Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you an attorney who needs some tips on what to avoid doing? In this live podcast episode, hosts Jim and Tyson discuss 99 things that lawyers should stop doing. 

Jim and Tyson go over a long list of things attorneys should not do and provide advice on what to do instead in order to become more successful in the legal field. One of these is to not schedule hour-long meetings. Truthfully, most meetings do not need to be a full hour. Go into meetings with a defined agenda and don't waste time talking about things that are irrelevant. 

Attorneys are known to work long hours with little sleep. Tyson and Jim really emphasize the need to get enough sleep to maintain good health and to be more productive. Set boundaries on when you need to finish your work in the office and transition over to doing things that help you unwind. That could be implementing a hard stop at 5pm and putting your phone on silent until the morning. 

Many people fall victim to saying yes to everything as a way to keep the peace and avoid conflict. As attorneys, you will be busy with a lot of moving pieces throughout your day. You will not have time to take on every case or please every client. Learn how to say no and get comfortable with the feeling.

It is important to not compare yourself to others and focus on your own goals. The legal field is full of aspiring attorneys who want to be the best in the business and will try to compete against their fellow colleagues. This can really eat away at many people’s self esteem and progress. Tyson and Jim talk about the importance of focusing on your own goals and not letting other people’s progress affect your own.

Mental health is an important thing to focus on. It is important to focus on both your personal mental health and that of your team. Think about the decisions you make as a leader that affect their work and personal lives. Make it a priority to have routine conversations with your team to understand how they are feeling and how to adjust expectations.

Take a listen to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:39 Avoid wasting time on unscheduled phone calls and hour-long meetings
  • 3:13 Prioritize getting enough sleep to maintain good health and improve productivity
  • 8:23 Discussion of the importance of saying no
  • 18:13 Focusing on your own growth and improvement
  • 26:36 Importance of considering the mental health of both yourself and your team

Resources:

Transcripts: Metrics That Matter with Tim McKey

Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 2 (00:00:23) - 99 things you should stop doing today. We want to go through these relatively quickly and again, when we're done, you can get up and talk about something that you're going to stop doing or something you're going to start doing, or some big takeaway you've had from the conference. So we have those three mics. So just be thinking about that, because we'd love to get as much feedback from you as we can. And then then that'll be it for this year's conference.

Speaker 3 (00:00:46) - You had me laughing. I was kind of smiling because I was just hearing you talk about running to the back of the room, and I wish I had something to sell to you, because you'd run to the back of the room and nobody.

Speaker 2 (00:00:53) - Runs to the back of the room faster than I.

Speaker 3 (00:00:54) - Do. That's right.

Speaker 3 (00:00:55) - So all right, we're going to start. We are going to go fairly rapid fire because we don't want there's 99 of these. So we're going to go fairly quickly. Bookkeeping. You should not be doing your own bookkeeping. If you are doing your own bookkeeping right now, what you need to be doing is getting on the internet as we speak and putting a job post out for a bookkeeper.

Speaker 2 (00:01:11) - If you missed Adam's great talk on bookkeeping, make sure to get the recordings. By the way, the recordings you should be getting in about two weeks. It takes the awesome fellows from the casino who have done the audio and visual to get that to us, so we'll have that for you in just a little bit. And don't let me forget at the end, Tyson, we got to do our thank yous. Yes. All right. So some of these suggestions of the 99 things we also got from guild members. So we give a little shout out to the guild members who did this. But many people, including our friend Greg Steel, said stop taking unscheduled phone calls.

Speaker 3 (00:01:39) - No question hour long meetings. If you're scheduling our long meetings and they actually have to be an hour long meeting, you need to go into it with an agenda. Each meeting needs to have some sort of an agenda going into it that way. There's got to be a defined time. It should not be an hour. It's very rare that you actually need an hour for a meeting. It's I mean, if you give me an hour long meeting, it drives me nuts.

Speaker 2 (00:01:59) - Yeah. I would assume they should be 15 minutes and work backwards from there. Stop freaking yourself out. Freaking yourself out does no good. It does nobody on your team any good, and it's not going to help you be clear of thought in order to get out of the problems that you're having.

Speaker 3 (00:02:13) - Is anybody from Jim's team here? If you are, raise your hand because this is there we go freaking your team out. Stop freaking your team out with all of your madness. Stop freaking your team out.

Speaker 2 (00:02:23) - Number six saying just this one time, oh, I'm just going to fix this this one time, or I'm going to go take care of this little task one last time, because it's not one last time.

Speaker 2 (00:02:32) - You'll keep doing it over and over and over until you just stop doing it, saying, just this one time, you might as well just keep doing it.

Speaker 3 (00:02:40) - Binge watching Netflix when you should be working. Work times for work time. Okay, go to go to the office with something in mind that you're you've got to have a defined schedule, well defined schedule, and get the work done. Don't spend your time on Netflix or on Facebook all day. Get the work done.

Speaker 2 (00:02:54) - There's somebody on this stage who has a tendency to send out angry tweets, and and that person is wearing a hoodie, and that's because he's been watching too much news. And Tyson will let me know that I'm rage tweeting again. Just totally wasted energy.

Speaker 3 (00:03:09) - I'll send him a screenshot of it and then he usually deletes it.

Speaker 2 (00:03:12) - That's what you really mean to say this, Jim.

Speaker 3 (00:03:13) - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Next one is sleeping too little. I to be honest with you. I've got this problem. I do go to bed late and I get up early and I don't sleep enough.

Speaker 3 (00:03:21) - But it's extremely important to get for your health to get sleep. I acknowledge the fact that I need more sleep, but please get more sleep. It's for your health.

Speaker 2 (00:03:28) - Some people feel like they need to approve every expense. Give the people who are helping you the authority to spend a certain threshold of money, and then have a process for any expenditures over that amount. But you do not need to be involved in the approval of every expense.

Speaker 3 (00:03:43) - Set some limits. Yes. Next is updating your clients. Thank you, Heather Ford, for this. I mean, you don't need to be updating your clients every day. You've got people that can do that. Hopefully you do have people that can do that for you. If you don't hire some staff and let them update the clients, the more that they build that relationship between the clients and your case managers or paralegals, whatever you call them, the better it is for you, because then they're going to trust them more, so allow them to give those updates.

Speaker 2 (00:04:07) - Ryan Anderson falsely claimed that he was the most disorganized person in the world, because that happens to be me. I did the exact same thing he did. I didn't leave my passport. I left my cell phone in my car, so I had to borrow the baggage guy's phone to call my wife to get my phone back. But along those lines, one of the things I'm notorious for signing up for subscriptions that I don't use anymore, right? Because I just forget about them. And a great trick if you want to find your unused subscriptions is cancel a credit card, because then they'll all start bothering you to let you know that you're not there. Not being able to bill you. And you're like, oh shit, I have that subscription. I don't even need that anymore. So that's a good way to get rid of that.

Speaker 3 (00:04:43) - Yeah, you should get in touch with your bookkeeper that you're going to hire, and you're going to have them constantly monitor this to make sure that you should have a review every single year, at least about your subscription.

Speaker 3 (00:04:52) - So make sure you do that. Next thing is stuff you don't want to do. If you don't want to do it, then you should not be doing it. It's a pretty simple thing and we do it every day we find ourselves, oh my gosh, I got to do this again. And then what happens is you never do it right. No matter how good your task system is, it doesn't matter. You're just not going to do it. So stop doing the things you don't want to do. Delegate those things.

Speaker 2 (00:05:13) - You'll notice if you pay attention that some of our stop doings are contradictory. Right? And and it's because different people in this room are at different stages and are having different experiences. So. Take what you like and leave the rest always. But this is one that I think we can all agree on. Ignoring your hobbies. Ignore your hobbies at your peril. You've got to have some kind of outlet besides exercise. I think it's something that you just do to get your mind off things.

Speaker 2 (00:05:37) - I like to work on Legos, the Star Wars Legos with the kids, or go to their softball games with no more play practice with nor. So you've got to have other things to do just to stay balanced.

Speaker 3 (00:05:46) - Repetitive tasks. If you find that you're doing something over and over and over again, automate it. It's pretty simple. Stop doing repetitive task or delegated to somebody.

Speaker 2 (00:05:54) - You should not be doing the initial screening of hires. You should not be doing the initial screening of hires. You should be higher up in the food chain. You should be later on in the process. So you don't want to be the ones doing that initial screening. Let somebody else do it. Even if there's only two of you and you're hiring a third person, let somebody else do that initial screening, get their impressions of the people, and that'll cut down on the time you spend in interviews.

Speaker 3 (00:06:15) - Alex, are you still in the room? What's the name of the program you use for videos? Interviewers? I can allow you to screen a lot of those interviews.

Speaker 3 (00:06:24) - Really good, really good tip ordering supplies. You should have an office administrator for that. If you are ordering supplies, you should have an office administrator. The mail.

Speaker 2 (00:06:32) - Now, I was just talking to Cain earlier that I started in the mailroom at a law firm before I went to law school, but you don't need to be doing the mail anymore. Lets somebody else do the mail, even if it's a service.

Speaker 3 (00:06:42) - Oh, this one's big. And hopefully end of yesterday with Dr. Selke and then Gwynn this morning hopefully, you know that negative self-talk is very destructive. Stop doing it. Do some of the stuff that with the PCT and the SF. If you find yourself doing the PCT, apply the SF. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the video when it comes out in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 (00:07:01) - Generating invoices. Now, if you're in a place in a firm where you're doing billable hours and you need to check over the invoices, that's just fine. But don't be the one to actually do the mechanical work of generating the invoices.

Speaker 2 (00:07:11) - That comes from Russ and Devin from the guild. Make sure that you let somebody else do that.

Speaker 3 (00:07:16) - Absolutely. If you have things in your firm that a VA can do, go ahead and hire a VA to do it. It's going to free up your people in the States. If if your VA's are overseas, it's going to free up their time to do more meaningful tasks. So stop doing that work that a VA can do.

Speaker 2 (00:07:33) - This one got a ton of tears in the side of the guild when we were talking about it. Too many practice areas. So this is something we talk about a lot. There have been plenty of presentations on Niching down, but when Ron told the story of how he had given up one of his practice areas, like everybody was cheering. So the sooner you can do that, the better.

Speaker 3 (00:07:49) - It's a great one. Immediately updating clients. This is from Heather Ford. A lot of the things that whenever it happens on a case, you don't have to immediately pick up the phone if you don't want.

Speaker 3 (00:07:57) - I mean, you really don't need to pick up the phone to call your clients. Let them know right away. You can have your staff do it, or it can wait till the next day. You don't have to do it immediately.

Speaker 2 (00:08:04) - I think we can say one other thing you should stop doing is using the same slide twice, because we had that one twice, apparently. So it.

Speaker 3 (00:08:10) - Was similar. It wasn't the same. They were similar.

Speaker 2 (00:08:12) - This comes from my friend's presentation two years ago. Stop the bullshit. So just stop the bullshit. Stop telling yourself all these things that aren't true. Be real. Be accurate with your thinking.

Speaker 3 (00:08:23) - I think this may be Jim's problem. Saying yes too often, saying yes to things. It's okay to say no. You're not going to hurt people's feelings. People tell me no all the time. It's completely fine.

Speaker 2 (00:08:33) - I came home with a sweatshirt that said yes on it in huge letters, and a money started yelling at me and said, no, no, you can't wear that chasing shiny object.

Speaker 2 (00:08:42) - So chasing shiny objects. This is another gym issue. I don't know if anyone else here suffers from chasing shiny objects, but I often find myself distracted by the next cool thing. I will say that I've been with File Vine longer than any other piece of software, and I've had some employees with me very long time, but generally I'm always on to the next thing.

Speaker 3 (00:09:04) - Or the next thing. Again, ignoring financials. Ignore your financials at your peril. I cannot stress this enough. If you want to scale your firm, pay attention to your financials, get a financial advisor, work with your accountant. You need to have financial experts helping you with your financials.

Speaker 2 (00:09:19) - One of my favorite presentations of the whole weekend was Bill Ferris's presentation on Setting Expectations. And I think that's so important. But along those lines, allowing clients to push you around, one of the there are many, many reasons why you should have lots of clients. But the best one is, is that it gives you the freedom to fire them when they're terrible.

Speaker 2 (00:09:37) - Right? So do not allow clients to push you around. And just like Jack Welch was saying, that he always is looking to get rid of the lowest performing employees. I think you need to think you need to regularly review who the clients are that are pushing you around, or pushing your staff around.

Speaker 3 (00:09:53) - By raising hands. Be honest. Who has an underperforming employee?

Speaker 4 (00:09:58) - Uh oh.

Speaker 3 (00:10:00) - I mean, you make some tough decisions and find another opportunity for them. You should not be keeping under-performing employees.

Speaker 2 (00:10:06) - Yeah. And to that point, I was saying to somebody today that the one thing about people that come to Max is that when the business owners go home, some people are getting promoted. Some people are getting fired, and you're usually going to the bookstore to buy a bunch of new books. But yeah, underperforming team members need to go and you can do it kindly. Like you said, skipping the gym. So this is something that I suffer from. This was actually one from Amani, my wife.

Speaker 2 (00:10:30) - Skip the gym at your peril. You got to do that. You got to take care of your body. You got to get your muscles moving and your body moving.

Speaker 3 (00:10:37) - This one's from Becca. Waiting for the time to be right. It's never going to be right. Jump on it. Act now. Get act now.

Speaker 2 (00:10:45) - We talked before about software hopping, but this is a real thing. I mean, we've been doing some analysis lately about how much it cost us when a good employee leaves or even when a bad employee leaves, we need someone to do. What's the analysis of how much productivity do you lose by jumping from one piece of software to another? We had one piece of software that we were we were on, and Amani said, I'm going to wait six months to see if you're still on it before I start to learn it. And for that particular one, we were already off it by the time, so she never had to learn it.

Speaker 3 (00:11:13) - This one's from Elise. She just doesn't know it.

Speaker 3 (00:11:16) - Letting Eloise tell you what to do. That voice in your head is lying to you. Stop listening to it, okay? Stop letting Eloise control your life.

Speaker 2 (00:11:26) - Number 34 not systematizing routine tasks. We just had a wonderful presentation on that very subject, so we'll move right on to 35. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:11:34) - Quit making excuses, okay? Quit making excuses. Does you? No. Good.

Speaker 2 (00:11:39) - Number 36 focusing on the problem. Dr. Silk's presentation yesterday I thought was fantastic. If you didn't catch it, definitely. Everyone has a copy of the book. Make sure you watch it when you get the recordings. But that whole mindset shift from focus on the solution versus the problem was huge.

Speaker 3 (00:11:55) - Stop putting yourself last, okay? The reality is you should be putting yourself first. We're taught to to be more modest and not do that. You've got to stop putting yourself last. You should be first and everything else will fall in line. You got to be able to take care of your family. You got to take care of your health.

Speaker 3 (00:12:09) - All that starts with you.

Speaker 2 (00:12:11) - Tyson came up with 37 and 38. When I first saw him, I thought they were the same one. But paying yourself last is actually something that a lot of you talk about, and that should be alarming. I think if you're going to do that, it should only be for a limited amount of time. You cannot do that for too long and you got to give yourself a deadline. On this date, I'm going to start paying myself, even if it's only $500 a week. You've got to make sure that you're getting paid, no question.

Speaker 3 (00:12:34) - Avoiding those tough conversations in our guild hot seat the other day, there were some tough conversations that need to be had. Once people left and they went and had those conversations, they've already reported back to me, and some really good things are happening in their firms because they had the courage to have those conversations. You should.

Speaker 2 (00:12:51) - Too. Overcompensating. I would say we don't see that this much in our community, but it is a problem where people are trying to show off or be bigger than they really are.

Speaker 2 (00:12:59) - That point that Elise was making yesterday about just being honest and honestly assessing where you are and leading with your vulnerability, it's so much more impressive and so much easier to connect to a person who's being vulnerable and honest versus pounding on their chest saying how great they are.

Speaker 3 (00:13:13) - So I hit the button. That's fine. Another one is hitting the snooze bar. This is kicking the can down the road. Quit kicking the can down the road. Quit hitting the snooze bar. Take care of the action now.

Speaker 2 (00:13:22) - Trying to be somebody else. There's a lot of comparison that can happen, especially in the guild or especially as you come to a conference like this. You see people on stage. There's only one of you, and I honestly believe that. People say, why do you give away all your systems? Why do you give away all of your approaches? Why did you tell us everything you know about email marketing? Because no one's going to send the same email as me and it's fine. No one's going to do the same marketing as me.

Speaker 2 (00:13:45) - Just be yourself and the people. Your tribe will will gather around you because they like what you have to say, and you're not going to be there for everybody.

Speaker 3 (00:13:54) - Forgetting the people that got you here. When you go home, I want you to hug your loved ones, your spouse, your significant other, your kids, and thank them for allowing you to come here and learn so much. They're the ones that are helping you get here. They've gotten you here. Thank them. Right. Your team members thank them. Remember those people who's.

Speaker 2 (00:14:12) - Been to the doctor and waited for an hour, an hour and a half to get into the doctor? Don't do that to people. Don't do that to people. Over scheduling is a real problem, and it's an outward facing client facing problem that really, really pisses people off.

Speaker 3 (00:14:26) - Blaming others. Okay, it's really easy to blame people on your team for not doing something right. You might want to look in the mirror and say, maybe that was my fault.

Speaker 3 (00:14:36) - Maybe I should have done a little bit better job of training. Quit blaming other people for other things.

Speaker 2 (00:14:41) - Getting in your own way. There are so many ways that we get in our own way. I thought Dr. Stewart's presentation this morning and Jason's presentation last night about all the chatter that goes on in our head and how there's Dr. Stewart, talked about their activity and there's quiet time and. Just you can really block yourself by getting so caught up in the activity that you're not in that quiet time at all.

Speaker 3 (00:15:03) - Next is this is from the Sandy van playbook. Making your own travel arrangements. You could hire a VA that just does this. So quit making your own travel plans when you come to Max law. Next time when you go to one of the masterminds, have a VA do it. Take care of all the travel for you. Have. Have a list of rules for your travel and have them arrange it.

Speaker 2 (00:15:22) - I think number 48 is one of the most important in the whole list, and that's putting the urgent ahead of the essential.

Speaker 2 (00:15:28) - Stephen Covey talks about the the tyranny of, of the little task that you have to do immediately and how that, that just overwhelms everything. So you might be running your firm right now, urgent matter to urgent matter. And I get that right. But if you can't outright start working on the essential long term things, carve out some time each day. And like Dr. Selke said just to, how can we make it a little bit better tomorrow? But you've got to start carving out time. 15 minutes, 15 minutes, five times a week is an hour and 15 minutes. You can get a lot done to improve your systems so that the urgent comes down.

Speaker 3 (00:16:05) - This is I'll give I'll make another Dr. Selke reference where sweating the small stuff that is that weak minded thinking. Strong minded people do not sweat the small stuff. Stop sweating the small stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:16:17) - How many people have a day go by or two days go by? Or even I've had two weeks go by where I just realized I've been operating on autopilot.

Speaker 2 (00:16:25) - I've just been going, going, going from thing to thing, thing to thing without a whole lot of awareness. Don't do that. Try to break that pattern.

Speaker 3 (00:16:32) - Forgetting gratitude. This is a really good one. We do this every day at the dinner table. I really recommend that you do something similar and encouraging your children. If you have children to do something similar, like starting out with it, because it can be really, really easy to go weeks and months without really not thinking about being appreciative for your circumstances. So at the end of this, you know, do some gratitude internally and be appreciative of where you are.

