You don’t need to hire a team or an assistant to scale your business. Here’s how I prevented a lawyer from needing to hire a team by automating her operations, so now she can easily manage her growing client list on her own.
If you’re tired of dealing with the headache and overhead of managing a team, this is for you. I'll walk you through a real-life example of automations I built for a lawyer to streamline her intake process, consultation bookings, file organization, and recurring payments. I’ll cover the strategy, the tech stack, and the challenges of this project, and then I’ll give you peak of the final setup in Zapier.
Objective: Scale Without a Team
Let’s start with the primary objective of this project. My client is a successful solo lawyer who was experiencing significant growth in her practice. She wanted to capitalize on this momentum and scale her business while maintaining control over client service quality and operational efficiency. Rather than hiring additional staff she had to manage, she recognized that investing in automation to streamline her administrative tasks was the best way to achieve sustainable growth.
Our strategy focused on three critical areas of her operations: client intake, consultation bookings, and payment processing. By automating these processes, we aimed to free up her time, allowing her to focus on serving clients and growing her practice.
For each area, we identified specific automations that would provide the most significant time savings for her investment:
Client Intake: She wanted to automate the process of adding clients to her Brevo newsletter list when they opt-in on her intake form. Up until this point, she had been manually adding them, which was time-consuming and error-prone.
Consultation Bookings: She wanted her paid consultation booking process to be completely automated, because she books them very frequently. She already had a Calendly booking page set up to collect payments, but then she was having to manually send a confirmation email, create and send the agreement through DocuSign, upload the signed agreement to the client folder in OneDrive, and create a notes file for the client. Automating these steps would make the process entirely hands-off for her while ensuring a seamless booking experience for clients.
Payment Processing: For her subscription-based legal services, she wanted to automate the setup of recurring monthly charges made to clients and the collection of payment methods. It was crucial that all of her clients’ card or bank information be collected and stored securely while giving her to ability to manage all of the recurring charges in one dashboard.
My solution for this project was the build the automations in Zapier. And the best part is that we could build them using the tools already in her tech stack:
Brevo for email marketing
OneDrive for file management
DocuSign for digital signatures
Calendly for scheduling
LawPay for payment processing
PracticePanther as the central CRM and case management system
and Zapier as the integration platform connecting everything together.
Leveraging these tools for the automations meant that we could minimize additional software subscription costs, and she didn’t need to overhaul her systems or change her processes in any way. As a result of these automations, she now has more freedom and time to focus on scaling her business and serving clients, all while maintaining high-quality service without the need to hire additional staff.
Design and Approach
Let's review the strategy and the approach to this automation. I always start my projects by diagramming the process and how it's going to be automated:
Client Intake
Let's begin with the client intake. Once a client or a prospect submits her intake form, the automation will check the field that indicates whether they'd like to opt-in to her newsletter. If so, it will add them to her Brevo newsletter.
Consultation Bookings
For her consultation booking, it always starts out with a booking through Calendly, which will accept payment in return for the booking. Then the automation will send a confirmation email, which includes a list of next steps, and it will send a consultation agreement through DocuSign.
Once the DocuSign agreement is signed, it will create a folder for the client in her OneDrive account. Then it will upload that signed agreement to the folder that was just created. If that folder already exists, it will find it and use that instead. And then it is going to create a notes file for my client to use for note-taking during the consultation call.
But first it needs to check whether a notes file already exists. Maybe this is a repeat client who has scheduled multiple consultations before. We wouldn't want to create duplicate notes files. So the automation will check the list of files that are already in the folder, and if the file is already there, it will not proceed. Otherwise, it will copy a template notes file to the client folder.
Subscription Charges
For the subscription service, the workflow begins with a few manual steps because my client wants to control this part of the process. Usually it will start with either a consultation that turns into her monthly subscription service, or someone will submit her intake form.
Once she identifies that a client is going to sign up for her subscription service, she will send them an email, and then she will create a case for them in her case management system, Practice Panther, with the option type in the name of the case.
She has two different service levels for her subscription service: Option 1 is a little cheaper and it doesn't have as many benefits, whereas Option 2 is a more premium option. In order to distinguish between them, she needs to include the option number in name of the case so that the automation can reference that information later. Then she will manually send a subscription retainer agreement using a template in DocuSign.
Once the client signs the subscription agreement, the automation will create a contact in LawPay, her payment processing system. Then it will send an info request to the client via email requesting either their credit card information or their bank information to be stored securely in the LawPay system.
Once they provide that information, the automation will retrieve that subscription option number in the name of the Practice Panther case. Then it will calculate the subscription amount based on the option type. It will charge the first installment for the current month, and afterwards a monthly recurring charge that will charge them every month automatically.
Zapier Setup
Watch the YouTube video above to get an inside look at the final setup in Zapier, where I discuss the challenges faced in this project and how they were solved.
Conclusion
I hope this has been insightful if you've been looking to scale your law firm without expanding your team. As demonstrated by my client, it's entirely possible to grow your practice while maintaining a solo operation - if that's your goal. You just need a strategic approach to automation and a willingness to invest in streamlining your processes.
If you're interested in implementing similar automations to streamline your operations and free up valuable time, I invite you to book a free consultation with me. During our call, we can discuss your specific needs and how automation can help your practice thrive.
And if you have any questions about the setup I showed in the video above, feel free to leave your questions in the comments of this post or the YouTube video, and I’ll be sure to answer them.
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