This week on the show we have Jess Birken, owner of Birken Law Offices where she helps charities and non-profits to solve their problems so they can focus on what’s important. In this episode we’ll discuss spotting problem prospective clients, being a good friend, how to stay motivated about your work, and the best software to be using as a solo.
Twitter @JessBirken
www.hackyourpractice.lawyer
Hacking’s Hack:
I’m really excited about this week’s hack, it comes from a lawyer in my office named Ashley Moore. If you go to printfriendly.com you can enter the URL and it will print just the text, no ads or anything else cluttering the printed paper.
Tyson’s Tip:
I just finished listening to the podcast Land of the Giants. The first season goes in-depth with how Amazon started out and how they grew to the size they are today.
Jess’s Tip:
In Zapier, I recently learned that you can filter information from data that you have. So you can pull just an email, or just a phone number from your data. The conditional formatting is pretty amazing and will let you do just about anything you want.
For more content from us please subscribe to our Youtube Channel
Don’t forget to sign up for MaxLawCon20!
Thanks so much for listening to the show! If you want to know more about this and keep on maximizing your firm, please join our Facebook Group or like us on Facebook and comment!
You can also go to MaximumLawyer.com or, if you’d prefer, email us at: info@maximumlawyer.com
Interested in being on the show? Shoot us an email at support@maximumlawyer.com or message us on Facebook!
Resources:
- Join the Guild Membership
- Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube Channel
- Follow us on Instagram
- Join the Facebook Group
- Follow the Facebook Page
- Follow us on LinkedIn
Transcripts: “Being a Smarter Solo (and a Better Friend)” with Jess Birken
Jess Birken
Every day, you should like wake up and reach out to somebody and just send them a little voice memo or text or something and just be like, Hey, I’m thinking about that time that we were at the place where we did the thing. And whatever happened, and it was really great. And just stay on their radar.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Ty symmetric. What’s up Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson just had a great weekend up in Chicago with my son for his birthday. September is both our birthday month so we’ve been celebrating all month.
Tyson Mutrux
I like it. I saw that. I didn’t do that to Chicago or something like that. I see pictures of that.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, we saw the Cardinals play the Cubs up in Wrigley. It was a five hour game and the Cardinals emerged victorious.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s right. They all they do is win win win these days. I love it. Fantastic.
Jim Hacking
Hey, speaking of winning, we got a real winner on our show today. Her name is Jess Burke. And we’re really excited to have her I first met Jess in of all places on stage. She was presenting at the Clio conference last year in New Orleans. And then I ran into her again at Mike Whalen conference down in Austin. And since then, we’ve become fast friends. She’s a nonprofit lawyer up in Minnesota, and she’s got a lot of cool things going on. So we wanted to have her on the show, Jess, welcome.
Jess Birken
Hey, thanks for having me. You totally saved my butt at that. Clio presentation, too. I desperately needed a volunteer. So you were my hero right away. That was fun.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, that’s the first and last time you’ll ever hear that, Jimmy. So that’s good. No wonder the clip that went off. That’s good. All right. So just let’s jump right in and talk about what you will do. How you got there talking about your backstory, I think you know, the routine right now.
Jess Birken
Yeah, so I, you know, I’m a lawyer. I’m a solo. I have a small team of people around me, but I’m the only lawyer and I work with charities. So anything from you know, pet rescue to summer camps to PTA groups, or youth athletic leagues, or churches, you name it. I work with them. I’m in Minnesota, and I got into the nonprofit lawyering gig because I grew up watching too much law in order. I really thought I wanted to be a criminal trial attorney when I was a student. And I was was very like, much going down that road. And I clerked for a judge and I worked at the county attorney’s office and I worked for a criminal defense firm. But once I kind of got into the the judicial clerk role and started seeing court all day, every day, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn’t for me. And then the recession happened and there were no jobs. So I went back to school and got a master’s in nonprofit management and never thought I’d be a lawyer after that. But here I am.
Jim Hacking
And so how did that take shape? How did you start as a nonprofit lawyer? Did you have any mentors in that space?
