#548: Essential Strategies to Know Before You Go Solo, with Stephanie Everett

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett (00:12): 

Hi, I’m Stephanie Everett. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:13): 

And I’m Zack Glaser. And this is episode 548 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie and I talk about the first five steps of going solo in your law career. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:28): 

Today’s show is brought to you by Paxton AI and you’re going to hear Zack’s conversation with them in just a few minutes. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:34): 

So Stephanie, one of the steps of going solo is getting your website, getting yourself out there, starting to advertise, and we each year do a best law firm websites contest. I think we’ve been doing it for a decade now. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:52): 

Yeah, I don’t know the exact length, but it’s always fun. I love seeing the winners and the different ways law firms are showing up with their website. It should tell a story. It should tell a story to your ideal clients about the clients, what they’re struggling with, and then how you can help ’em, right? It really, the website isn’t exactly about you. I mean it is, but you’re the second star, 

  

Zack Glaser (01:23): 

Which is very different from how websites were, I mean, even five years ago when they were just these bright beacons into the night of, they were essentially digital billboards and now they’re much more complex and doing a lot heavier of a lift in your marketing 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:44): 

And in your client experience because now with so many people using websites for client portals, you can now have that it’s not just a place for prospective clients to find out about you, but maybe it’s also where your current clients are interacting with you and paying you and getting updates on your case. So your website could do a lot of work. I mean, we had Stanley Tate on the show a while back and he said, I mean, he pays as much money as he would pay a senior paralegal slash maybe junior associate because he’s like, look, I invest a lot in my website because it’s a member of my team and it does this work for me. And I thought that was a really cool way of thinking about it. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:25): 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense because they’ve been changing over the years. Well, so one of the changes that we have to our contest though is that we’re pushing it out a little bit further this year. We usually have it February, March, something like that. We’re pushing it out a little bit further because we’re adding a little bit of educational content to the whole concept of the best law firm website. We’ve got a podcast coming up about building your websites. We’ve got a couple of educational articles coming out, and so we’re hoping to give people a little bit more of a head or some reminder. A reminder, if you’ve been thinking maybe I should overhaul or adjust or tweak my website, maybe write about now is the sign, or maybe some of these articles that are coming out that speak to you are the sign to do that. 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:20): 

And so applications people will be able to nominate other sites. We allow self nominations and that whole process is going to kick off in first week of April, right? 

  

Zack Glaser (03:32): 

Yeah. I think we’re going to launch the actual contest at tech show at the A tech show. So kind of coinciding with that. So we got a little bit of time. If you’re not happy with your website right now, you could potentially get it adjusted or just tweak your fantastic website and make sure to enter it when this swings around 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:55): 

And go check out the last year’s winners for inspiration and ideas and see what you see. I think it’s always a fun thing that we do. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:04): 

Yeah, yeah. 

  

Stephanie Everett (04:05): 

Alright, so now let’s hear Zack’s conversation with the folks from paxton.ai and then with me. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:12): 

And before that though, and before you rattle off a curt response to opposing counsel’s last minute filing, head on over to Apple Podcasts. Leave us a review. 

  

(04:24): 

Hey y’all, Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist Today, I’d like to talk to you about artificial intelligence in your law firm and I’ve got the guys here from Paxton, Tongu and Mike, and we’re talking, I guess legal tech, AI research. Guys, thanks for being with me today. 

  

Tangu Chau (04:45): 

Thank you, Zack. I’m very excited to chat with you. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:47): 

Alright, so I know what Paxton does. I’ve toured Paxton, I’ve seen it, but I don’t know that everybody else does. Could one of y’all kind of give me an idea of what is it that Paxton does in this kind of AI legal research space? 

