Solo Contendere

What did you resolve this time last year? Most people make the same New Year’s resolutions every year, and if (as the Supreme Court says) corporations are people, then your business ought to be making New Year’s resolutions as well.

A completely unscientific Google search of “New Year’s resolutions” reveals the most popular resolutions people make every year. When those people are the owners of small firms, however, their resolutions can do double duty. What resolutions can small-firm practitioners make that will benefit their businesses as well?

Spend more time with family and friends

Network, network, network. Everyone says this. There’s a reason for that. Small firms cannot compete with large firm marketing budgets and will get a smaller share of cold calls: people with no personal connection who just Google “lawyer” and click on the top link. Most small-firm clients come from referrals: from our friends, family, family friends, business associates, business associates of family friends … and so on. In short: networking.

So make your New Year’s resolution this year to spend more time with family and friends — and remind them what you do. When your cousin whom you see once a year asks what you have been doing this year, don’t just remind him you are a lawyer. Be specific. Once the holidays are over, keep it up: Spend one hour a week getting in contact with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. If your family and friends don’t know exactly what your practice area is, most likely no one else does either. Your firm will benefit, and so will you.

Fit in fitness

Even though it’s never fun to think about, exercising good client communication is key to any small business. We’ve heard all the excuses. We’ve made all the excuses. You don’t have enough time. Something always comes up. You can’t get on a good schedule, or haven’t done it in too long, or are too out of shape. Sure, you bought that Constant Contact membership six months ago, used it once and haven’t used it since. But that’s not enough.

Exercising good client communication is good for your firm’s health because it turns the smallness of your firm into an advantage. A small firm means a more personal relationship with your clients, which is one big advantage smaller firms have over larger ones. If you don’t exercise good client communication, you are trading away that advantage and the corollary advantage of increased client satisfaction. Planning 15 minutes a day of good, medium-intensity client communication will make a huge difference building your firm’s strength.

Tame the bulge

Is your firm budget a little bloated? Probably. These days people are trying to tighten their belts. Without a boss looking over your shoulder or an accounting department to harass you, it’s easy to spend money without ever taking a hard look at what you’re spending. But a hard look at your budget will help you trim the fat off your spending habits.

Take a minute to look. Could you use an e-fax service as effectively as a dedicated fax line? Vonage instead of a landline? Are you biting off more Westlaw than you can chew? Worse still, are you going out to lunch every day or happy hour twice a week and calling it a “firm expense”?

Most experts agree that crash diets don’t work. You don’t have to cut essential functions or stop spending money on marketing to rein in your budget; you can start by cutting the little things that add up. Cutting $25 a month by using an e-fax service, $50 a month on a landline and $100 a month by bringing a sack lunch adds up to $2,100 a year. And who couldn’t use that?

Quit smoking or drinking

British writer Clement Freud once quipped that if you quit smoking and drinking you won’t live longer, it will just seem longer. How does a law firm quit its bad habits? Procrastination or over-researching briefs; taking on too many projects; staying in the office too late; turning things in just under the deadline: It’s easy to become addicted to bad practices, and once you’ve started it seems impossible to quit. Sometimes, the stress of these habits can be as bad as the habits themselves.

So make a plan. Set a “quit date” and work toward it. You don’t have to quit your firm’s bad habits cold turkey; start by tackling one project at a time. First get your daily schedule under control: Make a schedule and stick to it. Next lay out a timeline for projects and set intermediary deadlines. Before you know it, staying late at the office will take care of itself.

Once you finally kick these bad habits and lose the stress that goes along with them, you may not actually have more time, but it will certainly seem like more.

Learn something new

How far behind are you on your CLE reporting? Honestly? It’s easy to think of CLEs as a trip to the dentist’s office — or a trip to the emergency room, if you realize in a panic two weeks before your reporting date that you are 12 credits behind. You cram in whatever is available in those two weeks, try to stay awake through a mind-numbing breakfast CLE that you have paid $175 a credit for — and is nowhere near your practice area.

Don’t wait until the last minute. Preventative CLE planning is far more beneficial and less expensive in the long run than waiting until it is an emergency. Plan ahead, look on public websites (and in this paper) for upcoming CLEs, and you will find that you might be able to learn something interesting while learning something new.

Every year we make resolutions; some we follow through with, some we don’t. The point is: Sentiment is not enough. Wanting to make ourselves — or our firms — better is not enough. We need to get specific. Want to cut the fat? Set a target weight or a target budget. Then look at what you are eating or what you are spending, and trim the excess. Check up on how you are doing every month. Remember that falling off the wagon once does not mean that you have fallen off for good.

New Year’s resolutions are about hope, and in this economy everyone, especially small firms, needs a little hope. But by making a plan we turn a resolution into something infinitely better: a goal. Of course, sticking to the plan is a different story, but that is … well, a different story.