Creating a Successful Law Practice › membershipsite-downloadables › ... · 2014-10-13 · That...

Creating a Successful Law Practice

Week 1 of 12

TOPIC Goal Setting, Magic Statement & Picking a Niche

Homework, supporting materials & transcript

of audio recording

© 2014 Copyright HowToManageASmallLawFirm.com

Week 1 Homework

Establishing Goals, Setting a Practice Area & Magic Statement.

Listen: Audio for Week 1.

Review: Week 1 Materials.

Time Management Exercise: Quantify How You Manage Your Time. Fill out

worksheets.

Writing Exercises: o Personal Goals: Identify and write out your Personal Goals.

o Professional Goals: Identify and write out your Professional Goals.

o Financial Goals. Fill out worksheets.

o Practice Area: Summarize ideal case/matter and your ideal client.

Write out your Magic Statement.

Action: Say Magic Statement out loud at least 15 times and say it to at least

3 people who don’t love you.

Weekly Call – Follow‐up Homework:

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

© Copyright 2014 How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm II Inc. All rights reserved. These documents may not be reproduced without written permission.

PERSONAL/SOCIAL GOALSQuantify How YouManage Your Time

Do you have an inappropriate relationship with your law firm!?

No matter how much time and how much energy you put into your law firm, it’s never going to love you, and it’s never going to give you a hug.

Your law firm is your mule.

It’s there to pull your plow, so you can grow crops to feed yourself and your family.


STEP 1: Circle everything you do in a typical day...

PERSONAL GOALS

Audit Trust Account

Audit Accounts PayableEat Breakfast

Eat Lunch

Eat Dinner

Present A Speech

Conduct A Seminar

Ongoing CLE

Sleep

See A Movie

Attend A Sporting Event

Read A Book

Find The Right Person To Whom Make A Referral

Get A Haircut

Meet With Prospective Referral Source

Learn More About Law Office Management

Visit A Client’s Place Of Business

Personal Hygiene

Commute To & From Office

Alone Time With Significant Other

Spiritual Time

Correspondence On Behalf Of Clients

Voir Dire

Meet With Investigators

Prepare For Deposition

Take Deposition

Develop Discovery Strategy

Meet With Litigation Support Professionals

Motion Calander

Visit Clients Who Cannot Come To You

Attend Networking Events

Read Newspaper

Document An Of-fice Procedure

Document An Office Policy For Staff

Staff TrainingGet Training On Law Office

Management Software

Spot-Check Staff

Pick Up Dry Cleaning

Drop Off Kids At School

Fill Up Car

With Gas

Grocery Shopping

Oil Change

Give Kids Allowance

Help With Homework

Play Bills At Home

Interview Prospetive Clients

Chase Down Old Accounts Recevable

Payroll

Pay Bills At The Office

Legal Research

Drafs Contracts

Negotiation For Clients

Draft & Review Documents

Attend Hearing

Trial PreparationConduct Trial

Conduct Evidentiary Hearings

File Maintenance

Put Out Fires

Meet With The Accountant

Learn About How To Make It Rain

Fire Clients

Train Clients

Witness Prep.


168 Hours I. Things You MUST Do Yourself Every Day And Cannot Delegate.

#HRS/ WK Sleep ______ Eat ______ Personal Hygiene ______ Commute ______ Other ______ Subtotal

II. Things You WANT To Do

Exercise/ Hobby ______ Kids Playtime/ Homework ______ Personal Time w/Spouse or S.O. ______ Spiritual Time ______ Social Time w/Friends + Family Other ______ Subtotal

III. Things You Do For The Mule To Keep It Healthy + Productive.

Marketing Networking ______ Sales Calls ______ P.R. ______

Management Training + Supervision Staff ______ Policies & Procedures ______

Financials

Budget/ A/R’s/ Evergreens ______

Trust Account Management ______ Legal Services

Calls w/ or for Clients ______ Research ______ Court/ Prep for Court ______

Draft/ Review K’s + other Agmts ______ CLE ______ Other ______ Subtotal

Total: 168 hrs


STEP 3: Count hours

I Things You MUST Do Yourself Every Day And Cannot Delegate#HRS

Subtotal

II Things You WANT To Do

III Things You Do For The Mule

#HRS

Subtotal

#HRS

Subtotal

TOTAL

24 Hrs x 7 Days = 168 Hrs Available to you every week. Since life’s not perfect and some weeks will be better than oth-ers, it’s best to average every two-weeks. In other words, some weeks the mule needs you to prepare for a big case so you’ll give it more Hrs. Other weeks you need time with friends + family. Use this exercise like any other kind of budget as a man-agement tool not an edict carved in stone.


From the Newsletter:

A Busy Lawyer’s Guide To Budgeting Your Time

In honor of the recent Memorial Day Weekend I re-read (actually I have it on CD, so . On its surface, this week’s article is about how the most Successful Rainmakers budget their limited time to balance work and life.

But there’s a deeper meaning here for you, which appropriately-enough following a Memorial Day Weekend, was perfectly captured in In honor of the recent Memorial Day Weekend I re-read Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book “The Greatest Generation”, which I highly recommend the audio version narrated by the author.

On it’s surface, this article may appear to be about how the most Successful Rainmakers budget their time to balance work and life. But there’s a deeper meaning here for you that we can all learn from the Veterans Brokaw interviewed for the book who reported the feeling of having “lost” the years they spent at war, and being motivated to find a way to “catch up” upon their return to civilian life. According to the book at least, one of the reason for all the extraordinary civilian accomplishments of so many of those Veterans upon their return was the time and pressure of sitting in foxholes planning and prioritizing the way they’d use their re-maining time when they got back.

I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself if you need to go out and sit in a hole in order to get your own priori-ties in order or if a few quite hours in an empty conference room with the phone unplugged and the comput-er turned-off will suffice. Either way, I give you. . .

A Busy Lawyer’s Guide To Budgeting Your Time

24x 7 = 168There are 168 hours in a week. In the workbook that came with your copy of How To Market A Small Law Firm you should have found a simple worksheet I created to help you budget your time to be sure you get to spend enough of it with family & friends, instead of in the barn with the mule. With proper planning and just a little bit of discipline, you’ll find it takes far less time, than most people think to professionally operate a suc-cessful law firm.

Very often, lawyers are actually disadvantaged by our law school education which emphasizes adherence to precedents. Too often the lawyers with whom I share these exercises begin by budgeting the life they are already unsatisfied with, instead of the one they want to lead.

Instead I want you to begin by thinking about every single thing you do in a day from the mundane tasks like eating and going to the bathroom to the truly important activities such as spending quality time with family and exercise. Then list all the things you do for the business including time spent on administrative tasks like pay-ing bills, training staff, marketing, putting out fires, and of course, delivering high-quality legal services. Don’t even bother to think about how much time each task takes. We’ll get to that later.


A “Typical” Time Budget

From the hundreds of lawyers with whom I’ve done this exercise, I have a pretty good idea how you’ll likely want to budget your time. Most lawyers with whom I’ve done this exercise over the years end up budgeting their time something like this:

First, we usually talk about the things they MUST do each day, like eating & sleeping. Almost all of the things that absolutely must get done in a day are biological in nature, but also include things like your commute to & from work.

So, before you can get to your workbook, while you’re driving and just listening, let’s just make some rough estimates.

• Budget 8 hours a day for sleep, times 7 days is 56 hours a week for sleep.

• Let’s figure most people spend about 2 hours a day on personal hygiene.

• I’d like you to budget at least half an hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch and two for dinner every week-day and a little bit more for the weekends, so we’ll figure 20 hours on meals.

