By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Over the past couple of months, we covered the importance of properly hiring and incentivizing your associate attorneys and support staff in order to build and maintain a successful estate planning practice. Now, we will address training. As I’ve stressed in all other aspects of your practice, you must have processes, procedures, forms and systems for everything that happens in your law firm on a daily basis. This includes your marketing, client meetings, work production and work review, as…
What to Do When Your Employees Ask for a Raise?
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach If you’ve ever had an employee approach you randomly and request an increase in their salary, it may be challenging to know how best to respond. While you may be happy with their work, you may be strapped from being able to financially accommodate such a raise. It creates all sorts of fears and concerns around this person walking away if you don’t oblige. Below are some practical tips to help you manage (and avoid) this happening. TIP #1: Create a Process for How and When You Review Compensation. First and foremost, by creating…
Squash the Drama: 5 Steps to Properly Handling Interoffice Conflicts
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach It’s a fact in just about every single office, conflict is going to happen. There are times when the workplace is going to be stressful. There are going to be different people with different personalities and with different things going on in both their personal and professional lives. Regardless of what industry you’re in, but especially in an estate, tax or financial planning practice, what is inevitable is that, at some point or another, there will be conflict. Knowing and implementing the steps to properly handle this conflict, while they may seem obvious and…
64 Years of Combined Experience Running a Successful Estate Planning Practice
An Interview of Phil Kavesh’s Two Most Senior Employees Interview by Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach I had the most amazing experience to go on a trip with nationally renowned estate planning attorney and Ultimate Estate Planning Attorney, Phil Kavesh’s, Law Firm Office Manager (Arlyn V. or “AV”). We went out to Florida to visit with his Senior Estate Planning Paralegal (Elaine A. or “EYA”). Elaine just celebrated her 34th anniversary working for Phil and Arlyn will be celebrating 30 years this August. During our trip, not only did we get the opportunity to stop by a client’s office and…
Drowning in E-mail? Tips to Save Time and Be More Efficient!
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Electronic mail, otherwise known as e-mail, has become a vital and primary form of communication for most businesses. In fact, it’s the very reason you’re probably reading this newsletter article. While e-mail has become a very efficient way to communicate and handle business, it can also become a source of major inefficiency and time-wasting in the office. Think about how much time is spent sifting through all of your daily e-mail. Double or triple that when you come back from the weekend. And let’s not even talk about how much e-mail we come back…
What to Do When Everything is Urgent & Important?
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Too often for most people, there’s far too much to do and not enough time to do it. This requires a balancing act of figuring out how to prioritize your work. For most people, the work that gets set aside are the non-important, but also sadly, the non-urgent and important items. The things that you know you need to get to, but that don’t have a looming deadline to be met. Those tasks will constantly be backburnered into an oblivion, perhaps for eternity. We implement what is known as the “Urgent & Important” (or…
8 Steps to Hiring a Great Executive Assistant
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach An executive assistant is an often overlooked position for many estate planning professionals. I know this because I often interact with a lot of attorneys, financial advisors, and CPAs directly on matters that I also know would be best handled by an executive assistant. Not having an executive assistant means that you, the executive, are often stuck with a lot of daily administrative tasks in the office. And that’s fine if that’s something that you enjoy doing and it works for you. But, for most estate planning professionals, that’s a huge misappropriation of the…
Should You Have a Full-Time Marketing Person on Your Staff?
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law We often espouse the importance of building your firm infrastructure with competent staff, adding first an executive assistant and/or paralegal, then an associate attorney, and then more staff. Having effective staff is the primary way to leverage your own time and output and increase your profit margin. But most attorneys overlook one particular key staff person when building their practice – – a dedicated full-time person to handle their marketing. Everything from making and confirming appointments to managing the…
The Art of Confirming an Appointment
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Knowing the steps of how to properly confirm an appointment – – any kind of appointment, including a phone appointment, client meeting, lunch meeting, etc. – – is extremely valuable to any office looking to continue to operate efficiently and effectively. However, I have found that a lot of people don’t do this (or don’t do it properly) and this can result in a lot of disruption in the office. Whether or not you are the one responsible for confirming appointments, if you know that your office could benefit from a makeover in your…
Are You Fitting Jobs to People?
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Hiring, training, and managing employees have certainly not been easy things to learn when it comes to owning my own law practice. I say it time and time again, but these are the things that we never learned in law school, but yet seemingly take up a great deal of time (and expense) if not done well. One common mistake that I am guilty of making in the past, but that I’ve seen come up quite a bit lately…