Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Podcast #161: Building an Automated Law Practice, with Conor Malloy

microphone with caption "lawyerist/legal talk network" below


In this episode with Conor Malloy, we talk about some of the technologies Conor has built into his firm, and how those tools have changed the structure of his law practice.

Conor Malloy

Conor Malloy headshot

Conor Malloy is a partner at Chi City Legal, a law firm dedicated to serving small and medium-sized landlords in Chicago. He merges his knowledge of technology and legal processes in order to reduce friction between his clients and the court system. Conor a recent recipient of Meritorious Recognition of the 2018 Louis M. Brown Award for Legal Access.

You can follow Conor on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists and Clio for sponsoring this episode!

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Transcript

This transcript was prepared by Rev.com.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the lawyerist podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street and this is episode 161 of the Lawyerist podcast part of the legal talk network. Today we’re talking with Conor Malloy about building an automated law practice.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is brought to you by Law Pay, Fresh Books, and Ruby Receptionists. We love their support and we will tell you more about them later in the show.

Aaron Street: So one of the things I love about our show over the last three years is how we’ve done I think a pretty good job of balancing a variety of topical themes. So we’ve had lots of practicing lawyers talking about their interesting practice niches and we’ve had a number of leaders in the open access to law movement and the legal librarian movement talking about those topics. And we’ve had Ed Walters on a number of times to talk about robots.

Sam Glover: I don’t think we’ve actually used the word robots between this episode and dozens.

Aaron Street: That’s shocking because I think for our first 50 episodes, we mentioned it almost every time.

Sam Glover: Totally.

Aaron Street: I don’t know where my one solo episode about bitcoin fits into these collections of themes but another theme has been us trying to really engage with what’s often called the legal hacker movement which is really tech-savvy lawyers who are doing their own software coding and tech projects to build tech tools. And that’s where this one fits and I think it’s cool that we’ve got this mix of topics and that we recognize that in our community there is a broad spectrum of tech savviness and we certainly have our own thesis on the fact that small firm lawyers need to be somewhat tech competent but we are not of the expectation that lawyers need to learn to code but this is one for sure for people who do this is for them. And even if you don’t … I Think there’s some really cool ideas and projects to think about here.

Sam Glover: I think everybody is going to like this one but there’s a moment towards the end where Conor says, “I think everybody can do this stuff.” And I think what you hear it you’ll realize that I don’t think he’s right. I don’t think most lawyers can build their own and host their own secure MySQL databases full of client data and then access them using API and things. Like this is not … I think would struggle to do that. And that doesn’t mean you’re not going to enjoy this podcast. But I don’t want people to think like oh, you’ve got to. What’s cool though is like Conor can do these things and it really opens doors to the way he can structure his law practice. So he doesn’t have to go work on a word template. He can go and build out a new system and code for serving his clients. And so for working on his practice means for him is different than what it might mean for somebody else. And I think it’ll be neat to be exposed to how he thinks about this as opposed to how somebody else might think about it.

Aaron Street: So sometimes we talk about meditation and sometimes we talk about business. And today we get to geek a little bit and here we go.

Conor Malloy: My name is Conor Malloy and I’m a partner at a two-man law firm based in Chicago called Chi City Legal which is a firm dedicated to representing small and medium-sized landlords across Chicago.

Sam Glover: Hey Conor, thanks for being with us today. So you said two men, so is it just you and your partner then or do you have staff as well?

Conor Malloy: It’s just my partner and I and then I guess we have some staff because we do virtual receptionist and then I also have an artificial intelligence that does a lot of my scheduling.

Sam Glover: Does your AI have a name?

Conor Malloy: Yes, it’s Amy. It’s from a company called x.ai.

Sam Glover: Oh, yes. Absolutely cool. So two humans virtual receptionist service and a robot. That sounds awesome. Very 2018.

Conor Malloy: You better keep it in 2018.

Sam Glover: And you said it’s just landlords?

Conor Malloy: Yes, it’s just landlords. The landlords that we represent … And just to throw it out there my partner’s name’s John Norsk got a firm out there. The landlord that we represent though they’re probably the landlords that you would find that if they didn’t have us by their side they would usually just go self-represented in court.

Sam Glover: Oh, interesting. So you’re really targeting the small-time landlord.

Conor Malloy: Yes exactly. So we have anybody from … It could be the pensioner renting the second floor in their two flat in order to make ends meet. Also with somebody that maybe just honest to goodness came to this country with a little bit of money in hand, started investing in property and just leaving the dream.

Sam Glover: I should offer by way of disclaimer here that I have always been a tenant’s rights advocate and I have strong feelings about landlords but I’ll grit my teeth and bury it and we can keep going.

Conor Malloy: We’re the same way. My partner John he did a lot of his work when he first started practicing with the lawyer’s committee for better housing and the way we like it with passionate, John says this all the time is that we’re trying to tackle the housing crisis from our side. And so we can work in conjunction with the tenant’s rights groups and things like that. We’re going to make the playing field a lot more level and hopefully avoid a lot of the conflicts and avoid court. That’s one of the end goals here.

Sam Glover: Well, say more about that. Say how does that affect your approach to representing landlords then?

Conor Malloy: A lot of times the eviction … Some people just see it as a means to an end and that the end would just be evicting somebody. But the way we try to look at it sometimes you just got to evict somebody. It is what it is. But sometimes we just want to be able to heal the relationship between the landlords and the tenants and you’re in court, all right? That’s your venue in order to resolve conflicts at least the way it’s drawn up and we try to make the best out of it and the vast majority of our cases we end up settling because we are able to find a middle ground and if there’s a lot of education of our clients on the process and just understanding where the other side’s coming from and seeing if we can find something of a middle ground.

Sam Glover: One of the things that I have noticed in working on landlord-tenant issues and honestly in many other sort of consumer-level legal issues is that most of the time people end up in court because they aren’t talking to each other.

Conor Malloy: That’s exactly-

Sam Glover: Like a landlord leaves a letter somewhere and the tenant just that’s the last thing they heard about it and so they decide that it needs to go to court or vice versa. And sometimes the problem is as simple as the letter never got to its destination but sometimes it’s just that people are making all kinds of assumptions about what the other person is doing or saying or thinking or intending and there’s either no communication or it’s completely broke down. Is that your experience too but also how do you kind of approach that and try to solve that?

Conor Malloy: And that’s a big one. In my background, before I partnered up with John because he’s the landlord-tenant guy, is I did a lot of family law and so you had litigation that lasted a very long time and there’s a trust that’s built up around the family versus just a contractual relationship between a landlord and a tenant. But that’s the biggie is once we get them summoned to court, you walk through the courtroom, and is so and so here? Somebody raises their hand and you come out in the hall and talk with me, you know why you’re here today? What are you looking to do and just open it up with an open-ended question and that might be the first time the landlord heard something like I want to stay. I just need to be able to do this or to do that. It’s big just you hear from the horse’s mouth and get people talking.

Sam Glover: So let’s talk about your client service model because that’s what we’re here to chat about and it sounds like what you’ve done is you’ve taken the less desirable section of the landlord market right? Like big property management companies have plenty of firms willing to represent them. You’re going after lots of smaller landlords and so like how do you start thinking about how to do that effectively and for an affordable fee?