Speaker 2 (00:16:57) - This should be don't fail to celebrate your wins. I think a lot of people don't celebrate their wins in two ways. One, they don't celebrate their wins with their team. And I'm talking about on a case by case basis or a firm improvement basis. They don't celebrate it with their team enough, and they also don't celebrate their wins publicly. So for me, the greatest content that I come up with is when I talk about success stories of our clients.

Speaker 2 (00:17:23) - That's the best thing that people love to read about. The clients love it. So I would encourage you to don't forget to do that.

Speaker 3 (00:17:31) - This next one is Thinking small and it's it's a lot like that middle or middle class mindset. Right? You think that your your ceiling is down here in reality it's really up here. But you're thinking down here. So you need to stop talking to yourself that way and thinking small.

Speaker 2 (00:17:46) - This next one, 54, is also one that came from Ron. Is that, as you know, who has had that situation where somebody contacts you might you might need a little bit of money to make your nut for the month. And it's a little bit outside your practice area, or it's something you're trying to get rid of and you just say, oh, I can just take this one. That one case is going to prevent you. It's going to give you a whole lot of urgent, and it's going to prevent you from improving your systems on the things that you really want to be doing.

Speaker 2 (00:18:10) - So you've just got to actively say, no.

Speaker 3 (00:18:13) - Jimbo, we have a duplicate forgetting your hobbies. So I'll skip over to the next one. Yeah, comparing yourself to others. This is so, so terrible for you. It really is. You think, oh my gosh, that other lawyer on the other side of town, they're just killing it. They're making so much more money than I am. Stop it. Because you have no idea. You need to focus on yourself. What can you do and not focus on other people?

Speaker 2 (00:18:36) - All right, so number 57 comes from my son Yusuf, who's sitting back there with the big fro. And so when he was in Montessori, when he was five, we had a check in with his kindergarten teacher and we said, Mrs. Huisman, how's Yusuf doing? And so at Montessori, it's very kid driven activity. What do you want to do? And you get to go and do that. And so he had a lot of kindergarten activities, and we asked Mrs. Hillsman, how is Yusuf doing? And she said, oh, he's just a wonderful boy.

Speaker 2 (00:19:03) - He's a wonderful boy. She said, but you know what? Sometimes we find him down with the three year old's. Really? What's he doing down there? He's polishing the silver. That was one of the little tasks that they could do. They could actually polish old silver. And we've developed that. Yusuf doesn't know. We've developed that into a whole concept inside the guild, which is when you develop an expertise and you like to go back to do things that are easy or that were fun or comfortable that you used to do, like almost in a nostalgic way, like, like for me, sometimes, like I'm not really learning anything, going to another citizenship interview, it's not really a great use of my time, but sometimes I like to do it. Don't do that too much. Don't polish the silver too much.

Speaker 3 (00:19:43) - The next one is delaying the inevitable. If you have a tough decision that needs to be made today, make the decision today. If you've got something bad you need to tell to a client or an employee, make the decision today because mentally it's just going to eat you up.

Speaker 2 (00:19:56) - As I mentioned, one of my. Presentations was bills yesterday. And that's overpromising or under delivering two sides of the same coin. You are setting yourself up for big headaches by overpromising.

Speaker 3 (00:20:10) - Totally agree. Next one is always giving an answer right away. Sometimes it takes some time to think, right. You've got to. You've got to think about things. So when you're talking to a vendor or a client or an employee, it's okay to say, hey, let me think about it overnight and I'll get back to you. So you don't need to give an answer right away.

Speaker 2 (00:20:29) - Don't sit at your desk all day, you know, move around. You can go on walking meetings with people to two people walking together. You're not even face to face. There's a different level of clarity that comes when you're walking with a colleague. You can also get a standing desk, and you can even just move into a comfortable chair, as opposed to your desk chair.

Speaker 3 (00:20:46) - I like this one. I don't watch the news anymore.

Speaker 3 (00:20:48) - And I and Jim, I've noticed a difference from in him since he stopped watching the news. He doesn't rage tweet as much as he used to. So it's just not productive these days. It's you can get your news other way elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (00:21:00) - Things like file buying are great software that we that allows us to stay in contact with our clients or our cases is great, but now we can bring our whole law firm home in our pocket. In the old days when I wanted, if I wanted to work on a brief, I had to save it on a disk, bring it home, put it in my pocket, bring it home, plug it in, edit it, then come back, delete the old one and reinstall it. Right. But now we have our whole law firms in our pocket. Literally. Try not to do that. Try not to bring your work home. Try to have clear boundaries with your time.

Speaker 3 (00:21:27) - And this will help with that. Keeping the phone notifications turned on. Turn that off.

Speaker 3 (00:21:32) - If you're getting email alerts on your phones, turn it off because you know it's driving me nuts, right? You're trying to watch a presentation and a phone alert comes up, and then another one and another one turn them off. They're not productive. Pick a time during the day to check your email. That's how you should check your email.

Speaker 2 (00:21:46) - We got this from a couple of guild members, including Cade checking the bank account every day. That's just not good for lots of reasons. You're either going to stress out or be overreliant on it. Don't. Don't spend that time checking the bank account every day.

Speaker 3 (00:21:58) - This is one of my favorites keeping toxic people in your life. If you have people that are bringing you down on a daily basis and you're constantly thinking about those people, cut them out of your life. It sounds harsh, but it's it's what you should do.

Speaker 2 (00:22:08) - This one's for my wife, so maybe I should take a lesson from it. Just don't go to bed mad. I think it's great advice.

Speaker 2 (00:22:13) - Try to work things out beforehand. And speaking of bed, here's a bonus one. Since we have that duplicate, if you wake up in the morning thinking about the same problem person three times in a row and they're not your spouse, you need to get rid of that person out of your life.

Speaker 3 (00:22:26) - It's good advice spending money you don't have. If you're putting everything on credit cards, stop doing that, okay? That means you you've got something going on and you need to talk to your account and figure it out. Stop spending money you don't have.

Speaker 2 (00:22:36) - Glory days, glory days. Forget your glory days. Whatever you did in the past, whatever great things you've achieved doesn't mean shit. There's someone else coming. Someone younger, someone leaner, someone cooler, someone smarter, someone more technologically savvy. They're coming to get you. So whatever you did, you're 50 years of combined experience. Nobody gives a crap.

Speaker 3 (00:22:55) - And if you have employees that keep trying to drag you into the past, you might have to have some tough conversations.

Speaker 3 (00:22:59) - You know, I really I really like things the way they used to be. Well, that could you might have to have those tough conversations fighting every battle. You've got employees that work for you. Send them out to battle. Let them battle. Okay. That's why you've hired them. You don't need to fight every battle.

Speaker 2 (00:23:16) - Or you can choose not to have some battles.

Speaker 3 (00:23:18) - That's also.

Speaker 2 (00:23:19) - True. So anyone trying to please everyone and Andrew gave us this one, trying to please everyone. You're never going to please everyone, so don't even try.

Speaker 3 (00:23:26) - Manage your own email inbox. I think all of you know my opinion on email. I'm not a fan of it. You should not be handling your own emails. If you have someone answering your phones, you should have someone answering your email.

Speaker 2 (00:23:36) - I believe I've said this at every max law con that most law firms that I encounter are woefully understaffed. We're asking, and this is including my law firm. We're asking too much from our team members, and we need more help.

Speaker 2 (00:23:52) - So don't be scared to hire.

Speaker 3 (00:23:56) - Ignoring your best referral sources, you should have a list of your best referral sources and check in with them on a daily or a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis. That way you can maintain that referral relationship.

Speaker 2 (00:24:08) - Micromanaging can be a form of polishing the silver, where you're trying to get other people to do things the way you used to do them, or you want them to do them. Micromanaging will eat up all of your productivity.

Speaker 3 (00:24:17) - Stop procrastinating. I know that for those of you that have ADHD or other things, it's one of those things that can you you've got to find other ways to to get around the procrastination. I know it's really, really difficult, but procrastination is very destructive. Stop procrastinating.

Speaker 2 (00:24:32) - And Beck is like, that's coming from the two guys who finished their slides this morning.

Speaker 3 (00:24:36) - That's right. Exactly right.

Speaker 2 (00:24:38) - Trying to do everything. Don't be trying to do everything. You can't be everything to everybody, and don't try to do everything. And that's on the macro level of practice areas or everything related to your firm or just on the day to day basis.

Speaker 3 (00:24:50) - This was from Jim's great presentation yesterday, sending blow horn emails to your list. They don't care. Quit sitting those blown emails. They just don't care about you beating your chest.

Speaker 2 (00:24:59) - Stop making it all about you. When I tried my first case, I kept coming back. My my mentor was sitting next to me, and I kept. I kept asking her, how am I doing? How am I doing? It is not about you. And that's true about everything related to your firm. It's not about you. It's about the best interests of your client, fighting for your clients and building a good atmosphere for your team to work.

Speaker 3 (00:25:20) - Next one is wasting money on garbage vendors. I'm not going to ask for you to raise your hands on this one, but I know some of you are spending money on vendors that are not making you any money. You need to get rid of them.

Speaker 2 (00:25:29) - Our friend Jay Rain gets a lot of work done late at night, but most people, I think, do much better when they get up early.

Speaker 2 (00:25:34) - So I think going to bed too late is a little take on getting enough sleep. I think if you want to decrease your stress, go to bed a little bit early er and get up a little bit earlier.

Speaker 3 (00:25:45) - This one's pretty self-explanatory. Quit dropping bombs on your team, just especially if you're doing it on a on a weekly basis. You are going to push them out of your firms. Quit dropping those bombs on them.

Speaker 2 (00:25:55) - Stop taking your problems out on your team. You know, I was in this little resentful period where I was thinking some people weren't carrying their weight. And at the end of the day, as a law firm owner, every problem is our everything is our fault. Anything that's wrong with our law firm is our fault. Nobody else is.

Speaker 3 (00:26:11) - Hiring crazy people. And it might be crazy people, might be bad employees, but you need to have a filtering process to prevent you from hiring crazy employees. So stop hiring them.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21) - Stop skipping your vacations. Stop denying yourself time to rest and relax.

Speaker 2 (00:26:26) - Stop skipping your weekends. Make time for yourself and you've got to have. I'm a big believer in working really hard when you're working and relaxing really hard when you're relaxing.

Speaker 3 (00:26:36) - Totally agree. Ignoring your team's mental health. Not just your mental health, but your team's mental health. Thinking about the decisions that you're making that affect them, what's going on in their lives and stop. Ignore them. Having those those regular conversations with them is important.

Speaker 2 (00:26:49) - Overanalyzing everything. Number 87. We see so many people who just think about things, think about things, think about things. It's just an excuse. It's just a way to avoid taking action.

Speaker 3 (00:27:00) - So next one forgetting to get that Google review, you need to have a system in place for getting a Google review, especially at the end of a case. So you got to make sure you make the ask. I know it's uncomfortable for you to make the ask, maybe, but have an employee do it instead. Make the ask for that Google review.

Speaker 5 (00:27:15) - Stop cutting.

Speaker 2 (00:27:16) - Corners. It takes time to build a practice. We see a lot of people, especially after a weekend like this. They want to just jump ahead and be like the people that they see that are really kicking butt. Don't do that. Take your time, build it right, build. Build the support structure for what it is that you want to achieve.

Speaker 3 (00:27:35) - We're on the homestretch here, Jimbo. Refusing to give yourself a break. Give yourself some grace, okay? What we do is tough. It's not easy. We get you get angry clients. You got defense attorneys that are terrible. It can be a tough job. Give yourself a break.

Speaker 2 (00:27:48) - Maintain clear boundaries with your clients. Let's go. We got a minute left. Let's knock them out. So definitely maintaining clear boundaries with your clients is really important.

Speaker 3 (00:27:56) - Underpaying your team. Okay? And you know who you are. Okay? Give your team a raise. Pay them more money. They'll stick around. You'll attract more talent. Quit underpaying your team.

Speaker 2 (00:28:06) - If everything is important, nothing's important. You've got to be able to say no to most things and to prioritize.

Speaker 3 (00:28:12) - Overstimulating with caffeine or any other substances. Stop doing. It's not good for you. It's not good for your firm. It's not good for your family.

Speaker 2 (00:28:19) - Kelsey Bratcher has taught me many things, but the number one thing that he's taught me that is purely evil is duplicating your data, having to re-enter data over and over. So you've got to use Zapier or other tools to push your data all the way through your system using voicemail.

Speaker 3 (00:28:33) - I know you all may think I'm crazy about this. You can not leave a voicemail with our firm. It is amazing. So get rid of it. Find a way for it. Get an answering service. Have your team answer it. Do not have voicemail 10s left.

Speaker 2 (00:28:44) - Stop resisting change, settling and not joining the guild.

Speaker 1 (00:28:53) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content go to Maximum lawyer.com.

Speaker 1 (00:29:05) - Have a great week and catch you next time!

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Do you want to learn more about how to create and maintain a successful business? In this episode, CPA Tim McKee delivers a presentation on "Metrics That Matter" at the 2022 Maximum Lawyer conference. Tim discusses the many ways to run a successful law firm.

Tim shares how there are only 4 ways to grow a law firm: increase the value of each transaction or resolution, get clients to revisit, take on more cases and increase the value of those cases. Working in law firms, attorneys focus on identifying what the information is and how to go about obtaining it. Obtaining it comes from data systems such as spreadsheets, KPI systems, case management systems, etc.

As law firm owners, communication is key to a successful business and a well functioning team. Tim talks about the importance of communicating to the team about performance, where things are going well and where things are lagging. Most times, teams don't perform well because there is a lack of clear communication on expectations. If this is the case, you need to ask yourself as an owner if you are providing your staff with the right tools to succeed and if they have had the right training to do it successfully.

It is important to train staff in order to get the results you want for your business. No one walks into a job knowing everything there is to know. You also can’t expect new staff to know everything right off the bat without a proper onboarding plan. There needs to be something in place to ensure staff are showing up and performing, otherwise you get turnover and a bad workplace culture.

Tim goes through a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that businesses and firms should consider to understand how well the firm is doing. One of these is diagnostic reporting. This involves categorizing cases which then are turned into numbers and percentages that can be analyzed. This could be closed cases with a fee, closed cases with no fee, cases that didn't make it to trial, cases with a physical injury, etc. The categories are endless, but what this does is take all of the information and pump out numbers that show the performance of the firm and how many cases are being handled each month or year.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:59 Four methods for growing a law firm
  • 9:13 If there is low performance …
  • 13:20 Highlighting the need for training and coaching in order to achieve desired results

Connect with Tim:

Resources:

Transcripts: Metrics That Matter with Tim McKey

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Lakhan 2022. Keep listening to hear Tim McKey as we share his talk. Metrics that matter. You can also head to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Let's get to it.

Speaker 2 (00:00:14) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 3 (00:00:38) - How many of you have seen the depiction on a chalkboard sometimes as this big circle? And inside that circle it says your comfort zone. And then there's a little bitty circle off to the side that says where the magic happens. Have you seen that? All right. We're going to try it. I want everybody to get up and at least move a seat a little bit closer to me. That's going to put you out of your comfort zone, right? Well, come on, if you can do it, it's where the magic happens.

Speaker 3 (00:01:06) - The reason I want to do this, you can't do it. The reason I want to do this is twofold. One, to get you to move around a little bit. It's after lunch. You've probably eaten way too much. And we're going to talk about numbers. I'm a CPA very, very nerd like, so I want something to happen. Oh, this stage does not have rails on it. And there are pie people here. So if I fall off you're you're in trouble. Okay. So I'll do it. But I'm a wandering speaker. And now my thing fell out, so. Okay. Thanks a lot for that. I'm going to show some spreadsheets that now that you're a little closer, hopefully you can see some of it. And if I think I was told you're going to get a copy of these slides, and if you don't or if you want to give me a card afterwards, I'll make sure you get those slides. So you also are going to get the fast forward version of me today from very rural South Mississippi.

Speaker 3 (00:01:59) - We can't say hello in 20 minutes. Okay. But I'm going to run through this like like you wouldn't believe. So okay, first of all, a quick story about Timmy and Tommy. Two kids in school, one very, very bright, which happens to be Timmy and the other Tommy. His grits are not quite in the middle of the plate. Okay, it's got some issues, so. But anyway, teacher gives them a test. Ten questions. Okay, ten questions. They finish the test, turn it in, and the teacher's grading. She grades Timmy's first. First nine, you know, 100% on the first nine. The 10th question Timmy had written, I don't know this one. Okay, so she starts grading Tommy's paper, who happens to sit right behind Timmy. Okay. And sure enough, she starts seeing, you know, Tommy's getting these questions right. This is pretty cool. First 900%. And at the end, Tommy had written, I don't know this one either.

Speaker 3 (00:02:56) - So what does that mean? Cheating is bad. That life is an open book, folks. That's what it really means. We don't have any real cheating anymore. You have an opportunity to come to conferences like this and learn as much as you want to learn, right? You can read as many books as you want. There is no test, okay? It's about success and you defining what success means for you. Okay, so we're going to hit this talk was mainly designed for PE firms. So I know there are other firms in here because I've talked to you. I hope this hits home and you get a few nuggets out of it okay. This is where you pick up your pencil. There's only four ways to grow a law firm okay. Only four ways. And guess what the second tour subsets okay. Get more cases or clients okay. Increase the value of each transaction or resolution. Get clients to revisit. Or in the case of Pi, you don't want to say I mean, you were in a car wreck last week.

Speaker 3 (00:03:52) - We want you back now. Now, don't do that. You know, what you say is you treat them so well, okay, that they refer to you. Then increase the efficiency and effectiveness of each process. Okay. These last two are subsets. They only will really way to grow right is more cases and increase the value okay. And with Vista Consulting that's the only thing that we concentrate on with our clients. How can we do that? How can we move the needle for more cases or more value? Okay. And we're going to talk about KPIs. Right. In the academic world, we are always given enough information from which to solve a problem. Right. And that's how tests work. They give you the information, you work through it, you solve the problem. That's not how the real world works. Most of the time. The hardest part is getting the information to solve the problem right in our business, in the business world, especially in law firms and especially in plaintiff firms, you've got to figure out how to get that information and what that information is.

Speaker 3 (00:04:55) - And we're going to hit some of those. Okay. First of all, you have to have a system to obtain data. They're smart advocate file vine out or out here. Those are good systems to begin in gathering data. It's a repository. You can get things out of that. There are many other methods right. There's case management. As I said tech mark spreadsheets. We actually helped some of our clients build what we call dashboards or KPI reports. And again we're going to hit on those. So I have a had a partner, Chad Dudley, still a great friend. I'm not sure if I'm a bad ass Robin him out, but he's a great friend and he would always just come in and start talking about these numbers and how you interpret them and go forward. And we had to say, Chad, let's slow down. We've got to help people get those numbers first. Okay? So we're not going to dig too deep on that today, but just know that you've got to get with someone, whether it's if it's you or someone in your office to figure out how to gather data.

Speaker 3 (00:05:51) - Okay, I'm not going to go too deep on that. We're going to look at some of that data today, okay. Generally, two types of KPIs. They're lagging KPIs lagging indicators. And there's leading predictive indicators. Most financial data is usually lagging. This is what happened. Now we can always use the past to predict the future. That's a good thing. Predictive are generally how many cases did we sign. And that you can use that to predict what's going to happen in the future. Okay. And then there are some that are both okay. Just like those we measure the cases that we sign up. How many leads do we get? I'll go into that in just a second. You can you can have one that tells you both and what you look back okay. We need to get this many cases in. It's also going to predict, depending on your average case fee, what you can actually produce from that to other types of KPIs, their objective ones, which is the ones most of us think about, usually financial or some type of operational metric.