• And for most lawyers, there’s about an hour-a-day of commuting to & from work five days a week, so that’s5 more hours for the budget.

That still leaves you with 93 hours you can choose how to use each week. Now, let’s get to the things we want to do, but too often sacrifice to the mule.

• I want you to budget at least 10 hours each week to spend with family & friends. If you don’t have any familyor friends with whom you can spend the time, use it to find some friends

• Budget 5 hours a week for exercise. If you don’t take care of your body, it’s not going to take care of youand you won’t be able to go out and find lots of great clients, or enjoy the fruits of your labors.

• Budget a couple of hours a week on any hobbies you have, or just use the time for quite or spiritual time torecharge your batteries.

OK, by this time, you’re well rested, well fed and clean. And you’ve spent some quality time with family & friends and taking care of yourself. Guess what? You still have 76 productive hours left to feed the mule!


PERSONAL GOALS Decide upon personalized GOALS which are measurable, realistic and driven by your desire.

# Sleep 7-8 hours each day, so that my body is well rested and I am living a balanced life.

# Walk/ Run/ Bike ___ minutes ___ times a week,

# Work out ____ times a week. This is important to keep a positive mental state

as well as staying physically fit.

# Reduce my BMI to ____ by __________. # Lose _____ lbs by _______. This will involve both daily exercise and changing of

eating habits.

# _________________________________________________________

# _________________________________________________________

# _________________________________________________________

# Read one 'real' book a week.

# Spend ___ hrs per week on ____________________, my favorite hobby.

# Spend ___ hrs per week studying ________________ (language/ musical instrument/ art/ creative endeavor)

# _________________________________________________________

# _________________________________________________________

# _________________________________________________________

# Volunteer ___ hrs/ wk in one charity/ organization I truly care about.

# Focus on family without distraction ___ evenings per week

# Spend one night a week on "date night".

# Plan a ___ week vacation.

# _________________________________________________________

# _________________________________________________________


Why Do You WantYour Law Firm Business

To Be Successful?

I Want my Law Firm Business to be Successful so that

or

I Want my Law Firm Business to be Successful to be able to

or

I Want my Law Firm Business to be Successful because

Let’s align your true motivations with your Marketing plan.Let’s give you almost effortless energy.Let’s make your success unstoppable by working-out the answers to a fewseemingly simple questions that you’ve probably never been asked before:


Step 1. Visualize the life you WANT to be living 12 months from now. Use the worksheet on the next page to be sure you remember you take into account the cost of life & disability insurance to protect that lifestyle once achieved and project it forward for the way you want to be loving your life 12 months from now, in three years, and even five years from now.

Step 2. Alright, so what does it cost to live that lifestyle? [A]

Step 3. Now multiply [A] times two and that gives you your annual Gross Income Goal: [B]

Step 4. Divide [B] by 12 months to determine your gross monthly revenue requirement: [C]

Step 5. Here we get a little more granular. Some might say “gritty”. There are 52 weeks in the year ahead. Deduct all the major holidays and you’re left with only 50 weeks. Deduct another 2-weeks for “life” to happen to you (kid gets sick, best friend needs a shoulder to cry on, the day is just too nice to be cooped up in an office so you go to the beach) and now you’re left with just 48 productive weeks in the year. Now budget at least 2 weeks for a vaca-tion so you can thank yourself and your family for supporting your career and now we have no more than just 46 productive weeks in which to achieve your annual financial goal.

Annual Gross Income Goal [A] divided by 46 (or fewer) weeks = Weekly Gross Income Goal [D]

So now you know what your law firm has to generate in gross revenues each week in order to hit your gross income goals, in order to extract your net income requirements in order to support the lifestyle you want to enjoy.

Keep that number in mind. This will be an important number we will refer back to and I’ll show you how and why to measure it when we get to the modules about Eradicating Ac-counts Receivable and Financial IQ for Lawyers.

kristen

Typewritten Text

FINANCIAL GOALS


Your Present Age

Age of your Kids

NOW 1YR 3YR 5YR

Home

Auto 1

Auto 2

Toy

INSURANCE

Health

Life

Disability

Umbrella

EDUCATION

HOUSEHOLD

Groceries

Domestic Help

Utilities

Telephone

Cable

Internet

Maintenance

INVESTMENTS

SAVINGS

CHARITABLE

CAUSES

ENTERTAINMENT

OTHER

TOTAL:

Let’s look at your spending:

How much money does your law firm business need to produce... in order to sup-port the lifestyle you have chosen for yourself?


NICHE/ MAGIC STATEMENT

Tips to Craft a Successful “Magic Statement” • Identify who you are helping and what you are helping them do.• Target your ideal audience and craft your Magic Statement to appeal to the “A client” you want to

represent.• Use language your client will understand.• Don’t be long winded -‐ be to the point.• Make it memorable.• Make it unique.• Ask yourself if the Magic Statement may encourage the wrong type of clients and think about how

you could be more specific to exclude those you don’t want.• Short and sweet – think elevator speech.• Use Magic Statement to invite further conversation.• Speak with your own “voice”. What works for one, may not be right for you.• Play with multiple versions with different adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc.• Find a Magic Statement that makes you smile each time you say it. (It should show that you enjoy

doing what you do!)• “I help . . .”• “I protect . . .”• “I defend . . .”• “I fight for . . .”• “I represent . . .”• Edit, Edit, Edit, Refine, Refine, Refine, Boil it Down, Boil it Down, Boil it Down.

kristen

Typewritten Text

- Examples

© 2010 Copyright How To Manage A Small Law Firm.com & RJon Robins 1

Week 1

RJON: Well hello everyone and welcome to the 2009 First Quarter Start Your Own Law Firm in 90 Days or Less Coaching Program. For those of you who know me, thank you for joining us. For those of you who only know me from my, from seminars and workshops and some of the audio programs that we offer I’m going to just take a few minutes and begin by introducing myself.

My name is RJon Robins and I’m the founder of howtomakeitrain.com but my motivation in doing this program is really, this is really more of a passion project for me, because you know I started my career as a solo practi-tioner and I quite frankly fell on my face, and had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way. I was one of these guys that went to law school and didn’t really have a whole lot of expectation or interest in actually practicing law, actually, until I discovered I actually had kind of a knack for bankruptcy law and then actually clerked for a, or interned for a federal bankruptcy judge after law school for a while and then sort of got into opening my own law firm by accident. I discovered that I had so many friends and family who once they discovered that I had actually passed the bar and became an attorney they came to me with problems and needed help, and I one day I just decided okay it’s time to open my own law firm.

