Feeling stuck in a legal career that drains your soul?
What if you could build a thriving practice based on your values and ditch the pressure? ⚖️
Patrick Patino, The Newfangled Lawyer, throws away the old rulebook and shows you how to build a thriving law firm based on YOUR values.
This episode is packed with actionable advice, including:
Ready to stop feeling like a cog in the machine and become the lawyer you were meant to be?
Hit play and unlock the secrets to practicing law YOUR way!
Feeling inspired? Patrick wants to keep the conversation going! Connect with him on LinkedIn: Patrick Patino's LinkedIn and explore his website, The Newfangled Lawyer: newfangled.legal
Need empowering and approachable bankruptcy services in Nebraska or Minnesota? High Five Legal is here to help! Visit their website: highfivelegal.com and take a fresh approach to your fresh start.
Got lingering questions? Shoot Patrick an email at patrick@newfangled.legal.
____________________________________
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
Feeling stuck in a legal career that drains your soul?
What if you could build a thriving practice based on your values and ditch the pressure? ⚖️
Patrick Patino, The Newfangled Lawyer, throws away the old rulebook and shows you how to build a thriving law firm based on YOUR values.
This episode is packed with actionable advice, including:
Ready to stop feeling like a cog in the machine and become the lawyer you were meant to be?
Hit play and unlock the secrets to practicing law YOUR way!
Feeling inspired? Patrick wants to keep the conversation going! Connect with him on LinkedIn: Patrick Patino's LinkedIn and explore his website, The Newfangled Lawyer: newfangled.legal
Need empowering and approachable bankruptcy services in Nebraska or Minnesota? High Five Legal is here to help! Visit their website: highfivelegal.com and take a fresh approach to your fresh start.
Got lingering questions? Shoot Patrick an email at patrick@newfangled.legal.
____________________________________
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 was on a Zoom call with the CEO of a huge company, full arm sleeve. I show up wearing a backwards hat. He's like you're the dude right. Traditionally you'd be like I'm meeting with the CEO of a multimillion dollar company, I have to wear a suit, a tie, and I just don't think that's the case. I've had clients now say because I ask how did you find me, why did you go with me? And people are starting to say things like well, you're not wearing a suit. I love that and to your point, will I ostracize some people or some people where you're like I'm really stepping into myself.
Speaker 3:I'm being myself. We don't want those clients anyway. What's up everybody and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's guest is Patrick Patino. You might know him as the newfangled lawyer. Patrick is a bankruptcy lawyer out of Minnesota, but he's also got a brand new firm that he's just opened in Nebraska. We're going to be talking personal brand, starting your law firm and having a better life with more money and more time. Patrick, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me, brian. And yeah, I mean, how I practice law is very much so like I'm a person first that just so happens to practice law and it's taken kind of a reframe of who am I first, why am I, why do I do what I'm doing, and allowing that to inform the delivery of legal services and my branding, my marketing, my messaging.
Speaker 3:I think there is a coming wave of that right and it's increasing in size, the number of lawyers who are saying like no, it doesn't have to be this way, we don't have to be in suits and ties, and it probably was accelerated by the pandemic. And I can practice law and have a great life and do that without billing 2,400, 2,500 hours a year when you don't have any ownership interest. And so for you, patrick, what was your education? A life education like that kind of brought you to the conclusion where you are now. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:So the journey started there about two years ago. I had gotten my Minnesota driver's license, having moved here from Nebraska. In my picture I looked miserable and the joke is like it does not look like me and I was. So I felt like at that time, like the person I had become was just not me, like I felt just out of place, out of sorts, dissatisfied, and so I was like, what radical life changes can I make? So I stopped using a smartphone.
Speaker 1:That was kind of the beginning of, I guess, like this journey I'm on, of self discovery, and I realized just how much of my brain space was going to something that didn't serve me. It was not a tool anymore of productivity, it was really a tool of distraction. And so from there I took the extra time and just started reading voraciously. I have read more books in the last two years than I have in probably the prior two decades. I just became, or just discovered, kind of unmasked, who I've always been. I love learning, I love reading, I love trying new things, I love creating. I took a pottery class Like I just started discovering like who I was again and why I'm here, like I want to have a good time.
Speaker 3:All while you were continuing with your law practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so um, simultaneously during this time, um, so, prior to that, I went solo April 1st of 2020. Okay. Which we all know what happened after Um, and so yeah I. I went on my own um a bankruptcy attorney and no one was filing bankruptcy. I went on my own I'm a bankruptcy attorney and no one was filing bankruptcy. Stop there.
Speaker 3:stop there for a second. Adam Rawson, who is a criminal defense lawyer in South Florida, is in a mastermind group that we run, and Adam, in our April meeting, thought about launching a bankruptcy practice because he thought everybody was going to declare bankruptcy and it and you know, this is before yes, uh, the government just printed money for everybody, but so you were a bankruptcy lawyer in 2020 oh yeah, watching I mean you must have, you must have thought like this is going to be the greatest time to be alive from a business perspective because they even all like, let's say, the bankruptcy drafting software.
Speaker 1:There were CLEs how to break into bankruptcy right. It was kind of highlighted as this golden ticket during the pandemic Everyone come over. And actually the opposite happened 35-year low bankruptcy filings, contraction of bankruptcy attorneys, people retiring, people getting out of bankruptcy, people shutting down their firms right, partially because they had been running with high overhead, right and low margins volume practice. I don't run a volume practice. I have what you would consider more like a boutique bankruptcy practice, highly specialized, so I can adapt really quickly. But even there it was slim pickings scarcity. So that requires you to be more creative, more inventive, and so I was originating a lot of litigation work, right. People are like that sounds kind of like a distress thing, and so I ended up partnering with an attorney who was going to go off on his own. I was like, hey, man, I'll just feed you, fill your plate, which I did. So he and I partnered.
Speaker 1:We started adding right, we added an estate planning attorney, we added a rural practice attorney and what I discovered is that that wasn't the right kind of growth. I thought you just grow by growing right, like, yeah, estate planning. Estate planning is kind of like bankruptcy Lit yeah, that's like a supportive of thing and it didn't work. So it failed, um, pretty gloriously. We had a unique compensation model. We're fully distributed, right, these are all the sexy things. Right now, we're largely flat fee billing. We are practicing in a way that I think is attractive to a lot of people, and so I tried that for four years about three and a half years and it didn't work because it wasn't me anymore. I became the backwards, hat wearing, hoodie wearing newfangled lawyer, which meant I was a different person than I was at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaker 3:So when you say it didn't work, like from an objective business perspective it didn't work, say it didn't work like from an objective business perspective it didn't work, or it didn't work for Patrick or both.
Speaker 1:It was both objective and subjective. Objectively it didn't work from the standpoint of our compensation structure basically became eat what you kill and it's really hard to decondition attorneys to not think of scarcity right.
Speaker 1:And instead reframe of abundance. Right, like there's a benefit of collective benefit that takes a special group of attorneys and I'm not trying to criticize people. I was with right that works for them. Right, and part of it's subjective right. I changed a lot and what I wanted out of life had changed and I understood what it took to how much you had to work to make a million dollars. If that's what I wanted, could I Sure? But do I want to? Not necessarily?
Speaker 1:And just like from a branding standpoint yeah, just like from a traditional, like kind of a branding standpoint right, I'm a consumer, small business, bankruptcy attorney, on debtor side. Right, people had started in Google reviews saying I'm kind, a normal person, a regular dude. People on Reddit which is crazy on TikTok right, I'm not in any of these spaces Started being like, hey, you want a normal bankruptcy attorney, go see Patrick. And so I was like it's a missed opportunity that my law firm branding doesn't showcase that. And so I approached my partner. I said, hey, this is what I'm going to go do. And he's like I represent banks. Right, I'm a litigator. You can't wear your hat backwards in a hoodie.
Speaker 1:You can't say you're kind.
Speaker 3:And that's fine.
Speaker 1:You go, do you? It wasn't kind of your traditional bad breakup. There's no animosity and so that's where I'm at is kind of like with launching High Five Legal. It's not a new thing, so I've been practicing in Nebraska for a decade. It's just a reinvention, a realignment, a reframing of this is how clients already see me. This is why people are hiring me, not necessarily because of my technical acumen, but because who I am as a person.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was poking around your website before we got on and it occurred to me, number one, that you have figured out a way to differentiate and to compete in the bankruptcy space on anything other than price right, because most bankruptcy lawyers that I see advertising it's the 495 flat fee, chapter seven or whatever right. And you're not really competing on expertise either. It's on what is important to the person who's declaring bankruptcy, which is I'm going to get this behind me and then I'm going to move on with the upper trajectory of my life. So talk about that. How did you develop that brand?
Speaker 1:So how I developed that was I had the benefit of joining my father-in-law's practice out of law school and my father-in-law was a bankruptcy attorney for almost four decades, right. And he invited me into his firm and he didn't know what he was saying yes to, right, because I'm a change maker, like I like smashing stuff and putting it back together and so like through that process he was kind of in an evolution, kind of watershed moment in his career. He had been kind of like the grand pooper of bankruptcy volume guy and had started transitioning into more what someone would consider a boutique practice.
Speaker 1:And what I realized is I'm never going to compete on price On technical acumen. Sure, like I callied bankruptcy in law school, I could have gone clerked for a bankruptcy judge in Delaware. That's not bragging, that's just a fact. But regular consumer people don't care.
Speaker 3:Do not care.
Speaker 1:They don't care, they don't know what a Callie Award is, it does not matter to them, it does not drive decision making, it does not drive their behavior, it does not drive them to action. They're not like I chose this bankruptcy attorney over the other one because this guy Cali'd bankruptcy in law school 14 years ago. I had the benefit of being at a firm Koenig Dunn in Omaha. They're a family law attorney. One other big thing so I had the benefit of being at a firm Koenig Dunn in Omaha they're a family law attorney and one of the attorneys. And one other big thing was business development and personal branding and having like your niche.
Speaker 1:And so I just discovered, like I don't want to be the volume practitioner Right, I'm going to compete on me. Right, like I'm, I'm a market of one. Like, I get referrals from the volume practitioners, I get referrals from the medium, big size law firms that don't do small business, right. So I found a donut hole and just sat there and that's worked for me. And just sat there and that's worked for me. I get clients that are responsive. I get clients that have buy-in, because I'm not spending the whole time trying to convince them that I'm the right person, and how big is your team? Right now, it's me a paralegal and a law clerk.
Speaker 3:And I don't know a whole lot about the bankruptcy practice, but is the actual compiling of the case and the presentation to a court? Is that mostly formulaic, in other words, can you systematize that, or is there a lot of? You have to be deeply involved in every case that's going forward.
Speaker 1:So the types of cases we do are not plug and chug. The types of cases we do are not plug and chug so kind of a traditional consumer bankruptcy practice. There's not a lot of variation between case A and case B and case Z. Right, it can be very systematized, can be very rote, can be very like, yeah, the attorney kind of just rubber stamps the paperwork. What I specialize in is a little bit more complex, kind of the funky, the out there type cases.
Speaker 1:I do have high involvement. However, I also delegate a ton. I trust my paralegal. Paralegals can do a lot of work in this space. They can do a lot of the client interaction, they do a lot of the drafting, they do all the filing, the court management and it really frees me up a lot. So, yes, it's kind of administrative law in some way because there's forms you fill out and you're synthesizing and distilling information to fill out a form in a box. But in terms of high attorney involvement compared to, let's say, some other areas of law that require, you know, an attorney has to do a deposition, you can't delegate that to a paralegal and there's no adverse party right. So I'm not dealing with, like opposing counsel or personalities of opposing parties or that kind of thing is very uncommon in bankruptcy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it just seems to me that many, many bankruptcy firms are built on the model of there's one lawyer and then there's a whole bunch of paralegals or legal assistants compiling all the stuff, putting it onto the form and then the lawyer just signs off on it. But your practice you're much more involved with the actual clients, which in a way limits the scale which we talked about a little bit. But what has your experience been with handing those clients who are expecting you and expecting your culture kind of off to the paralegal to manage the case, manage the expectations and get all the ducks in a row for you? You have any pushback on that.
Speaker 1:No, there's a lot of fear around this. Attorneys find themselves to be exceptional. They're the only ones who can deliver information to the client. If you look at my Google reviews and the feedback, everyone loves my paralegal. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:They mention her by name, I think sometimes more than me Mm-hmm. She's the first line of defense. It's like a client care concierge you have to have the right people right, and I'm just really fortunate I've worked with my paralegal almost my entire career that we have a very kind of like symbiotic type relationship. She knows just what to do the clients. I tell them right, it's about expectation setting. I tell them from the very first time I talk with them, you're going to hear from my paralegal, kylie. She's going to walk you through exactly what you need and will help you get through the process. She helps me do it and she's awesome, right, here's the thing about consumer psychology If you feed someone a line, they're going to seek to confirm that bias. So, like even in bankruptcy, I don't tell people like this is gonna be hard, this is gonna be difficult, this is gonna ruin your life. I don't do any marketing around that. No, fear based marketing. It's all. We're going to make this painless. This is going to be easy, right, we're going to walk you through exactly what to do, when to do it.
Speaker 1:By what do people do? Then they seek to confirm that bias. If you tell people this is going to be difficult. You're going to be garnished. If you don't do this, you're going to be sued. Your life is going to be ruined. What are they going to? It is going to be difficult. This is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. What do people do? They see if it confirmed that bias, and then they're like it is hard, look, I'm going to make it hard. And so we have just kind of put this on its head, and so our feedback is gosh, that was so easy, that was easier than I thought it would be. Wow, you made that painless. Like, that was easier than I thought it would be. Wow, you made that painless. This is, then, the feedback we get, and it really starts with my paralegal. The brain surgeon who does the brain surgery is not also scheduling the consult.
Speaker 3:No, 100% right. So the technician should be freed up to do the absolute strategy and the highest level stuff, and you have the anesthesiologist and the nurse who preps the room and the schedule out front. Somebody else is doing the billing, right? The only thing you should be doing is focusing on the highest level operation. I love that brain surgery analogy and so you can only do this where you're licensed. Right Bankruptcy, even though it's a federal code. Can you help somebody who's in Florida or no?
Speaker 1:It's a great question. The answer is no. So even though this is federal law, there is a ton of nuance. So, like you, let's say, stack Nebraska next to Iowa. They meet right. Filing bankruptcy in Nebraska very different than filing bankruptcy in Iowa. Filing bankruptcy in Nebraska very different than filing bankruptcy in Iowa. Filing bankruptcy in Florida even way more different still. And so there's local customs, there's local rules, there's different ways that judges run these, and then there's a chapter seven trustees and chapter 13 trustees, and how they want the information delivered or the process they follow can be wildly different state to state.
Speaker 3:So then let me ask you the expansion question, like why the hell pick Nebraska?
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's a great question. So I'm from Illinois. I went to University of Illinois for law school. My father-in-law was in Nebraska and then that's where my wife was. So I was imported. I was a Nebraska import and so that's where I started my career and I really did a ton of business development Like I was. I was everywhere, I was a mad man, and so I mean, brian, there are people who refer me work that don't even know I don't live there anymore. How were you still keeping up with those people? How, yeah, um, I'm just top of mind, right. Like I re, I'm still involved. Like I went, went presented in nebraska and a seminar in carney with all the bankruptcy people.
Speaker 3:I'm still very actively involved are you doing email newsletter newsletter, anything beyond your podcast?
Speaker 1:no, and just like linkedin presence. I've had people refer things to me just because they're like, you're're still active, you're alive. I mean this is the thing. This stuff is a lot easier than people realize. And so, yeah, I mean I still have a physical presence in Nebraska, and the reason why Nebraska is there's not a lot of bankruptcy attorneys. I mean under the age of 60, I think there's less than five bankruptcy attorneys.
Speaker 3:That's interesting. Okay, and so what is the like? The intellectual barrier to learning, bankruptcy, high, medium.
Speaker 1:It's highly it's highly technical. You can't dabble in bankruptcy. You'll get, you'll get destroyed. Yeah, you can dabble, maybe some other things start. You can't dabble in bankruptcy because the penalties are so high yeah, right, it's not like any other really practice of anything else. Because you can't overcharge someone, right, everything is disclosed. You're reviewed by the us trustee trustee. So it's a different beast.
Speaker 3:Have you thought about that geographic expansion question and studied maybe how many bankruptcy lawyers there are in somewhere like South Dakota or other low?
Speaker 1:density states.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I could take what I'm doing right now and do what I call like a pod. Basically, in every geographic location there's an attorney and a paralegal, and the paralegal doesn't actually need to be geographically located there. I think the secret sauce is you do need some amount of physical presence because you need community, and so, yeah, what I'm doing with High Five Legal could I spin up a law firm right now in Wisconsin, north Dakota, south Dakota, iowa, illinois. Sure, what's the overhead? Literally nothing, because we don't need an office space, and if we do, we can get a $300 a month coworking space that has mail.
Speaker 3:Very interesting.
Speaker 1:Right. Consumers don't even expect to meet you in person anymore. They don't want to.
Speaker 3:No, that was the biggest shock to me coming out of the pandemic. I couldn't even get people to do Zoom calls. So when we first stopped letting people into the office, my old holdup was if somebody doesn't come into the office and sit down with me for a consultation, there's no way they're going to listen to me. At the end of the case, if you can't make the time in the front, you're not going to listen to me at the end of the case, right, if you can't make the time in the front, you're not going to listen to me. Then it just turned out to totally not be true.
Speaker 3:And so you know, in 2000, we were offering people do you want a Zoom call or do you want a phone call? And nine out of 10 were picking phone calls. So I just stopped offering Zoom because then I didn't have to dress up or think that I had to dress up, and I can count on one hand the number of clients in the last 12 months that came into my office before they hired us. Now people might come in to drop stuff off, they might come in to sign papers, pick up a check, whatever, but those are even few and far between. So nobody's coming physically into my office space these days.
Speaker 1:I mean it's really. I mean, people are almost relieved.
Speaker 3:You're buying back time because you don't have to drive here, you don't have to drive home, you don't have to take time off of work.
Speaker 1:Childcare, or if you're old or disabled, or I mean I tell people you can do the entire process and never leave home. I mean you can do a bankruptcy like you do your taxes, like you order DoorDash, like you order something off amazon, it's literally the same in terms of the experience.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I mean the opportunity to take. What I'm doing is figure, like I go present at this seminar and like people are asking questions like, well, where do you keep the wet ink signature paperwork that people are signing? I'm like, well, that's not even required, so I haven't, I have none. Answer is zero. And so even the opportunity right now for younger attorneys to go off and start their own firms I mean the barrier to entry is so low, the cost of spinning up a firm is so low compared to what it was historically, and if you're bringing some amount of a book of business, I mean you can be up and running making more money in a very short period of time even in a low market right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's talk about that, cause I know you have a launch law firm launchpad cohort that's starting in September. It looks like a 90 day accelerated. You're going to take a handful of people. Why don't you talk about like who, about who? That would be a really good fit for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. So I mean the target there is someone who's at big law, who has built up a good reputation, a good book of business, and just wants a better lifestyle, wants more control, more autonomy, more agency, more flexibility in what they can do or say without being scrutinized or feeling like they need to run it through a committee. There's no red tape. You go start your own firm. It's you. You get to make the decision.
Speaker 1:If you want to have branding where it's all based upon your love of phishing, go for it, like, clients love that. And that's more and more people are hiring attorneys because of who that person is outside of being an attorney, right. And I even like thinking like, hey, let's say you really like tattoos, right, you could have a whole law firm that all you service is tattoo shops. Right, and what else could stem from that? Oh, skateboard shops. I mean not to stereotype, but I mean you can pick. So the ideal is someone who's looking to kind of go out on their own but feels like it's really hard or doesn't even know where to start. And you know I've now done this several times of kind of launching and transitioning and know kind of the playbook of here's what to focus on here's what you need and here's what you don't and to go do it is really not that hard. You can do it honestly in as short as 60 to 90 days.
Speaker 3:Well, you could do it very quickly and the technological barrier to entry now is really low because you can buy space on the Google Suite. You can get a case management software for less than 100 bucks per user. You buy a Zoom account and a website and you're off and running right, and then you just have to find a different space to compete on and you have to think outside of the traditional lawyer marketing, which is I'm the best in the area and that's why you should hire me, right? And so that's where you come in is let me help you with the personal brand and let me help you actually accentuate the things that make you different and the things that make you unique to clients. And it's going to turn off some people who don't want to work with a sleeved up lawyer Right, but the people who do, who don't? There's also a is probably an equal amount of lawyer people that don't want to work with the button down lawyer Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, and that's been. You know, you know, all I have is anecdotal evidence for me. Right, I've had clients not say because I ask how did you find me, why did you go with me? And people are starting to say things like well, you're not wearing a suit. I love that. I was on a Zoom call with the CEO of a huge company, full arm sleeve. I show up wearing a backwards hat. He's like you're the dude. Traditionally you'd be like I'm meeting with the CEO of a multimillion dollar company, I have to wear a suit, a tie, and I just don't think that's the case. And to your point, will I ostracize some people or some people where you're like hey, I'm really stepping into myself, I'm being myself. We don't want those clients anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean you're going to lose some deals because of that right, but it's better to know that now and then, to not spend 18 months on a relationship, than to get all the way down the line and then you don't have a client for life. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's wasted energy really.
Speaker 3:I want to ask you about this You've got some language on your website about not living a contingency-free, not fee life, so kind of saying no to the idea that I'm going to be happy when I reach this pedestal or when I have this achievement and I think lots of people say that right, and I'm one of these people that say that how do you put that into practice?
Speaker 1:into practice. It's a lot of being mindful and sitting with where you are and accepting that you don't know everything, that it's not a becoming, it's in the act of being and being present in the moment and being there in your life. Right, and this is just something I've discovered is, you know, not feeling so distracted or feeling as though, like I didn't have agency, right? It was like all these external forces Right that were making me feel the way, and if I remove these external forces or these events or something would happen or not happen, that somehow my life would be different, my law practice would be different, and so I've just spent a lot of time sitting with what is taking more moments to pause, you know, and that it can be as simple as like.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, brian, I just go outside on my deck and watch the trees in the breeze. There's no life hack here. There's no KPI for how many stars did you see in the sky? And I think that's where we get caught up in. Everything has to be quantified. When I make a million dollars, when I get more cases, when I make a million dollars, when I get more cases, I think that in the legal profession, we've gotten so tied up in metrics and less into kind of like well, how do you feel? And, trusting our intuition of like, what is the sensation you have in your body? Do you feel overwhelmed? Do you feel satisfied? There's no metric for that.
Speaker 3:So where do you come down on annual goals, quarterly goals? You do anything like that.
Speaker 1:I set themes, like I said before we started recording. I'm not your traditional attorney. I'm not really a planner. I don't really set benchmarks and then go achieve them. I'm an achiever Like I work. I'm a hard worker, I'm very passionate, I can be very intense. But do I go out and say like I'm going to make a million dollars this year? No, I don't. I don't have attachment to that. What I've started doing instead is setting like creativity goals. Right, what does that?
Speaker 3:look like.
Speaker 1:Like um, setting like creativity goals right, what does that look like like um, in terms of like with my podcast, like how many podcasts I'm going to produce in a year? How many new connections am I going to make? How do I feel like I have more like feelings? Basically, like this year, my theme was to play, to have more fun, to take things less seriously. Well, that doesn't necessarily have like a benchmark, right, like I'm going to have a hundred more utility utils of, although some economist somewhere has, I'm sure, figured that out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but. But so I mean the pushback I would give you on that is that there's somebody out there sitting there who goes like I don't know what the hell that means, and so then I don't know how I take the first, next step towards looking back in 30 days and say, yeah, I actually did play more or I actually did have more fun. So if you're in an office and you're billing I don't know 2,400 hours a year and you're like this sucks, what's the first next step.
Speaker 1:The first next step is to determine, well, how do you want to be spending your life and why. Right, for some people, right, and this is, I think, just part of the conversation. Some people, how they want to spend their life is billing 2,400 hours. They want to be that attorney and they get clear and they say, like this is what I want. Right, and this is what makes my heart sing, this is what brings me satisfaction and fulfillment and joy and all those things you know.
Speaker 1:But you have to get clarity around that. You have to sit down and be like okay, how do I want to spend my day? Do I want to be able to spend time? I think you you focus on this like coach my kids baseball game, baseball team. Well, you can't do that and also then have the expectation that you're going to work Monday through Friday at an office till 8 pm, like those two things conflict. Sometimes you're at a firm where that's the expectation and if you were to ask, hey, I'm going to coach my kid's baseball team, they're like wait a second, that's not what we have here, that's not the deal you signed up for. And so I think it's in that clarity, like what are your non-negotiables? How do you want to be spending your time, you know, and why. What do you value?
Speaker 1:You know, some people don't value time with their family.
Speaker 3:Or some people say they do right, that's true. Well, really, what they do is they enjoy complaining that they don't have time with their family. So I mean, I love the intentionality about that and I think I think there's, as you're saying, that it occurs to me like there's just so much fear in a young lawyer, or in a even an older lawyer, about addressing that with the firm that you're at right, because there's so much fear about what happens if I say I really would like to go coach Little League three nights a week and they say you can't do that right? Well, now somebody's got to give. Either they've got to change the policy or I got to go find another place to work.
Speaker 3:And we've had this impending recession now for five years and one of these days it's actually going to hit and it's going to be harder to find a job. And so I think there's so much that keeps people stuck in the firms where they are because they don't have the self-confidence in themselves or in their personal brand or whatever, that they'd be able to leave and take clients with them, or leave and create a firm and have a better life. And so I think your message and in many ways my message is like no, it's not actually that hard. You just have to do it and start building the parachute on the way down.
Speaker 1:That's right. I mean you're going to be. You have to get comfortable with building it as you go and there's not the certainty or security you're used to, but with, like, by way of example, like I've made as much money this year as I did working a whole year for a firm and we were only five months through the year. It's like that. Am I doing anything special? Am I working on the weekends? No. Do I sometimes work long days? Yes. Is that every day? No, do I get to decide when? That is yes, and so I think you have to even reset what it means to be a successful attorney or hardworking. Is hardworking meaning busy? Is hardworking meaning you're sitting at a computer or on your phone waiting for the next thing to come in? Or is it being productive? Is it being efficient? Is it being mindful? Is it being intentional?
Speaker 3:Is it creating value, not only for your clients but for yourself and your own life, and the suggestion that I would have on that point is remove the word attorney from that phrase and don't worry about what it means to be a successful attorney or lawyer. Just what does it mean to be successful? And actually, if you could sit down and you could write that out and you could not use the word lawyer or attorney, I think you'd get a lot closer to what you're, you know, to finding what that term means for you.
Speaker 1:That's true. It's only one identity. It's not the identity, and I think you're starting to see this like even where, uh, it's like if you look at what other you know, other professions, right, or other career people, what does it mean to you? Know work? Is it nine to five, monday through friday? I I don't know. Or generationally, like you know, some of the younger people like they're able to produce because they're so efficient, they know how to use technology, they're able to produce in 20 hours what used to take 40 and they're just saying right, and they're just saying that's valuable yeah, and they're just saying I'm I'm done, I did my production.
Speaker 1:So it just even takes a mindset shift of you know when is enough enough.
Speaker 3:Most of those people should just go work for themselves, because it's really hard to translate that into an employer right. Like, if you can do in 40, if you can do in 20 hours what most people can do in 40, then you probably should just go work, because no boss is ever going to at a large enough company is ever going to tolerate that You're doing can do two people's job. Yeah, yeah, great, we'll pay you one and a half times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Capitalism, yep.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, it's a problem with a billable hour model, which maybe is another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, conversation for a different day, whole different episode. Yeah, All right.
Speaker 3:Patrick, this has been awesome. If people want to learn more about you and get more personal branding, and certainly if you're in a big law firm and you're miserable and you're thinking about going out on your own, where can they find more information about you and the Law Firm Launchpad?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you can check me out on LinkedIn. I'm highly active there. I have a newsletter you can sign up for. You can also hit me up at newfangledlegal. I have resources on my website. That's where you can sign up for and apply for the law firm launchpad. You can shoot me an email, patrick. At newfangledlegal, you can also check out. My law firm is highfivelegalcom. You can check out how I've taken my decade of doing this and are putting it at play in real time and doing this stuff myself. So it's not just do what I say, but not what I do. I'm doing it. I'm living this every day.
Speaker 3:Patrick, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1:Thank you Appreciate it.