Speaker 3 (00:06:53) - And there are subjective things which measure feelings. Okay, subjective meaning, different things for different people. Just because sometimes we say it's hard to measure subjective things, we shouldn't do it. We absolutely should do it. And I'm going to hit it on one very big one through this presentation. Okay. Once you get that data, you use it to do what you analyze and coach you don't use. And there's two types of reports. There's the scoreboard reports, which are are we winning and losing in an area. For example, is your conversion rate on cases. Clients that call in that you want at least 92%. That's great. That's a scoreboard. We're over 92%. We're converting 92% of the cases are the people that call in that we want okay. That's one that's one method. That's a scoreboard. Then there's a diagnostic which says, okay, if you have more than one person taking those calls, someone may be getting 98%, somebody may be getting 80%, somebody may be getting whatever the total can still.

Speaker 3 (00:07:56) - Be over on the scoreboard, but your individuals are not hitting their mark in some cases. So again, just a difference between a scoreboard report and a diagnostic report. Scoreboard reports usually go to owners or very high level managers, and the diagnostic reports are what your team leads do to coach from okay. And there's a coaching tool. They're not a hammer. You don't go yell on them and say you should do better. You should. Your numbers should be here. You figure out what's going on okay. How do you coach them up? Okay. You use those numbers with something going on. Look, your other team members are doing this. Where do you fall in that? What's going on in your life? That's how professionals work. They don't yell at people, okay? You communicate and you do hold them accountable. You use those numbers. And then at Vista we have we're going to trademark this sometime T&E which is tools training and expectations. What does that mean Tim. Tools training expectations. If you have a team member that is not performing well okay, you first should ask yourself, have you given that team member the tools to their job? Have you trained them on how to use those tools to do their job? And have you clearly explained the expectations? Guess which ones we don't do most? We don't explain expectations.

Speaker 3 (00:09:13) - We say so-and-so is not performing well. Well, have you told them what you really expect? No. Well, you can't hit a target. You don't know that, is there? Okay, so if you're having high performance, I mean low performance, and you go through this thought process of tools, training and expectations, I propose to you, you do not have a people problem. You have a management problem. Okay. So but let's say the converse of that happens. You actually have done it. Tools, training expectations. You've done what you need to do. And you're still not getting performance that you expect or need or want or is the norm. Okay. There's only two reasons for that. Your team member is unwilling or unable to do the job. There's simply nothing else, and it's up to you as leaders and managers to figure out which and decide how to coach them. Decide if they have another spot in your firm, if that spot is just not for them. Or it may be, heaven forbid, time to free up their future to go and find something else to do.

Speaker 3 (00:10:12) - It has nothing to do with them personally. But if you don't go through this first part, those KPIs, have we done this then I suppose so you need to really look at your leadership and management abilities, okay. Very important stuff. Okay operational and financial KPIs. Let's look at again plaintiff law firm intake statistics. I'm going to hit them pretty quick. This particular firm gets 3000 leads. Let's just say it's a year. They want 1500 of those. In other words that of those 3000 1500 meets the criteria that that firm would accept. Okay. Then they signed 1395 of the 1500. Okay. So here's our stats. Here's the KPIs. The wanted rate is 50%, right? Leads a once divided by leads. The signed rate is 47% sign divided by lead. Here is the big one conversion rate. What do we sign of the ones we want? That's huge because a two point improvement in the conversion rate at $5,000 average fee is $150,000 in revenue. Those numbers obviously vary depending on your average fee.

Speaker 3 (00:11:23) - Hopefully $5,000 is a low average fee for you, but these are the type of statistics. These are the things that you should look at. This is a scoreboard report okay, of how to manage and look at your intake productivity. And this is the reason I want you to move a little closer to the front okay. This is an intake summary report. Notice as a scoreboard it has the things I just talked about. These are case types. Here's the total number of leads. Here's the wanted ones. Here's the signed up. Here's our wanted rate. Conversion rate okay. This information is very important especially for plaintiff firms. When you're getting you've marketed you spent money in most cases to get people to call you get leads. And then if you fumble the intake, you don't convert the ones you want. It's a it's in my opinion, it's a tragedy. Okay. And we've gone into firms and one of our teams is here Amanda Hankins. Raise your hand. Stand up. Turn around. Now.

Speaker 3 (00:12:20) - You don't have to do it. She's here. And she knows that. We go into firm sometimes and they say we get everyone we want. Bzz. Okay. Barbra Streisand, you don't. Okay. We have you measured it in a lot of times. No, no, but we know we get them all. Well, yeah, let's measure it. So, anyway, this is a scoreboard report. This is an example of the diagnostic report. We blocked out the names over here, the team members. But it's the same thing. You know total needs wants signed up wanted conversion but by team member. So then you can manage and go in and coach these folks. The ones that are not getting that conversion rate that you want. That leads into a lot of training, right? Customer service intake sales and some some speaker at some point during the day, talked about getting their best team members from places like chick fil A or or Hardee's or somewhere. But we've gone into firms where they say we can't get our people to do what we want them to do.

Speaker 3 (00:13:20) - How does Disney train all of those people to stay in character? How do they do it? How does Chick-Fil-A, you can't get out of there without somebody saying, my pleasure, you know it. Just how do they do it? Well, they train, okay. We don't train. And again, I'm talking to myself a little bit here too. We do not train, but we have to do that to get the results that we want okay. So keep going here. Intake summary by source. You can slice and dice this data in the thousands of different ways. This is the same data. Again remember Leeds wanted sign up but it's by the referral source client referral. Google reviews lean letter outdoor et cetera. Because we're asking how did you hear of us now? We always get that right. Not always. The client may say, hey, I got your name from a billboard, and you hadn't had billboards in five years. But you get something. You've got to get something better than nothing.

Speaker 3 (00:14:14) - Okay. How is your marketing working? Brooke talked about ROI. We got to believe that. I got five minutes left. This ain't going to work. Diagnostic report. This is closed. Cases by case type. We want to look at closed with fee. In other words, enclosed no fee. What does that mean? We've accepted a case. How many of those cases actually make it to the finish line? How many do we accept that we end up booting out of our firm, out of our practice line because we learn something new, okay? Or we didn't get the right information up front? Okay. So we want to measure those things. We want to measure close with fee rates. We'll just look at motor vehicle accidents here 89 closed and 51 of those closed with a fee for a 57% closed with fee ratio. Kind of interesting number right. We like to see around 70% there, 75% there. Usually the norms that we see once they're in the firm usually boot about 25% of them.

Speaker 3 (00:15:11) - But again we want to know what your firm is doing. We can't put everyone in the same bucket. That's why our work is all very custom to your firm. It's tough to give a talk like this when you're talking to a wide array of different types. Firm. Are you a high value, low volume firm? Are you a low value, higher volume firm? Differences in ratios, differences in analysis? Diagnostic report. Something else that we like to see which is a KPI which is time intervals. Intervals between open to maximum medical improvement. Maximum medical improvement to the demand, demand to the settlement settlement to received. And then you get the check. So these are things when you measure you start to see okay, here's what my firm is doing. And then we start talking about how can we shrink these. What can we do to make these better. We often get, well, what's a good time frame. Well let's measure yours first and improve it okay. There's a lot of these are just simply not standard.

Speaker 3 (00:16:10) - We want to know what yours is and then move that needle. Overwhelming 3.24 seconds. This is a case management report. This is a total built out dashboard report. Some of the big things on here are treating needs a contact non treating needs contact. These are things that go into a case management system. If your firm has a client contact requirement of every two weeks or 21 days or 30 days where the paralegal or the attorney must contact, we track that. And if they're not making that contact, then we know they have to go and do that. Okay. And this is how we gather that information. Mad Records KPIs. Getting Mad Records is usually a big backup in pie firms. What we like to see is that that you might have on this one, we've got 103 records are out, but it's only 47 providers. So when you when you call a provider, are you asking for everyone or are you having different paralegals calling ask for records okay. There's some efficiencies and effectiveness and systems that really need to be looked at.

Speaker 3 (00:17:19) - I'm going to roll through some of these. I wanted to get to this one. This is a quick what we call a condensed PNL analysis. I know that Brooke talked a little bit about some of this, but this is there's really only three major expenses for pie firms attorney comp, non attorney comp and case acquisition costs, usually marketing. And there are different phases of firms start up turnaround realignment sustaining success. So we we kind of put our firms in buckets. And then we run this analysis and kind of see where their stats are. Don't go out of here and say Vista says if you're sustaining success, you should be at a 25% profit margin. This is an example. We always want to look at where you are and then decide how to move the needle. And guess what? Taking Twinkies out of the breakroom is not going to move the needle very much. Okay, changing attorney comp, getting more efficient at the work with paralegals and legal assistance can move the needle much quicker. Looking hard at marketing.

Speaker 3 (00:18:20) - Marketing. It's easy to throw money at it. Lots of firms like to do it. Are you doing internal marketing? One minute left. No freaking way. This is diagnostic that goes into the individual attorneys how much they brought in their compensation, their team's compensation. Really looking at a profit center analysis per attorney team. Oh, this is the one that 37 seconds Hugh Laurie. This is a subjective key performance indicator. We call this performance attitude grit. At least once a year we'd like to see your you do an analysis of your team members with a grid like this. Top left you see top performer bad attitude. And then you come down to Karen on Will and Grace. Poor performer, bad attitude. Got Betty White, poor performer, good attitude. And Jimmy Fallon, who I think is very, very talented and seems very happy at what he does. If you've got the Hugh Laurie in your office and you've all most of you who've seen House who do thing gets a great result but is a terrible bedside manner, that's a farce.

Speaker 3 (00:19:22) - It doesn't happen. Okay. Those people are toxic. You should probably get them out of your your firm. Numbers can lie. Not going there. This is what I hope you can get from the slides. These are a list of key performance indicators that we like to get from plaintiff firms. Again, if you give me a business card I'll be happy to send you these slides if you want them. I'm out of time. Last thing is dog on the porch. Don't be the dog on the porch real quick. Two old guys sitting on the porch. And one. It's his home and the other is visiting. And the visitor says, you know, why is your dog whining and moaning like that? And the guy says, well, I think he's laying on a nail. And the other guy says, why doesn't he move? Well, he's just uncomfortable enough to whine and complain. He's not uncomfortable enough to move. Don't be the dog. Don't bitch and complain. Go do something. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:20:14) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Are you thinking about focusing on email marketing for your firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Jim provides practical tips for effective email marketing within a law firm. 

In order to do email marketing, you need to be dedicated and committed. This is because email marketing usually entails sending planned mass emails to people depending on what is in your marketing plan. Sending sporadic, random emails to people will not be as effective, so it is important to sit down and plan how email marketing is going to look for your firm. Another aspect of email marketing is building a dedicated email list of people who are already subscribed or have connected with your firm.

Jim outlines the difference between leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are what you can control and what you can do to get more subscribers or clients. For example, if you are wanting to dedicate your time to email marketing, focus on sending out dedicated content. Make a plan to send out 3 emails to your email list each week for a year. Lagging indicators are things that you can’t control. This can be losing subscribers or clients as you are dedicating yourself to sending out 3 emails a week.

Planning content ahead is crucial to ensure you do not fall behind. It is important to plan for email launches weeks in advance to ensure everything in your email is covered. Writing an email the day it is to be launched is one of the worst things you can do when email marketing. Make a plan ahead of time!

Jim also talks about the importance of having a call to action for those who are reading your emails. This provides people with things to do. An example can be inviting people to join a Facebook group or to sign up for an upcoming webinar. This connects those on your email list with other platforms and brings more subscribers or watchers to those platforms.

Another important aspect of email marketing is using branded and unbranded emails. Branded emails will have your logo and name of your firm, while unbranded will not. There are reasons to use both which can make email marketing effective. It is good to use branded emails for the sporadic, blow horn emails. Unbranded emails are more effective as they are short, personal and usually ask for a reply. You can even respond to these replies using a template, especially if you are getting the same response from different people.

List segmentation is another great aspect of email marketing. Using email providers like Mailchimp allow you to segment your emails based on a topic. For example, if you get a bunch of people asking about citizenship or the process of getting citizenship, you can segment your list to where you can send these people all types of information only on citizenship. As a lawyer, this will allow you to help solve a specific problem.

Listen in to learn more on how to do effective email marketing.

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:10 The importance of making a decision to do email marketing
  • 10:41 The significance of including a call to action at the bottom of an email
  • 11:37 The effectiveness of unbranded emails that are short and personal


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Resources:

Transcripts: Email is Dead? Long Live Email Marketing with Jim Hacking

Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 2 (00:00:24) - Hello, everybody. We're going to talk a much more practical than my talk this morning. I have been doing email marketing for, well, since I started. The firm started with a really little list. The list is up to like 26,000 people. And we we cut people who don't review our emails regularly. And that's important and something that we'll talk about. We have gotten to a point where our emails, we're at like a 45 to 55% open rate, which is really sort of crazy. So we spent a lot of time on email marketing. We get a lot of good cases, and I'm going to talk. I'm trying to be as practical as possible. So the first thing, even going along with the lines of what I talked about this morning, is that you have to make a decision, you have to make a decision that you're going to do email marketing.

Speaker 2 (00:01:10) - If you're going to half ass it, don't do it. And that's true of any marketing channel, but it's especially true with email because if you send sporadic emails, it's not going to be nearly as effective as when people start to get used to receiving content from you. So you've got to make that decision. You have to decide to build an email list, all right? And you have to begin with the end in mind. So what do we want? We want to sign up 12 new cases. And we want to do that by staying top of mind. So our email list is our greatest competitive advantage because they know us already. We've already spent all this money to get them to give us their email address. And we while we have them in our email world, while they're still subscribing to our emails and hopefully opening our emails, we're the only voice they're hearing from hopefully. Right. And so we want to sign up 12 new cases a year. So one a month out of email. How how would one extra case a month just by sending email and probably 45 minutes a week.

Speaker 2 (00:02:15) - How would that sound? Good. All right. And but of course, 12 new cases is a lagging indicator. That's something that's sort of out of your control. Does everybody know the difference between lagging indicators and leading indicators. Right. So the leading indicator would be what you can control what you're going to do. So if you're going to make this decision with me I want you to promise to yourself that you're going to send three emails a week, every week for the next 52 weeks. All right. And that'll be a leading indicator. And I would suggest you have a little chart, a little piece of paper. Jerry Seinfeld was asked, Jerry, how do you write so many jokes? And he said, I have a big desk calendar, and I write one joke every day, and my job is just to not break the the X's. So he puts an X on each day when he makes the joke. And you can do that with three emails a week. Are you going to do it or not? And again, don't half.

Speaker 2 (00:03:11) - Asit, if you agree to do this, I'm prohibiting you from stopping for 12 months. You can't look at the data, you can't get down on it. And again, this is true of any marketing. If you're going to start a YouTube channel, I think you've got to put your head down and do it and wait to judge the results. So like I said, you have to have the tracking sheet you're going to commit and then you've got to build your list. All right. So we're going to go over all these things. You need to open a MailChimp account. MailChimp is super easy to use. It's $17 a month. So and it MailChimp has come so far from when I first started doing email marketing. It's really all that you need. So cost is not a factor here, right? And 17 per month is is definitely if you're starting with a small list, $17 a month is definitely enough. And even if you start growing your email list, it's still a really, really cheap form of marketing.

Speaker 2 (00:04:02) - So we're going to build that list. We want to export our contacts out of Gmail or Outlook, and we're going to clean up the list in the Google Sheet. We just need first name, last name, email. And so you might have stuff on all different platforms. You might have stuff scribbled on a piece of paper. Just start adding this to your list and then you're going to upload. Once you have the list clean you're going to upload, you're going to upload that list, import it into MailChimp, and that's going to be your first set of contacts. And then part of your job is to keep adding new contacts. When anyone calls our office, if they want to ask a question, they have to give us their phone number and their email address. And we just say, you know, we might lose the connection. Before we get started, can you tell me your phone number, your name and your email address, and you just add them to the list? That's the cost of getting to talk to anyone at your law firm, so it doesn't even have to be you who's ever answering the phone.

Speaker 2 (00:04:52) - You make sure that happens. And like I said, they don't have a choice if they want. Otherwise hang up. Goodbye.

Speaker 3 (00:04:59) - All right.

Speaker 2 (00:05:00) - So now that you've created your initial list, we're going to talk about the weekly schedule. It's really important that you plan out the content. You don't want to be having to write an email on the morning that the email is supposed to go out, right. That's the last thing you want to do. In fact, you want to get maybe 4 or 5 ahead of time, right? So we do them. We do them in two week batches and we try to stay two weeks ahead. So because the greatest way to get writer's block is to have to do it under a deadline. Now when it comes to content, the most important thing don't be boring. Don't be boring. That's like the cardinal sin of marketing is being boring, right? And so don't make that mistake. Also, don't be afraid to take a stand and to be willing to let some people hate you.

Speaker 2 (00:05:49) - So I have sort of a easy practice area when it comes to marketing to let people hate you. Right. So I'm an immigration lawyer, so I decided long ago that there are 30 or 40% of the people who hate what I do would never refer me a case and would hope that my practice is put out of business, and to them I want to stick it right in their eye. Right? So I want to market against that. I want to I want to get them ginned up. I mean, not in my email marketing, but just generally you have to be willing to take a stand because if you're milquetoast, if you're boring, if you're vanilla, then no one's going to. It's just going to be boring, run of the mill crap. And this goes for any service that will write emails for you is by definition, crap. So I'm sorry if there's anybody here selling that as a service. But in my opinion, the only way that works is that they can capture your voice.

Speaker 2 (00:06:46) - But if they're selling your content to other people that do what you do, then that's by definition you're not standing out. Another great thing when it comes to all forms of marketing, but especially email, a good email that you send is better than a perfect one that you never send, so you have to be willing to ship. You have to be willing to hit send, right? It doesn't have to be perfect. And yet you might come across a typo. I sent out an email the other day about The Karate Kid and I spelled dojo dojo instead of dojo. Nobody cares. All right, so we should send out. We're going to send out our emails Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, and we're going to send it at 8 a.m.. All right. We're just that's when we send our emails and you can schedule it ahead of time. You can schedule it months in advance. Right. So we're going to send Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. On Tuesdays we're going to teach the reader something about our practice area, some news, something that we do in our field on Thursday.

Speaker 2 (00:07:45) - You don't have to write jack squat. You just have to summarize a recent video that you did. Because, of course, email marketing is not your only form of marketing, but you're going to summarize in a couple paragraphs of video that you released last week. I got an email back from somebody the other day. Mr.. Jim, I already saw this in last week's YouTube video. I was like, okay, thanks, but that's generally not true, right? So people think and people get worried. Oh three emails Jim. Man, that's a lot. That's a lot. I don't know if I don't know if I want to be bugging people that much. Well, always make it easy to unsubscribe and don't be boring. And they're not they're not going to want to unsubscribe and they're not going to see half the emails anyway. On Sunday, my favorite emails, those are the ones that I still write myself. You want to inspire your clients with success stories or mindset shifts or life advice. These are where I'll write about my son's going away to college, my daughter Noor playing softball, about a client that we fought for, and we won their case.

