Operational Excellence: Your Blueprint for Law Firm Efficiency and Growth

By Christy A. Schmidt, Esq.

Attorneys know how to navigate precedent and craft arguments. Among others, the challenges we face can include client and market demands, pressure to remain competitive in fees and services, and overworked legal staff demanding better working conditions and increased benefits.

Consider your typical work week. You likely spend a significant amount of time planning, budgeting, networking, volunteering and building community connections, marketing, drafting blogs, managing the staff, producing invoices, chasing payment, attending CLE courses, and fixing the copy machine!

Beyond legal practice management, you need time to live your life—eat well, sleep, play a round of golf or pickleball, have a spa day, or attend your kid's baseball games. To find this balance, operating a well-run law office is imperative. You need sensible policies and effective procedures.

Let’s explore the importance of law firm efficiency for your bottom line, your career satisfaction, and the mental health of you and your team.

Case Study:

A year into my solo practice—despite hiring an office manager and a paralegal—I was working “eight days a week.” Plenty of clients were pouring in, yet my team and I were perpetually cranky and under pressure. Every case was a “trial.” (Pun intended.)

I was mirroring the processes I had learned at my previous firm. So, why now was everything so hard and exhausting? Perhaps what I was mirroring was the reason 62% of attorneys find tracking progress and outcomes lacking or inefficient.

I pressed pause and took a long, hard look at how I was running my business.

That’s when I discovered operational excellence.

Let me share how implementing operational excellence secured steady growth, maximized efficiency, and delivered measurable results for my firm.

What Is Operational Excellence?

Operational excellence is a business efficiency model focused on systematically improving processes, optimizing resource utilization, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Ultimately, this model is about delivering optimal value to your clients while minimizing waste and reducing costs.

Efficiency is not about doing less, rushing through tasks, or setting pre-deadlines. It’s about proactively adding smart systems and procedures to eliminate friction and add value to every action.

Who has time for all this planning? You do. With just a few hours of initial planning and a small monthly commitment, your firm can lay the groundwork for operational excellence, meaningful efficiency gains, and a strong return on investment—better work-life balance, higher job satisfaction, exceptional client service, stress-free deadlines, and an end to those “eight-day” workweeks.

The Pillars of Operational Excellence for Law Firms

1. Mission-Focused Effort

Avoid oversimplifying the definition of outcomes as “superior client service.” Calling the client back, meeting deadlines, honoring attorney-client privilege, and not using trust money on a new office rug are inherent ethical mandates. Both profit and reputation are essential to your business’ existence.

Consistent client referrals and paid invoices are the result of superior service and targeted effort.

Operational excellence requires mission-focused effort. To implement effective policies and processes, you must constantly focus on defining and fulfilling your law firm’s core mission. Realize, too, that your business objectives include work-life balance. Regularly re-visit your mission statement and business plan to guide where you put your effort.

Consider:

• How is your current work-life balance?

• Is your firm living up to its deeper mission? (Helping the community, social justice, reputation, compassion, a welcoming environment, tenacity…)

2. Team Culture

Your instinct might be to implement and enforce policies. Pause. Collaboration and a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and shared commitment are necessary for operational excellence.

As a managing attorney or firm owner, you may have a limited, top-down perspective and could miss opportunities for improvement only experienced by others. Insights from team members can be insightful. Also, enforced change is rarely well-received. When your team plans together, each member will own and take responsibility for that plan.

At my firm, we launched Monday morning team meetings—coffee in hand and healthy snacks on the table. Here, we talked openly about what was working, what wasn’t, and how we could improve. Those conversations set a positive, forward-looking, and productive tone to start each week.

Consider:

• Get comfortable with sharing control and delegating. This becomes easier when you have a team that you can trust.

• Entrust appropriate team members with responsibility as key decision makers.

• Choose a team member who can lead your operational excellence program. This person can receive and review feedback, track metrics, and free up your time.

• Schedule regular feedback sessions where the team can review data together.

