Drowning in casework and yearning for control? Stop fantasizing and become the CEO of your own legal empire!
In this episode, Ben and I throw the "CEO" myth out the window. It's NOT about a fancy title; it's about crushing the billable hour grind and building a firm with ironclad systems, a kickass culture, and a team of legal rockstars.
Get ready to:
Expose the brutal truths (and hidden opportunities) of law firm leadership.
Steal the growth secrets from a battle-tested mentor, Dan Kennedy – think high-quality service, personal freedom, and booming profits.
Become a team-building mastermind. Forget egos, it's all about clear roles and a culture that breeds rockstars.
Make the lawyer-to-CEO leap and unlock explosive firm growth and unparalleled personal success.
Nurture the next generation of legal champions and embrace strategic turnover to build a thriving and inspiring workplace.
Stop dreaming, start building! This episode is your roadmap to a fulfilling law practice.
P.S. Do you dare to break free from the billable hour cage? Tune in and find out!
____________________________________ 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.
Drowning in casework and yearning for control? Stop fantasizing and become the CEO of your own legal empire!
In this episode, Ben and I throw the "CEO" myth out the window. It's NOT about a fancy title; it's about crushing the billable hour grind and building a firm with ironclad systems, a kickass culture, and a team of legal rockstars.
Get ready to:
Expose the brutal truths (and hidden opportunities) of law firm leadership.
Steal the growth secrets from a battle-tested mentor, Dan Kennedy – think high-quality service, personal freedom, and booming profits.
Become a team-building mastermind. Forget egos, it's all about clear roles and a culture that breeds rockstars.
Make the lawyer-to-CEO leap and unlock explosive firm growth and unparalleled personal success.
Nurture the next generation of legal champions and embrace strategic turnover to build a thriving and inspiring workplace.
Stop dreaming, start building! This episode is your roadmap to a fulfilling law practice.
P.S. Do you dare to break free from the billable hour cage? Tune in and find out!
____________________________________ 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.
Hello my friends, and welcome back into another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's episode is actually not a solo episode. This is a conversation between Ben and I about what it means to become the CEO of your law firm. And CEO of your law firm has become this like marketer's thing. I don't know, maybe a year and a half, two, three years ago, something like that Um, becoming the CEO of your firm became a marketing pitch and so many people are just not sure what it means.
Speaker 1:
Like I look on social media and I see owners of law firms who say I'm the founder and CEO and it's like dude, you're a true solo, just own that. We get lots of questions about when do I need to bring in a CEO or a COO to run my law firm and what does that even mean? So this episode is about the mindset shift that happens as you go from being the practicing lawyer who does everything in your law firm to being the CEO whose job it is to attract great talent, maintain that great talent and go hunting for more revenue to support that talent. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation about stepping into your role as the CEO of your law firm.
Speaker 2:
Hey everyone, welcome back. In today's episode, brian and I are going to talk about your role as a CEO in the law firm, so let's just start here, brian. Does every law firm owner need to be a CEO? Because this is a high-level job.
Speaker 1:
So I think there's two questions embedded in that Number one does every law firm need a CEO? No. Does every law firm owner need to be the CEO? Also no, I think there's plenty of solo and small law firms that can operate as minded. For the first part of my career as a solo growing a firm, the thing is that if you're doing that and you're not building businesses, systems and processes with people, then you need to understand that you are going to be forever the one who's doing the work inside of the firm. The second half of that question is does every law firm need the lawyer or the owner to be the CEO? And the answer to that also is no. It doesn't necessarily have to be the lawyer who's the owner, but in order to grow and in order to scale the business beyond the lawyer's self, there needs to be somebody who's installing systems, processes, culture and good people to help the business grow.
Speaker 2:
As my mentor, dan Kennedy, once told me, it's perfectly okay to have a job where you're running a business and you don't want to grow. If that's by deliberate choice, that's okay. Frankly, most of the folks who join Great Legal Marketing, and particularly those who are in the tribe and in our in-person mastermind groups, they do want something different. They want to grow. They want more money, more time, more freedom. So let's talk about that, because the thing I've observed over the years, brian, especially with some of our longtime members, is that they come to us and they're like I am never going to stop the lawyering part. I'm always going to take the depositions, I'm always going to talk to the clients and then we watch them transition over the years to being I don't talk to anybody, I just run the business.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I think that's head junk for many lawyers is I'm the one who has the legal degree and so I'm the one who needs to be answering all of the client questions, holding the client's hand throughout the process, and as we see that our staff does a better and better job at that, we elevate ourselves into higher and better uses of our own time.
Speaker 2:
There's a fear factor there that we'll talk about in a few minutes, but for sure, what we've seen with some of our most successful members is, if we all went to law school, we want to help people who want to get good at a certain practice area. You're actually able to help more people in a better way when you've got a growing firm that's staffed with people who know what they're doing, with process and procedures. That will help you get there. And so let's just talk about one of the things you and I talked about early on when you joined Ben Glass Law is what are we really doing here? And talk about the conversation we first had when we said why are you in business?
Speaker 1:
I think most lawyers, when they're growing a business, really want to generate more clients and more money, but the thing that we actually want is the freedom to work on the things that we're really good at and the things that we actually like doing. So why are we really in business? The discussion we had in the law firm is that we're in business to create a place where people can thrive. So that starts with us and our employees, but it trickles down to the clients, because if the staff is well taken care of and they're happy and operating in their own highest and best use, then of course they're going to take care of the clients. And we've said many times from the stage and from our various podcasts we're not in the business of holding insurance companies accountable or instilling justice or even making change in the world, and we're not ashamed or afraid to say that out loud. I think for many of the firms that say that, they say that because everybody else says that.
Speaker 2:
First of all, yeah.
Speaker 1:
But I think getting really clear in your own head about why you wake up in the morning ready to go to work on Monday, like what excites you to show up at your office on Monday morning.
Speaker 2:
The way I like to put it is lawyers will be happier if they're allowed to do work that they really like doing with people they really like working with, for people they really like doing the work for. And if you can solve for one and two work you like doing with people you like, then you screen your clients, then you're going to be happy because everybody is just happier and you actually make the world better that way. Let's talk a little bit. So. Culture is a word that's bandied around a lot. I think we do a pretty good job of it inside of Ben Glass Law and inside of Great Legal Marketing. At the end of the day, culture is not the signs on the big board outside. We believe culture is the way that we talk to each other internally. Actually, let's talk a little bit about that. What have you seen us do and other top GLM members do in terms of building a place where people actually do working with the people that are there?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so it's not signs and it's not pizza parties, right? Culture, I think, starts with building a supportive environment where you actually want your employees to succeed. Right, and I think many small businesses think of it as a zero-sum game. If I pay my employees more, then I'm taking home less for myself, but when you've got the right people on your team and you're paying the employees more, you're paying them more because they are helping grow the pie internally. So some of the things that we've done at the law firm like when COVID hit, the first thing that we did rather than install our own HR policies about you have to be here.
Speaker 1:
You have to not be here or not be here or maintain your nine to five hours, even if you have young ones and kids running around home. We just went around on a listening tour and said what would be perfect for you. Now we can't promise that we're going to meet all of that for everybody, but we won't ever know if we are hitting the target if we don't ask everybody else what they want. And the thing is that you have to first in your mind again set what is perfect for you as a law firm owner so that when you hear those responses from your staff you've got an idea of whether you can actually meet that need.
Speaker 2:
You know, the hardest part about asking that question which is how can I make this perfect for you is that they've never had anyone ask them that question. If they have, it was bullshit, right. So culture really is and this sounds cliché, but it is living that culture. And one of the other ways we do this is from onboarding to the exit interview, we're really trying to find out what makes people tick.
Speaker 2:
We have a lot of regular quarterly meetings with our team relaying down what leadership has decided, what leadership is working on, and I think the thing that we've gotten better at and I've watched you, brian, grow into this is the leader can be the last one to talk to. This is just the leader can be the last one to talk, like when there's problems that need to be solved or issues, either personnel issues or just other process issues. Be the last one. Let the team talk. They have good ideas, you hired them and every single day you're making a decision to keep them. Let's talk briefly about the thing which is so hard seems to be so hard, although we've had some good successes just hiring people, people. We talk a lot about building that team of great people, but a lot of lawyers find that challenging. What are some of the things that either we're doing or you've seen others do, that we don't have this problem. We've had that problem.
Speaker 1:
It's not perfect. We've had great hiring successes, but we've also had failures. We had somebody who was here for about three days and then stopped showing up for work. We've gotten better at it, as we've clearly defined the role that the person is coming into, and I think the mistake that many firms make is you go on Indeed and you copy what everybody else says a legal secretary or a paralegal or a first-year associate is supposed to do without doing. What we've done really well in the last couple of years is create for ourselves the chart of stuff that we're not good at and or that we don't like doing, and creating job descriptions for people who can come in and replace you in those areas. The other thing that we've done that you've done really well in the last couple of years has developed the team culture document that gets read and starts a conversation with the employee on their first day working at the law firm.
Speaker 2:
If you don't have that team culture document, if you've never gotten it from me, just email me and I'll make sure you have it All right. So let's talk. We want to talk about mindset and ego, and one of the biggest impediments to my own growth personally over the years was thinking like nobody could do this as good as I can, or I'll do it. It'll be quicker if I do it. So let's talk about ego a little bit and that feeling you get it really as you transition from lawyer running a law firm to CEO running a law firm, because I think this holds a lot of people. On the other hand, we've seen many breakthroughs in the in-person mastermind groups because we keep pushing people to just get out of the way.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So, yes, you can do it faster and better than everybody in the beginning. But if you keep doing that for them, then you're always going to be the one who's I don't know pulling the thing off the copier and putting it in an envelope and sticking it in the mail. And so we've got to get better at systems and processes of training our people for how they do our job, by telling them not necessarily how to do the job, but what the end goal is and where the guardrails are, especially in the legal world, where you can't have a paralegal who's giving legal advice, where the guardrails are around things you can and cannot say to a client.
Speaker 2:
One of the things that I've worked on for a number of years to get the team better. So, just so you know, I never answer a client's email and I rarely even get pulled in to even make client decisions, but a couple of strategies and things that we've done here is in the early days when I am on client calls or I've got someone new to the team, like they're in my office, they're on speakerphone, they're listening to the words I use, what concerns of the client have and what the concerns of the client are, and so that's a great way to transfer your knowledge into the team by just inviting people in to listen to these calls. The other thing is just I forward every email that does come to me to the team, ask the team to answer it. If the team doesn't know the answer, then they come to me in one of our weekly meetings, say here's five things I really wasn't really sure about. Can you teach me on that? But now we're teaching with the whole, in my case the long-term disability team.
Speaker 2:
So everybody knows that, and what I've seen in our practice is I rarely have to get involved in most of the things that most lawyers get involved in. I'm surprised, brian, how many lawyers have so many emails? They're responding to their clients so many things, because they either don't trust the team or they haven't built a team who's able to answer this. Again, ego says oh, I'm the lawyer. The client hired me because my name is on the door. The client wants to talk to me. That's just, objectively, we found not true.
Speaker 1:
And I think it starts to your point about not always having to be the one with all the answers when your team comes to you with questions, just getting into the habit of responding with what would you do if I wasn't here, or what three things do you think we should do, and which one would you select? So we're not telling the team the answers all the time. We're having them come up with the answers on their own. And if you need to be the one who's selecting the one of the three things, fine for a while. But again, the team will never scale and grow beyond you if you're the one who's always providing all the answers to their questions, and you, if you're the one who's always providing all the answers to their questions, and all that's going to cause is a big line outside of your door preventing you from doing your best work.
Speaker 2:
Which is why we started to do the work on this, to try to get better, because that line was long, so mistakes will be made. There will be things that we're allowing the team to say or do for a client or for a case, and sometimes it won't be exactly the way we would have done it. Sometimes it could be like errors. My experience is really anything that's fatal, and if you think about this, if you do want to grow and have more time, freedom for yourself, make more money, you're going to have to push through the years. It starts with hiring great people, starts with being very transparent and starts with being able to have this conversation. Hey, calvin, you said this to a client. It was great. Tell me about how this. All right, maybe we could do it this way better in the future. The opposite, though, is you never do any of this stuff and you're still the one with the long email inbox and the line hanging out your door. Let's talk for a little bit about the mindset, and so much of this is mindset you being the ceo what I call it like founders remorse, or founders guilt.
Speaker 2:
I was in a mastermind group. Once I get up in front of the group, it's another group of non-lawyers. Look, I feel guilty that I feel like I'm doing less. I built this thing I worked very hard for years and years. I'm doing less. Everyone is working really hard to make more money and I feel bad about that. And, of course, they slapped me a little bit and said you, you're crazy, like you're doing your best work. But I'm curious whether you have felt that way yourself and, if so, what do you think about? Read, look to get through that.
Speaker 1:
Of course, one of my goals coming into the next year is to scale my portfolio of cases by 50% smaller. Not many lawyers walk into the year and say I want to have half as many cases next year as I did this year, but I'm at a stage where I just don't want to be that involved in the day-to-day operation in many of the cases. Yes, of course, there's some remorse that goes along with that. The thing to remember as the lawyer is at one point when you were 10 or 15 years younger, there was all this stuff in the cases that would have been interesting problems for you to solve. The mind junk that we get into is thinking that because we don't want to solve the problem anymore, it's a boring problem and nobody wants to solve it. That's not true of your associates, of your paralegals and of the young people who are working in your office. Those are exciting problems for them, just as they were once for you 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 years, however long it may have been. And so really, I think if you ask them and they were honest with you, they would tell you that they want you out of the way more. They want to have more responsibility.
Speaker 1:
The thing that we hear over and over again when we hire people from other firms is I want more responsibility, I want more client interaction, I want more time to go to court or depositions. It may be different in whatever your practice area is. People want to do more stuff and the only way that they can do more of it is if you get out of the way. Do more stuff, and the only way that they can do more of it is if you get out of the way. Now I do think in the early stages of that, you almost end up keep reminding them out loud that I'm doing less of this so that I can go and find more cases, so that I can bring more money into the firm, so that I can blah, blah, blah. That eventually starts going away as you get more and more comfortable with the fact that the people are here, learning how to operate and that they're not going to get up and leave you.
Speaker 2:
The biggest challenge lawyers have with this is that you're just typically not exposed to any of it in college or in law school or in the profession, and so when you start to think about the CEO stuff, it becomes challenging, which is one of the reasons why Great Legal Marketing has been successful it's been around really for now 20 years or so.
Speaker 2:
It's because we have built a tribe of people who think like this, who have these problems. So let's just talk a little bit about some of the resources that we have. Of course, we have the private Facebook group. We've got the Lean, the Altier coaching. Hopefully you are listening into the private podcast as well. Well, we have people like I guarantee you that in Great Legal Marketing there's someone who is in your practice area, in the same size city and the same size practice, but in a different city, who's a little bit farther along than you are being able to access. The thinking of the group, I think is something that we've brought to the market which is different from many of these other coaches and certainly all of the marketing agencies that are out there of the marketing agencies that are out there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and one of the things that you could do start either your journey or start your next year is to go into something like the Facebook group and try to find somebody who's near you to get in touch with. They don't even have to be near you. Zoom, now you can have a coffee with anybody in a different practice area. I would invite you to come into the Facebook group, introduce yourself you haven't been around the tribe for a while. If you've been around the tribe and you just assume that people know you with what your practice area is and what it is that you're trying to accomplish in the next six or 12 months and see if there isn't somebody in the Facebook group who's already been there and can help you along the journey.
Speaker 2:
And our team can also help connect you because our team has good knowledge of most of the lawyers here in Great Legal Marketing. All right, so here's a couple things you can do for your own homework. Ask yourself that question how could you make this perfect for you? It's your life. It's a one-way journey. What is it Like?
Speaker 2:
Take an inventory about your firm, your practice, the folks who are there and what irritates you, what isn't working great and what irritates you. What isn't working great. If you start by identifying that, because it's usually easy to eliminate the things that are irritants first and then start to think deeply about it. I want to give you permission to think how could this be better for me? Do you want to free up more time for yourself? Do you want to hire, in some cases, good litigators or good writers for your firm? Be very clear about that.
Speaker 2:
Take some time and bring that to the calls that we have here at the tribe. The second thing is like this culture thing is important and if you've not done it before and had deep conversations with your team again, they won't believe you at the beginning because they've never had anyone be serious about law firm culture, and the culture at most firms is, I think, not good. Why don't you talk for a bit, brian, about the limiting beliefs, because you're really good at this. You hang around with a lot of people who talk about your own self-limiting beliefs as barriers to growth.
Speaker 1:
I think the largest limiting belief is that as you grow, the team won't come along with you or that they will be jealous that you're spending more time at masterminds or having a thinking day at a coffee shop, and I think it's just not true, right. As leaders in our firms, we are there to uplift everybody else, but also to create opportunities for everybody, and as the firms grow, it creates opportunities. It's really not a career path much of a career path in many of our firms for a paralegal. Somebody comes in at 25, they're maybe doing the same thing at 47, doing the same thing at 60. But if we've created firms that are growing, where they have supervising capabilities now, we've created more opportunity for them to stay with us throughout the course of their lives and their careers.
Speaker 2:
Let us leave you with this that as you grow into the CEO role and as your firm gets bigger and more robust and more stable, you are going to have change. We've talked a lot about the change inside your own mind. You're also going to create personnel change and I just want to tell you that is just a fact of life. The people who can get you to a certain level of growth in your business are often, quite often, not the folks who can run with you to the next level. We should never feel bad or guilty about that.
Speaker 2:
Of course, you treat everybody civilly, but if someone is not good for your firm at this next level, then it's not a really good place for them. And when you and they have those discussions, I think the thing that you can do is help them find the right place for them. But just accept that quote turnover is not a bad thing. It's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for the person that's leaving. Most importantly, it's a good thing for the rest of your team. So your A players. They want to play with A players and they often wonder how come the CEO is the last to figure out that Billy Bob over here just is a C-plus player. So think about this. Craft your vision for yourself. We can help you, brian and I and our team can help you, but, more importantly, the tribe has a ton of experience and we really do want to change the profession. Every single member of Great New Marketing is working on two things changing their own lives and really making the profession better.
