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 Lawyer's Happiness Equation: Time, Money, & Family | Jay Ruane
Is your criminal defense practice slowly sucking the joy out of life? Working long hours, managing demanding clients, and feeling like you're on autopilot? You're not alone. But what if you could build a thriving law firm and have time for family dinners, date nights, and those precious kid moments?
Jay Ruane, co-founder of Ruane Attorneys and mastermind behind the Criminal Mastermind group, cracks the code! In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, Jay spills the tea on how he prioritized family time while building a successful criminal defense practice.
Get ready to ditch the "billable hour" mentality and discover:
- The Family-First Formula: Learn Jay's secrets for structuring your firm to maximize time spent with loved ones without sacrificing results.
- Client Connection Hacks: Craft compelling client narratives that humanize your cases and impress judges and prosecutors.
- Delegation Domination: Discover how to effectively delegate tasks and leverage support staff for a high-performing practice.
- From Money Obsessed to Time Blessed: Ditch the grind! Jay reveals how he shifted his focus to prioritize personal happiness.
- The Happiness KPI: You heard that right! Learn about Jay's revolutionary system for tracking activities that bring you joy and ensure you make time for them.
- Building a Supportive Culture: Discover how Jay fosters a work environment that values family time and encourages employees to achieve a healthy work-life balance.
Bonus! Jay also shares the inside scoop on the Criminal Mastermind group, a community designed to help criminal defense lawyers achieve the elusive work-life balance we all crave.
This episode is your roadmap to a fulfilling legal career and a thriving family life. Hit play and let Jay Ruane be your guide!
Want to learn more? Head over to ruaneattorneys.com to see his firm in action, and join The Criminal Mastermind at thecriminalmastermind.com to unlock the secrets of a thriving, family-friendly practice.
Ready to escape the grind? Grab your headphones and get ready to take notes!
____________________________________
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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
structured my practice in a way, you know, I did not decide to take on cases and we don't take on massive federal white collar criminal defense. I declined them because it doesn't really fit our model. Our model is get home. So you guys can, you know, spend your evenings with your kids and you're not spending, you know, an exorbitant amount of time being away from them, and that's just the model that I think works for us. Now, you know, we, this year it's crazy, this year in my office of 40 people, we have, between when did it? June 12th and October 5th, we have six babies being born. Make it work, you know, take your time off, be, you know, be with, be with your kids, and and that's important to us, and so it's important to me and it's important to my people.
Speaker 2:What's up my friends? This is Brian, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers who want to exit the traditional Bill Moore hours model and live a life of their own design. Listen up. Do you ever feel like running a criminal defense firm is a never-ending fight against your own work-life balance? You have clients with empty wallets, endless hours in the courtroom and family dinners that turned into missed calls. Does that sound familiar to you? Well, hold on for a legal miracle, because today's guest, jay Ruane, the CEO of Ruane Attorneys at Law, is here to show us how to build a thriving criminal defense practice that doesn't come at the expense of your personal life.
Speaker 2:This episode is your roadmap to living a life of your own design, and Jay is going to be your guide. Today, he's spilling the tea on how to delegate tasks, build a rock star team so that you can finally free up some free time for yourself. He's also going to show you the power of crafting client narratives that humanize your cases and impress judges and prosecutors and get better deals for your clients. And the best part, jay has secrets on how to prioritize family time without sacrificing the firm's success. So buckle up, because Jay is about to drop some serious golden nuggets on how to build a criminal defense dream team that lets you win cases and win at life. Let's dive in. Hey everybody, welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs and the head of the greatest name for a mastermind group, the Criminal Mastermind, where Jay coaches other criminal defense lawyers on how to build better practices and live better lives. Jay, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Jay, I want to talk about this first because, as I think about, you know the kinds of practices that you can turn into a real business. Criminal defense is really one of the last ones that comes to mind Because I think it's very challenging. Number one you can't outsource much of the doing of the work. And, number two, you can't push a lot of the doing of the work down the pay scale to a paralegal or to a legal assistant in the same way that you can in PI or family law. You know, or even trust in the states, and so, as you have built up the criminal mastermind, what are the challenges that you see criminal defense lawyers having as they try to build their law firms as actual businesses?