Jess Birken
So you know, going to grad school for a master’s in nonprofit management, I got really embedded into the nonprofit professional community here in the Twin Cities where I live. And then I ended up getting a job after I graduated, that was not strictly lawyering, but not strictly administrative either. I worked for National Concert wildlife conservation organization that was looking for someone to join their accounting team that had a lot of contracts experience, you know, and to listen to my old boss tell the story story. It was something like, you know, he put out the job ad and 28 lawyers applied, and he realized he could get an attorney and ended up hiring me. So, you know, he was really my main mentor and learning the ins and outs of like, what it really means to run a national scale, nonprofit deal with funders deal with grants deal with staff. So that’s kind of how I cut my teeth. And then when I left for private practice, I had joined up with another woman who also does nonprofit law, and we worked together for three or four years, and then I hung my own shingle. And that was almost four years ago. So yeah.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, just so you’re I, I’m fascinated by what you do, because you’re dealing with an industry that I’m assuming is it’s all about struggling with the money because they’re always trying to get the money, the money going to the right places, and they don’t want to waste money. And so how do you deal with clients that are? I mean, a lot of it is all about the money. I mean, it’s, it’s different. I know that, like a criminal offense clients, they really they really care about money. But like your, if you think about what a nonprofit is, they’re all like getting money and resources to the right places. And so, like, what do your clients struggle with? Things like that? And how do you deal with it?
Jess Birken
Nonprofits are some of the thriftiest possible clients could ever have, they can be a challenge. I mean, part of the reality is, at this point, in my practice, I’m not really working with anybody who has a problem paying for legal services, I have a really robust like screening process where I figure out if this potential client is going to be a good fit for me, and one of the factors on that sheet is whether they hire professionals when they need them, or if they view legal services as sort of a necessary evil. Or if they have, like, I’d rather do it myself and just have you look at it real quick mentality. So I really am lucky that I have great clients who have resources and, and want to pay for professionals to help them. But I think that, you know, absolutely, like they can be difficult. And it’s, it’s often like, well, we have to push that project off until after the first of the year, because we just don’t have the funds right now, or that’s not part of our approved budget. Or we need to go out and fundraise so that we can get this done. I mean, those are all real struggles that my clients have, just like, you know, really anybody else.
Jim Hacking
Just talk to us a little bit more about that scorecard, I know that you’ve, you’ve spent a lot of time developing that with your wing woman. And I know that a lot of our listeners would be interested in this is something that you use to try to figure out not not that they’re going to hire you, but whether you’re going to let them hire you. Right,
Jess Birken
I have a really great closing rate, and I charge for my consultations. So if somebody books a consultation with me, it’s already very likely that they’re going to want to hire me. So in a sense, I am using my scoring process to filter out clients that are not a good fit. And that’s not just for my own mental health, which is important. But also because I offer subscription legal services, and I do everything on a flat fee basis, I really need to avoid clients that are going to like completely be the 20% of the Pareto rule where they just drain you have all of your time and energy, because I need to be really efficient. And I also really care about working with people who fit a certain profile on our organizations who fit a certain profile. So the card basically was passed to me as a screening a client potential client screening scorecard that was given to me by a friend of mine, who went to an ABA family law conference, and he’s a family law attorney. And I basically took that and started modifying it for my clients. Okay, and so let me back up, these are scored on a scale of zero to five, zero or one is good. Five is like run away screaming. So it’s like golf, you want to have a low score, a very low score means it’s a really great lead. Okay. So one of the things on the card is have you worked with another attorney? Like what number attorney am I for you? Am I the first attorney, you’ve contacted? Am I the second attorney you’ve worked with? Am I the third? Am I the fourth? Because for each additional attorney you’ve worked with, especially in family law, you know, this is a problem. So if you’re meeting with a new client, and they’re telling you, oh, yeah, my first lawyer was like this, and I fired them. And then I worked with this other person. And they were like this, and I fired them. And now I’m here to work with you, you should be like, Oh, like this person is going to be hard to work with. So I don’t have that exact issue with my clients, right? So you can see how that would apply. That didn’t apply for me. So I took it out and put in something else but you can see the whole principle so you know what those things are for you. And now those are key indicators that you can actually tally up and score and have a real number What’s great about it for me, and I think this probably applies to you, Jim, too, because you have a big heart and you like to help people is, you know, I tend to be really idealistic and optimistic, and I get excited about like, oh, I want to help this person with their cool mission. But like, if they’re a raging narcissist, or there’s other red flags, if I am feeling like I need groceries, I might take the case anyway. And the scoring actually helps me be a lot more objective. Because Megan, my wingwoman, and I have pre agreed that these things are positives, and these things are negatives. And so having an objective number to have to wrestle with and talk about, really helps me sort of keep my feet on the ground and not be so like, I just want to help everyone with their cool, do good missions. That makes sense.
