There are roughly two camps of practitioners on How to Get Great Testimonials: those who treat it as a niche worth investing in and those who treat it as something they pick up as cases arrive. The camps diverge financially within five years and don’t recover the gap.
This piece is for divorce financial coaches who already have the basics and are deciding whether to make How to Get Great Testimonials a focus area.
The economics of How to Get Great Testimonials engagements for divorce financial coaches usually favor flat-fee or tiered-fee structures over hourly billing. The work is well-defined enough to scope cleanly, and clients usually prefer predictable costs. Coaches who develop reliable scoping templates can produce consistent margins where hourly-billed coaches absorb variable amounts of scope creep.
The most common opening question
The single most common question clients ask in their first How to Get Great Testimonials call is some version of ‘how long will this take?’ The honest answer is usually between three and eight months — but with hard variability based on the responsiveness of opposing parties, third-party document custodians, and (in litigated matters) the court calendar. Practitioners who give clients a range with specific factors that could lengthen or shorten it produce more realistic expectations than those who quote a single number.
Clients usually have an implicit theory of what How to Get Great Testimonials can do for them — sometimes wildly optimistic, sometimes pessimistic. The early conversation should surface that theory and address it. A client who thinks the engagement will solve a problem the analytical framework can’t actually solve will be disappointed regardless of the technical quality of the work.
What practitioners get wrong about How to Get Great Testimonials
Practitioners often fail to recognize when a How to Get Great Testimonials matter has crossed from analytical work into advocacy or therapy. The work has clean boundaries — analytical work is appropriate; advocacy or therapy beyond your role is not. Recognizing the boundary and referring out when appropriate is one of the markers of senior practice. For deeper reference, see ABA Family Law Section resources.
A common mistake among experienced general practitioners moving into How to Get Great Testimonials is assuming their general competence transfers automatically. Some of it does; some doesn’t. The technical and procedural specifics of How to Get Great Testimonials differ enough that practitioners who shortcut the deliberate learning end up making errors they don’t notice until a senior colleague points them out.
Where the field is moving
How to Get Great Testimonials has shifted in three meaningful ways over the past five to seven years. First, the volume of data available in most matters has grown dramatically — bank, brokerage, retirement, and credit records are routinely available in electronic form, which both enables deeper analysis and creates more work to organize. Second, the regulatory and tax environment has shifted (most notably the 2019 federal alimony tax change for divorces). Third, the client population has become more sophisticated; clients increasingly come to How to Get Great Testimonials matters having done meaningful online research.
Software for divorce financial coaches working in How to Get Great Testimonials has improved significantly in the past five years. The standard tools handle case management, document organization, billing, and coordination far better than they did a decade ago. Practitioners who haven’t updated their tooling stack in the past three or four years are usually working harder than they need to.
The decision before the decision
Honest assessment of your market matters too. How to Get Great Testimonials has different dynamics in different markets — major metros with concentrated family-law sections versus smaller markets with broader generalist practices. Practitioners in markets where the area is underserved by genuine specialists have steeper paths to dominance; practitioners in markets already saturated have harder paths.
A simple test: do the matters in How to Get Great Testimonials that you’ve already handled interest you? Practitioners who genuinely enjoy the analytical work and the relational dynamics tend to build sustainable practices in How to Get Great Testimonials; practitioners who found the matters tedious tend not to, regardless of the market opportunity.
If you’re considering How to Get Great Testimonials as a focus area and you want one concrete commitment to make: pick the upcoming family-law conference closest to you and commit to attending every year for the next five years.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline How to Get Great Testimonials engagements benefit from: organized case files, integrated communication with co-professionals, deliverable versioning, and the kind of operational consistency that makes the difference between burning out at twenty matters and running a sustainable practice at fifty.
Practitioners interested in seeing VennBoard’s case-management infrastructure for How to Get Great Testimonials work can learn more at VennBoard.com.
Further reading
National Center for State Courts
ABA Family Law Section resources