Feed Yourself First This Holiday 5 years ago

You’ve heard the adage about “teaching a man to fish”, or the one about helping plant the corn, or the fruit-bearing tree — well, you can insert your favorite food/work metaphor here since it is the holiday season. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, what better time to challenge you, our attorney friend, to really think about the fruit your tree is bearing. Is there enough to sustain your practice? Does it bear enough to feed your family? Your community? 

 

Taking care of yourself first is not a selfish way to live. It is only through being the planter, someone who recognizes the important stages and cycles of preparation, growth, and harvest, that you can reap enough bounty to take care of your loved ones and community. The same is true with your business today, and especially law. Your relationship with clients, especially the explanation of payment, needs to be taken in steps in order to operate successfully. iQualify’s payment management software takes the most important steps for you. Start using it and get back time and money you might not have realized you were losing. Within 30 days, you’ll be saying “yes” to more clients and start seeing the benefits of your well-laid plans with iQualify. 

What are you talking about and how does it relate to my law practice?

Just as there are no instant-harvests, there are no get-rich-quick schemes. Did you know it takes an average child until 12 to have an intermediate mastery of the English language? Just like having the alphabet down in middle school doesn’t make you Shakespeare, simply being a lawyer doesn’t make you rich. Everything has to grow and be nurtured, including your law practice and your relationships with your clients. iQualify, powered by Fortify, does exactly that. Our client payment management system builds a structure of financial stability into your practice. It doesn’t happen overnight, but rather the changes iQualify brings to your business frees up time and is the key to unlocking the next stage in your law practice. 

 

Doing things in stages helps deliver clarity. Think about Thanksgiving: you have to set the table, cook the food, get the house ready, plate the food…all in stages. You don’t just throw the turkey down on the table before it’s ready. Achieving financial stability for your law practice with iQualify is also a process in stages: 

 

  • Stage 1: you sign up and get the Fortify software
  • Stage 2: getting clients signed up, stress melts away
  • Stage 3: financial stability feeds the office, your family, and community

 

How do we invest in the community and ourselves after that? Planning to support a future we didn’t know we were going to have is difficult. But once you’ve taken the steps to simplify and streamline the collection and payment side of your practice, you’ll find so many more opportunities opening up. You could give your newfound free time to Big Brothers or Sisters, or volunteer at a food bank or homeless shelter. You can make larger donations to your favorite nonprofit or a charity close to your heart. Find some way you’d love to help your community, and, once financially solvent yourself, give back! It’s the perfect way to celebrate the spirit of the holidays.

 

Give iQualify a real close look this holiday and sign up so you can start reaping/harvesting/feeding your law practice sufficiently in 2020. Insert your own food/work metaphor here. 

 

Happy Holidays from iQualify! 

TIRED ATTORNEYS MAKE BAD DECISIONS 5 years ago

Poor choices in finance and billing possibly blamed on lack of sleep…

Aren’t you exhausted? You work a lot of hours as an attorney, with the ABA claiming the average is 60-80 hrs/week. That means early mornings, late nights, lunches at your desk, missing that soccer game, or pushing off the family vacation for another couple of months. It also means there’s never enough sleep and you find yourself feeling tired all the time.

Before you know it, your life is stolen from you by a million little things, not the least of which is your debt load. The costs of not getting paid back for your attorney fees are staggering. When you factor in labor, billing, and reconciliation, you could be making as little as 55 cents on the dollar!

You know what else will keep you up at night and cause you exhaustion? Earning 55 cents on the dollar.

Chasing down clients and/or making collection calls to get them to pay is draining your energy and your bank account. Not to mention you’re probably also dropping clients because of non- payment, which is causing you to lose even more money. The average lawyer worked just 2.5 hours of billable work each day in 2018! (2018 Legal Trends Report, pg. 49)

Stressors like these can lead to clouded judgment and poor choices made… such as the way you’re going about trying to collect your retainer fees. The smartest attorneys (or maybe we should say the most well-rested) are fixing both their financial and stress problems thanks to innovative programs like legal retainer financing.

Legal fee financing takes the work and headache of collecting your clients’ payments off your shoulders and lets you start making more money, almost immediately. You’ve worked hard to build your practice. And with iQualify Lending, you can get rid of the stress of chasing payments and get back to doing what you love – practicing law

Want to see how it works? Reach out to us right now and see for yourself how iQualify Lending can relieve your stress, make more money, and get more sleep.