#101: Working Out with Clients, with Drew Amoroso

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Speaker 1: Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week Lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Now here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: I’m Aaron Street and this is episode 101 of The Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. This is our first episode of 2017. Today we’re talking with Drew Amoroso about fitness law and working out with clients.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Ruby Receptionists and its smart, charming receptionists who are perfect for small firms. It is CallRuby.com/Lawyerist to get a risk free trial with Ruby.

Aaron Street: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Spotlight Branding. Learn how they use the internet to make all of your law firm marketing and business development more profitable by visiting SpotlightBranding.com/Lawyerist.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by FreshBooks which is ridiculously easy to use and packed with powerful features. Try it now at FreshBooks.com/Lawyerist and enter lawyerist in the “how did you hear about us” section. Aaron, today talking to Drew, he has a niche or a niche. I can’t decide how I say that.

Aaron Street: Niche.

Sam Glover: Yeah. You’re absurd. Aaron hates the way I say absurd or at least he thinks it’s very funny.

Aaron Street: Because it’s pronounced absurd.

Sam Glover: You’re absurd. Anyway, Drew has a niche that’s really just a small business law practice, but he kind of has a marketing pitch. He’s fitness law. I’m wondering how far does that go. Could Drew just throw up another website and be the mall kiosk lawyer or the kid party clown lawyer? Because it seems to me if you’re the fitness lawyer, you’re always going to win against the generic small business lawyer. Wouldn’t it make sense to just make all of those landing pages or try to brand yourself as those things?

Aaron Street: No. No. He is not the fitness lawyer because of his website. He’s the fitness lawyer because he is the lawyer of the fitness tribe. He’s in the group. That’s what makes him the fitness lawyer, not because of some opt-in landing page that is SEO optimized for clown car lawyer. No.

Sam Glover: This is an example of being too simplistic in your thinking about marketing? There are lots of lawyers who think, “Okay. I’m going to throw up a landing page for this practice area and this practice area and this.”

Aaron Street: No. No. Don’t do that. Don’t be fake. If you’re going to be the X lawyer, you need to be a part of X.

Sam Glover: Well, so then I’m wondering like you could hang out in mall kiosk bars and then go to fitness workouts, but it’s really a matter of …

Aaron Street: To be the mall kiosk lawyer, you hang out in the mall kiosk.

Sam Glover: I don’t know. There’s probably a clown …

Aaron Street: This is the best example I’ve ever heard.

Sam Glover: As you pointed out to me a minute ago.

Aaron Street: Practice area niche.

Sam Glover: We actually know somebody who is in the mall kiosk tribe.

Aaron Street: Yes, he’s a member of the kiosk hall of fame.  

Sam Glover: If there’s a trade journal for it, there’s probably a tribe that you can build for it.

Aaron Street: Oh, God. We’re falling apart.

Sam Glover: I’m trying to think like how many tribes could I realistically be in.

Aaron Street: Sure. Music lawyers usually actually play an instrument and when they get together with their clients, they fucking jam. They talk about the contract and the record deal and what not.

Sam Glover: Right. Like Joe from a couple weeks ago can whip out the saxophone and jam with anybody.

Aaron Street: Yeah. Matt Ritter who has written for us in the past, standup comedian, fucking cracks jokes with his clients.

Sam Glover: Drew, as you’ll find out, goes and works out with his clients. It kind of feels like I’ve been saying this in Cohen, chunk from Goonies, entertainment lawyer.

Aaron Street: The child lawyer lawyer or the child actor lawyer?

Sam Glover: It’s Josh Saviano from Wonder Years.

Aaron Street: Yeah. Yeah. Child actor/entertainment lawyers. It works. You got to be part of the tribe if you’re going to claim to be part of the tribe.

Sam Glover: Tribes are still a thing in 2017?

Aaron Street: Sure.

Sam Glover: All right. That was that Clive Christiansen’s book?

Aaron Street: Come on. It’s Seth Godin.

Sam Glover: Seth Godin’s book about tribes?

Aaron Street: Yeah, that’s right.

Sam Glover: There you go. Go read Seth Godin’s book about tribes and then join one. Now that we’ve obliterated niches or niches, however you like to say it …

Aaron Street: That is absurd.