Speaker 2 (00:08:48) - That's where people want to say, oh, that could be me. I want to be like that. And so people really like those Sunday emails, and I get more feedback, more email replies on Sunday than any other day. And I've tried every all seven days. All right. Now let's talk about the format, the format of your email subject line. The whole purpose of the subject line is to get them to open the email. That's it. Again. Don't be boring. Make it interesting. You don't want to make it clickbaity. I'm not advocating for that. I'm not advocating for clickbait. But you want to give them some reason to say, ooh. What's in there? I think I'd like to read that. One thing that's great with MailChimp and all other email service providers is that you can use merge fields to make it seem as if you are writing directly to that person, so you can put in their first name, you can put in their last name, you can put in all kinds of stuff in their merge fields.

Speaker 2 (00:09:41) - And one of the things with immigrants receiving emails is sometimes they think that I'm really writing just to them. And I had one guy come to me and said, Jim, my mother thinks she has to reply to every email you send her. So you got to be a little careful with the personalization. Now let's talk about tone. Think about Starbucks and think about email as a conversation starter and a conversation method. Right. So there's a big difference. If Alice and I are sitting across from each other having a nice conversation at Starbucks versus me standing up on the table and saying, hey everybody, I'm going to have a webinar next week, right? So there are times where you want to have that webinar kind of a blow horn announcement, but those should be rare. Those should be infrequent. Typically what you're hoping is to start a new conversation. So as an immigration lawyer, again I want to have my sentences easy to read, short easy sentences, plain language. Don't use a bunch of legalese.

Speaker 2 (00:10:41) - And I very rarely have any paragraph that's more than two sentences. It's sentence white space, sentence white space because people can read it much faster. Nobody wants to read your your Emancipation Proclamation. All right. At the bottom of the email, you to have a call to action. You want them to do something. Hey, we've got this Facebook group for immigrants. It's called Immigrant Home. You should join us there. Hey, we're doing a live show on our YouTube channel next Tuesday. Here's the link. You want to give them something to do? A couple reasons for that. One is you can measure how many things people are actually clicking, and you can and you giving them something to do. Another way to to make that sticky connection. And the most important part of the email. Anybody know the PS? The PS watch yourself when you get emails, you will scroll to the PS and you will always read the PS. You may have the peas. That might be your call to action.

Speaker 2 (00:11:37) - I usually have a call to action somewhere in the middle and then repeat it in the peas. Really good. All right. Now. Branded versus unbranded emails. You want to have both. So you want to have some with your name of your firm, your logo, all that stuff on there. Those are good for the more blow horny emails, which again, should be sporadic. The unbranded emails are much more effective. They're short, they're personal, and they're expecting a reply. I'll talk about that in a minute. Now, sometimes the lead will respond. That's a great thing. That's better than your open rate. That's better than click through. They'll actually send you a response. And I would say that we get probably we send out 18,000 emails three times a week each time we send out an email. We get probably 40 or 50 replies. Oh, Mr. Jim, I've been meaning to tell you something. Oh, Mr. Jim, do you think you can do what you did for these people, for me? And so you've got to be ready for that, right? Because, again, we're law firm owners.

Speaker 2 (00:12:44) - We don't want to get all caught up in the machinations of responding to each and every email. So you've got to have templates. Now Google makes it really easy. You can save templates inside your Gmail, or you can have an assistant do this and just have a built in response that's templated right now. The best kind of email response that you get from a client or a potential client is the love letter. The love letter is. And this I got from Dean Jackson. The love letter is when they tell you their whole life story. They send you a long ass email and it's not one sentence white space, one sentence white space. It's big old paragraphs. That's an opportunity to sift through. Hey, is there something we can work with here? Is that could be the start of the conversation. But that's when you know that they know, like and trust you because they're telling you their story and they're looking for help. Right. So when you when you start getting those love letter emails, you should do your happy dance because that means you're doing something right.

Speaker 2 (00:13:46) - Spear emails short, personal, expect and reply. I have many times sent email to people. An automated email to everyone on my list. Elise, how are you doing? Question mark. Jim that's it. Automated. I've spaced down the unsubscribed towards the bottom and again people reply and the thing they always say is, I've been meaning to ask you something. You can't beat it. You can't beat it now. So that's sort of the weekly emails. I got five minutes left. That's sort of how we're going to do our three emails. So teaching on Tuesday, video on Thursday, inspirational on Sunday. The next level. The next phase of our email marketing is list segmentation. So the great thing about MailChimp and other email service providers is you can tag or segment your list. So let's say that you do immigration law. You have somebody who lets you know that they're interested in citizenship. You can send emails specifically to them about citizenship or asylum or deportation or whatever. Right. And this is really important because people aren't interested in everything that you do.

Speaker 2 (00:14:57) - They just want to know, can you solve my problem right? Do you know about my problem? Are you an expert in fixing my problem so you can tag people manually? Or when you do your squeeze page, which we'll talk about, you can actually ask them, what is it that you're interested in and have a little dropdown and they can click and you can start even before. So so those emails you can send three days a week, you might start them in a campaign related to their practice area for a week or two, and then shift them over into the weekly regular email that everybody gets. All right, tagging and segmenting. We talked about that. We talked about three emails per case type. So we're just going to get that started. Get them like send them a video about that question. Tell them a story a success story. You can reuse the weekly emails that you used before. And you can save them and put them into your campaigns for that practice area. Does that make sense? All right.

Speaker 2 (00:15:49) - So the way they're always willing to trade information for an email address. So a great way is a special report. We used to put a lot of time and energy into reports about practice area. People don't want to read all that stuff. What they want is your best stuff. So our single best email trade system item is our documents of what we submit, what kind of marital evidence people can submit when they're applying for a green card. People love that stuff because they're obsessed about how am I going to make my green case stronger? And you might say to yourself, oh, I don't want to give away my best list. If I if I give away my best list, they'll never hire me. They'll never hire me. Wrong. Give it all away. All your best stuff. Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now. Because you're right. Lots of people will take that and use it and not hire you. But you know what? If you care about immigrants, that's okay.

Speaker 2 (00:16:43) - If you care about people who are hurt, that's okay. But if you if the ones who you want to work with, who recognize your value and recognize your expertise, they're going to love you for that and they're going to be grateful. And that's again starting the conversation. So those single page downloads, things like that are are really, really effective, especially right now. Squeeze page. So a squeeze page is. Either a video or that download that you're giving them with a squeeze page. Just it's a box that says first name, last name, email. You all filled them out, email, maybe cell phone number. You might not want to put cell phone number. You might want to get that later because that'll impact how many people actually fill out the form. Right. So again you want that email. And then if you want to have a little bit of you could do it afterwards too with MailChimp or keep or whatever, you can have them tell you after the fact. They can fill out one of those checklists so that you know what to what marketing to send them.

Speaker 2 (00:17:40) - All right. Last email tip again comes from the email guru, Dean Jackson. If you haven't studied Dean or taken his email mastery course like I did, I highly recommend it. And that is the amazing nine word email that revives dead leads. All right, so the amazing nine word email that revives, that leads. So when everybody gets home, this is what I want you to do. I want you to find your list of everyone who's contacted your firm in the last three months. So go back 90 days, find anybody who emailed you or whose email address you have and who asked you about something. Now hopefully you can remember what they asked you about, right? But if you don't know, you can keep it sort of vague. Right? And so I'm going to show you the nine word email, but I want you all to go back home or tonight, send this email to your list. And I can almost guarantee that you will start 3 or 4 conversations towards maybe somebody's hiring you because you incorrectly assumed that they were no longer interested because they did not hire you on the spot.

Speaker 2 (00:18:47) - We actually have this at the end of our 90 day campaign. So 90 days after someone has contacted us, they haven't hired us. They get this email. So even this can be automated. Dear Geraldine, are you still looking for blank help? Jim. That's it. That's it. Now, the evil Dean Jackson, he sent me, I didn't I didn't sign up for his course right away. He sent me an email that said, Dear Jim, are you still looking for email help now? Tyson will tell you that when we have these conferences, I'm always the first one to run to the back room and sign up and buy shit, right? So I'm a special kind of kook. But that email from Dean Jackson, it got in my head like a like a worm. Like a worm, like, oh my God, how could I not respond to this? He must know something about email that he forgot to tell me. And I've got to find it out. So I've got to reply.

Speaker 2 (00:19:42) - That's what the amazing nine word email that Revive Dead Leads does have a great rest of your conference, everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:19:50) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content content. Go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Are you struggling with knowing how to build a business from the ground up? In this episode, Jessica Gonifas shares her insights on building a successful law firm. She provides some tips on how to gain the confidence needed to run a business. 

In order to run a business, you need to have a good understanding of your firm’s numbers and where your firm sits financially. Jessica shares some questions to ask when you get your books in order. Ask yourself: Where is the revenue coming from? So what are the types of cases you take and how much profit are making from these cases. Another question is where is your money going? How much is going towards salaries, softwares, training, etc. The last question is what is the firm’s profit margin? With this, it is important to partner with an accountant that understands law firms who can help determine this margin.

When starting out as a new firm owner, it is important to understand what your personal and work goals are as well as the time you are willing to commit. For personal goals, consider how much money you want to take out of the firm and how much your family needs on an annual basis to keep afloat. In relation to work goals, understand what your purpose is at work. Are you reviewing technical work, doing technical work or going out and getting clients? The time you dedicate to your firm is so important because it will determine how much you make. Decide how many hours a week you want to work.

Jessica emphasizes the importance of having a big picture goal. What do you want your firm to look like in 5 years? What steps will you take to get there? In doing this, think about what you need to do as an owner and what your staff need to do as they help you run the business. Think about all the things you want to accomplish (ie. a certain number of cases, a new intake system, a new tech tool for the firm, etc.) and outline exactly how to get there. It might be good to break them down into quarterly objectives, that way it is spread out over 4 periods and you can take time throughout the year to plan.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:12 The importance of financial structure and asking key questions
  • 4:16 What about personal goals, work responsibilities and time commitment?
  • 8:16 The importance of setting big picture goals


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Jessica:

Resources:

Transcripts: Unlocking the Key Strategies to Building Your Law Firm Empire

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Lakhan 2022. Keep listening to hear Jessica Gonzalez as we share her talk. Unlocking the Key Strategies to Building Your Law Firm Empire. You can also head to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Let's get to it.

Speaker 2 (00:00:16) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 3 (00:00:40) - I have a few questions for you all. Raise your hand if you have a bachelor's degree or your undergrad in accounting. Raise your hand if you've taken any courses in accounting. So there's maybe 40 people in here, maybe about ten of you have any sort of background in accounting. And here you are expected to know how to use your numbers to grow your law firms or your businesses. And you also, not only that, you also went to law school and probably didn't learn how to run a business.

Speaker 3 (00:01:12) - So you're all definitely experts in the law, but you've had to learn how to be experts at running a business, which is very, very challenging. So having confidence in your firm's numbers really is the key to building your kingdom into an empire. And today I'm going to show you how to get that confidence. So there's three steps to gaining the confidence that you need to grow your firm. And over the next 16 or so minutes, we are going to unpack each of those. We're going to begin with getting clarity. So in this area we have three pieces we want to explore. We're going to start with financial structure. So what we're looking at here is what is your financial foundation and what sort of shape is in. So I get lots and lots of potential client calls and pretty much all of them that tell me they think there's something wrong with their books, there is something wrong with their books. So I would advise you all you're not accountants. Most of you don't know the debits and credits, but you do know your gut.

Speaker 3 (00:02:11) - So trust your gut in this area. And if you don't have the books right, the foundation isn't right. You can't really move forward with good information to make good decisions to grow your firm. So there's three questions that you need to ask. Once you get your books in good order. The first one is where is your revenue coming from? So what types of cases, how much revenue is coming from them. And then the advanced piece would be actually calculating what sort of profit you're making off of those types of cases. We have done this analysis with several clients, and it's really about eye opening for them, and not something that they necessarily inherently knew how to do in their firm. The second area to look at is where's your money going? So Brooke talked a little bit about this, but we recommend you look at all of it, the good bad and the ugly. So you really need to get to some sort of transactional level as the owner of the firm to understand what you're spending money on.

Speaker 3 (00:03:07) - Brooke, use the example of the gym membership on your credit card. You'd be surprised how many times we see those things and we have really found, especially on the expenditure side, there's a lot of emotions that go into the expenses and what the owner thinks is actually happening. Without looking at the data. We had a client that thought they were spending way too much money on food for the kitchen, for the employees. He thought it was out of control and he didn't know what they were actually buying. So once we got the books cleaned up, we looked at the number and it was $200 a month, and it's a $1.5 million firm. So he was irritated. It probably caused some irritation with the staff. But the reality was is it really just wasn't very much. So the third area is the profit. And is your firm profitable and what is the profit margin. So at the end of the day, a 150% agree with Brooke. You all are getting compensated primarily through the profit. So if your firm is not profitable, that is money out of your pocket that your family is not able to use for the goals that you have for your family.

Speaker 3 (00:04:16) - So this is super important to partner with an accountant that understands law firms. I can't say that enough. It's just critical law firms have different accounting needs. They have different the trust account, all of those things. And so you have to have an account that knows law firms. So the next area we're going to look at is desired outcomes. So there's four pieces to this. And this is really starting the piece of vision and setting the vision you have for your firm. So what are your personal goals for your firm. And here we're mostly talking about the profit. And how much money do you want to take out of your firm. So how much money does your family need on an annual basis to reach the goals that you have for your personal financial goals? The second piece is what are you doing at work? So are you reviewing technical work? Are you doing some technical work? Maybe you're just reviewing the high level work, or maybe you're not reviewing any work, and you're the rainmaker and you are just out there getting clients.

Speaker 3 (00:05:21) - So how do you want that to look when you are working on your vision for your firm? And then the third piece is how much time do you want to spend at work? So we have a client that only wants to work 32 hours a week. Jordan's presentation, he works about two hours a week on his law firm. So what do you want that to look? Like. And then the last piece is what is the legacy you want to leave with your law firm? So when you're done being a lawyer, what do you want to have happen to your law firm? We have one client that would like to build his firm in such a way that his kids can take it over if they want to be lawyers, so that's something to think about when you're designing your firm and building your firm. So now we've covered two of the three pieces in gaining clarity. And we're going to talk. The last piece now is about determining your current baseline. So this is really the 50,000 foot view of your firm where you're at today.

Speaker 3 (00:06:14) - And basically what your problems and opportunities are. We use the Swot analysis to go through this with our clients. There's a lot of different tools you can use. We like that one, but it makes you really forces you to step into the strategy level of your firm and where you're at today and face the reality of what your problems really are. We like this also because you can look back on it from year to year and see how far you've come, maybe the areas that you still need to work on and the stuff that you've really nailed. We had one client we were going through this process with, and there was a one of his competitors in town was retiring, and as we walk through the opportunities and threats, he realized this was both of them for him. He had an opportunity to purchase her law firm, and if he didn't, then that could potentially turn into a threat because somebody else could purchase it and he would have another competitor in town. So out of the three areas we've talked about getting clarity, now we're going to talk about designing your strategy.

Speaker 3 (00:07:16) - And this is really where the rubber meets the road. This is where the numbers come in. This is where you're designing that entire the vision. And you're saying, how are we going to make this happen. It's really heavy on accounting. So just bear with me. At the end of the day, you really need a partner with a strong accounting person with an accounting background. They can help walk you through this. I want to go through this with you because I want you to have a baseline. So you know what sort of discussions to have with your accounting professional. And you feel confident in asking the right questions. And you also have a vision of what this piece needs to look like when they're done helping it with that. And at the end of the day, it is your firm. It's not your accountants firm. So within designing the strategy we have, the first piece is our success targets. And we use a five year planning horizon with most of our clients. So this is a statement of what you want your firm to look like look like in five years.

Speaker 3 (00:08:16) - And you've already done some of this work. When you were getting clarity and figuring out where you wanted to go. So an example of a statement would be within the next five years, we're going to grow our firm to X revenue. We're going to provide these services in these states. So this is a really, really big picture statement of where you are going. Then we drill that down into 12 month milestones. So this is going to be your blueprint for the next year of how you're going to accomplish the stuff that you want to see happen in after five years. So we would want to include things that the owner is going to be doing and the business is going to be doing. So an example for the firm may be finalizing or developing a new performance based bonus system. So that might be something you want to do in the next 12 months. It's going to help your firm grow and get to where you want it to be in five years. We have one client that has a statement in here saying that he wants to focus on the firm profit and the goals that they had set associated with that profit in relation to every decision that they make in the firm.

Speaker 3 (00:09:21) - So if they make any decision to spend any money, he wants to run that through the process of, okay, how is this going to affect our profit and the initial goals we had set for that profit? So once we have the 12 month goal set, we are going to break those down into quarterly objectives. So we're going to look at each quarter of the year and what pieces we're going to accomplish to make sure we're reaching those 12 month goals. So I'll just use the performance based bonus system as an example. Maybe in Q one, you want to meet with your staff and get input. You want to do some research to see what other folks are doing. Q two you may want to actually go ahead and draft a sample, or maybe just the first draft of that performance plan, run it by the staff again and get feedback. And then the third quarter, you're ready to go ahead and roll that out. So we have made a big picture. And we've been able to bring that down into small accomplishable goals that are going to help us get to where we want to get to.

Speaker 3 (00:10:23) - So now we're going to look at the last piece in designing your strategy. And that is the five year forecast. So this is where your accountant is going to be crunching the numbers, doing the Excel spreadsheets, helping you with all of this piece. And you're going to be guiding them and taking a look at their work to make sure it's where you want it to be. So when we do our five year forecasts, we start with owners wealth. So this is how much money you want to take out of the firm every year for the next five years. Again, profit. That is how you are primarily getting compensated for being a law firm owner. Then we work on the staffing plan. So we start with a current staff, and you need to make sure you have all their costs, their salary, benefits, taxes, everything, and what staff you want to add as you're going through the five years. So that creates our five year staffing plan. And then we can start with the profit and loss projections and fill in the rest of the pieces.

Speaker 3 (00:11:23) - Start with your fixed costs. So these are things like your software, your rent and your salary. You already have that ready. So you can plug that in the expense side. Then you add your variable costs advertising things that you can control a little more. Then add in your revenue what you think you want your revenue to be. So then that's going to give you your profit. And you can compare that to your profit goal that you had when you started with your owner's wealth plan, and adjust where is needed to get you to the profit that you want. So at the end of the day, we're always talking about profit. So we had a client that came on and we're a fairly successful P.I. firm and two partners. They had wanted to invest in some real estate. They had a very profitable firm, but they just weren't confident in the numbers and confident of what the scenarios might be five years down the road to pull that much profit out of the firm. So we went through this process with them and they felt really good about it.

Speaker 3 (00:12:23) - We did some scenario planning and if this happens, what's this going to do to the profit of the firm? And they went ahead and invested in that real estate. And they're really happy that they were able to take the profit out and have basically another business venture for themselves. So now we've covered the the first two pieces of designing your strategy. And now we're going to look at the last. And this is your goals and objectives. And this is where we start talking about key performance indicators. And there was just a separate session on this. But this can be a whole thing on its own. So I'm not going to go into this too much. We do use this book Small Law Firm KPIs with our clients. We like it. She talks in terms that everybody can understand. She gives examples how to calculate it, and she actually has examples of law firms that she puts in there. This is how we would use it. So we really liked this book. Would recommend that. What we like to start with, if you've never done any KPI work, start small.

Speaker 3 (00:13:21) - Pick maybe 3 to 5. That makes sense to you. You understand and you can get the data. So that really the biggest challenge with KPIs is you can have this massive list of them. But do I have the data and are we tracking it in a way that I can use it? So start with the few that you know. You have the data, you're confident, and then once you're more comfortable with that, then you can start building and adding more KPIs. So start small and then you can always build on that as you go through. So we have now talked about getting clarity how to design your strategy. And now we're going to move into monitoring your performance. So we want to make sure we're monitoring our progress. We've done all of this work in the front end. So now we're going to monitor it to make sure we're accomplishing the goals that we had in mind. So the first piece is real time reporting. This is all on your accountant. Your accountant should be giving you consistent, accurate reporting at a time and a place and in a format that you know and that you're comfortable with.

