What are your goals for starting a law practice?

You may wonder why I’m asking you what are your goals for starting a law practice. One of my favorite quotes from Alice In Wonderland pretty much sums this up:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where-” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Everyday that you wake up, you have choices about what you are going to do, and how you are going to do it. We all have the same number of hours in the day. How you choose to fill them is going to be up to you.

If you don’t have the faintest clue where you are going with your law practice, then what are you going to do each day to work on your law practice? It doesn’t much matter, does it?

But if you have a solid goal of generating $10,000 per month in revenue, then you can start to put together a plan of how you are going to get there. Only then can you take affirmative action to work toward those goals.

Gary Keller, chairman of the board of Keller Williams Realty and a best-selling author, wrote an illustrative book entitled “The ONE Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results”.In this book, Mr. Keller discusses, among many other things – the topic of setting goals.

Goal Setting to the Now

One of the topics that Mr. Keller discusses in “The ONE Thing” is the idea of Goal Setting to the Now. You are probably wondering what that means. It’s a pretty easy concept, really, and will change your outlook on your law practice. As described by Mr. Keller, the idea is this, “set a future goal and then methodically drill down to what you should be doing right now” to get you to that goal.

If you think about it, lawyers do this all the time. When we get a new client, we will map out what has to happen on that case to get you to trial. Working our way back from the scheduled trial date, we will prepare an outline of each and every task that must get done to prepare for trial, along with deadlines for each task.

Goals for starting a law practice

The same technique can be applied to your goal setting for your law office.

Let’s say that your goal is to build a small law firm with gross revenues of $500,000 per year. We’ll call that your “someday” goal. The question that Mr. Keller will now ask you to consider is this – based on your someday goal, what one thing do you need to do in the next 5 years to get to that goal? What one thing do you have to do in the next year? Next Month? Next week? Today? Now?

It is important that you take a minute to write down these goals, and then you must start speaking them outloud. Doing this will help to train your mind on how to think about your goals and how to start to connect your one goal with the next goal so that you can determine what one thing you need to do “NOW” to get you to your monthly, yearly, 5 year and “someday” goals.

If you have some ambitious goals you want to share, feel free to post them in the comments below.