EP 456- Legal Office Management with Angela Louis Part Two

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Welcome to The Jury is Out a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm Tim Cronin Personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm and St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth.

Erich Vieth:

Welcome to another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth. I’m

John Simon:

John Simon.

Erich Vieth:

We’re back with Angela Louis, legal administrator for the Simon Law. Firm, welcome back.

Angela Louis:

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Erich Vieth:

Okay. Here’s a struggle that I’ve had in the past, not with you. Obviously we didn’t work together, but occasionally someone from on High will tell me what software to use as an attorney and I have some very strong feelings about what works best for me. So how is that process? Do attorneys have a choice of some software or none of it, or how does that work? Here

Angela Louis:

We have one document management software, and when we got that software, it’s a vetting process because I need to have secretaries look at the paralegals, look at the attorneys, look at, and we looked at various softwares because everybody works differently. Everybody wants to work differently. Everybody doesn’t necessarily change. So having that buy-in, especially when you’re going to a larger shift in software is great. The IT person does not managing all of the various different softwares and plugins and all of that thing. So we’re pretty standard here in terms of how we operate, in terms of our IT structure and what software we have and don’t have.

Erich Vieth:

So do you have a standard, a Microsoft Word processing package?

Angela Louis:

We do and the complete, the highest level Adobe suite for our OCRing. We have an OCR process through our copier system and then our document management software.

Erich Vieth:

Since we’re on the topic, is there anything in recent years that works really well that you’d like to give a shout out that here’s software that we were really happy we figured this out and everyone’s happy with it?

Angela Louis:

No, because quite frankly, I think we’re going to move from our document management system as soon as we move next year. I think those talks are already in the works, so no.

John Simon:

Well, and things are change so fast that I think whatever we’re investing in now and 24 months will be obsolete, be the next thing coming along.

Erich Vieth:

Yeah, I remember in the past with other firms that there comes a moment where they realize, oh, this package, it was a mistake to get into this package, but you’re kind of all in and it’s hard to get out of it to get into another package.

Angela Louis:

What I find hard too, and this is not for everybody, is we’re a plaintiff’s firm. We operate in accounting software different, we don’t do the billable hour. So some of the softwares that are out there are really driven by the defense firm versus a plaintiff’s firm. So that’s what we struggle with in terms of the process of procedures there as well too.

Erich Vieth:

This is an especially big topic with your firm. I know because we’ve had a number of podcasts on this topic of marketing. Tell us what your role in the marketing process.

Angela Louis:

I’m kind of behind the scenes, right? John is active on the marketing side in terms of directing what we do. The podcast quite frankly, was an idea that popped up shortly after I was here and it never came into fruition, so I started the podcast, so I was the one that got that moving. But it’s a lot of moving parts with the marketing department, it’s the website, it’s socials, it’s press releases, it’s getting things out timely, but it’s also on brand. We have to think about what our brand looks like and what we want to say as well too.

Erich Vieth:

What is your brand? How do you want the world to see the firm?

John Simon:

Excellent work. I think that’s been our banner since day one is, I mean that’s the most important thing to me is the quality of work that we do. I mean, if we’re going to be known for anything, I would want to be known for whatever matter we’re handling or case or whatever it is with our name just associated with our name that we do excellent work consistently is I think the most important thing. And I think that really drives everything else. We do Litigation, plaintiff’s, Litigation, but it’s kind of spread out. It’s not marketing just for personal injury cases or product cases. A lot of plaintiff’s firms are more known for one type of personal injury case than others. There are firms, for instance, that do almost exclusively product stuff or automotive product stuff, and you need to be a certain size and have enough resources to be more spread out. But I think it’s just bottom line is good quality work consistently. I think

Erich Vieth:

Before I joined you back in 2013, I didn’t know much about your firm as far as size, and I assumed from your marketing efforts that your firm was two or three times bigger than it was. And when I came here, I realized that the power of marketing, because the firm I came from did almost none, and it just makes a huge difference to let the world know what you do and it really affects how people see.

John Simon:

I think a big thing for us, most of our business still is referrals. And at one point it was 90, it was 90% are more. I don’t know if it’s that high now, but it’s the most vast majority. And I think a big part of the marketing is sort of indirect marketing, and that is getting involved in the legal community. And that’s something that I’ve always done from day one. The other lawyers here we’re very involved and I really haven’t had to push the attorneys here for the most part. And I think part of it is the firms that I started with, I saw that firsthand and it was just something I thought, it’s part of what we do. It’s who we are. You need to join BAM, SEL and join Matta and get involved. And over the years here, I mean even right now, if you pick it today, even where the involvement by the individual attorneys is over the top, I mean it really is over the top for the size of the firm that we have, I think isn’t even leadership positions in different legal organizations.

