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“Get Paid” with Marco Brown 171
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LET'S PARTNER UP AND MAXIMIZE YOUR FIRM


This week on the show we Marco Brown, owner of Brown Law, a divorce law firm based in Salt Lake City.

In today’s episode we’ll discuss some of the biggest mistakes young lawyers are making when they start out, flat rate vs billable hours, and how Marco stays motivated and driven leading his practice.

https://www.utdivorceattorney.com/

Hacking’s Hack:

You guys know I love audiobooks. Check out Atomic Habits by James Clear, focuses on the small habits that make all the difference.

Tyson’s Tip:

Send out your holiday cards soon. Especially if you’re sending thanksgiving cards, you should be getting them this week.

Marco’s Tip:

Fire your worst client this week. Get rid of that person, you will make more money.

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Transcripts: “Get Paid” with Marco Brown

Marco Brown
What’s that number one thing I can change that will change downstream all of the other stuff in the law firm. And that for me was getting paid. I thought, okay, let’s focus on getting paid 100% for the work I do, and see what changes that makes in the law firm.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m

Tyson Mutrux
Jim hacking. And I’m Tyson Meatrix. What’s up Jimmy? Oh, Tyson. I’m

Jim Hacking
on my way back from Memphis, Tennessee. My daughter Nora and I came down last night to see Elton John on his farewell tour. I think this farewell tour has been going on for about three years, but he seems to be winding down for a 70 year old he put on a hell of a show. We had a great time.

Tyson Mutrux
I’d never seen Elton John concert. It’s it seems like it’d be a good concert. And, you know, if you get a presence like that, it’s going to take at least three years to do your do your farewell tour. So I can’t hate on him for that. So that’s pretty cool. So ignore had fun.

Jim Hacking
Nora had a great time. I think she was the youngest person there by about 50 years. And she she didn’t like the smell of the wacky weed. So that made her a little upset. But

Tyson Mutrux
that’s fine. Let’s, let’s get to our guest this week. So our guest this week is someone that’s been recommended to both of us I think several times. I see his Facebook post where he’s in Italy, and I’m jealous. This is he seems legit man. From from from the people that I talk to you. This guy is legit. It’s Marco brown with Brown Law. He’s in Salt Lake City. Marco, welcome to the show.

Marco Brown
Hey, thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it.

Jim Hacking
So, Marco, tell us about your firm. I know it’s a family based firm. Sort of maybe give us your story of why you went to law school what happened during law school and your journey till today?

Marco Brown
Okay, well, I haven’t thought about that about law school for a little while. So we’re here in Salt Lake, we just do divorce in a car accident cases or real estate cases, we do one thing because we want to be better at it than everybody else. That’s kind of my mentality. And I’ll talk a little bit later about specialization and why that why that’s important, but we just do that one thing. Law school. I went to law school at the University of Nebraska really enjoyed my time there. I was a little bit aimless. You know, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, because law school is almost less about studying a substantive area than it is about just not making a decision until you absolutely have to. And I got out I work for a big insurance defense firm in New Mexico. I clerked first actually in Iowa, the third district which was great. And I worked for insurance defense firm in New Mexico, hated every second of that was the worst job I’ve ever had in my entire life. decided that I had to leave that I made it like 18 months maybe. And then I just had to get out. My wife wanted to go to Salt Lake to get her doctorate. She sings opera, she want to get her doctorate and vocal performance. decided, okay, you know, we went to college here in Utah decided to come back. And that’s 2010 not a good year for lawyers are shutting down firms in Chicago and New York, LA, I decided that, hey, it’d be a great time to start a law firm, and just did anything and everything that came in the door, a tons and tons of mistakes, like we all do, and we start a law firm, eventually got to the point where people started coming in for divorce. And I figured out I was good at it. And then more and more people came in for it. And you know, one day at about I think 2012 I just decided okay, I’m just going to do this from now on.

Tyson Mutrux
So Marco, what were you doing before? Why were you sticking everything in the door? What I mean, was it just a couple of things and how did you choose to do those things that we’re doing?

Marco Brown
In the beginning in 2010, it was literally anything that would come in the door. So I thought I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney figured out really quickly that I was not good at that. But that’s what I focused on. So I took a lot of that. And I’ve done insurance the fan so I figured hey, I can personal injury as well. So I would take those cases and then realized and care about them too much. They were just you know, anything that came in, they would pay I did. And then as a family law stuff and the divorce stuff kept coming in, I figured out I was better at that than everything else and gravitated toward that

Jim Hacking
So talk to us, you said you made some mistakes early on. And I’ve certainly made plenty talk to us about some of your early mistakes when you first started the firm.

