posts are here, my latest posts, you'll see here as well. And then if I wanna show all the posts, you'll see I post weekly. So there's a lot of posts every week. You'll see coming up here and you can see that what you wanna put in that top piece is really important because you want them to see that. So if somebody wants to see the Law Firm Rollercoaster article, it's here and they, and it pinged right back to my website. So that's important to do as far as it goes when you're starting to, to work with LinkedIn. Now, is LinkedIn the only place you should be doing your marketing to? No. In fact, LinkedIn can be very annoying. I'll be quite honest. When you start to post to LinkedIn, you're gonna start to see that you get hit up with all these messages, these little tiny messages from everybody trying to sell you stuff. It's probably my least favorite social media to be on, but it is kind of a necessary evil when you're working with law firms and attorneys. And there's a lot more tips. We went in very deeply into how to make LinkedIn a great page for you. And we did that in the Accountants Law Lab. If you join, you get access to the past meetings. We actually had an expert come on and tell us how to make our pages better. And she was on twice. Very, very, very good sessions that we had with Meredith Vieira. So that's one way. Another way to get clients that are in the law firm realm, I'm gonna toss this one over to my good buddy Steve Leipart, Leipart, because he actually did this in his firm. And how he started was he started working, he got close with the local bar association started teaching courses on accounting to attorneys. So they have like Friday breakfast meetings and things like that. And Steve was actually the guest speaker and he started building his business that way. He was getting himself in front of attorneys, telling them and sharing what he knows to help them build their practices and help them understand the accounting side of it. And he's very popular there and he's pretty much the guy in Denver, Colorado. If you wanted to learn about legal accounting, Steve's your guy. So he's, he's definitely. has the story and the resource of how to do this and how to build your practice and get yourself in front of more attorneys. That's one way. You could go to a BNI meeting. So those are meetings that they only allow one industry per person. So if you wanna join, there's already a bookkeeper or an accountant in place, you have to make sure they understand you're something different than that person to be able to get them to kind of bring you into that. And again, that's getting in front of people. That one can be successful. One of the members in our group was pretty successful doing that and building her business, but That one is a little bit more difficult because it's a lot of, a lot of time going to these meetings and you might not get any results from it. Another way is to look at what you're— I always say, take a look at who you're speaking to. So my perfect attorney, my avatar, if you wanna call it that, is a client that is an attorney that has a mid-market firm. So there's multiple partners. I wanna talk to that partner in the multiple partner firm. That's the partner that kind of drew the short straw and is in charge of the accounting side, making sure the workflow, everything's done. Usually it's the, the younger partner maybe coming into the firm that really ended up wanting to automate things because the older partner's leaving the firm. We get a lot of that. So that might lead into data migration because we've got to move them off of some antiquated software into something more modern. That's how they land in our lap. That is a way to And get clients for sure. And how do I reach them? Well, I have to figure out who that person is that I'm speaking to. Then you start to write blog posts to them. You start to write articles like you're just writing letters to them, basically creating videos like this to let them understand. We understand your pain points. We know how to fix this. We're here to help. And don't be afraid of showing them how to do it. First of all, they don't wanna do this work, just so you know. They don't wanna do the work. They might think they do when they come in, and then they start to see how complex it is, and they're like, I better I better hire Linda because she's the one that knows how to do this and she'll do it right. I'll try to do it, but it might not be right. Or maybe you're talking to that attorney that's a solo that's sitting with spreadsheet, and you know how to get them out of a spreadsheet and get them into QuickBooks and get them into some kind of software to get them automated and get them going. So that's another way you can build a practice around getting more law firm clients. Of course, the more that you get and the more that you really have working, you're working with, then they start to refer you, which is a great thing about working with attorneys. They refer each other. They're in, if you work with family lawyers, they're in court a lot and you'll find that they might talk amongst themselves and then they'll say, hey, you know, this is, I found this really great person that does this work. Would you like me to share her name with it? She has a business that does this. So that's a way that you can get yourself in, in on that kind of referral system, which works very well. And I love this. I just heard this from Jason Stats, which is a great person to follow on YouTube, and he said, but you want referrals from the good clients. You want them from the clients up here that you love working with, and not the ones down here. So that's a great thought, because if I've got a client that's— I didn't charge enough for, and I'm doing a lot of extra work for, and they've gone beyond their scope, I don't want more of those. I want more of the bigger ones that I'm helping, maybe helping them get their business going, or helping them, drive their business, helping them with their employer, employer manual, helping them with staffing, helping them with deciding what benefits they wanna give to their employees, that kind of high-level advisory services, if you wanna call it, or business coaching, if you wanna call it that. So that's what I want more of, and that's where the referrals will land. But of course, all of these things that I'm mentioning with it, whether it's social media, LinkedIn, whether it's, working with making blog posts on your website, if you're starting to direct traffic off of being a bookkeeper for all, it takes time. And it took me probably 2 years. I can almost remember that day. In fact, I hadn't get— I had received some client referrals from LeanLaw because I had associated myself with them. I got certified in their product, and they started to feed me some clients, which you may find Clio does this, and a lot of the other software will do that if you stick to one software that you really like and you start to promote it, they start to— one hand washes the other, in other words. And I still remember that day because I had received some leads from LeanLaw. They turned into clients. And I still remember that day because I remember talking to Jonathan Fishman and saying, hey, I got my first one on my own. And it took like 2 years. So it's not a fast thing. So know that it takes time. I hope it's faster for you than it was for me, but that's where it landed. Oh, what? Lastly, before I finish this, Oh, this is a great topic. As you can tell, I love talking about marketing. But the last thing I wanna share with you is, so if I've determined that my partner that I wanna target to is the newer partner in the firm and he or she may be 40 to 45 years old and they have lots of things, they spend a lot of time on really on Instagram and not TikTok and not Facebook 'cause they're not that age group. And maybe your client is in the Facebook age range. You want to look at the demographics and where are they sitting at night scrolling through. That's where you want your video to pop up, or that's where you want your article to pop up. So that's really where you wanna land when it comes to trying to build a client base of more attorney clients. And of course, the last tip I have for you is joining our group, the Accountants Law Lab, 'cause we've got more tips and more ways to help you get more clients. In fact, we share referrals, so it's worth joining the group if not for that reason. So on that note, I hope to see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.