And that is when I discovered everything they forgot to teach us in law school, didn’t they. They’d teach us all how to perform legal services but they really don’t teach us about the business of running a law firm. And so there I was, I had opened my own solo practice and you know proceeded to make every kind of marketing and management mistake you probably could have made. Fortunately I didn’t mess up my trust account, other than, I didn’t mess up my trust account and I didn’t mess up my calendar so bad that I violated any statutes of limita-tions but short of that I probably made every mistake that you could make. You can still be surprised because what do they teach any of us in law school about the business of running a law firm. You know I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But to make a long story short I was there practicing as a solo practitioner and doing business law and I discov-ered that the Florida Bar had a department, wonderful department called the law office management assistant service – LOMAS, which is, teaches lawyers about the business of running a law firm. And I was calling that department so often for help with so many different things that I guess I struck up something of a relationship with the guy I was always talking to, and then came that eventful moment I guess you’d say, you know the say-ing goes you have to be in the right place at the right time but that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

You have to be in the right place at the right time and say the right thing to the right person. And so as it turned out I was in the right place speaking with the law office management assistant service on the Florida Bar. I was at the right time. I was speaking to them at a time when they were looking for a new practice management advisor to replace my predecessor who had been recruited away to go work for the Florida Supreme Court, and I was speaking to the right person who was the director and I said the right thing. Which is that I was really interested in learning about the business side of running a law firm, and to make a very long story short he made

Transcript

© 2010 Copyright How To Manage A Small Law Firm.com & RJon Robins2

me an offer that I couldn’t refuse and so I, he convinced me to close down my solo practice which had finally started to get off the ground (and after many miss-starts I might add), and so I, you know, I put my boat in stor-age, I packed up my apartment on Las Olas on the inter-coastal in Fort Lauderdale where I had a very wonderful enjoyable life rollerblading up and down the boardwalk every morning before I went to work, and I moved to Tallahassee, Florida which is the headquarters of the Florida Bar, which for those of you who don’t know Tal-lahassee I didn’t understand the first week or two that I was there and I would go round and ask everyone ‘Well what do you do fun?’ and they would answer that they go to Atlanta. Atlanta’s five hours away from Tallahassee for those of you that don’t know.

Anyway, so I landed at the Florida Bar, I became a practice management advisor where I had the opportunity to work with you know, thousands and thousands of attorneys on every kind of law office marketing and manage-ment issue that I could have imagined and every time I thought I had heard everything, something new came at me which was always interesting.

But my favorite work was always helping lawyers start their own law firms. It’s just something that I have a passion for. It used to be me. And when I left the Florida Bar, I mentioned I was going to talk about this, when I left the Florida Bar that’s the first time that I discovered that I was not in the minority. You know, I know that being a solo practitioner gives a tendency to feel like you’re some kind of a loser, like you couldn’t make it or weren’t good enough to be in a large firm. But when I got to the bar and I got access to all the data and statistics and started speaking to thousands of lawyers a year, not to mention some of the you know the director of the LOMAS department and JRs been there since 1978 and the other practice management advisors from around the country who I got to work with and they mentored me and it was wonderful.

And what I discovered is that the statistics bear out the opposite – that solo practitioners are actually the ma-jority, the vast majority of attorneys in the United States today. Always have been, and still are. Statistically it breaks down, it’s all on the website by the way under the Press Room under Statistics if you want to see these stats but there’s about 1,300,000 attorneys in the United States today according to the American Bar Associa-tion.

Roughly 10% work, a little under 10% work in large law firms which is no big surprise because large law firms typically only recruit 10% of the graduating class and usually there’s a migration out of a large law firm not usually into a large law firm. About 10% of the attorneys in the United States are working for the government – they’re not actively in private practice they work for the government.

About 7 or 10%, 7 or 8% are like me – we’re no longer actively practicing law. That would include in-house general counsel, people who just decide to pursue other careers with their JD not necessarily doing consulting or educating lawyers. 15% work for mid-size firms, and if I’m doing my math right (it’s correct on the website but I’m doing this off the top of my head here), but I do know that roughly 60% of the attorneys in the United States work for firms of five lawyers or fewer. And I will tell you having done many, many, many disciplinary consultations on small law firms of five lawyers or fewer, and comparing notes with other practice management advisors from other state bars around the country, that the vast majority of small law firms really are nothing more than a collection of solo practitioners.


They’re functioning as roommates, they don’t really function as a law firm, they don’t share, they don’t share any of the hallmarks that you would expect to see to categorize a group of attorneys working together as func-tioning as a firm.

That is they don’t share a common billing system, they don’t share common budgets, they don’t share a com-mon filing system, a conflict of interest system, calendaring system, they don’t share common policies or proce-dures – not important policies and procedures. They might share policies and procedures when the office opens and closes but you know when it comes to the real meat and potatoes and mechanics of running a law firm busi-ness they don’t share those hallmarks. So the vast majority of attorneys in the country, 60% are solos or working in small firms and the majority of even that 60% are either outright solos or for practical purposes they’re solos.

Anyway, so after I left LOMAS I, very long story made short again because we’re on a tight timeline here, I raised venture capital to create a business that was going to outsource the administrative functions for small law firms and that went okay. I did that for a while and got recruited out of that position – that was with a large accounting firm that was my venture capital partner, and I got recruited out of that position by another consult-ing firm where I went back on the road for three more years doing consulting with mid-size firms all over the country, and when I was at LOMAS I lived out of a Dobbs kit and a suitcase because I was on the road.

Half of every month I was literally on the road doing disciplinary consultations, voluntary consultations, speeches, workshops, seminars, things like that for the Florida Bar. And when I went to do the private consult-ing with the mid-size firms I was still on the road but now I was going on airplanes all over the place which sounds very glamorous but it’s really, it’s something that I’d been trying, it’s something that really motivated me to start How To Make It Rain because working for mid-size firms was great, you know it’s very exciting to get four figure bonuses, you know high four figure bonuses at the end of the year, but then only firms that could af-ford to give me high four figure bonuses at the end of the year could get access to what I knew and I really like working with solo practitioners. It’s where I am most comfortable with small law firms because that’s my roots.

And we’ll be talking throughout this 90 Day Start Your Own Law Firm Program about picking a niche, and this is my niche for better for worse, this is my niche, it’s what I enjoy doing the most. I like bringing, you know $10,000 strategy sessions to groups of non-competing solo practitioners from all over the country, and being able to deliver that to you for a lot less than $10,000, but still give you the $10,000 value because I like to see you get results and of course it makes me feel great when I get thank you letters and testimonials and, you know I like to brag about the successes that we have, and so that’s what I do. That’s who I am.

We also have some other coaches who are on the roster, or on the faculty I’d guess you’d say at How to Make It Rain, and you’ll meet some of them throughout the calls. We have, we have, the approach that we try to create when we, the approach we try to take when we created I should say How To Make It Rain, was the recognition that no one can be the best at everything. And so, in my travels I have met some outstanding consultants and coaches and experts in various aspects of law office marketing and management and attorney motivation and other things like that, so what I did was I went out and found the people who I considered to be the best in each area, so that you get the best, you know when we’re talking about technology we’ll bring you the best of the


best, when we talk about time management and getting out of your way and all that kind of stuff. That’s sort of the philosophy of How To Make It Rain.

You know, we’re all about teaching lawyers, helping lawyers in small firms – we stick to small firms – to make more money, who have more fun in the practice of law because happy lawyers make more money, and we like to be happy and we like to have fun.

Okay. Okay. So welcome to the 2009 First Quarter Group, Coaching and Mentoring Group of How to Start Your Own Law Firm in 90 Days or Less. I’d like to first start off by introducing some of the members of my staff who are on the call who you all have interacted with and will continue to interact with in order to get access to me. Tony Falcon is our administrator. Tony, I’m going to take you off of mute, just say hello for one minute. Tony?

TONY: Good evening everyone. Welcome.

RJON: Thanks. Tony sounds like he’s driving home. And we have Henry Harlow on the line. Henry is a very experienced coach who you’ll learn more about and you’ll get to meet him. I’ve known Henry for ten years; he’s one of the coaches here at How To Make It Rain. Let me see if I can get you Henry. Henry, do you want to say a word or two? Henry, do you want to say a word or two?

HENRY: Hi there, Henry Harlow here.

RJON: Alright, that’s Henry. And Grant is on the line but I’m sorry Grant I can’t tell which call, which number you’re on. I only have phone numbers not names. Anyway let’s start off with a little housekeeping.