Tyson Mutrux
That makes perfect sense. I’ve got so many questions I want to ask you, and I’m hoping I’m gonna I’m gonna wait on this one question I really want to ask you about hopefully, Jim doesn’t steal it from me. But you mentioned some that about, you know, taking in clients and things like that. So I do want to ask you about this with with who you target as a firm, and you have a really badass website, it’s really cool. Do you most of your clients come in through the website? Or they find either word of mouth? How does that work with with who you target as client?
Jess Birken
That’s a great question. I feel like that’s the million dollar question for every law firm that’s not got an in house marketer, like Where the hell do these people come from? I think that I do get a lot of word of mouth. But I know that the first thing that people do when they hear about you is Google your name. So sometimes it’s very clear. Oh, so until told me to contact you. Or here’s an introduction from this person I know. And then it’s really obvious sometimes, though, I feel like they’re saying they found me online. But maybe they heard my name somewhere, or they saw a YouTube video or something like that. I don’t have great data on like exactly where people come from. But I think that it’s probably 6040. Referrals versus internet. I really don’t spend money on online ads. So it’s just content marketing strategy right now. So it’s like, Did you see a piece of content? Did I make a YouTube video? Did I have an article that you found and then you ended up here? Or does someone I know actually hand out my card to you? I wish I had better data on it.
Jim Hacking
Let’s talk a little bit about that event. When I did meet you when you were on stage with Megan, Xavi. He’s also been on the show, talking about creating content or courses for potential clients. Talk to us a little bit about what you created, the work that went into it and how it’s been working out.
Jess Birken
Sure. So I’ve made all kinds of stuff. Some of it has worked. Some of it has not worked as well. The presentation I did with Megan Xavi at Clio was about making online courses and sort of productizing the knowledge that’s already in your head. So the way that came up for me was that I meet with potential clients and do these consultations. And I basically just repeat myself, for like, an hour, every time, you know, I go over the same topics, I answer the same questions, I sort of review the same issues with people over and over again. And I thought to myself, well, you know, I could really package this up and productize it into an educational piece, and sell it beyond Minnesota. So I made that and had a real fun time making it and then a real bad time marketing it because as you know, you and I have talked about Jim, I’ve had a real hard time finding people who are thinking about starting a nonprofit, there’s not a one single life event or one single Facebook status, or whatever that you can sort of like target ads to for that. So that has actually recently turned into an upgrade to my console. So it’s like on the sales page for my consultation that’s like a nonprofit Strategy Session. come in we’ll, we’ll form formulate a plan. Oh, by the way, if you would like you can upgrade your strategy session with my online course for an additional couple 100 bucks. And then you’ll get all of this information from me. And we’ll really get to the meat and potatoes during our strategy session. If you don’t want to upgrade that’s fine. No worries. We’ll cover this stuff together. But it’s just, it’s up to them if they want to really maximize their time with me. So that’s kind of how that works. And then, you know, there’s just a bunch of other videos and articles and my subscription portal and whatever else has made
Tyson Mutrux
objects, just for my next question, it’s going to seem like it may be out of left field, I just want to ask you about this, you wrote a really cool blog post in April, about being a good friend. And the title of it is, are you a good friend, and I think it’s a really, I just love the idea of it. We talk a little a little bit about that, and where you got that idea from,
Jess Birken
somebody had been talking about leaving little voice recordings for their friends. And I just thought that that was a really cool concept. I like that you’re making me remember a post that I wrote in April, as if I have all that shit memorized.
Tyson Mutrux
Don’t you love that? In general about it. And I know it’s way out of left field. But I just wanted to talk about just the gist of it.
Jess Birken
It’s just like, you know, we just get so busy. And the thing I remember from writing the post is that when I went to summer camp as a kid, I had this all these pen pals, right, and like, I made all these great friends at camp. And I had this girl Kira, and we we called ourselves the Hug Patrol. And we would run around camp like giving random hugs to other campers. It was super awesome. And I stayed in touch with Kira and all my other pen pals for like, a long time, like a bunch of years. But then at some point, it just sort of fell off. And, you know, I think whatever High School hormones, things happen. And I feel like that’s, if you don’t really keep up on being a proactively good friend. That is what happens is a grown up too, right? Like we we get busy, we have our lives, we have families, we’ve had jobs, and it’s like, pretty soon, it’s like six months have gone by and I haven’t talked to you or you know, had any sort of contact with you beyond maybe seeing your life updates through the wall of Facebook or Twitter or something. So the post was really just about like, hey, like, every day, you should like wake up and reach out to somebody and just send them a little voice memo or text or something and just be like, Hey, I’m thinking about that time that we were at the place where we did this thing. And whatever happened, and it was really great. And just stay on their radar. Because if you don’t, then you know, Hug Patrol goes away. And that’s sad.
