Learn the Critical Success Secrets of High Achieving Attorneys

One secret of highly successful attorneys is that they make time to plan for the future. We recommend meeting at least once per quarter with your senior partners (even if you are the entire partnership) to evaluate achievements, set new goals and work on your law firm Marketing Action Plan.

Ideally, your firm has already made plans and set goals for the New Year. Many of you are fully geared up to achieve your goals and objectives and make the necessary improvements in your practice and life.

However, many goals made at the start of the year are often forgotten sometime in early March.

Here are 4 rules for legal professionals for staying focused and achieving your goals:

1. Ask someone to hold you accountable. Accountability is key when it comes to keeping your commitments. Whether it's your firm partner, an attorney in a different firm, or one of our business coaches, set up a regular time to meet with someone you trust and who has your best interests at heart and request they keep you accountable.

Simply knowing that they will ask you about your progress every week can make a big difference to a lot of people.

2. Make sure they are S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Timed. A good goal needs to incorporate all of these criteria. It is not sufficient to say "I want to be a millionaire." That statement may be measurable, but does not include time frames, it does not lay out a specific game plan for how you will accomplish this goal, and it may not be realistic for you at this point in time.

An example of a SMART goal is: "I want to meet in person with a minimum of 4 different potential referral sources every month for the next 6 months and ask them to send me business."

3. Make your goals smaller. While this may seem contradictory at first, we have found that sometimes setting a goal that's so big it feels unreachable actually kills your motivation. Break up your long-term goals into smaller ones that you can reach on a regular basis.

For example, gaining 50 new clients in the next 12 months may sound overwhelming, but this works out to about 1 per week. If you know that you convert 50% of prospects that come to your legal practice then you only need 2 new people to walk in your door per week in order to achieve your goal.

4. Focus on the right goals. Whenever I have a consulting client that goes more than 2 weeks without achieving the goal they set, I start asking questions to determine if this is a goal they really feel passionate about.

If there is no commitment to a particular goal it will be very difficult for most people to devote time to accomplishing it. Before you commit time, energy and resource to a goal, make sure it is something you truly care about and that will make a noticeable difference in your practice.