Amy’s president of Matt, right? Amy’s president of Matta currently and is Elizabeth LA president? Yes. And it’s kind of the list goes on, but also not just joining the organizations but spearheading CLEs, getting involved with legal services, things like that. And I didn’t start out doing that because I thought, well, if I do this, we’re going to get a case or something from somebody. I did it because I’ve always felt that it’s the kind of thing, it’s kind of like growing up, that’s what my family did and it was getting involved with something that you just did. And that really probably has had as much to do with our success marketing as anything else. The involvement, it’s all about relationships. You and I’ve talked about this before, and you can sit at your desk and be the best brief writer in the world, and if that’s all you’re doing is sitting at your desk, you’re not going to get a whole lot of briefs to write.

You need to get out there and develop relationships. Also like cross referrals. The vast majority of cases that come our way, the vast majority of cases out there, we don’t handle. We don’t pretty much, we don’t do any criminal stuff. We don’t do any estate planning, probate. We know a whole lot about a very narrow area of practice, the Litigation stuff, commercial, personal injury, product liability. And so that’s an opportunity too when we get things in. And part of it too is when somebody calls you, I always feel good about not just telling them, no, we can’t do it, but getting them to somebody that we know does that and is going to do a really good job. And so you’re kind of fulfilling both. You’re helping the person that’s calling, but you’re also keeping somebody in mind on the referral end. It’s just like the DNA of some firms. And I think this one that everybody seems to be involved and maybe without even being aware of it, we sort of look for and attract, try to get people who we know are going to be a little bit more be involved in the community. So

Erich Vieth:

This is an industry that invites conflict in the sense that you advocates against another side or you have to get something done, maybe even with a vendor or whatever, there’s going to be times where you need something and they don’t want to give it or vice versa. And John, I adopted your phrase, you phrased it as it’s all about relationships and it seems like it’s especially important right now. And we’re seeing more and more problems with cancel culture, which seems to be the opposite of where if something doesn’t work out and you go hell with you, you go separate way. And it seems like a really nice mantra just to remind yourself, I know that I’ve seen you navigate your way through various situations where you told me, you said, here’s the reason I did it. It’s all about the relationship.

John Simon:

Long-term, right? Being right. Then everything short term, think long-term. One of the, and this happens, this has happened to me dozens of times. I’ll go to a deposition, meet a young lawyer, older lawyer who maybe I know of but don’t really know, spend some time. I always like talking to people, spend some time talking to him. I had a case a couple of years ago maybe with Joe and you might know Joe Blanton, the attorney, and we tried a case, it was a two or three week case and it was in mid-Missouri. And I had known him and I don’t know if I had spoken to ’em, but we tried the Casey’s on the other side. I just enjoyed spending time with them. We have similar interests. We were talking about you’ll like this history philosophy. I know you and I share the interest in philosophy during the breaks and that we were talking a little bit, got to know each other pretty well.

He beat me. I lost the case. And after the case about a week or two, or maybe it was a month later, I get a book in the mail and it’s a really nice philosophy book that he had sent me. We’ve continued to stay in touch, but again, that’s one of many, and it makes it more satisfying. It makes your life richer and you’re not just doing it to get a paycheck or doing it to advance the case. And on our end, I mean as a practical matter, how does that not help? It helps you get referrals. It helps you get business. And we don’t bill by the hour. We want to get things done. So I don’t want to spend half of my time fighting over motions to compel and all of this discovery stuff. I’d rather just get the information we need and go and try the case. So I think a lot of those things aren’t sort of planned a little bit, but they’re not structured. It’s more of who you are and how you deal with people.

Erich Vieth:

It’s also, personally, I was going to say satisfying, but it might be protective of your ability to function in the world to come to work. And the main reason you might like to come to work is that you’re thinking, I like the people I work with. I like my opponents and I know John, we’ve talked about this before when I was on either defense side or the plaintiff side. I pick up friends on the other side of the aisle and a lot of people who are not lawyers have trouble believing that. Why would you ever get along with it? Why would you, after, why don’t you just lost the case? Why would you go out the door and be shaking hands and saying, Hey, let’s meet for a beer next week. If you don’t have that, it seems like you’re losing a great opportunity to live a fulfilling life.

John Simon:

Grab meet with the younger lawyers and talk to them about promotional stuff, marketing, professional development. Do it on a regular basis. I’m happy to do it anytime, any place that somebody wants to talk to me about it. And my sense is everybody does it a little bit to a certain extent. Everybody’s got ideas and

Angela Louis:

Executing those ideas.