  

Tangu Chau (05:04): 

Yeah. Paxton is a legal AI assistance. So the best way to describe it is what is that you would interact with Paxton in the same way that you would interact with an associate at your firm asking Paxton to perform legal research or analyze documents that you have provided or ask Paxton to draft language some of the legal language or extract information. The big advantage with Paxton compared to other legal research tool is that it’s directly connected to a database of real-time database of statutes, court rulings, rules, regulations that we maintain in real time. And so what is that? When Paxton retrieves information and sites information, it’s up to date information, it’s not hallucinated documents. You see where the information came from. You can audit it, you can verify it. And so that’s really what we focused on building. 

  

Zack Glaser (06:11): 

Okay. Okay. Well let’s take a little bit of a step back because I think we got deep into Paxton there. What is the area of information that it is actually querying or getting into? So we’re talking about the laws of the states, the statutes, things like that. 

  

Michael Ulin (06:32): 

And Mike here, CTO and co-founder at Paxton. That’s exactly right, Zack. We maintain a database of US laws, regulations, court decisions, court rules that can be queried using just natural language. So no more Boolean search strings that you have to worry about. And it’s kind of interesting in the evolution of technology. We see some initial users of Paxton like typing, like Google type search strings into Paxton, so just list of keywords. But the really cool thing about this tech is you can actually ask a natural language question about whatever topic you’re interested in and provide a little bit of context around the matter case you’re working on. And that actually lets Paxton produce an answer that’s tailored specific to that case or matter that you’re working on. So it’s not just return a list of search results and then I have to go read them, interpret them myself, Paxton is going to find the relevant information for you and then do a writeup of what it found in light of your question. So you’ll get a writeup, like a chat TPT write style response. But what’s different about us is we can actually cite back to be primary source materials. So you’ll get an answer that has citations back to the primary law, back to the court decisions that informed that response. So you can verify for yourself and understand where we’re getting this information 

  

Zack Glaser (08:20): 

So I can double check it like I’m supposed to do as a lawyer, right? 

  

Michael Ulin (08:27): 

Absolutely. Transparency is one of our big values here at Paxton, and so making sure that we help our customers, our users understand where an answer is coming from is kind of paramount for us. So providing those citations and then not only do we give you the full text of the court decision, we actually highlight, you can actually go understand what part of that is informing Paxton’s answer. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:00): 

Okay. So it’s showing its work, I guess not even in a way it is showing its work. So thinking about where Paxton is getting information from, in my mind there are two different types of products like this. One is I can go and I can search case law, something that is related to Lexi or something like that. And then another is I can kind of query information that I have, documents that I have, something like Copilot might be able to do that. Paxton can do both of these things. You can load up information, contracts, playbooks, things like that into Paxton safely and query against that too, right? 

  

Tangu Chau (09:50): 

Yeah, I think this is something that we learn from our users. There’s no need to have two separate platforms. You can use Paxton single platform to either perform legal research like you would on your traditional legal research platforms, but you can also upload your documents connected to your document management systems and use Paxton to extract knowledge, extract information from your own set of files. And so that means starting to create tables or timelines or things like that that analyze large amount of documents, fine languages, query documents that you have uploaded in a matter that you might in a litigation matter or in a transactional matter if you’re trying to find a needle into haystack information. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:53): 

So I could potentially upload discovery documents that I got from the other side and say start querying against that. That would be really handy to be, I mean, at the very least, to double check somebody else’s brief even to say, do these documents say what this person claims they say? Is there something else in there that might be contrary to what they’re saying in this brief? 

  

Michael Ulin (11:19): 

Yeah, absolutely. And we really wanted to design a tool that could be used throughout the full life cycle of a matter or case, so not just the legal research portion, but really using that as the foundation because an understanding of the law is going to be important to how you make use of evidence, how you draft either court filings, motions, other types of filings or other documents. So it’s not just that you can use this to retrieve information about the law, it’s actually helping you incorporate that throughout your whole life cycle of work. And to your point, we have employment attorneys who have to review an employee handbook as part of a case that used to be a nightmare, like dozens and dozens of pages of material to review. You can just upload it to Paxton and really pinpoint what is relevant to that particular case in a matter of seconds. And then look at that in light of the relevant case law and statutes to help you tell people that your end work product. 

