Financially Legal

If you’ve ever wondered how to tie together different systems in your law practice, you need to know about Zapier.

Judie Saunders doesn't take the easy way.  

Whether you're talking about her efforts to go to law school as the child of immigrants, her chosen practice area that combines criminal defense and representation of abuse survivors, or the lengths to which she's gone to build a consumer friendly law firm using technology, Judie's all in.

It seems like every time you turn around some company is offering a new practice management solution. We tried to count them recently and got tired after about a dozen.

This episode of Financially Legal is a departure from our usual. Normally we talk about law, economics, and even finance as applied to the practice of law. Today, we’re talking about one specific legal issue that has some financial underpinnings. Specifically, the GameStop short squeeze.

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

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

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

Subscription-based outsourced fractional general counsel sounds like a mouthful, but it’s not really that complicated. A fixed monthly fee for part of a lawyer’s time offering business advice to a company. The examples of a variety of different types of subscription offerings in our recent five-part series on subscription legal services is all the evidence you need. Beth Lebowitz believes that this outsourced general counsel model is as good for lawyers as it is for clients. In fact, she’s so committed to it that she’s founded both a law firm, Nimbus Legal, and a marketplace/community, Auxana, around the model.

Lawyers can usually think of lots of possible reasons why trying something new in their practice is “against the rules.” Megan Zavieh is a California state bar defense attorney (who lives in Georgia!) and she’s not messing around. Instead, she’s launching a subscription legal services offering, cheering regulatory changes related to non-lawyer ownership and breaking down the rules around shifting credit card processing fees to clients or selling your law practice. Megan’s got some great takes on all of this plus how to run an ethical, forward-looking firm in the time of COVID and beyond.

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

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

Greg Garman is a busy man. One of the founders of a 20 person law firm in Las Vegas, Greg is also the co-founder and CEO of LAWCLERK, an online marketplace for freelance legal help. In this episode, Greg shared some great insights on how and why he thinks right around 20 lawyers is the sweet spot for a small law firm.

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

Jacqueline Horani is a lawyer engaged in integrative consulting and plain language law in New York City. Inspired by the integrative law movement, Jacqueline is building a practice around conscious contracting, which focuses on identifying and integrating the parties’ values directly into the contracting process.

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

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

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

Kim Bennett got burned by hourly billing. She lost a bunch of money and, having come up as a young lawyer in a corporate, in-house role, the model didn’t make sense to her. One day she pitched a client on a recurring monthly fee and, to her surprise, they accepted. That’s right, we’re talking subscriptions again. But where the guest from our last subscription-based law practice, Jon Tobin, uses subscriptions in more of a "one-to-many" way, helping lots of clients with a specific set of offerings, Kim has fewer what she calls “premium” subscriptions and they include more comprehensive, regular work with the clients.

I know you didn’t go to law school to manage financials or be an accountant, but it turns out that your ability to successfully support and represent your clients is contingent upon running a sound business. And Chelsea Williams, founder and head of Core Solutions Group, is dropping some wisdom about how to manage your firm’s finances so that you can worry less about money and more about your clients. 

Subscriptions services for a law-firm? It might be what your clients are looking for.

Jon Tobin is running one of the most innovative law firms you’ve never heard of. Counsel For Creators is an LA-based law firm for creatives and entrepreneurs that sells a subscription to clients. In this episode of Financially Legal we expand upon many of the topics we cover in our 5-part series about subscription legal services (which includes a number of shout-outs to Jon) and talk with Jon about the inspiration behind his subscription legal services plan, how he made it a reality, how (amazingly) it’s morphing into a profitable, self-sustaining community, how he calls his clients "members," and what’s next for his bold firm.  

Dan Price is a big deal. Full stop. And we got him on the podcast!

Dan is the inspirational CEO of Gravity Payments. In 2015 Dan raised the salaries of each of his employees at Gravity Payments to $70,000 annually and, in doing so, he became an overnight business celebrity. He’s been on the Today Show, been interviewed by Trevor Noah, and keynoted hundreds of business conferences around the world. He breaks down how he thinks about company culture, why Gravity Payments is investing in Confido Legal, and how he thinks lawyers can change the world.

We get nerdy this episode talking accounting, trust accounting, and regulatory jazz with Lainie Hammond.  Lainie runs a law firm in Washington State helping lawyers with issues related to IOLTA trust account compliance.

Today, we're excited to have a conversation with John E. Grant, the Agile Attorney. John is a compelling thinker when it comes to law firm economics, law firm efficiency, and law firm productivity. 

Welcome to the very first episode of Financially Legal, with your host, Dan Lear, head of partnerships and marketing at Confido Legal.