Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 213: What Should You Expect from Your Law Firm Business?

Transcript

213: What Should You Expect from Your Law Firm Business? · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Davina: Your law firm should make you feel more confident about yourself and your ability to take care of your own needs as you make your way through the world. With your own law firm business, you get to decide your income ceiling. So you don't have to set limits on the amount of money you can make. And if your law firm business is not doing that for you, making you feel confident about your ability to take care of your own financial needs and make your way through the world, if it came down to just you or you and your children, then thinking through what may be missing there for you and how do we raise that expectation for the law firm. Your results are completely in your hands.
• 0:43
  You get to decide not only your income ceiling, but you also get to decide your limitations, right? What you're going to allow to limit you or not limit you.
• 0:52
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more? Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
• 1:38
  Now here's Devina.
• 1:42
  Davina: Hi. This is Devina. And before we jump into today's show, I'd like first to introduce you to some of our sponsors. When prospective clients are looking for an attorney, they usually turn to Google first. Optimize My Firm helps law firms grow their practices and attract more right fit clients through on page and back end search engine optimization.
• 2:06
  Optimize My Firm can help your firm rank higher on Google so that clients can find you before they find your competition. They serve personal injury, family law, workers' comp, immigration, and other types of law firms. Optimize My Firm does SEO the right way, delivering meaningful results with geographic exclusivity and no contracts. Contact them today at optimizemyfirm.com or click the link in the show notes. In the next ten years, 90% of legal services will be delivered online.
• 2:42
  Gavel is the software lawyers are using to streamline internal document automation and build online legal products like landlord legal or hello divorce. With gavel, you can easily build client intake that generates document sets through powerful logic based document automation. Gavel, formerly known as document can be used internally or you can make it client facing. It also integrates with nearly everything. Clio even rated Gavel their best integration tool.
• 3:14
  Visit www.gavel.io and mention the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast for a free fourteen day trial, or just click on the link in the show notes. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And today, I wanna talk about expectations, specifically what expectations you have or perhaps should have of your law firm business. Thinking back on my own experience in owning my own law firm business and reflecting on conversations I've had with many of you, I put together a short list of some law firm owner experiences that most of us did not expect when we first hung out our shingles.
• 3:56
  So number one is we did not expect how it would shape our views of other people. The good, the bad, and the ugly, mostly the bad and the ugly. Because our job is to solve legal problems. Most often, we are dealing with people during a time of struggle. And as a result, we get to see and hear them oftentimes at their worst.
• 4:16
  Over time, this can make us feel a little bit more jaded, especially if we experience any sort of secondary trauma. It can really impact us. And that's something that we may not have expected when we went into business for ourselves. We also did not expect the incivility of many of our attorney colleagues. I remember when I was in law school being hammered with the rules of professional conduct, but apparently some folks skipped that class and yet still manage to pass the bar and go into practice.
• 4:46
  And I have met many of them. We did not expect that we would wind up many times working eighty hours a week for ourselves to keep from working fifty hours a week for someone else. Often we go into business for ourselves because we think it will be less stressful than having to bill long hours for someone else, only to find ourselves working more than ever in our law firm. Still, somehow it seems like the better option, like it's really worth it. Number four, we did not expect that we rarely get to dress up in designer duds.
• 5:19
  Unlike the attorneys in suits or your favorite legal drama, most of us work in athleisure wear most days with glasses on and hair up in a messy bun, braless if we can get away with it, ladies. Do you feel me? Number five, we did not expect what a challenge it could be to balance getting the work done and doing the work that once we bring it in on a consistent basis without sort of having something fall through the cracks. We also likely did not expect that 6 figures in revenue would not be enough. When we first start out and hang the shingle, the first goal is that first 100.
• 5:57
  And it seems like it's going to be so much money. And then we get it and we realize, oh, wait a minute, this is not anywhere close to what I need to be making. If I want to personally take home 6 figures or multi 6 figures in my business, I'm going to need to make more revenue. Number seven, we did not expect that we'd have to become hiring managers, therapists, tech bros, social media marketing experts, videographers, or any of a dozen other different professions. So I could go on and on with all surprises of law firm ownership.
• 6:30
  However, what I want to talk with you about today and why it's important is if you want to build a law firm that allows you to thrive and not just survive in the future, you may need to be intentional about setting expectations, not just blindly having sort of thoughts about it. And even if you've been in practice for some years, it now may be a time for you to stop and reassess what your expectations are of your law firm business. What do you expect it to do for you? Your law firm above all should be designed to support your personal goals. And unfortunately, I witnessed many attorneys start and build law firms that do not support their personal desire.