The best way to get in touch with me is always going to be by sending an email to Christina at How To Make It Rain or sending an email to Tony at How To Make It Rain. I almost always insist on having a telephone ap-pointment and that’s not only because it allows me to be prepared for the call and for all the other reasons that you’ll learn from me as to why you should always schedule telephone appointments, but it’s also the only way I can be fair to my Platinum one-on-one personal coaching clients who don’t really want to be interrupted when they’re paying me upwards of $500 an hour to meet with me. So I have to schedule telephone appointments. Fortunately I don’t sleep very much and so I’m usually available to schedule appointments very early in the morning and even late at night to accommodate your schedule with enough notice.

Okay, I have next on my list that we need to review the terms of the program so that everyone, everyone knows how it works. This quarter, the program is free and I am doing that because I just woke up one day and I decided I really, really wanted to do this program again. I’ve done this program with many, many attorneys over the years, I’ve had great success with them and it’s just something that I personally, it’s just like a passion project for me.

I really love helping attorneys start law firms and I like to see their success and I like to get thank you letters and I like to brag about all the success of our clients and our members, and so this quarter I decided to do it for free


because I want to get a bunch of people into the group and I know that not everyone is in a position where they can afford $1200.

We did get some flack when people came to the application and to apply for a $1200, I mean a free course and discover that I was requiring a $1200 performance deposit, and that to me is lesson number one for everyone on the group. If a prospective client comes to you and they demonstrate that they lack the wherewithal and or the commitment to follow through on your services it’s probably a client you don’t want to be working with to begin with. The terms of the deposit are that you will get your money back at the end of the program if you attend all the calls, if you do all the homework and if you demonstrate at the end of it that you actually opened a law firm. And that can be a home office, it can be a traditional office, you can office with someone else, it could even be a part-time office. I just want to see that I didn’t waste my time and I want to see that you put our advice to good use.

Because if you follow the steps that we’re going to give you over the next twelve weeks you will have your own law firm in twelve weeks. And it will be a viable law firm that can produce enough income to support you and your family and give you a solid foundation to build from, and to make it as big and successful as you want.In order to do that for you in just twelve weeks I’m going to cut out a lot of the theory.

We’re going to get into things where I could give you a big long education but I’m probably just going to skip it and say look, here’s the way to do it. It might not be the best way to do it because there might be many best ways to do it, but in the interest of getting you up and going in twelve weeks I’m just going to tell you a best way to do it.

For example when we get to the software, there is a dozen different software products out there on the market, you could spend twelve weeks just investigating all of the great software products on the market, but when we get to that section of the program I’m just going to tell you the one to get started with; that’s the one you should use, next, let’s move on, because we have a lot to cover.

Okay, what to expect over the next twelve weeks. The topics we are going to cover are as follows. We are going to cover goal-setting, coming up with a strategic plan.

We’re going to talk about choosing a location, we’re going to talk about, we’re going to get you choosing a location.

We’re going to talk about you need to acquire to make that location function as a law firm. We’re going to be talking about all of your technology needs.

We’re going to be talking about your policies and your procedures. Those are the rules and the regulations that make your law firm work for you rather than allowing the law firm to eat you alive. That’s going to be a really important section when we get to it.

We’re going to be talking about financial management, budgeting, budget projections and we’re going to be teaching you how to manage a trust account to be able to use it as a profitable tool that trust accounts are meant


to be. Most attorneys don’t understand how to use a trust account to protect their profits but I’m going to show you how to do that very quickly and very easily.

And then the last three weeks of the call, the last three weeks of the program is going to be devoted to nothing but rainmaking. And you’ll spend your last month just marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing so that when you open your doors you have some deal flow coming in to feed yourself and feed your family, because there’s nothing worse – take it from me, I was there – there’s nothing worse than opening your doors and waiting for the phone to ring. When I opened my doors I had a book of business with friends and family but working for friends and family is not the same thing as having strangers give you a load of confidence by hiring you.

Okay, I have a promise to make to you. I’ve two promises to make to you actually. And this is just to give you all some permission and so you don’t go crazy because I know as attorneys sometimes we tend to be perfection-ists, and so here are the two promises: promise number

1 – nothing is going to exactly as the way you plan when you open your own law firm; 2 - promise number two – something, probably more than one thing will definitely go wrong.

Those are two things that I can absolutely promise you without a shadow of a doubt.

That nothing will go exactly right and something will go wrong.

And that’s okay because everyone who’s ever opened a successful law firm had to deal with those facts of life.

The second thing that I want to talk about before we get into the substance of it tonight is the difference between knowing and doing. A lot of the things that I’m going to be teaching you, and a lot of the information we’re go-ing to be sharing with you, and a lot of the exercises we’re going to be asking you to do, your initial reaction is very likely going to be ‘Oh, I already know that’, and I want to ask you to resist the temptation to allow yourself to say that.

When your mind says ‘Oh I already know that’, there’s a tendency to on a subconscious level to dismiss it and then figure you can skip the step because you already know it.

Well there’s a lot of things that you already know but you don’t do. And so this program is really geared to-wards getting you to take action in small steps that lead you to your goal to open a law firm in twelve weeks. So anytime you hear yourself think ‘Oh I already know that’, the red flag should be going up, that that’s probably a topic that you need to spend extra special attention to. You don’t accidentally fail to take action on it.

Last but not least, and this is about as inspirational as I get because I tend to be much more realistic with people, I just want to take a moment to talk about all the people who are going to tell you that you can’t open your own law firm. And if you’re listening on the call and no one has ever told you you can’t open your own law firm, then that’s terrific and just bear with us because I promise you there are other people on the call who have post-poned opening their own law firm because people have told them they can’t do it. So I need to speak to those


people right now.

In my typical fashion I tend to be very analytical about things so why should this be any exception. Let’s talk about the people who tell you, you can’t open your own law firm, and just sort of dismiss them category by category.

The first category are people who have never opened their own law firm. Those people don’t get an opinion because they don’t know what they’re talking about. If they’ve never opened their own law firm how can they tell you that you can’t do it.

The second category are going to be people who already have their own law firm, and they tell you, you can’t do it. I’m sorry if I’m the first one, you know who’s going to break this news to you but there’s a lot of people out there who believe in the myth of competition. I don’t believe in such a thing as competition, and we’ll talk more about that when we get to marketing. But there are a lot of lawyers out there who operate from a place of fear and scarcity and when they hear that another attorney is going to open a new office, instead of thinking ‘Wow, this is potentially a joint venture partner, this is potentially a referral source for me, this is potentially someone who I can give my small cases to, to feed them and keep my clients happy so that I can focus on the big stuff’, they see nothing but competition and fear. Those people are dangerous and you need to learn to rec-ognize them when you spot them. Likewise, the partners in large law firms who might be depending on you to feed their own families because they’re leveraging your time, and it’s in their best interests to keep you down. When someone in a large law firm, particularly someone who gets a piece of your productivity, when that person tells you, you can’t open your own law firm, run. That’s not a person that has your best interests at heart.

Okay, well that’s pretty much, that’s pretty much me being motivational.

What I consider to be motivational is when I tell you to take action you take action, you see results, you feel empowered and then you come back to me and say ‘Fantastic RJon, what can I do to get more of this, the high that comes from getting results’.

Okay, we’re generally going to follow a preset agenda each week just so we can make the best use of our time together, as follows. I’m going to begin the call every week by introducing the topic and introducing any guests that we have on the call, because we’re going to have guests from time to time. Second, we’re going to review the homework from the last week. Some of the homework is going to be turned into me before the call and I’ll just go through and review it for everyone. Some of it is going to require your input and we’ll take you off mute and do little exercises so that everyone can benefit. Third, we’re going to cover the topic at hand and hand out the assignments. And fourth, we’re going to have an open question and answer period and I’ll stay on the call as long as reasonably necessary and answer everyone’s calls.

