Videos

Now that you've decided that you're going to start a law firm, I want to talk to you about the dip. And this is what I call the stick to it or don't start at all rule. I was very influenced by Seth Godin's book, The Dip before I started my law firm. And in it, he makes the point that there are certain things in life. I like to think about snowboarding as an analogy where it makes sense to either push your way through the struggle that's necessary to get good at it or you [...]

It became absolutely obvious to me that I needed to start my own law firm when I sat down and did the back of the napkin math on the sort of money that I was earning for the law firm that I worked at versus what I was taking home myself. If you really sat down and you took every hour that you spent towards professional pursuits, I'm talking about hours from the minute that you walk out of your house in the morning till you get to the office until the time that you come home, [...]

As the breadwinner of my family, the number one concern that I had when I was starting my law firm in 2019 was whether I was going to go broke and whether I was making a big financial mistake. At the time, I was a partner at a large law firm and I had four young kids, the oldest of which was not yet 10 years old. And I was certainly the breadwinner in the family. I'm also not a trust fund baby. I don't have any particular financial backing from family. And I hadn't saved up [...]

As I talk about in one of my earlier videos, the greatest con ever that lawyers fall for is believing that people who have the ability to generate business and get clients, they've got some kind of magic that you don't. I could tell you, as someone who didn't have a ton of success in the large law firm environment, building up a huge book of business, that it is absolutely possible for most lawyers out there to get clients, certainly enough to make your practice viable for a period of time as you grow and develop [...]

It's really wonderful that we live in a digital age as we think about launching and running law firms because the ability to take your message to the market at some level of scale is really an unfair advantage compared to the way things were a decade ago. I am recording this video and I am going to take just a few minutes and I'm going to reach thousands of people. And to me, that was a very important part of my ability to bring only two clients with me from the large law firm where I [...]

Buying professional services is really challenging, and that is actually a secret weapon for the people who are able to generate the right kinds of attention. 20 years ago, I tore my meniscus and I needed to get my knee scoped, and I looked at a bunch of different doctors who are going to be able to do the surgery for me. And let me tell you, I read everything about them. Where they went to school, I saw some videos about what they do. I talked to people that worked with all of them as patients. [...]

One of the absolute worst things that I think that people can do when they are leaving a comfortable job at another law firm and they're making an entrepreneurial move is to practice door law. Anybody that walks in the door, I'm going to take on as a client. And I think that in the early going, as you're pushing your way through that first dip that's part of a bigger dip that you've got to push your way through if you're going to be successful, if you're like me, you're the breadwinner, you've got all these [...]

Among the sayings that I am most fond of using is that when you sell professional services, it's not a good idea to keep what you do a big secret. And one of the secrets to my success in my law firm has been generously giving my thoughts on a variety of different topics because it is not selling, it's about trust building. The clients that tend to hire me now have been tracking me for a long time. They see my videos. They see what's on LinkedIn. They get the newsletter. These business to business type [...]

I didn't have a ton of success getting my own book of business when I was working at the large law firm because I was making a lot of mistakes. Obviously there is a bit of a political game to be played in a large law firm. You've got consultants that come and they sit with the partners and they talk about business plans and you get a little business grad school type training. And you're supposed to write a marketing plan that fits within your practice group's plan. And then the practice group is supposed to [...]

Before I started my law firm, I spent a couple years digesting all of the content that I possibly could find about running law firms, launching law firms, marketing systems, business plans, operations, delivery, everything. It is something that was very interesting to me and I fell down a deep hole. And there were a lot of people at the time, and we're talking about 2016, 2017, 2018, as I was sort of coming around to the idea that I was really going to do this. And a lot of these people are trying to sell something [...]