Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Fix This Next: The Tale of Two Law Firm Quarters
What if the key to success lies not in your results, but in your actions? Welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs! This week, we turn the spotlight on the unpredictable journey of the first half of the year at our law firm. The first quarter was a financial nightmare, yet when we stripped away the dollar signs, it became apparent that our team had achieved significant milestones. By the time we hit the second quarter, our consistent efforts began to bear fruit, culminating in two of our most successful months in years. This episode dissects why it's crucial to focus on controllable actions rather than just end results, especially in the rollercoaster realm of auto accident law.
Immerse yourself in our discussion on how the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) has been a game-changer for us. We break down our scorecard metrics, emphasizing the importance of tracking actions like demand packages and intake efficiency over mere outcome-based goals. By honing in on these controllable factors, we've improved our conversion rates and expedited case resolutions. Tune in for a treasure trove of insights aimed at helping lawyers and law firm owners take the reins of their practice, regardless of the inherent uncertainties of the legal industry.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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.
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Welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot. Exit the traditional Bill Moore hours model and greet each other with something other than I'm busy. But it's better than the alternative. If you want to live a life of your own design and take control of your future, join us as we explore life beyond the briefs. So it's been a tale of two quarters at my law firm. The first quarter was just absolutely one of these abysmal, soul-crushing quarters where it felt like nothing was going right and we lost a whole bunch of money in Q1. But ironically, as we're sitting at our planning session for Q2, our EOS implementer says if you took money out of the equation, how would you grade the quarter? It is a quarter I had graded like a D when you're looking at the P&L, but without looking at the money, it's probably an A quarter.
Speaker 0:We executed on a bunch of big projects, we signed up a whole bunch of cases, things seem to be all working and this quarter is one of these quarters where God, we just reaped all the benefits. The last two months have been two of the top maybe three months for the last two years, if that makes sense. We just crushed it in May and June coming out of the quarter and the thing is that our activity and our action was no different in Q2 than it was in Q1. And that's the thing that so many lawyers and law firm owners can get wrapped around the axle on is looking only at the outcomes of your action and not at your action itself, because the reality is in my line of work, in auto accident work, so much of what you do revenue-wise actually just comes down to luck. I mean, if you don't do this kind of work, you may not understand that, but it is so easy to have a case that looks like a $500,000 or a million dollar case lose a zero right. It can be worth $50,000 or $100,000 because that's just what the insurance coverage is. And it's really challenging and difficult to get all of the things to line up Good liability, serious injury and good insurance coverage and the thing is you have no control over the good insurance coverage part, so you can have these cases come through and you go. Oh my God, we signed up all these cases, but if there's not any insurance money there, then there's often not the recovery and it's not going to make the firm happy, certainly not going to make the client happy. So there's so much of this that's beyond your control that really, what you have to focus on is the thing that you do have control over week in and week out.
Speaker 0:And that's why running on EOS has been so important for our law firm, because we can look at our scorecard, which is made up exclusively of things that we actually have control over, right? We've tried very hard to not put outcome-based goals on the scorecard, so we have things. Of course, we have some outcome-based goals, right, like how many cases did we retain? How many qualified leads came in? We track that stuff, but really only because what I? The thing that I actually want to be tracking is what percentage of the qualified leads that came in did we sign, because we have control over that. How good is our intake? How quick are we getting back to people? How convincing are we on the phone when somebody calls with a legal problem, that we have solved that problem for somebody that looks or sounds like that person before and we can quickly gain their trust and get them to sign.
Speaker 0:So, yes, we track qualified leads. Yes, we track cases retained, but really only so that you can get to the percentage conversion percentage rate. But the other things that we track are how many demand packages do we send out? What's the time on desk? Because if you can condense the time on desk, you can speed up the outcome, you can speed up the revenue, and so, as you look back over our last year, we really paid in Q1 for the sins of the middle and the end of last year. Right, because it takes the earliest. It takes six months for a new client to turn into money in an auto accident firm. The longest it takes, I don't know, 36 months, five years sometimes, but most of the cash flowing kinds of cases are going to turn into money in nine or 12 months. And so, when you look back at our scorecard, we had a period where we were not doing well In the middle of 2023, we were getting all these leads coming through the funnel and we were just fumbling the ball, and so the number one thing that you can fix in your law firm often is that conversion ratio right.
Speaker 0:If you can just not fumble the ball when it comes through the door, you can often find a lot more revenue in your files and in your marketing and it is a easier and far cheaper thing to solve than just paying for more leads coming through the funnel. And that's the problem that we solved earlier this year when we brought our intake back in-house. We had offshored intake function maybe two years ago. To do what many lawyers try to do, which is save a little bit of money, hire somebody who's overseas at an arbitrage rate lower rate, because many lawyers like we did do this as a stair step to having a full-time intake person. Because you go, I can't afford the full-time intake person because after salary and benefits and training, fully loaded maybe you're looking at $75,000 to $100,000. So the easier thing to do is to just go offshore or go near shore and find somebody for $25,000, $30,000, $35,000 a year, all in right, no benefits, no FICA tax, anything like that.
Speaker 0:The thing is that in an injury law firm especially, it does not take that many more cases before the full-time in-house excellent intake person pays for themselves. Right, let's call that pay pay difference 40,000, it's probably fewer than three cases that you have to sign during the course of the year. So the biggest change for us this year has been in our signed case ratio. So last year we signed somewhere around 65% of the cases they called this year. We are. We are about 82% of the cases that we want have signed us and as a result, and as a result also of getting a little bit better at marketing, our signed cases are up 74% year over year without any additional marketing spend. That number is wild. It's not going to turn into money in 2024, but in 2025, it's going to be awesome.
Speaker 0:So if you're sitting here in the middle half of your year and trying to figure out what do I fix next? Because running a law firm, being a lawyer, owning a business, like whatever it is, it's this life. Actually, it's just this series of what's the next best problem for me to solve. I said a couple of podcasts ago like there's three ways to increase the amount of money that you're earning in a law firm. Number one get more cases. Number two make them worth more money. Number three decrease the amount of time that you're spending working on these cases. Number three decrease the amount of time that you're spending working on these cases. And so, depending on where you are in that cycle, the thing to do over this four-day holiday weekend before we jump into Q3 is to figure out what is the next best problem that I need to be solving?
Speaker 0:I think for a lot of firms that answer is intake Closing the gap between the number of cases that call you that you want and the number of cases that call you that you want. That retain you right, and that starts with drawing a really clear, bright line distinction about what kinds of cases do I want, so that you can give that to an intake person, so that you can give that to a sales team member to say, when this case calls speed, like we're signing this case up, and so that they know if there's a case on the fringe, okay, those are the cases we gotta come and talk to somebody about. Can we help? Can we add value to this person's life? If so, what does that look like? As important as the speed and the team member being able to make that decision is that it will now give you the ability to track what we call at. My firm want cases and don't want cases, and this tells you two things what percentage of the people that are calling you have a case that you want versus a case that you don't want? And the next step on that is where are those cases coming from and where is there a great disparity between. This is a good source, a good case attraction source, and this is not, and I'm going to come back to that in a minute. The second thing that that allows you to do is what percentage of the cases that we want are we actually signing. This is the most.
Speaker 0:I think the most important metric in a growing law firm is of the percentage of cases that are coming through the door. What percent are we signing and your mileage may vary depending on practice area. In an auto accident firm from referral sources, I think your number ought to be around 80, 85%. Those people that are coming through the door who have been vetted already by one of your referral sources, who have gotten your name from somewhere that's not the first page of Google, right? They're coming to you. You ought to be signing those people at 80, 85% and if you're not, you have to fix that first, because when you go out and you start getting better SEO and PPC and LSA, those people are coming to you without an endorsement. They're coming to you with a shorter leash, number one like. You have to get back to those people quicker and you have to do a better job of selling because they're already pre-sold. So you're going to have that ratio drop off from 80, 85%. As you get into classes of people who've come through your law firm or come to your law firm who haven't been referred to you by somewhere else, that ratio is just naturally going to drop off, and so I think, if that's not already really high to begin with, like you have no business running paid ads or spending money on SEO until you figure that out and nail that process first.
Speaker 0:The other thing that diversifying, not diversifying the other thing that running this want versus don't want, analysis by case attraction source does for you is it lets you know where to spend the next dollar. So one of the things that we realized when we got really good at this is, of the people that find us online, less than 20% of them have cases that we want. It's actually somewhere around 15% have a case that we actually want to work on. Of people that come to us from a referral source, it's over 65%, right, and so your next hour is probably better spent finding other referral sources, because there's a two-thirds chance that when somebody calls you from one of those sources, it's because they have a problem. You actually want to and can solve from one of those sources, it's because they have a problem you actually want to and can solve, whereas there's a one in eight chance that when somebody comes to you online, they actually have a problem that you want to solve. So you have to attract far fewer phone calls from referred clients to get to the client that you actually want than you do from a Google client or from a PPC or an LSA client Actually, all of those are Google clients.
Speaker 0:Last thing if all of this went over your head and you don't have a good framework for tracking all of this stuff, that, I think, is actually the first thing to fix. Get a good CRM. We use Lead Docket and Casepeer. We're very happy with both of those products, but it really, as you grow from lawyer to law firm owner to law firm CEO, you really have to get good at knowing the numbers or find somebody in your firm who's good at knowing the numbers. So I hope that this mid-year check-in finds you exceptionally well and I hope that it finds you focusing on your output rather than your outcomes, because that really is where the magic is If you can focus on the next thing to do every single month, week and day, rather than on the bottom line of your P&L. Your law firm will take off within the year. Happy 4th of July. Have a great long weekend.