Jim Hacking
Glad Tyson’s reading books on how to be a good friend. Maybe one of these days we’ll learn how to be good. Oh,
Tyson Mutrux
no chance, no chance. Not with you at least
Jim Hacking
she got so many things going on? How do you do it with just one support person?
Jess Birken
Megan is awesome. She is not allowed to leave, because she’s super capable and hardworking. And she’s like a great Jill of all trades, like, I’m very able to just be like, Oh, I’m gonna teach myself this thing. And then I’m just gonna learn it. And I’m gonna go do it. And Megan is wired that same way. So I think we, between the two of us, like really have a great capacity. But then also, I’m a little bit dysfunctional, where like, my favorite hobby is working on my business. So when I was single, a little while back, and you’d go on first dates, and people would be like, yeah, what do you do for fun? And then you’re sitting there being like, do I tell them that it’s work on my business, because that makes me super demented. But that is it is true. Like I get really excited about making a new Zap, like we made some new Zap that fix some problem the other day, and like the good feeling of making that zap lasted for like, at least 48 hours, like a day and a half later, I was like, oh, man, that sounds so great. I am just really dorky about my work and get excited. And sometimes I would rather do that then do something else. But I also like to delegate really as much as I can. And like I if, if I can learn it and figure out how it works. I like to do that one at least one time so that I know what I’m going to ask for and I know what my quality standards are going to be. But then there’s a point at which I realized like, okay, and I shouldn’t be doing this. So let me hire someone on Upwork or let me send this to Locklear and really maximize the freelance stirs around me to help me get stuff done.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s so funny. You’re speaking my language language zaps. Ryan McCain and I have been nerding out since file by an illegal X conference last week because they made a bunch of changes. And so now we can we do a bunch of stuff with Zapier, which is freaking awesome. New triggers for Oh, absolutely. Flag group and we just keep setting. Oh, I just did this. I did this. And then Christopher nicolaysen got in on the action today. So it’s, we’re all just nerding out over it. So
Jess Birken
just so I can, like, talk to you guys about that.
Tyson Mutrux
It is so awesome. It’s just it’s such a nerdy thing, but it’s so freakin awesome. But anyway, well, on that note, though, what what’s your favorite technology? What do you what do you enjoy working with the most?
Jess Birken
That is Zapier, whatever. I mean, that is pretty damn cool, though. That is gotta be right up there in my top three. And then I guess right now, I really love jet form. Because I’m pushing out a lot of things for client facing interviews, Client Onboarding client experience surveys, doing a project and breaking it down into its component pieces, like, Okay, we’re gonna work on, you know, we have to provide this notice to the government, every time we do this kind of a project, I need to collect this information from the client, Hey, I bet we can make a jack form for this and email the client was a link. So I really love jot form. And then I’m getting pretty deep into Active Campaign right now, we just upgraded and are going to be using the CRM feature inactive campaign. And so that’s pretty great. And we have a lot of things running through Active Campaign at the moment. And it’s just easy. It’s, it’s automates so much stuff. And I’m really excited to like, get into the CRM features more. So those are probably my top 10 right now.
Jim Hacking
Alright, just so where do things look like the next 234 years? For your firm?
Jess Birken
I hate that question. Because I gave up on five year plans a long time ago.
Jim Hacking
Luckily, I only said two or three
Jess Birken
or four. Yeah, right. Exactly. I would really like to continue expanding the subscription, legal services offerings, we’ve got a really good, solid start. I think we’re closing in on the end of year one, for subscription services. So I think like, two, three years from now, there will be no more hourly billing will hopefully be doing more like leveraging group subscriptions were like association management companies can offer legal services to their nonprofit association customers or something like that. I’d like to expand it to that area. Just basically like maximizing the subscription.
Tyson Mutrux
Just so I want you to think about this for a second. And what is some because you’re you’re just so positive. I just I love it. And you just You seem so positive and so great. What is something though, that you you really, really struggle with? Maybe you’re perfect, maybe it’s nothing?
Jess Birken
Hell no. I mean, last year, Jim got me to cry on the airplane back from Texas because I was struggling so hard, because I had put so much time and effort into my online course and had sort of like, tanked my revenue at that time. But I’ve really turned that ship around, which is really great. So right now, I think the struggle you know, I don’t have any, like deep psychological struggles right now. Like last year, you know, I put my rent on a credit card for months in a row because I was just juggling everything so close to the line. But right now my struggle is really building the airplane while flying it like I feel like Megan and I are constantly creating new systems and iterating and making version 9.2 and version 9.3. And we have like, everything is going all at the same time. And I would love to be able to like you know, bring in another person or something but the revenue is just not quite there to do that. So I think the struggle of like, how do I scale this or like how do I get to that next level? That’s kind of the struggle right now. So it’s it’s a good struggle because it’s work gang and we’re building it. And we’re always like, it’s working like things are going well. But it’s also really hard, which I think is hard for our morale when it’s just like the bottomless pile of things that you know, you need to improve upon.