3. Data-Driven Management

Policies and procedures—and tech adoption—should not be reactive. Proactive, data-based decisions are key to sustainability, effectiveness, and crisis elimination. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your law firm must be mission-focused and precisely tracked.

Before you implement any change, identify and gather key data and track trends. Three to six months of legacy data will likely give you an adequate picture of what you are doing well and where you need improvement. Going forward, use the metrics that provide the most insight.

Consider:

• Where are you spending too much? Too little? Examine hard and recurring costs.

• How can you improve billing? Examine invoice production time, invoice errors, and aging.

• What practice areas are profitable or unprofitable? For example, I stopped doing name change matters as we always lost money. We also created intake standards for what cases were desirable or undesirable.

• Analyze billable hours versus non-billable hours. How do you make each minute of your firm’s time more valuable? Also track time spent on administrative tasks (generating engagement letters, making copies, preparing forms).

• Investigate absenteeism and employee turnover. Do you or your team members often feel miserable, stressed, or sick? What if your paralegal could work from home when her kids are sick?

4. Process Optimization

Once you have support from your team, and have identified key metrics, the team can examine and solidify workflows. From initial intake to payment and archive, pinpoint where errors or backlogs occur and identify key persons, decision points, and decision makers along each workflow.

Identify both physical and procedural gaps or barriers. Many will be obvious, but some process-killers are sneaky:

• Your paralegal uses the printer and copier in the front office, wasting time during a trek back and forth.

• You regularly run out of paper, ink, and envelopes. Is it time to digitize more of your workflow?

• Each morning is a scramble of who is doing what (often including the alarming: “I didn’t know that was due today!”)

5. Purposeful Technology Adoption

Only after you have sketched and optimized your processes should you consider technology adoption. Building a tech stack for your law firm should never be reactive or as a boast of “we use such-and-such.” Tech must directly solve a problem and/or optimize a process.

Consider choosing legal software that can help you:

• Streamline intake, communications, and marketing

• Offer online payments and automatic email reminders

• Automate workflows and tasks

• Produce, track, and analyze KPIs and financial reports

• Share calendars and critical dates

• Provide remote access to matters and communication

• Summarize, perform research, or produce documents

Resistance to Results

I sense your hesitation: My staff will resist. We are already overworked. Training staff on new software is daunting. I don’t want to waste time setting up workflows and automating documents…

However, you must consider the potential return on investment.

My firm’s efficiency audit—and the subsequent implementation actions—happened in year two. By year four, we became a staff of eight (eventually capping at fourteen). My team and I had an incredible work-life balance. Billable time reached over 65%, and the profit margin proved it.

And we kept that Monday morning meeting—snacks included! This provided the environment for continual improvement, open conversations, and secured morale.

As we wrap up, here’s a quick recap of the principles that drive efficiency, resilience, and profitability. Keep them front and center as you put operational excellence into action at your firm.

4 Practical Steps for Implementing Operational Excellence:

1. Talk with Your Team: Start with those open-forum weekly meetings. If you have a large firm, consider starting with practice groups with representation to leadership teams.

2. Identify KPIs: Perform a statistical analysis using three to six months of legacy data. Continue to track those metrics, scheduling monthly, quarterly, and yearly evaluations.

3. Implement Smart Processes: Integrating efficient procedures requires trial and error. Be patient and avoid reactivity. Plumber’s tape might seal a drip—but it won’t stop a flood. Instead, you must locate the source and thoughtfully build a dam that guides the flow in the right direction.

4. Keep Improving: Invite every team member to contribute ideas. Many of the best solutions will come from paralegals and administrators.

Ultimately, despite the inevitable bumps along the way, implementing operational excellence is one of the best investments you can make at your law firm.

About the Writer

Christy A. Schmidt, Esq. serves as the Adoption Manager for AI and estate planning at LEAP. She operated her New Jersey solo law practice for twenty years where she specialized in business formation, funding, and management; estate planning and wealth conservation; real estate; elder law; and tax law.

A Communication professor at Monmouth University since 2003, she has published several textbooks and one novel. She also contributes marketing, business, and tech articles to several publications—lately focused on AI ethics.