Lawyerist: Episode 345

Transcript

[0:00:19] NVN: Welcome to Author Hour. I’m here today with Sam Glover and Stephanie Everett, two of the four authors behind the new book The Small Firm Roadmap: A Survival Guide to the Future of Your Law Practice. This book was put together by a team of contributors, from Lawyerist. For the past decade plus, Lawyerist.com has been helping small law firms through their vast library of information which includes resources, articles, podcasts and videos. With these materials, Lawyerist helps lawyers navigate not just the practice but the business of law. One of the appealing elements of Lawyerist and the client centric model, they walk readers through in their new book is their human approach. This approach is applied equally to clients, lawyers and small firm owners. It’s not just an ideal, it’s a proven way of helping small law firms thrive and reach that significant gap of clients going unserved who need legal help but for various reasons, don’t know how or where to get it. Let’s get started by explaining to listeners what Lawyerist is?

[0:01:32] SG: Lawyerist is a community of solo and small firm lawyers who are innovative or entrepreneurial minded and are trying to figure out how to build a successful modern law practice in view of all the trends shaping the practice of law. Lawyerist is also a publication and a resource, we have product reviews, we have lots of topical subject matter areas where people can learn about legal marketing, legal technology, things like that. But the core of it is really the community Lawyerist Insider and Lawyerist Lab.

[0:02:04] NVN: How did you guys come to start this?

[0:02:07] SG: I guess I should explain that. The way Lawyerist started was a blog back in 2006 and seven where I was just writing about legal technology and after a while, Aaron Street came along and we decided to turn it into a business and over time, it evolved from just being a publication and a blog to being the community that it is today and it really came about because we saw a real need from lawyers to understand how to build more successful law practices which is also how we wound up writing a book. We’ve been talking about it and writing about it and speaking about it and podcasting about it for years now and we just saw the need and really heard the need from our community for a guide to practicing law and building a more successful law practice. And so that’s how it all evolved was just trying to fill that need.

[0:03:02] NVN: Sam and Stephanie, are you two lawyers yourself or did you practice in the past or how are you coming at this?

[0:03:10] SE: Yeah, we’re both lawyers, we’ve both had our own practices. For me, I started out at a larger firm and then started my own firm with a partner and ran that for seven years. Sam also had his own firm, so we actually understand exactly how our community feels. We’ve been in their shoes; we understand their frustrations and their fears and I think that’s why we’re really relatable to them and all the problems that they’re having.

[0:03:38] NVN: So, Stephanie, it sounds like you can speak to those, what are some of the different circumstances that small firms specifically have to deal with as supposed to larger practices?

[0:03:50] SE: There’s so many. I mean, the big thing that for everyone in our community is that the moment that you decide to open your own firm, right? You’ve been to law school, you got your degree, and somewhere along the way, someone said, “you’re a great lawyer, you should open your own firm.” Well, the moment you do that, you become a business owner and so all the problems and all the issues and the opportunities that business owners have now are on your plate as well. You’re no longer just that technician practicing law, you have to figure out how to market and advertise and attract new clients and then convert those clients and deliver amazing client services. And then you have to invoice them and collect that money and then let’s just throw in that you’re the IT person and you’re the HR person and you’re just like every other small business owner in the US and this is across the board, true for lots of small business owners, right? You know how to do your thing, your craft but sometimes, all of the other pieces of the business that come along with it can be hard.

[0:04:56] SG: One of the things that we’ve noticed is that lawyers come out of law school being told a story about law practice is going to be like, whether it’s working for a big firm or even starting their own practice, but they’re completely unprepared for it, especially if what it’s going to be like is starting their own practice. Because then, you have to be the CEO and you have to be the CTO and the COO and the CMO, you know, you have all of those jobs, none of which are covered in law school. For a long time, it was enough just to hang your shingle out there and tell everybody you’re practicing and the trends that are shaping the practice of law today just don’t really allow that. They’re not very tolerant of that traditional method of just hanging out your shingle, building your reputation quietly and counting on people to knock on your door or ring your phone. And so, we’re just trying to help lawyers understand how to run a business which is really the piece of it that you miss out on in law school and even then after law school, if you’ve been learning how to run a law practice from people who have been doing it for decades.