Sam Glover: Here is my conversation with Drew who is not absurd.

Drew Amoroso: Hi, I’m Drew Amoroso and I’m the owner and founder of Move Legal, a San Francisco based law firm where I practice fitness law which essentially means that I represent innovators in the fitness, health and wellness and supplement and pallial food industries. We help emerging and established fitness companies grow their brand and protect their business.

Sam Glover: That’s Move Legal, right? As in get out, bust out a dance move?

Drew Amoroso: Exactly. Get moving. Keep moving. Yeah.

Sam Glover: Very cool. How big is the firm?

Drew Amoroso: It’s just me right now about five months out of leaving my big firm job. I have an administrator or an administrative assistant who works with me about half time and then I have some other independent contractors that I engage. My intent is to grow the firm.

Sam Glover: Well, tell me about the independent contractors. What are you using them for?

Drew Amoroso: Sure. Fortunately for me there was a lot of … I actually started off with having a lot of work right from the get go. I transitioned from a big law job where I was able to have some of my clients there come with me. I was fortunate to actually start with a nice chunk of work right out of the gate. Between establishing the firm and getting it set up and figuring out the day-to-day, I really needed some help actually doing the legal work which is a good and interesting place to be in. Plus there’s some things that my clients need that I wasn’t able to do for them and so I would contract out some of that work.

Sam Glover: You said you got to take some clients with you. Were you already representing some health and wellness and fitness companies then?

Drew Amoroso: Yes. I was an international firm for about five and a half years. That’s where I started my career was at that law firm. I was doing financial services litigation which was a … It was a great firm and I had fantastic mentors and the firm was fantastic, but at some point I realized that it just really wasn’t getting me out of bed in the morning. I started a practice at the firm that was specific to representing fitness and health and wellness companies. We called it the fitness innovation team. We essentially started a team there and so I was able to grow this little niche practice at a big firm which I think was the unique thing. I give a lot of credit to the firm for allowing me to do that. Then when it came time for me to transition and to start my own firm, my clients all decided to come along with me which was great. It was a great way to start.

Sam Glover: Let’s talk about that then. You’ve been doing this fitness innovation team for how long before you decided to go solo?

Drew Amoroso: I would say about a year and a half. Maybe coming up on two years.

Sam Glover: I mean at what point did you decide, “You know, I think I want to leave and do this on my own?”

Drew Amoroso: Well, at some point I realized that there was this whole group of young emerging fitness companies and I’m a fitness person so I’m connected with the San Francisco fitness community and actually was a member at a gym where they had … The owners are pretty influential people in the fitness space. They had all kinds of fitness innovators, young companies coming through there who are working with the owners and I became friendly with them over the years and realized that they didn’t have anyone who was helping them on issues that were specific to their industry. Firms will have sports law practices. They’ll have entertainment and media law practices, but the fitness industry is kind of its own unique interesting industry with its own issues and relationships.

No one was really practicing what I call fitness law. They weren’t really speaking to those issues and singling out those companies and saying, “Hey, I understand your industry.” I realized that that was the case and that there was a hole there and so I started to just represent. I had one client which turned into two, which turned into four.

Sam Glover: You kind of created a niche, right? It’s not like this was a recognized niche and you were competing for people who were looking for a fitness company lawyer.

Drew Amoroso: Exactly. Yeah. I researched this right around the time when I realized that there was a gap. I had never heard of anyone practicing fitness law before. I wasn’t aware of any big or small firms that were specifically catering to clients in the fitness industry. That was a pretty interesting revelation and I saw an opportunity to work in a space where I’m very passionate about that’s based itself in my personal life. I understand the products and the client.

Sam Glover: It’s a big thing right now. I guess it’s always kind of a big thing, but it feels like the last I don’t know five, ten years have been kind of a boom in nutrition and fitness and all that kind of stuff.