  

Zack Glaser (12:36): 

Okay. Well, there’s a lot to Paxton and I don’t know that we can get to all of it here in the time that we have today, but if people want to learn more about paxon, you guys have a webinar coming up on February 19th that they can go to. We’ll drop the link to that in the show notes. What kind of things are they going to be able to see or learn a little bit more about in the webinar? 

  

Tangu Chau (13:03): 

The webinar basically walks the audience through different use cases. It’s really a workshop. This is done with one of our power user, and so that power user will explain how they’re using AI tools, and it’s here, in this case specifically Paxton, to do their day-to-day work and where they have found efficiency and how it’s impacted them. They’ll walk through examples, actual examples of client work where they’ve been able to find a lot of time savings and gains by using a tool like Paxton. And then Zack, I think something that’s really important to mention is that as more and more AI tools become available for lawyers, something that Mike has shared is that we thrive on transparency. And transparency starts with making the tool easily accessible for people to try. And so if lawyers are interested in just trying it out, it’s very, very, very simple. For someone to experience Paxton, just go on Paxton AI, launch the module, click on try for free. This launches you into a seven day trial process. You get to actually experience the entire full product before you make your decision on whether or not this is right for you. So you don’t need to get on the phone with a salesperson sign, a multi-year agreement, do firm for you to actually experience and have the benefits of a safe, secure, legal AI assistant at your fingertips. 

  

Zack Glaser (15:03): 

Okay, that is good to know. Yeah, you can try Paxton for free Paxton ai, and you can also go to the Paxton webinar series at paxton.ai/accelerating accelerating your legal practice. We’ll have that link in the show notes, but suffice to say, you can always go to Paxton ai and you’ll find both of those things. Mike Togi, thank you for being with me. I appreciate all the information here and all the knowledge, and I look forward to people exploring y’all’s product. I know I like Paxton. Perfect. Thank you so much. 

  

Stephanie Everett (15:43): 

Hey everyone, it’s Stephanie here. And what are your lab business coaches today? We thought we’d talk about starting a law firm. 

  

Zack Glaser (15:51): 

Yeah, Stephanie, thanks for being with me. I like this subject. It kind of gets to the guts of what we do here at Lawyerist and Lawyerist Lab, honestly, in the podcast. The point of this podcast is starting running and maintaining a law firm and a law practice. 

  

Stephanie Everett (16:14): 

So we thought today, if you’re thinking about getting started, you’re not sure where to start. Maybe you’ve already started and you need to revisit some of these. I think it will still be, I hope it might still be relevant. And so let’s kind of roll through our five strategies to get you started. 

  

Zack Glaser (16:32): 

Top five strategies to get you started going solo, hang in your shingle. It’s tough, and we weren’t taught this, as we say a lot of times on this podcast. So yeah, let’s dive in. Number one. What’s our first one? 

  

Stephanie Everett (16:48): 

Yeah, well, okay, pre bonus tip number one. I did a whole show once it’s been a couple of years on the five questions you should ask yourself before you launch a business. So I’ll just give a nod to that. We’ll make sure we put the actual episode number that I don’t remember what it is in the show notes. Yeah, 

  

Zack Glaser (17:04): 

We’ll put that in the show notes. 

  

Stephanie Everett (17:05): 

That’s like things to think about. Do you really want to do this? Okay, now you’ve decided you want to do it. So what’s your first step? And this shouldn’t shock anyone that’s been around me with any amount of time, but you got to define your vision and your business strategy. 

  

(17:19): 

What do you want this firm to look like, but be more specific. So obviously we’ve talked a lot around here about creating that vision and what kind of business are you building and why are you building it? But for this purpose today, I want you to really think about the business plan. Who are you going to serve and how are you going to serve them? And here the big question because we just get a license to practice law. And I mean the nice thing is nobody really asks us these things. We can just go hang a shingle. We don’t have to do market for many of us. We don’t stop and say, wait, is there a real need for this business in the market? Does 

  

Zack Glaser (17:56): 

Anybody need a lawyer in this town? 

