Practice Area Criminal Law

Hi there. Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting and The Proper Trust. This week is the last week and we're going to finalize. We went through all the different practice areas and really the bookkeeping nuances and also some of the advisory pieces. So some of the accounting work that we would do with a client, talking about KPIs and different ways that we would set up a file to help the firm grow. This week it's all about growth. So when you're working with a criminal lawyer, I find that with most of the criminal lawyers that we have on our— with our firm, they tend to be solo practitioners. And I'm not quite sure why. There's probably some kind of psychological reason why that is. They spend a ton of time in court. A lot of times they'll have to go to the jail to meet with their client, or they have to go to the hospital to meet with their client. And then these times, it's usually when the clients— our client's client, or the law firm client— is in crisis. There's something happened in their life, there's a DUI or some other thing that's caused or triggered that they need to hire this attorney to help defend them in court. These attorneys spend a lot of time in court, so they're not at their desk a lot. So you really need to come up with a system. This is why we like Licio, a system where The client can reach out to you and be able to upload documents for you and really be able to communicate with you securely. This is why we use Lucio at our firm. We've got that all nailed down. One of the other things about this type of law firm is that there is— when these people are in crisis, they might not have the money to pay for a lawyer. So you have to look at ways that the client's client or the law firm client can pay the attorney on the spot. We like Gravity Legal for that. So Gravity will give the option to either pay by credit card. A lot of— there's a lot of credit card monies exchanged that way because of the fact that the client is in trouble. They need to pay the attorney and get that retainer in. So Gravity is great for that, especially if you're using LeanLaw. It's integrated in backend, in the backend, or you can use Clio Payments if you're using Clio. We find a lot of these attorneys will use a system like Clio because it's the all-in-one package. They can have their documents accessible to them. It's cloud-based. They have their calendaring, the reminders. There's a lot there, which is why a lot of the clients do pick Clio or they'll pick LeanLaw and maybe use an alternate source of being able to put all these things in place in the system. We find as well with Gravity, it gives the client the ability to maybe make payments over time. So because maybe they don't have the room on their credit card, they make a payment upfront, then they pay per month, maybe an evergreen style scenario. Or they'll have the ability to pay almost like progress billing. They'll pay with payments like that, and they will do it in that fashion when you work with these type of attorneys. So there's a lot of smaller amounts moving around. These tend to be shorter cases. So we're not looking at like a PI firm that goes on and on and on for multiple years. You're looking at maybe a lot of the states have laws in place that require that these cases move along quickly. They might be 90-day cases or 180-day cases. We do see with these law firms that because they know what it costs to defend the DUI first offense, second offense, third offense, they'll have a menu style with the price of this is going to cost X, and then this is going to cost X. This may complicate it and add to that. So you'll see almost a menu style of what the services are, so the client knows upfront it's going to cost me $2,000, or it's going to cost me $1,000 first offense. So you have that in place. I'm just throwing numbers out there. I actually don't know what that costs, but that's what we see at some of these firms. So there'll be a set fixed fee, and that works really well. It's a lot easier on our side too, and it doesn't box the client into hourly, and it's better for the client. They know what it's going to cost in the long run for the whole matter or case. For KPIs, we definitely track how the clients find you. It's a little bit different than finding from the other firms. So you might get a lot of referrals if you have referral-based. Definitely have a good reputation when it comes to that and servicing your clients, taking care of them, having empathy, and being very sincere and respectful in the whole engagement. You'll also see that maybe they are advertising on billboards or advertising in certain places that these might be where people would find them automatically. My brain is going to Yellow Pages, but this would obviously be Google. We don't have Yellow Pages anymore, or it's online, but it's gonna be somewhere where that person can find you that if they're in trouble, They're not going to spend a lot of time finding an attorney. They usually have a short window to find them. So Google advertising might be what you need. And then for KPIs, you want to track the cost by matter, especially if they're using fixed fee. You're going to track— they're going to track their time, but it will be non-billable. But we'll get a metric there to see exactly how much was invested in this client to see if it was profitable. Is it a profitable service? You can kind of direct your income that way. So there's a lot of things we can look at. Marketing spend is definitely a KPI you want to track, see how effective it is. You have that person or that form. If it's online, get a nice online intake form or methodology. There's plenty of them out there for law firms. That's helpful when you're doing this kind of work because they'll be able to do all of this online in less face-to-face interaction. They can do it on their phone if they're in trouble and they're in the police station. You wanted to make it easy, less friction. more apt for the firm to, you know, for someone to hire you in that fashion. Obviously, having 24-hour accessibility is important on this type of law firm. Harder when you're solo, but there's things out there cloud-based that we can help you set that up with. So that's about it on learning about a criminal lawyer. You want to have this all preset. If there's multiple attorneys in a firm, obviously tracking income by the attorney is important. And then of course, Profitability by Matter and Marketing. Those are the big ones. So I hope that's helpful. Obviously, setting up your QuickBooks is important in this kind of a law firm, all of them, actually, all the practice areas. So I hope this is helpful. Any questions or comments, please reach out. If you're that kind of attorney, you need help with your accounting or your bookkeeping, reach out to us. We can help you with firm growth and help you with setting up your file properly. We are also going to start next month. We're going to be working on Clio and learning about Clio and Clio settings and Clio just setup. So hopefully that will help you in the next few weeks. If you like our video, please check that you liked it, subscribe. We'd love to stay in touch with you. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.