In this bonus episode, Jim gives a talk at Saint Louis University Law School to a group of students who are taking Law Practice Management with the hopes of one day opening their own law firm.
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Transcripts: BONUS Episode: Law Practice Management talk in SLU Law School
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer podcast. This is Jim hacking. We have an extra bonus episode for you. I recently gave a talk at St. Louis University Law School, my alma mater, to a bunch of students who are taking law practice management in the hopes of one day opening their own law firm, I was a little bit wound up and I think you’ll hear that in the talk. But I got real excited about the possibility of these students going out on their own someday. And it really, I thought laid the groundwork for sort of where my mindset is on when and how attorneys can go out on their own. So I really hope you liked this bonus episode. The best part about it is a Tyson is nowhere to be found. So hopefully you’ll enjoy that. Thanks, everybody have a great week.
Unknown Speaker
I am very excited that Jim Hacking has is was able to come he’s very busy man. And you have probably heard his name. If you recall the economy girl kill youlet had mentioned you know always say you’ve got Jim hacking. Jim hacking hit you actually taught this class at one point in June is just kind of a guru. And he has really, he’s very generous with his time with many students of ours and just anybody that goes out on the road, he’s been through it, he knows it, he’s got a great story to tell about going out on your own and very passionate about about it. And I, I want you to hear from him because he is really among the best in the area. Let me just say that I really mean that. I’m very excited. And without any further ado, Tim, I’m gonna let you talk, thanks.
Unknown Speaker
I want you guys to give a shit. I want you guys to take this.
Jim Hacking
I want you take this whole class really seriously, because you might not know it or not. But you guys are the smartest kids in the school. You’re the only ones who took this class. And this is the most important class in all of law school. You can learn about torts or trust or any of that other crap. studying for the bar. It’s important I get it. If you want to be in a particular practice area, you got to know the substantive area. But the one thing that they didn’t teach when I graduated from this law school exactly 20 years ago was I know was that how to run a law practice, and how to make business how to make money, and how to run a business, and how to manage people. And these are all things that I’ve had to learn the hard way. And on my own. Next week, you’re going to hear from a buddy of mine named Tyson nutrix Tyson and I have a podcast called Maximum lawyer. It’s just about a year old every week we rant and rave and interview people and talk for about half an hour about things related to law, practice management, running your firm and, and marketing. My journey began when I graduated from law school. 20 years ago, I went to work for a small midsize firm 20 attorneys and claiming, and I was really happy I was making $45,000 a year and I thought that was just great. And after about a year and a half of working there, and taking abuse from one of the partners, I decided, boy, I’d really like to get out of here. Well, a friend of mine was a new partner at Louis rice, which is one of the bigger law firms in the city. And he said, Hey, Jim, we’re hiring laterals, and would you want to come down in the interview to come work here and I thought, Oh, that’d be great. Because I’d be going from making 45,000 to making 85,000 a year that was just gonna be great. So I went down and interviewed, and I got hired for the job. Now I should back up. For two years before I went to law school. I worked at a plaintiff’s firm called Green Ritter. And that law firm was a great place to work. I did plaintiffs work for two years, I learned a ton. I knew it. interrogatory is where before I got to sift Pro, and it really set me up for success. When I got to law school, I continued working there during law school, and I had health insurance through there. And that firm wanted to sue Blue Cross and Blue Shield, because Blue Cross Blue Shield had been doing some funny business with their money. And they needed some plaintiffs and I had Blue Cross Blue Shield through that job. So there was a lawsuit filed a class action filed. And it was Jim hacking, and one other guy versus Blue Cross and Blue Shield. And so this is all before I went to law school. And this is all before I went to work at reason Blitz and before I went to work at before I interviewed at Lewis rice. While I’m in law school, I met my now wife and we had a conversation one day about me being in that lawsuit, but she says, No, this is a small legal community, you probably don’t want to have your name on something like that. And I said, Nothing bad’s ever gonna happen. So I forgot about that. She forgot about that. We were engaged. In June, we got married, and I had it all timed out. So I got hired at Louis rice. We got married on June 19. We went on our honeymoon, and I was gonna start back like August 1. And when we came back from our honeymoon, there was a message on the answering machine from the hiring partner saying at Lewis ricing, Hey, Jim, there’s a there’s a problem. You need to call us before you come into work tomorrow. And I said, okay, so immediately, I thought of that lawsuit. I didn’t say anything to my wife. But I knew right then that there was a problem. And what happened was, is that in between the time that I was hired, and the time that I started, they had brought on a new partner, and that new partner had landed his new client, and that new client was Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the lawsuit that he was defending was James Oliver hacking with third versus Blue Cross and Blue Shield. So like that, I was unemployed. I lost my salary doubling job, my wife had her job lined up, and I was unemployed for about a month, I found work, employment at a maritime law firm, and I and I didn’t know anything about maritime law, I never took it didn’t know anything about it. But they were paying well, and they were nice guys. And they hired me. And so I worked at that firm for 10 years. And I became a partner at that law firm. And those guys were great guys. At the time, I was like 33, one of my partners, I eventually became a partner was 43. And the other partner was 53. And we had three or four big, big, big clients. And I was thinking to myself, that I did not want to be dependent on other people for my business that I did not want to have to find work to do through other attorneys contacts. At my prior job, my first job, there was a partner there, who really abused the other attorneys. And he really was mean, and he could do that and get away with it because all the clients were hits. And with the guys I was partners with, they weren’t like that at all. But I always had that in the back of my mind that I was worried about being stuck, dependent on people. There was a partner there, who was like in his 50s, he got all of his work from this asshole attorney. And he had to take this guy’s BS every week because that guy had the clients and he did not. So I always knew, in my heart of hearts, that the only stability in this business is having your own source of clients and clients. And, and I think that’s one of the main takeaways, I want you to hear me today. All right. So I went to work at this maritime firm, I worked for 10 years. By this time, we had two kids. And I had this great idea. I really wanted to go out on my own. I wanted to leave the stability of a partnership, I wanted to leave a six figure salary. I wanted to leave it all behind and start on my own. Now where in the hell did I ever get this idea? Well, during law school, I had changed religions. And my wife is originally from Egypt, she used to teach at the law school. And so I converted to Islam in 1998. We got married in 1999. And all that time when I was doing maritime work, I go to the mosque, and people would ask me to help them with their immigration matters. And I was like, I don’t know anything about immigration. I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it. I taught myself maritime law with my partners. So I thought I could do it again. But I just sort of I wasn’t ready to take that plunge. Amani was working here at the time. And so we had health insurance, and we had enough salary to know that we could pay the mortgage. And so I I I begged and cajoled and pleaded for about a year. And she agreed to let me go out on my own. And so I hung out my shingle. And my idea was that I would do immigration. And I would do legal work for immigrants. So I knew how to do personal injury stuff, because I’ve been doing personal injury defense for 10 years, and I’ve done it on the plaintiff side before and during law school. So I thought that I could do that. I also thought I could teach myself immigration. I didn’t know anything. So I had another attorney who was working in the private sector who worked for me part time as a 1099 contractor. And he helped guide me through me learning immigration for like the first two years. Eventually it dawned on me that he was making more mistakes than I was and I decided to separate from him. And we just kept doing more and more immigration and getting rid of the other stuff. And that’s a really important lesson for me and for you, I think is that you really have to be able to follow where the need is I ultimately satisfied a need that people had so I study a lot of marketing stuff. And one of the marketing people that I study is a guy named Gary Halbert. And he’s crazy. But he he would ask this question of people. If you were going to open a hamburger stand a restaurant, where would you? What do you think would be the number one factor in the success of your hamburgers? So I’ll ask you guys. Yeah, location. That’s right. So you got really quickly. So he said, the number one thing is a starving crowd. And the starving crowd is the most important thing. So I didn’t know it at the time. But immigration was very important to people. And my partners, were all like you’re going on on your own, I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’re crazy. There are a lot of immigrants who need help, but not any of them that not many of them have the money to pay for it. Well, the thing is, when you’re talking about immigration, about staying in the United States, about bringing your spouse here, keeping your spouse here, finding a job, getting your citizenship, keep him from being deported. These are all things that are sort of high on the list of priorities for people who are here, so they people find the money. But we kept pushing out different things. And we kept seeing what worked and what didn’t work. And resoundingly it was immigration that came back to us that people wanted us to do immigration, they wanted our help with immigration, they they weren’t calling me to do car accidents, and we just sort of pushed that stuff out. And it really got to a point where I was it wasn’t like I was getting these big, multimillion dollar personal injury cases. And, and so I just started, I was burning up all this energy on these little cracks and in cases. And it dawned on me that I could do really easily some immigration work and make the same amount of money that I did on the personal injury side, and with a whole lot less headache. So about five years ago, we stopped doing anything but immigration. And now that’s all that we do. And