Speaker 3 (00:14:23) - So when I say a format you're comfortable with, you need to sit down and think about what you want to see and make sure you're communicating that with your accountant. Because we don't know, we have one client just wants to see kind of red, yellow, green lights, really high level dashboard type reporting. We have other clients that want to see the general ledger detail for maybe one of their accounts every month. So we have that discussion with the clients and make sure we're providing the reports that they want. So you need to work with your account to make sure they're designing that. And then last but not least, you need to be comfortable that you can trust your accountant and you can trust the numbers. So if you feel like you don't know if the numbers are right or you're telling them every month how to do something and you're not really the accountant, you really need to think about that and see, is that is this relationship helping really move my firm forward or where I want it to be? So the second area is measuring and monitoring.

Speaker 3 (00:15:22) - We're going back to our KPIs, and we've set the targets for the KPIs through that strategy piece. And now we're going to compare our target with our actual. So this is going to tell us how well we are doing and as we're moving forward. And then. Last piece is check in in scale. So I know this sounds like a lot, but trust me, when you have a strong relationship with your accountant, you really can set this and forget it. You will get your monthly reports. You will go out, sit on your patio, have iced tea, review them for 30 minutes, maybe shoot them a few questions. But at the end of the day, having that relationship is really the key for you to moving your firm forward. So for us with the check in with our CFO clients, we have, they get monthly reports from us and we call that our monthly performance report. And then quarterly we meet with them for a strategy session. And we go through the quarterly results, the goals for the quarter.

Speaker 3 (00:16:22) - And we talk about what the goals were for the next quarter, whether we need to tweak those, we need to look at the budget, all of those pieces to see if we need to make any changes going forward. So I know I've covered a lot of ground in the last 17 or 18 minutes. First, we talked about getting clarity and really making sure that financial foundation is set for your firm. Then we talked about ways you can design a strategy to have the firm of your vision in the next five years. And finally, we talked about how to monitor that performance to make sure you are accomplishing the goals that you had. So I hope by now you will agree that gaining confidence in your firm's numbers is key to building your kingdom into an empire. And I have a couple of action items for you. So before you leave the conference tonight, because I know what happens when you get home, you forget about all this stuff, look at those three areas and really just score yourself super simple red, yellow, green.

Speaker 3 (00:17:17) - And if you're red or yellow yourself, a couple of goals over the next quarter, turn that area into yellow or green. Super simple. But it gives it's going to force you to have a chance to really look at how well you're doing in these areas. And then I give webinars every two weeks. I'll be giving one next week. You can check that out and register for that at the website there. And and you'll get more information about this entire process.

Speaker 2 (00:17:45) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts, and to access more content, go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Are you looking for systems to manage your tasks better? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, Ryan Anderson discusses the concept of task-based management in law firms. 

A lot of people run their business using calendar and email based management. It’s so easy for most because many people use their calendar and email frequently. But, Ryan shares how these methods are not efficient to manage your to do lists. He shares how using task based management systems are the way to go when it comes to staying organized and on top of all your tasks. 

Ryan shares its own platform, FileVine. FileVine is a task based management system that allows you to know what you have to get done for the day and what you have assigned to other people. So many lawyers have a million things to do from meetings to research to court. Having a system that lays everything out is ideal for this type of work. What makes FileVine and other project management systems so great is you remove the “email me” from your language. Most times, people will say “just email me”, but that can get lost in a flurry of other emails and priorities. With these systems, you can say “task me”. This allows you to task things out quickly to other people. If not, you are emailing, calling and messaging multiple people to get things done.

Ryan shares that people should be able to use case management systems with no more than their voice. He announces the creation of a voice interface that FileVine will have. With a voice interface, more tasks and communication will get onto the platform. What this feature does is allow someone to make a call to the platform where an AI bot will answer and ask what you would like to do. Let's say you realize at 10pm that you have to do something right when you get into the office, but you are worried you will forget. Call into the platform and let the AI bot know to leave a task for you and have it added to whatever case file. That way in the morning, you will get a notification that the task is waiting for you.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:24 The concept of task-based management
  • 6:31 The benefits of using a task-based management system
  • 11:27 Using task-based management to keep track of important information


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Ryan:

Resources:

Transcripts: Why Your To-Do List Isn’t Working: How to Get Things Done with Task-Based Management

Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 2 (00:00:24) - Good afternoon, everybody. I realize I stand between you and the weekend, so I'm going to try and be efficient and effective with my time. And we're actually talking about uses of time today. So this makes a lot of sense. I've decided I want to talk about something I call task based management. And we'll get into it in a second. But before I tell you what I believe task based management is and the way to employ it at your law firm and why it's so important, let's go through some of the things that are not task based management. Some of the ways that I think we currently manage our tasks that are definitely not optimal. First, let's talk about calendar based management. Now who here has said I need to get something done? So I'm going to put it on my calendar.

Speaker 2 (00:01:10) - That is happened to a lot of us, but of course a calendar is an optimized for a to do list it shared, others can see it and it can wind up looking a lot like this. This tells you nothing about the prioritization of your tasks. It tells you nothing about what you need to do next. It tells you nothing about how important the things you maybe don't need to get done that day. Ah, it tells you absolutely nothing about the most important things in your life that day. And yet so many of us default to a calendar based task management system. I'm going to tell you that is a very poor way to run your business and your life. Appointments are not tasks, they are distinct and they are different. A task might come from an appointment, but an appointment is not the same thing as a task. The next is email based management. And my oh my, do lawyers love their email based management? It's easy. We're in our emails a lot of the day. It can be very easy to kind of shoot off an email to somebody else.

Speaker 2 (00:02:15) - There's at least a little bit of context in an email. There's whatever is in the email, plus the subject and the other people involved. And email is the least common denominator. So if you are in this room and you use email to manage your tasks, congratulations, you are doing it in the least good way possible, because everybody can at least do that. If you can't manage your task via email, like at this point, it's 2022, there are some issues going on, but everybody manages their tasks to some degree this way. And it is a problem because what you're doing is you're attempting to manage your tasks again in a place that it wasn't meant for. We have all seen this reply did this get done? The did this get done or what? I like to call the hey, did you get to that thing email right? You send an email to somebody who works with you. Maybe it's a paralegal, maybe it's a partner. Maybe the paralegal is sending you an email, maybe an associate is.

Speaker 2 (00:03:17) - And there's some back and forth. You don't know if it actually got done. And days later you think, oh my gosh, I have no idea if this thing actually happened. And then you get the, hey, did you do this thing email? This happens all the time. The problem with email is not only does it not tell you very much about the context of everything, you need to make the decision, but it doesn't tell you what hasn't been done. In fact, it's one of the key reasons that I built File Vine. I wanted to know not only what do I need to do today, but I want to know if I've assigned something to somebody else. Have they not done it? Because not doing something in law can almost be as important as the doing of the thing. Here's one of my least favorite the first in first out method. I see a lot of lawyers. I talk to a lot of lawyers. The thing they wind up handling is the thing that is right in front of them.

Speaker 2 (00:04:11) - The call that they just took, the email that just came in, the phone call, the text message. Even for some of us, the facts that just came in and all of a sudden we're handling things as they come in. We're not handling things strategically. The first, first in, first out method is a reactive way to handle your tasks. It's not triaged and you will never make progress on your objectives. But still, a lot of us do this. We sit in our office and wait for somebody to approach us with something to do. Which leads me to the last bad way to manage your tasks. And this is the superhero associate partner paralegal firm admin way. Some of you have a firm admin that is special, that you believe can remember all the things that he needs to remember. And so you're constantly saying, just tell Alex and it'll get done. Just tell Alex we need to respond to the interrogatories. Just tell Alex we need to respond to the rfas. Tell them that we should handle this process differently.

Speaker 2 (00:05:17) - Tell them that we need to hire this person or that we need to do this thing. And then the task is out of your lips. It's gone and hopefully it's sitting with Alex and hopefully he will do it. But often Alex does not. And then you are faced again with the situation where you have made a task and the thing that you thought would happen didn't happen. As a lawyer, we are dealing with an incredibly complex set of things to do. Our tasks are important. They are high stakes, and yet we often think through very little about how we assign these tasks out. So what are the features of a task based management system? Well, I think for so many of you, when you're digging out something to do, we've talked about this. You say email me, of course, or all emails somebody else and ask them to do something. For those who are file blind customers, I know that they have picked up task based management when they change the language that they use, instead of I'm going to shoot you an email, or instead of email me when somebody needs you to do something as a partner or a manager at your law firm, you don't say email me, you say task me.

Speaker 2 (00:06:31) - I see this all the time. The very best users. It doesn't have to be file mine of a project management system. Don't say email me. They say task me and why? Why are they saying task me? Because they don't want that email sitting at the top of their email inbox. Because then all of a sudden you'll be you'll have the exact same problem you just did. You will have an email based management problem, a very low context way to understand the problem. You have to handle so great law firms that use their case management software well should be saying task me. And the reason this is true is because there's so much going on in our day. We have to triage the inputs that come in, right? There's email, there's text, there's phone calls, there's pop ins from somebody who thinks that what they have to do matters. Right now. There are so many different things going on, and you can't possibly take in all that information. And so you need to be able to task it out very quickly.

Speaker 2 (00:07:28) - Now, some of you know me, a lot of you know me, and I don't know how many of you know, though, other than these two sitting right up front, just how disorganized I am. So I'm going to tell you a story about me. This is how disorganized I am. I truly believe I might be the most disorganized person you've ever met. Maybe. Maybe the entire world. I fly a lot. My wonderful wife, who is very patient, will sometimes take me to the airport, and she took me to the airport about a year ago. And I get there and I've got my backpack on and I leave. I walk into the airport and then I realize, oh my gosh, I forgot my suitcase. Now that's pretty bad, right? Most people, when they walk into the airport, they forget their suitcase. Like, that's a rare thing. You're going somewhere, you're staying overnight. You need the suitcase. So I call my wife. She comes rushing back to the airport.

Speaker 2 (00:08:20) - I get the suitcase out of the back of the car and I go in. Then I get through security and I realize, oh, I'm going to Canada. I don't have my passport. So then I literally run through security, back out, call my wife. She goes all the way to the house, grabs my passport, and comes back to the airport to give me my passport. That is how disorganized Ryan Anderson is. I built an entire case management system because I am so personally disorganized. So what I have to do, because I have such a hard time organizing the very important tasks that are in my life, just like you all have in your life. I need to make my tasks appear in a trusted system where I know they're going to be there when I need them. If you're using task based management and you say task me in file bin, that task is going to show up in two places. It's going to show up on your task list when you define for it to show up, and it will show up on your feed immediately so you can do something with it.

Speaker 2 (00:09:23) - You can say, okay, I need this information in order to fulfill this task, or I need this person to look at this before I fulfill this task. And I see so many people in file vine making notes, putting their emails in file Vine. But I don't see a lot of this kind of behavior. So here is Austin. Austin is sitting in front of me. We are looking at getting a data scientist for vine, for some AI that we want to apply to some of the data that is in file line and makes make some predictions about things that we do. And so Austin is saying, hey, we've got the data scientists, we've got some people here that we're looking at. And then Austin attaches a job description. I then approve the job description, and then Austin gives me an update. I think in most firms that back and forth discussion is handled in an email. Let me tell you that is a problem. And it's a problem because six months from now or a year from now, instead of that discussion being in your.

Speaker 2 (00:10:22) - Management system. It's going to be in an email and you'll have to go find it. And hopefully that email has enough context for you to remember why you did the thing you did. So if those rfas or those interrogatories have responses in them that are somewhat abnormal for some particular reason, and all you did was go back and forth in email. If you can't find that email, you might not know that reason. But if you went back and forth in File Vine, you will be able to see the history of why you did that thing, why it was important, and why you handled that particular issue in that particular set of interrogatories the right way. So preserving context is incredibly important. Lawyers are often required to go back. Why something happened matters a lot in the law. We have all had a case where we're reading through a pleading where perhaps a claim gets dropped and your client says, hey, why did you drop this? My lost wages claim. And you think, oh my goodness, I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:11:27) - The last lawyer that was handling this case, my associate was handling that issue. I have no idea. Did that lawyer make a note that the employment claim was dropped? Did that lawyer say anything? Is there any record of this? You won't know if it's all sitting in email, if it's sitting in file line, if you use task based management, you will know and it will come back to you when you need it. But for me, the most important thing is just that you use it to begin with, and using a case management system or a project management system can be challenging. It's really challenging. It's challenging for me personally. I know that throughout the day I think of things that need to be done. We're all thinking of things that need to be done in the middle of the night. I have woken up and thought, oh my hell, I have got to file this document by tomorrow. Has anybody ever had that happen to them? I got to file this by tomorrow. You're in bed.

Speaker 2 (00:12:27) - You've got to file something by tomorrow. If you don't file it by tomorrow, your client could sue you. That's a problem. What do we do in that moment? I've done all sorts of weird stuff. I sent myself a text message. I've sent myself an email. I have sent myself a timed slack message. I have written a little sticky note and put it on the fridge so that I know when I grab my drink, it's actually a Diet Coke. Let's be honest, when I grab my Diet Coke in the morning, I see the sticky note and I think, okay, I'm going to file this thing. But it doesn't just happen at night when I'm in bed. It happens when I'm in my car and I think, oh my gosh, I've got to do this. And there's 20 other things going on and I forget to do anything about it. I even have I'm fortunate to have an e.R. But I don't want to call my E.R. at 10:00 at night. I'm not a monster.

Speaker 2 (00:13:17) - I don't want to call my E.R. on the weekend yet. Those kinds of things happen to us all the time. So I have always thought for years, when we started a file vine, that we needed a way to get what was in my head into a trusted system very, very easily. And so at File Vine, we've thought of a lot of ways to do this. We thought. Should we use an app? Should we make file Vine easier? And to be honest, this is a problem that lawyers have been dealing with for a long time. In fact, dictation and digital assistants are a hundred year problem in the law. In fact, I bet some of you in this room still use a dictaphone. There's a reason that you see doctors get out of their offices, and they hop on that dictaphone and say everything that was in their head the minute they get out. Why do they do that? Because they also, just like us, have a high stakes job with big problems that have to be solved and they cannot make a mistake.

Speaker 2 (00:14:28) - But for us, it is very hard to do that kind of a thing. So I has gotten better than it ever has been in the past, and it continues to get better. For a very long time, I believed that you should be able to use your case management system with nothing more than your voice. And today we are announcing in front of this group and nobody else this. You will be the first people to hear about it. The very beginnings of the voice interface we use with File Vine. We think that this will change how you use File Vine because it applies to your tasks. More tasks will get in file vine, which will mean more communication will get in file vine, which will mean that your clients will get the result of better decisions that your paralegals, that you're associates, that your partners will make better decisions because the most important information will be in there right when you need it, when you need it. So we're going to test this live right now. Are we ready? All right.

Speaker 2 (00:15:35) - Okay. So File Vine has developed an AI that you can call again. We thought about this a lot. An application might have worked, but we think a phone call is best because you can do it from anywhere.

Speaker 3 (00:15:51) - Hi, Ryan. Welcome to John. How can I help you.

Speaker 2 (00:15:54) - Make me a task?

Speaker 3 (00:15:57) - I can do that for you. What project should I add this to?

Speaker 2 (00:16:01) - Max con 2022.

Speaker 3 (00:16:05) - I have located the project Max lock on 2022. Who should I leave this task for myself? What task would you like to lead?

Speaker 2 (00:16:16) - Have Jim bring Diet Coke next year.

Speaker 3 (00:16:20) - I have added the following task. Have Jim bring Diet Coke next year. There we go. Sorry, I didn't get that.

Speaker 2 (00:16:28) - All right, there it is. The task in. File in. We hope. For those of you who are Five9 customers, you will use this. And if you're not following customers and you're really adamant about not being Five9 customers, fine, then you should talk to your own case management systems and figure out how they can get this kind of functionality in.

Speaker 2 (00:16:49) - But I'm telling you, the more your tasks are where they need to be, and the closer you can get your brain into a trusted system, the fewer mistakes you'll make and the better your decisions for your clients will be. Thank you everybody. I have a deep appreciation for Max Law con. I want to tell you, I think I told this group a couple of years ago, we negotiated the lead docket purchase at Max Law Con. I was at Max Law Con, I think in the very, the very first one that ever happened. And today to be able to announce it at Max law con means a lot to me. This is an incredible group of people. Jim Tyson my goodness, what an incredible community you've built. Thank you all so much. Have a great weekend everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:17:35) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Do you need virtual support for your law firm? In this podcast episode, Daniel Maxwell, an attorney with Amicus Settlement Planners, discusses the benefits of hiring and training virtual assistants (VAs) for law firms. 

Daniel talks about how hiring internationally located individuals as VAs can help businesses grow and prosper. Many people have fears with hiring VAs, especially ones that live halfway across the world. Daniel says business owners need to move from problem centric thinking to solution focused thinking in order to get over these fears. Thinking about how a VA will help your company instead of what potential issues exist will lead to success. What makes outsourcing work to VAs in other countries beneficial is that people can be working at different times of the day. Daniel shares how he will provide a list of tasks to his VAs before he goes to bed and they are complete when he wakes up.

For many business owners, the question can be where to find the best VAs. Daniel shares the three ways to find VAs: hiring direct, using a freelance marketplace or using a VA staffing firm. It is important to not get stuck in this step. Choose a route to find a VA and follow through. If one method does not work to your liking, try a different one later on. Daniel stresses the importance of hiring a VA for one task. Not all VAs will be able to do everything and that is totally fine. For example, if you need help with invoicing, hire a VA solely for invoicing so they can focus and master that skill. If there are other tasks that they can do down the line, allow them to branch out.

Something to add to your recruitment process is having potential VAs complete a test task. This task should be similar to the work that person would be doing if they were to come on board with your firm. This will narrow down potential hires and sift out those who are not the right fit. It is also important to have a good standard operation procedure (SOP) for VAs to follow so everything is done in the way it needs to. Some examples include access to software or templates to complete work or a video demo on how to complete a task. This all helps VAs become familiar with how you run your firm and decreases the chance of a VA not knowing what to do.

Communicating with your VAs regularly is important. Pick a standard channel, whether it be email, Slack or Asana. Communicating new tasks is also crucial to ensure the VA understands how things work. When you are providing a new task, record a video demonstration so the VA can refer back to it.

Listen in to learn more on hiring VAs!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:20 Daniel addresses the fears and concerns that may be holding law firms back
  • 6:07 The different options for finding and hiring virtual assistants
  • 9:09 Tips on filtering and hiring virtual assistants
  • 10:14 The importance of having standard operating procedures (SOPs)
  • 14:07 The benefits of investing in virtual assistants


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Daniel:

Resources:

Transcripts: How Every Law Firm Can Find, Hire, and Train Rock Star VA’s

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Con 2022. Keep listening to hear Daniel Maxwell as we share his talk how every law firm can find, hire and train rockstar virtual assistants. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2 (00:00:18) - Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Tricks. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (00:00:41) - Hello, everyone. That was a great introduction. My name is Daniel Maxwell. I'm an attorney with amicus settlement planners. Today I'm going to share how hiring a virtual assistant 8000 miles away literally transformed my law firm and my life. I believe that every law firm can hire a team of rock star Vas to catapult their firm and their practice forward. My goal is to share exactly how to find, hire, train and manage a team of Vas. If you already have a virtual or virtual assistants, if you already have virtual assistants, I hope that you can learn something today to improve your existing processes.