Okay, with that said the topic tonight is goal-setting, picking a practice area niche that you’re going to dominate, and third, developing a magic statement. These calls will be recorded and you will get copies of the recordings so don’t worry about if you missed a sentence here or there.


I’ve helped hundreds of lawyers develop and implement business plans and open their own law firms. And I can tell you that the ones who have had the greatest success are those who began by developing the right kind of goals. And that is goals that are realistic, measurable and address all of the true motivations that drive us to open and operate successful law firms, not just the financial goals. In my experience the right kind of goals are those that address your financial, personal and your professional needs. If your law firm isn’t serving each of these it’s probably not going to work very well in the long run, like a stool that’s got a leg that’s way too short and the whole thing tilts.

You know you’re not going to be able to make much of a commitment to building a firm that doesn’t meet your financial needs, right. If it doesn’t make enough money for you to live you have to give up sooner or later. Would you be much more committed if the business was able to meet you financial needs, but only at the ex-pense of your relationships with your family and friends, or even your health? Of course not. And I know this is another rhetorical question but you know how successful do you think you or anyone else for that matter could ever expect to be doing work every day that you found to be intellectually unsatisfying, or for clients that you don’t like. I personally was first exposed to this idea that your goals, that a lawyer’s goals have to be multi-dimensional when I was introduced to a really great book by Cynthia Kersey called Unstoppable, and once I absorbed those lessons I finally had an analytic framework for understanding exactly why some lawyers are only moderately successful while others with seemingly, in my opinion, no greater talent or skill, they seemed to have extraordi-nary success in both their professional and their personal lives.

In preparation for this call I had the opportunity to speak with one or two of you personally and I did my best to talk to you out of your stated practice area, and I was doing that to test your resolve. And that’s because I’ve seen lawyers make successes of themselves in almost every practice area imaginable. And I’ve seen plenty who have failed in those same practice areas.

But what I’ve never been able to do is predict success or failure based on anything other than how well their goals fit their lives. One of my favorite quotes from Kersey, I wrote this down in anticipation of tonight’s call, is as follows “By living on purpose in pursuing dreams and goals that are consistent with your natural strengths and desires you can create unstoppable passion almost effortlessly. And when that happens nothing can stop you”.

And I’ll tell you from personal experience that is absolutely true. There were lots and lots of roadblocks that we ran into in preparing for tonight’s call in getting this program pulled together, but I have a passion for helping lawyers starting their law firms and there was nothing that was going to stop me, not even if we had to do this with tin cans and string tied together.

Okay, so, let’s talk about our goals.

Financial goals – law firm economics one-on-one. 50 cents of every dollar you collect is probably going to go to overhead when you are a solo practitioner. Even large law firms, even very well run small law firms don’t operate on the rule of three. That is, roughly 33% of the revenue that you generate is going to go to overhead.


Roughly 33% of the revenue you generate is going to be need to be kept for a rainy day and only the last third of the revenue you generate is actually going to go into your pocket to take home and live on. So if your goal is to take home $100,000 for example, we need to make sure you’re generating at least $300,000 of revenue for the firm.

24 x 7, multiply 24 hours times 7 days a week and you find that every single person on the planet has the same 168 hours available to them with which to be productive every week. When we take away the time that you’re going to spend doing the things that you have to do biologically, you biologically have to eat, you don’t have a choice; you have to sleep, you don’t have a choice; you have to commute back and forth to the office, unless you have a home office, you don’t have a choice. And then you make time for the things that you want to do; spending time with your friends and family; spending time with your kids; exercising; hobbies – all the things that make a life. What you’ve got left over is your inventory of time. That’s the time that you need to maximize in order to generate your revenue. If you take 52 weeks in a year and you take away all the major holidays – Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years etcetera, they add up to 2 weeks and then you’re down to 50 weeks. And you take away 2 weeks that happen to you because life happens, your car breaks down, your dog gets sick, your best friend needs a shoulder to cry on. Life happens to you for 2 full weeks in the year. Now you’re down to only 48 weeks. You want to schedule a 2 week vacation at least every year so you can be civilized and give back to your family who support you. And now have really only 46 productive weeks in the year with which to produce the revenue you need to produce. Especially when you’re running your own law firm and your income is based entirely on your actions; you need to be acutely aware and protective of your time.

Okay, what you do, and in the homework you’ll get a formula for how to do this but I’m just going to explain it so you hear it once before you get to the homework. When you set your financial goals what you need to do is, number one – you need to make a budget for what it is going to cost to live the life that you want to live.

Forget about the life you’re living.

If you live in a crappy house and drive an old beat-up car and don’t have enough money to take you spouse out for a nice dinner, leave that life behind. You need to talk about the life that you want to live. If that’s going to cost $120,000 a year well then you know you need to make $10,000 a month. If you know that you have 46 weeks in a year to make $120,000 a year you know you need to make $2600 every week. If you know that you are going to have only 40 productive hours after you do all the biological things that you need to do, do all the family things that you want to do and then you cut that 40 hours in half because half your time is now going to be spent running your business, you now know that you need to generate roughly $130 an hour, for every hour that you work. That’s your burn rate. So if a person comes to you and they have a problem and they don’t have $130 an hour to give you to solve that problem, unfortunately you need to turn them away. And that’s the reason why I say that the most noble thing we can do as legal professionals is make a lot of money. Make more money than we need so that when someone comes to us with a righteous case that really needs our help but simply can’t afford us, we can afford to help them.

Being broke sucks. It doesn’t do anyone any good, doesn’t do you any good, doesn’t do your family any good, doesn’t do your staff any good, doesn’t do the community any good, doesn’t do our legal profession any good.


We need to make you financially successful so that you can do all the work you want to do. Okay, I think I’ve said enough about financial goals.

Now we can talk about personal goals. If you ever want to get a good laugh stand around a group of lawyers and start talking about how many hours you spent in the office last week. And inevitably some other lawyer is going to puff out his or her chest and say ’50 hours? I spent 60 hours’, and then someone else will try and top that and say ‘I spent 65 hours’, as if there was something to be proud of like that you were spending so many hours in the office slaving away for the business instead of figuring out how to get the business to slave away for you.

If you ever catch yourself thinking of your law firm as your baby you’re heading in the wrong direction.

A law firm is not your baby. The appropriate analogy between a lawyer and his or her law firm is not an analogy to a parent and a child. It is an analogy to a mule and a farmer.

If I came to anyone on the group and said ‘Hey listen, I’ve got this really great business proposition for you – you’re going to invest millions of dollars of your time over an 18 year period. It’s going to require 24 hours a day work, night and day, blood, sweat and tears. At any point during that 18 years due to no fault of your own the business could disappear and oh by the way in a best case scenario what we’re projecting at the end of this is that maybe, maybe the business will break even and pay for itself’. That would be a stupid business investment.

No one in the group would allow a friend or a family member or a client to invest in that kind of a business proposition. That is the relationship between a parent and a child.

A farmer on the other hand, keeps a mule for only one reason. And that is to do work for the farmer. Specifically to pull the plough and the plough gets pulled to grow crops, and the crops get grown to feed the farmer and his family. And if the crops aren’t growing, the mule’s got to go. Even if it’s a nice mule it’s still got to go. You need to think of your law firm as your mule. It’s there to serve your needs and to work for you. Not the other way around. And you need to be our kind of lawyer. You need to be How To Make It Rain type of lawyer who takes pride in how smart you are by training your mule to work for you out in the field without you having to be there doing it all yourself.

