Over the past 10 years at Sterling Lawyers, we’ve grown from zero attorneys to 25+ and $15+ million in revenue.
Along the way, I’ve noticed that law firms tend to hit growth walls at specific points in their development:
- First Plateau: ~ 2-3 attorneys and $1-2 million in revenue
- Second Plateau: ~ 7-8 attorneys and $2.5-3.5 million in revenue
- Third Plateau: ~ 20-25 attorneys and $8-10 million in revenue
At each point, firms typically encounter one or more of the three barriers I’m about to discuss.
When this happens, growth stalls until the firm can break through these barriers and reinvent itself.
Barrier #1: Ineffective Leadership
The first barrier that prevents law firms from scaling is ineffective leadership at the top.
Many lawyers are exceptional practitioners and technical experts in their field.
However, the skills that make someone an excellent lawyer are very different from the skills needed to lead and grow a firm.
In family law, 97-98% of law firms are one-, two-, or maybe three-attorney firms. Very few go beyond that.
This isn’t because these lawyers aren’t exceptional people or attorneys—it’s that they haven’t developed the skills to delegate, train, inspire, motivate, and lead others.
When law firms start, lawyers must handle everything themselves to get the business going.
Many find it difficult to evolve beyond this “do-it-all-mindset” as the firm grows.
The biggest challenge is usually delegation—it’s hard to hand over work when you know someone else won’t initially do it as well as you can.
I had a conversation with a local attorney who has eight lawyers in his practice but has stayed at that size for over 20 years.
He was candid with me, “I would love to grow to where you’re at, but I am not willing to give up control. I’d rather have the control than the growth.”
That’s the trade-off you have to make—you can either have growth, or you can have control.
In our family law firm, the most valuable lawyers are those who can train others, bring them up, and replace themselves.
That’s counterintuitive—you might think if you replace yourself, you lose your job.
Not in our practice.
If you replace yourself, you get elevated because we want you to keep doing that with other lawyers on the team.
Barrier #2: Poor Marketing
The second barrier is poor marketing—or simply getting the attention of potential clients for your practice.
This is the easiest barrier to fix, primarily because you can buy effective marketing.
You don’t have to know how to do it yourself naturally. You can buy marketing talent, and it’s relatively inexpensive.
Most practices that are caught by this barrier either:
Aren’t willing to spend the money over the period of time required to develop effective marketing, or
Can spend the money but can’t handle the influx of new clients because their intake or sales systems are poor
Many firms focus exclusively on building a referral-based practice, which is great. These are the best clients and cost the least to acquire.
The challenge is that building a referral practice that scales beyond one or two lawyers takes so long. It’s incredibly time-consuming.
If you want to scale, you need to move beyond just referrals (unless you’re willing to spend 50 years building your practice).
The key factor is investing in marketing yourself and telling your story—and sticking with it long enough.
Almost all marketing works to some extent, and the key is giving it the time required to gain traction.
Effective marketing always starts with getting very clear about:
Who your ideal client is,
Determining where they spend their time, and then
Making yourself visible in those places—either in person or through your marketing content.
Barrier #3: Non-Scalable Infrastructure
The third barrier is not having a scalable infrastructure. There are three types of systems that efficient, scalable firms need:
1. People Systems
This was by far the most challenging area for our firm to develop.
Our people system problems started with a bad compensation plan. Our best leader-lawyers were not incentivized to train others.
We would hire exceptional lawyers, but because of our compensation structure, we essentially incentivized them to be a one-person firm inside our firm.
They weren’t rewarded to raise up new lawyers.
It took us years to get this right. I’d like to say we are there now. I hope!
Our current compensation program has helped us break through this one nasty barrier that constrained our growth.
The other critical people systems are recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training.
As we’ve developed these systems over time, they’ve given us the capacity to grow significantly.
2. Business Processes
Having high-quality workflow processes for our attorneys and paralegals to follow has been essential.
It took years to develop tech-enabled processes that allow our team to scale, but we finally have processes that let our attorneys do more work in less time while serving our clients better.
Every family firm has almost the same business processes. These are all solvable with patience and willingness to test and measure.
3. Technology Systems
Our technology infrastructure starts with our CRM (Client Relationship Management) tool.
While many lawyers use platforms like Clio, Westlaw, or Smoke Ball, we opted for a more robust (and expensive) system—Salesforce.
We invested in this early on because we knew we wanted to scale and didn’t want our data management to hold us back.
This has given us the capacity to grow far beyond the 25 lawyers we have today.
Beyond our CRM, our tech stack includes communication tools like Slack, Google’s many tools, and various other software that we’ve integrated to enable our team to scale efficiently.
Moving Forward
What I’ve shared about these three barriers will help you build your practice.
As you approach these barriers, you’ll be able to identify them more quickly and build the right processes and systems to break through them.
The key is recognizing which barrier is holding you back at each stage of growth and then focusing your energy on creating solutions specifically for that challenge.
With the right leadership, marketing approach, and scalable infrastructure, you can successfully grow your practice beyond the plateaus where most firms stall.
