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
The MOST Important Question You AREN'T Asking Your Clients
Do you know the single most important piece of information to gather from potential clients? Uncover the key to unlocking higher conversion rates and happier clients in our latest episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. Through a compelling real-life example, I reveal how understanding the client's true problem is often overlooked by lawyers, leading to misaligned expectations and unsatisfactory outcomes. Whether you're a seasoned attorney or just starting out, this episode offers invaluable insights into transforming client consultations for better alignment and success.
Join me as I explore common pitfalls where lawyers miss the mark by focusing on the wrong issues, such as a case involving an injured child where the client’s primary concern wasn't monetary compensation but preventing future harm. Discover why non-lawyers equipped with a good script can be more effective in intake and sales, and how focusing on what truly matters to the client can lead to more meaningful and effective legal solutions. Tune in for an eye-opening discussion that promises to change the way you approach your practice!
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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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Happy solo episode Friday, everybody, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. On today's episode, I'm talking about the number one, most important piece of information to gather from potential clients to your law firm, or for your younger lawyer to gather from your clients to make sure that you are handling their case in the way that they want them to. You're listening to Life Beyond the Briefs. This is the number one 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. So if you want to live a life of your own design and take control of your own future, join me as we explore life beyond the briefs. Let me tell you about the number one piece of information that you need to be gathering from potential callers to your law firm and, if you're a young associate, from new clients that have been placed on your desk, and it is the reason that more and more of my friends are having success taking intake and sales out of a lawyer's hand, putting it into a non-lawyer with a good script and seeing higher conversion ratios and happier clients. And that's this. What problem does the client actually want to solve, because many of your clients who are calling your law firm do not want you to solve the problem that you want to solve. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:I got a call just this week from a man whose kid had been injured at a daycare. The daycare is run by a charity. There are all kinds of charitable immunity issues in my state of Virginia and so we're going through this consult and I know that this is the wrong way to do it, but I do it anyway because this is how lawyers are trained. The first thing that I'm asking about first thing is like all of the facts that stack up to a charitable immunity defense. Oh, tell me, like was your rate discounted? Were you going there for free? Tell me about your financial relationship with the entity. Oh, let me tell you about this charitable immunity thing. And eventually he's like stop. Really, the goal that I'm after is I'm going to prevent the daycare worker who works there from working there anymore. I want to keep her away from kids and prevent her from ever being able to do this to any other kid. And at that point I'm like well, shit, I've got it all wrong. He's got a problem, the problem that he wants to solve is not the problem that I'm capable of solving. It's not a civil lawyer's purview. He needs somebody at CPS, he needs somebody to do a criminal investigation, he needs the Department of Health, whatever. He doesn't need or want.
Speaker 1:The solution that I have, which is money from the entity to your son and here's the thing that we get wrong all the time is that we, when presented with a fact pattern, dive into the issues of the fact pattern, because that's how you're taught in law school, that's how the exam is graded, that's how the bar is graded and, frankly, it is for what we do. It's the important result, right? If you have a client who is aligned with you, who wants the same thing, that you can deliver, perfect. Your job is to explore the issues, find all the alligators and figure out how to cross the swamp successfully with the client. But what it doesn't do this process doesn't do is suss out those clients who are not aligned with that, those clients who are calling you because of their vision of what lawyers and the law can do and because they have some notion that you can deliver a result that actually you can't.
Speaker 1:Perfect example of this in the auto accident world is the property damage issue. Like so many clients that we deal with the property damage and getting the car fixed and getting into a rental car and getting diminished value on their vehicle, that's actually the more important thing to them, sometimes because they assume that the injury side is the easy part because they've read somewhere on the internet that all that you do is you multiply the medical bills by three and you have the injury settlement. So sometimes that's why They've got to get their kids to soccer practice. They've got to have a way back to work, and so the immediate pain for them is having the car that doesn't work or having the car that's in the lot. And when we dive into here's how I'm going to treat the injury claim. Here's all the things that we do to make sure we get you maximum compensation on the injury.
Speaker 1:Actually, many of them don't care about that, and so the question that we are working into our intake and sales scripts is some version of. You know, if we could only solve one problem for you, what would that be? Or if you had a dream outcome at the end of this case, what would that be? Or what's the most immediate problem that you would like us to try to solve for you, to solve for you, and we're working on trying to catalog a way to store that information somewhere so that we deliver, at the beginning of the relationship, an excellent customer service experience. Because one of the things that happens in the age where many of your clients are not coming into the office and they're signing a retainer, either on DocuSign or whatever your variation of that is, is that there is then a lag between the signing and the actual doing of any work. And so how can we identify what the chief pain point for the client is? And if it's a chief pain point that we can solve early on, let's get to solving it. So how can we, you know, figure out what's the number one thing they want solved? If it's the property damage, let's have the paralegal know that, so that when they're opening the case, they are telling the client and reinforcing that the client made a good buying decision by solving their immediate problem first.
Speaker 1:The other thing that this framework of asking the client what problem they want you to solve does is it tells you when they have a problem that you can't solve, and the thing to do there is not to convince them that actually you solve a more important problem. One of the things that I've learned over my years is that, despite all the persuasion writing, persuasive oral argument training that lawyers get, persuasion is really hard, especially when somebody has a preconceived notion of what the result should be, should be, and so in many cases I've stopped trying to persuade somebody that I have a better answer or that the problem that they need to solve is actually over here, because you haven't built the level of trust with a potential client yet. And if they truly want a problem solved that you are not capable or not willing or you don't want to solve, then you ought to just tell them that, willing or you don't want to solve, then you ought to just tell them that Just let them go. Let them go find a lawyer that wants to solve that problem and focus your marketing and your client attraction strategies on solving problems that you want to solve, because one of the fastest ways to become unhappy in the law is to be solving problems for clients that you actually don't think are problems.
Speaker 1:I remember early in my career sitting in the back of a Loudoun County courthouse during scheduling day, and at the time I was working for a general practitioner and we're setting this setting something. I forget what it was and it wasn't our case that was being set, but the two lawyers in front of us were asking for two hours. There were family lawyers. We need two hours to argue this motion. What's the motion about? The motion is about Judge. Last month she overstayed her visitation hours and dropped the kids off seven hours late or something. And this month we want a modification so that we get seven more hours. And it was at that moment that I knew I didn't want anything to do with family law because I couldn't believe that there were people in the world paying lawyers to write motions. Come to a scheduling docket and argue a motion somehow for two hours over. I need seven more hours last month because you had seven more hours the month before.
Speaker 1:If you spend your career solving problems that you don't want to solve or problems that you actually think are not problems, you will be unhappy and this takes guts, especially at the beginning of your career to turn away cases because somebody has a problem that you don't want to solve. But I promise you that by turning those cases away you make space on your calendar and space in your life for solving problems that you actually do, and if you don't have a 40-hour workweek full of problems that you actually do want to solve, then your chief job is to learn how to market for cases with problems that you want to solve, because you can't just do good work and hope that the cases will come. They will not. That is something that old lawyers tell young lawyers. To keep young lawyers poor. You have to learn how to market and find cases that have problems that you want to solve. The best way to do that is to start creating content articles, videos, social media posts, whatever answering questions with problems that you want to solve.
Speaker 1:We actually and this is a tangent we had an issue in our firm with our SEO years ago. We were attracting like all of these shitty slip and fall cases and we're trying to figure out why it was. Well, it was because we had written all of these articles about why slip and fall cases were hard. Here's all the problems in a slip and fall case. You know what happens if I see it and I slip anyway, and then Google was telling people that we could answer that question. So people with questions about what happens if I see it and I fall anyway, were calling to find out if the real answer was anything different than what was on our website. It turns out it wasn't, and so the content that you are creating in your marketing needs to be answering questions for problems that you want to solve.
Speaker 1:Again, as a lawyer, it's easy to see the negative and to write all of the reasons that somebody can't solve that problem, but the more that your content can be created towards problems that you want to solve and where the solution is yes and where the drive is yes, we will take that case the better off you will be. That's man. I got a tangent there, but I have a sore spot in my memory bank from all of those calls with cases we didn't want, and so I think the challenge is going back to the topic of this episode. The challenge really is how can we, in a natural way, be asking clients from the beginning what problem do you think you have and what problem do you want me to solve? And I've done this before where clients say, like you're a lawyer, I want you to solve my legal problems.
Speaker 1:Okay, but let's be a little bit more narrow. Tell me what the result if you could write for yourself the perfect result at the end of our engagement. What would that look like? And then that'll give you number one, what you ought to be pitching towards as you're trying to close a deal and push somebody towards signing your retainer. But number two, it's going to give you a great indication of whether they have expectations that you just cannot meet. I went to an urgent care one time and I think my case is worth $100,000 because I could have died. You're never going to convince somebody that could have died is not compensable. It is. You are far better off, especially in a small case like that, just saying here's the law. I don't know that I can solve that problem. You may need to talk to somebody else. Again, most of us want to sign that person up and set expectations that are too high and then, at the end of the case, tell them why their case sucks. And that's why we end up unhappy, because we end up battling clients who had problems that we didn't have any business telling the client we could or wanted to solve in the first place. My promise to you is that the better that you get at saying no to clients who have problems you don't want to solve, the happier you and your team will be, and the better that you can get at identifying things that are pain points to clients and finding quick solutions to them early in the case. That will build trust with your clients that by the time you get to giving them actual legal advice, they might listen to you instead of running back to Google to find the answer.
Speaker 1:This has been a Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I do these solo episodes on Fridays. We do interviews with successful lawyers, successful business people on Tuesdays. If you are getting value out of this podcast, do me a favor, hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any episodes, and leave us a rating or review. It means a lot to the show and it helps us get wider distribution and it helps us share this show with people just like you. Have a great weekend.
