Videos

Even though professional liability insurance and cyber insurance can be extraordinarily expensive, and I will tell you that I spend more than a thousand dollars a month on professional liability insurance and quite a lot of money on cyber insurance. Don't shortcut around this. I personally have an astonishingly large amount of professional liability insurance for small law firms, many multiples of what would be expected because I like to put my head on the pillow at the end of the night and know that I've done my very best and I am not going to worry [...]

One of the things that I wish that I did when I started my law firm, when it was early days, when I had more time than money, was to try to write down the things that I was doing on a repetitive basis to try to come up with a standard operating procedure. So how are invoices generated? What do we do to run conflict checks? What is the procedure for sending out engagement agreements, things of this nature? Because when it was just me, it was easy for me to just kind of rock and [...]

For the first 20 years of my practice when I worked at an AmLaw 100 and then an AmLaw 200 firm, the idea of asking clients for a lot of retainers was not something that I saw happen all that frequently. Certainly at the big law firm where I was a partner, if we were bringing on a new client and they wanted us to engage in a litigation matter, it was common for us to take a 50,000 or 100,000 retainer. But it wasn't the case that the firm felt like every client needs retainer money [...]

This was an enormous blind spot for me, but I can tell you without any question that the hardest part of running a law firm, at least in the six years that I have done it, has been hiring. And I had this absolutely wrong. This was such a blind spot for me. I come from the big law world where we're doing on- campus interviews and we're talking about Ivy League graduates, and these people want to work so hard that they will bill 12 hours a day and then mop the bathroom floor. They want [...]

Another one of my very large blind spots when I started this law firm in terms of unexpected hassle was benefits and 401k in particular. I offer health insurance and dental insurance and 401k and a number of other benefits to my employees. And none of it is easy to manage, but I will tell you that there is absolutely nothing that has been a bigger pain in my butt since I started this law firm than 401k. I am not a lawyer that had anything to do with ERISA since I clerked for a judge in [...]

As I've mentioned in some of my other videos, I have changed my vision for the firm. When I started out, I thought a dozen lawyers or so, maybe the same number of support staff, but I've realized that profitability and size are completely not correlated and I no longer desire to have a large law firm, particularly because I'm not interested in being a manager of people. At this point, I'm interested only in profitability, the bottom line. And so that is generally a smaller, efficient law firm. And so I would encourage people who want [...]

One of the best things that I've discovered since I started thinking about running my own law firm is a podcast on selling and running creative firms, professional firms, not law firms. This is law firm adjacent. It's called Two Bobs by David C. Baker, No Relation and Blair Ends. And these are two of the smartest people that have ever hooked up to a microphone and done a podcast. I have learned more about how to think about running my firm from listening to these two guys, even though there's nothing about this that is legal [...]

It costs money to make money, as they say, and that is certainly true with running law firms. I think that there are some people who are the exception that may have networks and referral partners or they're sufficiently niche that they are irreplaceable and they don't have a lot of competition that may not need to spend the same sorts of dollars on marketing and advertising as other lawyers do. But I have heard as a rule of thumb that law firms might spend somewhere between 10 and 20% of their gross revenue on advertising and [...]

Back when I worked at the large law firms, I had my own way of recording my time and it wasn't necessarily contemporaneous with the activities that I was engaging in. I was really careful about the time that I put into the system. I wanted to avoid big write-offs, that the partners who were managing me might feel compelled to put into my time entries. And so there was a lot of politics. It was a lot more complicated. And so I would sometimes ride the train the day after and go recreate my time and [...]

One of the things that I did that I wish I didn't when I started my law firm was to do a whole lot of useless tasks that I thought would be helpful to me. And in an effort to try to get some certainty around things that are uncertain, I tried to control maybe a little bit too much some of the things that maybe I needed to hold a little bit more loosely. And I'll give one example, and it's the creation of a whole different variety of engagement agreements that I was going to [...]