Jim Hacking
I remember that conversation on the plane. And and I think, you know, you you’ve been a great member of The Guild so far. And, and there have been a couple of times where people have had sort of breakthroughs like that tied in with emotion. And I think sometimes, and you’ve encouraged people through that moment, I think channeling back to that plane ride, and just how there has to be that sort of breakdown, but sort of like an acknowledgement of reality, and then things sort of take off after that.
Jess Birken
Yeah, I really firmly believe that we have stories that we tell ourselves or limiting scripts that we run in our head, like, I can’t do this, because x prevents me from moving forward. And that’s why on the plane back from lawyer forward, you were like, you just have to admit that you don’t want to do these projects. And that’s why there’s this backlog. And you should be delegating, and you’re not. And I apparently really needed to hear that and then cry and just sort of freak out and be like, oh, so I absolutely think that, as attorneys, we’re not encouraged to sort of do those things or be open or vulnerable or sort of like, even investigate our own internal scripts and psychology. There’s something about the culture of lawyering that really discourages that. And so I think, both through the podcast through just you being you guys and through the guild, like, I love that you bring that out, and encourage that because I think it’s, it’s the thing that helps you get through to the next place, you know, or fix the thing that’s not working. So thank you, again. I love you. Thank
Jim Hacking
you pretty awesome yourself.
Tyson Mutrux
All right. On that note, I hate to end on that note, but I do need to wrap things up. Before I do. I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group. People like Jess are in the Facebook group and sharing every day. It’s an amazing place to be. So go there, get involved. And then if you don’t mind going to Apple podcasts, or wherever your podcasts, give us a five star review. Help us spread the word, I would really appreciate it. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?
Jim Hacking
So I’m really excited about this week’s hack. It comes from my colleague at the office. Ashmore, she came across this website. So do you ever have a problem where when you print out something like maybe an article from the Post Dispatch or some other newspaper or and it prints all the ads, and everything else in the formatting looks like crap, and you feel bad for wasting a lot of paper, Tyson?
Tyson Mutrux
No, because I do not print articles, I read them on my phone. But anyways, I get the point. Go ahead.
Jim Hacking
Like for our asylum cases, we have to print a lot of like news stories and country conditions updates and the formatting is always bad. And you always end up using 10 times pieces of paper than you really need. If you go to print print, print friendly.com You can put in the URL and then formats just the text out of the article. And that way you’re not wasting paper. That’s good. We don’t like wasting papers.
Tyson Mutrux
I do well. So what we normally do is we’ll if it’s a something for a case, like an injury case, we’ll save the the article as a PDF. So we don’t normally have that problem, but I get it but if especially we just removed all the ads completely. I can see that how that’d be great. That’s really good. All right, just so what is your tip or hack of the week?
Unknown Speaker
My tip of the week. This is in Zapier, Zapier, whatever I want to call it a few
Tyson Mutrux
Zapier a just called Zapier that
Jess Birken
I recently learned that you can filter and like suck out information. So if I get an email from my contact form, or I send an email or an email hits the deleted folder, and it has certain information in it that you want, you can actually say like contact form email, filter out just that person’s email address, so that I can automatically add them to Active Campaign or just filter out their phone number. And for a few applications in our firm that has like saved so much human effort in the last week or so that I’m like completely nerding out about that PA is filter or
Tyson Mutrux
not. And then the Evie, have you seen the past? So you got it. You’ve got the filtering, you’ve got the PAVS or whatever they call, I mean, like, yeah, the conditional formatting. It’s just amazing. It’s really cool.
Unknown Speaker
Crazy. Crazy. Good.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a good one. All right, so I am going to recommend a podcast that I just finished listening to. It’s called Land of the giants. It’s really cool. The first season talks about Amazon, the rise of Amazon. And it it really gets into the nitty gritty, you know, taking care of employees, logistics, a bunch of things. And it’s told in a really awesome way. And so I think I really recommend it. It’s really cool. Land of the giants. It’s a fun one to listen to. Alright, just thanks so much for coming on. It’s been a lot of fun. We really, really, really, really, really, really appreciate it.