  

Stephanie Everett (17:59): 

Instead, we’re just like, oh, I want to be my own boss. Let me go start a business. And then we think about the marketing and the strategy afterwards. Figure 

  

Zack Glaser (18:06): 

It out for the fact. 

  

Stephanie Everett (18:08): 

Yeah, I actually want you to start first and say, okay, what is the need in your community and how are you going to serve your community or serve it differently? Are you jumping in? Are you just trying to be another PI lawyer? Because I mean, I don’t know about you, but I drive around town and pretty much all the billboards are for PI lawyers. It’s a very saturated market. So if you want to do PI and you’re just going to do it the same way everyone else is doing it, you’re just jumping into an already crowded space. Or is there something missing in your market? Is there a different approach you can bring or a different niche marketing, whatever that’s going to be. But you need to think about that on the front end and think about how you can be different. 

  

Zack Glaser (18:52): 

And so our vision, I have a vision to make a lot of money, or I have a vision to be my own boss. I mean, it can be part of your vision, but we’re talking about really getting into what is it that I want to do and what does that look like? What is the vision of that, right? 

  

Stephanie Everett (19:10): 

Yeah, maybe you want to price differently or scope differently. We talk a lot about here about alternative fees. Maybe you want to serve the community differently, but really just kind of get a grasp on that. And again, this doesn’t have to be a beautiful, perfect document. Bullet points on a page of what you want to be and what you don’t want to be can be really compelling. So start there and then you’re ready to move on to step number two, which is to set up your legal and financial framework. 

  

Zack Glaser (19:39): 

So yeah, I know what I want to do. I know what I want to accomplish. I know kind of what I want it to look like. Now we’re lawyers. Let’s get this thing. Let’s make it official. 

  

Stephanie Everett (19:51): 

It’s sad that how many lawyers get, we still stumble. Well, not all of us are corporate lawyers, right? Yeah. 

  

Zack Glaser (19:58): 

We’re not all business lawyers, 

  

Stephanie Everett (20:00): 

But you do need to do some of this. So we’re not here to tell you any advice on this, but you need to decide your entity type, maybe consult with a lawyer to find out what the best entity type is for your jurisdiction. 

  

Zack Glaser (20:13): 

I mean, if you’re going to say that people should come to you for the type of law that you practice, I think it would be safe to say that you should probably go to an attorney that is well versed in that type of law. And it’s the same thing in any practice of law. He who represents himself has an idiot for a client. I mean, it is good to kind of separate yourself from that, and then you’ve got somebody to give you advice. Putting people into your corner, getting people on your team is also a part of this. 

  

Stephanie Everett (20:47): 

Absolutely. And remember, you may also want to consult with the CPA because there’s really two big buckets you’re thinking about when you’re setting up your entity. One is liability and shielding yourself and your family from any liability that you may have as a result of your firm. And the second big bucket is tax considerations. So you’re kind of thinking about both those things and making sure you’re planning for the best. So again, there’s smart people out there that can help you figure that out. 

  

Zack Glaser (21:18): 

There certainly are. Okay, so we’ve got our vision, which values and business statement. Then we’ve set up our company where we know what kind of entity we want it to be. What do we start thinking about then? 

  

Stephanie Everett (21:32): 

Well under that legal financial framework, I just want to make sure we mention go get insurance. I know it’s not required in every state, but 

  

(21:40): 

Get some malpractice insurance. Call a broker or they can quote it for you. They can help you. Usually it’s pretty inexpensive when you’re just starting out. So it’s an expense, in my opinion, that’s worth it. Make sure if you have it’s peace of mind, exactly. If you need a special license, whatever you need to set up, make sure you get those set up. And then also on the banking side, in most jurisdictions, you’re going to need not just an operating account, but also some kind of trust account for your client’s. Money. In Georgia, we call those IOLTA accounts. Banks are familiar with this. Usually your bar will have a list of participating banks so that you can go. A lot of times there’s not even a monthly fee for that type of an account. So you definitely want to just get those kind of ducks in a row and make sure you have that set up the right way from the start. 