Speaker 1:So thanks, you know that's a really good question. It's tough to run a criminal defense business. I'm not saying it's not tough to run any law firm but you know we deal with a unique set of struggles in that we got to get paid up front and so you need to find clients that have the money and can part with it. And there's a lot of people who are just literally doing no work on a file and taking $500. Literally doing no work on a file and taking $500. And that's a challenge when the free or next to nothing cost, for when you really want to do a good job, it can get really expensive to do that job for a client. And it's difficult because, like you said, it's a lawyer intensive practice. Regardless of what you're doing in the criminal, the lawyer needs to be involved and the clients want to talk to the lawyer. There's not a lot of pushing it down the line.
Speaker 1:So really, what we're able to do and the members of the mastermind have done, what we, I think, have done successfully in my own firm is we've really sort of tried to divide up the work and identify what only can be handled by a lawyer, which is obviously being in court strategizing what can be assisted by law students and we always employ some law students to help us with briefing so we can get the bones of a motion to suppress in to the lawyer's hands without them having to start from scratch and then really having a talented set of support staff that can do some of the things that we like to do.
Speaker 1:One of the things that we like to do is, in connection with all of our cases, we create client narratives, client bios. That can be done by a paralegal, you know, with the right set of prompts and the right set of skills. So in that respect, like we can mirror some of the stuff that's done in an injury law practice where you're gathering medicals while we're gathering school records and life stories and that type of thing. So if you, if you break it down, you can find pieces that other people can do, but it's only when you're giving that level of service. If you're going to be the hey, I'll meet you at the courthouse, bring $500 cash lawyer, you're never going to be able to give that level of service because you don't have the funds to do it and you don't have the time to do it because you're in the weeds.
Speaker 2:What's the deliverable with that, as you're putting together these client narratives and the client stories? Is the end product something that you're handing over to a prosecutor or to a police officer to try to help them make a better decision for the ends of justice?
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically what we're trying to do is, when the prosecutor gets a docket, they have a client name and what they're charged with, they know nothing about that person.
Speaker 1:Part of what we need to do is we need to humanize that person, take them away from just everybody else that's charged with those similar offenses and show that this is most more more times than not.
Speaker 1:It's an aberration, it's a blemish on an otherwise very productive and good citizen's life, and we can show how the worst night of their life, no matter what it is, should not define their entire life. And so by giving our audience which is either a prosecutor or a judge or even, you know, the client themselves, because a lot of them get down on themselves for what they have, what they've been accused of or even are guilty of, it helps us build them up so that they're ready to take on whatever challenge it may be, whether it's pleading guilty and owning up to something, which is a challenge for a lot of people. You know it's pleading guilty and owning up to something, which is a challenge for a lot of people. It's tough for people to take responsibility and admit things out loud, or getting them prepared for a jail sentence or a trial. We want to make sure that our clients are fully informed and able to mentally handle anything that's going to be thrown at them.
Speaker 2:So I've never heard of that before. Is that something that you are like one of one doing, or is that just because I have no exposure in the last 15 years to criminal defense?
Speaker 1:So a lot of lawyers will do it at the time of sentencing, when they know the client has pled guilty. We try to do an end run and say why are we doing it there? After we've already negotiated a resolution and we just want the judge to go within a cap and a floor type situation, why don't we do it on the earlier side and try to get that floor as low as possible? And so we found that in communicating that stuff to a prosecutor, the way the system works in Connecticut, it's allowed us to get better results. We've gone so far as to actually do day-in-the-life videos of our clients and show them to prosecutors, because if we can separate ourselves from everybody else, it puts us in a power position. Maybe about power is not the right word, but it puts us in a better position in terms of negotiating.
Speaker 2:Well, and you're not coming at the last minute, after you've already negotiated the deal, to say and here's all this other stuff, right, right.