Drew Amoroso: I think in 2014 health clubs alone grows like $25 billion. It was a $25 billion industry which was like a 10% increase from the previous year. You’ve got over 50 million Americans in 2014 belonged to health clubs which I think was a 20% … It was just 20% of the population. You’ve got this really consistent growth that you see happening. Then anecdotally I mean if you follow social media trends and you’re looking at the types of new businesses that are popping up, a great deal of those businesses are fitness and health and wellness related. I think it’s a huge industry and so I was surprised that no one was specifically marketing their legal services to that group of people.

Sam Glover: Did you just decide like, “There’s no point in me doing this within the firm. I can totally just go out on my own and do this?” Were you feeling hampered by being in the firm or what?

Drew Amoroso: It was a little bit of both. Like I said, to the firm’s credit they were phenomenal in allowing me to grow the practice there. Part of the problem was that I didn’t have enough billable hours from my clients to meet my billable hour requirements. Plus I loved doing the work. I was only able to do it a couple of hours a day if that … Then put in a bunch of extra time after hours trying to market and grow my own brand. The tipping point for me really was that I got up everyday and was excited about doing fitness law and wasn’t able to do that as much as I wanted.

Sam Glover: The other stuff you just were trying to get out of the way so that you could focus on what you wanted to do?

Drew Amoroso: Exactly. I was into kind of put up with that work. Meet my billable hour requirements so that I can actually focus on the work I wanted to do. That was really what drove me to start my own firm.

Sam Glover: Let’s talk about that process because I think it’s interesting. There is a few different ways to go solo. Some people go solo because they feel like they don’t have any other choice. Some people do it aggressively and enthusiastically because they feel like it’s better than their other options. Somebody who’s got a well paying firm job who decides to go solo is taking a different kind of a risk. I’m curious about how that thought process went, how you planned for it and how you eventually … I know people who’ve been planning for years to go solo, but they’ve never really set a date and just jumped. I’m curious about how you did that and how you thought it through and how you planned for it and how it all worked out.

Drew Amoroso: For a long time I thought that I would grow the practice within the firm and I was comfortable with that, but then I had a couple of people say to me, “You know, you’ve got your own clients. You’ve got this great idea. Why don’t you go out on your own?” I remember the first time someone suggested that to me. I thought, “Absolutely not. No way.” All of the thoughts like I don’t know enough, will I make enough money, all of those things were sort of the first thought that came into my mind. After thinking about it for a couple of months and then also talking to colleagues who had left big firm jobs and started their own solo practices or small firms and also honestly reading things like The Lawyerist, reading articles that were on there and looking at … Listening to stories of other people who had done it, I became more and more confident that this was viable for me.

I think the other thing too it’s interesting that you talked about risk, I think that there’s actually a lot of risk in just staying put too.

Sam Glover: Nobody talks about that so keep going.

Drew Amoroso: There’s a risk that I could wake up 10 years from now and think, “Wow. I missed the greatest opportunity of a lifetime to do something that I’m passionate about.” There’s a risk that I could have gotten fired. There’s all sorts of risks.

Sam Glover: Downsizing. I mean all kinds of … Yeah.

Drew Amoroso: Absolutely. The other thing too, Sam, was I thought if you think about taking something like going out on your own and let’s say that it’s a complete failure, right, it’s like what are you left with? Well, I’m left with five years of big law experience. I’m left with a great network of people. Let’s say it’s a complete failure. I could just start over.

Sam Glover: I love that. I usually call it the likely worst case scenario.

Drew Amoroso: Yeah.

Sam Glover: Which is usually bankruptcy. You get to carry some of those assets out of bankruptcy, right? You get to have your network. You get to have your experience. You get to have all that stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with your marketability for future jobs really.

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. Yeah. I think if you look at it that way, it’s like, “Well, why wouldn’t take a risk?”

Sam Glover: It’s a chance at happiness versus guaranteed mediocrity.

Drew Amoroso: Absolutely. I didn’t want to be stuck in an office building 10, 15 years from now regretting not having made that decision and taken that chance. When I started to adopt that kind of mindset about it, it was a no brainer. I was 100% ready to go. I had done a 180 degree turn in terms of my mindset about how to approach it. Then it was like, “Okay. Well, when am I …”

Sam Glover: I supposed as somebody who both personally and professionally deals with wellness and fitness and health, those are all about self-improvement and once you view your professional goals in a similar light, I supposed it’s pretty easy to think about it in that way.