So we’re going to be emphasizing a lot of systems and a lot of procedures and a lot of policies and a lot of auto-matic rainmaking techniques and methods that bring business to you so that you don’t have to be there slaving away day and night.

I want to take a moment and just speak to the attorneys who are on the call right now who don’t bill by the hour and don’t plan to bill by the hour. Everything that I’ve said is exactly, completely just as relevant to you as to the attorneys who bill by the hour. Even if you do contingency billing, even if you do flat-fee billing, even if you do value-based billing – all of which I advocate, you still have the same burn rate. If you want to earn $120,000 a year you know what your hourly rate has to be. You need to know your rate.Okay. So we’ve talked about establishing your financial goals and one of your homework assignments is going to be to budget the life that you want to live.


We talked about establishing your professional goals, I’m sorry your personal goals and that is understanding that your law firm is there to serve your needs, and not the other way around. You need to think about what kind of personal life you want the law firm to enable you to have, because if you don’t build the firm that way from the beginning, it’s like if you don’t train a baby mule to pull the plough for you, you’re not going to be able to turn it around you know two, three, five, ten years later. You will be trapped.And last but not least is going to be your personal needs, your personal goals, I’m sorry your professional goals. Your professional goals are the kind of work that you want to do.

Financial goals, personal goals, professional goals. Your professional goals are the kind of work you want to do. There’s a lot of ways to make money at the practice of law. There’s no practice area that I’ve seen that couldn’t be very profitable. The key is picking a practice area that is going to serve your professional needs. And that’s going to become extremely important when we start talking about rainmaking. So the business needs to serve your professional goals on at least one of three levels, and these are not meant to be better or worse, they’re just different. It needs to serve your needs because it’s enabling you to serve a client population that you truly care about and that’s going to feed your passion, helping people. Or, and or, it needs to serve your needs because you’re working in an area of the law that you find intellectually stimulating. Helping clients is just icing on the cake. But you just really, really, really dig this area of the law.

It’s like me and bankruptcy. I don’t really have that much empathy for bankruptcy clients. Maybe that’s politi-cally incorrect, maybe that makes me an asshole, whatever. What I really dig about bankruptcy is the law. It really fascinates me. Interestingly I feel very differently about foreclosure clients; I don’t find foreclosure law interesting at all. But the people who are in foreclose for some reason I just have enormous empathy for and just want to do everything I can to help them.

And the third area where your business could serve your professional needs is the business itself. Maybe you pick an area of the law that doesn’t necessarily excite you because there isn’t an area of the law that necessarily excites you.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have, you know, a huge deep reservoir of empathy and passion for a particular segment of the population – that’s okay I’m not going to tell you you have to be someone that you’re not – but maybe you’re the kind of person who just really, really gets off on figuring out how to make a business work. I have a client who’s enormously successful, enormously, enormously successful guy, prob-ably makes $250,000 to $300,000 a year, I doubt if he works more than 3 days a week, and every time we talk he doesn’t care about the area of law in which he practices, he doesn’t really care that much about his clients - I mean he’s glad to help them but that’s not what drives him.

What he gets off on, when we get together it’s like two kids taking apart their dad’s lawnmower. We just take his business apart and go through every little piece of it, and he can’t get enough of that. And that’s where he gets his passion from every single day – is how to build the business and improve the business.

You don’t need to be politically correct I guess is the point I’m trying to make here. If you don’t care about


people that much, that’s okay. You’ve got to be true to yourself. But you’ve got to find something in your life, in this business to serve professionally, got to hit some point.

Okay, picking a niche to dominate. I need to dispel some myths about picking a niche. Just because you pick a niche to dominate does not mean it has to be completely exclusive. It doesn’t mean you have to never do any other kind of work so that’s something that people get scared of when I tell them they have to pick a niche to dominate to begin with. The second thing is just because you pick a niche to dominate today, does not mean that it’s something that you’re going to be stuck doing for the rest of your life. So I know that we have some attor-neys on the call who are recently out of law school, who are in their twenties and early thirties, and the thought of picking a niche to dominate and committing yourself to that niche can be very scary and intimidating because you just say to yourself ‘God, you know, I don’t want to be sixty years old and still just be the’ you know what-ever your niche is ‘guy’. Don’t worry about that. You just need to pick a niche to dominate to start with.

It is a myth that full-service law firms even exist – there is no such thing as a full-service law firm. All of their PR dollars not withstanding it just doesn’t exist. And number two to the extent that the law firm is multi-service it started off with a niche. That niche became successful, and then it grew a second niche. That is the way to grow into multiple practice areas, not by committing door law. And notice I didn’t say practicing door law, I said committing door law because I’ve done more disciplinary consultations for the Florida Bar than I care to remember, because the attorney didn’t pick a niche and so he or she was flailing around and never really became proficient in any particular practice area, and so they screwed things up.

Which brings me to the next reason to pick a niche - the next myth about picking a niche, which is if you pick a niche it does not mean that you are leaving money on the table. When a prospective client comes to a great divorce attorney who does nothing but divorce and says that they need a real estate transaction for example, the divorce attorney might be tempted to try and handle the real estate transaction but it’s not going to go well for anyone. That divorce attorney isn’t going to enjoy it, they’re not going to be good at it, they’re not going to be able to deliver the service efficiently and what’s worst of all from my standpoint, is they’ve just sent out a message to every real estate attorney in the market not to refer divorce cases to them because even if you do just one, even if that family law attorney does just one real estate transaction a year, every real estate attorney in that market who could potentially refer a family law case to that divorce attorney, is going to worry that the one real estate transaction you’re to do is his and they won’t refer business to you.

Okay, reasons to pick a niche.

Number one – you become much more efficient. If all you’re doing is divorce work, you are going to have a much easier time developing and documenting the systems and procedures that make that niche function. You’ll have a much easier time training that mule. Number two – you will be able to become an expert much more quickly. I know we have some attorneys on the call who have many, many years of experience and you probably are much better legal practitioners than I will ever be. That’s okay, but if I got into your practice area and I did nothing but your particular niche. In six months I’d be competent. In a year I’d be good. And in two years I’d probably be your equal, if I am focused on that niche. Nothing excites me more than helping an attorney get into, helping a young attorney open up his or her own law firm convincing them to pick a niche, and watching them kick butt against other attorneys in their


market, and suddenly they start getting business referred to them because they’ve developed a reputation for be-ing a great attorney in a relatively short amount of time. Part of that reputation is real and part of that reputation is rainmaking. Either way you’ve got to pick your niche to get there. I mentioned that a reason to pick a niche is so that you don’t compete with your potential referral sources. I won’t elaborate on that.

And last but not least the reason to pick a niche is because you’re going to be learning a whole new skill set in running your own law firm, and the last thing you need to do is have two or three or four different skill sets that are competing for your time and attention. You’re going to be learning rainmaking, you’re going to be learning HR and personnel management, you’re going to be learning bookkeeping and financial management, you’re going to be learning how to just manage a business. At the same time I don’t want you out there trying to learn two different practice areas – documenting systems and procedures for how to run those practice areas. It’s just going to make it very difficult for you to be successful.

Alright, last but not least tonight’s topic we’re going to be talking about what I call ‘the magic statement’.

Other people call it laser talk, other people call it your elevator pitch, everyone’s got their own little way, other people call it their benefit statements. I call it your magic statement because I’m going to translate what pro-spective clients and potential referral sources mean when they ask you a couple of questions, or ask you a ques-tion.