  

Zack Glaser (22:29): 

Yeah, the IOLTA account is big if you’re going to be practicing on your own there, and if you go to a financial organization and they don’t know what an nialta account or the trust account is, just go somewhere else, steer clear. It is a well-known thing. So yeah, get all your ducks in a row there. 

  

Stephanie Everett (22:49): 

And then the third step really is moving into your area, Zack, which is thinking about those tech systems and the technology tools that you need. I mean, the nice thing is back when I started my law firm, I feel like I sound very old, saying that back in the day when we had a walk in the snow uphill, barefoot, 

  

Zack Glaser (23:10): 

Oh man, there’s a lot of attorneys that have been licensed since you or I got licensed, Stephanie, 

  

Stephanie Everett (23:17): 

I know. But when I started my firm, we had to buy a server. We had a server closet. We actually had, I still remember this, we had a old school stereo player that would play the hold music for our phone system back in the closet. We would go set it to the radio station of what people would hear that. Really, I also had a Blackberry server because we had one lawyer that needed, you had to have a special server if you wanted. Blackberries this big expensive equipment and you had to buy telephones and you had to buy a lot of stuff. Luckily, it’s much easier now you go online, you can get some cloud software and you need a computer. And I mean, you need the right software, but you can get some tools to be up and running pretty quickly. 

  

Zack Glaser (24:04): 

You can, I mean, people complain about SaaS and having to pay monthly fees for, I used to just be able to buy Microsoft Word. We also don’t have to put forward that initial investment anymore. We used to purchase our servers and then I would lay out money to purchase another server in three years, three to five years, and then I have to buy another one, and now I can just go and buy the proper software. And I’d say here, people like to get sideways and get really, really technical and try to find the perfect thing and the absolute right thing. Get started, just get the thing. It is more important to get your processes in place than it is to get the exact right software. When you start get the software that does the job phase one of your legal tech stack is get the crap to do the crap. 

  

Stephanie Everett (25:00): 

Absolutely. And I think you’ve done a whole show on this. Again, we have so many more resources on all these topics really. So this is going to be a pretty extensive show notes that we’ll help put together. So we could have a lot of resources on this and we’ll mention some of them at the end as well. Make sure though, you have accounting software, please do not try to use a spreadsheet. Just get it. There are some good things to start right from the beginning. And I know we have, I think you did a show too just on the technology and keep data security in mind. And again, I know we did a whole show, and if you do nothing else on data security, get a password protector. I don’t remember all the tips. I interviewed you for that show, so I do remember we did it, but we want to make sure. 

  

Zack Glaser (25:47): 

Yeah, a password manager is huge there, I think at this point. And yeah, we’ll do another thing on the onslaught or the oncoming quantum computing issue, but having a password manager, you’re just going to have to have that now yesterday. 

  

Stephanie Everett (26:06): 

Yeah. So then we’ve got our basic tech stack built. We’ve got some workflows and systems like you talked about, that could be so important. Thinking through client onboarding and getting an engagement letter, retainer agreement set. So just thinking about some basic workflow processes, again, it won’t be perfect and it’s not going to be all encompassing. It just isn’t just too much to do. So you just want some basic ones. You’re going to need an intake process. People call you, how do they engage with you? And then the others you’ll build as you go. So don’t get stressed out about that. 

  

Zack Glaser (26:46): 

Right? A couple of templates and some processes and roll. 