Speaker 3 (00:01:20) - So throughout the presentation today, I'm going to refer to internationally based workers as Vas. So I'm not talking about US based remote workers. I'm talking about internationally located individuals and so I'll refer to them as Vas. So first I want to talk about how my VA team has helped me in my law firm. So in the last two and a half years, we've three X to our business and we've been able to maintain an 80% net profit margin while doing that. So more is getting done at the firm. While I personally do less and I'm free to focus on what I do best. So before we dive into the nuts and bolts, I think it's important to address common fears and limiting beliefs about Vas. So if you haven't hired a VA, why not? What fears and concerns are holding you back? So last year at Max Lakhan, José Vitale gave a great talk on Vas and he talked about the importance of essentially flipping the script on our fears and concerns. So he invited us to consider this question What if the opposite of your fears and concerns are true? So if you're worried I may not be able to find a good a good VA? What if you what if the opposite is true? What if you're able to find a great VA? Right? Ultimately, you are going to have to take a leap of faith when you hire your first virtual assistant.

Speaker 3 (00:02:43) - So Dr. Jason Silk yesterday talked to us about shifting from problem centric thinking to solution focused thinking. And so my goal is that hopefully one of the ways that you can the one thing you can do to more effectively work with Vas is to follow a proven system and process. And that's what I want to share with you today. So first, why hire an international VA? I think this is pretty obvious. It's an incredibly low cost for excellent helpers, right workers in your firm. So for me, for administrative tasks, I'm typically paying 5 to $8 per hour and for specialized tasks 10 to $15 an hour. By specialized tasks, I mean things like SEO, video editing and graphic design. Most of my Vas are in the administrative tasks category. So the next question that I often get from attorneys as well, what what can Vas do? So here is my litmus test. Could a smart college educated person do this task? If yes, that's a great thing to outsource. So I have a Post-it note on my monitor with this question, and as I'm doing tasks, if I ask myself this question and the answer is yes, I try to never do it again.

Speaker 3 (00:03:57) - I try to outsource it to my Vas. And so some of the things that the Vas do for my law firm include billing, following up with leads, requesting Google reviews, legal drafting, blog writing, CRM, updating data entry, creating automations, and the list goes on and on. But ultimately only you know what you can and should outsource in your firm. So Michael Hyatt, in his 2019 book Free to Focus, gives us a great tool to use to figure out where do we start outsourcing tasks. So he says that all tasks fall into one of four categories. We have the desire zone, the distraction zone, the disinterest zone, and the drudgery zone. As attorneys, we want to spend our time in the desired zone. So, for example, my desire zone is helping personal injury attorneys reduce their taxes and build wealth and helping their clients wisely invest their settlement recoveries. Any task that doesn't fit in that category is something that I should outsource. So my invitation for the next week or several days is draw this grid on a yellow pad.

Speaker 3 (00:05:04) - And as you do a task, place it in one of these quadrants. At the end of the week, you're going to have a great list of tasks to look at for potentially outsourcing. So the best place to start is the drudgery zone where your proficiency is low and your passion is low. That will be with that list. Next. The next question is where do you find a VA to help you with those tasks? So I personally prefer the Philippines, and there's several reasons for this. First, their English proficiency starting from essentially elementary school throughout their education. English is a required topic. So they typically read, write and speak very well. The cost of living differences between the US and the Philippines creates a win win. So, for example, my first VA, I hired her four years ago. She had recently completed a four year nursing degree and her offer to be a nurse was $315 a month. And she would have had to, of course, pay her own transportation costs. Working for me, she's making about triple what she can make as a nurse.

Speaker 3 (00:06:07) - And so it's like I said, it's a win win by nature. Filipinos are loyal, they're friendly and they're hardworking and they just they make great employees. Finally, there's a heavy US cultural influence, so they watch the same TV shows, the same movies, they listen to the same music. I don't feel any sort of cultural divide with my VA team. Finally, as I like to tell my wife with Vas working halfway across the world, the sun never sets on my kingdom. So I have Vas who work during my daytime hours and also while I'm sleeping. And I love nothing more than sending a list of tasks before bed to my Vas and waking up with them complete. It's it's a magic that I don't think I'll ever get tired of experiencing. It's great that someone is working 24 over seven on building my law firm. All right. So now the question is where do you find Vas? So there's three main options. You can hire, direct. You can use a freelancer marketplace or you can use a VA staffing firm.

Speaker 3 (00:07:06) - My preferred method personally is to hire direct using a site like Online Jobs Dot, which is an online job board that you pay for a month of access to. Once you hire someone, you directly interface with them and you handle billing and time tracking and things like that. The next option is a place freelancer marketplace like Upwork. Upwork handles the billing and the time tracking and charges an hourly fee for that. The most hands off solution is to use a VA staffing firm. Get staffed up is here and I know many attorneys have had great success with them. They handle all of the the heavy lifting, so to speak, in both finding a VA as well as managing that relationship. And so it's really a matter of your personal preference on how best to get started. My advice is this Don't let this step hold you up. Pick one, move forward, and then the next time you hire a VA, you can try a different one. If it didn't turn out well for you. But don't get stuck here.

Speaker 3 (00:07:59) - So now that you know where to find them, how do you hire the right VA? So one of my best tips is to hire for one task. So we talked about the drudgery zone. You have a list of tasks. You're not going to find a single VA who can do everything on that list. You're not going to find someone who can write SEO articles and graphic design and bookkeeping and everything you want them to do. Hire for a single task. Of course, once you onboard them, they can expand into other tasks, but hiring for a single skill set, you're going to have much more success. The next thing that really helps is by creating a great job post. What I mean by this is I like to include what I call a magic phrase in the job post, which is just a quote or something that the candidate needs to include in their application. Any application that doesn't include that quote is immediately eliminated. The next thing that I like to do is I have the applicant submit a one minute video recording saying, Why are they a good fit for my job description? This helps get rid of copy and paste applications and it also shows how technologically savvy someone is that they can record a video uploaded to YouTube and send me the link.

Speaker 3 (00:09:09) - So that's a great first initial filter on the Vas. The next thing I like to do is I like to have a multi-step email sequence. So each email contains a series of questions and this helps me figure out several things. First, how responsive are they? That's extremely important with a VA. How quickly are they responding to emails? It helps me see their writing ability, their ability to communicate clearly via email. And finally it shows their stick to itiveness, their willingness to go through multiple hoops to get the job. Once I've filtered all the way down to the end of the hiring sequence, I like to have them do a test task. So ideally, this test task should be as similar to the job that you're hiring for as possible. This gives you a great way to see their work product before you hire them. And so using this, this funnel essentially will greatly reduce the amount of time you spend on hiring Vas. With my first VA, I didn't do this. I had over 80 initial applicants and it was a nightmare.

Speaker 3 (00:10:14) - So this is these are tips that I've learned the hard way, essentially. So now that you've hopefully found 1 or 2 VA's that you're ready to hire, the question is how do you train them? So this is the biggest single pitfall I see with attorneys. So oftentimes I'll be speaking to attorney and they say, Hey, I hired a VA. It just didn't work out. So the biggest pitfall is this that the attorney does not have standard operating procedures or SOPs for the VA to. Follow. They are great at following processes and systems. They're not going to build your business for you. You have to build the systems and they can help run it. So the key to my success with Vas is my detailed SOPs. So here's a screenshot of my SOP template. As a side note, you can download this. I'll have a link at the end of the presentation where you can download this and everything else I referenced today. But I first I want to talk about what does a good SOP contain? So I like to make sure that it includes the purpose for the business.

Speaker 3 (00:11:13) - Where does this fit in the overall picture? It helps increase their buy in with the task. Next, I like to include a video demo of me doing the task so that the VA can follow click by click when they do the task. I also include everything that they'll need to complete this particular task, whether it's access to software or data or files or whatever it may be. Next, I like to include how are they supposed to report when they've completed this task? Do they send a slack message? Do they mark a task complete in a case management software? ET cetera. And finally, I like to have a written step by step instructions list at the bottom of the document. So if a VA likes to follow a video, they have that option. If they want to follow step by step instructions, they have that option. Once you have created a solid sop, the question is how do you use the SOP to train the VA? So what I do is that when I hire for a task, I provide the SOP to the VA.

Speaker 3 (00:12:09) - I let them review it and study it and let me know if they have any questions. And then we go through the task together. In other words, we get on a Zoom call and I watch them do the task. As we're doing that, I give any feedback on things that they need to change and any feedback is incorporated into the SOP. Once we've gone through the test together and I feel confident in their ability to do the task, I can outsource it and I don't have to touch it again. So as far as managing your Vas, a couple tips here, I recommend pick a primary communication channel. I prefer Slack, but keep everything in one place makes it much cleaner. So initially I did email and slack and messenger and it got messy. So pick one communication channel and make sure everything happens there. When you have new tasks for a VA record a video for those tasks, I find the video communicates much more information and it's much faster for you as the attorney. And in addition, if it's a task that I will that we will as a team ever be doing again, I ask them to create the first draft of the SOP.

Speaker 3 (00:13:15) - So I know that the SOP template was a little bit daunting. Frankly, I haven't created one of those in years, so I just record a video doing the task. They create the SOP, I review it, and then again we go through that same process of doing the task together. But because you have the video, they're able to build the SOP on your behalf. The next thing I recommend is having them do a daily report, whether video based or text based report. And I have them answer three questions What did I do today? What questions do I have and what problems did I run into? It's a great way to keep a pulse on what's going on, get in front of any issues and help them in the performance of their tasks. Finally, once I had more than one VA, I started having a weekly team meeting similar to in office employees. It's a great way to build rapport to make sure everyone knows what we're working on this week to answer any questions they have and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (00:14:07) - So similar to an in House employee, my my next piece of advice is to invest in your team. So these are my Vas. So the in the upper left hand corner is Angel. She's the first one that I hired. I hired her originally to write blog articles for my law firm. After a while, she expressed interest in learning new skills, so I purchased courses for her on digital marketing and the next thing and the next thing. So four years later, she her skill set has has exploded. She helps me manage a nonprofit organization and manages Facebook ads and handles social media channels and on and on and on. And so one of the reasons she has said she loves working for me is that I'm investing in her and she's learning and she's growing. And obviously, for me, it's a huge win because I have a VA who's increasingly skilled and can do more tasks. As another aside, when I first hired her, she had this dream of. Buying a home in the Philippines, which is actually quite difficult to do.

Speaker 3 (00:15:09) - So she has recently moved to her dream city, which is in the mountains of the Philippines. So it's much cooler. She likes that and then she's in the process of buying a home. So it's been really rewarding for me to to be a part of helping her make her dreams come true. So the bottom line is that by following a proven system, I believe every law firm can successfully build a team of Vas. Your VA team will help you save time, get more done, and increase your bottom line. So I've compiled all of my resources on a website. You can go to law firm vas.com, so there's much more in depth videos on all of these topics. I have my SOP template sample job posts, my email hiring sequence, my recommended software tools. ET cetera. So my day job is helping plenty of attorneys and their clients. This is just a passion project for me. I love all things Vas, so I've spent hundreds of hours trying to figure this out. My goal with this website is to just shortcut your success with Vas so that you can get started much quicker and avoid lots of the the pitfalls that I ran into.

Speaker 3 (00:16:17) - So if you have any questions or want to chat, I love talking about this. Please feel free to reach out. This is my email, my phone. You can call or text me. My invitation is this. Get started. Take the leap of faith. And I'm confident that your law firm will transform, just like mine has with a team of rock star Vas. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (00:16:41) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Are you looking for a way to automate your intake system? Do you use various tools within your firm? In this podcast episode, Kelsey Bratcher from Hired Gun Solutions shares a presentation on automation intake and the evolution of the process.

The intake process began with a simple piece of paper. When someone called a firm, a receptionist or administrator would write their name and number down on a piece of paper. This would then get passed to the attorney. In the legal field today, there are many tools and softwares that are used to automate the intake process, making it more efficient and faster. The ideal intake system will get a client on board in one call, without having to bother with scheduling an appointment.

You want a level of consistency in the intake process. The same questions should be asked, the same information collected and the handoff of information should be right after everything is collected. This will ensure every client is treated the same and nothing is left out for the attorneys. Kelsey emphasizes the need to have a centralized system. If a firm is tracking calls and messages, scheduling meetings and has a marketing channel, all of this needs to be in one place or within one software.

Take a listen!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:05 Kelsey Bratcher shares the fundamentals of the ultimate intake system
  • 3:46 The need for consistency in how calls are handled
  • 6:38 Centralizing information in one place
  • 8:43 The importance of staying organized in the intake process
  • 9:36 Easy and real-time access to reports and metrics


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Kelsey:

Resources:

Transcripts: The Ultimate Intake Machine with Kelsey Bratcher

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Lakhan 2022. Keep listening to hear Kelsey Bratcher as we share his talk, The Ultimate Intake Machine. You can also head to the maximum layer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Let's get to it.

Speaker 2 (00:00:15) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 3 (00:00:38) - So, yeah, like I was saying, I'm Kelsey Bratcher, my company's hired gun solutions. I've been working with different small business owners for the past 14 years. As he said, one of the things I want to point out is there's a gentleman, a house painter that kind of brought me into the world of automation and which ended up connecting me with a guy that we all know, and that's Mr. Jim Hacking. I want to take a moment to thank both Tyson and Jim for being so generous as to letting me use their stage to talk about automation intake.

Speaker 3 (00:01:05) - For the past three years or so. Up until recently, I've been living in an RV, traveling in the country and helping people automate different systems and processes in their business. This is a photo of me and my family, my wife and my youngest daughter over at Mount Rushmore with a Teddy Roosevelt lookalike. The reason I share this stuff with you is that all the processes that I've created for my businesses and for my clients has been gone to allow me to be able to operate from the road continuously for three years during Covid and all that kind of stuff. And so I want to make sure that some of those things are kind of explained. So the first thing we want to talk about with the ultimate intake system, we have to go and talk about the first intake system. The main thing you're going to think about is the beauty in its simplicity. And that first intake system is just a piece of paper. So all the crazy tools and everything that we've been talking about and we just focus on what a piece of paper and what an intake system based on this might look like.

Speaker 3 (00:02:03) - What if your phone rings and you have someone on the phone, you write their name on it and you write down their phone number and you go through some of the stuff that Russ and Gary had been talking about. And then when you have to transfer this information to attorney, either because there's a meeting that you're scheduling or you're physically transferring it, you could take this piece of paper and walk over to another person and hand it to him, and they have everything that they need to know. But since then, intake process has started to look more like this. And so you have, I don't know at any given time, a dozen or so different tools that have to work together perfectly in conjunction with your team. And it just gets kind of messy. And so one of the things I want to break down is you can't get away from this today unless you go back to using paper. Some of these tools are going to be involved no matter how you look at it. Some of you have already chosen different tools.

Speaker 3 (00:02:51) - And we're going to talk about how those things can interact together. But this is not an abnormal tech stack that I've encountered. I mean, we have some redundancy here, but you can kind of get an idea. So we want to talk about the fundamentals of the ultimate intake system. And Gary's touched on this. If you think about the conversation that Russ just went over, the first thing we want to focus on is that our process needs to be one call able. What this means is that if a person calls your office that you can take them for beginning to end. Not every single time, but from beginning to end and be able to sign a new client without them having to waste time scheduling and appointments, postponing them. You want any delays in the process to be client facing more than your own process, right? Like telling somebody that you have to set up an appointment with them a week from now is going to cause introduce a delay that you've now imposed on the client when they would be ready to go.

Speaker 3 (00:03:46) - An example of this, I was just at a car dealership last week. I stopped in randomly to get a price on a truck that I have and I was able to talk to a salesperson, get a quote from my truck and buy a new car in less than an hour at a car dealership Like we're going through financing everything. And I was they had a whole crazy system in place for doing that. But it's I've never gone through a car dealership in an hour. And so one of the things that reminded me of this presentation is that that one call close will process. I was ready to go buy a car and get through everything. And you have people calling your office. Not everybody, but most people that are going to call through will accept the pace in which you want them to operate at. So why not allow that to be as fast as possible? We also want to look at keeping everything as repeatable and as clean as possible. It creates confusion for your clients. If every single person that calls in is treated differently, how can you establish some kind of standardization from the people that are answering your phone, whether it's reception or Smith or whatever you got going? On how that handoff takes place with your intake team and if you have any attorney or other type of sales function in the process.

Speaker 3 (00:04:52) - Like ideally that needs to operate where 80, 90, 95% of the time it's always the same. And the one thing we want to do as well is if you look at the piece of paper, it's very easy to collect the information that you want from a PNC, step by step, literally following each field all the way through the process. And it takes hardly any effort when we introduce a lot of the technology. These tools kind of like force somebody to like skip around, open the windows, click around all these different places, and it creates kind of like a big pain in the ass. It causes a lot of confusion, especially if you have older people on your team. They might have issues with like how all these different tech tools work together, and so you want to create it and silo it as much as possible. Next step we're going to be looking at is I'm going to combine both of these together because multiple. It's kind of unavoidable. You're going to have a phone system, you're going to have a CRM, you're going to have a file, a case management system.

Speaker 3 (00:05:44) - You might have a different application use for text messaging. And so it's impossible to get away from that. So we want to centralize the information into one place, especially during intake. So if you're going to be communicating with the client, either via your phone or via texting, ideally all the records of that information would exist in one place so that you can review what's going on. This also helps you understand any of the KPIs or metrics that you're going to be looking at. I mentioned earlier the one call close. We want to be able to shrink and expand the process based on how the client will be interacting. So like if I'm a lazy client and I don't want to meet with you because I'm going on vacation two weeks from now, that's when the appointment should be. If I can't meet sooner, right, If I'm ready to go now, I got my credit card out or I was just in an accident. I need to sign an agreement. Get that to me as fast as I possibly can, and I'm ready to go.

Speaker 3 (00:06:38) - And then the last thing we've all learned is that it needs to be 100% remote. There's no reason why you physically need to be present in your office or have anyone be physically present in your office to be able to conduct this going on. You're going to have people in other countries, other states that participate in your intake process. And therefore we want to focus on how do we create the piece of paper situation when the person just talked to the client is in a completely another state. So we're going to talk about now is the components of what these intake machines look like. So the first thing we're going to talk about is like marketing referrals and like that is a piece of intake. Like I've worked with another attorneys at this time where I see people are always referring in and you are continuously referring out. You have friends, colleagues, cases that you might receive some type of cut on and being able to track and how that interacts throughout the intake process. The other piece of missing is that I often find missing is the attribution that comes from, let's say like someone clicks on a Google ad and arrives on your website and knowing which ad that that created.

Speaker 3 (00:07:37) - And then ultimately, if somebody is closing a week later, how do you provide how do you count that sale against that ad spin that you just did that flows right into call tracking, which would be the next piece? The marketing channel is that it helps you identify where that's going to be coming from. And a lot of people are in this room, probably are on call rail or call tracking metrics. And then the next piece is like, how does okay, if you're going to track that a call came in your phone system and scheduling tools and messaging needs to all be in alignment. So a lot of folks are using the RingCentral just call, you have email marketing that it's going to be going out for sending automated communications and then ultimately scheduling links. So I want to talk about one quick thing that came up that I didn't have in my presentation when I first went through this, but Russ and Gary both talked about the speed component. So if you get a lead on your website, the amount of time that it takes for you to reach out to them, at the minimum, you need to have an email that goes out one step better is an email and a text message provided that you've adequately gained permission to text message somebody.