Jim Hacking
Mary Pat wanted me to talk a little bit about the form of the law firm and sort of how that works and sort of what’s happened since so when we started in 2007. It was in a room like from that door to hear we rented space from some other attorneys. And it was myself and my paralegal Adela della was Bosnian. She worked at the, at the mall selling cell phones. She was 18 years old. When she started with me. She would answer the phone and she and she would say hacking law practice. And then she’d say, Jim, it’s for you. I think I think I mean, it was like, it was like Better Call Saul. It was like The Lincoln Lawyer. It was real, real hand to mouth and learning as we go and researching and just sort of improvising. And I am a fast starter. I am a I am a risk taker. I always had the stability of Amani working and having health insurance for our kids. But other than that, I was really willing to sort of go out on my own and really put myself out there. And eventually we started developing. I’m fasting. Oh, yeah. No. So we we eventually started building systems. So it dawned on me that we were doing a lot of the things same things over and over and over. And so like if Mary Pat married someone from Ireland and wanted to bring him here, we would we had to prepare a whole set of forms. So we would do we create an intake form. And we got some processes together where we really started to. To get things going the right way we streamlined it a little we cut down on the time, we got our turnaround time pretty good. Adele has now been with me for nine years. And we’ve really grown and I’m gonna talk a little bit about that. But back then it was she and I knocking out forms mean with clients. And I always sort of took this attitude with clients, that I can help you I’m good at what I do, I will do a good job for you. But if you don’t hire me, that’s okay. I think that if if you as a lawyer are if they can sense that you’re hungry for the business, they walk right out the door. But if you take the attitude, I don’t give a crap if you hire me or not, then they want you more. I don’t know really why that works. I guess it’s a psychology thing. But um, so the first year we had about 40 clients, the next year, we had about 70 clients. And eventually you get into this rhythm with immigration. It’s really nice. So if I helped Mary Pat’s husband come to the United States, then I help him get his green card. Then later, I help him get his citizenship. And then later on, he wants to sponsor his mom and dad. And then Mom and Dad come and they want to sponsor their kids. And so this virtuous cycle sort of happens right where you can help people move up the immigration ladder, and they can keep referring you Okay? From a marketing standpoint, I didn’t know jack squat. I was an arts and science history major. I didn’t know anything about anything. I had the world’s lamest website if you want to go on Wayback Machine and look at hacking law practice.com You can see it I think I even had maritime and immigration on there. It was five static page It just it was the worst thing you ever saw. One day, there’s an attorney in town that I was looking for his name was Dan Ryan and I got on Dan Ryan’s website. And I still have never met him. But I got on his website. And I got to the very bottom of his website. It said, this website is created by foster web marketing, the most impactful important legal marketing website company in the world or some crazy thing. So I clicked on it. And on this website, they had two things that had become essential to my success. One is, they had three questions up on top, it said, Why, why? Why am I here? One was my website sucks. One was, I need more business. And I don’t remember what the third one was. But I clicked on one of those things. And they took me to the lead magnet, I wanted to learn about social media, and took me to this lead magnet, does anybody know what a lead magnet is? A lead magnet is something that you offer to make a lead to someone who’s interested in what you do in exchange for their email address. Okay, so for me, there was a special report about Twitter that I really wanted for free, because I wanted to know how to learn, use Twitter to get clients. And so I clicked on that. And I put in my email address. And that started me in this email sequence for foster with marketing that kept telling me how great they were, and showing me all their cool websites and explaining why I might want to do business with them. So as I said earlier, I’m a fast implementer. So I called them right away, I totally bought all the crap that they had, I paid $10,000 for a website, I signed up for seven $50 a month for this internal website that only they controlled. But through that, I learned how to market because they invited me to this marketing seminar in Virginia by a guy named Ben Glass. And Ben Glass is a personal injury attorney, medical malpractice attorney in Virginia. And he does his three day seminar where all he talks about is marketing for lawyers. And this was like unheard of this was like the skies parted, the clouds parted and the sunlight came in, and I was like, I was gone. I was like ready to go. So I went to this conference, like three years in a row. And I started learning about marketing, I started learning about business and, and I learned about books to read. And I learned about podcasts to listen to. And I proposed that if you listen to these podcasts, and if you read these books before you graduate from law school, you’ll be 1000 times ahead of almost all attorneys in St. Louis, not even just the ones who are graduating, you guys can level the playing field by teaching yourself this stuff long before you ever graduate. And so I became a real student of marketing. And I found a podcast that I really love called