  

Stephanie Everett (26:52): 

Absolutely. Number four is probably the biggest one where you’re going to spend some of your time and a lot of your time in the beginning, which is marketing. So you need a basic marketing strategy. Do you need to go spend hundreds of thousands of dollars? No. You need a basic website and you’re going to need to think about how are you going to get your name out there into the world and get the phone ringing. And the reason I say this is going to be where you spend a lot of your time for a lot of people when you start, unless you’re bringing clients with you from where you are currently, this is the biggest challenge. Initially, you can set up the beautiful backend of firm, but unless you have the phones ringing and clients are coming in, it doesn’t matter. In this world, cash is king and you need that cash coming in to fuel your firm and to fuel your growth and to pay your rent, all the things. So you got to focus on getting new clients in the door, and that really is going to be where a lot of new lawyers, when they just start their own firm, they might spend 60% of their time or more on marketing. 

  

Zack Glaser (28:02): 

Yes. Yeah. Well, it also goes back to some of the stuff that you’ve been doing, the vision and values and your business statements and whatnot. But yeah, I could be the best attorney in the world if nobody knows that I exist. If nobody knows that I’m offering the services for them, it doesn’t matter. 

  

Stephanie Everett (28:22): 

And in today’s world, we often see it used to be that you could just be the best attorney and somehow the word got out and your reputation allowed you to get those clients. Today, people are bombarded with the information in different ways. And so it’s a struggle where we often see maybe not the best attorneys, but they have the best marketing strategy and they’re getting those clients. So it definitely has shifted. 

  

Zack Glaser (28:48): 

Yeah, absolutely. But I’ll also add though, a lot of people will say to me when I talk to them about marketing or getting into it and tracking their marketing, especially as they say, I work mainly on referrals. Okay, great, fine, that’s marketing. How are we going to get more referrals? How are we going to track those referrals? Are you thanking the people that are referring you? Are you even trying to figure out who is referring you? Are you putting your name on? Are you sponsoring a little league team or something? There’s more to marketing than just digital marketing in your website. Now, I would suggest definitely looking into that, but even if you’re just saying, I’m doing word of mouth. Okay, great. How are you doing that? Have a plan. 

  

Stephanie Everett (29:34): 

And it’s not free. So I think this is the other quick 

  

(29:38): 

Misconception people have is they’re like, I’m not spending money on marketing because I’m just going to three events a day or whatever they’re doing. And I’m like, well, the time you spend on those events, that has value. I mean, your time has value. So you can easily start to assign a value to the activities that you’re doing, and you should be tracking which ones are actually getting you something. And also keep in mind, you can’t give up because a lot of times we know that it takes seven to 12 touches quality interactions before somebody will be willing to either send you work as a referral or potentially engage with you. And most people give up after one. So marketing’s a long game. You got to stay in it, keep at it, and you kind of keep chugging away at it forever. 

  

Zack Glaser (30:31): 

Yeah, yeah. Well, and we have resources obviously on the website, the dig way deeper into what you need to think about with marketing. But I think for me, we go through law school and we think I’m going to be writing briefs all day, or I’m going to be studying law all day or coming up with arguments. But it is a big thing to market. You have to either create or take advantage of a market that is out there, and that is a huge part of being a solo attorney. 

  

Stephanie Everett (31:05): 

Yeah, absolutely. Alright, then we come to our fifth tip of the day or step, which is really establishing your financial and your operational discipline. So I want you to set some financial goals at the start. I mean, at the end of the day, although starting a firm is not just about money, the business needs to make money and it needs to right to get, 

  

Zack Glaser (31:29): 

You got to, 

  

Stephanie Everett (31:30): 

Yeah. You sustain yourself. You want to get to the point where you are paying yourself. Sometimes, sadly, I get on with lawyers and when we really start digging in, they could make more money working a different, not even practicing law. They don’t realize that their firm is not making them the amount of money we need it to make. So 

  

(31:51): 