Whenever you meet someone and they ask you at cocktail party or a networking event or your kids’ soccer game, ‘What do you do?’ what they are really asking you is ‘What can you do for me?’ And so we don’t want to waste time in answering the question that they’re asking. We want to get to, we want to answer the question that they really wish they could ask if it wasn’t impolite, because that’s what they want to know. And we need to come up with a very brief, distinct, succinct, colorful, vivid, compelling niche, narrow answer to their question.

What do I do? I help lawyers in small law firms make a lot more money and have more fun in the practice of law.

Did I exclude a big chunk of the legal market?

Yes I did but if you are my target market; that is going to speak to you very powerfully, and in fact it does.

Put yourself in the position of a client. This is where my magic answer comes from. Put yourself in the position of a client. You walk up to a law office, a building with a law office in it, and to your left is a divorce attorney (I don’t know why I’m on the divorce attorney example tonight but I am, nothing meant or implied by it). To your left is a divorce attorney; to your right is a magician. They’re both going to accomplish the exact same result for you. Which one are you going to go to? Assuming the price is the same, assuming that you believe that they can both accomplish the same result for you; most clients are going to go see the magician, as evident by all the con artists out there who scam people into hiring them when they’re fake lawyers because they sell the promise. They sell the dream.

You see, clients don’t care how we do what we do; they only care about the result. So now you go to the magi-


cian, he or she takes out their magic wand, they wave it over your head and just as they’re about to tap you on the head and make your legal problem go away, they have just one question for you and that is ‘What do you want?’

That’s the answer to the question when people ask you ‘What do you do?’ If I could tap you on the head with a magic wand and give you what you want, that is your answer. ‘I help people get divorced quickly and easily’ might be an answer. Not only is it a great one but it’s something to start with. When you get to the homework you’ll see examples.

Okay, so the homework. I’m going to send you an email, or Tony’s going to send you an email (Tony, make a note, you’re going to be sending them an email) and it’s going to be a questionnaire for you to fill out where you will be asked to think about and document your financial, personal and professional goals for the next twelve months.

You will be guided through the process of calculating your weekly as well as your hourly burn rate so you’ll know what it’s going to cost you to achieve those goals per hour. You will be asked a series of questions that will help you come up with your niche, at least your initial niche. And you will be asked a series of questions and go through some exercises to come up with your magic statement.

At the top of next call we’re going to be talking about choosing a location, we’re going to talk about being a home office lawyer, I’m going to give you some tips and exercises to how to very quickly and easily evaluate office space and we’re going to open the call up for people to practice their magic statements. And if you want to email me your magic statement in advance of the call for a critique I will be happy to try and give it some attention.

We have about ten more minutes on this call and I’m going to open up the, take everyone off of mute, or better yet so we don’t have a free-for-all, if you press *6 that will raise your hand and I will be able to take you off of mute selectively so everyone doesn’t have to hear everyone else’s background noise. So press *6 to raise your hand and ask any questions you want. This is a unique opportunity to get my attention.

MAN: Hello.

RJON: Hello.

WOMAN: Hello, good evening everyone.

RJON: Good evening. First names only by the way please, I want to maintain everyone’s confidentiality and privacy.

WOMAN: Okay my first name is very unique anyway, I’m Seniz. So thanks for your feedback. Okay it’s about the magic statement. What if your niche is, you know, immigration law so you’re going to speak, you know, I mean the clients you talk to, I mean you speak to, obviously, most of them are overseas so if I see if, okay, so


how to I mean, you know, the people, some of them they have immigration issues still but because I don’t want to lose any money so, you know, sometimes I think about okay what does this client want maybe, but the person is already here, so you know, so I don’t say choo choo my, you know, initial, you know, the initial practice area sometimes, not to lose that client, I mean how do I get to that, you know you suggest, I don’t know. You under-stand what I’m trying to ask you? [Laughs]

RJON: I’m going to repeat it back to make sure I’m clear, and correct me if I’m wrong. I think what you’re telling me, I think what you’re trying to say is that you really want to be focusing on being an international im-migration attorney with clients overseas to bring them here, but sometimes you get clients who really don’t need that service and so you’re afraid of coming up with a too precise or narrow of a magic statement because if you tell someone ‘I help wealthy Europeans, wealthy people from Europe get their papers to live and work in the United States’ you’re afraid they’re going to say ‘Well thanks but that’s not what I want. What I really need is a business lawyer.’ And then you will have lost the client. Is that, am I, do I have the right idea?

WOMAN: Yep.Totally correct. [Laughs]

RJON: Okay. Well, that’s what I was talking about earlier with picking a niche. For at least the first six months of your practice I would say pick just one niche and dominate that niche. Because what you can then do is you can then go to all of the business lawyers who don’t do immigration and get them to refer their business clients to you. And when you get a client who says ‘Oh, well you do immigration, what I really need’ for example ‘is a real estate lawyer’ or ‘a business lawyer’ or ‘family law attorney’ or something else, you will go out and when we get to the rainmaking section of the program I’m going to have you going out and networking to build up your referral network. That’s a two-way street. Those are going to be all of the people that you’re going to refer clients to, and all the people who are going to be referring business back to you. So if you want to be a business lawyer, be a business lawyer and let’s make you a dominant business lawyer in your niche. If you’re going to be an immigration lawyer, that’s fine but let’s make you the dominant immigration lawyer in your niche. Trying to be both is going to make each of them only 50% as likely to succeed.

WOMAN: Okay, I got it.

RJON: Think about which one you want to do and again, like I said it doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself that way forever, just until you have all of your business processes and procedures running smoothly. Then if you want to open up a business law practice next to your immigration law practice, that’s fine. Does that make sense?

WOMAN: Yes. Totally, thank you very much.

RJON: Okay, we’re going to 860 967. Hello?

MAN: Hi, this is Bill. I just have a question logistically. Are we going to do the next eleven weeks at the same time and can we gauge those weeks’ homework time commitment, by this week’s time commitment, in other words for planning and scheduling.


RJON: Excellent question. The calls, I’m going to try and keep the calls every Tuesday at 7 o’clock, I’ve got a lot of time blocked out for that. I have every Tuesday from 7 o’clock to 9 o’clock blocked out in my own sched-ule for the calls. Barring something coming up the answer is yes the calls will always be at the same time on the same day. Homework, homework I don’t imagine that the homework is going to require more than a couple of hours a week. Other than a couple of assignments where you have to go to a bank and open an account, it’s mostly work that can be done in the evenings, weekends, early morning hours. It’s a lot of thinking and plan-ning and strategizing. You will have homework where you have to go out to networking events; those usually happen in the mornings, you know, morning, lunch or dinner. You will have homework assignments where you need to go out and meet with potential referral sources, you know those appointments should last twenty min-utes, thirty minutes plus travel time. You will have some homework assignments where I’m going to ask you to go and look at some office space; you know you’re talking what fifteen minutes to travel, fifteen minutes back and fifteen minutes to look around. You know not heavy, heavy, heavy homework. My goal is to tell you what you need to do so you do it and get results, not spend hours and hours and hours studying.

MAN: Okay, thank you.

RJON: You’re welcome. Alright, we’ve got 214 868.

MAN: Hi, this is Ovid and my question is a chicken and the egg kind of question. I’ve been licensed for a cou-ple of years but in those two years I’ve been doing contract legal work which is kind of grunt work. I haven’t really progressed in my legal skills so my question is do you have any words and, you know if we’re going to cover this down the road that’s fine too, but do you have any words of wisdom on how I can become proficient in the field that I want to become an expert in while, I mean it’s kind of like on of those things were you become efficient when you work but then how do you get to work unless you get proficient. Do you know what I’m say-ing?

