Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 217: Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert | How She Scaled Her Law Firm to Multiple Millions (Grab Her Secrets!)

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217: Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert | How She Scaled Her Law Firm to Multiple Millions (Grab Her Secrets!) · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Jennifer: There was a lot of narratives about mom guilt. Like, I have three kids, and there's a lot of people that will say, Why are you working? Or just different things that you have to learn to ignore. And the thing I've realized over time is that any thing that anyone is saying to you is more about them than you. So it's like from their filter, from the stories they were told, from their point of view, you're disrupting something that doesn't align with their impression of how the world should be.
• 0:33
  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.
• 1:20
  Now here's Devina.
• 1:24
  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. Optimize My Firm can help your firm rank higher on Google so that clients can find you before they find your competition.
• 1:55
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• 2:34
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• 3:06
  Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And today, I am very excited about today's guest. I've been following her content on Instagram for a while, and I'm a fan. And if you're not following her, you're gonna need to follow her.
• 3:21
  It's Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert, and she is the founder and owner of Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, a prominent firm specializing in personal injury cases across Georgia. The firm excels in representing those injured in auto accidents, truck crashes, slip and fall accidents, and wrongful death cases. Since its establishment in 2013, so she's celebrating a ten year anniversary, Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group has expanded its caseload, revenue, and team size considerably. Jennifer's achievements have earned her prestigious awards, including honors from organizations like the National Trial Lawyers, Super Lawyers and ABO to name just a few. Most recently, Jennifer's law firm was recognized on the Inc.
• 4:04
  5,000 list of fastest growing private companies in The US in 2022 and 2023. Aside from establishing her own law practice, Jennifer actively speaks nationally at conferences on the business of law and she holds influential positions on the boards of both Atlanta's John Marshall Law School Alumni Association and the Georgia Association of Women Lawyers. So Jennifer, thank you for being here today. I'm so glad you and I finally connected.
• 4:32
  Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast and I love the information you're sharing and raising up awareness about what it's really like to be a woman in the industry and different versions of success.
• 4:47
  Davina: Well, I'm excited to hear your story and I know our listeners are too, because they're going to learn a lot from today, I suspect. So let's jump in and get started, which is kind of your journey. I always like to start with sort of your journey to becoming a lawyer because I'm fascinated by people who just knew they were gonna be a lawyer from a young age and people who just kind of fell into it by happenstance. What was the case for you?
• 5:10
  Jennifer: You know, I really was not planning to become a lawyer per se. I come from an entrepreneurial background. My parents kind of were small business owners and I always thought I would own my own business. So I did know that, but I basically had a series of events that happened in my life that required me to hire lawyers, and they were not positive experiences. My identity was stolen by my employer, then I had to go through a federal lawsuit, and I was in a really serious car accident.
• 5:45
  And in a separate event, my serious boyfriend from when I was a teenager was killed in a motorcycle accident. So like all these things happen and I was like, I feel like the universe wants me to become a lawyer. You know, I was also the kid, like on the bus, if someone was bullying someone, I was like, You are not going to bully my friend. You know, like I was always kind of an advocate style personality and very confident with confrontation if needed. So people would say like, you should be a lawyer, you know?
• 6:16
  So I think that's kind of how it happened for me.
• 6:19
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. So when did you start and finish law school? How long have you been a lawyer?
• 6:25
  Jennifer: About ten years. The day I got my license, I opened this law firm. So as long as I've been a lawyer, I've had this place.
• 6:34
  Davina: Oh, good. Good. So like I did the same thing right out of law school, started my practice. I got a lot of pushback from people. Did you get pushback?
• 6:41
  Did you have people tell you that you shouldn't do that? You should go work someplace for a while. Did you ever hear that?
• 6:48
  Jennifer: Yeah. You know, I went to Knight Law School and I worked during the day as a paralegal in two firms over the the years. So I felt pretty confident by the time three years had gone by that I had been working in law firms in personal injury. So I remember thinking like, you know, my boss doesn't know everything. I can probably do this.
• 7:10
  It was a very small firm. And so I was confident to kind of just start. And in addition to that, I had a young baby. So I had my daughter. She was only two months old when I started the firm.
• 7:24
  So I took the bar nine months pregnant, basically had her started So the I kind of felt like as a new mom, I was going to have more flexibility having my own firm than working for someone else. So I only know my life, right? So I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of owning a business where I have come to realize that a lot of people, that wasn't something in their awareness when they were a child. Like that's not something they would ever think. Want to start my own business, but that was always part of my upbringing.
• 7:56
  So yeah, there was lawyers that pushed back and some people were not supportive, but I always was like looking at people and looking at their results and saying like, do they have the results I want? And if they don't, I don't really care what they think.
• 8:11
  Davina: Right. And that is a great way to be. Unless they have what it is that you want, but you care what they think. Right. I always say, unless they're paying me or contributing to my piece, their opinion really doesn't matter.
• 8:24
  I will say that when I first became
• 8:28
  Jennifer: a lawyer and I went out there, there was like a ton of like mentoring groups. I don't know if this happened to you where it's like, we're going to mentor younger attorneys. And I got a ton of bad advice in those groups. And it caused me a lot of distress because I remember thinking like, why are these people saying, telling me these things? Like, I remember one piece of advice I got that was horrible was you shouldn't take your law firm like really seriously or like get an office until your kids are grown.
• 8:54
  Davina: Oh my goodness. That's terrible advice.
• 8:57
  Jennifer: Like an older woman who that's what she did. And I remember thinking this does not sound like something I want to do.
• 9:07
  Davina: Right, right. I do think that a lot of times the practice of law has changed so much, even from when I started and certainly from my mentors, when they started, it was a different practice and you didn't have the tools to be able to work virtually. You didn't have the tools to be able to use some of the automation and the things that we do now. And also I came up in a professional career in the nineties before I became a lawyer in the Deep South. It was definitely a good old boy's world.
• 9:38
  And women had to become masculine to advance. And so they had to adopt these sort of patriarchal ideas. It was a lot more cutthroat and it wasn't nearly as collaborative as what you see women today are able to do because we live in a different world, right? Where that's an environment that we have that we didn't have the luxury of back then. And I wasn't even practicing law back then.
• 10:05
  I can imagine a law firm.
• 10:07
  Jennifer: I can definitely see that. And so it was very hard for that era of women lawyers to give advice to my era because it was a different it's a totally different landscape. And I think that's been one of the challenges for women in the space is that from decade to decade, it's a dramatically different environment.
• 10:29
  Davina: Yeah, for women it is. And thank goodness we had women who were out there on the front lines who were willing to put up with that no And said, I want this despite that because women wouldn't be where they are now, but for those women laying the groundwork. I want to go back to your story about you were injured, severely injured in an accident and you said you lost your boyfriend and then you worked in a personal injury firm. So it seems like you really knew your practice area and where you were headed. Was like a calling for you.
• 10:59
  Like you're definitely doing this. I think a lot of people have an idea that you have to be a larger firm to do personal injury because you have to have the resources to be able to front cost for people. What was your experience like in that?
• 11:17
  Jennifer: You know, I just always had this probably really cocky attitude that if you really cared and you did great work, there was always space for you. I always have felt that way in any business, like any sector. There's always space in a saturated market for someone who wants to do something excellent. And I felt that my unique perspective of having been a client was something that most of the other people in the space didn't have. So I never really thought about that issue.
• 11:48
  I will say like the first year or two, we didn't make a ton of money, but I lived super lean and I was a law student previously to that. So really all I had to do was make more money than my paralegal salary, which was not high. So my baseline for like, okay, this is great if I make any more money than I made when I was a paralegal. And I was so used to not making any money throughout all law school, like, you know, good money. It just was easy for me to kind of transition to, okay, I'm making a little money as a lawyer now, and then it will get up.
• 12:23
  You know, One thing I did was I went to a ton of people who had taken on PI cases in my network. Like, let's say they were a criminal firm, but they had taken on This happens quite frequently where people will take on random cases they really shouldn't have. And so those cases were kind of ready to be resolved. And so I said, Hey, listen, I will take all these cases and I will split the fees with you 50%, but I'll get them all done. And that really like fast tracked some of my growth in the beginning because I didn't have to wait that like twelve to eighteen months time frame to start cash flow.
• 13:03
  Davina: Right. So people, you connected with other injury lawyers and everybody's got those case. If you've been at it for a long time, everybody's got those cases and they're like, I wish I could pass this off to somebody else to do. So you volunteered to do that. I always find that interesting.
• 13:19
  One of the exercises I go through with people is asking them to think about what their, the SWAT analysis, your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and threats and the opportunities and advantages. We all have something that is unique to us. And your story is very unique. And even talking about being a paralegal, I always envy in law school people who had been paralegals because I felt like they really understood the language. I mean, I don't have any lawyers in my family or anything to understand what that was.
• 13:48
  And people who were in law enforcement or people who've been paralegals and they were going in, you know, fields that they were familiar with. I always envy that because I was like, that's such an advantage and a leg up to already know where the courthouse is, how to file the paperwork, you know, just the language and the process and everything.
• 14:06
  Jennifer: Yeah. There's also like an intimidation factor. If you've never worked in a law firm of what you don't know, you don't know. And like, it's been in the field for a few years. You kind of like you start to realize that this is the practice of law and a lot of people are just trying to do their best and figure it out.
• 14:22
  And so it kind of lowers the fear level of like, need to be perfect or anything. Like, that's not a
• 14:29
  Davina: right Yeah. Yeah. That's why I think that's a wonderful advantage and being able to approach it that way and already feel kind of fearless in the face of that, in that and also that you have this entrepreneurial background. So those two things are the things that often really get in people's heads, right? I've gotta figure out how to be a lawyer and I gotta figure out how to be a business owner.
• 14:50
  And so that's wonderful that you were able to do that. Let's talk about the growth of the firm. How quickly did you start hiring staff and how quickly did you hire lawyers?
• 15:02
  Jennifer: Within about six months or three months, I had my first team member, but that person was actually like an intern from my school. And so she was like a paid intern. And then as soon as I got used to having any type of support, I was like, I need more. So, you know, I had like a couple people in the first years, and I remember it was really hard because they had to be people that could do multiple things just like I had done as a paralegal. Know, you're kind of the receptionist, you're the legal assistant, you're the case manager, and you kind of have to be multidimensional.
• 15:36
  And as the firm wore like time wore on, I started to feel like frustrated because, you know, you've given this person too many hats to wear. They're not really able to be good at any of them. You know, what do you want me to do? Do want me to do legal work or do you want me to be the receptionist? And so I was always feeling like I need to get people into more specialized roles and I need people to have one major priority because it's very hard to be excellent at 30 things.
• 16:06
  Davina: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love when you talked about that demand that we often put as we're growing. We want people to come in and we want them to be where we are. Like we want clones of ourselves or duplicates.
• 16:18
  And we very quickly figure out, I need to sort of give these people some parameters for their job and authority for their job. And I love what you said about like, soon as you had help, you're like, I need more of this. I need more of these. How do I get more, please? And being a personal entry, I'm assuming, so you've got cashflow because you're probably settling some cases along the way.
• 16:39
  And then you probably have some bigger ones that you're settling, which allows you to get those kind of chunks to help set aside to hire people. So that made hiring a little easier for you. Maybe give us a little insight into money management for attorneys who maybe are behind you on the path and they're trying to figure out how to manage a contingency practice in a way that keeps cash flowing.
• 17:02
  Jennifer: So a contingency practice is one of the most complex types of law to manage because the business model is basically we're taking on cases, we're funding them, we're putting payroll, we're putting resources in them, not to mention the costs to acquire the case, the marketing expenses. And then at some future date, we're expecting to be paid and we're projecting what that payment's going to be. And it's kind of like, it's advanced. It's not just like simple. For the first few years, my mentality was like, okay, I'm just going to do the best I can to project expenses, but I feel like I ran it pretty lean.
• 17:43
  And that got me so far. But what you'll see invariably in contingency firms is that they are typically short staffed because they're always trying to run so lean. And there's real costs to running a short staffed law firm, not to mention client satisfaction, but also just unnecessary delays. And what you'll come to realize is if a law firm that's doing contingency work is experiencing what we call a cash crunch, it's usually because they're actually short staffed. So it kind of compounds the problem if you're short staffed, even though that's counterintuitive.
• 18:20
  So over the years, we started developing cash flow models and we started doing some advanced cash flow planning. We had hired a fractional CFO. I was like, I am going to figure this out. We are going to learn how to get this under control because I just couldn't believe that there was so many large PI firms that they must have all figured it out is what I thought.
• 18:43
  Davina: Right.
• 18:44
  Jennifer: I will say this day and age, I can say without a shadow of the sophisticated cash flow forecasting and modeling, and it's still challenging. Like it's definitely not for the faint of heart. You have to kind of be like a risk taker to do this type But of really what you need to have is a lot of data in your firm and you need to understand what your average case value is in pre lit, and you need to be able to model, I signed up this many cases in this month. This is my projected calculation of when those cases are going to resolve based on historical data in my firm. So we know, let's say the average case takes twelve months, and then you can basically create models that should say based on your intake and your marketing when that revenue should come in.
• 19:31
  Then you have to make a lot of your hiring around that. So what I see a lot of times is that people will do massive marketing campaigns and they will not, at the same time, plan and project the hires that they're really going to need to make to deal with that influx.
• 19:45
  Davina: Right, right, right. You've probably blown a lot of people's minds right here, not even not just contingency law firms, but people who charge by billable hour or flat fee. Because one of the biggest struggles that I see women law firm owners have is around hiring and particularly hiring lawyers. So they may hire some staff, but there's a lot of fear around hiring lawyers because now I've got to pay this lawyer and I've got to bring in a peer and they have a lot of fear around that. And for you to actually say the issue in being successful is capacity.
• 20:21
  It's capacity, right? So it's not just getting the work in, but it's actually performing the work. Producing the Exactly,
• 20:33
  Jennifer: Exactly. That is a major issue I see across many law firms. And I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the statistics. The average woman owned business in America, let's not even mention law firms, creates the average revenue of 100 ks a year. Okay.
• 20:50
  So that's like a desperate, sad fact, right? Because in my mind, that business is really in a sense, a side hustle. How many people can you employ with 100 ks in revenue? So the reality is that so many women owned businesses don't have a ton of employees. I think it's like two and a half or something like that.
• 21:14
  And that kind of robs a lot of women of the experience of having a really amazing robust staff and what that experience can be. And one of my mentors once said to me when I only had like one or two lawyers, it was like, You don't have enough cash registers in your firm. Oh, I love that. Have all these things, but the lawyer is like the checkout point. The lawyer is like the one in contingency work that makes the sale final.
• 21:42
  Davina: Right. Right.
• 21:43
  Jennifer: I had a lot of work, but I didn't have enough lawyers to take it over the final line. And so that made a lot of sense to me. And I was realizing the lawyers are really the top revenue producers in most law firms.
• 21:58
  Davina: Right, right.
• 21:59
  Jennifer: So if you don't have enough lawyers, you're limiting your ability to create revenue.
• 22:06
  Davina: Exactly. So your statistic is spot on. And I think it's something like one point seven percent of women small business owners make over $1,000,000 a year. In revenue. Yeah, over 1,000,000 doesn't even mean 5,000,000, 10,000,000, a 100,000,000, right?
• 22:26
  And I do think it's one of the challenges for women that we don't dream big enough. Like we cap ourselves a certain amount and we go, this is enough for me. Not realizing that all of the options you have available to you when you have more resources and the power to influence that you have when you have more resources and the job creator you can be, and the leg up you can give to other women in the workforce. And I think what stops a lot, so you said two lawyers and somebody said to you, oh man, obviously you don't have enough cash registers, right? And I'm sitting here thinking about all the women lawyers I know who like, if they have two lawyers, they're good, man.
• 23:11
  They're doing great. They're doing great to have two lawyers. And how many lawyers do you have now working for you?
• 23:18
  Jennifer: We have six and then we have about 40 people working here in total. And I have no partners. It's a single share owner. And last year we ranked on the Inc. 5,000, as you were alluding to, and it was quite shocking because as I'm there with my parents, my dad, and we're in the audience, and I think one of the top five people that ranked was a woman.
• 23:44
  So I was just like, Oh, this is awesome. And then they said something like, there's only five 10 women that have ranked on the whole list of 5,000. And I was like,
• 23:56
  Davina: that's so crazy. There's cultural societal things that affect all of that, no doubt. But there's also sort of our beliefs, maybe because we brought up in a patriarchal society. But there's a lot of limiting beliefs women have about what this is enough, right? This is enough.
• 24:16
  And also not being able to handle the stress of it or saying, I'll be judged for it or whatever. Even if it's not on a conscious level, there's something going on. That's a self limiting factor that comes into play beyond society already limiting.
• 24:35
  Jennifer: I love that you're talking about this. And this is one of the reasons I think your podcast is so needed because I've been on a very personal journey with this issue and I feel like I'm in a really good place now. And I attribute a lot of what I've experienced in the last few years is breaking through any of that noise. But it's almost like now that I feel like a lot of those things are not in my frame of mind, it's almost hard to even remember when I was thinking that way, but I know historically I remember there was a lot of narratives about mom guilt. I have three kids, and there's a lot of people that will say, Why are you working?
• 25:13
  Or just different things that you have to learn to ignore. And the thing I've realized over time is that anything that anyone is saying to you is more about them than you. So it's like from their filter, from the stories they were told, from their point of view, you're disrupting something that doesn't align with their impression of how the world should be.
• 25:38
  Davina: Sometimes people aren't even saying it to us, but somehow we're absorbing it into our narrative from what's not being said or what we think people believe or what we think people think or whatever. Now, I grew up in a family that did teach very limiting thoughts and beliefs, not intentionally, but just because my parents are the silent generation. So, and they worked, they grew up in poverty, real poverty, my dad especially. And so what they accomplished in life was huge and that allowed us to accomplish. But that I always say that my sisters and I were sort of raised like we were children of the sixties and yet we were sixties and seventies.
• 26:20
  Yet we were raised sort of like in the fifties. That was the mindset of how we were raised of, and it was never overtly spoken, but it was just kind of expected that we sort of all get married and have kids and really, that's so interesting. Yeah. Funnily enough though, my the only one of the three of us that has children is my youngest sister and she has twins, but she didn't have them till she was 35. So it's very interesting.
• 26:46
  We all turned out to be these really independent women much mean, my poor mother who's just like such a sweet non boat rocker has three children, daughters who are just the boat rockers, right? All the way around.
• 27:02
  Jennifer: You know, my mom is kind of like that too. My mom was a stay at home mom, very traditional. But I remember as a small young girl thinking, Okay, which of my parents would I rather be like? I'd rather be like my dad because he seems to have a lot more power. My mom seemed more submissive.
• 27:21
  She kind of had to go with what he wanted to do. And I remember thinking, this ain't my scene, you kind of the same thing.
• 27:28
  Davina: Yeah. I remember very recently, my parents are in their mid eighties now and I was complimenting my mother. I was saying, one of the things that I think had led all of us or your daughters to be career women is that you did something really. She was part of the women's movement in her own way. And then she went to work when my youngest sister went to school, my mother went to work and she started out volunteering and she worked for many, many years and loved it.
• 27:56
  My parents married, my mother couldn't have a checking account. She didn't have her own credit card. She couldn't have any
• 28:01
  Jennifer: of that.
• 28:01
  Davina: That was radical four. That was radical. That was what women did. But even as I was complimenting her on that, she turned to my and says, it's because of that man right over there pointing at my dad saying because He let me do allowed me. Wanted.
• 28:20
  He allowed me to go do that. It was basically it. She didn't quite put it that way, but that was, he allowed her to go do it. He supported her in going to work. So people think that we're far away from women's rights and we're really not.
• 28:35
  We're living in a time that is so exciting to see how women today don't even think about like the thought of not being able to run a multiple million dollar business or be able to have a credit card or bank account in your name. And yet there are women alive right now who had that very experience. So it's really exciting to see, but you can see where people have these ingrained beliefs generation to generation and how they're sometimes they're like in our heads and we don't even realize that they're there. That messaging makes such a difference in who we become as people.
• 29:13
  Jennifer: Everything you're saying is so true and we have to keep that all in perspective. One thing that has helped me a lot in dealing with a lot of these issues, you know, I went into a lot of personal development. I hired tons of coaches. You know, I know the work that you're doing. You have to surround yourself with people that have the narrative that you want to believe in, and you have to distance yourself from honestly people that are holding you back in any way in those narratives.
• 29:41
  Like, I'm very okay with leaving people that don't want me to go forward. Like, I'm not going to sacrifice my future growth. If you're not cheering for me, it's cool. I've become a person where I'm okay letting people go. That is really a lot harder than you might think.
• 30:02
  There's friends that I've outgrown, there's people I've outgrown, and that's the real hard truth behind becoming successful. All the people you will have to leave behind who can get on your train and be excited for your growth. And I've had friends that have had to leave marriages or had to leave behind their parents or different people that were not supportive of their dreams and goals. And I think that is the difficult work. It's easier if you have coaches and mentors in your life.
• 30:36
  And, you know, I'm really big on the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives, the story we tell about our lives. And I have a daughter, so, you know, when I was a kid, the one thing I think that was a huge advantage for me was that I think my dad kind of treated me as his son, and so he didn't have any sons. I was the oldest. And so he used to tell me when I was a young girl, like, One day you'll be a CEO. One day you'll own a company.
• 31:03
  I'm going to take you to work with me because you need to know this. And so that possibility was set in my mind at a very young age. And I think when you're talking about things we tell girls, this is a huge thing I talk about all the time. I don't really have like a hard time creating a big vision because my whole life, my dad told me I could do anything and that he expected I would do incredible things and that that was in my capability. And so like that one thing can change the course of a young girl's life.
• 31:37
  Davina: Right. Right. Absolutely. I think also there's a part of you though that ask questions, that questions things. Some young people today that I've been around, I'm always kind of surprised how few questions they ask about, you know, like you would think if you meet somebody who is successful and doing well, that you would ask a lot of questions.
• 31:59
  And to me, that's so shocking that people don't ask more questions and ask questions of the right people. Right? I see a lot of going on social media and asking questions and then you get whatever stranger out there who chooses to answer and you take that as whatever. You know, somebody writes something on social media and you're crushed by it and you don't consider the source, right? You're going, is this somebody I want to emulate?
• 32:22
  Is this somebody that I even The know source. Anything
• 32:24
  Jennifer: That's like the number one thing you have to consider. Do they have the result you want? Because if they don't, the advice is not going to get you where you want to go. And I will say that I do think my parents raised me. My dad used to always say like, the number one thing you should be in life is an independent thinker.
• 32:43
  And I think that's what always made me curious is like, I want to have my own thoughts, but I need to understand. So I need to ask all these questions because I want to have my own thought. I want to have my own conclusion. And you know, I do that now with my daughter. Like, I take her to work with me and I tell her like, One day you're going to be an amazing leader in this world.
• 33:03
  I don't know what you're going to do, but you're going to do something amazing. And like that encouragement that we need to give to young girls to make them believe that anything is possible, we have I
• 33:17
  Davina: think it's also the example though, the example of it. So you're living the example of it because telling one thing and then not living it is the other piece of it. I do wanna go back and talk about your law firm. Saw on your Instagram that you guys were looking for a manager you're looking for, and you told me as COO, I'd like for people to hear about this sort of leadership team and leadership structure in your firm, because this too is something that I know there are a lot of women law firm owners out there that can't even imagine having a firm, having 40 people in a firm and having a firm this size that can have a leadership team so that they are running the business and able to be gone if they want to, or be able to pursue other interests if they want to, or that kind of thing. So tell me how you came to the idea of a leadership team and how you started that.
• 34:10
  Jennifer: Yeah. So again, I observe other firms that were successful and I saw that there was firms that were having a lot of success and they were running on this thing called EOS, which I'm sure you may have heard of Traction. And so we transitioned our firm onto EOS. And the part of EOS is that you install a leadership team. And I remember the first day that I was doing it, they're like, Who's on your leadership team?
• 34:34
  And I'm like, What leadership You're looking at her. Well, at that time, it was me and my office manager, basically, Tracy. And an office manager is good at certain levels, but it's really not One of the things that I think can keep a firm really small is having an office manager for too long because an office manager becomes this person that you're like, you're doing 12 roles and effectively they aren't doing all of them well. So you're doing the hiring, you're doing the onboarding, you're doing the IT, you're doing, you know, the finance, you're doing so many different roles. Even the most talented person in the world can't do all of those well.
• 35:19
  So it's a frustrating position for that person at some point. And so it made a lot of sense to me to say, okay, we're going to build a leadership team, a C suite. We're going to have a head of marketing, head of intake, a head of finance, and we're going to have like a round table. And we're going to come to this round table every week and talk about the problems in the firm. And then everyone is going to own the to dos and the things they need to solve for the week and come back in a week and report back.
• 35:49
  And one thing that I talk about with a lot of women lawyers is like, you need to give yourself the experience of having an amazing person work for you because it's so sad when you hear people say like, Ugh, employees. Like there's a negative narrative around having people work for you. And I always tell people like, If you ever had Tracy Hammond or Alexa Lovantis come work for you, which are two people in my team, or Noella, you would love people working for you because these people are amazing. They value the same things I value and they're superstar unicorns. How
• 36:29
  Davina: do you think you got so good at hiring superstar unicorns?
• 36:33
  Jennifer: Taking 10,000 steps to the bat. You just have to like it's like a numbers game. Like, you have to be really clear on what you want. You have
• 36:42
  Davina: to be relentless on your standards. You've been through some staff members and some team members
• 36:48
  Jennifer: You and you kept have to be able to be resilient and get back up. Every time, like, you know, it doesn't work out, you have to think like, why didn't this work out? What is my part in this? Like, one thing I believe is that you have to become the leader of a $10,000,000 law firm. Like, you have to become the kind of person that that many people would follow, which means you've got to do a lot of work on yourself as a leader.
• 37:14
  The leader I am today is 10 times better than the leader I was ten years ago. And, you know, I had a lot of hang ups. I wasn't like good at delegating in the beginning. I was too OCD. I didn't have the self control, the emotional discipline that I have now.
• 37:31
  And so when you don't have all those things, you're not going to attract the caliber of people. Like now, I'm much more confident in my leadership skills. And I went through a lot of trainings, a lot of personal work to try to fill those voids. And through that process, I feel like I earned the privilege to have higher caliber people come want to work for me.
• 37:57
  Davina: Yeah, I love that you said that because that really is the key is that when somebody quits or you have to fire somebody, the longer you stay in your feelings about it, the worse it's going to be. Like, just go back, get that ad out the next day, get that ad out ahead of time. When you know it's coming, get that ad out and start looking because the longer you say, Hurry, you go, well, this person left and I've got to think about this. I'm just gonna step back for the next six months and just regroup. It's all a mental
• 38:31
  Jennifer: You You gotta go and you gotta not waste time. And the other thing, when you get bigger, like now, I'm not involved in terminations. I'm not involved in a lot of the discipline that goes on in the firm. So that's been really good for me.
• 38:46
  Davina: Yeah, that's really nice.
• 38:48
  Jennifer: That was something like they kept telling me in EOS, like, what are the things you're great at? What are the things you love to do? And like, what are the things you'd be happy to never do again? And so I'm mainly involved in the, like, I guess the reviews and like the discipline, if there was any. You know, there's not really discipline at my leadership level.
• 39:10
  I mean, we have hard, hard conversations, but I don't really have those issues at the higher levels right now. But having to deal with everyday things like this person's not performing, like you can get amazing people in your company that they are really good at that and they're happy to do it and they feel passionate about that if you don't love to do that.
• 39:33
  Davina: Of the things I'm often talking with people about management is so many women law firm owners say, I didn't want to be a micromanager. And so what they do is they on the side of It's hands
• 39:46
  Jennifer: called abdication. Abdication is just as bad because you've been Without completely
• 39:55
  Davina: your vision, without your input. I mean, you're the creator and the visionary of the business. That's the number one. And you can't grow that team unless you are communicating and inspiring them to follow was guilty of that.
• 40:11
  Jennifer: I guilty of that. I would go from micromanaging to abdicating because I couldn't, I wasn't comfortable like being in the middle. I wasn't comfortable with letting people fail. I wasn't comfortable with making mistakes. Like there's a whole like evolution that you have to go through that you can find people that can help fill you first, I think, is self awareness.
• 40:34
  You have to be very self aware of your deficiencies and always have to take 100% accountability. Like if someone doesn't work out in your office and you hired them, you hired them. You brought them in.
• 40:47
  Davina: And Peter failed to manage. Peter failed to manage, right, the process, right? This is exactly there's another podcast episode that's coming out next week, actually, that I did on this very topic. Yep. Sure.
• 40:59
  You've read extreme ownership, Jocca. Oh, Jocca Willock and Lake Babin. And they say there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. And that's so painful when you hear that. And you're like, like, I hate to tell people that because it feels a little insulting to say that to them.
• 41:13
  But the reality of it is, is that we have to take a look at ourselves because we can only control our own behavior. At the end of the day, really, we are only able to control our own behavior. So what is it that I can do better? Or what did I fail to do? Either hire the wrong person, fail to train the person, fail to clearly communicate my expectations, fail to help them set up a system, all kinds of things.
• 41:42
  And I think it's hard for people as they're hiring because it does feel, but the smaller you are, the more it feels personal.
• 41:49
  Jennifer: It was so personal to me. Now, I kind of feel like if you build a really strong culture, which we have here, we're very clear on what we stand for, what we don't stand for, the firm will actually kick people out. It's like its own entity and like it's not on our vibe. The firm kind of just like
• 42:09
  Davina: It's like an alien that it just expels you.
• 42:13
  Jennifer: And the other thing I will say is like when we have someone who's a problem who's not working out, when I come to the leadership team and we're having this discussion and there's five women here and me and everyone's come to the same conclusion, this person is not a fit, it's less lonely. I feel like you don't take a lot of this stuff personally as you build a bigger business because you've got all these people you really love and respect that you're working with and they've came to the same conclusion. Right. So it's not like you don't get in your head, you
• 42:45
  Davina: know, you don't get in there and go, well, you know, maybe if I had done this or maybe if this had happened or whatever. I love traction, by the way. We'll put the link to the book by Geno Woman in the show notes. We'll wrap it up here. One of the things that Geno talks about in traction is get it, want it, capable of doing it.
• 43:06
  I love that. Back to the word capacity, right? So when my clients experience somebody quitting or feeling like they need to fire somebody, I say, Okay, what is it? Do they get it? Do they want it?
• 43:18
  Or they did. Was it a capacity or capability of doing it right? So what was missing here? And usually it's more than one thing, right? When you put it in a framework like that, you start to see so clearly that sometimes you just have the wrong mud in the wrong seats.
• 43:35
  And
• 43:37
  Jennifer: guess what? It just is what it is. Like there's a lot of people that I study that they're very successful and they will tell me, you can be the best hirer. You can cross all your T's, dot all your I's. You can go through all the personality dis profiling and do all this amazing thing.
• 43:54
  And you can still have people that mislead you in their interview and tell you everything you want to hear. And then when they arrive, they are not the person that they see themselves as because they lack self awareness. And so there's a level of like, you also have to understand there's going to be a certain percent no matter how good you are at hiring, that's just not going to work out. And you just got to like, okay, I'm moving on, I'm moving on.
• 44:17
  Davina: That goes with being a good leader. That goes with being a good leader. It's like, there are certain people that no matter how much you invest in training, they're not gonna be a good fit for whatever reason. And being a bad leader lets them sit there like a cancer and infect everyone around them. And a good leader says, No, this isn't gonna work.
• 44:41
  Only way that you get good at it is It's like being a lawyer. You knew certain things when you started, but you're a completely different lawyer now than you were back when you started the firm because you've practiced it, practiced it, practiced practiced it. It's the same thing with building a team, practice, practice, practice, hire, fire, hire, fire, get elevate, elevate, right? It's a constant. And I love how you talk so much about personal work, the personal development work that you have done to be a better leader of a multimillion dollar business.
• 45:13
  And growing into that, it's not something, it's a process. I often tell people that if I handed you the keys to that dream business today, you'd freak out because you wouldn't be able because you're not the person who can lead that level because you have to do And nobody likes to hear this. You have to do the work. And it's not hard work necessarily, but it's work. I mean, the hard work is not in the paperwork.
• 45:39
  The hard work is in the internal work.
• 45:41
  Jennifer: The personal work. And then my license plate is Mindset. I'm big on that. I think your mindset creates your reality. I'm also big on surrounding yourself with people who are further along than you.
• 45:56
  Like the real danger is getting around a group of people that make you think you've arrived because it's like the journey. And sometimes it's lonely and you've got to find like some of my best friends, I'm sure this is true for you too, they don't live next door to me. They live all around the country. But we're harder people to find. There's not like a ton of us, right?
• 46:18
  Davina: Right, right, right. Well, see, the older you get to, like, I'm at a point where I have fewer friends.
• 46:24
  Jennifer: I want people to hear this. I have fewer friends, but the friends I have inspire me, make me feel like anything is possible, and I'm picky about who my friends are. And the limited time I have to take away from my kids, my family, my business, I only want to spend it with people that really fill me up with it. Exactly. Make me excited.
• 46:47
  So you have to become more selective of how you use your time and like, are the people I'm around really adding value to my life?
• 46:57
  Davina: And I'm adding joy. It's the vibing thing you're talking about. Like, are we on the same wavelength so that I don't have to defend myself. Diminish yourself or defend what you're doing or what you have or whatever that is, right? So on that note, we do need to end.
• 47:14
  Jen, I could talk with you for another three hours and you and I will have more conversations. Tell us how people can find out about your law firm and connect with you, follow you on Instagram, which I love.
• 47:27
  Jennifer: Yes. My email is jenniferatlinjurylawgroup, the website, atlinjurylawgroup. Instagram, jengoerlawyer is my personal brand, and then atlinjurylawgroup on Instagram and TikTok. We're also posting like crazy on LinkedIn. But thank you so much for having me on here and for pioneering this podcast.
• 47:50
  It's so important that we have these conversations.
• 47:54
  Davina: I totally agree. I'm so happy that I reached out to you and brought you on because you're definitely one of the women out there who is killing it. And so I'm really glad I got to meet you and talk with you.
• 48:06
  Jennifer: 1% better every day. That's all That's we can right.
• 48:10
  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 clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.