John Simon:

We will sit down and have a marketing meeting and somebody new will come in and say, what about this and this? And we go, yeah, yeah, we thought about that 15 times before, but we’ve never gotten around to actually implementing it. And that’s really what you need to do is you need to not have so many ideas that everybody’s time is limited. And especially the attorneys. We talk about website stuff and in the old days we tried to get lawyers, attorneys to write stuff and that’s never going to happen. It’s just never going to happen. Angela, let me ask you this, and I think some of our listeners might be at firms with 200 lawyers or three or smaller firms or somebody starting out. If I’m at a firm and let’s say there are 10 attorneys at that firm, maybe 10 attorneys, 10 staff people, and we’re getting to the point where we’re big enough for a full-time administrator, what do you look for? What are the two or three qualities or traits that you think should be at the top of the list in terms of hiring an administrator for a 10 to 20 person firm?

Angela Louis:

I don’t think you necessarily have to come from the legal industry. I did not. You can learn, but it’s probably nice to have some legal background. I think the person needs to be flexible, right? Flexible because no day is the same, but even if you plan on doing things, know that you might have to modify what you were doing anyway. So being flexible and not being upset by it, you have to have thick skin.

John Simon:

I was just thinking

Angela Louis:

Thick skin. I think you have to have it on all avenues. I feel like I’m stuck in the middle sometimes because I lean very heavily in wanting to support and in some senses protect the staff and to get what they need. But then on the other side, I want to do what is right by you and the firm and running the company line. So there’s a lot that goes on in between that as well too, having thick skin so you can deal with all the different sides and the different personalities and some things that come out of people’s mouths that they may or may not mean that day. And it’s not for you to take that personally at that moment.

Erich Vieth:

As you say that, I’m thinking of the importance of creativity because you’re stuck between sometimes two people that require the things and everyone’s looking at you to figure out, how do we solve this?

Angela Louis:

Well, it’s a negotiation some days. Some days I feel like it’s a negotiation. It’s a delicate dance to, I know we’ve talked about what we know what the final outcome is. Sometimes it doesn’t look the same, and then we ultimately get there, but I’m always looking, I know where we need to get to. Sometimes it doesn’t look the same given the individuals and the circumstance.

John Simon:

Actually add one more thing to your list. Okay. A sense of humor.

Angela Louis:

Yeah. If not, you’re going to be crying if not. Right. Sense of humor. Key. Very key.

Erich Vieth:

You have a background in managing defense firms and plaintiff firms. Would you like to take a shot at talking about the differences? Well,

Angela Louis:

The biggest difference is I had 15 bosses there versus one. So that was one of the biggest things. And the almighty billable hour, we don’t bill time here, so I don’t have that process and procedure of getting time in and getting invoices out the door, and that kind of consumes a lot of people’s time. But the biggest thing that I experienced when I was at a defense firm versus a plaintiff’s firm was having multiple owners and multiple directions to go in on most days.

Erich Vieth:

You mentioned in your suggestions about the budget, the budget’s a lot different potentially.

Angela Louis:

Yeah, well, so in a billable, our firm, you can budget, you can look historically what you build in a particular month. You can look historically with if you have X amount of people and you have X amount of clients, you can kind of multiply that out in terms of what that looks like. So yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s easier to budget and to plan out in the future. Not so easy in a plaintiff’s firm, you can look at cases, but what happens if you lose those cases that, so the budgeting is, or

John Simon:

You know what? You can have a spectacular result at trial and you just bought yourself two years worth in the appellate courts. So again, yeah, it’s kind of like a rollercoaster

Erich Vieth:

With my financial advisor. They say every year, well, how much are you going to make this year when you have larger numbers? You’ve got, what? A dozen attorneys here, 13. It’ll balance out a little bit. If someone, what doesn’t do so well, someone else might do better. And

Angela Louis:

I think John has established enough that we’re on a good cadence where we can predict and we can know what’s coming in seven years from now based on the inventory that we have now. And I think there’s enough cadence that in history that you can look at that and we have to be mindful of the budget every day in a plaintiff’s firm. Every day we have to think about what we’re going to do or what we’re going to plan for.

Erich Vieth:

There’s no way you can do this in 40 hours a week, what you’re describing. No, sir. What’s your guess about what it takes to do what you do on a typical,

John Simon:

I know she’s on call 24 7 all the

Angela Louis:

Time, so if I would say a number, I probably fall between 50 and 60 hours a

Erich Vieth:

Week. So if someone’s thinking about going into law firm administration, what advice would you have as far as, let’s say they know nothing about it other than it’s the person who does HR type things. Maybe just someone with a very superficial understanding of what all this means and they’re thinking about doing this work. What should they be prepared to discover as they really get into it that it might not be apparent from the coursework or just from a general description of the job?