You are going to have some upfront startup costs. Like we said, you’re going to need to invest in some of these tools and maybe some marketing expenses. One piece of advice that I love that somebody, I don’t know, I picked this up along the way and it made a lot of sense and my husband and I’ve done this every time we’ve started a business, which is we agreed on the front end, what are we willing to invest in our personal money in this business and more than the initial cost. Because what ends up happening a lot of times, like, okay, we invest this initial amount of money and then a couple of months later we’re not quite breaking even yet. We need a little bit more money. And then maybe the next month, oh, we just need a little bit more money. I’m going to break through. And you can slowly get yourself into trouble and not realize how much money of your personal funds you’ve actually invested in this business if you’re not careful about it. So I like to have that. And it’s hard when you’re in it and if you are struggling, it’s really the temptation is there, oh, well, we’ll make this work. We’ll just we’ll put in a little bit more. I like to have a conversation on the front end. What am I willing to invest in this? What’s my initial investment going to be? What’s my backup investment going to be and at what point, how much time am I going to give myself to really make a go of this? Because it is, like you said, this is hard. This is hard work. This isn’t just like, I mean for a lot of people, you just don’t come in and flip a switch and money starts flowing in. You’ve got to work at it. And so I think going in with some good goals and expectations and sort of ground rules about what you’re willing to do can be really helpful. 

  

Zack Glaser (33:33): 

Well, so talk to me about that a little bit, because that’s the initial investment kind of money that I’m trying. So yes, I want to make sure I don’t go past this point. And I remember having conversations with my wife about that when I was running our firm many times. But okay, let’s think about it positively. What things do I need to be tracking KPI wise? When things are going well, how do I know that I’m doing well in my firm? 

  

Stephanie Everett (34:01): 

Yeah, I mean, you should understand your financials. I think we say this almost like at the beginning of our book, which is also another great resource by the way. We, we’ll talk about that. But lawyers love to do this little silly game where they say, ah, I’m a lawyer. I don’t know about numbers. And if I wanted to know about numbers, I would’ve gone to business school. Okay, stop F that, right? Yeah, you’re a business owner now. You have to know about the numbers. You have to care about the numbers. You need to understand your financials. And if you do not, there is no shame in saying, I don’t understand. By the way, we did a great episode with our financial coach, Bernadette, on how to read a profit and loss statement or also called an income statement. We do this in our coaching program. 

  

(34:49): 

We take people’s statements and I’m like, let’s break it down step by step. You need to understand every dollar coming in and every dollar going out of your law firm and what the implications of that are. And you need to understand the path to building it and what that financial growth can look like. So at the base level, when you get started, you need to understand what your overhead expenses are, what you’re going to need to break even and cover those expenses, what it looks like, not just to cover those expenses, but pay yourself a reasonable salary for the work you’re doing in your business. A lot of lawyers are just like, well, I’ll just take the profit that’s left over and that’s what I get paid for. No, we need to set this up where it can pay you just like you had a job. 

  

(35:35): 

You should get paid if you’re working in the business and you should get a reasonable return on your investment. So really thinking about those KPIs, those are some simple ones. We have more on the website that we talk about because you can get into a lot of KPIs, but if it’s space, what do you need to break even? What do you need to hit your goals? How many cases then do the backend math of that? So if you need to make $10,000 a month, how many clients is that? What’s the average case value that each of those clients is going to bring so that you can then back into some marketing goals and really start tracking? Okay, so what I’m talking about is I need five or 10 or however many new clients each month. Here’s my path to getting that, and if I do that, I should hit these goals and I’ll be successful. 

  

Zack Glaser (36:20): 

I love that because it kind of wraps the whole thing back on itself a little bit because we said, okay, what is our vision and our business statement? What are we trying to do here? And then we get into, through a couple of things, into the marketing of how am I going to do this? When people go into marketing sometimes I remember my father would always say, well, anybody’s a potential client, do not do that. Yeah, that’s just not the way you do it, but it is really easy to say, well, I just want to make as much money as I can without spending any money, spending as little money as possible. If we get into these financial statements and talk about how much money do I need to make, how much are my clients worth? In a sense, well then I can actually have some real marketing goals and I’m not just throwing stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks. 

  

Stephanie Everett (37:15): 

Yes. And to that point, I see this a lot. People come to me and I’ll be like, tell me about your firm. And they’re like, well, I do family law. I do some real estate. I help businesses get set up, so I do some corporate work, some estate planning and some PI cases, and I’ll be like, how many people are your firm? 1, 2, 3, whatever. 

