Strengthen Your Law Practice with These 5 Insights from Recent Court Reporting Conferences

Since the start of the year, we’ve attended major national conferences by the National Court Reporters Association and the National Network of Reporting Companies. What we learned during these sessions can benefit your law practice too!

The sessions we attended were taught by industry leaders and range from practical business advice to detailed information on what to do during emergency situations. We know we learned a lot during these events, and we’re excited to share this knowledge with you.

1. Plan to run your business forever. Act like you will sell it tomorrow.

First and foremost, we want to make it clear we have no plans whatsoever to sell Stewart Richardson. But, what we learned in a session from Navigare is that the mindset of “Planning to run your business forever, but acting like you will sell it tomorrow” can benefit your business. By planning to run your business forever, this helps you to “focus on long term decisions to build sustainable value.” When you also ‘act’ like you’ll sell your business tomorrow, you can improve your margins and develop a strong infrastructure.

2. In order to achieve business excellence, you need to understand that you become what you focus on and become like who you surround yourself with.

In a talk on Achieving Business Excellence, keynote speaker John Spence discussed effective business strategies, the importance of culture in your firm, the elements of a high-performance team, and more. Part of his talk was emphasizing the importance of your business leadership team’s focus and the employees in the company. He said, “the lowest performer in your office sets the standard for your entire firm,” and he believes that “the quality of people that you can get, grow, and keep on your team will determine the success of your business in the long run.”

3. Your online presence matters.

As you most likely already know, how your business appears online is important. Steve Scott, owner of Tampa SEO Training Academy, gave us some helpful tips for making sure you have a high-quality and attractive online presence. Overall, you should make sure that your website is mobile friendly, ready for voice search, fast, secure, and user focused. You should also take advantage of Google’s advertising tools and social media platforms to engage your clients.

4. A good peer mentorship or mastermind group can provide a good sounding board, a faster way to master learning curves of new technology, give valuable business tips, and is an avenue for learning and growing in the industry.

The Journal of Court Reporting wrote an article that was included in our conference packet and focused on the value of peer mentorships and masterminds. A peer mentor is someone who is on your same level professionally. This could be an influential stranger from afar, an industry-specific mentor, a direct mentor who may be paid for their time, or someone else. A mastermind group is made up of trusted colleagues who turn to each other for advice, solutions, referrals, and more. As mentioned in our main point, there are many benefits of being involved in one of these types of groups, and they could be useful for you in your industry as well.

5. Remember to prepare for the unexpected.

At the NNRC 2018 Conference, we heard from four firm owners that had been through recent natural disasters. You might believe that an event like this will never happen to you or your firm, but you should be prepared nonetheless. Have a written plan that covers various natural disaster scenarios and consider the following:

• Off-site backup of data
• A Virtual Office
• Insurance coverage reviews
• Important documents being stored off-site
• Prepare your staff mentally

As they mentioned, “if you wait until a disaster happens to start practicing, it’s too late.”

Work with a court reporting firm that cares.

We attend these conferences because we care about staying on the leading edge of technology and court reporting, and so that our business can provide you with the best in customer care and service.

We’ve already taken some of the lessons above to heart and have new opportunities for our staff. As part of celebrating National Captioning and Court Reporting Week this month, we offered our reporters an opportunity to better their skills, and we paid for the training of anyone that signed up.

If you are interested in scheduling a deposition with us, click here. Or, learn more about our services and see how we can help you.