Marco Brown
I think the first one was that I took everything in the door, I should have had a better idea of what I wanted my law firm to be. And vision is a huge thing. You need to kind of figure out what you want to do, and then go do that. Otherwise, you’re just going to walk aimlessly through through life, and you’re going to be a generalist, I’m, I’m convinced 95% of firms that just kind of do everything is because they just never sat down and thought about what they actually wanted to do. So that was my first problem. And then the second problem was, I was doing all these things. And I wasn’t getting paid for him. I didn’t have good systems to get paid. I was scared to ask people for money, because I’ve never been taught how to do that in law school. In fact, I’ve been taught by law professors and the bar that making too much money with a bad thing. And we just need to go out and do good as lawyers, whatever that means. So I didn’t know how to do that. I was really hesitant about it. And I didn’t collect Well, on the hours that I was working on all these disparate types of cases. Those were the two biggest mistakes I made in the beginning.

Tyson Mutrux
So how did you get over all that? Because I think most of us have experienced that at some point. So how did when did you decide, listen, I’m done with this man, I gotta start making money.

Marco Brown
That’s, I call it the shower story. So what happened was from 2010, to 2015, it was pretty much just me, I hired somebody to answer phones eventually, and then hired a contract attorney to do some of the paperwork. But it was pretty much just me, grinding it out, networking, getting clients going to every hearing going to every mediation, and I was actually pretty successful at that. So in 2015, I won lawyer of the year divorce lawyer of the year, voted on by the Bar Association here in Utah. And I’m the youngest person ever to win that. I think I’ve only been doing family law full time for about three years. At that point, I don’t put much stock in awards, that one I really, really enjoyed. Because that felt like it was serious, it felt like I kind of arrived. And then during that period of time as well, you know, I one that I thought was great. And then about two or three days later, I’m taking a shower, and I realized that I have all of the same problems I had from before I won the award, and nothing had actually changed. And I love showers. I like one of the best parts of my day. So I’d get in the shower. And I was good for about five minutes. And then I would start thinking about cases and thinking about things that stressed me out, and then my heart would start to palpitate and my chest would constrict. It was like while I’m in the shower. And I just kind of knew at that point that if I went down this path, and didn’t make a lot of really, really fundamental changes that I was gonna die when I was about 60, maybe 65 I was gonna have a heart attack. I just kind of knew that. And I decided then in their head, I don’t, I don’t really want to do that to myself. And I want to do that to my family. So I need to change things. And I really started working on what can I change? What’s that number one thing I can change that will change downstream all of the other stuff in the law firm. And that for me was getting paid. I thought, okay, let’s focus on getting paid 100% for the work I do, and see what changes that makes in the law firm.

Jim Hacking
That’s awesome. Marco. So what steps did you take to begin implementing your your shower epiphany.

Marco Brown
I have eight rules that I’ve kind of put together. I didn’t verbalize all of these or write them down. At the beginning, it was a lot of trial and error. And mostly it was okay, I’m gonna get paid. And I gotta figure out how to do that. So I think the first thing was to send out all the bills and then call all the clients and say get me paid otherwise, I’m gonna get off the case. And just to be really upfront about that, but over time, as I kind of refined what my system I came up with eight rules to make that happen. And the first one is that you got to change your mind set about money, and about getting paid because again, our law professors told us to think about money one way and it was usually obliquely because they’re bureaucrats and they never really thought about money. But you know, that they never focused on it was kind of a dirty thing. At least it was in my law school. And then when we get in to practice, I think the very first thing that Bar Association’s tell us and what they harp on the most is the that we need to give away our stuff for free, do pro bono work do pro bono work, I was just listening to somebody, yesterday went through a CLE. And one of the first things they said is, hey, remember that 50 hours, you’re supposed to do a pro bono work a year. And I thought to myself, you’re talking to a whole bunch of people in a room that have a very serious problem getting paid, because almost all attorneys, solo attorneys and small firm attorneys in America have a very hard time getting paid. And you’re telling them to give away their stuff for free. You know, that that’s their mindset. So I had to change my mindset about it to No, no, my first job as a lawyer is to get paid 100% for the work I do. And my second job is to do exceptional work for my clients. That’s a big mind shift.

Tyson Mutrux
Marco, I think part of that probably the fact that you started to niche down to because I think, at least everyone on this call can agree that when you niche down, you’re gonna make more money. But when you did that, it, it can be really difficult to turn down those money cases, when they come in the door, when, let’s say a criminal case calls you and they’ve got money in hand, it’s hard to turn those cases down. So can you talk a little bit about that, that struggle and how you got past that?