[0:05:56] NVN: One of the things that you guys talk about which is very interesting to me is not only the business toll that not having this knowledge can have, but also the human toll that some lawyers were running these small practices experience. Can you guys talk to listers a little bit about that?

[0:06:17] SG: Yeah, for sure. Our profession is kind of sick really. Is maybe the best way to put it? Lawyers are at the top of the charts for depression, suicide, alcoholism, other substance abuse, divorce and that feels like there’s a piece of that at least that is the result of the way we have built practices. We built practices around sacrificing from the client we’ve built a culture of long hours and beating yourself up in order to win cases and win judgments or win negotiations to get the best deal. And that traditional method of law practice is almost sacrificial and just about pounding your head against the wall in order to try and win and succeed and we think that a huge part of the problem here is not acknowledging that you’re a human being and that you have to have some harmony between your work life and your home life and your personal life. You need to have a new approach to structuring your business. It has to take all of that into account, you have to be ab le to bring your whole self to work and not just you know, leave it there, pummeled on your desk. You have to be able to go home and still be a real person and I think if you build a practice intentionally around the idea that there’s client time and personal time and that those things can be complimentary. Not completely separated and not sacrificing one for the other. That you can actually come out ahead and better and I think we can begin to heal the profession if we remove ourselves from some of those expectations we’ve built up over so many years.

[0:07:57] NVN: This is a holistic approach it sounds like. That helps to alleviate business problems and then also make the experience more enjoyable for lawyers also.

[0:08:07] SE: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we’re advocating with this book and with everything that we’re doing is that it’s time to change the fundamental way in which we practice. And being able to look at practicing law from a new angle opens up all kinds of possibilities for how your approach to work can be better and healthier and more fun quite frankly.

[0:08:33] NVN: So, with that, I’m assuming that you guys touch a ton of lawyers in different small law firms with what you do at Lawyerist. Can you tell me one of your favorite stories about how a firm was perhaps struggling in some way and what that turn around look like?

[0:08:49] SE: Yeah, so many folks come to mind but one in particular, you know, I’ll just give a slight sliver of an example that I was just working on this morning. Turnover is a huge problem for lawyers because I remind them that there was no HR class in law school, no one told us how to find and hire the right people or have the interview skills and there are – there’s actually a way to do it, right? There’s a good way to do it that allows you to figure out if the person’s going to be a good fit for your firm. And so, there was one particular lawyer that I was working with who had really been struggling with this and had a lot of turnover and kept finding people with the right skills, but they just weren’t a good value fit and so they ultimately wouldn’t work out for him and his firm and that’s got a huge cost associated to it. So by approaching it strategically and with his values and understanding what he was building and how he was building it and what type of people he wanted on his team and taking that approach, we were able to completely restructure his hiring process. And I just got a note from him this morning, his new person is amazing, he just, a client just reached out and was like, “wow, I know this person hasn’t been at your firm very long but I can’t believe the level of client service I receive every time I call and it’s taking –. “ I mean, it’s just changed the whole attitude in the office when you just take that one person who wasn’t fitting and fill it with someone who is. And so, that’s just one example of one small change that I see lawyers do this incrementally throughout their practice in every step of the way. And so it just changes their overall experiences as business owners and as team leaders.

[0:10:33] NVN: That leads to something that you guys discussed in the book which is this idea of a client centric model. So, obviously, you dive into this fully, what it looks like and how to build it in the book but can you give listeners an overview and a feel for what that might look like.