Conor Malloy: Sure. So one of the issues that you run into is when you’re dealing with maybe a larger management group and you have a certain amount of attorneys that may earn probably that practice area. When you deal with the client you’re dealing with maybe one attorney dealing with one property manager who manages hundreds and hundreds of units. So if those units are defaulting you have a ratio of many units to one point of contact to be able to handle that. And so what’s going on on eviction cases if you to give them a deep briefing it’s very easy to communicate all that. The issue that we run into is we have a very low ratio of legal issues to points of contact. And so that’s one of the big things that we need to bridge is if we have 100 active cases, we might have 90 clients for those 100 active cases versus somebody who might have 100 active cases and have one point of contact. So the technology that we employ and it’s really all off the shelf stuff that we’re seeming together and to be able to open up communications, increase transparency and a lot of the people it might be their first eviction. So you really have to be hands-on as you can without tying up the phone lines all day or bringing people into the office and chatting about things that pretty matter of course.

Sam Glover: So this is a bit of a tangent but something you just said made me wonder. Let’s say somebody is dealing with their first tenant problem and they think they need to evict them. How do they find you?

Conor Malloy: We do a lot of online advertising. The other thing that we do is we do a direct mailing. So just to give you a lay of the land in Cook County every year there’s probably between … It’s down now since the crisis but it’s down around maybe 25000 evictions filed every year. Then when you deal with the Daley Center right in Chicago the amount of evictions there is probably about 80% of that. But then you have as far as self-represented tenants filing cases it’s probably between 80 and 120-

Sam Glover: So as soon as the landlord files an eviction do you send them a letter then?

Conor Malloy: Yes. Exactly exactly. But the other thing that we do as well is for the people that we have e-mail addresses for that are going through this process we manage it and a lot of the stuff is automated. We manage it so that we’re constantly listening to the court activity to see where they’re at so we can potentially intervene at any given point because we know a lot of choke points where somebody is not well versed in the process that we can intervene. And so it’s a very … I try to make this process as seamless as possible for us to just jump right into a case with like limited skill representation and document automation. I’ve had a call at 9: 29 to hire us for a 9: 30 port call and we came in ready to roll.

Sam Glover: So you’re monitoring the dockets in general and even if somebody hasn’t already hired you, you may reach out to them based on a trigger that comes later in their process.

Conor Malloy: That’s exactly it. We’re just so heavily intertwined with what’s going on in Chicago that a whole lot that gets passed at-

Sam Glover: Is that automated or are you every day combing through the court records to see what’s new?

Conor Malloy: For the new cases, there’s a high level of automation to do the filtering. Unfortunately, the state of technology in Cook County really isn’t as you said be in the conversation 2018. So you do have to have boots on the ground over at the Daley Center to be able to pull that data off the computers and things.

Sam Glover: So do you do that then or is it somebody else?

Conor Malloy: Sometimes I do it, sometimes we have every so often we might get look an intern that goes over and can bang away at the computers.

Sam Glover: So back to the client service model, are you doing evictions for less than somebody who might be representing a big property manager or are you just having to deal with the fact that it’s actually less cost effective for you to represent one person at a time because of all the extra communication you have to do?

Conor Malloy: That’s a big thing. My partner and I were just talking about this last night and for some of these very run of the mill routine conversations that people always have the same questions, I’m going to start employing various chatbots that can deploy at certain instances where people have questions to see how far that takes us. The model that we have … The pricing that we do we sort of parse it out based upon the point they are in litigation. So they are flat rates so it covers depending upon the phase you are in they cover an unlimited amount of court dates and drafting paperwork and client communication and like. But what we’re looking at is just trying to provide something that’s affordable for people and it kind of is what it is to be able to get in there. So we don’t do sliding scales. It’s just one price for people because we think we have sort of a sweet spot.

Sam Glover: Are you promoting it as a more affordable arrangement than they might get if they went to one of the lawyers who’s representing property managers?

Conor Malloy: Without a doubt.

Sam Glover: Okay, and that’s what I was curious about.

Conor Malloy: But the biggie is for people is you’re speaking to the lawyers who represent property managers the biggie for us is because once upon a time in Chicago, they passed the Chicago landlord-tenant ordinance. It was designed very well to deal with the problem they were dealing with in the past where you have some lords and people were doing some pretty nasty stuff at their properties and like the Wild West. But over time you would have maybe some of these property managers, who knows? Maybe they were sued out of business but then some of them would get compliance people and be able to adapt right. So some of these more stringent regulations for the people that really couldn’t adapt readily are these small homegrown Chicago landlords. So the big thing that we look at for people is our subscription model where … Okay, you’re in court, that’s how we found you.

We’re going to put that fire out sort of like the emergency room, deal with the triage. And then once we’re out, we’re going to try to put you on a subscription plan where you’re going to pay it could be a few bucks per unit per month and be able to provide you with that compliance, provide you with those leases. All these other things so you don’t get things under the ordinance. So is taking care of people in and out of court which I think is a bigger trend. And I know that there’s some places that do this stuff on a macro level for sort of these prepaid legal services are sort of insurance but we just keep it very very nichey where I think we’re pretty decent at what we do. And we hope that our clients appreciate especially the compliance and stuff.

Sam Glover: So you’ve mentioned you’re doing everything from come in in the middle of a court case to pay a subscription and we’ll help you stay in compliance. Deal with whatever comes up. I mean what’s the ratio like how many people are coming in on non bundled service basis or limited scope basis, how many people are coming in to hire you to handle a court case and how many people are on subscription kind of across your client base?

Conor Malloy: If I had a ballpark and I ran these numbers awhile ago when we started doing some analytics but for cases that we’re intervening on that are brand new cases, remind you this keep shifting because the signs that we intervene on are becoming clients that are giving us new cases. So you keep seeing that shift but if you would’ve asked me six months ago, I probably would have said we’re intervening on maybe two-thirds of our cases and one-third of them are probably new filings.

Sam Glover: And then how many subscriptions?

Conor Malloy: For the subscription clients at this point, we’re probably covering north of 300 units across Chicago.

Sam Glover: I mean is that like one or two clients or is that 150 clients?

Conor Malloy: It’s a lot of clients. But we have people that … Still, small-time landlords, I would say, they might have like a couple dozen units. People get these … Somebody passes away and overnight you’re a landlord right. So that kind of stuff where people fall into.

Sam Glover: So we’ve got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and we come back, I want to hear about some of the tools and technology you’re using to enable you to do this small landlord representation at scale. So we’ll be right back.

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Sam Glover: Okay we’re back. So we’ve talked about kind of the big picture how your various representation looks like between limited scope or representation in cases subscriptions. This is all based on you trying to be really really efficient so that you can bring the price down to a rate where small landlords can afford. So what are some of the tools you’re using to do this and what does that actually look like for a client to work with your firm?

Conor Malloy: The big tool that we use for our practice management, we use a Trello board. I’ve had experience with various practice management tools even when I was waiting for my bar exam results. I created my own practice management tool in vb.net which worked for me for a while. But right now because of the amount of cases that were handling and the flow of cases, Trello just seems to be the place to go. But what comes with Trello though on the back end which really drives everything as far as our infrastructure is … And I know you and I talked about this Zapier. Am I doing that right?

Sam Glover: It is Zapier.

Conor Malloy: Okay.

Sam Glover: I believe. Because it is an API or.

Conor Malloy: But that’s what drives a lot of things. So with the integration that we have built in, you go on our website you can draft an eviction notice for free. And that eviction notice you plug in your information that things going to go through a gravity form that connects with Zapier and then reaches out to web merge creates a document and sends that document over to your email. At that same time it’s creating a card on our Trello board where it’ll set up a date that if it’s a five-day notice, we’ll reach out to you within five days if you need legal assistance. And we can intervene and pick up from there.

Sam Glover: You do need eviction letters as sort of a way to attract leads to your site. And then you can follow up with them and hope to make them into clients?

