Even though jobs for lawyers are expected to grow at 8% per year over the next several years, the legal industry also faces major challenges. As noted in Clio's 2023 Legal Trends Report, some of these challenges include that:
- Most attorneys don't bill more than 2.5 hours of client work every day
- Lawyers fail to get paid on more than 10% of what they do bill
- Nearly 70% of law firms don't use AI at all
If you're not consistently looking at where your law firm does well and falls short, you could miss out on opportunities that help you stay competitive, win clients, and grow revenue. By conducting a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis, you can determine what industry trends and individual issues impact your law firm.
Don't make the mistake of rushing through SWOT analysis. By being thoughtful and intentional about how to conduct one and use the data from it, you'll be in a much better position to build a long-lasting, thriving law firm.
How to Perform a SWOT Analysis on Your Firm
A SWOT analysis is an excellent tool for strategic planning, setting you up to make informed decisions from what you find. It can help you build on an existing foundation of your law firm's reputation while maintaining a competitive advantage in your market.
To conduct a full SWOT analysis in your firm, you need an action plan that addresses:
- Why a SWOT analysis is helpful
- What data you'll need to get, including internal and external factors
- How you'll use the information found in the process
- Who do you hope to involve in the process as stakeholders, including people you'll use for the analysis and those you'll share it with afterward
Most lawyers will use a SWOT analysis not just to tell them what they're doing well but because they're looking for a realistic sense of their struggles. This means you need to be objective. Since the analysis starts with looking at your law firm's strengths, it's easy to get caught up in what's going well, but you'll get far more meaningful results by remaining honest through the rest of the assessment.
Strengths
Your strengths are often the easiest section of a SWOT analysis to work through since you likely already know what makes you likely to succeed in your region and practice areas. Your strengths may be things like unique case knowledge, a strong track record, a team of attorneys with extensive experience in the field, or something else. You will probably note several positive attributes for your firm.
Here are some questions to evaluate as you note your strengths:
- What makes your law firm distinct from the competition?
- Which things in your firm are noted by your client base as exceptional?
- In individual cases, what contributes to your law firm's success?
- What are the reasons people hire you or refer you?
- What do you offer that no one else can?
Weaknesses
No law firm is perfect, and yours is no exception. Everyone has room for growth, and an accurate assessment of weaknesses can give you a roadmap for how to improve and grow from your current position. Some weaknesses might be obvious, such as problems with communication that clients have mentioned in online reviews. But don't stop there: really investigate all possible weaknesses to include in your overall list.
Use these questions to guide your exploration of law firm weaknesses:
- Which things are currently blocking you from taking on more business?
- Why have you had issues getting potential clients or keeping clients in the recent past?
- What things about your firm keep you up at night or feel like unsolvable problems?
- In what areas do you or other staff members need more training or expertise?
Opportunities
Your opportunities are the places where you identify the potential to do well. For example, maybe you discover in your competitor research that many estate planning clients are unclear about pricing and find it frustrating that no other lawyers share upfront pricing information. You might use this to develop clear packages shared on your website to help address that gap in the market.
Or perhaps you realize that there are numerous personal injury firms in the area but that no one is addressing those claims where personal injury and workers' compensation intersect. As long as there are enough cases in your region, this is a chance to position your law firm attorneys as experts in these crossover or complex cases.
Here are some questions to consider as you approach the opportunities section of this analysis:
- What unique abilities, interests, or backgrounds can help differentiate our firm?
- What legal changes could impact your firm?
- What events or trends in the legal industry and your practice areas could bring in more new business?
- What technological advancements can be used to transform client experience or the way you do business?
Threats
Sometimes, opportunities might also be threats. In other cases, the threats may be things not currently impacting your firm but issues that could pose problems in the future. This may be the most difficult aspect of running a SWOT analysis since it's not always easy to see what presents risks for you. An important note: most potential threats are truly outside of your control, although there may be things you can do to mitigate their impact on the firm.
Here are the questions to bear in mind for this portion:
- Where is our marketing falling flat?
- Which financial issues, such as cash flow, are consistent problems?
- Why does our competition get more cases than we do?
- What trends or tech have we not invested in yet, causing us to be held back?
- Are there any laws, rules, or regulations that could cause challenges to the way we do business?
Tips for performing a SWOT analysis
When doing a SWOT analysis, it helps to follow some best practices for what works with other law firms and businesses outside the legal industry. Keep these top of mind before running your own SWOT analysis:
- Be prepared to put your ego aside. This is not the time to pat yourself on the back. You'll be far more likely to develop a plan to succeed by remaining honest.
- Look at your numbers first. Get profit/loss reports, marketing KPIs, and other data in place beforehand to keep things objective.
- Involve your team members, who can help see things that a managing partner or owner may not.
- Look at all kinds of data, like reviews, testimonials, social media, surveys, or interviews.
- Look for trends, patterns, and relationships in your data that may help you develop action plans to capitalize on strengths and improve weaknesses and threats.
Using Your SWOT Analysis
It's not enough to put in the work to understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You need to use what you learn and put that into practice in your firm. With your new learnings, you may need to revisit your law firm marketing plan or hiring strategy to account for what you discovered.
If you need help turning your research into a comprehensive understanding and plan for getting new clients and scaling your law firm, Rankings.io can help. We have years of experience helping law firms make the most of their digital marketing strategy. No matter whether you practice criminal defense, personal injury, estate planning, family law, medical malpractice, or something else, we can help you maximize your online presence through things like content marketing and paid ads.