I love marketing. And it’s by these two guys, Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. Dean Jackson is a real estate guy, Joe Polish was a carpet cleaner. And they taught me through 250 episodes of their podcasts, how to do marketing for lawyers. And what I realized is that the coaching group that I was in and the website that I was in, was they were sort of doing what these guys were giving away for free on I love marketing. So I quit all that stuff. And now I do it all on my own. I moved all my website to WordPress. So I have a WordPress website that cost me like $35 a year. And I have a YouTube channel where I have 180 282 YouTube videos that are just about three or four minutes long. And I have about 1200 followers on Twitter. And I have a Facebook group, a private Facebook group of 460 people who are interested in immigration. And I send out a weekly email every Monday, like clockwork, every Monday morning, I sent out an immigration, email and it’s half about immigration. And it’s half about me or people in the office are funny things that happened, or really were the favorite thing that you have or client successes. So I am a I don’t consider myself that much of a lawyer anymore. I consider myself a marketer who happens to be a lawyer. So I if I got to do this stuff all day long, I wouldn’t be happy. I still have to practice law because we’re so freaking busy. But eventually I want to outsource that stuff. And we’ve we’ve really grown so right now in our office Adela still there. She sort of runs the place with me. We have a receptionist. So Dallas from Bosnia her receptionist receptionist is from Iraq. My wife Aman even joined our firm last year after leaving the law school. She came with us and she’s practicing law full time now. We have another attorney from Minnesota. So there’s three attorneys. There’s Adela Marwan and then we have two part time people. And then we have a bunch of law interns. So it’s a really busy place. We’re getting ready to move out with to West County. Yeah, yeah, our landlord is renovating our building and invited us to move out for three months, but that just wasn’t gonna work. So we went and we bought my parents house on West County. So now we’re out there, and we’re moving out there and we’ve really developed the nice thing about immigration too is that it is a it is a nationwide practice. I can practice it Immigration Law anywhere in the country. So I can’t give legal advice about a criminal law citation or something in Georgia. But I can go to Georgia and I can do somebody’s citizenship case, I can practice law throughout the United States. The other thing, I’ve really developed this niche, because I’ve done litigation for 12 years before I did an immigration and because I frankly feel more comfortable talking about litigation than I do about some really esoteric area of immigration law. I’ve developed this niche where I have
Jim Hacking
I have these Muslims who have been waiting for their citizenship for a really long time. There’s this this government program to slow down immigration of Muslims to the United States called carp, the controlled application review and resolution program. And the ACLU had a big lawsuit about this. And they found out that it is a real program, and that there’s basically 35 agencies working together to figure out ways to slow down immigration by Muslims, and they slow him down and citizenship and green card and asylum all these different things. So when, when a case has been delayed for more than a year, or for an unreasonable amount of time, you can go into federal court and ask the judge, you can do the world famous writ of mandamus. This is like the one legal thing I still remember the writ of mandamus. And you can ask the judge to compel USCIS to decide someone’s case. And in that lawsuit, you throw in a claim that the control application review and resolution program is illegal and you want to declaratory judgment that this program is illegal and shouldn’t be stopped. And the immigration service will do some horse trading, they will move out your clients case by deciding the case in exchange for you not pushing ahead with the carp challenge. And I’ve done this now, probably for about 120 people. And it’s really my favorite thing to do. Eventually, it will be the only thing that I do. I’ve been filing one a week, and I really get a lot of joy out of it because the people hire me to do the lawsuit. I just this week, I had a guy who was waiting for a citizenship for four years. He called a senator. He called the ombudsman he made info pass, he went down there, everything he could do to get his case moving and it didn’t move until we filed the lawsuit. We filed the lawsuit. We serve it on an by registered mail, they have 60 days to answer the 50th day they call me up they say Jim, we’re going to schedule Lee for an interview, I fly down to Houston for the interview, he gets approved on the spot, and he’s going to become a citizen next Wednesday. So it’s very fulfilling. It’s financially pretty good because I can get the lawsuit together and about an hour and a half. And I can get an I get to travel and go down and they pay me for that too. So it’s really gotten to be something that I really enjoy, because it’s really impactful. So that’s sort of us in our practice. As far as systems go. There has been an interesting change that’s happened since the money join the law firm. So I am a quick starter. I am not a follow through her. Right. It’s not my bag. I am I am. It’s totally Omanis. I’m a shiny object kind of a guy if I see I’ll try something new. I was at the gym today and I literally saw a squirrel and squirrel squirrel at the gym. Which is like the joke that they say but I literally did that. So if Adela were here, she’d be groaning and grunting and saying, oh, yeah, like we’ve tried every kind of software practice management software. We’ve tried every kind of marketing thing we I’m always look for like, like we’ve been on Prolog Cleo. abacus