Conor Malloy: Exactly. And because one of the things that we’ve noticed obviously and it works for us it’s just a nice service to provide though because I have a lot of people that just use our website. You see him come on there all the time drafting notices and they never want to use our services. But what I know is that when they’re out there in the world, they’re not one of the people that we intervene on and we find out that they either did no notice or their notice was deficient in one-way shape or form.

Sam Glover: Right, if they ever did become a client then you’ve actually got a better client.

Conor Malloy: Yes, and we can walk right in the case and I can pull up the five-day notice and I know we’re ready to rock.

Sam Glover: And so let’s say they bring you on after that. What are some of the tools you use during the ongoing representations?

Conor Malloy: One of the things that we use for our back and for all our data is I have a MySQL server kind of locked up and when we’re drafting documents we use a form tool Doxsera. So that’s drafting all our documents. So that was a big one because we don’t have any staff that’s pumping this stuff out is we had to make sure that whether we’re drafting one complaint package to file with the court or 10 that we can pump these out and we’re wasting no time with your classic copy and paste job.

Sam Glover: So you’ve dropped a couple of things now that the typical listener probably isn’t aware of. You said you’ve got a MySQL server who’s built that and who’s maintaining it?

Conor Malloy: The MySQL server sits on Google Cloud.

Sam Glover: Right but I wouldn’t even know what to do with that and I bet a lot of our listeners don’t either. So I’m curious what does that mean, What do you do with it, How does it work with your systems and who maintains it?

Conor Malloy: Sure. So what happens is when data’s coming through on these Gravity Forms and Gravity Forms, I love it because we use a WordPress site. There’s so many plugins that you can do with it. The WordPress site is taking all that data and that’s the big thing is that once you get that data that use it over and over again because otherwise, you’re just bogging yourself down with double, triple, quadruple data entry. It’s taking it and then throwing it into MySQL database so it could be an Excel spreadsheet. It could be … I was doing it with Google Sheet for a little while-

Sam Glover: Did you set that up?

Conor Malloy: I set that up in the background. Yes.

Sam Glover: And that’s just the database that holds all of the form entries and associates all the documents with them so that when you need to deal with a client you’ve got a database of all of the interactions you’ve had with them?

Conor Malloy: Right at my fingertips. And a lot of that stuff is constantly updating with the Trello board. So I have a lot of little triggers built into the Trello board that just makes the process transparent to the clients.

Sam Glover: How do you read the data off your server? Do you have a web-based front-end for it or are you always interacting with it through something like Trello or how do you find out if you wanted to look out how many times has this person filed something with us. Where do you go to do that?

Conor Malloy: So there is a call that we can do from Google Sheet. I don’t like the stuff sitting out there on Google Sheet but we can do a call just like a simple query to it. But the one thing that I had to do especially to take it off the Google Sheet is the Doxsera program doesn’t for the people that use it out there it doesn’t read off of Google Sheets. It can’t really pull off of the cloud in that way. So since it sits inside of Microsoft Word, you have to have a connector and that connector will just reach out to a MySQL or SQL server type of database in order to populate all of our documents.

Sam Glover: How did you know how to do that?

Conor Malloy: I just kind of when I was 18 I did what everybody else did and I started learning Microsoft Access and-

Sam Glover: Literally nobody else did that.

Conor Malloy: But I-

Sam Glover: Hey, because nobody uses Microsoft Access in the first place because nobody does that.

Conor Malloy: So I come from what a lot of people argue with me about this new generation where that forward on trail generation. So I grew up … I remember my brother for high school graduation gift. He got a Commodore 64 playing around on that thing and when we got our first computer playing around on that building it, building PCs through the 90s and so all this stuff just kind of intuitive to be able to do these patchworks. Obviously, the people that were doing that sort of high-level stuff, I can’t hold a conversation with you for more than five seconds but some of these little things where you get this what you see is what you get Zapier connectors and stuff that I can jive with.

Sam Glover: So I’m curious how do you ensure the security of the system?

Conor Malloy: So the first thing is when we’re transacting data on the website … If you were to go on our website you’re going to get the green certificate. We had to pay the extra bit of money to be able to get the SSL certificate for the website. So I feel pretty confident that our data is pretty safe when it’s transacting through the website.

Sam Glover: But that doesn’t have anything to do with your MySQL server.

Conor Malloy: But then the MySQL server itself is locked up on the back end. I had to throw that and my brother who’s sort of a whiz with these things he does odd jobs for computer work and everything helped me lock down the SQL server a lot better.

Sam Glover: Got you.

Conor Malloy: Than off the shelf Google cloud services.

Sam Glover: So to bring it back to the bigger picture essentially what you’re doing day to day is you’re collecting all the information you can from people who use your website, who hire you and most of the representation it sounds like involves generating documents and going to court. What if you just want to look up information about a customer rather than using it to generate a document? Like if I’m a Clio user I can look at a contact record or a matter record that shows me everything that we’ve ever done in this case and all of the tasks, all the calendar appointments all that stuff. I’m wondering if there’s something equivalent in the system as you’ve put it together.

Conor Malloy: So the way our Trello cards work … So if you have a legal matter then it’s going to come off as a Trello card. So and for people who don’t use Trello, it’s really just a computerized version of post-it notes. So you click on that or you do a search for the person’s name and it’s pretty fast to grab and that will open up the Trello card and really all we have is a sequence of either communication between my partner and I that are on the cards.

Sam Glover: So you use comments on the card for your internal communication?

Conor Malloy: Exactly. And then if we have to comment with the client rather than opening up an email, we have certain hues that we could put into Trello card that Zapier’s listening for and can draft an email. Actually, there are several ways that we do it because our clients are very tech savviness. So for some of our people that don’t have email obviously it makes life a little bit more difficult but or don’t like email, we can do our updates via SMS but for the people that don’t even have cell phones, some of our clients are elderly. I set something up to be able to do a voice dial and give somebody a ring with an automated scripted message to let them know what phase we are in their case. That goes out through Trello.

Sam Glover: Interesting. How often does your system need maintenance? As somebody who is also a tinkerer, I’ve built some pretty interesting things on my own but I often come to the conclusion that I’m spending more time fixing broken connections and things than I’d like to.

Conor Malloy: Are we talking about how often it needs maintenance or how often I tinker with it?

Sam Glover: Both.

Conor Malloy: How often it needs maintenance, it’s chugging along. I noticed one little formatting issue for example on one of our automated documents that I fixed yesterday. But as far as tinkering goes, it’s just sort of a never-ending process for me because I’m always thinking of different features to add on to it or like I said earlier with talk with my partner last night for some of these communications with clients that well, let’s deploy chatbots for these certain phases that they’re at in the case and see if that takes care of that issue. So we’re not getting calls on this stuff. We’d love to talk with them but if I can deal with an issue and you can deal with an issue just hanging out you don’t have to worry about getting a hold of me, I think we both come out better for that.

Sam Glover: And are you checking with clients to see if they’re happy about stuff like that? I mean I know Net Promoter Scores become pretty popular, we’ve advised a lot of people to use that to find out because I think the push and pull is obviously if it makes you more efficient but it puts off your clients then it’s maybe not the best solution. So how will you know if that’s happening?

Conor Malloy: The clients that will reach out will give us feedback on it. I used to work in the restaurant industry. And I remember talking with the owner one night we’re watching some people walk out by the hostess table and she says “Well, have a good night. How was your meal?” And they say “Oh, great.” And he says see that they’re always going to idea. So sometimes we just wait for somebody to see one of our automated messages and say “Oh, thanks for the update.” And this is just stuff that’s pumping out because the way we update people is … The moment we open up a new matter inside Trello there’s about 14 different steps inside an eviction case and we just click the box and that’s an internal information for us that we need in order to prosecute the case. But on the back side, it’s informing the client that this has happened in the case or this hasn’t happened in the case. This is when the next court date is all that good stuff.