Speaker 1:It's about being prepared and, quite frankly, you know 99% of what criminal defense lawyers do is done, you know, in my office behind closed doors. The client really doesn't see it, and so when you have somebody in your office who's dedicated to getting their college transcripts and getting letters of support and creating that stuff, they actually see the value in the service that you're providing. It's like when you go to a car dealership. You can't walk out with a car to try it at home, but they give you that nice glossy book and say look at this. When you're at home, imagine yourself, we do the same thing. We get that stuff early on in our case, and we get that to the client so that they feel like, hey, I paid for something that I'm getting.
Speaker 2:It's not dissimilar to something that we do in our ERISA long-term disability appeals practice. We do a 45-minute or so personal interview with the clients, a paralegal asking the client questions. We get that transcribed, we put it in the appeals package. It finds its way into the administrative record if that case ever gets filed. There's no discovery in those cases, so like the whole administrative record just goes in front of it. This is kind of a way to backdoor that. But the more important point is you're giving somebody the opportunity to tell their story and they feel like they're getting good value for you for the services that they paid for, and they're seeing more of the work, because so much of what we do is kind of like, you know, being the plumber that knew where to hit the pipe and not so much like showing all of the work that we've done. So that's interesting. How big is your firm now?
Speaker 1:We're 41. We'll be 42 in a month. 41 people or lawyers. We've got 12 lawyers, 40 people.
Speaker 2:Wow, and that's like anathema in the not white-collar criminal defense world right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're street lawyers. We are definitely street lawyers. Our practice is DUI heavy, but DUI assault charges, drug charges, you know it is, it is street law in one-on-one.
Speaker 2:Hmm, and one of the things that I heard about your intake and sales process is that it's rare that a client actually gets to talk very much with a lawyer before actually signing on in the case. Am I right about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that was my philosophy with that was. You know, even back in the day, even 20 years ago, I said look, I said I really can't care about the facts of your case until you've hired me because I've got a responsibility to the existing client base that I have now and I'm not going to take an hour or an hour and a half to do this full, in-depth interrogation of you about everything that happened that night. Look, I'm a criminal defense lawyer. I can fight any fight. I get paid to show up and fight, you know, and I'll do that for you. But I'll do that for you after you've retained us.
Speaker 1:So you're talking to intake people. You're talking to my staff. You're not talking to me or any of my lawyers. In fact, none of my lawyers will ever talk to an intake until we've been retained, money's in the bank and then immediately they get scheduled a call with the lawyer who handles that courthouse or that group of courthouses so that they can get to know the people that are gonna be on their team. But yeah, no, I don't wanna if I took I mean, with the number of intakes that we're doing on a daily basis if I took the time to put everybody on the phone with the lawyer. We would eat up easily 100 hours of lawyer time a week and there's no guarantee those people are going to pay us and it's a disservice to the people who have paid us. I want my lawyers focusing on legal issues, not on whether or not you're going to hire us If you had to ballpark it.
Speaker 2:What percentage of law firms criminal defense law firms do you think are operating the way that you are? What percentage of law firms?
Speaker 1:criminal defense law firms do you think are operating the way that you are, like one One? Every lawyer I know, even lawyers that I coach, are still stuck in this. Well, you know, I got to sit down with them, I got to find out about the case and I said to a friend of mine you know out in Indianapolis who's a phenomenal DUI attorney, chuck Rathburt. I'm like, how long does your intake take? He's like it takes about two hours. I said two hours before they paid you a dime. He's like yeah, I need to know what I'm going to defend them on and they're impressed with my brilliance. I'm like I'm sure they are, but you owe that time to somebody who's already paid you and you should really focus on that. And I'm trying to get him to come around and focus on really focusing on the people who've hired you and take that two hours and give that to them and say, look, I'm going to give you a two-hour block after you've retained me. Make them want you.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that, because I think that's you know, listen, people in my world, in the auto accident world, will sign up with an intake person over the phone without ever having talked to the lawyer, but they're not paying me any money, right? And it's very different in estate planning, family law and criminal defense, because most firms 99% of firms are operating in a framework where you're talking with the lawyer. You're getting probably some free legal advice because the lawyer wants the business before you sign on and it's a waste of a lawyer's time in most places. But because that's the way that the vast, vast majority of firms are operating, you must have done something on the front end to differentiate yourself, to put yourself in a position where you can say no, we don't give you any legal advice until you've written us a check and it's in our trust account. So what is it that you've done to get there?