RJON: Okay. I hear what you’re saying. I have a couple of different answers for you. The first answer is that in my experience I have never had anyone ever look at my diploma and base whether they’re going to hire me or not based on when I graduated from law school. And I still get mistaken as if I’m in my twenties. You can imag-ine when I was actually in my twenties, I used to get carded all the time. I looked very young and no one ever questioned that. They assume if you’re a lawyer you must know what you’re talking about. Unless you’re going to be doing, you know, like major SEC public offering kind of work like some heavy duty, you know criminal defense work or something like that; I would be absolutely shocked if you ever had a client asking you about your credentials. They assume you’re a lawyer, they know you’re a lawyer; they assume you must know what you’re talking about. That’s your insecurity.

Don’t let it bleed into your interaction with your clients. If it’s happening, it’s coming from you, you’re tele-graphing it to them. That’s something you need to get control over. That’s number one. Number two – you don’t get new clients because you’re good at doing the work. The clients hire you before they know if you’re any good or not. Like it or not, being a better lawyer doesn’t help you get much more business. People will buy your book based on what your cover looks like. Then it’s up to you to be able to write a good story. How do you do that? That’s going to be addressed, I’ll tell you the answer but we’ll talk more about it, we’ll talk even


more about it I should say when we get to the networking, and what you’re going to want to do is when you are networking to find lawyers who can refer business to you and who you can refer business to them. You’re going to want to be mindful of looking for mentors as well as potential referral sources.

And let me just say this, so you understand, when I say potential referral sources, whenever I say potential referral sources I always mean a two-way street. When I go out to meet with someone who is a potential referral source the first thing I’m thinking about is how can I send business to him or her. That’s always my first concern – how can I get business to them? Because once someone recognizes that you’re trying to give business to them, most people are going to go out of there way to try to find a way to give business back to you.

When I first graduated from law school I thought for a time that I wanted to do family law, divorce in particu-lar, and I called a local divorce attorney who I read about and I told him I just graduated from law school, I am thinking that I might like to do divorce, I would like to, you know, pay you for an hour of your time to just let me come to your office and give me like a crash course on, you know, what I need to know about you know do-ing divorce work.

Let me tell you. This guy would not let me out of the office until the sun went down and then refused to take my money, and then was like falling over himself to tell me that if I decide to do divorce work, you know first you try to sell me on why it’s the greatest practice in the world, and then was you know falling all over himself to tell me all the business he can refer to me because he was at a point in his career where a lot of the cases that came to him he didn’t want to do those types of cases any more but they’d be perfect for me. Does that answer your question?

MAN: It does. Thank you.

RJON: You’re welcome. We’re going to 813 951. 813 951, hello.

MAN: Yes, my name is Scott. I just had a follow-up question on the picking your niche. I was wondering how specific do you think we should get? For instance you could say that your niche is criminal law but some attor-neys might say their niche is DUI.

RJON: Okay, rather than speak hypothetically, let me ask you what niche are you thinking you might want to pick?

MAN: Well honestly before I got on this call I was thinking about doing criminal defense and personal injury, but after listening to you it sounded like you think that we might need to be more specific such as doing some-thing like concentrating on DUIs.

RJON: I would definitely say that in the beginning for the first six months you should either do personal injury or criminal defense. Just to give yourself a chance to get out there and develop policies and develop procedures. When we get to policies and procedures and we talk about the mechanics of how to run a law firm, you’re going to see that once you have the experience of documenting your policies and documenting your procedures for a criminal defense practice for example, it’s like cake – you’ve got your template.


Building a personal injury practice is just a matter of changing the content. The mechanics of how a law firm functions is not that different from a personal injury practice to a criminal defense practice. You know there are certain differences but there are not that many differences. You’ll be, you know, 75% there once you’ve built a successful criminal defense practice, or when you’ve built a successful personal injury practice. You’ll build a successful practice faster by picking a niche, whichever one you pick.

You’ll get there faster by picking a niche. You can then reinvest some of that money to buy, help to build your second niche, which then makes you grow your second niche faster also. I would ask you to think about which one you personally, you know, get a charge out of more – personal injury or criminal defense.

As far as criminal defense or personal injury, you’re absolutely right I would suggest you narrow that further because a guy who’s been arrested for white-collar crime is not coming to a guy who does DUI defense and assault and battery defense. Imagine having a white-collar crime client sitting in your waiting room waiting to meet with you next to a guy who just got dragged in for assault and battery on his wife. Just imagine the ten-sion between those two people. That’s representative of the tension that exists when you try and do two different practice areas or two different niches. If you, I’ll give you an example, another client of mine, brilliant marketer, he got out of law school and decided he wanted to focus on criminal defense DUI actually. And he did a market-ing plan and we called it ‘forty bars in forty nights’, and every night for forty nights he went out to a different bar and left an outrageous tip with the bartender, introduced himself, left a card ‘This is who I am, this is what I do.’ You know, boom, well it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that forty bartenders between them had a bunch of DUI business to refer to him before forty nights were up, right? He used that money to then build a different kind of practice for himself when he decided he no longer wanted to put drunks back on the road – that’s a dif-ferent story. Does that answer your question?

MAN: Yes it does, thank you.

RJON: Okay, sorry I went off on a tangent there. Okay, we’ve got no one else lined up for a call. We’re nine minutes over the hour. I’m happy to stay on the phone as long as we have questions coming in but I’m also per-fectly happy to go have dinner. So I’m going to put up the call a couple more times. Anyone want to raise their hand? Okay.

MAN: Hello RJon, it’s Mark here.

RJON: Hello Mark. You are Mark from Australia, right?

MAN: I am, yes indeed I am. I’m sorry?

RJON: I said we have an international call tonight. I love it.

MAN: I’m glad you’re glad. I’m very appreciative to be on your course. I certainly hope it translates across. I’m pretty sure it will. Just to let you know, it’s just after midday here at the minute but I’m setting aside time in the middle of the day. I just have a question about the course materials. What will they consist of – we’re having


these calls and you’re going to send us some emails. There was mention of some hard copy material being sent, are you able to tell me anything about the course materials?

RJON: Yes. The course materials are going to include like you said, the phone calls, you’re going to get email assignments, follow-up email assignments, you’re going to be getting faxes from time to time, you’re also go-ing to get a complementary copy of our best-selling How To Market a Small Law Firm audio program which normally sells for $300 but we’re going to give it to everyone for free for participating in the call. You’re also going to get a complementary copy of, not our best–selling but it’s my personal favorite, How to Have a More Enjoyable Small Law Firm audio program and workbook which normally sells at 250 (that’s US). You’re also going to get a copy of I think at least one of the How to Close Every Sales Call audio programs which is a $99 program. We’ve got several different guests lined up that I’m still trying to squeeze them for more freebies so I don’t want to speak for them but I’m hoping to have free subscription for a law firm marketing website that I’m doing some consulting for. I’m hoping to get some free software, law office management software. I’m hoping to get some free website services. I’m hoping to get a bunch of free stuff for everyone on the call to help you get off, you know, on the right foot with a successful practice.

MAN: Thank you. That sounds terrific. I really look forward to it. Thanks very much.

RJON: Thank you, I appreciate it. Okay, I’m going to take everyone off of mute and we can just, anyone who has any questions speak up, we’re all, can everyone just say hello at the same time…

[Hellos]

RJON: Well, everyone, goodnight, thank you and we will speak again next week.

[Goodnight and goodbyes]

* * * * * * * *

Creating a Successful Law Practice › membershipsite-downloadables › ... · 2014-10-13 · That...

Documents

Transcript of Creating a Successful Law Practice › membershipsite-downloadables › ... · 2014-10-13 · That...