Unknown Speaker
Thank you talking about abacus at work with it. You really
Jim Hacking
liked it. I did. It was great. Yeah. Now, I’m on this. I’ve been on this program this software for a while it is not legally based at all. It’s called Infusionsoft. And it’s a marketing software. And we’re building our practice on the back of it. Tyson will talk to you about that next week when he comes. But when it comes to bringing in business, one of the key tenants of our firm and thing that we work on in marketing is we talked about the before unit, the during unit and the after unit. So the before unit is how do I get people how to identify people that are interested in hiring me or immigration help? How do I get them to raise their hand. And so the before unit is from the time they raise their hand, until the time they actually hire us. The during unit is all about marketing that we can do to them, which is primarily doing a good job for them. What can we do during the representation to make them like us know us like us and trust us more. And then the after unit are two things referrals and repeat business. So it’s really a cycle eventually, before during and after unit and so Tyson is really good. He’s done a really good job of automating through Infusionsoft a lot of his during practice during steps. So he does criminal and personal injury and he’s really automated. Like I refer cases to Tyson sometimes, and he’s got it set up so that he just needs to put in like that amount. offers been made from the insurance company and it’ll automatically send me an email that automatically send the client an email. It’s really it’s really fancy, I focused more on the before unit. So that’s what’s my weekly email. And so marketing so sophisticated right now that even within immigration, I can break down. If somebody’s interested in asylum or citizenship or green card, or whatever, we can market to them specifically about that. So they get they get put into an email sequence about asylum or about citizenship, because if they’re asking about asylum, they don’t care about citizenship. And if they’re asking about citizenship, they don’t care about green card. So it’s really, really sophisticated and it’s really helped our growth. When I started with Infusionsoft, we had about 500 people in our database. Right now we have about 9000. Right? And certainly 500 of those people get an email from me every Wednesday, every Monday. And invariably, when they get that email, they always call me. They always write me back and say, Oh, Jim, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. So I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.
Unknown Speaker
What’s up? What email service do you use? That’s Infusionsoft. So Infusionsoft sends it while I write it. That’s the vehicle.
Jim Hacking
But then everybody, yeah, that part is sort of manual. That’s almost like Constant Contact that little part of it. But the real value of Infusionsoft is we keep all of our notes on what happens in the case. And also, if someone says they want to, they want they are interested in asylum, then they get 10 emails over the course of two weeks about asylum and, and, and they also get access to my my video. So with YouTube, YouTube has been insane. Absolutely insane. So I started, you know, I make them one video at a time. So in my office, I have a little green screen closet, right. So there’s, there’s two lights, there’s this camera, which I forgot to bring my memory card because I was recording myself. And there’s a tripod and there’s a green screen. And I’ll go in there and I’ll in the morning I’ll put on a tie score, I won’t if I don’t feel like it. And I’ll I’ll shoot a video. And and I create content. And the content is really good because the content all comes from questions people ask, so you don’t ever need to tell anybody. I’ve been a lawyer for 30 years, I we have 30 years combined experience, we will fight for you. We look at us, in front of these pretty law books. All that stuff is stupid and crap. People don’t care about that people just want answers to their questions. So what I do is, I keep a notebook. When I meet with clients, I use their language and I write down the questions that they have. And then I go back the next day, and I’ll shoot a two or three minute video or five minute video. And I just do it on the green screen. I upload it into the Google Drive folder. My man in Pakistan Assan. edits, it puts my logo on the back of my phone number and he uploads it to YouTube, YouTube. Automatically, through Zapier, it goes off to rev. Rev transcribes it, then rev, uploads the transcription into my WordPress site, I go in and clean up a couple things. I insert the video and I posted. And that’s that’s all Google juice. So we’ve done that. Sometimes I go sort of crazy. And I do like Like sometimes I’ll challenge myself like I did 30 videos in 30 days, because that was weird. But usually I just do. Usually I just do one a week. Every Monday I try to do on with with the new with the new email, I tried to do another video, how much time does that. So it used to take me about an hour because I was editing myself. But then I found us on through up works. And he does it for 10 or 15 bucks, 15 bucks. And so the video takes me through it takes me more time to get dressed to do the video than it does to actually do the video. And then I just take out my little memory card is sorted in, I upload it to YouTube. And he gets it all up. And it’s great. Yeah. And so you know, then Google loves the Google loves the transcription, because those are all key words and phrases. And we’ve really just tried to make it as frictionless as possible.
Unknown Speaker
That’s really great.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, so we have right now I think, I think my one of my, one of my videos has like 60,000 views. And some of the videos that I do are things that are annoying questions that people ask me all the time that aren’t gonna lead me business. So the number one video I have is what I do if I want to get a visitor visa to the United States, I can help people with visitor visas. So I’ve taken every piece of information that I know about visitor visas. I’ve put it on that video, I’ve transcribed it. And now when somebody if Barry Pat calls me up and asked about a visit visa, I just click a button on her contact record and it shoots are off the email with a video and they leave me alone. So it’s really about being efficient and about knowing where you make your money. Okay. What else
Unknown Speaker
didn’t How did you drill down to determine if you could expand a little bit about that about focusing solely on immigration?
Jim Hacking
Okay. All right. So I am I have become convinced and I believe this to be true. One of the books in there that was with a book called Tribes. I wouldn’t be here are the ones that book called Tribes by Seth Godin that Americans, and for me, people around the world’s attention spans are so short right now. That you need to be in a place where when people think of you, they think of one word. And when they think of that one word, they think of you. And I absolutely believe this to be true that if, if if somebody thinks that I, you will find websites, I will come across them of people, one attorney who has 30, practice areas on the website, now that just screams, I’ll do anything for a buck, I’ll do anything. If you’ll pay me I am so desperate, I need you to send me business, I need you to send me money. Drilling down and picking one practice area was the best decision I ever made. Every time I narrow my focus, I make more money, I envision a time very soon, where we will not even do a deportation. deportation cases are stressful, they’re combative. I wake up in the middle of the night worried about my clients. I don’t do that when I’m doing a green card case. And I can do four green card cases for the price of one deportation case. And I have no stress for deportation. So I suspect that very soon we will start farming out or deportation work, or, or we’ll have an attorney who loves doing that. And that’s all that they do. Yeah, which is fine with me, I’d be happy to do it. I like deportation work, it’s just really stressful. So I also think that when you are when you are a specialist, or narrow in one area, you are much easier to refer to. In other words, for a while I was doing immigration, and I was suing employers for employee employment discrimination. And now and I stopped doing that. I refer that stuff out now. And one, one reason that’s good is because I can’t be an expert in more than one thing. It’s just impossible. The law is way too complicated now. And I was making small mistakes that were slowing things down I, I told a client that their judgment was not going to be subject to income tax. And it turned out it was so it ate up my whole fee, and I lost the money. That’s one thing number two, when I say about making it easier to refer to, when I was suing these big employers, some of them were at firms that were unwilling to send me clients because I was suing their other clients. But now that people know that I’m only doing immigration, then they’re not worried that I’m going to either steal their clients or sue their clients, right. So it’s right now 50% of my business comes from immigration or comes from the internet. 25% of it comes from past clients and 25% of it comes from attorneys. So that just is something that’s really easier for them. And there’s no friction. I’m all I always want to get rid of the friction. I think
Unknown Speaker
starting off though, yeah. When somebody you know, and some of these folks might want to go out on their own. Okay. How hard I mean, do you recommend starting that way? Or was it a valuable experience to have done more? Like you did, do you not? I’m saying
Jim Hacking
no, I think they should do it. I think they should do it as fast as they can. I think they should do it as fast as they can. They should get rid of the bullshit, get rid of the things they’re not good at, get rid of the things that they don’t like, find out what you like now. Now now, start writing about it. start blogging about it, start connecting with people on LinkedIn about it, and become an expert before you graduate in that area. Pick one thing, one thing, not two, not three, not 411 thing and become the go to person. If you pick somebody tell me something that they want to do. Tell me somebody, somebody who knows a practice area that really really interests them. Tell him a criminal law? Yes. What year are you? Second year, second year? All right. You’re going to start a blog. You’re gonna start a blog today. The blog is called what’s your what’s your first movie on movie on criminal law? Right. And you’re gonna you’re gonna set up Google alert, you’re gonna set up Google Alerts, and you’re gonna find people on Twitter, that talk about criminal law and there’s gonna be article because he’s being prosecuted for sexual battery, you’re gonna write a blog post on that you’re not going to get legal advice. You’re not going to you’re not going to be a lawyer. You’re going to comment on it. You’re going to show that you’re interested in. You’re going to write about criminal law and tweet about criminal law all day long. The next a year and a half after you graduate. When you’re done. Your website is going to have a shitload of content and Google juice and you want to go work for a law firm. For, if you’ve come to me, and you’ve been bogging about criminal law for a year and a half, I’m gonna want to hire you, I’m gonna know you’re paying attention, I know that you’re engaged. If you want to go out on your own, then you just change that into your law firms website and you gather up all that Google jeans. And you’re also going to learn criminal law while you’re doing all that it’s, it’s it’s learning in public in a way that’s beneficial to you, and maybe your reader, you will get followers, there was a kid that graduated from this very law school, named Rex grade list. When he graduated, he had 36,000 Twitter followers when he graduated from this law school 10 years ago. So I wouldn’t I think, the sooner you get out on your own, the sooner you get your own clients, the better off you’re going to be. I used to come in here. And I was like, Oh, I don’t want to tell those students to go out on their own. I don’t want to be responsible for that. I’m done with that. I’m done with that. I have seen too many people like Tyson, like Joey, other people who have gone right out and started their own. Now my wife would go apeshit, if she even heard me saying, she would say you’re crazy. And there’s certainly perils to it. You can’t hold yourself out as an expert until you are an expert. And you can’t, you have to partner up with other people. In order to make sure that you’re giving competent advice. There are the rules of ethics, that you have to do your due diligence and have to be able to do this correctly. But you can learn a ton now. And as much time as you spend learning your substantive area of the law, learn marketing, learn management. I was talking earlier about how things have changed in my office since Amany came, and they really have changed so much for the better. I think Adele has been driving me I’ve been driving Adela crazy over the years, with all my fits and starts with all my harebrained ideas, and I don’t really focus and follow through on finishing things. Well, now that Imani is there, Adela has an ally, and she has someone and she has someone who can call me out on my bullshit. So literally, about a month ago, I was sitting around thinking about some things. And I said, I’ve got this great idea, you guys. And they’re like, no, no, no, we’re not doing that. So this is what we’re going to do. So they have started this program to completely systematize everything in our office so that if you walked into my office tomorrow, you could open up a binder or actually get on a Google internet that we’re building. And it would walk you exactly through how to complete a complete a naturalization application from start to finish. And even if you didn’t know anything about the law, you would know how to fill out this application. That’s how we’re getting to the point where this is how you turn on the lights. This is how you turn on the coffee machine. This is how you make phone calls. This is how you get a refund. All that stuff. So Tyson is great on the systems of the during unit. I’m pretty good on the marketing side, and Amani and Adela are living in here. I understand its value. I know it’s important. I know that we have to do these things. I’m just not the right person for it because I’m more about connecting and finding new clients and finding, you know, different mechanisms to make it. Um,
Unknown Speaker
you know another thing Jill was talking about it students really enjoyed her
Unknown Speaker
purple hair. She got rid of her purple hat. No, she didn’t. She was she had it on it was yeah, she’s awesome. Oh, I love I’ve really enjoyed her first time. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
She really, she really was just good, very competent. Um, but she was talking about talking, she doing flat fees, and figuring that out and doing alternative billing. And she didn’t say exactly what she did when she talked to you. She thought. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like how to
Jim Hacking
select the alternative? I don’t know, is it that’s all we do. All we do is for every everything you do hourly anymore. The only thing we do hourly are deportations. And that’s only if I think it’s going to be a really complicated case. Most almost everything else is flat fee clients really, really like flat fees. Right? And I’m real. I’m real flexible. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So did did she talk you instead, did you? You know, she said that she you guys talked about that, and that? It shouldn’t say she talked you into it. Do you find you do make more money doing it that way?
Jim Hacking
Well, I think that if you if you’re gonna do flat fees, I think it’s important that you understand that in some cases, it’s going to be to your benefit. In some cases, it might not be but that on the end, it averages out that you’re not. You don’t want to have any case where someone Eating up all of your time. But at the same time, if you can get some cases done for three hours, and some end up taking 10, it averages out, as long as you’re making seven hours worth of time, you’re happy. So I think just from an ease, I think, especially when you’re dealing with individuals, much more than companies, they want to some certain they want to know, before they hire, before they hire you exactly how much it’s gonna cost. And I’m really easy. So for almost everything that we do cost 3027 50, something like that. And I’ll always give people the option if you pay upfront on that a little bit off, or you can pay half upfront and the rest over time, I don’t care how much how long it takes people to pay. I mean, I guess I should from a cash flow standpoint, but it’s really worked out for us well, to let people sort of set it there. And and I had a guy from Iraq, he was bringing his wife and two kids here. He paid me $50 a month for like three years. And he showed up every every month on the first of the month, always paid, always paid cash. He was always, you know, very diligent about it. So I have not been burned. But again, I’m not the one who pays attention to who’s getting paid and who’s not just because that’s not my thing. I don’t really like conflict. I don’t like having a complaint about people not paying their bill. But I think in the whole 10 years that we’ve been together been running. I’ve had maybe three or four five clients now pay us every day.
Unknown Speaker
So yeah, now with the levies. How do you mean, I guess through your experience, you can figure out like how much?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, so that’s been a learning curve. We, we don’t keep track of our time. Right. And, and that’s probably not the best thing to do. But we have a general sense as to how long a given case. I mean, so to do a green card case, we meet with the clients couple times. So that’s probably two hours of work to della right now. So I have a lady on a farm in Kentucky named Anita. I found her on Fiverr. And so she knocks out all of my forms on the most complicated case, it cost me $55 For her to knock out my forms, and then Adela reviews them. And then, you know, we’re definitely making money. I don’t know precisely, but I’m not losing money, for sure. I guess I guess what I would do if I were starting out is I would keep track for sample cases. I tried to get freeze case type within criminal, I would want to know, okay, so if I have, you know, three felonies and three misdemeanors, look how much time it takes me on those three, average that out, figure out what I think should be my hourly rate, multiplied out at 500 bucks, and call it a day. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
You say she max out your phones for you? Do you mean like she actually makes them? Or she goes over them and looks over?
Jim Hacking
She types. So our form so immigration has a lot of paperwork and forms. So they have to be tight? Yeah. Yes, PDF. So we get an intake form. We I just did it right before I came, I scanned it in. I sent it off to her with all the clients documents through Google Drive, she looks at it. She types up all the forms. There’ll be back in there tomorrow morning. Clients come back sign pay, and we review them and stuff. And then
Unknown Speaker
what was the name? Like?
Unknown Speaker
What are your what was
Unknown Speaker
fiver on Fiverr or Upwork, Fiverr? Fi ve RR or Upwork. Those are both like five, five for a two hours.
Jim Hacking
Like a fiber. I think back in the 70s people would say I’m gonna give you a fiber. And then they added an art to it to make it something weird, you know, because how websites are. That’s one Upwork is the other word, one word of work. And you just post jobs on there. Like, do you need a logo for your criminal law firm? Say Louis law. So you have an Allen and Allen so there’s people you can pay 20 bucks and you say, Okay, I have 20 bucks to spend on this logo, who wants to do it for me and the people bid on it and you pick who you like, and there’s reviews and everything. So my crazy buddy Brett was in town and he said I bet you can find someone to do your immigration forms on Upwork. So we looked and there was a lady who had a paralegal degree, she take an immigration law, which is more than I had as a paralegal. And she she this is what she wanted to do. So she’s on this farm with her husband in like that part of Georgia or part of Tennessee, right before Georgia by Chattanooga, and I’ve never met her. And I have she does all of our forms now. And I have a buddy in DC who had a lawyer that was working for him and she needed help. So now I needed those her forms. It’s a total win win situation. She signed a confidentiality agreement and non disclosure agreement and all this stuff. We did a background check on her. And it just she sends me a bill once a month job pays it and I don’t have to worry about that stuff. So ultimately Everything above everybody working for me is just me pushing out were the one one concept that’s really important that I really liked is that when Louis opens his law firm, he does not want to be emptying the trash, and licking the stamps and doing all that stuff. So his his job is going to be to push down to the greatest extent possible, so that he’s doing the work that only he can do. That’s the most important of all the things that I’ve learned, it’s that I should not be doing things and I slip into doing things that I don’t need to be doing. Sometimes I’ll type a form or because I think it’s faster or sometimes I won’t follow procedure and whenever I don’t follow a procedure, all hell breaks loose and everything goes back like if I scheduled something on my own on the camera.