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. One of the best things about my practice is that I get to work with people who as you say are interested in improving the lives of other people. Right? Just by their very nature, the CEOs and some of the other folks that I worked with on the business side are just very positive motivated people. I get to watch them grow their business and see how it is that they operate and that’s very inspirational for me.

Sam Glover: I bet. Once you decided you’re going to do it, how did you come up with your game plan?

Drew Amoroso: I was saying to you before we got on that …

Sam Glover: I’m all about tangents, but let me bring you back.

Drew Amoroso: About this time last year I remember sitting down and just mapping out a plan. I took out a huge sheet of paper and just kind of wrote down everything that I wanted the firm to be, all the resources that I thought I would need, projected out a timeline and did a very rough back of the napkin budget. Then from there I started to kind of check off all these little boxes, right, understanding what tools I needed, getting myself ready and putting a timeline together.

Sam Glover: Did you save money?

Drew Amoroso: I did save money, but I was actually surprised at how easy it was to get the firm off the ground with just using my own funds. It didn’t really take too much. I mean my practice is pretty portable, so I do a lot of transactional work. I don’t necessary need an admin for a lot of things. It’s not litigation and so it’s not document heavy. I really can take my laptop and kind of go anywhere and really operate the firm if I have to for a couple of weeks at a time.

Sam Glover: Well, I’ll tell you what, let’s take two minutes to hear from our sponsors and when we come back, I want to talk more about that, more about the tools that you use, how portable things are and we can geek out for a little bit.

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We’re back. You were just talking about portability which is I love talking about all the geeky stuff. You have an office or don’t you?

Drew Amoroso: I do. Yes.

Sam Glover: Okay, but you let things move around and you’re able to work from anyway I assume?

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. It’s pretty easy. I just really need my laptop and a charger and I’m good to go.

Sam Glover: You said you have an admin. Does that person work in your office? Are they remote?

Drew Amoroso: She comes in once a week for about four years. I do like the idea of being able to sit across from someone for a couple of hours a week to explain things. We get to touch base. I can show her things on my screen and she can do the same, but for the most part we’re able to conduct business remotely. It’s pretty seamless for the most part.

Sam Glover: It sounds like you’ve kept your overheard quite low.

Drew Amoroso: Yes.

Sam Glover: You were able to bring some business with you. Were you profitable on month one?

Drew Amoroso: Yeah, actually, I was. I was again really fortunate to be able to have a base of clients that I could bring with me.

Sam Glover: I suppose you got to bill all of the time then instead of just getting paid your salary which was a fraction of the time you billed?

Drew Amoroso: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I was able to bill all that time and as I said before, I had to bring in some contractors to kind of help me with some of the overflow especially in the beginning when you’re just trying to set up the business and understand how the day-to-day has to work. I was very fortunate in that respect.

Sam Glover: I always struggle with exactly how to ask this question to get a meaningful response without requiring somebody to give me their profit and loss statements, but how is it going? Are you successful according to the goals that you set? Does it look like you’re going to be able to do this as your job? I realized you’re five months in, but I assume you’ve got some indications so far.

Drew Amoroso: Yeah, absolutely. I’m hitting all of my financial projections and I’ve got a 12 month plan and a 12 month budget in place and it’s aggressive. I made it that way on purpose because I think you really need to set aggressive goals if you’re the one who’s in the cockpit everyday pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. You really have to set some aggressive goals for yourself. I have some other advisors and folks that I work with who keep me in check and who I rely on to give me some outside perspective, but yeah, I’ve been profitable so far and the business is growing. My goal is by the end of January 2017 to hire my first associate. I’m on track to do that. I think that that will only help to make the firm even more profitable. My goal is to grow this.

I never wanted to do this just to be Drew’s getting by single person law firm. I have some big goals for the firm which includes bringing on associates and a full time admin very soon.

Sam Glover: Is the goal to replace your big law salary or is the goal to work less and make less, but still a comfortable amount? Do you have some targets in mind there?