Marco Brown
Yeah, and that is really, really hard. When they come in, and they have cash ready, and you just see those, you see those dollar signs, and you want those dollars. I call that chasing money, though. So chasing money, is one of my rules to don’t chase money, chasing money is doing things that you wouldn’t normally do, or we’re doing things outside your wheelhouse. So it’s taking those cases that you know, that you wouldn’t normally take, because they’re outside your niche, or you’re doing a favor for a friend of a friend, or you drop your retainer, in order to take a case, you drop your hourly rate, whatever it is, you’re chasing money when you do that. And those cases, if you look back at your history as a lawyer, those are the cases that go wrong. And those are the cases where you just do poorly. And that’s not going to help you overall, I mean, it’s going to be a kind of a patch fix, right then and there. But over time, you don’t like those cases, they don’t make you a ton of money because you work on them too much, or you don’t get paid on them. And you just need to realize and have the self discipline to say no, I’m not going to chase that money, man.

Jim Hacking
So I had this come through to me one time, I was talking to my former bookkeeper, and she was QuickBooks Online specialist. And she decided to she had 12 clients. And she decided to let three of them go because they refused to switch to QuickBooks Online from desktop, QuickBooks. And I remember when she talked that through with me, she said, you know, just what you said, Marco, that it’s a headache to deal with the ones who are outside the way we do things. And I’m willing to let those go. And that was an that was an epiphany for me. I was like, Oh, you mean, I don’t have to take every single case that walked in the door. But talk to us a little bit about that, and a little bit about that, and then about how to make that transition? Because when that $5,000 Just sit on your desk in cash? I mean, my answer is that you need to just do a better job of marketing to the types of cases that you want, and that you started. So slowly wean yourself off the cases that you don’t want anymore. But do you have any other tips for actually making that transition?

Marco Brown
I think the way you do it is exactly the way you should do it. So don’t when you make this decision to niche down, just tell all of your clients that aren’t in that niche to go, you know, Bug off, just let them fall off. Naturally, you just finish the cases, right, and you focus on the ones that you really want. I think that’s the best way to go about that.

Tyson Mutrux
So we’re talking about actually marketing towards those clients. Do you get most of your clients via word of mouth do you get from internet? How did you get your strategy to start just getting family law clients?

Marco Brown
When I started in 2010, I figured that the internet was the way to go. And now we look back at that and say of course it was but in 2010 That wasn’t an intuitive kind of leap that you logical leap you would make. But I’ve always done the internet. And I came here to Utah and I had no network. No anything. So I just had to advertise. So we’ve always got most of our clients from the internet, even today. It’s between 75 and 80%. From internet and then 20 to 25%. From referrals. The way I really started honing down on family law and divorce in particular, we don’t even do paternity cases that much because we’ve kind of priced ourselves out of that that market and we do divorces because we found them to be of a higher net worth case. And a little bit easier to work is you just figure out who your client is right? Who you actually want to work with. And then start writing for that person, or start creating content, start meeting people that know that type of person, and networking with those types of people, that that’s the only way to make it happen. Otherwise, you’re even within that thing you do, you’re just going to randomly pick up people on the entire spectrum. So you need to really hone down on who you want, and what they look like, where they are, and how to talk to them. So let’s

Jim Hacking
say you’re a family law attorney up in Massachusetts, and you’ve decided, Alright, I’m gonna, I’m gonna identify my avatar client, what would be the process you’d recommend to them to do that? Do you just go to the richest neighborhoods? Do you just focus on dads do you take you take a stance? What’s your advice on that? Marco,

Marco Brown
it depends on who you want to work with. So I’ll give you an example. There’s a city here near Salt Lake Park City, where everybody goes to ski. Park City is to Utah, what Austin is to Texas, it’s a city, that doesn’t make sense. You know, it’s not like any of the other cities. And there’s a ton of money in Park City. It’s where Californians go to buy other homes and Texans go to buy other homes. It’s crazy out there. But you have some very good divorce attorneys who will take cases in Park City, I personally don’t take cases in Park City, I’ve never opened an office there. And I never will. Because there’s simply not the type of client that I want, they have a lot of money. So they kind of treat you like a slave. And I’m not a big fan of that. So I don’t want that type of person. So I decided early on, that I wanted to work with middle class, upper middle class people, mostly talking about, you know, kids, and figuring out how to how to do custody and parent time. That’s kind of our, our niche. I just figured out who I liked to work with, and who had money for us to be able to work with them. And I went with that. And I think everybody needs to go through that process. And it’s a little bit of process of self discovery, that you need to figure out who you enjoy interacting with, and who you work best with, because they’re probably the ones you’re going to work best for. And just start going down that path and getting those types of people.

