The First Pillar: Creating a Playbook to Scale and Protect Your Practice
Last week, I shared my story: how I stepped away from Integrity Marketing Solutions for a year while battling cancer—leaving my son, James, and our team completely in charge—and found the business not only survived, but thrived. If you missed it, you can catch that personal story here: How Systems, Culture, and Leadership Helped Our Law Firm Marketing Agency Thrive Through Crisis
Today, I want to unpack the first pillar of a business that runs without its owner: documented systems and processes—what I call your firm’s playbook.
Why Documented Systems Matter for Law Firms
Systems are the silent backbone of your business—not just tools for scale, but for survival. Look, most of us have thoughts like:
- “I should fire that person, but training someone new feels too hard.”
- “I’ll just do it myself—no one can do it as well.”
- “There are still so many processes that aren’t documented yet.”
If that hits close to home, you’re not alone. Here’s what changed at IMS when I leaned into building our playbook in 2023:
- We documented our client-facing and internal processes
- New hires onboarded faster and became productive sooner
- Our training became streamlined and standardized
- And when I was out for health reasons in 2024—the systems held
That’s the real magic of a playbook: it removes “you” as the single point of failure.
What Goes Into a Scalable Law Firm SOP Playbook
Our playbook lives in Google Drive—nothing fancy, just reliable and scalable. Each process includes:
- Title, department owner, tools, expected time-to-complete
- Short Loom video (no longer than 15 minutes, broken into segments if needed)
- Step-by-step written instructions—bullet by bullet
- Completion checklist to easily audit or train
- Built-in onboarding format so new hires follow it from day 1
We didn’t wait for perfection—we got it into daily use immediately. And it paid off.
5 Principles for Building a Legal Business Playbook
- Don’t document before you know the right way. Do it → then document it → then delegate it.
- Make it living and evolving. Playbooks update as you evolve.
- Let go to grow. If you want your business to scale, you must let go of doing everything.
- Systems are nuanced—use the framework, not rigidity.
- Utilization beats documentation. A stack of docs is useless unless people actually use them.
How SOPs Improve Law Firm Culture and Delegation
We used to hear resistance. But once team members saw the benefits, their questions shifted:
- “Now you don’t have to micro-manage me.”
- “I can take a real vacation because someone else can do the job.”
- “If I want to move up, I need to train my replacement—and this helps me do that.”
That’s institutional buy-in, not boss-driven compliance. And that kind of ownership is gold.
Start Building Your Law Firm’s Process Playbook Today
This is just one pillar of the framework I shared in last week’s post. Stay tuned for Pillar Two: Culture That Holds When You Let Go. That post will be coming soon—and I’ll link to it here when it’s live.
But if you’re already ready to take action… start today:
- Choose one high-leverage task and document it
- Record a short Loom video
- Create a checklist for completion
- Plug it into your team’s training
If you’d like to learn more about what the IMS team does—helping estate planning and elder law firms scale through marketing strategy and automation—visit our Essentials Custom Program.
Be sure to tune into our podcast at The Marketing Lawcast.
Need a Speaker for Your Legal Event?
Does your legal conference, bar association, or practice group need a speaker who knows how to build a law firm that runs without burning out the owner?
I speak on this topic regularly—offering keynote presentations, interactive webinars, and mini-workshops designed specifically for estate planning, elder law, and probate attorneys. I’d love to share the frameworks that helped me step away from my business for a year—and return to find it thriving.
Let’s talk about how I can support your next event.
📩 Reach out directly at jennifer@estateplanningpartners.com
Up next in the series: Pillar Two – Culture That Holds When You Let Go.