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. My goal is definitely to continue to grow to the point where I can sort of hire my replacement. I like to hire someone who can come in and work in the firm so that I can work on the firm, work on the business side.

Sam Glover: You must have read The E Myth?

Drew Amoroso: Yeah, I did. Yeah. There’s all sorts of books that I read talking about getting prepared to leave. That was one of the things that I read. I’m also part of a group called How To Manage A Small Law Firm. I’m up there with those folks, but I’m part of that program and some of the content that they put out in the programming is phenomenal. That’s helped me to wrap my head around how I want to grow. At some point I would like to hire my replacement and would like to work on the firm and not only replace my big firm salary, but hopefully exceed it. I think with some careful planning that’s definitely a possibility.

Sam Glover: Tell me about building a niche like this because it’s … Niche I guess if you prefer. I don’t know. I was raised to say niche I guess. What’s your marketing plan look like for reaching this specific group of people?

Drew Amoroso: My marketing plan at the outset was really just a word … It was sort of a word of mouth campaign. There was a really great group of emerging fitness companies who were all sort of connected to one another in Southern California and also the Bay Area. As soon as I had a couple of clients that were in that niche, then I think word just sort of spread. That was actually the way that my marketing worked was I just would work with one client and they would tell another and then it sort of spread that way. That only will take you so far. After maybe six months of that I started to write a lot, to blog and put out content. I started to have a presence on social media because that’s where my clients live. That’s where their clients live and so I wanted to have a presence there so I can follow them and understand what they were doing and also let them know that I understood the mediums that they travel in.

The other thing I would say about having a practice like this is that for me I think there’s a level of enthusiasm that I bring to my practice because I honestly really do care about the work. I want nothing more than to see my clients succeed. I get up everyday and I’m pumped to go to work. I think that it’s not necessarily the case for some attorneys and certainly wasn’t the case for me at the start of my career, but I think that that enthusiasm really allows you to develop the kind of practice that you want and especially I found something that I’m genuinely interested in too. That’s allowed me to expand within the industry because I think people will recognize that I’m genuinely interested in helping them and that I understand the product.

Sam Glover: Do you take time to go workout at all of your client’s different gyms or visit their places and buy their snack food or their healthy snack food or whatever? Do you actually kind of do the rounds?

Drew Amoroso: Absolutely. None of my clients had never come to my office ever. I always go to them. Instead of going out for drinks, I’ll go and we’ll have a workout at their gym. It’s definitely a different kind of relationship. A lot of their products I actually just was using. Some of my clients I was using their products before I ever worked with them and then got to know them and then there you go. I understand what their product is and who they’re trying to reach. I go and workout. I buy their products. That’s a really exciting part of it for me.

Sam Glover: Let me get this straight, you’re like, “Hey, let’s come over and talk about your waiver that you need signed and run me through a workout while we’re doing it.”

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much that’s the way that it goes down.

Sam Glover: I mean I’ve heard of people doing walking meetings, but I’m trying to imagine what a crossfit meeting would look like.

Drew Amoroso: You can’t really talk business while you’re in the middle of it because you’re breathing so heavy, but afterward is when a lot of the business gets done. That’s the fun part, right? I get to go out and meet them on their turf which I think is really important. I don’t think that they have the time to come in to talk and I’d rather make it easier for them to make it as seamless a process as possible so that there’s the least amount of disruption to their business. I just love going off site and visiting them.

Sam Glover: That sounds fun and like I want to have that practice now. Circling back again, I feel like I keep dragging you off the point, but what is the technology? What kind of software do you use to make sure that you can draft a contract or to even just take notes while you’re sitting in a client’s gym?

Drew Amoroso: I have some pretty simple tools that I use. Starting from the beginning of the relationship I use Lexicata to onboard clients and have found that to be a really efficient way to get folks in the door. I was always surprised that my big firm job where we would send these like engagement agreements where we would require that they hand sign. That was sort of our cake and I always wondered why we did that, but Lexicata removed having to do that. It’s a great CRM tool that I use a lot. I use Clio and I also use QuickBooks Online. They all talk to each other so it’s been super useful. I use Slack and Trello. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Trello, but I use that to sort of manage tasks with my administrative assistant.