Tyson Mutrux
So you actually list on your website, your the you will do flat rate fees, and kind of why we talked about why you do flat rate, and then I am assuming you’ve done the billable hour, because you’ve worked for a defense firm. So can you talk about the differences? Because I’m sure a lot of people listening to this have questions about Okay, should I do flat rate? Should I do billable? And can you talk about why you chose flat rate?

Marco Brown
Yeah, so we do billable and flat rate? To be honest, we’ll do both of those just depending on the case. And depending on what the client wants. I started doing flat rates, in large part because of Lee Rosen, who makes a pretty compelling argument for flat rates. And the compelling argument is that you can actually make more money, they’re more lucrative because people will pay a premium to know exactly what they’re going to pay. Right with the billable hour. The The beautiful thing about the billable hour for attorneys at least is we get to obfuscate what the case is going to cost. And you know, some people, some clients like to be lied to, in the sense that they they like not knowing at the beginning, what it’s going to be in the billable hour works for them. But you people will pay premium in order to know exactly what they’re going to pay pay at the end. So you can actually make more money on flat rates, if you structure them properly. The problem is that most attorneys do not structure them properly at all. They just don’t think through the problem. They don’t think through their system, they don’t think through how a case goes. And they very much undervalue their each segment of the case. And which means that they don’t charge enough. And then when they don’t charge enough, they get mad at the flat fee, because it’s not high enough. So they stopped doing it. Well the answer to it is go back into your system, figure out where he made the mistake in each stage of the case, and then raise your price to make it commensurate with the time that you’re actually spending. But most attorneys just don’t go back and do that. They don’t go back and look at the data. They don’t go back and adjust. They just go back to the billable billable hour because the billable hour is what attorneys have done in America for a very long time. So it’s it’s what we know and it’s what we go back to

Unknown Speaker
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Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. We’re talking today with Marco Brown. He’s a family law attorney from Utah. He’s sat down and identified that eight problems that lawyers have in getting paid Marco, what are some other issues that you’ve seen with lawyers when it comes to them not valuing valuing their worth and making sure they get paid? I think

Marco Brown
one of the big ones, and this is a huge problem for solos, even well established solos. And 56% of American attorneys are solos. So that’s it’s actually the majority of who we are as attorneys in America. And but one of the big problems is billing regularly. They just don’t do it. So you need to bill at least once per month. If not more than that I have a friend who builds every week, and she gets paid 98 99% for the work she does, and she does divorce. So it really works for her, I actually experimented with that because I experiment with everything. I think we did it for a month in my office manager threaten to quit because she hated it so much. And it just didn’t work for us. So we do it once a month. But everybody needs to build at least that if not, you know every two weeks. If you don’t do that, then your clients are going to get upset at you because they’re not going to regularly understand what you’re doing on their case. Or you know how things are progressing. And then you’re just not going to get paid, if you don’t Bill once a month. And there’s some really interesting data from Clio. It talks about how long it takes a lawyer to actually get paid. And the average is 170 days from the time the lawyer does the work until the lawyer gets paid for the work. So the average is about 87 days from the time you do the work until you bill for it. Send out an invoice. And then they average about 83 days to actually get paid on the invoice. And anybody who who get it outside of law knows that once you let an invoice go past about 60 days your chances of getting paid on an invoice go down really, really dramatically. But that’s the norm for attorneys 170 day turnaround time,

Tyson Mutrux
man do I feel that pain with doing PII? Jeez, it takes forever because, you know, we we put all the money in and we don’t get anything until the was family wise. I’ve got to see Bartle he listens to podcasts. He’s a buddy of mine, he talks about collecting and once it does detect certain point and just basically shut the write it off because there’s nothing you can do about it. So which sucks because you do the work. You deserve to get paid. So just suck to get screwed over like that. Let me tell me this. Where are you headed with this firm? I mean, are you going to stay about the size you are and you want to grow to some mega firm? What were you headed with them?

Marco Brown
I don’t know what the definition of a mega firm is. We’re not going to stay where we are, though. I can’t do that. It’s not part of my nature as a human being to kind of stay where I am. I tend to get depressed unless I’m progressing. So I read a ton. And I actually get depressed if I don’t if I don’t read enough, because I’m not stimulating my mind. But no, we’ll we’ll grow will grow more in the Utah market and dominate that. A we’re we’re already a big big player here. But we’ll do that. And then we’ll move into other states, probably in pretty short order.

Jim Hacking
Backing up what is your current setup? How do you have your firm arranged? Do you have paralegals lawyers, what do you have set up?