[0:10:53] SG: Yeah, one of the things that’s really core to the way we structured the book and the way we structure our approach to building practices is around the idea of clients centered which is a design philosophy and so the idea being to focus on what it is your client wants out of their relationship, what are their needs that they have and how can you serve them and this is something that as soon as you start talking about business and law, lots of lawyers go, “whoa, whoa, whoa, this is a profession not a business.” The whole think about a profession is that you are serving the clients. And lawyers aren’t necessarily doing a great job serving that client. Lawyers are doing an amazing job or solving legal problems, but that isn’t the end all and be all of what clients need. And so what awe are advocating for and what we’re trying to teach lawyers how to do is to think differently about the problems that they are trying to solve for their clients and to do that means getting in your client’s head, exercising extreme empathy for your clients and really understanding how can you decide on your location? How can you figure out what to put in your office? How can you design your website? How can you structure the way you communicate both successes and failures within the representation? How can you change the strategy that you might even employ based on what your client is bringing into that relationship? And if you can do that, if you can exercise the extreme empathy with your clients and out yourselves in their shoes, you can really design a client experience around that client and around that client’s needs and perspective. That is really hard to do if you are taking just a traditional approach of, “bring me the legal problem and I will come up with a legal solution to it and you’d disregard all of the other stuff about the relationship.”

[0:12:36] NVN: That strikes me as very important in this field because I am imagining that the people who come to you are inherently in a vulnerable state much of the time.

[0:12:48] SG: Oh absolutely. I mean that’s most people who come to a lawyer are – well I supposed that is not entirely true. Many people who come to a lawyer are in some kind of a crisis, but also just trying to accomplish something, maybe starting a new business or adopting someone and so often people need a lawyer’s help to get something joyful done as well. So, it is not just crisis but quite often that is exactly what we are dealing with here. And if you can soften that relationship and really build it around meeting the client where they are to serve them in the way that they need you to serve them, I think you can really change the way you practice in a way that is better for everyone.

[0:13:25] NVN: Speaking of clients, another thing you guys talk about is this gap that exists between people who need legal help and people who can get it. Can you talk to listeners a little bit about that?

[0:13:38] SE: Yeah, so we know that there are a lot of people out there who have legal problems and they need legal solutions and they may or may not be looking to lawyers to have them help solve those problems. So sometimes it is a matter of people. It is not even understanding that it is a legal problem. Sometimes it is a matter of them not believing that a lawyer would actually them or maybe they believe they just simply couldn’t afford a lawyer. So our profession has a little bit of work to do because there is a lot of people who need our help and certainly, the data shows us although there is a lot of debates over what the actual number is or how to measure that data but one thing we can say for certain is that there is a lot of people who need legal help, who could benefit from having legal help and just aren’t getting it.

[0:14:28] SG: I was going to say at our conference last week, one of our members described it in very rough numbers as there is the top 20% of the legal market, which is being well-served mostly by big firms. There is the bottom 20% of the legal market, which is mostly getting served by the Legal Aid and pro-bono services and there is the vast middle 60% of the legal market, which almost nobody is serving. These aren’t necessarily people who are impoverished. They are people like you and me who have money, but have other challenges or just distaste or confusion about hiring a lawyer or getting legal work done and that’s really the opportunity and the puzzle that we are trying to help lawyers solve is to figure out how to tap into that vast middle 60%, which really is something like the access to justice gap and those are round numbers. Who knows if they are actually correct but they are closed then and the core idea is about right there, which is that we could do a better job of getting legal services to everyone not just the wealthy or the poor.

[0:15:35] NVN: I am sure that this is a very in-depth answer and that there are several different solutions but are you guys able to give one way of doing that, of appealing to that gap?