Speaker 1:Well, I think you know it goes back to me starting off my career. I mean, I wanted to become a niche market leader, which I think I developed. As you know, I can't say I'm a specialist in my state because of the state rules, but I really focused narrowly on the area of DUI defense. My father was focusing on the area of criminal defense, and so we set out to be published authors, be frequent speakers, be the best educated in that area. We can communicate all of those things in the intake process. That allows people to know okay, these are the people to talk to, and that's built up over time.
Speaker 1:So we have a name and industry recognition. We also have recognition in the general community. We have, you know, across all of my offices. We've got 1200 plus Google reviews. I, you know, I had 100 Avvo reviews back when that platform made sense, you know, and those types of things, and so people are coming to us and, of course, our website also has a ton of social proof icons and reviews and just general information out there for people. So we position ourselves as the authority of knowledge in this area, and so I think that helps.
Speaker 1:And then there's some other things that we do psychologically, I think during the intake process that helps people to lead them to hiring us. If you call one attorney and you talk to that attorney and he quotes you a fee and you hang up the phone and you decide not to go with them, you've got to reject one person For us. When you call into us, you talk to our receptionist and who greets you, who passes you to intake, who passes you to our head of intake, who passes you to finance, who passes you back to intake and we're doing certain things along the way. So you have to reject five people in our office to tell them that you're not hiring us.
Speaker 2:Do all five of those people call and do follow-up calls if somebody ghosts you.
Speaker 1:Yep, wow, oh yeah, we do. You know our process because it's criminal, because there is some time pressure. We have about 15 days from incident to court date. You know we're following up by text, by email, by phone every day in that 15-day period and sometimes even longer, and that's another thing.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of lawyers well, you know, they know I'm good, I just spent two hours with them, they'll hire me and then, you know, you got to realize that people go through a criminal case. They got a million problems. The case is just one of them. They probably are having marital issues or job issues or substance issues or mental health issues or just life issues of where do I get my groceries and that type of thing, and this is an unexpected expense, and so you're one problem for them, but you're not the only problem for them and so you need to stay on them.
Speaker 1:So many, so many lawyers I know do zero follow-up, zero follow-up. I have a guy coach here in our mastermind who last year he was happy that he was at $700,000 in revenue as a solo lawyer. He said this was unbelievable, I'm so happy. I got there and I said, okay, now you know, starting in, starting in January. I said now I actually want you to follow up with your intakes. So we hired him a remote assistant for, you know, $2,000 a month, and he's added he month.
Speaker 2:He's on pace now for $1.3 million this year it literally was an additional $20,000. No additional for the assistant who's doing follow-up calls, right, exactly.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Those are the types of things we hammer that in our office. I'm happy that all these people aren't doing it.
Speaker 2:It's not unique to a criminal, although your window is much shorter. I mean, one of the things that we do every three months is I go okay, everybody in the last six months because we go back one quarter previous who called us, contacted us, filled out a web form, whatever, who we couldn't get in touch with or who dropped off the face of the earth Like somebody, call them back and let's get them. Get them to either tell you that they settled their case on their own, to leave them alone, or that they hired somebody else, and if 15 or 25% of those people don't say oh no, it just slipped my mind and I never hired somebody, and I want to work with you now. It's just found money that you've already spent the marketing dollars for, so yeah, it's just found money that you've already spent the marketing dollars for, so yeah, that's a really good use of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I think part of that is like lawyers for whatever problems we don't have when we go into a courtroom to make an argument, like we're afraid of rejection when it comes to calling the client and trying to figure out where did you go.