Marco Brown
I’ve always liked working with lawyers more than I do paralegals or staff. I just prefer working with attorneys as opposed to working with people that I’m paying 15 or $20 an hour to. So we’re attorney heavy. The attorneys do. Most of the work really most of the substantive work and the kind of perfunctory stuff is what the paralegal or office manager takes care of. So I have four full time attorneys right now plus me and there’s one paralegal that coordinates everything and then I have an intake person and that intake person runs the intake side of things that that entire system. So from first contact through hiring, it all goes to Daniel, he does all of that. And then it goes to legal, which is the paralegal. And then it goes to the attorneys after that, and they start working the case.

Tyson Mutrux
Marker I want I want to ask you another question and something I asked a lot of people because you seem like you’ve got your stuff together and everyone that that I talked to you like they they talk really say really good things about you. So what is something that you struggle with? Quite a bit?

Marco Brown
Oh, man, focus, focus is my big thing. I am add enough where, you know, I read widely because I get bored if I read just one type of thing. And it’s the same kind of thing in lawyering is I get unfocused, and I’ll get unfocused for you know, a month or two. And then I have to get myself back on track, and really kind of buckled down. So I think that’s always been my biggest my biggest problem. And I’m going to a period right now, where I took some time off this summer, we went to Italy as a family. And it took me a while to get back into it. And now I’m really buckling down. And okay, here’s the things we’re going to do over the next few months. So that that’s always been my, my biggest problem within the other than that within the firm itself. My biggest issue has always been client acquisition. It seems like some people can magically get clients by sleeping or going to the bathroom. I mean, whatever they’re doing, they just get clients, right? I’ve never been that guy. I’ve always had to study and grind it out, to go get clients and to close deals and to help people. I’ve had to read innumerable amounts of books to figure out how to sell and close. So that’s been years long process. For me, and still probably the thing I work on the most market, where do you find

Jim Hacking
your energy if you got to pick which aspect of running your farm or practicing law or interacting with or overseeing processes, what’s your, what’s your bag? What’s your go to? If everything’s sort of humming along? Where do you find yourself drawn?

Marco Brown
I thought about this the other day, mine is in the creation of things. So I was an am a terrible employee for somebody else, because I’m not creating anything. And I kind of felt bad for the firm I worked for in New Mexico, because I just My heart was not in a man I was not I was not a very good attorney. So coming here, doing my own thing and creating a firm figuring out things doing it differently than other people. Helping clients. I love that the creation process and I get antsy when I’m not when it’s you when things work. Then I get antsy and I have to go create something else. That’s what really turns me on.

Tyson Mutrux
Great stuff. All right. So I do want to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone go to the Facebook group. Get involved there. Just every day, I’m just shocked by how much information people are sharing. So make sure you get involved there. Also register for Max law con 20/28. And on June 11, at 12 Next year, and we shouldn’t be announcing a venue very, very soon. Jimmy, what is your second week?

Jim Hacking
So you guys know I love audiobooks and making my way through atomic habits now by James clear, it’s a little bit like a slight edge and by Jeff Olson and the compound effect by Darren Hardy, but James clear has a great blog on productivity. And I thought atomic habits meant really big monsters habits but when he means the time he needs it, sort of that how little hinges swing big doors, how you make little changes in your day to day routine can really help maximize your output.

Tyson Mutrux
Super cool. Mark and before we get to your tip or hack of the week, I do want to give a shout out to one of our other sponsors blue shark digital Seth price Malini they do awesome work over there. both Jim and myself use blue shark they are amazing. They’ve done a lot of great things for my my website, and my SEO so give a shout out to them. They’re also designing Jimmy our website in which we’ll be launching in the next couple of weeks. We’ll make an announcement for that. So be pretty exciting. Marco, what’s your favorite hack of the week?

Marco Brown
I’m gonna go back to my rules for this. Rule number seven is fire your worst client today. That is my that is my tip of the week. And when I say fire your worst client there was a face that came up in your mind. That is the person that is your worst client that’s the person you can’t stand that’s the person you’re Office can’t stand, get rid of that person, you’re gonna make more money

Tyson Mutrux
while the man used when you said that I was like, yes, it just made me feel so good. So I’m gonna go do that myself. So that’s that’s a great, great tip. All right, so my tip is, today is October 31. When we’re recording this, they will come out next week, which I think is the fifth. You need to if you’re going to send out holiday cards, you need to get them out soon. So order them and send them out very, very soon. So if you’re especially we’re going to send out Thanksgiving cards, get those things out. If you’re getting that Christmas or New Year’s card, get those things out. So my tip is to get those ordered. Like right now like this week. Marco, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been great talking to you. I want to get to know you some more. So thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate it.

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