We do probably run into borderline maybe too much communication. For some of our clients where they might have more units they don’t want something like that, they want it more aggregate. And I think that’s what I’m going to work on next. But that’s a biggie. But one of the other things that it does too is right from the Trello board being able to generate invoices straight from the thing. So if something happens in the case, hey this has happened in the case and now to go straight to accounting software we use zero generate invoice send that out and then get us rolling. So we’re not having to mess around with jumping from system to system.

Sam Glover: Well and it’s interesting because on the one hand I am sure people are listening going I don’t know how to do that stuff and some other people maybe are thinking well that doesn’t sound much like lawyering. What’s interesting about what you’re doing though is you’re essentially programming a system for client service that delivers the same consistent level of client service across the board and has automated away some of the things that really aren’t lawyering and aren’t an effective use of your time so that you can focus on the stuff you do. And to the extent you’re tinkering and fixing what you do is you’re maintaining your client service machine monitoring it and making sure that it continues to receive high marks from your clients.

Conor Malloy: Because here’s what’s going to happen. To take care of the back office stuff if we can do that and roughly automate most of it … I was at a conference not too long ago. And when you go there and you hear from people that are driving certain technologies you have some people that are driving technologies for lawyers to employ but then you also have another side of technology that instead of lawyers employing it sort of employs lawyers. The Uber model and something that hangs over you. And that’s what makes me nervous is I want to be able to find tools and I want to be able to create little models. And that’s one of the big things that was so interesting with all the different that flew Sam Brown Award.
A lot of the different players that came into it.

Sam Glover: So what is that? Most people don’t know what that is.

Conor Malloy: Sure. So it’s the American Bar Association’s award for legal access. Developing tools or developing new programs things like that to be able to … I don’t want to say it because … Well, I will say it because it’s just kind of gets played out. But it is an important thing just to deal with the justice gap and to deal with these legal access issues. So one of the biggies that they’re looking for on the criteria is it has to be replicable. So what I want to be able to do is create certain things and let people look under the hood to see how we do stuff to be able to employ this in their own firms if you’re a solo out there. All right, what about streamlining this one process and in that helps make you just a little more tech savvy, efficient and competitive. It’s coming where we’re going to kind of be cogs in the wheel to be able to meet a certain end. We go out to court in the morning, we litigate, we spend an hour or two in court and hash it out and then we’ve got to sort of decompress when we get back to the office and start churning things out and the easier we can make that and get back into court the next day and be home in time for dinner. That’s a plus.

Sam Glover: Very cool. Thanks so much for being with us today Conor. I really appreciated getting kind of the peek under the hood of what you’re doing. It was very interesting.

Conor Malloy: Thank you for having me. This is fantastic.

Speaker 1: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of the lawyerist podcast by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast app. And please leave a rating to help other people find our show. You can find the notes for today’s episode on lawyerist.com/podcast. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.

Podcast #161: Building an Automated Law Practice, with Conor Malloy was originally published on Lawyerist.com.



source https://lawyerist.com/podcast-161-conor-malloy/

Monday, February 26, 2018

Hackathons, #MeToo, and Switching Tech

headphone and microphone

On the Road: “The Global Legal Hackathon Leaders from NYC”

Hosts David Fisher and Laurence Colletti go on the road to the New York City chapter of the first Global Legal Hackathon at American Express headquarters. They talk with all five New York City team leaders, John Scrudato, Christian Lang, Priscilla Fasoro, Olivier Van Borsel, and Max Paterson, as well as discussing the projects they will be working on.

Planet Lex: “The #MeToo Movement Through a Legal Lens”

For this episode of Planet Lex, host Daniel Rodreguez talked with Laura Beth Nielsen, director of the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University, and Deborah Tuerkheimer, Research Professor of Law at Northwestern and an expert in criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. They discuss how the #MeToo movement differs from past movements, the role President Trump may have played in the movement’s growth, and the impact the movement has on public discussion about sexual harassment and sexual assault.

New Solo: “The Difficulty of Switching Technology”

Guest Joe Patrice talked with host Adriana Linares about what it looks like for a lawyer to switch from Windows to Mac and the advantages and disadvantages of using tablets for business. There are also tips about buying new tech tools and switching to the cloud.

Hackathons, #MeToo, and Switching Tech was originally published on Lawyerist.com.



source https://lawyerist.com/hackathons-metoo-switching-tech/

Friday, February 23, 2018

How Lawyers Work: Aaron Rocke, Driven Problem-Solver by Day & Adjunct Law Professor by Night

Aaron Rocke headshot

In this week’s edition of How Lawyers Work, we hear from Aaron Rocke. Aaron is the founder of Rocke Law Group and primarily practices in the areas of civil litigation, with a focus on employment and commercial litigation.

You can follow Aaron on LinkedIn. 

What’s your elevator pitch?

Because our employment is such a big part of who we are and how we survive and thrive, we help small business and nonprofits, and employees of big business resolve those problems.

What apps or tools are essential to your daily workflow and why are these tools useful?

I like Microsoft’s Office 365. It comes with OneDrive for cloud storage, OneNote for taking notes and making lists, To-Do for prioritizing tasks to get things done, and Bookings to let clients look at my availability and schedule appointments online. I’m interested in replacing Bookings, but it is secure, convenient, and free with Office 365. These apps sync across my devices (except To-Do) and my team’s. I ask my clients who do not have scanners to use the app Office Lens, which relies on the camera on their phone to scan documents into .pdf and optimizes for documents. I sound like a commercial, but I live near Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

What does your workspace look like?

My ridiculously large office has lots of desk space, a roundtable, and a view of the Puget Sound. It is big enough to fit my entire ego, plus some growing room.

Click to view slideshow.

How do you keep track of your calendars and deadlines?

We use Outlook to track deadlines and tickles. My entire team sees my calendar, and we have a group calendar. Each lawyer prioritizes their work weekly and reports the plan for that week and how they did on their plan last week. Office has a tool called Planner for that, but we’ve been slow to adopt it.

What is one thing that you listen to, read, or watch that everyone should, and why?

I follow the Building a StoryBrand podcast because in marketing “if you confuse, you lose; noise is the enemy, and creating a clear message is the best way to grow your business.”

What is your favorite local place to network or work solo and why?

My inspirations, best ideas, and best referrals come from fellow solo and small firm lawyers, so I founded a local bar association for us to meet and collaborate.

How do you or your team approach problems?

We use forms with our clients and our opponents to help focus our time on solving novel problems. Our small team regularly pitches ideas back and forth. This exchange is usually in person because we share an office suite. I had to change my wide-open-door policy. To batch my work, I have office hours to empower the introverts to connect with me, and to focus the extroverts’ time with me. It dedicates time to focus, time for teamwork, and lets me be a better human being.

What are three things you do without fail every day and why?

After morning coffee and personal time, I am blessed with manifold problems, most of which I am paid to solve. And I work in a murder of fine lawyers. (Murder as a noun, that is.) I’m transitioning from management by walking around to a weekly report with bi-monthly case meetings.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Katrina Zafiro (who introduced me to the Lawyerist); or Scott W. Campbell (who inspires me with his intellect and productivity).

How Lawyers Work: Aaron Rocke, Driven Problem-Solver by Day & Adjunct Law Professor by Night was originally published on Lawyerist.com.



source https://lawyerist.com/how-lawyers-work-aaron-rocke/

Thursday, February 22, 2018

The Practice Model Canvas, by Start Here HQ

Description and instructions from Start Here HQ, a companion to our podcast with Alice Devendra on design thinking for lawyers:

The Practice Model Canvas is a visual planning tool for thinking through the core elements of a legal product or service. While it isn’t necessarily a replacement for a fully fledged business plan, it will help you collect assumptions about the key components of your proposed offering. It is the preferred tool for new and established businesses alike following Design Thinking and Lean Startup methods.

The canvas is a rapid prototype. It will help you address and capture your thoughts about the essential elements of your product or service.

While there is no right or wrong way to use the tool, we have a few suggestions that have worked well for us and our clients:

  • Use sticky notes instead of writing directly on the canvas. This lets you more easily rewrite or rearrange your thoughts.
  • Go in order (mostly). The numbers are useful guides, but not mandates. If something occurs to you for a box other than the one you’re working in, capture that thought but then go back to where you were. That said, if you can’t think of good answers for one of the boxes, skip it and come back to it later.
  • Be specific. The canvas works best when you’ve identified a specific customer with a specific problem set. If you have multiple practice areas, or if you perform different services within one area, pick a narrow offering to start with and create additional canvases for other services.
  • Set a timer for each section. Try to knock out an entire canvas in about an hour. That’s roughly five minutes per box with some transition time in between.
  • Rinse and repeat. Your assumptions will change over time as you gain more information, hopefully through real-world testing. Update your canvas when that happens, or don’t be afraid to make a new one.

This version is 11″ x 17″. You can find larger sizes at Start Here HQ.

The Practice Model Canvas, by Start Here HQ was originally published on Lawyerist.com.



source https://lawyerist.com/product/practice-model-canvas-start-hq/

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Podcast #160: Fostering Culture in Your Law Firm, with Paul Spiegelman

microphone with caption "lawyerist/legal talk network" below


In this episode with Paul Spiegelman, we talk about what culture in your law firm means, why it is important, and how to create culture deliberately and intentionally.

Paul Spiegalman

Paul Spiegelman Headshot

Paul Spiegelman is the co-founder of the Small Giants Community, a peer-group of purpose-driven business leaders. He is the former chief culture officer of Stericycle, the co-founder and former CEO of BerylHealth and the founder and chairman of The Beryl Institute.

You can follow Paul on Twitter and LinkedIn.

During the show, Paul also recommended the book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins.

If you’d like to hear more about this topic, you should check out Nicole Abboud’s podcast with Paul.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists and Clio for sponsoring this episode!

Listen & Subscribe

To listen to the podcast, just scroll up and hit the play button (or click the link to this post if you are reading this by email).

To make sure you don’t miss an episode of The Lawyerist Podcast, subscribe now in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or find out about new episodes by subscribing to our email newsletter.

Transcript

This transcript was prepared by Rev.com.

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Lawyerist Podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week, Lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street. And this is episode 160 of the Lawyerist podcast, part of Legal Talk Network. Today we’re talking with Paul Spiegelman about fostering culture in your law firm.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is brought to you by LawPay, FreshBooks, and Ruby Receptionists. We appreciate their support and we will tell you more about them later in the show.

Aaron Street: So, for the past 6 months or so, we’ve been growing and engaging an ever-increasing group of Lawyerist insiders in a private Facebook group for Lawyerist insiders. There are hundreds of small-firm lawyers there now, helping each other by asking and answering practice related questions, and engaging with us on the resources and advice we have on how they can manage and grow their firms. And it’s a super interesting and engaged and supportive group of people and I thought it would be really fun to pitch to all of you the opportunity to get into that private group for free, which is very simple. You just go to Lawyerist.com/insider and you can get an invite if you are a practicing small-firm lawyer.

Sam Glover: Yep, go to Lawyerist.com/insider. Join there and we will send you an invitation to join the Facebook group. You can’t join straight from Facebook. We need you to go and register on our site first, but it’s a fun thing and we have a lot more plans for the insider generally.

Aaron Street: Yeah and the reason we funnel people through the website first, is because we want to make sure that everyone in the group is actually a lawyer, because we don’t want you to be subjected to pitches from vendors and consultants or PR agencies, who would otherwise try to get in with our audience. And so we limit it to practicing lawyers so that you can actually support each other in your firms.

Sam Glover: Yeah, so for today’s podcast we’ve got a brief sponsored interview with Jean Clauson, from ARAG, about the fundamentals of great client service, and then we’ll hear my conversation with Paul Spiegelman.

Jean Clauson: Hi, I’m Jean Clauson. I’m a legal industry advocate at ARAG, and I work to champion solo and small-practice attorneys to play a vital solution in the access to justice problems in America. I’ve spent nearly 10 years developing the ARAG network of nearly 13,000 attorneys. I’m a member of the Legal Marketing Association and I also serve as the president of Group Legal Services. ARAG helps to close the access to justice gap by providing affordable access to legal help for moderate to modest mean income Americans. One of the many ways we’re doing this is by connecting attorneys with clients they otherwise might not have access to.

SPEAKER NOTES: [00: 00: 24] Sam

[00: 00: 26] Aaron

Sam Glover: Hi, Jean. Thanks for being with us today, and we are gonna talk about client service fundamentals, which is, no matter what kind of fancy technology people are using, or if they’re delivering legal services from oak desks and leather chairs, they kinda remain constant. So, what are some of the fundamentals? Where would you start?

Jean Clauson: Oh, absolutely. We’re a big advocate of attorneys to be more client-centric and that means incorporating simple things, like responsiveness. I would really start there. I think it’s all about setting proper expectations for your clients to keep them up to date, with maybe their case status. Let them know the best way to reach you, by phone or email or text. And also keep a current voicemail recording, so your clients actually know when you’re available and when you’ll get back to them. I think I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that attorneys, either from state bars or our own business, that attorneys aren’t connecting with their clients, or are calling them back in a timely manner. So even just returning every voicemail, even if it’s just to say what your availability is, I think really helps that client understand where you’re at and really helping them overcome their situation.

Sam Glover: One thing that we try to talk to people about is, also talking to your clients about how they would like to communicate. For example, I know a lot of lawyers think, oh I’ll just send a letter and let them know. And like, for me, if you send me a letter, I might open it three months from now. It’s a terrible way to keep in touch with me. And so I think being responsive, as you’re talking about it, probably means more than … It means getting back to people and keeping people aware of things, but also making sure that you’re on the same page about how you’re going to communicate, right?

Jean Clauson: Absolutely. I think you said that well. Where it’s really being deliberate in how you design your business model to incorporate that design and all the technology in the world, I think you even mentioned it earlier, won’t help if you’re not just really looking at the fundamental basics of delivering great service. That just can never be overlooked. Really putting your consumer hat on is really important and kind of taking it from the perspective of, what kind of service would you expect? And would you be happy with the service that you’re sharing with your clients, from a personal perspective?

Sam Glover: I think that’s probably something that not enough lawyers do. Put on their empathy hat and put themselves in their clients shoes and, would I be happy with this? That seems like a pretty powerful way to gauge whether or not you’re likely to be making your clients happy.

Jean Clauson: And just, humanizing. We talk a lot about humanizing your practice. So, people, it’s all about being human and providing that great customer experience.

Sam Glover: What about change? You’ve dropped a few words here like, design, and client-centric, that may not be a part of lawyers vocabularies. And so how do you talk to lawyers about that?

Jean Clauson: Position it from a way of, really stay open to change. The legal industry especially now, in this time, is constantly evolving. So, we try to really collaborate with partners like you, Sam, and the Lawyerist, to really bridge the gap between the circle of influencers to the actual practicing attorneys and their staff. So don’t forget about the staff. It’s really important to educate the entire office and your firm on staying relevant and staying current. And you can do that by really staying in touch with what’s happening at your local bar, your state bar, and on a national level. Or even staying connected through social media and other outlets that are providing really great content on everything from technology, and what the latest and greatest tips are, to those customer service fundamentals that we’ve been talking about.

Sam Glover: Cause we’re talking about change in what the world that your clients are functioning in, right? Lawyers often think about legal technology, but technology changes the way that your clients’ businesses operate too and it’s helpful to stay on top of that. The way people communicate, interact with each other, the way markets change, those are all things that if you embrace them you can take advantage of them, right?

Jean Clauson: Absolutely. Understanding the consumer is huge. And understand the changes that they’re going in, and how are they getting their services outside the legal industry. And how does that align or match with the service that you’re providing and reaching those consumers.

Sam Glover: So, if you want to know more about providing great customer service to your clients, ARAG has a free whitepaper. Eight keys to providing great service to your clients and you can get it at ARAGlegal.com/LawyeristPodcast, all one word. And in case it’s not clear from my pronunciation ARAG is, A R A G. Again, that’s ARAGlegal.com/LawyeristPodcast. Thanks, Jean.

Jean Clauson: Thank you so much, Sam!

Paul Spiegelman: Hi, Sam. Pleasure to be on today. My name is Paul Spiegelman. I am a business person who’s learned and grown and learned along the way, like many of your listeners probably. I had a long career in healthcare after a very career practicing law, but I found that whether it’s a law business or any other kind of business, there are choices that we have to make in how we run our companies. And over the years, my passion for business has centered around culture and the relationship between driving an employee-focused culture and then how that leads to, not only better company, but a more profitable company. And in my healthcare business, we grew that business to around 400 people over 30 year career and ultimately sold that to a very large company and started a couple other small companies along the way. But, always with this theory that if we created an environment in which people loved what they did, that would lead to customer loyalty. That customer loyalty would then generate the ability for us to gain profits that we could invest back in our people.

So over the years I really became passionate and kind of an evangelist for this idea that culture really equals leadership. And how we lead our companies, makes all the difference in the world in whether you’re on the front line or you’re the CEO, we all want just couple thing in our careers. We want to feel that there’s purpose, that we’re values in what we do. We have the opportunity to learn and grow. So when I had the opportunity, I loved to talk to leaders about that. And what I find is many people resonate with these kinds of messages of running a values driven business, but obviously quite often ask themselves, or me, how to do it. And so, bottom line there’s a lot of practical ways that you can get involved in this kind of work and make a better life and company for yourselves and your employees.

Sam Glover: Well, I’m glad you’re with us today, Paul. Culture is something that we think about a lot internally at Lawyerist and that I think a lot of firms are starting to find on their radar. But before we start talking about culture, I’m curious about the three word thing that you’ve lost over on all of your online bios, which is, you are a lawyer and you practiced law briefly. What did you do?

Paul Spiegelman: Well, I grew up in Los Angeles and after going to UCLA and always wanting to be a doctor and getting a “D” in chemistry, I ended up following in my dad’s footsteps and my dad was a lawyer and had a small practice for many years. Actually retired at 85 years old and had a wonderful career doing that. And so I went to law school and I went right to practice with him, which was a small business litigation firm and loved working with my dad. Didn’t really feel the passion for the business, that I think even he felt, and a couple, maybe 18 months into it, got the opportunity with my two brothers to jump into business together. And so that’s what I did. So I had my 18 month legal career. I look back and loved the education and I think it prepared me in a really positive way for business. But, got out early and was able to just go my own way on the business side and it’s really been an enjoyable ride.

Sam Glover: So, I’m curious. Did they want you involved because you were their brother and they trusted you, or were they like, it would be helpful for us to have a lawyer and you’ve been a lawyer for 18 months, so why don’t you come on board and tell us what to do about that stuff.

Paul Spiegelman: Yeah, no, it wasn’t that. I think that we all … I’m not sure I had much expertise at that point but my brothers and I always wanted to do something together we just didn’t know what it would be or when we would do it. And my older brother was kind of the, born entrepreneur, because mostly he couldn’t really work for anyone else and came up with this idea, originally, to get into the medical alert business. And so, like many people who start businesses, we just bootstrapped it but we were 24 hour a day business from day one. And we responded to people who had medical conditions in their homes and one of us had to sleep overnight on a cot in shifts waiting for calls to come in. So, you just kind do what you had to do. So, we all had various backgrounds and together I think we made a good combination, but we were probably hoping that I wouldn’t need to use too much of my legal background if we just stayed out of trouble.

Sam Glover: So, the story of Barrel Health, in brief, is you did that for a while, you got a big contract and kind of took off from there and eventually got bought. And then kept working on culture at Stericycle. But, I’m curious, culture is a buzzword everywhere now, and I think it’s probably penetrating even the legal industry’s consciousness. But, at what point did you realize that culture was a thing that was helping to make your company successful?

Paul Spiegelman: It’s a great question, Sam, because we really never thought about it that way. We weren’t intentional about creating a certain type of culture, a certain business. But when … Early on, I think we might have had 10 employees at the time and we would hear from our employees comments like, wow, this is a really fun place to work. And we said, well what makes it fun? And they said, well you and your brother seem to genuinely care about us. We do things together and you seem to really care. And we said, where did you used to work? And then we heard these stories about where people used to work and I think we were young enough when we started our business that none of us had really worked in big companies or had some of these experiences that people typically when they don’t feel valued in their work.

And so we realized that what we were doing was unique, and that was pretty early on. And then we were, I guess, smart enough to think that we could take advantage of that, create this wonderful environment. We were essentially, our core business was a call center business, so we contracted with hospitals all over the U.S. to answer calls for them on an outsource basis. And when you think of call centers, we all think of the boiler room operation or the high attrition low margin business and you’re not thinking about a great place to work. And we said, we’re gonna do it differently and we’re gonna create this environment where … These are single moms taking 80, 90 calls a day from people that are upset about their healthcare. It’s a really tough job.

And yet if we can show some gratitude and make it pleasurable for them, then our thought was, they’re just gonna do better work for us. And that became, ultimately, our secret sauce. And we said that as we start to differentiate ourselves in business and in any business we realized that over time we get kind of commoditized. We didn’t want to charge based on price. We didn’t want to compete that way. We wanted to compete based on value and ultimately we were able to charge a premium price for our services because we didn’t sell what we did. We didn’t sell the features and benefits of our service. We sold who we are. We made sure our customers understood that by creating this wonderful culture inside, it was gonna benefit them as well.

Sam Glover: Your culture kind of emerged organically it sounds like. Later on, when your company grew bigger or when you went to work for Stericycle, it sounds like your job was a little bit more, trying to create a culture and make it into a real thing that could be a selling point for the company. How do you go about doing that?

Paul Spiegelman: Yeah, it’s a great question. In our business it did grow organically, but as it grew organically overtime, we started to define it and what it meaned to have a great culture and what were the components of that. Many little things that would contribute to developing a great culture and what we realized is that culture is not just a vibe or a feeling that you get. It’s actually a defined process. It’s a recipe. Just like any other process in your business that you have. And I believe that business leaders need to respect that culture process, even more than many others. We don’t think about documenting the culture, and I think we do need to document it. We need to make sure that we consistently apply it over time. When you’re small, it’s maybe a little bit easier to do that, but a big question people have is, well how do you scale it as you grow?

And as we went from 10 people to 100 to 400, then we’d put systems in place to make sure that that culture survived. And when I sold the company to this large public company called Stericycle, I got the opportunity to do something I’d never done. Which is to work in a large company, and in this case, the company … The five years that I did that, I think when I sold it to them, they were about 10,000 employees and they grew to 25,000 in the five years I was there. They did 30 to 40 acquisitions every year. So just imagine that challenge to try to create a culture or institutionalize it. And so the idea there was really the same thing. Like I mentioned earlier, is that how do we make sure people understand the purpose of the business and why they’re there. How do they feel valued and appreciated in the work that they do. How do [inaudible 00: 16: 26] the opportunity to learn and grow. And what we found was that the answer was not so much in the CEO or the senior leader, although they definitely had to participate and sponsor and buy in and support it. Then you have the front line, that people that are really doing the work every day. They love this kind of attention.

But when then you start to look at the middle managers, the supervisors, and people that have grown in the business and quite often don’t know how to do this kind of stuff and are focused on hitting a target or a number and not understanding the impact of spending time with their team, growing their team, slowing down every day to show that they care about the personal lives of their teammates. And then learning how that’s gonna impact them in their business. So, I can’t say I’m the expert in any of this, but I did have the opportunity to go to a larger company and try to figure out how you can scale these kinds of things. And it’s a long-term journey. It never ends, whether it’s a small or large business.

Sam Glover: Well, what about … You’ve talked about going from 10 to 25,000, what about like a solo practice? I mean half the country’s lawyers are in solo practices. Can you have culture as a solo?

Paul Spiegelman: Oh, yeah. Culture really is defined in a couple ways, and many people look at it differently. But I think a lot of it is the extent to which your employees, your team, yourself are willing to do discretionary work and go above and beyond and really understand why you’re there, and have that permeate the business. As well as the message, as I said earlier, that you deliver. There’s tons of lawyers, tons of solo practitioners and small practices and in this day and age, all of use have choices in terms of who we work with. And what I like to say is, no matter what business we’re in, we’re in the relationship business. Our method of developing those relationships, our methods of creating ourselves as thought leaders in industries, just like you’ve done Sam, to expand your scope, allows you to build your brand, your personal brand. And I think that that’s, for a solo practitioner, who’s looking at this has to say kind of stop and realize that impression that they brand they make on the outside, all starts on the inside. And how can they develop that, even if they have just an assistant, or a paralegal or whoever that’s working with them. I think it’s important no matter what size you are.

Sam Glover: So we need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and when we come back, I wanna pick up on something that you dropped, sort of in passing, but I think it’s probably central. Which is this idea of documenting culture and integrating it into the way you do things. So, we’ll be right back.

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Okay, we’re back. And Paul, so you kinda ran right past documenting culture, but I know it’s core, and I think you’re talking about values there. Can you run with that and tell us what is the relationship between values and culture and what’s so important about values?

Paul Spiegelman: Well when we think about a culture, or any process we have in business in particular, there’s gotta be a foundation. Where do we start? And I get this question a lot and I think the foundation of a great culture is that the mission and vision and values that permeate your company or your practice, even if it’s one or two people. And quite often when we’re that small, we don’t take the time to articulate what that is or we see some mission statement somewhere and we put a plaque on the wall. And I’m not talking about the plaque on the wall. This stuff has to actually to be genuine and it’s really a process that you go through. And I just did this with a small company yesterday, where … Actually an organization that’s been around for awhile, but didn’t have a definition of what their culture was or what it meant to be a part of that organization. So I took them through a visioning process and there’s many different ways to do that. The school of thought that I like to attack this with is really from Jim Collins, who wrote the great book, Good to Great. Which is kind of a bible for business people.

And he talked about this process where you looked at visioning and values as having three components. First is, purpose and our core purpose, which is defined as how we make the world a better place. It might just be a phrase. In my healthcare business it was, connecting people to healthcare. That was our higher purpose. The second is, our core values. And our core values, we defined as those behaviors that no matter what else changed in our business, would never change. When we think about things like integrity and accountability and originality, whatever they are. It doesn’t have to be one word it can be a phrase, but those are really critical to the business. And the third is what we call the future position. Which is maybe we think of as the typical vision statement. Put yourself out five years, and you say, okay what does our business look like today. Here’s our size, our scope, this is what we’re doing.

But getting back to the values, what I found, and I was a cynic like many around these value statements that companies [crosstalk 00: 23: 42]

Sam Glover: I mean a lot of people are, I feel like the first thing … You bring it up, I recently brought it up with non-profit worm on the board and it felt like everybody was like, oh god somebody’s talking about mission crap again.

Paul Spiegelman: So I was the same way in my business until I went through that exercise. And I remember doing it at that point, with a fairly large group of … They weren’t values that I came up with. I wanted everybody involved in that. And then I started to see how they permeated the business. And the examples I would use were when I might be in a meeting with our leadership team and we would be looking at a project that someone asked us to do that’s in the non-standard project. And some would raise their hand and said, but what a minute, one of our core values is never sacrificing quality and I believe if we take on this project we’re gonna sacrifice the quality of all of our work. And I thought, aha, they’re applying one of the core values. Or maybe that we’re having an employee situation that’s really kinda sticky and the manual says in section 3(a) this is how we’re supposed to deal with it. But someone raises their hand and says, hey one of our core values is always doing the right thing, and the right in this situation is not what’s in the manual. And I just thought, aha, this is guiding our daily decision making and that’s when I knew that we kind of hit the gold mine around how values are used.

It’s the way we tell stories every day. It’s the way we develop our reward and recognition. It’s guideposts for people to understand how to behave in the business. And again, you could be two people, or 20, or 2000. They became very powerful and became the foundation of our culture and I believe it’s the same in any company.

Sam Glover: How do you make those real though? Especially if it’s an aspirational value. When I read about values and how you figure ’em out, everybody says, oh you already have values, you just need to identify them. Well, what if you identify your values and then you realize, you know, we’re actually really shitty about making sure that people have balance between their work and their life at our company, but we want to be better about it. How do you decide that that’s gonna be your value and then how do you actually make it real? On a day-to-day basis. So that people do say things like that.

Paul Spiegelman: Yeah, well I think it’s not an exercise to be taken lightly. You don’t want to change them all the time based on the flavor of the month. These really have to be long discussions, it’s not something you come up within an hour, and go hey, these are our values and we’ll review them every year and see if we want to change them. We actually use them in ways to, very appropriately, make sure we have the right people on our team. And if you think about times where you might have had to fire somebody in your company, it’s most likely that you didn’t fire them because they didn’t have the skills to do the job. You fired them because ultimately they didn’t fit. And so what does it mean and how do we understand whether they fit or not in the organization? And we have to first go back to well, how did they get on board to begin with? And how did we use our values in the hiring process to make sure we were screening for fit and not just for skill?

In this day and age there’s plenty of people that have the skills to do just about any job we would hire for, but we used to say is that we were gonna hire and make it very difficult for people to get in the door. And put people through the ringer, but once they’re in, we’re gonna make ’em part of the family. So, for even call center positions for every 100 resumes we went through, we hired three people. I remember our head of HR went through 17 different interviews and we did that by dividing and conquering how we interviewed them to understand not only their skills, but whether they fit in the organization. We did personality assessments, we put ’em in different social situations. We did our best to make sure they fit and really concentrated on that. The tougher challenge is, because I think we make the best decisions we can, we never bat 1000%. It’s when we start to realize that maybe we’ve made a mistake, and we start to blame the person we hired or other people are talking and it’s creating all sorts of problems. And what we need to do is look in the mirror and say, what could we have done, and how do we have the courage to make the tough decision.

Sam Glover: Well and I suppose if you’re hiring three people at a time, two of them are getting fired.

Paul Spiegelman: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. At some point, [crosstalk 00: 28: 04]

Sam Glover: How do you prevent that from feeling like Survivor?

Paul Spiegelman: I think that, again, if you create an environment, that’s known as a positive culture, which we did in our case. That was a great recruiting tool. We won nine awards as the best place to work company. Who wouldn’t want, on paper, to work there? But look, not everybody’s gonna fit or people’s lives change or the company outgrows some of the talent that we have. And as leaders we have to have the courage to recognize when that’s happening, to make these tough decisions. And quite often we can trace back why that person doesn’t fit to a particular or a series of our core values.

So, it’s just something that you start to build in and you’d be surprised how apparent it will become over time. And we would start every meeting by telling stories about our core values and if we rewarded people it was because they lived up to the core values. So for the leader has to repeatedly talk about this stuff and make it so that it isn’t just that plaque on the wall but it is how you live every day. And we did have a time, I remember, when we started with four of them and because we were a family started company, there was a looseness in our business, in our culture that people felt like, at one point, we just didn’t have enough accountability. And rather than just start talking about accountability, we’re gonna make it a new core value. And we put a whole program and structure behind it. And it really then took off and stuck in the long-term.

Sam Glover: I mean you kinda have to stop and grade yourself on how well you’re meeting your own values sometimes.

Paul Spiegelman: Oh, you do. You really do and it’s just something that’s so critical. I can sense whether you’re starting a new business or you’re a solo practitioner in a law firm, you’re just thinking about surviving, you’re just thinking about getting that next customer, you’re just thinking about defining what your product or service is. But I just can’t understate the importance of defining who you are. Of those three things that I talked about, the things that can change are, your purpose can change. How you’re making the world a better place, that can change. We review that every year. That five-year plan obviously is going to change. What you think today is definitely going to change. But you want those things that remain constant and they provide security for those that come on board and work with you.

Sam Glover: When you started talking about how you try to get that cultural foot during hiring, I expected a really simple, nicely packaged answer, but your answer sounded a lot more like, it’s hard and you’re going to fail at it sometimes, so build in some safeguards and backups.

Paul Spiegelman: Yeah, there’s just no way we’re gonna always get it right, but, especially when we’re growing we get sometimes so excited about, we just got the budget to hire the next person, or our practice has grown and so, hey we get to hire the next one and you see a really good resume and you meet somebody and go, wow this is perfect. You drop them in and you wanna give ’em a computer and a phone and let them go at it. And I just say you gotta slow down. You gotta slow down and go through this process and be really deliberate about it. And try to do your best, knowing that at some point you’re going to fail, and then set yourself up to have honest dialogue going forward, because all of use have stories of how we procrastinated, took too long, finally decided to move somebody out of the organization and everybody else was looking at you and saying, what took you so long?

Sam Glover: If somebody wants to start working on culture or learning more about it, what’re the steps they go through? I assume step one is, if you haven’t sat down and done your mission vision and values, that’s step number one.

Paul Spiegelman: I think that is step number one, in terms of the process, but before that, what I always like to understand is if the leader is talking about wanting to do more in this area, and let’s say they haven’t done it before, the one, that interest has to be genuine. And then two, the question is, well whose job is it to do this work or to start this work? And I like to say that the more inclusive you can be, the better. You don’t want to go through this exercise and hand it to the people that you work with and just say, okay I’ve come up with this new thing. So whether you have one or two other people in your firm, or you’re larger than that, sometimes we have leaders who are more command and control style leaders. People who have grown up just saying, hey look, I learned as a leader to be direct, to tell people what to do and it worked for me. The world’s changed and now this idea of more collaborative leadership and team focused leadership has taken hold and you need to create trust in those you work with, that when you decide to go down this culture route, you’re really genuine and you’re gonna stick with it over tie.

So I think you need to be vulnerable with your team, and just say hey, this is something that I think is important. I’ve learned that there’s maybe a better way to do business. I’d like to do it with you, do it together. Once you get that buy-in, then you start with that mission vision values, and then you look at your other programs over time that show how we can do reward and recognition and training programs and other things and many small things that can be done. They don’t take a big investment. It’s ultimately just starting by showing that you care, listening, empowering your people to be themselves, that you work with and you’ll start to feel this feeling … I remember going to Stericycle, these very directive, command and control leaders who had years of success in the corporate world. And their success came from hitting targets, hitting numbers. They never felt what it was like to impact someone’s life and someone’s career. And when they started to focus on culture, they got that wonderful feeling as well. And so the message is you can well and do good at the same time.

Sam Glover: I suppose the hard work starts after you’ve identified your values then you actually have to make them real and walk the walk not just talk the talk. I think that’s why everybody is so, groans when you talk about mission vision and values because they know that they’ve worked places that have those things and there’s a disconnect between what it says on the break room wall or what it says on the org chart, and what people actually do and how they behave day-to-day. That’s why people groan, but the challenge is to make it real and embody that culture.

Paul Spiegelman: Well and the fact is that there are companies that live it well and companies that don’t. And whether you’re starting your own company or going to work for another company or a firm, then you have a responsibility to do your own due diligence to see if that is real. And that’s by talking to the leaders, seeing how it permeates their business, seeing how … You can walk in a place, my first book was called why is everybody smiling, because people would come and tour our call center and just walk around at the end of the tour come and meet with me, and said God everybody just seems so happy. Why is everyone smiling? I said, I don’t know, go ask them. But it turned out that you could just feel it by walking in the door that the environment we created just made people happy to be there and you could see it on their faces. Even in my short legal career, you could walk in any business, any law firm, you can tell. You can walk in a restaurant, you can look around and say, do these people look happy to be here? Do we feel like they’re treated well?

So I think that’s really where we start and I can’t overstate the fact that it is a long time commitment. Culture’s not a project. It is who we are. It evolves over time. We’ll always be challenged by it, but the results are really incredible. I mean we were able to be five to six times more profitable than other competitor in our space. There’s books that have been written about larger companies that we’ve all heard of like SouthWest Airlines and WholeFoods and Container Store and Harley Davidson, these culture focused, employee focused companies, that far [inaudible 00: 36: 02] in terms of growth and profitability, their peers. Why? Because they have this employee first mentality and culture and values that really mean something in the organization.

Sam Glover: I think that’s a nice place to end. And I neglected to give a shout out to Nicole Abboud, whose Leaders Love Company podcast is where I first heard you talk. And her podcast is well worth a listen if you’re interested in hearing from people like Paul, or Ashley Cox who was on a couple weeks ago. But Paul, where can people find you?

Paul Spiegelman: Oh they can find me at PaulSpiegelman.com and lots of resources there, even to evaluate your internal culture in your organization. It’s always get to set a baseline and measure where we’re going. But, I’m so pleased that the legal profession is taking a closer look at this as well because we’re a business like any other business and I think that lawyers and their teams can feel this impact and grow even better companies and practices by embracing this idea that culture is a very critical part of our business.

Sam Glover: Well thanks so much for being with us today, Paul.

Paul Spiegelman: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Aaron Street: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of the Lawyerist podcast by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast app. And please leave a rating to help other people find our show. You can find the notes for today’s episode on Lawyerist.com/podcast.

Sam Glover: The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.

Podcast #160: Fostering Culture in Your Law Firm, with Paul Spiegelman was originally published on Lawyerist.com.



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