• 7:16
  And years down the line, they wind up unhappy, oftentimes broke, unsatisfied, and wondering what they did wrong along the way. And if only they had spent some time at the very beginning asking themselves, what do I expect my law firm business to do for me in the way of supporting my most important life goals? And if you take the time to do that, it's likely that your whole life could turn out differently. So the keyword here is intentional. And with that in mind, I set forth four expectations that I recommend you consider.
• 7:52
  And of course, add whatever expectations you have to your list. But these four, I think, cover a lot of what comes up in conversation when I'm having conversation with women law firm owners about what they want for their life. And most of them don't make that connection in an intentional way about their law firm business and the way they create their business and how it affects their personal goals and desires in life. So expectation number one that I recommend that you give some thought to is that your law firm should make you feel more confident about yourself and your ability to take care of your own needs as you make your way through the world. With your own law firm business, you get to decide your income ceiling.
• 8:39
  So you don't have to set limits on the amount of money you can make. And if your law firm business is not doing that for you, making you feel confident about your ability to take care of your own financial needs and make your way through the world, if it came down to just you or you and your children, then thinking through what may be missing there for you and how do we raise that expectation for the law firm. Your results are completely in your hands. You get to decide not only your income ceiling, but you also get to decide your limitations, right? What you're going to allow to limit you or not limit you.
• 9:15
  There's no more waiting around for somebody else to pay you your worth, what you believe your worth to be. You get to decide that. And if your law firm business isn't providing that for you, then that's something that you really want to take a good look at. Expectation number two, your law firm business should allow you to be flexible. You're no longer working according to someone else's schedule.
• 9:39
  If you love staying up until 2AM because that's when the house is quiet and no one else is awake to disturb you, then go for it. If you prefer, like me, to have all your work wrapped up by 2PM so you can head to the gym, then that's your choice. Obviously, if you work with others or if you're a litigator and required to be in court on certain days and at certain times, you may not always be able to hold fast to your ideal schedule. But when it comes to your ability to introduce time flexibility into your life, you get to decide. And if right now you're not getting to decide that, then this is something where you may want to raise the expectation for your law firm.
• 10:15
  Maybe that decision leads you to a new practice area so you don't have to worry about being present for a client when it's time for you to be in the pickup line for your kid's school. But maybe it means growing a high performing team to support you. Whatever you choose, there's always a way to get the flexibility you crave if that is your highest priority, and your law firm business should be able to deliver that to you. Expectation number three, your law firm business should make you feel financially secure so that you never have to worry about money if you don't want to. The purpose of any business is to produce profits for the shareholders.
• 10:53
  It is the same with law firm businesses. Yes, you can also have other purposes like positively impacting the lives of your clients, your employees, your community. But ultimately, a law firm business is still a business. And the number one priority of any business is to be profitable. And if yours is not making you feel financially secure because it is not profitable enough or it's not sustainable at the way you're working right now, then you need to raise your expectations of what that law firm business can do for you.
• 11:24
  Expectation number four, your law firm business should make you feel free from time and place constraints possibly, but mostly free from living out someone else's purpose for your life. When you own your own law firm business, you get to choose the kind of work you do. You get to choose how you will run your business. You get to choose the message you wanna convey to the world, your clients, your team, your colleagues, and your community. True freedom is when we feel we are able to show up fully as our authentic selves and live a life of meaning according to our own definition.
• 11:58
  So if you are ready to raise your expectations for your law firm business to feel more confident and financially secure and have that time, freedom and flexibility, then I invite you to join me in my upcoming free training. It's called Attorney Confidential. Three secrets to unlocking a profitable, streamlined law firm. Without worry, everything will fall apart in your absence. And you can register for it now by clicking on the link in the show notes.
• 12:27
  I will be presenting this brand new material live on 09/14/2023 from two to 3PM Eastern Time. If you register now, there will be limited access to a replay if you cannot make that exact date and time. So you want to go ahead and register even if you have already something got something already on your calendar for that time because only the people who register will receive access to this limited time replay. So that's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it.
• 12:55
  It's not uncommon for folks to tell me that they've been listening to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast for years and they love to binge perhaps when they're on long road trips or that they've learned so much from it. If that sounds like you, would you please do me a favor? Please leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts. The more five star reviews we receive, the more Apple will promote our podcast to other listeners and the more women law firm owners who we can help become more profitable and sustainable, wealth generating law firm business owners. So thanks so much, and I'll be back next week with more great content.
• 13:30
  Go now to the link in the show notes and register for my latest training. I think you're going to love it. And I don't want you to miss out because you just forgot about it. I hope to see you there. If not, I'll talk to you next week.
• 13:42
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.