[0:15:46] SE: Sure, so we have so many examples of people in our community who are working on this, but simply changing the model, changing the way we deliver client services and then the pricing that comes along with that. So, for small business owners, a lot of times you can’t afford. You know your cash flow is tight already and so the idea of having a legal adviser who can just help you make critical decisions for your business or potentially avoid more costly ones is something you just deprioritize that. So, we have people in our community who are offering reasonably priced subscription services to small business so that they could have that counselor on call relationships. So if they have a question that they needed advice, they can get the lawyer involved early and help them actually solve problems. We have people who are doing divorce work and completely changing the model because maybe you don’t need a divorce lawyer to handle every aspect of your case. That maybe there is a lot of it that you could do on your own, but then there is those critical times where you could use some help or you don’t really understand what the court needs for you to do and so an adviser would be helpful. And so, we have people who come in and just provide legal services in those times and then it is priced very differently. It is not – many people might not realize this but a typical divorce that’s been contested can be as much as 20 or $30,000 per spouse. And so that’s just not realistic for a lot of families. Like Sam said, it is not poor people. It is like me. I tell my husband we are not going to get a divorce anytime soon because we can’t simply that, you know it’s costly. I mean I don’t want to get divorced anyway but you know. So, if I did find myself in that situation though, knowing that I could get help for those critical moments and just pay a lawyer to help me for those services would be something that would be very valuable. And so, that you can see we are just teaching attorneys how to flip the model and approach the problems like Sam was saying from a client centered approach, “what is it that a client really needs?” Well, let us figure out a way to adjust our model and deliver it.

[0:17:52] SG: Yeah, one of the examples, I gave over the last couple of days of our conference was, look, my wife and I still haven’t done our will. I am little ashamed to admit that and the reason is because first of all finding an estate planning lawyer that I believe is a good one is a really challenging thing to do in the world right now. But even though I think I found one, it is a pain in the ass to work with a lawyer. Now I have to work on their schedule, I have to do it during my work day. And the thing is, if you think about that when I say that middle 60% that’s people like me and I can afford to get the estate plan done, but I really don’t need the hassle of taking two, three, four hours out of my work days to go and get that work done. It just doesn’t feel like a priority. So, the problem for someone who is they’re like me, who feels like, “oh, this thing is just a hassle,” is how do you make this easy? How do you make it simple? And as Stephanie was mentioning, maybe how do you make it assisted DIY, right? So, I don’t have to do everything myself so I can feel confident that I am getting it done right, but I can also have the confidence of feeling like I am the one doing it and so I kind of know. And I think there is a lot of challenges like that in that middle 60%, but there is also challenges for people who are trying to compete for the top 20% of work as well and I like thinking about it that way. And I think when you start acknowledging that those are real issues that you can probably solve with client centered design then you start getting excited about the opportunities that exists for small firm lawyers in this market.

[0:19:22] NVN: I have to tell you guys from a client’s standpoint, I love that. I have been through the legal system in terms of getting a divorce and also recently, getting a will done and you’re absolutely right that some of this stuff can be done alone. I think for clients, a lot of times it is that feeling of overwhelm or getting stuck on a specific part of the process. So, this is incredibly appealing from a client’s standpoint.

[0:19:49] SG: Yeah and for too long the lawyer’s answer has been, “well, just shovel money into my pocket and I’ll take care of it for you.” And that is not client centered.

[0:19:57] NVN: Yeah, very true, also. Okay, so there is so much here. Let’s speak directly to a listener is who is running a small practice and just feeling generally overwhelmed, what’s the one thing they can start to think about right now to at least start to lift or alleviate that feeling of overwhelm?

[0:20:20] SE: I mean I think that one of the things we worked really hard to do in the book is to lay out a strategy that small firm lawyers can take in how they can approach their practice and so we are trying to guide them along that path of here is how to think about your firm and you start with what you – honestly you start with your personal life and your goals and your vision for yourself because your business should exist to serve you and help you accomplish those things. And so you start thinking about what is it that you want out of your life then, “what is it that you want to create with your business and what is most important and valuable to you there?” And then from there, you can start thinking about all the different systems and processes that you need in a business to support that ultimate vision and strategy.

[0:21:07] NVN: Excellent. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find The Small Firm Road Map, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.