What I Actually Believe
This is from my weekly emailer for boutique law firm owners. If you'd like it in your inbox every Tuesday, you can subscribe here.
I've been writing to you every week for a bit over a year now. Sixty emails on pricing, hiring, referrals, SOPs, cashflow and most things in between.
Recently I had to explain, in a couple of minutes, what my work actually does. It was harder than I expected. When you write about the parts every week, it's easy to lose sight of the whole.
So I sat down and wrote out what I truly believe about it. This is what came out.
The practice of your dreams
I help owner-led law firms build the practice of their dreams.
That sounds like a slogan, so let me be specific. I think it comes down to three things.
Decent income. Enough to provide well for your family.
Rewarding work. Doing legal work that is meaningful and engaging. The work that you actually love.
A balanced lifestyle. Achieving all of the above without sacrificing your health or your relationships.
Most principals I meet have one of these, sometimes two. Very few have all three at the same time. The most common trade I see is income bought with lifestyle. The firm pays ok, but only because the principal is in every file until 9pm and hasn't had a proper holiday in three years.
I don't think that trade is necessary, and it's the reason I do this work.
What it takes
What I've come to believe is that each of the three has its own lever. Pull the right one and that part of the picture changes.
One: Get paid properly for the work you do
This is the lever for income. It means three things.
- Understand what you actually sell to clients. Clients buy outcomes, not time. The business owner wants the deal done and protected. The family wants the estate sorted so nobody fights later.
- Price work to create high margins. Price on value, not time. Pricing is mostly a clarity problem, and once you're clear on the outcome, the price gets much easier to stand behind.
- Don't just take whatever comes in, even if it's square in your practice area. Some matters will never make money, no matter how well you run them. Every one you take uses up the capacity you need for the ones that do.
Two: Win the right clients
This is the lever for rewarding work. The work you love usually comes from a particular kind of client.
- Work out who you should act for. Your Ideal Client Profile, not just whoever shows up.
- Tailor your services around that client. Communication style, messaging, branding, working style, promptness. A founder led growth company and a grieving family need very different things from you.
- Develop relationships with those that will refer you this kind of client. The accountant, the financial adviser, the other lawyer down the road who doesn't do what you do, or whoever refers you the work you want.
Three: Build a firm that delivers without you in every file
This is the lever for lifestyle. If every file needs you, your time is the ceiling on the whole firm, and your health and your family pay for it.
- Build a team. Making the right hire, designing the role properly, and holding people accountable.
- Develop internal processes and systems. SOPs, delegation frameworks, a established process of doing the work that doesn't live in your head.
- Implement the right kind of technology. Not just AI, or practice management software, but the things that actually remove you as the bottleneck.
Why most fixes don't last
Nearly every principal I know has had a go at one of these. The new rate card after a bad run of write-offs. The weekend spent documenting every process. The hire that was supposed to take the load off.
Most of the time, it works for a few months and then the firm drifts back to how it was. I wrote about this pattern in The Whole Map.
I don't think that's a discipline problem. The problem is that the change was left to willpower, and willpower runs out on a busy Thursday when a client is on the phone and a deadline is due.
How we help
We advise and build the money, client and team systems that make each of those happen.
As the systems go in, we help you to grow into the role of an owner alongside them. That second part matters more than people expect. A new pricing system doesn't hold if the owner still discounts on the phone to keep a client happy. A new hire doesn't take the load off if the owner still checks every word before anything goes out. The shift from lawyer to owner has to happen at the same time as the systems, or the systems quietly stop being used.
And because the changes are built into systems, rather than left to willpower, the changes actually stick.
That's really the whole of it. Three things you want, three things it takes, and a way of making the change last. Pretty much everything I send you each week fits somewhere in there.
If there's something you've put in place in your firm that has made a real difference on any of these, a pricing change, a hire, a system, I'd love to hear about it.
Email me at [email protected] and tell me. With your permission, I can share the best ones in a future email, without names, so other owners can learn from what's worked for you.
More next Tuesday,
Gordon