  

Zack Glaser (37:39): 

Okay. 

  

Stephanie Everett (37:39): 

Please know, I’m going to say this loud and clear for those everybody can hear that is running five different businesses. It is hard. It’s unnecessarily hard. You will scale and you think your dad’s point, you think, but I just want to help everybody and this isn’t just the way I’ll take anybody. I don’t want to turn away any business. you’ll grow faster and it will be an easier path. The faster you can focus and not have, I mean, having a transaction practice like real estate or business transactions and having a litigation practice like family law, those are two different businesses. Everything about, it’s different. You’re marketing to different people, you’re setting up different workflows and the way the workflows through them, everything is different. So you can see it. I’ll get off my soapbox. 

  

Zack Glaser (38:29): 

Technology is different in those two. I would tell you to use different software in those two, but that scares the hell out of people. Stephanie, and it scared the heck out of me too to turn a client away. Somebody comes into your office and says, I need something and I’m willing to pay. 

  

Stephanie Everett (38:49): 

Yes. The best advice I ever got was, you make more money off of a no. 

  

(38:56): 

You make more money when you turn that client away, send them to a referral source where that referral source can then send you back your ideal client. You make more money off a no, instead of trying to go, you can’t just wing it and figure out estate planning. You’re going to think, well, I’ll get a form off. I’ll just get a form for the same reason. We would tell people, don’t do that. It’s complicated. There’s tax implications. I dunno, it’s not. It’s a complicated practice area. Don’t do wills for friends and family. Send them to an estate planning attorney. Have that attorney hopefully send you your ideal clients. You make more money off of a note. The time you’re going to waste trying to figure out that practice area and set up all that stuff. You could have served five or 10 of your ideal clients and made money. 

  

Zack Glaser (39:43): 

Absolutely. Love that. Love that. Okay. We’ve gotten five things that we need to do. 

  

Stephanie Everett (39:49): 

Yep. 

  

Zack Glaser (39:51): 

Anything else? Anything you want to leave 

  

Stephanie Everett (39:53): 

Us with? Let’s still bonus. Yeah. Okay. Bonus tip, here it is. You don’t have to do this by yourself. 

  

(40:00): 

Get help, seek guidance. There is a whole lot of information and people and community out there willing and ready to help you. So I know we have a ton of free resources on our website. We have a guide on how to start a law firm. We have a guide on how to do your marketing, so you can go into our website and download these guides for free. You can listen to a podcast, obviously you can get business books. There’s a lot of free content out there. There are also communities like we’ve created our lab community that we love where, I mean, lawyers love helping each other. This isn’t a place where everybody’s like litigation world and everyone’s against each other. There’s actually a lot of people out there that would love to help you solve those early problems. They’ve been in your shoes, they want to help you. And then obviously once you’re ready at any point in your business process, our team is also would love to help you. It’s what we’re passionate about. We love helping lawyers. 

  

Zack Glaser (41:00): 

It’s why I show up to work. 

  

Stephanie Everett (41:02): 

I mean, it really is, and I tell everyone, we hit the professional lottery, this is what we get to do all day, every day, is help lawyers create better, healthier law firms. And so if you’re feeling stuck or you’re feeling unsure, you don’t have to stay stuck or stay unsure. There’s help available and there’s no shame in asking for it. I mean, all of us, including I get business help and everybody does. 

  

Zack Glaser (41:28): 

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Think that’s a good thing to end on is be a part of create a community. You do not have to do it alone, and you can always get lawyers love being mentors. Well, Stephanie, thanks for going through these five, I guess six tips at this point. People can always find a ton more information on our website. They can grab our book, small Firm Roadmap pretty easily. So yeah, I hope people get in contact with us and we’d love to see any questions that people have on the videos or the podcast that we have, or anywhere that you run into this podcast. Please feel free to ask the questions. Podcast. 

 

 

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