EP 455- Legal Office Management with Angela Louis Part One

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. We have a guest with us from the outside. A lot of people who think of law firms think probably most about attorneys who interact with clients and go off and try cases, and they probably don’t think too much about what’s holding the firm together back at the firm while the attorneys are out in the world doing their thing. But there are such people. So we thought we would interview one of them. We did a worldwide search trying to find a highly qualified person to sit in this chair, and we ended up with Angela Louis of the Simon. Law Firm, welcome to the podcast.

Angela Louis:

Thank You Erich.

Erich Vieth:

How’s that for an intro? That was

Angela Louis:

Phenomenal. That was great.

Erich Vieth:

So you are the law firm administrator of the Simon Law Firm since 2015. Correct. We thought it would be good for our audience to understand the many hats that you wear. And I told you before the podcast, I’ll try not to use the phrase herding cats, but it repeatedly comes to me because although I wasn’t at the Simon Law Firm while you were here, I’ve seen how hard it is to work with type A professionals who are running around and they’re under pressure and a lot of things need to get done. Could you talk about your path from maybe including your training or your career and then how you ended up here at the Simon Law Firm?

Angela Louis:

Well, I got out of school with my bachelor’s degree in psychology and didn’t know what I wanted to do. So somebody said, Hey, why don’t you be a police officer? Great. So I was a police officer for a handful of years, but at the same time I was going back to school to get my master’s degree in human resource management. I ultimately knew that I wanted to kind of get behind any business or corporation. So that was my path there. I did some retail management after I got out of being a police officer and then interviewed at my previous law firm. I was not chosen, I was the second candidate, but reached back out to her, which was Lois Pfeiffer, who was the former administrator there because we had a really good interview and I reached out 18 months later and said, Hey, did that ever work out?

And they said, oh, that person just left. And they hired me at that point and she soon retired and I assumed all the roles, so not just I went in as an HR manager, but then I assumed all the roles in terms of, and when I say that it’s the operations, it’s the financial, it’s marketing, it’s the people management, it’s any of the HR duties as well too. And I was there for close to 12 years and then I’ve been here with John Simon at the Simon, Law Firm since then doing all the hats at that point.

Erich Vieth:

So I’m not familiar with the coursework and human resources management. How well do you think a degree in this area prepares you for the real world or does it require a lot of real world time before you really fit into this role? So

Angela Louis:

I think it’s more of the laws and what you can do and not do when you’re managing people. And that’s really what that HR management degree does is tells you what you can and can’t do. Process and procedures and organizational development. There’s a lot that goes into just the human resource part of that as well. But I think then leads to when you learn on the job and you learn how to do the financials and you understand most HR people don’t do both, but I understand numbers, I remember numbers, so I can do the both. Once you then get into that piece, you see how the budgets work and how I pay bills and how to make things that are done timely at that point. And then everything starts swirling and you manage all the things is how that ultimately ended up.

Erich Vieth:

So there’s no way to do this well without having a good grasp of numbers. That would be a bottom line requirement. You got to know the numbers, but there’s the people piece too, which is the

Angela Louis:

Largest piece.

Erich Vieth:

So tell me about maybe about a typical month in your life. How would you allocate what you’re doing? Because it seems like you’ve got so many things to tend to.

Angela Louis:

So this morning, for instance, right, I thought I was going to do some things today because we’re doing annual evaluations, so I’m talking every 30 minutes. I have somebody coming in my office, but I had a lot of time this morning because I wanted to finish payroll, I wanted to answer emails. There’s things that I’m doing with some of the mass tort team right now that I want to manage, but that didn’t happen. I was speaking to an attorney, I had a new person, part-time person start this morning, so I was getting him acclimated. I printed a check for somebody that needed to check. So it was just, there’s probably 10 other things that I’m not even listing right now all before I sat down and talked to you this morning.

Erich Vieth:

And right now it’s not even, well, it’s just turned 11 o’clock. Correct. So that was your morning and not even your entire morning. Correct. So the psychology degree, have you felt that you’ve drawn upon that degree here in your role?