Angela Louis:

I mean, I have deadlines too, right? I have to meet deadlines in terms of payroll every two weeks. I have deadlines on the insurances. I have deadlines when the attorneys are in trial and making sure that the support is there and that things are happening when they’re not in the office because they are in trial. And we are there quite a bit that that’s always a concern every week. So that is why those hours are put in because sometimes my role is dependent on what is going on in the firm that week or that month where I may have an influx, but I too have deadlines and things that I am responsible for as well to make sure that are done. And if it’s not getting done during the day, guess what? It’s being done after. I eat dinner at night and it’s a little quiet in my house,

Erich Vieth:

So I’m going to give you the irresistible force versus immovable object scenario. You got to have this attorney doing this thing. Whatever it is, you got to have it. It’s got to be done tomorrow. And the attorney goes, I can’t get it done because I got this. So I assume this comes up where you got to have it done. And what’s your best approach when it just, the person is flooded with work and you got to have something done? How do you deal with this?

Angela Louis:

I operate proactively then reactively. So I already know it’s coming, so I already know personalities and how to plan for those contingencies or maybe a plan B because sometimes it’s a plan B or a C or a D. And to know that that’s coming inevitably that’s coming and how to pivot when I have to.

Erich Vieth:

It’s difficult for me, and I think for a lot of people to step out of the normal routine when it’s intense to say to themselves, I need to step back and think about how to do better things and better ways in the long-term future. Do you have schedule sessions where you say, I’m going to step back periodically and think about maybe our IT or how we do things or how the office is set up? Or do you have moments where you force yourself to think long-term rather than the short-term stuff that you normally deal with?

Angela Louis:

I think I always have that long-term picture on, but I think sometimes it’s when problems arise and you’re like, I don’t want to do that again. What does that look like the next time that happens and how are we going to plan that? That doesn’t happen that way. Again, sometimes we get caught where it happens twice and you’re like, we can’t keep doing this. So it’s that time where you sit down and you pull the necessary people in. Sometimes it’s driven by staff. I had a software medical records thing the other day that someone realized that there was a new component to that software mechanism where everything was going into one portal that there was a new software. She took it upon herself to learn that software created a process and procedure, and now we’re going to do training next week with the entire staff on how to do that process and procedure.

Erich Vieth:

Based upon all your good work, sometimes third parties from the outside issue awards. And I was just noticing on your list, this firm has been given some accolades. Tell us about some of those awards that you

Angela Louis:

See. So this is our first time awards here for Honoree Women in the Workplace. We have won that every year that we started doing that. So that was pretty cool. We are very female heavy here, and we’re very female heavy in our attorney group, which sometimes is not noticed in other law firms. We have great maternity leave policies. We have flexibility, which lends to having more women work here, which is why we got that award. And we fill out a survey every year and let them know what our policies and our practice are, and we’ve been able to get that accolade every year. Same thing. And the St. Louis Post Dispatch Best Places to Work that is driven by our employees. It’s an anonymous survey that they fill out. They get a link from that agency and they fill that out. So that is, we’ve got that the

Erich Vieth:

Last four

Angela Louis:

Years. Yeah, that is based on our employee feedback and not, so that says something right there too. So yeah, it’s pretty exciting too. And I think I won something there once too. I think it looks like in 2020 you’re

Erich Vieth:

Being a little modest. I got

Angela Louis:

An HR award from the St. Louis business. Journal

Erich Vieth:

Well

Angela Louis:

Deserved. Yeah, one of five in the region. So thank you. Well,

Erich Vieth:

Thank you for joining us. This has been a good conversation about something I didn’t know enough about. We’ve been with Angela Lewis, legal administrator for the Simon Law Firm. Thank you so much for giving us your time and showing up for two episodes.

Angela Louis:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Erich Vieth:

This has been another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erich Be. I’m John Simon. We’ll see you next time.

Speaker 1:

The Jury is Out is brought to you by the Simon Law Firm at the Simon Law Firm pc. We believe in the power of pooling resources in order to create powerful results. We often lend our trial skills and experience to lawyers around the country to achieve better results for their clients. Our attorneys welcome the opportunity to work with you on your case, offering vast resources, seasoned litigators, and a sterling reputation. You can contact us at 3 1 4 2 4 1 2 9 2 9. And if you enjoyed the podcast, feel free to share your thoughts with John Tim and Erich at comments at The. Jury is Out Law and subscribe today because the best lawyers never stop learning.

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