From Divorce-Drowning Zombie to Legal Rockstar: How Marco Brown Conquered Chaos & Built an Empire (Yes, You Can Too!)
Feeling like a lawyer trapped in a never-ending divorce nightmare? You're not alone. Marco Brown has BEEN there - buried under a mountain of 112 clients, stressed to the max, and on the fast track to burnout.
But Marco didn't stay there. Buckle up for his INSANE story of transformation, from legal zombie to Utah's Award-Winning Divorce King! This episode is your battle cry to escape the lawyer grind and become the legal BOSS you were meant to be.
Get ready to ditch the burnout and embrace the boss life with Marco's secrets:
This episode is more than just Marco's story - it's a community builder! We're all in this together. Marco wants to see YOU win too, so he's inviting you to connect with him directly (seriously, email him at marco@brownfamilylaw.com or connect with him on LinkedIn - he's awesome).
Ready to stop drowning in cases and start THRIVING? Grab your headphones and dive into this inspiring episode! Let Marco Brown's story be your guide to escaping the grind and building the legal career (and life) you deserve.
____________________________________
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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
From Divorce-Drowning Zombie to Legal Rockstar: How Marco Brown Conquered Chaos & Built an Empire (Yes, You Can Too!)
Feeling like a lawyer trapped in a never-ending divorce nightmare? You're not alone. Marco Brown has BEEN there - buried under a mountain of 112 clients, stressed to the max, and on the fast track to burnout.
But Marco didn't stay there. Buckle up for his INSANE story of transformation, from legal zombie to Utah's Award-Winning Divorce King! This episode is your battle cry to escape the lawyer grind and become the legal BOSS you were meant to be.
Get ready to ditch the burnout and embrace the boss life with Marco's secrets:
This episode is more than just Marco's story - it's a community builder! We're all in this together. Marco wants to see YOU win too, so he's inviting you to connect with him directly (seriously, email him at marco@brownfamilylaw.com or connect with him on LinkedIn - he's awesome).
Ready to stop drowning in cases and start THRIVING? Grab your headphones and dive into this inspiring episode! Let Marco Brown's story be your guide to escaping the grind and building the legal career (and life) you deserve.
____________________________________
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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
I called it the great shower incident of 2015. So in 2015, it was a really good year and a really bad year. So the really bad part was I was super stressed. I had 112 active case files and it was just me doing the cases like 112 divorce cases at the same time. So that is not. It's not good. So I was stressed out of my mind.
Speaker 1:I wasn't sleeping well, I had let myself get fat and I was morbidly obese as a kid and I I tamed that, but I was letting myself get fat again. Like my emotions were all out of whack. My family like I wasn't serving them well, my spiritual life was out of whack and uh. But but I was doing really, really well as an attorney. Like I won divorce attorney of the year as voted on by my peers, and that was a big thing. I was the youngest person ever to win it Still am in Utah and but the problem was I won that award and then two days later, after the kind of gloss you know was off there, I realized I had all the same problems that I had before I won the award. So it didn't do anything and I'm in the shower one morning and I had kind of had this experience before I'll get in the shower and about five minutes I'm cool, like I'm good, in the shower, and then I start thinking about cases that starts with the crown of my head and will, by 3 o'clock that afternoon, envelop my entire face. I know this because it happened dozens of times.
Speaker 1:But this one was different because I was shown my life when I was about 60 or 65, and I was dead. So my life I was shown my funeral is what it was. I was literally laying in a casket, laying in a casket, and then I look out from the casket and I can see my wife and my family and kids were mourning me, kids that I didn't even have at that point. And that lasted for about 10 seconds and I'm a believer and I don't see the future often. Seconds, and I'm a believer and I don't see the future often that's just not a gift I have. But that was absolutely like. This is going to happen to you. This is real. It was as real as we're talking right now. And then, after about 10 seconds, it went away and I thought that was awful and I don't want that to happen. So no to all of that. I choose not to do that and I knew I died of a heart attack from the stress.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today I have Marco Brown from Brown Family Law out in Salt Lake City, utah, and Marco is the brand new owner of an Italian villa. We're going to get into that story in just a couple of minutes. But, marco, welcome to the show, my man.
Speaker 1:Hey, thank you very much. Appreciate being here. It's great to talk to you.
Speaker 2:So I know a whole lot about you from stalking you on LinkedIn, but from people that don't know. I mean, it strikes me you're part of what I would call a new breed of lawyers or maybe it's just kind of becoming apparent to me like the CEO law firm owner breed, and I have a lot of questions about how you got there. But I really want to kind of start at the beginning, so can you take us through early stages of your legal career and how you got to where you are now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I graduated in 07 and I clerked for a year in the third district in Iowa. I really like that's still actually my favorite job in all of law was that year I spent clerking. I just absolutely adored it. But got out of that and then got a job at an insurance defense firm, which was I went from the best job to the worst job. That was absolutely. It was awful. I made it maybe 18 months and I just couldn't do it anymore so I quit. My wife wanted to get a doctorate at the University of Utah and we had met in Utah and got married. So we said cool, let's go back. So we go up there and it's 2010.
Speaker 1:It's in the middle of the Great Recession and no one's hiring and no one is, in particular, hiring me, because I figured out during this period of time that I am essentially unemployable. Like I just didn't want to work for somebody else in a law firm because my experience in that law firm doing insurance defense was so utterly awful. I hated the system. I wasn't particularly fond of the people there. I mean, the people were nice enough, but the big firm thing no one really interacted. It was all siloed. It was really weird. It was very artificial, it didn't jive with me and I figured out that I don't play well with others, like I like to lead more than I like to follow, and I'm like, yeah, screw that, I'm not doing that.
Speaker 1:So I decided to open my own law firm and start with absolutely nothing. There were no clients, there was no business plan, there was no knowledge, there was no network. There was literally nothing. There was no network, there was literally nothing. And then it was five or six years of what I call walking through hell blind, trying to figure stuff out. And during those five, six years I figured out very, very little on the business side of things.
Speaker 1:But I was a very good attorney. I really cared about my clients and I really tried hard and that was my saving grace, right, that was the only thing that didn't give me malpractice lawsuits was that I cared about my, my clients quite a bit and served them really well. But the business side, like I, was just pathetic. And then after, after that period of time, that was really the start of the hey, let's figure out the business side, because this is not going well, this is completely unsustainable and my life is just. You know, this is not going well. This is completely unsustainable in my life. It's really tough when I'm going to work 12 hours a day and getting paid like 50 cents on the dollar. It didn't work.
Speaker 2:When you started the firm, was it a family law firm? Or did you just hang a shingle and I'm going to do whatever walks through the door?
Speaker 1:I'm going to do anything and everything walks through the door. So I chased money like crazy and that's one of my rules actually of getting paid is you don't chase money. And it all comes from that experience, like I did everything and I sucked at everything because I didn't specialize.
Speaker 2:What do you mean by don't chase money?
Speaker 1:So don't chase money. This is the way I, this is what I think about it. Don't chase money is really like you have. You have a thing you do that you're really really good at. Everybody has that thing and if you're doing outside of that you're doing taking cases outside of that then you're chasing money because you just you're not doing it because you're really good at it. You're doing it because you literally just want some cash.
Speaker 1:Okay, so there's that. You know it's things like you're. You're letting your clients not pay you right now because they might pay you in the future. You are taking a discount on a case because you really need, you think you need the case. So you'll take a lower retainer or you'll take a lower hourly rate. You know people at your friends will will refer people, or people at church will get referred to you, and you're like, yeah, I'll take that case, it's not my thing because again, I need cash. So it's that kind of anything that is causing you to take a case outside. What you know you're really really good at, just because you want the money, is chasing money, and uniformly. Uniformly, I mean you may get away with it for a little while, but uniformly it will come back to bite you in the butt and it will bite you really good and hard, like you will get in the end you will get screwed by it.
Speaker 2:In those cases that everybody kind of knows they shouldn't take, but the phones have been a little slow that month, so you take it or you discount the rate because it's a friend of a friend, or you put it on a payment plan when none of your other cases are on a payment plan. So I hear you on that. When did you discover family law as your own particular zone of genius?
Speaker 1:About two years in. So I had a lady. She was a friend of mine and she needed help with the divorce and I needed money. So I chased money, but thankfully this worked out right. So she was going to come in at 9 o'clock the next morning and I knew nothing about divorce in Utah, so I stayed up until like 3 o'clock in the morning studying divorce. And then she came in and I was able to fake it well enough. She paid me some cash. I got her through with the case, did really well, got her a great result.
Speaker 1:And then I thought, oh, wow, I like that. I liked how I felt and it seemed like I was kind of okay at that. I wasn't okay at many things at that point. And then more and more people just started coming in for family law. Because that's the thing about family law huge demand, limited supply, that sort of thing. So the barrier for injury is kind of low. And I thought, okay, I'll just take more of these. And I did. And then I figured out after a little while like, oh, hey, I like them and I seem to be really really good at this. I seem to be able to kind of handle the emotions and I get the case law, I get how the judges and commissioners think about this stuff. It just seemed kind of easy to me and I figured, hey, why don't I just do that? Why don't I just do the thing that I'm best at?
Speaker 2:So even from there, so we discover the family law is his own genius. About two years in. But you're still in the wilderness for three to four years after that kind of figuring it out. So was there like a moment or something that clicked for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I called it the great shower incident of 2015. So in 2015, it was a really good year and a really bad year. So the really bad part was I had I was super stressed at 112 active case files and it was just me doing the cases like 112 divorce cases at the same time. So that is not. It's not good. So I was stressed out of my mind. I wasn't sleeping well, I'd let myself get fat and I was morbidly obese as a kid and I I tamed that, but I was letting myself get fat again. Like my emotions were all out of whack. My family like I wasn't serving them well, my spiritual life was out of whack. But I was doing really, really well as an attorney.
Speaker 1:Like I won Divorce Attorney of the Year as voted on by my peers and that was a big thing. I was the youngest person ever to win it Still am in Utah but the problem was I won that award and then two days later, after the kind of gloss you know was off there, I realized I had all the same problems that I had before I won the award. So it didn't do anything and I'm in the shower one morning and I had kind of had this experience before I'll get in the shower. And about five minutes I'm cool, like I'm good, in the shower, and then I started thinking about cases, right, and then it just the nerves start. The anxiety starts, right Like I get, my heart starts to palpitate, my chest constricts and I start getting a stress headache that starts at the crown of my head and will, by three o'clock that afternoon, envelop my entire face. And because I know this, because it happened dozens of times entire face and cause. I. I know this cause. It happened dozens of times, but this one was different because, uh, I was, I was shown my life. Uh, when I was about 60 or 65 and I was dead, uh, I was at.
Speaker 1:So my life, I was shown. My funeral is what it was. I was literally laying in a casket, or laying in a casket, and then I look out from the casket and I can see my wife and my family and kids were mourning me, kids that I didn't even have at that point and that lasted for about 10 seconds. And I'm a you know, I'm a believer and I don't see the future. Often. That's just not, you know, not a gift I have, but that was absolutely like. This is going to happen to you. This is real. It was as real as we're talking right now.
Speaker 1:And then after about 10 seconds it went away and I thought that was awful and I don't want that to happen. So no to all of that. Like I choose not to do that. And I knew I died of a heart attack from the stress, like I just kind of knew that. So I thought, okay, all right, well, I guess I need to change everything. And that was literally. It was in within 20 seconds. Uh, I decided that my life was absolutely fundamentally going to change because of that experience.
Speaker 2:So in 15, were you a solo.
Speaker 1:So I had one contract attorney who was working with me and a paralegal, but 112 cases.
Speaker 2:So I had one contract attorney who was working with me and a paralegal, but 112 cases. So I mean, there are injury lawyers who say they can handle 112 or more cases, but those cases are in all different parts of the lifespan, right? Somebody might have been in a crash three days ago and my paralegal is doing all of that work for the next nine months as a divorce lawyer. It's like that's 112 active files and in probably in many, many different stages of litigation. So that's really hard. So managing that with one paralegal and one contract lawyer and then you've gone from that in 2015 to here we are nine years later to look at you have what? Do you have?
Speaker 1:10 lawyers now uh, they're gonna be 17 fairly soon 17.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, wow. So what was the first next step that you took after the shower?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that was actually. That was the hard part. So there's about 20 seconds, and I knew that like my life was going to change, but I had no idea how it was going to change. Right, like you, you make the decision and then you have to figure it out.
Speaker 1:So what I did was I thought, okay, what problems do I have? And I like wrote out the problems and then I realized I had a thousand problems. Like I can't solve a thousand problems, so I can solve one problem. So what is the one problem I can solve? That probably, I would think, would solve a whole bunch of other problems.
Speaker 1:And what I was able to identify was I was getting paid 50 cents on the dollar, right, it was terrible at collections. So I thought, why don't I just collect everything, because I'm already doing this work and maybe that gives me enough money to, you know, spend a whole bunch of cash to solve all these other problems, cause if you can write a check, you don't have a problem, right. So that's what I did. I thought, okay, let's do that.
Speaker 1:And I had to come up with a system to get paid because it was really bad at it, and I just kept doing it and experimenting with it until we got to the point where we're like 98% to 99% getting paid, and that's where we are right now. So that's like a huge, huge thing in the office is we get paid, like casino bosses, 100% for the work we do. But that was the first thing and that was really interesting because it did solve a lot of other problems. But it also taught me that you pick the problem that's going to help with all of the other problems and then you systematize that thing and then you just go do it again and again and again and that's how you solve massive amounts of problems without actually solving all of your problems.
Speaker 2:That helps. If you go from 50% collections to 98% or 99%, you doubled your revenue without doing any extra legal work. If you took that 112 clients and you were collecting 50% how many of them did you just have to drop?
Speaker 1:That's actually a very good question. I should go back and figure that out. I would say on the order of probably 25% that I just offloaded initially. And that's another rule that I have for getting paid 100% is fire your worst client today. So you just got to pay the stupid tax man and that's okay, like I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in stupid tax, yeah, but the way you do it is like firing your worst clients.
Speaker 2:There's nothing better for morale than firing a bad client once every three months or so. The rest of the team will thank you for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you think, if you're an attorney and you think you hate your worst client and, by the way, your worst client, you know it's your worst client Because when I said worst client and a face popped into your head right. So if you think you hate that person, your paralegal hates that person 10 times more than you do 10 times.
Speaker 2:And I've heard you say before that your first job as a lawyer is to get paid and then the excellent service of the client comes after that, which I think is controversial, and in certain circles most of the circles are law school and state bar circles that that prioritization. But how did you kind of come to that realization that we can't do good work for clients unless we're getting our bills paid?
Speaker 1:Experience, right, it's an argument from experience. So I did it and that was the thing. I was a very, very good attorney and I cared very deeply about my clients and serving them I always have but I didn't get paid and it was unsustainable. Like I was literally going to die, but before I died, you know, that was like 60, 60. But I was going to die way before then, right, because there was going to be some slow death right, of health and whatnot.
Speaker 1:So it's not sustainable. I wasn't going to be able to help my clients in the long term and that wasn't okay with me, because I want to be able to help my clients in the long term. So I thought, okay, well, let's just get paid first. And since making that switch, everything's changed. Like we serve our clients now One, I serve so many multiples more than I ever served alone, right, like we're serving so many people. And then we serve them better than I did when it was just me, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Even though I cared a lot, I still wasn't serving them as well as we're doing now, and it's a much more sustainable model. So that's why I say what I say.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about that. So what kind of systems have you put in place to make sure that, as you scale the firm from just you to 17 lawyers now, that that level of client service and the level of legal expertise remains the same or or improves?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really, it's really difficult. The one thing I will say is that you are I mean, if you were a law firm owner you're going to be worried about offloading this to other people because they're not going to be able to do it as well as you as you. Okay, that's probably true, to be honest with you, because you know no one cares like you do and you're probably the best at this one thing, uh, but you know what? Get over yourself that your people are going to be 90% as good as you, and there are going to be a whole bunch of them and they're going to be able to. They're going to be able to serve people, uh, in a way that you can't right, like it's going to be much more holistically. It's going to be better holistically.
Speaker 1:Right, you may be better technically on some cases, but holistically you're going to be able to serve more people at a higher level and you just that's the first thing is you just have to accept that. And then, after that is you just have to accept that. And then, after that, the biggest one, to be honest with you, is the talent acquisition like finding, you know, a level talent or really consistent B level talent and getting those people in there, because if you get people who are A's and C's and A's and C's, you know go up and down like that's not going to work. So you solve humongous amounts of problems by finding really good a level talent or would be level talent. And then there are, you know, beyond that, but I think that's most of the game actually is is finding the talent Are you now the long largest family law firm in Utah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, by far yeah.
Speaker 2:And and you have offices outside of Salt Lake, or is it just in that city?
Speaker 1:No, just, uh, just in Salt Lake. I mean, we serve every. We serve people all over the state, but we have opened up satellite offices in other parts of the state and they've just never really worked. So we're concentrated in Salt Lake County and then we you- know, and so so what's your um talent acquisition strategy?
Speaker 2:And let me, let me tee that up by by saying you know, it strikes me that at a certain age, most of the a players have decided everybody else sucks and I'm going to go do it for myself, right? And so many of the a players have gone and either open their own firm, uh, where they've joined with other a players, and so, like the the A players have gone and either opened their own firm or they've joined with other A players, and so the talent pool is fairly thin past a couple of years out of law school and at your firm, their name isn't going on the door, right? So how have you navigated that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one you have to find. You have to realize who you are and how your firm functions and what your firm is going, uh is going to do, okay, and then you need to find people that kind of fit, that mold. So the way I've done it is people, uh, lawyers, come in, they've about 30 cases and we communicate a boatload with our, with our clients, and to do that we need to have a fairly limited caseload. Okay, and there are clients pay us a lot because we specialize in one thing and it's all we're going to do, and that enables us to keep that kind of caseload, which means that you're not running around like a chicken with your head cut off. And then we have taken away all of the administrative duties from the attorneys, essentially. So they get to come in and lawyer and then they get to go home. Now we have other opportunities for them if they wanted to go into leadership and sales, that we'll talk about and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:But if you want to, you just come in, you do your 6, 7, 7, 2 a day and you go home and you don't work weekends and you do these things. So I try to find attorneys that that want that type of lifestyle and I go out and I find them. I mean, I literally go to court and I sit in the back of the court and try to find attorneys that are there arguing and see and scout talent, like. Like that I call you know, my, my attorney friends and say, hey, this is a great question to ask. If you could poach anybody from another law firm, who would you poach to work with you? And then you go meet those people and go out to lunch with them, and so on and so forth. It's about connection, it's all about connection.
Speaker 2:Have you found that in order to fit in with that culture, they have to have been out in the world and gotten slapped around by having to do the administrative stuff for a while?
Speaker 1:That helps, it really does.
Speaker 2:They have to learn, learn what all the headaches are, so that you can show them why you're the solution to the headaches, yep, um, so what? So 30, uh, 30 case files is a cap Like what's what's normal in your world.
Speaker 1:Normal outside of your firm? Yeah, boy, that depends. Usually 50 to 60,. I would say Once you get above 40, it gets really dicey.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's usually somewhere around 50 to 60. And you, you're not practicing at all anymore.
Speaker 1:Nope, I build no, no hours.
Speaker 1:How do you spend your time? So, for example, today, uh, my my priority list was we're we're going to open up some SEO offices in kind of different parts of the state where we're weak in on Google search, right. So we have, uh, one particular city that I want to get into because there's a pocket, there's a whole bunch of uh attorneys there and's a whole bunch of attorneys there and we're very, very weak there and it's actually one of the highest earning zip codes in the state. So I'm finding a spot there to get an SEO office and then another SEO office. So I've been searching and calling attorneys and calling CPAs to see if I can rent offices.
Speaker 1:So that's a big part of it. A lot of it is marketing offices. So that's a big part of it. A lot, a lot of it is marketing right, it's just that it's a function of marketing as well and talking about here. So a lot of it is marketing, because marketing is the highest leverage activity that you can engage in in your law firm. So there's a bunch of that. I meet with the executive team every day to go over kind of the problems and what we need to do and solve any of those. I am here for sales and sales meeting every morning to train the attorneys on sales thing that has driven our growth since COVID and actually went back and looked at the numbers and COVID was like the line of demarcation where we just like went straight up was that we put a whole bunch of time and effort and money into learning sales as a law firm.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that, because most law firms would call that intake. But of course, intake and marketing and sales are three different things, and so when you say sales, is it lawyers, is it a sales team? Is it intake? What's the setup for you guys?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a sales team, so it starts with intake right From first contact to hire. Is the intake system the intake system or the the the sales system, right, so we have, we have scripts for our intake team, they, everything's scripted out, so they. They run all the scripts.
Speaker 2:And are there lawyers on the on the sales and the intake team or no?
Speaker 1:sorry, no, they're, they're not. They're not lawyers right, non -lawyers.
Speaker 1:Okay, regular intake team. But they're selling, they're getting people in for a consultation and that's a sales job, right. So they follow the script. And then people come in and they sit down with an attorney and then we have a script for that. It's a little looser, right, because you have to be more responsive with people and they're sitting in front of you asking legal questions. But we have a script how we deal with consultations and then we definitely have a closing script. At that point, when you're going to close them, there is a script you follow Features, advantages, benefits. How do you deal with time stalls? How do you deal with not enough money stalls? How do you deal with time stalls? How do you deal with not enough money stalls? You know, how do you deal with all of those things?
Speaker 2:that's, that's what we go over and you have studied and maybe learned from grant cardone on this yes, yeah, I mean, I've read.
Speaker 1:I've read a ton, a ton of books, but grant cardone is the best on this that I found. Now, this might not, he might not be for everybody. When it comes to sales, there are different people and different systems and they will work differently for you. You have. What you have to do really is find the system and find the person and the teacher that resonates with you. And Grant just resonates with me, but I got friends who use you know a whole bunch of different people and they do very, very well, but Grant's my, my guy and we follow him. You know, like, like it's scripture when it comes to sales and market, or sales and closing.
Speaker 2:But I found it like is it? If you are kind of surface level aware of Grant Cardone, you don't like him very much because I think his initial stuff is very blustery. He sounds like a blowhard. But if you can watch long form Grant Cardone, he's really, really good.
Speaker 1:He's very good. Yeah, you have to get over that, because he has a plane and he does that kind of you know that, that big thing, uh, his helicopters, you know the whole bet Right. And I remember when I first thankfully I didn't actually watch him, first I read a book. So I read one of his books and his book was very good. I'm like oh, wow. And then I went and watched YouTube videos and then I picked up on what he was doing because it was all just for it was for show and for attention and marketing, and he actually talks about this. When you get down face to face with him, he's like look, dude, I do all this stuff because because attention, you know, attention follows, or money follows attention. So I go get attention. But you know, when it comes down to it, like we're doing like really, really big things here and his you know his teachings, the way he teaches this stuff is just top notch. So you do have to get past that surface level stuff with them.
Speaker 2:Have you done one-on-one or small group stuff with him?
Speaker 1:No, not, not small group and not one-on-one. I mean, I've been to that. That guy's gotten a lot of my money. Uh, I've been to a lot of conferences and you know we we use them for scaling, you know these types of things. So I've been in the room with him, I've met him and we've never done a one-on-one All right.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned looking for other SEO opportunities inside of Utah, but I've also heard you talk about moving and expanding out of the state. The first question that comes to mind for me is like are there any other kind of multi-state family law firms?
Speaker 1:There are a few, but very few. So Cordell and Cordell is a nationwide firm and I think they I know they were in Japan and England but I don't know if they are anymore but they're like really the only national divorce law firm and they have. But they have a very particular bent right they're a men's law firm and they exploit that incredibly well and good. Good for them. I don't play that game. I think it's cynical marketing. I don't like it. They're not true believers anyway, and so to me it's a little slightly disingenuous and I just don't play that game. But they're done extremely, extremely well by it. But it's very limited. They're essentially the only ones. And there are very few law firms that are in family law firms that are in two States, and it's almost always like in the border of Arkansas and Alabama or whatnot, and you know they kind of go across but very, very few that that are in even two States.
Speaker 2:So what's behind the drive for you to create one of the, you know, one of the very few that's in several states?
Speaker 1:I like to do stuff that no one else does, you know, and that's a big, that's a big part of it. I just think the way I think about it is there are very few people doing this and there's got to be a reason for it, and the reason becomes that it's actually really hard. It's really hard to create systems in one state and then move systems to another state and then retool. All of that takes a tremendous amount of time and money and effort and no one's really willing to do it and I think, okay, so the barrier for entry is extremely high, but that also means that the reward if you can get it make it happen is extremely high, and I thought, also means that the reward if you can get it make it happen is extremely high. And I thought, okay, let's go do that, then let's go do, let's go to where others are not.
Speaker 2:What's something else that you've done that nobody else is doing?
Speaker 1:Oh man, um, so the, the sales meeting every day, uh, the way we do sales, I don't know of another law firm in the United States that does this. I don't think you know and look, I'm not putting myself in this kind of echelon. You know Glenn Lerner and Morgan and Morgan. I don't think these guys do what we're doing on the sales side to be as effective as we are Now. The thing is like they have millions and tens of millions of dollars, so I'm not that late, but we do things that they're not even doing. So that's one we call every client every Friday. Every attorney does that. There are very few attorneys in the United States who do that. Very, very few law firms who do that. I learned that from one guy. I love that and that's, I think, the only guy that I know that still does it. I think the only guy that I know that still does it. So we may be only like the second or third in the United States that does stuff like that.
Speaker 2:You know there are a few like that, a few things. So it's just a Friday check-in. How are you doing? How are the kids? Yeah, yeah, I mean, if we talk to, a client on Thursday, we're calling them on Friday.
Speaker 1:And all non-billable stuff. I assume Well, with the attorneys it's billable, right? If you pick up the phone and talk to the attorney about the case and ask questions, yes, it's billable, but then every Wednesday our paralegals text our clients to see how they're doing and answer questions and that's all non-billable Got it Got it.
Speaker 2:That's cool. All right, let's talk some fun stuff. So you're maintaining a 300 list, tell me about that.
Speaker 1:So this is from Steve Harvey the comedian, and he it's essentially like write a vision to make it plain from Habakkuk 2-2. And the way he did that is he creates this list of 300 things that he wants to do or wants to possess, and really what it is. It's an exercise in what do you want and then once you get to like 50, you're done, you're all, you are just finished, but then you have to go to 300. So then it's an exercise in like what do I want in 50 years? Like what do I ultimately want for my life? Very specifically, like you're writing down very specific things and it really stretches you and stretches your imagination and stretches you as a human and makes you prioritize things that you never thought were priorities before. Like I've discovered things about myself and what I actually want out of life that I never knew before.
Speaker 2:The list yeah, give me one of those never knew before.
Speaker 1:The list yeah, give me one of those. Uh, well, the one, the one that's that comes to mind, is to own a $2 million villa in the Hill South of Bologna. So that check it off man. Yep, but that that was the actually easy for me because I thought about that one for a very long period of time. Yeah, Uh, what are the other ones? Man to own? Man to own a religious liberty law firm that's a big one for me To pay for. To cover a tuition for 1,000 girls in Guatemala. That's another one in there as well. Like, these are pretty big things. There are a whole bunch of different examples like that.
Speaker 2:That's awesome the villa. Is that an investment property or are you staying there routinely?
Speaker 1:Yep, I'm staying there routinely. It is not an investment property. I don't want people in my stuff. It's for me, my family and friends and family. That's it. So the history of that, really, really quickly, is I'm Mormon and I served a Mormon mission when I was 19 to 21 in Italy, and Bologna, which is about 50 miles north of Florence, was the first city I ever served in in Italy and I just fell in love with it. It has my heart. I love everything about it the best food in Italy, people are fantastic. It's the oldest university in the in the in the world and I just adore that place and I wanted to own a piece of what had my heart and I and I did. I went back and I did it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So my wife and I next summer is spending a month in Italy. That's kind of on our on our list, which doesn't have 300 items on it yet, but if we're over there at the same time, I'm going to hit you up. Yeah, absolutely. How do you deal with that? I mean, is it a revolving list? Do you review it and you go, ah, 275 isn't all that interesting to me anymore. Like, how do things come on and come off of that list?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think I've really taken anything off the list because I haven't crossed enough things off to take them off. Well, no, that's not true. I've done a couple of them. I decided I wanted to open an office in Vegas and then I decided against that because I would have to take another bar and it's just not worth it to me. So that's not going to happen. So I switched everything over to Phoenix, right? So that's kind of one example. But yeah, I mean, sometimes your taste can change. It's your list, right. So if you don't want to do something anymore, just take it off and then put something else on there that interests you and then go, go make it.
Speaker 2:And then do you set a goal for, like, we got to check eight of these off a year, or what does that look like?
Speaker 1:You know I haven't done that. I probably should. I just try to review it all the time and say, all right, what am I going to do next? What am I going to do next? Like I'm actually coming up with a trip to Boston and Providence, rhode Island and Vermont, like a weekend to tick off three of those things, right? So I look at him like, okay, what can I get done? How can I do that? Boom, let's take a quick trip out there, get those things done. Fishing, catching a swordfish is on there. So I do strategic coach, which means I go to Santa Monica once a quarter for a conference and the day after that gets done, like I'm getting on a boat, I'm going to go catch a swordfish in California, right, and like, but the reviewing of it is is the magic, not the, not the goal of how, like, how many things are going to get done here.
Speaker 2:Are you one of these guys that has a broader, like a vivid vision or something like that, that sits on top of the 300 and guides that list? Or is that your kind of your bucket list?
Speaker 1:No, I actually don't have that. So I have, I mean, I have a vision kind of sort of for my, for my life, but it's not it's not, you know, super vivid, like this is going to happen, right, and all of you know, like, I have things that I want to do and I have general things that I want to accomplish and some, you know, some things are non-negotiables, right, but the vast, the vast majority of it is like this is really really interesting to me and I love this stuff, so I'm going to go do it. That's kind of what the list is.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So, as somebody who's grown a firm from you and a contract, well, just you to 17 lawyers and multiple offices, and now you're going to go multi-state. What do you consider the Brown family law secret sauce From a client's perspective? What do you tell clients? Here's why you should hire us and not any one of the other hundreds of firms in Utah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it really comes down to specialization. We do one thing and we do that thing exceptionally well, and that's the only thing that we will ever do. Communication is another one that we always talk with clients about, because lawyers suck at it, right, and this is actually like the communication thing was simply going through. It was kind of like when, when I decided that, hey, I'm going to get paid a hundred percent and maybe that solves a whole bunch of problems, I thought what's the number one problem attorneys have with with clients? That that clients complain about it's communication. And I thought, okay, why don't I just go solve that problem? And maybe it solves a whole bunch of other problems in the law. And I thought, okay, how do I do that? And I thought, all right, systemic communication seems to, seems to make sense. And then we implemented it and, voila, like it solved a huge, humongous problem and it solves a whole bunch of other problems. So that's, that's a really big one. You know, oddly enough, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but you're going to pay us a lot of cash, which is exactly what you should do.
Speaker 1:So this is kind of one of the sales things, like we all kind of want to compete on price, which is absolutely the wrong way to go. You need to compete on quality and actually you want to be the most expensive guy around because that communicates to them that you really care about their case and about their life. Right, like, why is their life, why is their, their kids and whatnot valued at twenty five hundred dollars? You know some guy kind of cheapen it out sort of thing when they're probably going to pay us $10,000, right, and like, that attorney realistically values your family a quarter of what we value you at. Right. And when people start thinking about it that way, they know that that's true. They're like, oh okay, that makes a lot of sense. So actually us being more expensive than most everybody else is a big selling point. Us being more expensive than most everybody else is a big selling point.
Speaker 2:Well, the ultra-premium service. Okay, here's the price that we want to command. And now what do we have to do in order to command that price? And the other half of that is the old Dan Kennedy principle that there is no market benefit of being the second cheapest lawyer in the state. Right, and so, if that's true, just be the most expensive and figure out what you have to do in order to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And then the other big one is we have a team. 56% of American attorneys are solos. The vast vast majority of family law attorneys are solos or very small firms, and they usually do like 10 divorces a year. Right, like that's cute. We just had 68 new clients last month. So you know, like we know what we're doing, and we have a team that exchanges information incredibly quickly and incredibly efficiently to serve our clients really, really well, and that's a big, big deal. That's a huge selling point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's maybe close on this one. I was kind of looking at some statistics before we jumped on, because you talk about money a lot on LinkedIn, and one of them that I found is in 2022, it was a Clio statistic the average, or the median, us solo practitioner made $130,000 a year, right, which means that 50% of lawyers in America are bringing in less than $130,000. But they're graduating law school with $150,000 to $200,000 of debt. And so if you were somebody who's just getting out and just trying to figure out how do I get out from under this crushing rock of debt, what would you do in 2024 to begin earning more money faster?
Speaker 1:Yeah, now let me ask a. Okay, earning money faster, so let me ask you a question real quick Is that, are those gross receipts, or is that like pay to yourself?
Speaker 2:Because that is an incredibly high number from from the data. Yeah, let me look. I looked it up on the way up here. I thought it was. I thought it was salary. I thought it was salary. Fred, we'll edit this part out.
Speaker 1:No, it's totally fine. It's a good conversation to have. It's just a much higher number than I've ever seen.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, let's look so yeah. So it says May of 2022, us Bureau. Bureau of labor statistics occupational handbook. Median annual wage for lawyers One 35.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's for all. That's for lawyers. I guess that's for, that's for all comers, that's not for so solos are going to be significantly lower than than than that. Okay, Okay, Okay. So yeah, we're, we're kind of editing here, so that that's kind of the idea. Yeah, we're kind of editing here, so that's kind of the idea. But how to make more money and make it?
Speaker 2:quickly. Is that the question? Yeah, so let's ask a better question. Okay, Do you have a sense for what the average solo is making?
Speaker 1:So the best stat that I found was back in 15, so it's way dated, but it was like this is like 65,000. So you know, I would imagine it's probably somewhere in the eighties at this point, but you know the average it's still. This is still very, very, very, very stable over time. Eight hours a day is what the average attorney works. Four hours is what they bill in. 1.7 to 1.9 hours is what they actually collect. Like it's very stable data over that's nuts.
Speaker 2:All right, let's ask a better question. Um, okay, so we'll just go, we'll go with this. So statistics are that in the US, the median income for a solo practitioner is somewhere south of $100,000. But the average law school debt is somewhere around $150,000 to $200,000. And so if you were getting out in 2024, kind of into the same job market that you and I graduated into, right, people are being laid off again now, and in 2007, 2008, they were being laid off left and right, pushing you know the smarter graduates downstream, as it were. If you were setting up a solo shop now, what would you do to kind of supercharge your earning potential and beat the average?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if I'm, if I'm going into business for myself and I don't have a big pocket book to to spend on marketing, okay, what I, what I'm doing, is I'm doing what attorneys have always done that's been successful for them, and that's to refer, getting referrals from other attorneys. Okay. So I am literally like, if I'm not working on a case, I am on the phone to other attorneys talking with them, I am meeting them for lunch, I am going out to dinner with them, I'm dropping by their office unannounced to talk to them. Like I'm just getting to know every attorney that I possibly can that can refer cases to me, and that's the first thing I'm going to do, and I'm going to do that all day long, every day, until I get a core group of referral sources that can sustain me, and that's probably about 20 people actually. So it's way less than you think it's going to be, but you have to go wide so you can go deep. So that's kind of the first thing I'm doing.
Speaker 1:And then I'm learning how to sell and close, okay. So that's the kind of easiest money that exists is if you can increase your conversion rate the people you meet with to the people you close. If you can increase that 25% or 50%, that is an absolutely tremendous amount of money and tremendous amount of clients that you're going to be able to serve. But sales and closing is an art and a science and we're not taught it as attorneys and it requires humongous amounts of effort. And the earlier you start learning that and practicing and putting in that effort, the more money you're going to make on an exponential basis later on in your career. So those are the two things I'm going to do if I don't have any money, which is what I was going to do Now. If I had a whole bunch of cash, I'd market in kind of a different way, but no one has that when they start out.
Speaker 2:You still would need that skill right, and then that selling and closing skill would serve you well when you did have a bunch of cash, because you wouldn't then have your PPC company telling you that the reason that you're not converting all these leads is because you suck at selling.
Speaker 1:Exactly. You even have some data on that, because I've had them tell me that on a number of occasions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but that is the you know. So there's a number of levers you can pull right, you can have more leads, you can convert better, or you can have a higher average case value. Right, and there's a couple of other ones, but those are the three primary ones and the ones that will get most lawyers. The greatest ROI is figuring out how to close more deals, um, without spending any more money. So, marco, this has been awesome. Where can people find more about you?
Speaker 1:So I'm on LinkedIn, like I'm not on any of the socials any any more. Uh, they, they make my life worse, so I'm just not there. So LinkedIn is the one place where I am and I talk about business and I talk about success and I talk about law a lot over there, because and the reason I do that real quick is that no one talked about this stuff. I think you and I kind of probably have the same kind of experience Like no one talked about these sorts of things the first five, six years that I was in a law firm and, like I said, I walked through hell because of that, because no one talked to me about what success was or how to do it, and I just had to go kind of figure it out.
Speaker 1:And I don't want to be like that. I don't just want to share what's worked and what hasn't. So LinkedIn is where I do that. If people want to get ahold of me, though, man, just send me an email. I'm I'm happy. I absolutely adore helping my colleagues in any way I can. So it's marco at brownfamilylawcom. You can get ahold of me.
Speaker 2:I will do anything I can for you. Awesome, yeah, that's exactly why I do this podcast. Number one to talk to smart people, but number two because this medium didn't exist for lawyers back when I was growing up. So we're going to make sure we link to all of that in the show description and I have people could check you out on LinkedIn. I'll link to that also.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks so much.