We’ll put up boards in Trello and we’ll say, “Okay. Here’s five or six projects that I’d like you to do,” and then she will go in and kind of attack … “These are the high priority. These are the medium priority.”

Sam Glover: Do you do a board per client or do you do one big board or a few different boards? How do you organize that? I’m curious.

Drew Amoroso: Yes. She and I have a board or two boards, two or three boards, that are administrative focused. I personally have boards that are pending work, future work and some other daily … I’ll set up like this is what I want to do Tuesday, this is what I want to do Wednesday. Trello if you ever used this …

Sam Glover: We use it for Lawyerist that’s why I’m curious. I have my own systems on it and I kind of geek out with other Kanban people about it.

Drew Amoroso: It’s just a great way to shift around projects right? You can take it from one draft to another really easily and add all sorts of notes and pictures and things like that. I find that to be very helpful. Then Slack I think is great because I don’t want to … There’s so much back and forth that happens between us that I don’t want to clog up inboxes and so that’s a super easy way for us to have conversations without doing that.

Sam Glover: Do you just use that internally or have you thought about using it with clients?

Drew Amoroso: I actually do use it with three or four of my clients and that’s actually been a great way for us to communicate and again keep the inbox uncluttered. I’ll use LawPay also. I use Dropbox for file and document management. Some really simple tools. I use Byword sometimes when I’m trying to draft and don’t want to deal with having to format and I just want to crank out some good content, I use Byword.

Sam Glover: Are you an Evernote use too?

Drew Amoroso: You know I was for awhile, but then I found that I had too many systems that were tying to keep me organized that it was causing to be unorganized.

Sam Glover: That’s what I struggle with too.

Drew Amoroso: I think Trello kind of replaced Evernote for me in that sense for whatever reason. The visuals that are associated with Trello are much easier for me to follow so that’s what I chose.

Sam Glover: Very cool. By way of getting towards a wrap up, I’m curious about some of the challenges that you’ve had to overcome to this point. What have been the hardest parts and how have you overcome those challenges to get to your practice here to five months?

Drew Amoroso: I think the biggest change for me was going from being in an environment where I could walk down the hall and pass something by a more seasoned attorney and say, “Hey, what do you think about this? I think this is right, but what do you think about this,” and that’s kind of how the way a big firm works. There was this built in approval mechanism I guess that is totally gone when you are by yourself and you’re the only attorney there. Initially it was I felt the need to have someone else sort of … Whether it was business related or actual legal issues and developing strategy, things like that, I had this desire to just run everything by somebody. It turns out that I didn’t need to do that. I could really make do without having another person there to sort of sign off on what it was that I wanted to do.

You kind of have to adopt that mindset as a solo. I mean you know this. Having your own practice, you just kind of become comfortable with that.

Sam Glover: Do you also find it difficult to hold yourself accountable because there’s nobody else out there chasing you down for deadlines and things?

Drew Amoroso: You know, that’s one thing that I haven’t had too much trouble with. I have just been really excited about being able to get this off the ground. I really feel like this is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. Sometimes I think for me the struggle is to figure out what to do first because there’s … Initially I was my own secretary. I was the associate. I was the partner. I was the owner. I was the paralegal. I was all the things. The heavy marketing. Trying to figure out what to do to grow my business responsibly and at the rate that I wanted to grow that and get all the work done, I think that was the biggest challenge for me. Now that I’m five, six months into it, I’m getting better at prioritizing and understanding the normal flow of the work day which allows me to prioritize in an efficient way.

Sam Glover: Very cool. Drew, thank you so much for being with us today and for talking about your practice and building a niche and leaving big law. It’s been a lot of fun.

Drew Amoroso: Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Sam.

Sam Glover: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of The Lawyerist Podcast. If you’d like more information about today’s show, please visit Lawyerist.com/podcast or LegalTalkNetwork.com. You can subscribe via iTunes or anywhere podcasts are found. Both Lawyerist and the Legal Talk Network can be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and you can download the free app from Legal Talk Network in Google Play or iTunes.

Aaron Street: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said during this podcast is legal advice.

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