Speaker 3 (00:08:43) - And the third step would be to automatically have that person get called. So every lead that you get from a web form, whether it's on your website, a Facebook lead ad, et cetera, that it sets in motion the process for that person automatically get communicated from you. So the next piece is we have an organization and efficiency and the beauty of the piece of paper example that we just talked about is that it can it physically exists. You can hand it from one person to another. It can be stuffed in a folder and it allows you to just transport this piece of information. We want to talk about The piece of paper example is going to give you the ability to stay organized very easily because you can't get rid of that thing. So how do we create that? We need a proper core and we need to be able to jam everything all into that proper core and we'll go over that in a minute. So the next pieces are if you're going to have reports and metrics, I believe that they should be easy and in real time.

Speaker 3 (00:09:36) - And you can pull them up from your phone right now if you wanted to. When a key and critical piece of your intake process is typically circulated around document signing. I think Gary mentioned that it needs to be a 1 or 2 page type of deal. Ideally, you can get that into the hands of your prospects immediately. Now getting paid piece is probably the trickiest piece. Not all of you are going to be getting paid physically up front or during the getting started with a new client. And so if it doesn't apply to you, we're going to talk about that. But more or less, the getting paid piece is the final step of the intake process because if they just signed a representation agreement and they owe you $5,000 to get started, we want to make that process. As soon as they sign that, they're getting asked to pay and your process needs to reflect that. So we're going to talk about what are some of the the viable core options that you can use to build your framework to to start encompassing some of these types of steps.

Speaker 3 (00:10:26) - So you have a lot of different combinations and you can have all kinds of different combinations of these. But the first off the top, we're going to talk about Clio Grow plus manage. If you're using these tool tools together, there's a. Big infrastructure for how you can start to bolt these things together. Like if you have a new contact created in Clio Grow, you can use that as part of the process for walking somebody through. The next piece is lead document and File Vine. Those kind of work hand to hand together. They don't have to be used together, but they usually are. Lymphatics is out there, but you probably need some other stuff to be able to do that. I know there's some my case users in here. There are some challenges with that. But if you're using my case, you can start to implement some of the different things that we talked about and of course, custom solutions. And my favorite is Pipedrive at the moment. So with Pipedrive, it is not a legal software.

Speaker 3 (00:11:14) - It is a sales tool that's built for small sales organizations to automate and systematize their sales. And so I like to bolt it on to whatever case management system people have. So the next piece I want to get into is going to be kind of like what the future of this is going to look like. So I've been working with a bunch of different attorneys for the past since basically since before Covid started. Jim had me on the podcast a couple of times, and I've been since introduced to many of you. I've been on Max Law a couple of times and getting through the public speaking component being a little nervous. But I'm actually going to be creating a new company and it's going to be a software company called Automator. We're basically going to take a lot of this fancy crap that we've just jammed and jam it all together into one place so you don't have to learn 50 different tools and try to connect them all together. Now, there's no timeline on this, so I'm just making the announcement today. All right.

Speaker 3 (00:12:05) - I think I'm just about on time here. Five seconds left. Thank you very much. And I hope that this is helpful.

Speaker 2 (00:12:15) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Are you a practicing attorney who struggles with closing a deal? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, Russ, a salesperson with a law degree, presents the five most important factors to closing a sale. He talks about the skills and qualities an attorney needs to close a sale with a client.

Building Trust 

People will buy a product or become a client because of trust. Trust is essential in gaining the support and rapport of a client. Trust comes from credibility as well, in that you are good at what you do and you have the evidence to show for it. Now the question becomes: “How do you begin to build that relationship with a client?”

5 Steps for Closing a Sale

Russ talks about the five steps for closing a sale and how it can pertain to attorneys.The first step is engagement. As lawyers, engaging with the client at the beginning is easy because the client calls you for help. As long as you are quick with getting their needs met, you have them. 

Once this step is done, you need to focus on discovering the client. Get to know them and their needs. Spend time understanding their real needs and the needs they don't even know about. Walk the client through the process of how their needs will be both met and encourage them to take your recommendations. 

This leads to the third and most important step, which is building value. Clients are going to buy what you're selling, only if you convince them you or a product has value. To build value, communicate with them when you will be in touch, when you are available and all the information the client will need.

As attorneys, gaining the trust of the client comes from passion. You need to be passionate about them and their story. Working in the legal field comes with countless stories about people who have gone through turmoil, trauma and heartache. Clients need to have attorneys that are just as passionate as they are to solve the issue. This passion is important in showing clients that you care and are with them until the end. It will stem from the discovery stage, where you ask questions to get a better understanding of what the client needs and why they came to your firm.

Most of the time, potential clients don't know what they want because they are stressed out from their legal situation. As an attorney, you need to get them to commit to something. After showing them your value, have them commit to a phone call from you, a follow up call from your assistant, or signing the agreement. You need to give them a choice to make a decision. This is where you close the deal and retain the client.

Take a listen to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:19 The importance of trust, credibility, and rapport in closing a sale
  • 3:28 Engaging the client
  • 10:04 The importance of building value.
  • 19:30 The strategy of providing the client with a choice


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Russ:

Resources:

Transcripts: The 5 Most Important Factors to Closing the Sale with Russ Nesevich

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Con 2022. Keep listening to hear Russ message as we share his talk. The five Most Important Factors to Closing the Sale. You can also head to the maximum Lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2 (00:00:17) - Run your law firm the right way. 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.

Speaker 3 (00:00:40) - How y'all doing? Here's the deal. I'm a sales person. I happen to have a law degree, but I'm a sales person. I sell legal services. I sell estate planning. You're all salespeople. And once you all realize that you are all salespeople, your life and your practice will change. Everything Gary talked about is gold. It's awesome. It's up here. It's 10,000ft. We're going to come to ground level and we're going to talk about when you have the opportunity to talk to a client, how you're going to close the sale and how you're going to get them to commit and how you're going to get them to move forward.

Speaker 3 (00:01:19) - And that's what I've been doing for my whole career. I spent 15 years selling investment real estate through financial advisors to clients. Five years ago, I made a career change and I started selling estate plans. Period. End of story. You are all salespeople. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Why do clients buy? By the way, quick aside, I had this presentation professionally done and then I added like four slides. You're going to be able to tell really quickly which slides I added, so I apologize in advance. Clients buy because they trust you. Clients buy when they trust you. When they see that you have credibility, you can do what you say you're going to do and you develop rapport. If you do one out of 3 or 2 out of three, you will not close the sale. It will not work. So you have to get them to trust you. You have to get them to believe that you can do what you say you can do and that you're good at your craft.

Speaker 3 (00:02:20) - And you have to develop some rapport where on an emotional level, they like you and they want to work with you. Be consultative. I have been. So when I worked at the real estate firm I had for 13 years, I was at this company. The last five years I ran a 30% sales force. I had years and years and years of professional sales training. I sat in rooms like this for three days, four days and got professional sales training. If you ever have the opportunity to do it, do it. And I've taken those 3 or 4 experiences that I've had with professional sales training, and I've stolen a bunch of that stuff and put it together into a 20 minute presentation for you. Okay. So I have been trained to do this, to engage the client, to go through discovery, learn about the client, to build value, to demonstrate what you're going to do for them, and then to advance the sale. And it is truly a process and it's something that you have to practice and it's something that you have to be good at in order to get to where you want to be.

Speaker 3 (00:03:28) - So here's the here's the fun part. When I was selling real estate investment products, I had to get them to accept an invitation to talk to me. Hi, I'm looking for Mr. Smith. We have this wonderful multifamily investment opportunity to generate 6 to 8% annual returns, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is there any chance we can talk? No, he doesn't want to talk to you. He's fine on his real estate needs. Great. When can I call him back? Can I send you some information? That sucks. Okay, then after that, you got to get them to disclose their needs, embrace your recommendations, commit to moving forward. But none of it works until you. Until you get them to accept an invitation to talk. We as attorneys, we don't have to get them to accept an invitation to talk. They come to us. They actually call us. They call us because they need our help. It's the hardest part of the process. The hardest part of the process is to get them to be willing to talk to you and listen to what it is you have to sell them.

Speaker 3 (00:04:21) - You guys don't have to do that. I don't have to do that. We get to skip that step. They come to one of my webinars, they call me, they come to my office, they're already in now. It's on me to do the rest and to do it well. So we go from engage, we go to discover. We want to learn about them, their needs, both their real needs and their unconscious needs. The things that keep them up at night. We want to build value. Tell them all the things that we could do to fix that problem and get them to embrace our recommendations on an emotional level. And then and only then could we advance the sale. And the problem, the mistake that 90% of people make is they move to step four, they move to advancing the sale, and they haven't done a good enough job in step three, which is building value. If you move to advance the sale and they say, no, you didn't blow it at the end, you blew it at step three because you haven't demonstrated the value.

Speaker 3 (00:05:22) - So engage. When you engage, all you want to do is gain commitment. So we had to call and get somebody to talk to us. You guys, they're coming to talk to you. They've already committed. Okay, so this part's easy, but let's tweak it. Let's make it better and let's make it easy for you. By the way, here's you can tell. Anybody want to guess which slide wasn't professionally done. Okay. But this is important. All right. How do your people answer the phone? Good morning. Thank you for calling this law. This is Russ, How may I help you? I gave them my name. My name is Russ. Okay. I made a sincere offer to serve them. How may I help you? Hi, Law. Hi. Thank you for calling this law. This is Russ. How may I help you? It's subtle, but it's different. While I need such and such. Great. I would be glad to help you with that.

Speaker 3 (00:06:14) - May I have your name, please? You acknowledge them, You acknowledge the problem. You connected with them on a level they know your name. You know their name. People call and they get to me eventually. And they call me Mr. Nestle, and I allow them to do that once. And then I say, Please just call me Russ, Can I call you Bob? It changes the tone of the conversation. Thank you, Bob. Can I ask you a couple of questions to make sure I get you to the right person? You used their name and other centered approach. Not what's in it for you. What's in it for them? Can I ask you some questions so that I can get you to the right person? This is all so simple. But there's this subconscious psychology going on that makes this all incredibly important. Okay. Discovery. You want to ask questions? You want to understand their needs, both the subconscious and conscious needs. The conscious need for me is I need a will.

Speaker 3 (00:07:15) - Great. The subconscious need is I'm afraid that my wife's going to get all the money and she's going to spend it with her new husband and it's never going to get to my kids or my kids from my prior marriage. And that keeps me up at night. You don't need a will. You need a solution to the fact that you think your kids are going to blow through all your money or your wife when you're gone. It's going to blow through all the money. That's what you need. You need a solution to that problem. So you want to discover their needs. You want to build trust. You want to allow them to be heard, Ask open ended questions, ask clarifying questions. Okay. Another rough slide. Stephen Covey said, Seek first to understand, then to be understood. I think in the seven Habits it's not seven habits. It's how to win friends and influence. People don't talk. You go out to dinner with somebody else and you guys have a conversation and you do 80% of the talking.

Speaker 3 (00:08:06) - You are doing it wrong. You do 20% of the talking. Somebody random goes over and says to that person who was at dinner with you and you only did 20% of the talking, Hey, what do you think of that person? Oh, they were great. I loved them. Of course you did. You just got to talk about yourself for 80% of dinner. People just want to talk about themselves. We all do it. Shut up. Shut up and stop talking. Tell me about. Help me to understand. Share with me about. Tell me. Tell me a little more about this concern that you have about your wife dying and getting remarried and your kids not getting Give the money, ask clarifying questions, ask follow up questions. Oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more. If you're doing most of the talking during your consultations, you are doing it wrong. This is a script. This is a script. Use the script when you say that. What do you mean by that? Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:09:03) - Sometimes I ask people financial questions and suddenly they get a little standoffish. And I'm asking financial questions for two reasons. I'm asking financial questions because, one, in order to do their estate plan really well, I need some information on their financials. I got to know what their what we're dealing with. Two, I have a financial services firm that I work with, and if there's an opportunity to help them manage their money, I want to know about it. But sometimes you start asking a person, well, how much did he make? How much is in your 41K How much is in your IRA? Tell me tell me how much is in your brokerage account? What's your house worth? And you start asking these questions and they back up. Why are you asking me that? Well, beat them to the punch, Prime the question with an other centered reason. Not about you. About them. In order to better understand your tax situation when you pass away for estate planning purposes so that we can protect more of the assets for you and minimize the taxes.

Speaker 3 (00:10:04) - Can you give me an idea of how your assets are structured in terms of IRAs and 401 seconds versus brokerage accounts? They're answering that question. They're not answering. Hey, how much do you make? Make it about them and explain why you're asking the question and prime that question. Okay. Build value. This is by far the most important step. And this is the step that we do wrong. And by the way, this is the step where you get to talk and you get to explain how you're going to solve their problem, what you're going to do for them, what it will mean to them when you're done. Okay. Make it emotional. Word pictures. We did. A mastermind at the guild on Tuesday was Wednesday was Mastermind day. We all got together and had some masterminds and we were talking about all sorts of things, and somebody was talking about their estate planning practice. And one of the attorneys who was in the room said, you know. My father passed away X number of years ago.

Speaker 3 (00:11:12) - And there was all this paperwork. And I'm an attorney, and I didn't know what to do. And my mom had all these documents that were my dad's. And some of the accounts just had my dad's name on them. And we were just staring at that paperwork and my dad had just passed away. And as if we didn't have enough to deal with. Now we have this stack of paperwork that we didn't know what to do with. And my mom's looking at me because I'm an attorney and she thinks I'm going to know what to do. And I have no idea what to do. Did you all just feel that? That's word pictures. All right. Make them feel that. Take all that stuff that you learned during discovery and use that to build those word pictures, to make those strong statements, to make sure that they can see that you understand what you're what they're going through, and then you clarify back for them what they're going through and what you can do for them to solve their problem.

Speaker 3 (00:12:15) - And by the way, if you're not passionate about it, figure out how to become passionate about it. Take an acting class if you have to. If you cannot speak, I'm being serious. Become somebody else. If you cannot speak about their estate planning work or their personal injury work or their divorce with the same passion that I'm talking to you about sales. Find something else that will excite you and practice that instead, because clients can sense it when you're not excited and and emotional about their problem and what you're trying to help them with. Okay. Because you mentioned that protecting that money for your children is important to you. Let me tell you about someone we help just two weeks ago with a similar problem. They're coming in to sign their documents next week. This is how we did it. That money is going to get to their kids no matter what. By the way, you may also want to consider. Be aware of this. Have you thought about this? And that's how you show your value.

Speaker 3 (00:13:20) - Oh, no, I didn't think about that. Oh, well, you really ought to think about that. It's really, really important. When they emotionally embrace and care about the benefits and that meets their understanding and beliefs, you win. They will never say no to when you ask them to sign that agreement, not retainer agreement. Okay. You've all heard this before. You've all heard about the difference between features and benefits. Make it about them. You've got to be really, really careful that the features and benefits are about them. The features are what you're going to do for them when you walk out the door. Mr. Smith We're going to create a will. We're going to have a power of attorney. We're going to have all that stuff done. It's going to help you to ensure that the assets you leave to your wife will eventually get to your kids no matter what. That's the benefit. And you want those benefits to be specifically relevant and applicable to them. What do they care about? Do they care about money? Do they care about their reputation? Do they care about their kids? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:14:26) - But hopefully you got all that from Discovery When you zip your lip and just ask questions and let them talk. Because if you did that, well, this part becomes easy. Build value. This is how we do things a little bit differently. We're going to have a few reviews of your plan. We're going to be in touch every so often. This is how often we're going to talk. This is how often you're going to hear from us. You can call us anytime between 9 and 5. We will call you back within two hours. ET cetera. ET cetera. ET cetera. Demonstrate your expertise. We're one of the only firms in town that does this kind of planning for people like you. We're one of the only firms in town that has real expertise in dealing with clients who have 5 million in assets or 10 million in assets or whatever it is that you do. We're one of the only firms in town that has been dealing with catastrophic injury cases for years and years and years. Demonstrate your expertise and use those words where the first where the most.

Speaker 3 (00:15:26) - Where the only build that value. Emotional. I talked about the word pictures. Use those pictures to explain what's unfamiliar to them. They don't know what an AB trust is or what a testamentary trust is, but they know what it means when you leave your assets to your kids. Those monies will be protected if you leave them in a way creditors won't be able to get to them. Predators won't be able to get to them, their divorcing spouse that you never really liked. Because you told me that in discovery won't be able to get to them, that they understand they don't care about the testamentary trust. Tell some success stories. Show your passion, Speak like you're up on stage. Try not to use words like, um. And uh, when I first started doing webinars, I watched back a webinar that I did on estate planning. I use the word right 37 times. So does that make sense to all of you? Right. You want to talk about distracting the audience? If you're speaking like that, when you're in a meeting with a client, it is just as distracting.

Speaker 3 (00:16:30) - There's a term. Anybody see Top Gun yet? I hear it's awesome. Don't give it away. Tom Cruise, supposedly at 60 years old, still has abs. I've never had abs. I'm 47. But it gives me hope because 13 years from now, maybe so fighter pilots have a term about checking their six, checking their six. Just me knowing what's going on behind them. Check your six. You want to with your client, You want to check your sex? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir? Mr. Smith, does that make sense to you? Mr. Smith, Does that sound like a reasonable next step? Mr. Smith, Do you get that? Do you want me to clarify it a little bit? Check your sex with your client. How does that sound to you? They're going to have objections. Here's how you handle those objections. You want to accept them. That makes a lot of sense. You want to clarify them. You want to understand what they mean so that you can address it properly.

Speaker 3 (00:17:25) - Validate it. Drop the rope. Here's what drop the rope means. Don't play tug of war with the client. If the client objects to something, you say, drop the rope. Drop the rope back up. Rephrase it. Don't challenge them. You'll lose. Rephrase it. Make sure you understand, clarify, adapt. I can appreciate that. What issues concern you? Ameriprise This is really funny. Ameriprise has a strategy that they teach their salespeople. It's called feel felt found. Okay, Mr. Smith, I understand that you may feel that way. The last few people that I worked with felt that way as well. Eventually they found that this was actually a really good solution for them. Did you catch that feel, Felt found? I had a salesperson that worked for me who went in to see a financial advisor, and the financial advisor was a former Ameriprise guy and my sales guy use that on him. And the guy looked at him and went, Did you just feel felt? Found me okay.

Speaker 3 (00:18:29) - Feel, felt, found. Okay. All right, Advance. I got a minute and a half left, but that's okay, because this is the easiest part if you've done the first three parts correctly. All right. You want to gain commitment to what's next? Whatever that may be. Gary will say that what's next has to be them signing the retainer or signing the agreement. Maybe. Maybe because of your practice area. They're not ready for that yet. I don't know. But get them to commit to something. Can I call you tomorrow at 2:00 just to get some feedback on this meeting? Can I have my assistant follow up with you? Would you mind if we sent you some more information? Get them to end the meeting with a yes. Would you be willing to sign a retainer and move forward? Would you like to give us a deposit? Whatever it may be. Get them to move forward and commit to something. Give them a choice. Would you like to pay by credit card or by cheque? That's a fork in the road.

Speaker 3 (00:19:30) - It didn't say not pay at all. You gave them a choice and you force them into a decision. Would you like to give us a retainer by credit card or by cheque?

