Try NOT Being a Jerk: The Problem with Lawyer Well-Being
May 10, 2024
Brian Glass
Lawyer Wellness week rolls on as the established bar tells lawyers to "try not being a jerk."
Seriously - that was the Thursday Tip of the Day.
And while that may work for some lawyers, who find themselves boxed in to 70 hour work weeks without an escape - those of us who seek happiness, wealth, and wellness outside of the office have some different ideas.
In this episode, Brian walks through the benefits of thinking outside of the box when it comes to law firm success and happiness.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Lawyer Wellness week rolls on as the established bar tells lawyers to "try not being a jerk."
Seriously - that was the Thursday Tip of the Day.
And while that may work for some lawyers, who find themselves boxed in to 70 hour work weeks without an escape - those of us who seek happiness, wealth, and wellness outside of the office have some different ideas.
In this episode, Brian walks through the benefits of thinking outside of the box when it comes to law firm success and happiness.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
What's up everybody? Welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs, the show about being a lawyer without being miserable, and it is Lawyer Wellbeing Week International Lawyer Wellbeing Week and the tip of the day on Thursday, may 9th, as I record this, is I swear to God, don't be a jerk at work. If you go to lawyerwellbeingnet and look at the daily schedule, the Thursday try. This tip of the day is don't be a jerk at work. Even when you're busy and stressed, do your best to avoid being sarcastic, disrespectful, curt, snide, rude or unfair to your colleagues. Of all of the things that we could be suggesting to lawyers to live a better, happier, more fulfilling, healthier life, what we land on is don't be a jerk at work. It's an interesting segue to today's episode. It's just hard with these traditional bar folks of hey, here's what we have going on.
Speaker 1:
Wellness week Monday is track your steps day. Tuesday is do something positive for somebody else. That's okay, I get that one. Thursday is stretch, sorry. Wednesday is stretch. Thursday is don't be a jerk and Friday is be where your feet are focused on what you're doing. I get it Right.
Speaker 1:
None of this stuff is about like actually building a better business. None of this stuff is about spending more time with your family, or put your, build the business that allows you to put your phone down when you're with your family. Maybe that's what they're getting out on Friday. But I think these guys, they just miss the boat because they just assume that is the natural state of being as a lawyer that you will be busy, that you will be overworked, that you will be at your desk for 10 or 12 hours a day, five and a half or six days a week, and the best tips that we can give somebody like that is listen. If you're going to be there all the time, focus on what you're doing and don't be a jerk and get up and take some steps. And let me tell you, in my view, the quickest path to wellness which I define as fitness path to wellness, which I define as fitness, health, wealth, time with family and generally the ability to do what you want when you want with who you want for as long as you want, because there's a longevity component to that as well. But the fastest way to do that is to build the kind of business where you're making good money and where you're not working a ton of hours and where you can trust your team to talk to your clients and you don't have to answer every phone call and you don't have to respond to emails outside of work hours. And there's I mean there's not even anything on like boundaries in this lawyer wellness thing Because, again, I think they just assume that this is the way it has to be.
Speaker 1:
And so, inside that framework, here are the five things that you're able to do without creating your own blue ocean, without creating your own universe, without creating your own legacy of how you lived your life as a lawyer. And I didn't mean for this episode to be a rant on the traditional bar and lawyer well-being I'm going to pivot in just a minute but I just think, thinking about why it is that they come up with the five things that they came up with for this week. I think it's because they assume that the schedules that lawyers keep are normal and that they assume there's no other way to do it. And then, if you're going to be in this high conflict job, you may as well take some steps and stretch and try not to be a jerk. Anyway, don't be a jerk leads me into today's conversation because I gave a presentation.
Speaker 1:
I was asked to give a presentation a couple of weeks ago about this chiropractor referral system that we're running with great success in the law firm and if you go back a couple of episodes, I describe it in pretty good detail and I even offer to give you all of the materials that we've been using in the firm generate leads from medical providers. I was asked to give a presentation on that. I was down in Florida giving the presentation and one of the things that I say throughout that presentation is you have to find the pain points of the people that you want referrals from and you have to solve for those pain points. One of the pain points in a chiropractic referral relationship is the fact that lawyers hide the settlement statements. Most lawyers won't show the doctor the settlement statement when you're asking for a reduction, which I think is crazy. And I'm going through my presentation and I said this is one of the things that we do, it's one of the differentiating factors. And this guy who's in the front row hypes up and he says the first time that I ever was asked for a settlement statement from a chiropractor would be the last time I ever worked with that chiropractor. I said great, sounds like maybe this isn't the marketing tactic for you Like, okay, let's move on. And I said I kind of use guys like you as a punching bag when I'm talking to chiropractors about why they should refer me cases. And he says you should know there's many more guys like me than there are like you. And I said, yeah, dude, that's exactly why this works, because I've created Blue Ocean category of one, I've solved somebody else's problem and you don't even recognize what a pain in the ass you're being to these people.
Speaker 1:
There's this Mark Twain quote that says whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it's time to pause and reflect, and I think that's exactly right. If everybody in your industry is doing something one way, you ought to at least think about whether that is the right way to do it or whether there's a better way to do it that might result in better outcomes for you. And it's not just, it's not good enough just to be different. You have to be different and also be right. Don't be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian, but be contrarian to test theses. Just see if stuff works every once in a while. And what happens when you do that is that you'll get criticisms from guys like this, the first lawyers to do TikTok and Instagram and social media and even have websites.
Speaker 1:
First, lawyers to advertise outside of the yellow pages were received with scorn from everybody else. First, lawyers to advertise in the yellow pages were received with scorn because advertising at the time was seen as a kind of thing that lawyers didn't do. Lawyers are professionals. Lawyers should not be marketing themselves. The thing is, you just have to not care about the opinions of people that weren't going to buy anything from you in the first place. They're not putting food on your family's dinner table, right.
Speaker 1:
And, by the way, let me give you a little update on the results of this marketing to chiropractors experiment that we've been running here at the law firm. So last time I recorded an episode on this, we'd had 10 lunches gotten three cases as a result. I haven't had any more lunches have gotten. I think we're up to nine cases. As a result now of this program, I've also got an invitation to speak at the Virginia Chiropractic Association. I was introduced a pain management doctor who's going to start referring me his auto accident cases, and the network keeps growing and growing. Why? Because these people. They talk to each other because not everybody in every industry is competing and holding all the best kept secrets they're sharing. Hey, if you have a patient, if you have a client and you're being screwed by lawyers, let me tell you a lawyer who, at least, is telling me that he's not screwing other doctors because none of these deals really have come full cycle with anybody who's responded to this call to action yet, and so it's just trust. But it's working out pretty well. And so if you want to grab that whole framework for how we're running this referral network and get all of my templates for the letters that we've sent out, you're going to have to go back a couple of episodes, to the April 19th episode, which is titled steal, my $600 referral marketing plan. That's going to tell you exactly how to get all the templates and the video on how this is done.
Speaker 1:
And while I'm added at the end of this very short episode, let me just tease one more thing that we're doing here. So I am closing in on 10,000 LinkedIn followers. I should hit it sometime in the next 10 days at the current pace Awesome. What I'm going to do is open up my calendar for 10, 20 minute coaching slots for lawyers and it's got to be lawyers, like, don't get on here and try to, as a vendor, and try to sell me anything, please. I have to be a verifiable lawyer or law student who just wants to spend 20 minutes kicking back and forth ideas on what do they do next in their life.
Speaker 1:
Formatted, these calls will be this where are you now, where are you going and what are the three major obstacles that are preventing you from getting there? We're going to try to solve for at least one of those while we're on the call and I'll send you some resources for the other two when we get off the call. Just a way of celebrating hitting 10,000 followers. I had 900 when I started posting daily on LinkedIn I don't know almost 18 months ago now. So pretty good growth, better than podcast growth, I'll tell you that much. Maybe not as good as if it were on Twitter, but fewer haters on LinkedIn. So if you're interested in getting some one-on-one coaching, you need to follow me on linkedin so that you get a notification about that.
Speaker 1:
I'm going to drop on the link in a future podcast episode after we hit that, but I'm only going to do 10 of these and I think they're going to fill up pretty quickly. And now we're right back full circle to not caring about the opinions of people who wouldn't buy anything from you anyway, because I know that somebody is going to see that post when it goes up and think who the hell is he? What a big ego play to offer 10 coaching sessions to celebrate this arbitrary number of hitting 10,000. But if that's you, I don't care about the opinion anyway and frankly it's probably not you if you made it all the way to the end of this episode. So that's going to be coming out, I would bet it's within the next two weeks. We'll hit that number and when we do I'll open up those coaching slots. So I hope you have an awesome weekend and I'll hear from you soon. Bye.