Angela Louis:

I don’t know if the degree has. I think I’m highly empathetic. So I think that I want to connect, I want to understand people. I want to understand what motivates them. I want to understand how some days it’s just getting through the end of the day in terms of what we need to get done and showing back up tomorrow or what people need in general. So I think it’s more of my DNA versus maybe that psychology degree.

Erich Vieth:

Maybe we could describe for the people who don’t know the size of the Simon, Law Firm, that would help situate what you do and with how many people?

Angela Louis:

We currently have 13 attorneys, 15 something law clerks, 15 something paralegals and other support staff. There’s probably 66 in total, 66, 67 in total at the firm right now.

Erich Vieth:

And then you also mentioned in the process of describing things that you do the hiring for the firm as well.

Angela Louis:

Yes.

Erich Vieth:

Who are your core people that help you do what you do?

Angela Louis:

So I have Laura who has been with John I think 19, 20 years at this point, but she’s my right arm in terms of the daily day bookkeeping and accounting part of that. And then I have Zach who helps me in marketing and the intake department. He oversees the intake department with me as well too. That primarily those are the two that I interact most with every day.

Erich Vieth:

So I’ve never been in the role that you play and I don’t know that I’m wired to do a third of what you do. I like to be left alone to work on cases. And it seems like you would be having to always be on call for lots of stuff. Is there ever an hour or two a day where there’s not things that intrude on the thing that you’re doing

Angela Louis:

During the middle of the day? No. That’s why I do a lot of things. Either at night or on the weekends. If I have to focus on a project, then I know I’m not going to be interrupted. But during the day I very rarely don’t have someone either calling, texting, emailing, stopping by.

Erich Vieth:

So let’s just break it down into the pieces. Why does a law firm need an administrator?

Angela Louis:

Not all law firms need administrators. A lot of times, especially the smaller ones, they have that key person in place, whether it be a Paralegal or a legal secretary that has been with them for a long time that could order the supplies and pay the bills and keep the lights on in terms of just some of the emailing the insurance company or things like that. The things that as a smaller firm, you don’t need a lot of extra hands doing the bigger picture thing. A lot of times smaller firms, the partner or the owner will do the financial stuff themselves. So they will do the record keeping, right? So maybe you have a system that they do the record keeping, they don’t necessarily need an administrator, but you need to have a key person that you could delegate some of those things to. I think once you get to a larger size, then having someone whose sole role is that is key in making sure that everything is managed correctly.

Erich Vieth:

In my experience, I’ve been with some small firms and some larger firms and it seems like the small firms have more of a family feel and more of an informality to them. And then at some point in the growth, there’s something that requires more formality, more structure, more organization. In your mind, do you have a break point of some sort where that becomes a thing?

Angela Louis:

I think the break point is the owner going, I’m doing too much administrative stuff and not practicing law, which is what they ultimately love. And I think that’s where that break point is is when they go, I want to do law stuff. And that’s when the other hat comes into play.

Erich Vieth:

And I know John and you both quite well, and I know that John has not relinquished entirely. He does a lot of marketing and he’s hands on guy. John is active so he hasn’t entirely given it up, but so I assume you have regular meetings of some sort to make sure that you’re coordinating. How often do you need to coordinate with the head of the firm to make sure things are going well? Wow, you

Angela Louis:

Know what? We’ve

Erich Vieth:

Already had two or three phone calls this morning

John Simon:

Me calling in from out of the office about this or that or whatever.

Angela Louis:

I mean, I’ve answered the call at six 30 in the morning sometimes. Sometimes thinks John is up early, very early. So he’s thinking sometimes and I’m up early as well too sometimes. Sometimes it’s easier just to have those conversations that early in the morning. So we have conversations that early in the morning formally we meet every two weeks. We have a committee that we meet formally every two weeks and we talk about marketing and we talk about other things that we have to talk about. We meet with the attorney group every two months. We have a formal meeting at that point, but just like John says, it’s sometimes it’s all day long. Sometimes I don’t hear from him from a couple days, but we are always in contact or talking or moving

John Simon:

Things along. So Angela, let me ask you this and I bet I know what the answer is. What is the most, I don’t want to say the worst, but the most challenging part. You do financial stuff, marketing stuff, personnel, hr. What is the most challenging for you? What aspect is you’re spending most of your time on or just is the most challenging?

Angela Louis:

The people. The people managing the people because you have so many personalities in the same spot. Even though we’re all working for the clients, sometimes the interpersonal stuff creeps in to the day-to-day stuff. So I think right now I feel personnel stuff. Next month it could be the website stuff because I’m very into that. So things kind of go in waves.

John Simon:

We started this firm 25 years ago or so and there were three lawyers and three secretaries and we got big fast. And then this was before we had a full-time administrator and we had, it was personnel issues and this issue, there’s always something, and I remember my sister started a firm three years or four years before I did and I would go to lunch with her on a fairly regular basis and get advice from her about stuff. And I remember her telling me, don’t try to make people happy. Certain people who are happy and certain people who aren’t happy and whatever you do, that’s not going to change. I mean certain people are not going to be happy and certain people are going to be happy. But she said the main thing is just to try to treat them fairly. And so my philosophy is I’m always looking out to make sure that if somebody’s getting a case or whatever, I want to make sure not just income wise but learning wise. And I pretty much assign cases here when they come in unless people bring in their own and I’m the kind of person who likes to make people happy. I like people to be, I want ’em to enjoy coming to work and all of that. So what is your approach or philosophy in terms of handling personnel issues and people?

Angela Louis:

I think you hit it on the head with the fair and consistent. You have to be consistent in terms of what you do. And so it looks consistent from the outside world too in terms of, because perception is everything for employees. They see what you, so being fair and consistent, but I also fall in, I want people to be happy so I fall into that trap some days where I’m trying to solve all the problems and sometimes there’s not problems to be solved and not everybody will be happy with the situation or whatever the decision is. So it’s coming to some sort of agreement or coming to the table that everybody feels like it’s fair and consistent in terms of what we’re doing.

Erich Vieth:

I can’t help but think that there’s transferable skills from being a parent and you’re a parent of four children and John and I are both raised children too. The parents that get into the obsession with trying to make sure the kids are happy. It just doesn’t work. It makes it worse in my experience. Do you feel like you learned a lot of valuable skills from raising your kids to helping to

John Simon:

Keep I got my kids working with me. I haven’t raised them and set them on their way. Still here you’re keeping them, club keeping them, they’re still here. So I’ll let you know how that works out.

Angela Louis:

I don’t know that there’s a rule board of being impaired. I feel like I’m winging it some days still.

Erich Vieth:

Let’s talk about the day-to-Day operations. You’ve already mentioned some things about what you’ve done today, but could you sketch out just some generalities more to let people who don’t do this kind of work, understand the scope, the vast scope of the many types of work that you do?

Angela Louis:

I mean, for instance, we haven’t even mentioned this. We’re getting ready to do a build out and a move. So we have that going on in the background where I’m still talking with the building and I’m talking with the architect and I’m getting bids. So we have that part going on in the background. I’m meeting with IT providers about phone systems at the new place. I’m working with our IT people to coordinate what that’s going to look like on the move. So there’s a lot going on with that. I’m building out a website, so we’re getting all of the pieces to them. We had someone a personnel leave recently in one of our departments that I’m now sourcing to get a replacement for. But in the interim, I’ve been actively involved in managing the people that were left behind in the workload and working with the attorney on that. That’s consuming a lot of time. Right now I’m doing annual evaluations, so I’m meeting with everybody, all of the staff and doing annual evaluations so that that’s consuming a lot of my time. So that’s going on that I’m thinking off the top of my head today.

Erich Vieth:

It seems like even the digital aspect of what you do is a very challenging job. Do you offload any of that to anyone else? For instance, I am a Solo and I notice that every week is an hour or two where I’m making sure I got backup running and I got new tools that might be helpful to me doing my job better.

Angela Louis:

We have it. I have a person that is here as a help desk person that is on site that can help. We had issues at the front desk this morning in terms of their access. I haven’t helped desk person that’s up there now helping getting that resolved. But I also have a behind the scenes big picture planning person that’s going to help me build out the new servers and all the infrastructure when we have to move. That is helping me on the day-to-day. So he does that. He does the backups and plans and tells me what we need to look at and we meet with a committee internally, both with staff and attorneys once a quarter and talk about what those things are, what the big problems are, what the global issues are and how to resolve them going forward.

Erich Vieth:

I’m going to share an experience that I think might lead to a good comment or two. I’ve been at firms before where it seemed like those in charge were more worried about penny pinching and making sure that, oh, you can’t go to this seminar even though you think it’s a good seminar. How about you pay your own way? That one. That kind of thing. And when I came here within a couple of weeks I thought maybe I should go to a particular seminar and I went to John and he said, whatever you need you should go to and the firm will fund that. It’s your judgment. And it seemed like a really important thing. I was stunned by it because I was used to the other approach. It seemed like delegating that responsibility to the employees to guide themselves, motivate themselves to not be kind of on top telling ’em what to do, but to let them know that they are self owners, they are in charge of themselves to do the best job they can do. Is this leading to any thoughts by you about how to motivate employees to feel like they’re taking it on themselves rather than being employees that are directed or guided from the top?

Angela Louis:

I mean that still absolutely happens today. I mean in terms of how the attorneys choose to go and get extra credit or CLEs, but it also trickles down to the staff. I have some that are just, they want to learn and they bring stuff back to the table that we talk about in terms of new technology, new software, new ways of doing things that don’t cost a lot of money to go to A CLE or a seminar over lunch or sometimes they’ve done courses at the community college as well too. I think that learning helps us as a firm see new things, learn new things and be efficient. The bottom line is being efficient so we can take care of our clients.

John Simon:

So let me ask this, Angela, I think our audience is mostly attorneys, right? Erich, but we really don’t know, do we?

Erich Vieth:

Until today? I think we’re going to get a lot of law firm administrators maybe

John Simon:

Check in. So here’s, here’s a couple issues that I thought of. Are new lawyers, lawyers have been out four or five years. Lawyers at big firms, small firms. A lot of times when I started at my first firm, it was a firm with a hundred or more attorneys and there were multiple administrative employees. I didn’t know who they were, what they did, how they would interact with what I’m doing. And so my question is what would you tell attorneys, and it may matter depending on the size of the firm, if it’s 10 lawyers or 20 lawyers or a hundred, how can an administrator, somebody in your position, help them with what they’re doing? Like a flip side, how can the attorneys better communicate with you to help you do what you need to do?

Angela Louis:

It’s whatever the attorney needs is the bottom line. So what attorney shows up here, the new attorney, it has to be set up with on our website in the computer. Do they have business cards? Are they on super lawyers? There’s things that I go through with them to make sure that they’re set up, do they have the right support internally? It’s a simple question of where’s my Westlaw login? How do you do the day-to-day stuff. So working to make sure that they’re comfortable, but then when they’re here, I have attorneys that say, Hey, can you do this for me? My client father passed away. I’m really close to this client. Can you send flowers? I’ve had others who’ve done extra committee things that I’ve helped them with. So it’s even supporting them on their initiatives as well too. But it’s the day-to-day. If they have issues with a support staff, they’ll say, can you talk to them? I’ve already talked to them. I need you to kind of hit it from another angle to see if you can’t get more help or if you can help resolve some of the issues. So I think it’s having good relationships with the attorneys themselves allows me to do my job easier because then the open communication is there in terms of if there are issues, if there’s good things happening, I know immediately and we can resolve them so it doesn’t fester. I think that’s the main point there is the good communication and a good relationship.

Erich Vieth:

I see there to be a challenge. The firm is a number of individuals, but individuals work best when they’re knitted together and working together and there seems to be an overall personality or ethos to the firm. And it seems like that would require ongoing communication among many people and I’m sure that you have various ways to encourage that conversation. I know you sometimes have seminars where everyone comes together and you talk about you have weekly meetings, but what else? How do you encourage the people to take time out of their schedule? I say this as someone who can go down the rabbit hole and not come out for two weeks. If I’m working on a brief, it’s hard to get me out of that mode, but how do you get the people to come out and make sure they can take advantage of each other’s talents and encouragement to become a firm that has kind of its own personality? I

Angela Louis:

Think it falls back to getting to know people as a human and as a person. And I know sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to stand around and talk about that during the day, but when you do have some of those downtime or you do have, it’s talking about what you did over Thanksgiving. It’s talking about something funny your kid did or something funny your dog or your cat did. It’s having those little bits that you can learn your personality to go. I do see them as a person that I can get along with. Yeah, we do work well together too. It’s creating that. It doesn’t always happen. We don’t have utopia here and I don’t think I’ve ever had a utopia anywhere, but it’s allowing people to have those side conversations, to learn each other’s personalities and not get in trouble when I walked down the hall or when John walks down the hall and he sees someone talking. Right. Sometimes that interaction is good just to have a cohesive team.

Erich Vieth:

I’m walking down your list. You have insurances as yet another area. Could you talk about the challenges that you have trying to make sure that those are in place?

Angela Louis:

So I have brokers that help me on all of that, but it is filling out the annual applications for malpractice insurance, for cyber insurance, for all of the other general liability insurances that the firm needs as a whole. But then we’re talking about benefits for the employees. It’s creating that benefit package with a Embroker and rolling that out with a Embroker and make sure that those questions are answered for the employees as well too. So insurances are firm, but also individual as well.

Erich Vieth:

Give me a gut feeling how many vendors you deal with to get a job done here.

Angela Louis:

I have a lot of core vendors just because I’ve been doing this for so long in terms of the 20 years because it’s also developing relationships. I have a vendor relationship with a copy guy. I’ve used him for 20 years for my copy guy. We have a relationship with our scan service. It’s a relationship that I have with my brokers. It’s that ongoing relationship that I know that if I need anything they’re there. I’d probably say 15. Consistently consistent.

Erich Vieth:

So how are you and the firm currently about paper versus paperless and the challenges of storing?

Angela Louis:

Are we talking John, Simon or are we talking about the rest of the firm?

Erich Vieth:

Oh, okay.

John Simon:

We run spectro.

Erich Vieth:

John, do you know I’m getting

John Simon:

A little better. I’ve got a trial iPad. He does, but I does still keep my paper copies of the important stuff and I just, for whatever, I like the feel of it and writing on it and rolling it up and laying it on the table. And I know you’re completely paperless, right? Didn’t you like scan all your books and then or something?

Erich Vieth:

Yeah, the less paper the better for me. But there are times right now I am writing on a piece of paper. I’ve got a pad. If I find it valuable, it’ll either be scanned and the paper recycled or just thrown away. But I find that paper is highly restricting as it accumulates after the moment. So I don’t want to keep it around after it can be scanned. So what about, you’ve got 50 people here, you’ve got cases that could generate thousands, I assume still there’s people that will produce discovery in boxes. What do you do with the paper?

Angela Louis:

Like John said, we do run the gamut. Right now I’m down my back hallway. We were closing files from one of our mass tort Litigation, so I have a ton of boxes right now that we’re going to scan offsite because we’re going to keep that data. But it wasn’t scanned initially because we weren’t paperless back then.

John Simon:

So what was it? Is it 10 years? In Missouri you have to keep the We do the file. That means when you open the firm, you start collecting and you can’t get rid for the first 10 years, I can’t imagine it. It’s got to be thousands of boxes of storage.

Angela Louis:

We’ve called that down quite a bit, but it is about still scanning everything we want, everything scanned in on our network, right? Regardless if you like paper or not, we still want it scanned in on our network so we can have access to that when we’re not sitting in our firm and be able to produce that at a drop of a hat as well.

Erich Vieth:

Scanning it. And I assume making it OCR and finding

Angela Louis:

OCR and putting it into the appropriate place in the system In terms of the client,

Erich Vieth:

How can you dig back into your deep archives, do you think? Is that a rare thing?

Angela Louis:

I’ve had to go and look for things occasionally, not very often, but occasionally in the course of nine years. Thank

Erich Vieth:

You for joining us. We’re going to pause this conversation at this point. We’re going to have you back for another episode and thank you for your willingness to join us a second time.

Angela Louis:

Looking forward to it. Thanks Angela.

Erich Vieth:

Alright, this has been another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth.

John Simon:

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 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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