Speaker 4 (00:19:40) - Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:19:42) - I know Gary's not here anymore. I can say whatever I want. You want to create a fork in the road and make them choose, but provide an other center purpose? Why is it in their best interest to choose your road? And then get a commitment. Get a commitment to something. Closing isn't about technique. It's all about timing. It's about timing. It's when you've done number three really, really well and you've demonstrated all their value now, now, if you do it too early, you lost. And if you do it too late, you've bored them and they're thinking about meeting somebody else. It's about timing. Okay. Handle objections. Acknowledge this is the app. When I was talking about objections before, acknowledge the objection, drop the rope, explain what's in it for them. Get permission to continue moving the conversation forward.

Speaker 3 (00:20:35) - So I am out of time. We were going to go through an example. I'm out of time. I don't think I could even take questions. Right. Questions? Nothing. We're done. Okay, I have. I have one thing that I want to say. Just if you don't mind. Give me one moment. This is purely an ask. Don't hit it yet. I'm not selling anything. I'm not doing anything. It's an ask. My father passed away from cancer 15 years ago. I have a really good friend who is up for man of the Year for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and it means a lot to me. I have personally, as part of his team, raised about $20,000 as part of his cause. We're up to about $200,000 in assets. Today is the last day of fundraising. There's a whole bunch of people in this room that I reached to personally who made a donation as part of our team towards his Man of the Year campaign. If you got some value out of this and you would consider doing it, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (00:21:34) - I don't care if it's 20 bucks, I don't care if it's if it's five bucks, whatever it is. If you feel like you got something out of this presentation and you're willing to do it and you want to feel good before you go home, make a donation to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Okay, That's it. Thank you. If you have any questions, if you want to talk about this stuff, if you want to role play something, call me. My mobile is (267) 258-4793. You can call me. You can text me. I'm happy to chat with you. I'm happy to role play something. I'm happy to talk about a problem that you're having with this. I just like this stuff and if I wasn't selling legal services, I'd be selling something else. I think it's cool. All right. Thanks, everybody.

Speaker 2 (00:22:21) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Do you need help improving your law firm's client journey? Are you finding it hard to get clients? In this episode, Matt Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Lawmatics, discusses the importance of providing excellent customer service in the legal industry and improving the client journey.

It is evident that lawyers are not CEOs. They don't run businesses. But, Matt emphasizes the need for law firm owners to run their practice like a business. Law firm owners need to go out and find clients to grow their firm just like a CEO would go out and make connections to grow their success. Part of growing your business and law firm ensures the client is always happy because a happy client equals a happy practice. Matt delves into the ways to prioritize the happiness of a client.

1 | Client Begins 

The client journey begins the moment a client reaches out to your firm via email or phone. This is part of the “client intake phase”. This phase is crucial to getting a client because they are reaching out to multiple firms at once. You need to ensure staff are engaging right away so they don't lose the client. Immediate engagement shows the client exactly how you will respond to them throughout the process. It shows that those in the firm care and are ready to provide the client with what they need, even if it's just basic legal information.

2 | Active Client

The “active matter phase” is the communication throughout the length of a client's case. Like phase one, communication is key to getting and retaining a client. It is important to provide the client information throughout the journey. Make it a habit to market to them. Send them information like newsletters that include things that are external to your firm. It is a good idea to set up a client portal, where individuals can go into a system and get updates on their case. If email communication is too much (and it can be in this industry), a client portal is a great way to input all necessary information and the client can retrieve it on the other end. 

3 | Former Client 

The “former client phase” is a neglected but important phase in the client journey. 75% of clients come from referrals. Even when a client’s case is complete, the relationship between the attorney and client needs to continue. There are many ways to maintain a good relationship with a former client. Send a birthday and holiday email every year or add them to a mailing list for networking events. What this does is let the client know the firm has their best interests in mind even after the working relationship ends.

Matt speaks about only doing things in your law firm that you can measure. You need to be able to back up your success with KPIs and numbers. Think about the conversion rates of initial screening calls that lead to actual clients. This will measure how successful the intake process is for your firm. Cost per lead and cost per client is another metric to consider to ensure the amount it takes to bring a client on board and how much you are making from that client makes sense.

Take a listen!

Episode Highlights:

  • 6:57 Immediate engagement and rapid response to create a positive first impression
  • 8:45 Focusing on maintaining the relationship with a former client
  • 8:58 Providing excellent customer service from the very first contact with a client
  • 9:53 Delighting clients through effective communication during the active matter phase
  • 17:29 The importance of automation


🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Matt:

Resources:

Transcripts: An Actionable Plan to Formulate and Automate Your Processes with Matt Spiegel

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - In today's episode, we're sharing a presentation from Max Khan 2022. Keep listening to hear Matt Spiegel as we share his talk. An actionable plan to formulate and automate your processes, you can also head to the maximum layer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2 (00:00:17) - Run your law firm the right Way. The Right Way. This is the Maximum layer podcast podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Metrics. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (00:00:41) - Hey, everyone. Matt Spiegel here joining you guys remotely. But I'm excited to talk to you nonetheless and still have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you guys and some some holistic ideas that we've kind of developed over here at Maddox and just in my history and my experience in the space and as a lawyer and in legal tech space, just this topic, this idea of the client journey and this path to delight is something that is really, really important to me is something I'm very passionate about. So I'm going to start sharing my screen here so that hopefully everybody can see and the way we go, the client journey, the path to delight in it.

Speaker 3 (00:01:17) - And we're going to get right into it here. And I'm going to talk with you next 20 minutes about, again, this topic, very passionate. I am about it, that is really focused on not being a lawyer. Right. And it's it's the idea of thinking about your law firm and the most basic sense of a business and how to approach just providing good customer service, really. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm Matt Spiegel. I'm founder and CEO of Law Maddox. I have been around legal tech for a long time. I am the original founder and CEO of my case. I'm assuming that most people know what my case is. My case obviously is one of the biggest practice management systems on the market. I'm a golfer. I'm a dad. I'm a girl, dad. I'm my life consists a lot of softball right now as I'm coaching my daughter's all star softball team. So that keeps me very occupied. Less time for golf, more time for softball these days and running a business in between.

Speaker 3 (00:02:17) - I like you guys. I'm a lawyer, right? That's that's my trade. And that's what we are. We are lawyers, right? We are not CEOs. And this is a cliche. I know that this is well, it's becoming a cliche, probably in large part because of me. But it's talked about, you know, many companies talk about this like, hey, you know, you're a lawyer, you're not a businessman. And but it's really true. And, you know, the reason why it's true is just go back to law school, right? Law school is all about teaching you how to lawyer. Right. Teaching you how to understand the law, how to apply the law, how to think like a lawyer. It does not teach you how to think like a CEO. Not even remotely close. Right? There are maybe 1 or 2 classes nowadays in law school that are geared towards managing a firm, and some of the things that are a bit intangible that you that are hard to learn, but generally speaking, you don't learn how to run a business.

Speaker 3 (00:03:08) - And running a business is a really hard thing to do. It's not an easy thing to do. There's so many things that you have to juggle. You've got to maintain an office, right? The office doesn't just run itself. You have to focus on growing, right? Your goal is to grow, not stay flat. Okay. You have to. You have to be a successful lawyer. Okay. I'm going to talk to you a lot about not worrying about the law and trying to focus on some other aspects of your business. But at the end of the day, you still have to be a good lawyer. You still have to focus on getting great outcomes for your clients if you don't do that. Well, I'm going to make an argument later that even if you don't do that, you could still have a successful business. But obviously it's going to be much harder on yourself if you just suck at practicing law, right? So you still got to focus on being a good lawyer. New clients, you got to go out and drive new business.

Speaker 3 (00:03:58) - If you're not driving new business, then your business will slowly die, right? That goes in line with growing scheduling right on top of all this stuff, you have to worry about your calendar. You have to you have court dates, you have client meetings. You have so much that you need to keep track of. The list really goes on and on. And then you have to you have to worry about marketing. Right? And again, this kind of goes hand in hand with growing and bringing on new clients. But there's a lot of aspects to marketing that as a business owner you need to think about. And these are very difficult things. Not only are lawyers, not CEOs, generally speaking, they are also not marketers. Right? And you can go and, you know, you can hire a marketing agency and there are plenty of really good marketing agencies out there to help you as a law firm now. But the bottom line is you have to think about it, right? You can't just completely ignore it.

Speaker 3 (00:04:48) - So all of these things just make running a business very, very hard. But at the end of the day, I really believe that. A successful law firm or really any business for that matter. But a successful law firm really comes down to this simple equation. Happy clients will equal a happy practice. It's just that simple. If your clients are really happy, then your business will thrive and you will be happy. Now, what does it mean to have a happy client? That's what we're going to be focusing on a lot because I'm going to share with you that a happy client is not necessarily just a client that receives a good outcome. A happy client is somebody that receives a really good experience with your firm. Part of that experience is going to be the legal representation that they get, but a lot of the experience is going to go far beyond the four corners of the representation that you provide them. So what is the client journey? The client journey is really just your customer's experience with your law firm.

Speaker 3 (00:05:49) - So think about it with any other business, right like that that you might go through a journey with. So whenever you use Amazon, right, there is a customer experience that you go through when you are using Amazon to purchase something. When you go to the grocery store, when you go anywhere. You are on a journey, you are going through an experience with that provider, with that business. And so when we look at it in terms of a law firm and its clients, it's just simply that what is the journey that the client goes through with your law firm? And it starts from the very beginning. Every single stage is an opportunity to delight your customer. Again, the client journey begins from the very moment that they first reach out to your firm. And we're going to talk about all these stages. But it starts from the very moment that they reach out to your firm and it goes in perpetuity. Long, long, long after their matter is over with you. Every single stage, every opportunity, there is a chance for you to delight them.

Speaker 3 (00:06:57) - So here are the three phases of the client journey. The way that I break it down and I feel very strongly about this, there's three phases to the client journey. Phase one client intake. From the moment that a lead contacts your firm to the signing of the fee agreement and payment of any initial fees. That is the intake phase and there's a lot that happens inside of that phase. Phase two active matter. You've retained a new client, now you have an active matter and you've got a defined scope of service. You're representing them on a case or whatever it is, and that's phase two. Okay. Phase two has a definitive beginning and an end point. Right? Phase three, they're now a former client. The matter is over. And now you have to maintain that relationship. This is arguably the most important phase of the whole journey when it comes to your business. That's a source of reviews. That's a source of referrals. That person is critical to the success of your business going forward.

Speaker 3 (00:07:52) - So let's talk a little bit about each phase. Phase one. Hello. I'd like to talk to you about my case. That's it. That's the beginning of phase one. Maybe it's reaching out on a website, right? Filling out a form saying, Hey, can you please contact me? That is the the the first. Part of phase one. What can you do here? Right. Well, immediate engagement. Do not give them a reason to call the next lawyer on Google. You've probably heard this already from someone. Whether it's me in the past or whether it's from a marketing associate that you use or another lawyer. But time is everything. If you do not respond and immediately engage that lead that's reaching out to you, you're going to lose it. Right? There's tons of data that supports that first impression. Showing a potential client rapid response indicates to them how you will communicate during their matter. Okay. So by engaging with them right away and providing them this excellent service, you're telling them like not only are you providing them a good experience which will carry throughout their whole thing, you're actually helping sell, right? Because you're showing.

Speaker 3 (00:08:58) - You're showing them, hey, look, you know what? This is the level of service that you're going to get from me if you hire me as your lawyer. It's on from Hello. What I mean by this is that from that very first hand raise, that very first contact that the client has with your firm, you have an opportunity to give excellent customer service. And that's all you should be thinking about, right? You need to get the client. But think about it as just I just want to provide a great experience for them. I want to immediately engage them. I want to communicate with them in the ways by which they want to be communicated with. Maybe they want text message. Maybe they want a phone call. Maybe they want an email. I want to delight them. I want to communicate with them the way that they want to be communicated with. Now, in this phase, automation is absolutely critical. You cannot. You cannot engage rapidly enough without automation. So it's very important that you maintain some level of automation.

Speaker 3 (00:09:53) - Phase two, the active matter. Well, this is where I will tell you the outcome is only part of the experience, right? So the result you get your client is just a small part of it. They are more than just a matter. They hired you to represent them zealously, but that's not it. Communication. Communication is the easiest way to delight your client during this phase of their journey. The number one complaint at all state bars is still and it's been this way for like 15 years from when I started my case, actually. Still attorney client communication number one state bar complaint. There is plenty of tools out there to make sure that that is not the number one complaint ever again. Marketing. You can communicate to your current clients about things that are not related to their case. You can market to them. You can send out your newsletters, you can show them life beyond you as just their lawyer. And technology. I mean, guys, I think you guys all know this now.

Speaker 3 (00:10:46) - There's so much tech available to you in your practice practice, management, CRM. The bottom line is there's so many opportunities for you to let your clients into your tech stack and you should let them into your tech stack as much as possible. Perfect example of this is client portal, right? How many different pieces of software out there have client portals? Now that is a way to let your clients into your tech stack. Phase three former client. This is the most neglected and it's the biggest opportunity. And it's because of this number right here. 75% of law firm business comes from referrals. That means that as soon as that case is over, that person who's walking out the door is going to be the main source of your future business, of the success of your law firm. It's not going to be Google. That might help. It's not going to be seminars or whatever else you do that might help. But 75% across the board is going to come from referrals. You have to remember that as soon as their case is over, your relationship is really just beginning.

Speaker 3 (00:11:50) - Okay. And there are lots of different ways to communicate with them. Email cadences, birthday reminders. I mean, how many people in this room send something to their clients, their former clients, every year on their birthday? My guess I can't see you guys. And I think I asked this a couple of years ago, maybe to to a few of you, but I know the answer is minimal. I know there's a bunch of people using LOL Maddox and they all probably raise their hand because it makes it very easy. But generally speaking, you're probably not not doing what you should do for your former clients. And there are lots of easy ways using automation and using platforms to ensure that you are nurturing those former clients and making sure that you are getting reviews. You are getting, you know, the full weight of the referrals that they could they could provide you. You got to remember, it's not just about referring other people for the same practice of law, but it may be someone who needs a different type of lawyer.

Speaker 3 (00:12:43) - That's could still be a great source of referral for you. So again, we just kind of talked about this, but what are you doing to actually delight those former clients into referring business? I like milestones, so delighting your customers with birthday emails and newsletters, engagement like drip campaigns that we talked about. There's there's a plethora of things that you can do. You just have to remember that all clients are people and they are someone who you can have a relationship with. Now, you may be thinking, I do criminal defense and like some of the people, I don't want to have a relationship with them. I get it. That's what I did. But it doesn't mean that, you know, you don't have to have a personal relationship with them. You have to treat them like a person, right? That's how they want to be treated. What you have to remember, too, is that I've been mentioning this to a lot of customers bars lately and other lawyers that I've been talking to. So you have to remember that to the client, this is the most important thing that they have going on in their life.

Speaker 3 (00:13:35) - And that's true for almost any practice area. Criminal defense, bankruptcy, family law. Immigration. Personal injury. What this case is almost assuredly the most important thing that they have going in their life for you. It's just another case. You have to put yourself in their shoes and think about the way that they want to be treated, not just how they want to be represented, but how they want to be treated. And if you do these things, you're going to have an incredible experience and you're going to see a lot more business from it. So I hope that gives you a little summary on on how we think of this journey and how we think about providing good customer service and not worrying about the outcome. Here's what I will tell you. If I can leave you with one thing, I will tell you that you can be the best lawyer in the world, but if your customer service sucks, you will not be successful. You will not have a great business and the vice versa is true as well.

Speaker 3 (00:14:31) - You could be a terrible lawyer, maybe not terrible, but you could be a mediocre lawyer and provide mediocre outcomes for your clients. But you can have the best customer service and provide the best experience and you will have a massively successful business. It's not always about the outcome. And so the final part of my talk here, before we sum it up, I always like to talk about measuring things because as you're as you're building out these automations and as you're looking to delight your customers every step of the way and you're going to be spending more money maybe on marketing or you're going to be doing more things to run your business, not as much practicing law. I encourage you to only do things that you're able to measure and you need to set critical KPIs for your firm, right? These are performance at key performance indicators. These are business metrics that have nothing to do with practicing law that I think everybody should be really keeping track of as a law firm. Number one is conversion rates. This is just the percentage of leads that go on to become clients.

Speaker 3 (00:15:34) - What is your conversion rate? Is it 50%? Is it 80%? Is it 20%? Doesn't matter what it is, it's important that you know it and you should know it like the back of your hand. Number two, CPA and CPC. Most people probably don't know what this is. This is cost per lead and cost per client. This is probably the most important metric to your business period, because if these metrics don't make sense, then your business is failing. And what I mean by that is, let's say that it costs you $5,000 to acquire a new customer, a new client. But your average revenue from that customer is $4,000. Well, guess what It means Every customer you bring on, you lose $1,000. Most of your law firms are not suffering from that. But the point is that it's very important to measure these things for all of your different marketing sources, for everything that you're doing. And I'll see you in the next one. You don't want to just know this, General.

Speaker 3 (00:16:35) - You do want to know this generally for your firm, but you also want to break it down by all your different sources that you have, right? Whether it's referrals, whether it's Google, marketing seminars, whatever it is you want to understand, how much does it cost for every lead I bring in and how much does it cost for every client that I retain? You have to make sure you know those numbers and that and that they jive compared to the revenue that you generate. And the last one here, I really like everybody to measure their their initial consultation show rate. If they don't show up, they can't hire you. Right? So when you're booking consultations for those for those new leads, I think it's really important to measure what's the rate of them showing up. If you have a low show rate, then there's lots of things that you can do to improve. The whole point of these KPIs are to know exactly where you need to improve your business. It's that simple. So all of this comes down to automation, right? You have to automate.

Speaker 3 (00:17:29) - In order to do any of this, you're not going to be able to engage everybody as much as you need to. You're not going to be able to measure everything if you don't have automation. And to give you my quick strategy, I think it's really important to know your process. You have to understand what you have a process for, and you have to create processes where necessary. You might think you have a process for something, but then when you sit down and think about how it goes, you might think, Oh, well, this time it does this, and then the next time it does that. That's not a process. A process is something where every time it happens the same, write them out, sit down, literally write down on a piece of paper all of the different processes that you have or that you would like to have and write them out. The first step is to determine the triggers. Each process will need a trigger, something that indicates that the process is supposed to begin.

Speaker 3 (00:18:14) - So write down This is when I want this to happen, and then you just list each action. Once you have your triggers, you list out step by step. Everything needed to complete that particular process or workflow. It's that simple. It takes a little bit of a little bit of work. Building an automation strategy and a platform is some heavy lifting in the beginning, and I can't even tell you how much it pays off in the end. So what's your tech stack for this journey that you want to create, right? What tech do you need to cover the full lifecycle? All three phases. Well, phase two, which is that active matter, that's practice management. That's things like Cleo, my case file, Vine practice, Panther smoke ball and a host of others lol. Maddox Good CRM. That's what sits in phase one and phase three and then plays nicely with what happens in phase two. But this is a good idea for like where the different technology that you might already have fits into the journey.

Speaker 3 (00:19:10) - There's not one great solution for all three, although I'm working on that. But you can get the best in class by having something like Maddox combined with a Clio or a file Vine, something like that. So I hope that my timing was good. I believe that I was limited to about 20 minutes and I think we're at about 22 or 23 minutes on this presentation. Again, I sincerely apologize that I was not able to be there with you guys in person this year. I look forward to seeing all of you again soon. You can always reach out to me with any questions that you might have. I can be reached on my email address. Matt Atlantics Very easy way to get a hold of me. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your conference and I look forward again to seeing all you guys very soon.

Speaker 2 (00:19:56) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Enjoy Exclusive Access To Stage One Of The Maximum Lawyer In Minimum Time Course

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

We only send you awesome stuff =)
Privacy Policy
crosschevron-up linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram