One of my lawyer mentors once told me “if you don’t like to sell, don’t be a CEO.” Many lawyers set out to make a difference or have an impact. Not to be a CEO. But whatever you call law firm leaders, they are the “CEOs.” And if you want to be a CEO, you need to get comfortable with sales. In this bonus episode of Financially Legal, Jaimee Hall from Legal Back Office and I share experiences selling to lawyers and, more importantly, how lawyers can improve at sales and use it to grow their firms.

What started as conversations between a law professor and his student has evolved into a movement. Maximum Lawyer boasts a 5000 member Facebook group, over 200 hours of podcast content, two sold-out conferences, and much more. Oh, and did I mention that the prof and his former student both have successful law firms? Jim Hacking, the law professor, and Tyson Mutrux, the former student, are the leaders of Maximum Lawyer. Listen on to hear how they're helping lawyers to build strong, resilient...

Sam Glover once told me that he started the popular legal website, Lawyerist, to complain about a practice management system. He gave birth to a technology blog that, today, is way more than content. There's the free-to-join Insider program and the paid community, Lawyerist Lab. In this installment of our Lawyer Communities miniseries, we talk with Stephanie Everett about the intersection of entrepreneurship, lawyers, and Lawyerist.

The social media landscape has become almost impossible to navigate.  Keith Lee saw the social media meltdown coming and decided to do something about it. LawyerSmack started as a free extension of his popular blog but it has become a large and very active private online lawyer community. As part of our series on lawyer communities, I talked with Keith and LawyerSmack member Jeremy Richter about how LawyerSmack seems to have captured much of what’s good about social media and little of what’s...

In the first of a series of episodes this month on lawyer communities, we start with mindset. Some of the biggest obstacles to economic and business success are mental - not financial or even business-related. If ever you’ve wondered if it's your mindset that's holding you back, then this episode is for you. We dive in on mindset with Allison Williams. Allison is a Business Coach for Solo Law Firm Owners at Law Firm Mentor. She’s also the CEO and Founder of the Williams Law Group.

What if I told you there was a tool that could automatically increase your firm revenue by 1%? What about 2%? What about 3%? What about even half a percent? (if you’re not great at doing math on the fly, for a firm that grosses $1,000,000/year, one half a percent is $5000). In this episode, we dive into the background on shifting processing fees, how it works and the different ways firms can implement it, and how you can decide whether it’s right for your firm.

Whether it’s identifying the tasks that need to be done, teaching and coaching others to do them, or simply letting go, you’ll be hard-pressed to identify a skill more central to scaling a law practice than delegation. In this episode of Financially Legal Lindsey Corbin, the founder of delegate.legal, shares what you should and SHOULDN’T delegate, the tools that successful firms are using to unlock the power of delegation, and how delegation can help you do more of what you like and less of...

If you’ve ever wondered how to tie together different systems in your law practice, you need to know about Zapier. Like the machine that makes Pee-Wee Herman’s breakfast in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure or the idea of the Rube Goldberg machine, Zapier uses “if this, then that” logic to connect otherwise disparate systems and - more importantly - often automate mundane, repetitive tasks that can be efficiency time sucks for every law firm, but particularly smaller ones.

Lawyers are no strangers to tools - even technology tools - but few choose to build their own. In this episode, host Dan Lear explores why six firms chose to pursue a DIY path for practice management, how they went about building what they built, whether they’d recommend that other firms do the same, and what the future of practice management looks like for firms who might want to build or, at least, customize their own system.

In this special episode of Financially Legal we depart from our usual discussion and go hard into finance. If you’ve been paying any attention to the news - or social media - over the last couple of weeks you’ve heard the name GameStop. In this episode, I dive in with class action securities litigation lawyer Jake Walker from Block and Leviton to understand what’s going on with GameStop, what’s new in this situation, and what (if any) legal liability exists for any of the parties involved.

As we’ve all learned, taking your firm “virtual” is more than just sending everyone home with laptops. Firms need to think about everything from culture and camaraderie to Zoom etiquette.  In this episode, I speak with Elana Bertram and Tim Parlatore from Parlatore Law Group. We discuss how and why they built a cloud-based law firm BEFORE the pandemic, why they insist on calling it "cloud-based," and why the future is bright for nimble firms like theirs.

“I was told there’d be no math.” It’s a common joking refrain for law students and even practicing lawyers. “I went to law school to help people,” so many lawyers tell me. But a firm needs to pay for you - and itself - in order to keep helping people. Let’s face it: law firms are businesses. And the better a firm runs, the more people it can help. So understanding the finance and economics of a legal services business is crucial. That’s where Kenna comes in.

Allen Rodriguez is a legal product development strategist who has been serving the legal industry for over 18 years. He’s currently the Founder and CEO of the law innovation agency One400. Before that he was the Director of Attorney Services at LegalZoom, where he helped LegalZoom figure out their, now very successful, subscription and lawyer-assisted offerings. He got his start in the legal sector running operations at the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service.

Nika Kabiri is a JD, a PhD a decision science consultant, teacher, and writer. If that’s not enough for you, just know she’s a rock star. Previously Nika was the Director of Strategic Insights at the online legal marketplace Avvo. Whether through market research, tireless and effective advocacy, or her amazing public speaking skills in that role Nika helped Avvo and the legal industry better understand the legal consumer.

Subscription-based outsourced fractional general counsel sounds like a mouthful, but it’s not really that complicated. A fixed monthly fee for part of a lawyer’s time offering business advice to a company. Beth Lebowitz believes that this model is as good for lawyers as it is for clients. In fact, she’s so committed to it that she’s founded both a law firm, Nimbus Legal, a marketplace/community, Auxana, around the model.

Lawyers can usually think of lots of possible reasons why trying something new in your practice is “against the rules.” Megan Zavieh is a California state bar defense attorney (who lives in Georgia!) and she’s not treading lightly. Instead, she’s launching a subscription legal services offering, cheering regulatory changes related to non-lawyer ownership, and breaking down the rules around shifting credit card processing fees to clients or selling your law practice.

It’s common for dentists or doctors to sell their practices but far less common for lawyers to do so. And a Zillow-like marketplace for law practices? Forget about it. And yet, that’s just what Tom Lenfestey is doing. Tom has built his business, The Law Practice Exchange, to increase liquidity in a market for law practices and evangelize the buying and selling of law practices as a legitimate option for the development, growth, and conclusion of a lawyer’s professional efforts.

Our recent podcast on how lawyers talk to clients about money inspired Gravity Legal’s own Emery Wager to think about how lawyers had talked to him about money. A client of many lawyers at Gravity Payments (our parent company), Emery came up with a list of five things he wishes lawyers would do when they talk to clients about money. We dig in on this mini-episode of Financially Legal.

Greg Garman is a busy man. One of the founders of a 20 person law firm in Las Vegas, Greg is also the co-founder and CEO of LAWCLERK, an online marketplace for freelance legal help. In this episode, Greg shared some great insights on how and why he thinks right around 20 lawyers is the sweet spot for a small law firmTune in to hear Greg share valuable wisdom on where the legal sector is today, where it’s headed, and the finance and economic principles to help you navigate.

Conventional wisdom is that there are really only two reasons that marriages end: sex and money. Sex with a client is frowned on and talking about it - except, perhaps as a part of the representation - is probably not a great idea. However, conversations with clients about money can be some of the most important conversations you have with them. We ask eight lawyers in a variety of practice areas how they talk to clients about money.

Jacqueline Horani is a lawyer engaged in integrative consulting and plain language law in New York City. Inspired by the integrative law movement, Jacqueline is building a practice around the practice of conscious contracting, which focuses on identifying and integrating the parties’ values directly into the contracting process. She also has built a complex and comprehensive process to financially qualify her clients and then align the amount she charges to that qualification.

Geri Green and Cynthia Chandler have been fighting for marginalized individuals both in and out of courts for decades. In this episode of Financially Legal we talk about how and why, according to the 2019 Clio Trends report, civil rights attorneys realize so little of what they work (20% - the lowest of any practice area) and collect for so little of what they realize (80% - third or fourth lowest).

Seth Bloom is the Sr Director of Attorney Services at Levelset. If you’re not familiar with Levalset, it’s a company that helps all kinds of contractors, but particularly those in the construction space get paid and focus on what they like to do. It’s most relevant for legal professionals because those contractors often file, manage, and – when things go south – litigate liens. Enter Seth and the network of attorneys he’s building to help those construction professionals sort all of that out.

Erin Giglia is the Co-Owner of Montage Legal Group. As you’ll hear, Montage was founded more than a decade ago to exploit a “gap in the marketplace between freelancers and law firms.” Since then the model that Erin and her co-founder Laurie established has been emulated, adapted, and admired by firms and freelance legal businesses across the legal sector.

Kim Bennett got burned by hourly billing. She lost a bunch of money and, having come up as a young lawyer in a corporate, in-house role, the model didn’t make sense to her. One day she pitched a client on a recurring monthly fee and, to her surprise, they accepted. That’s right, we’re talking subscriptions again. But where the guest from our last subscription-based law practice, Jon Tobin, uses almost as lead-gen for his firm, Kim’s “premium” subscriptions make up the bulk of the work that she d