Speaker 1:I just spent two hours with you right, right, you know, it's funny, it's even calling people years after. One of the things that actually got us through COVID. You know, criminal courts close police are told don't arrest people literally told in our state, do not, you know, do not pull people over. Well, you know, for a person whose practice is 50% motor vehicle related, that cut the heart out of my business. So I, you know, for a person whose practice is 50% motor vehicle related, that cut the heart out of my business. So I, you know, I guess in anticipation of that, we had kept name and contact information for every single client who had ever not hired us as well. So we've got our retained clients list and then we have our weren't our client lists and about three weeks into COVID I said you know, all of those people didn't hire us. They might have gotten a conviction and we can do paperwork, pardons and expungements while we're sitting at home. Let's reach out to that group.
Speaker 1:It happened that the stimulus came out around the same time and being able to reach out and touch people who never hired us basically got us through COVID because we had kept that information and we were able to reach out proactively and offer a service and said hey, you know you didn't hire us, so we know you probably weren't acquitted. You may have been found guilty. Let's help you clear it. And so many people hired us for that. It was great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm curious about your education and how you got here right, because you think very differently than many other lawyers and so for you, was it a mastermind group, was it a course, a coach, or was it something maybe outside the legal industry, or is this just wired in your DNA.
Speaker 1:I think it's kind of wired into my DNA. My educational journey has been somewhat interesting, I guess you could say. I grew up in an inner city. My father's a criminal defense lawyer and he is, like you know, every other criminal defense lawyer out there living hand to mouth, that type of thing. We grew up in a city very diverse, multicultural. I did go to a Jesuit high school all boys high school. That exposed me to you know, different ways of thinking about things. One of the cool things about that is because of that high school I just when I went off to college in Scranton, pennsylvania, which everybody knows from the office it was a rather downtrodden city but the university there was great.
Speaker 1:I showed up as a history major and I had AP credits for all of my required classes, not only in history but for, like the other, like my science class I had taken AP. So like I literally showed up and I can remember sitting down with the guidance counselor within the first two weeks of my freshman year and they're like dude, this has never really happened. I didn't say dude, but they're like this has never really happened, you don't have to take any classes here. They're like this has never really happened. You don't have to take any classes here. As long as you take enough credits, you will graduate. So you got to figure out what your degrees. I said I knew my degree was going to be in history they're like but you can take anything anywhere on this campus and you have no requirements that you have to fulfill. They've all been fulfilled.
Speaker 1:So you have four years of electives, which allowed me to take, you know, feminism theory and the physics of light and vision, and let me try macro and microeconomics this year, because what the heck I got nothing better to do. I might as well take some stuff. And that was really cool. That allowed me to see just different things and exposed me to a lot of different ways of thinking, and I think that really helped me sort of just be a nonconformist. And I think you know I probably have undiagnosed ADD. You know I bounce around from idea to idea. You know that's just who I am. It's wired. What can I do next?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, and so on that ADHD issue, like I know, you're a big systems guy, and then we're talking before we got on about time blocking, and so those are two strategies that I think you probably use to curb the effects of your own undiagnosed ADHD. Why don't you talk about that for a minute? So for me.
Speaker 1:You know I was terrible at going to court and coming back home and sitting down and writing notes in my files. It's just you know that stuff didn't interest me. But I just you know Seth Price calls me Mr Systems. I need systems to survive. If I don't have systems, I will just be bouncing all over the place.
Speaker 1:So I set it up where back when I was doing the original intakes in my office, when it was just me and my father Mondays I would do my intakes, tuesdays I work on administration, wednesday I do finances, thursday I was doing marketing and then Friday I would catch up and do anything. So I really tried to narrowly tailor each day and I would have mornings and afternoons, and so it was mornings I was in court. I couldn't start my afternoon until I'd gotten my. This is what you do on a court day type of thing, and it just really helped me get into a rhythm. I mean, systems work for a reason, you know you get into a rhythm, you get stuff done and it allows you really to to really grow and maximize the hours that you're doing. And then, because you know I was single in my 20s when I was first starting out, you know I would work Friday nights that was my system like Monday nights was my jail night. I always went to jails on Monday nights because it helped me have client control for the rest of the week, but then then, friday nights, I'd be exhausted.
Speaker 1:I'm an introvert. I get exhausted talking to people. So I would you know, friday nights I'd come home, me and my dog sit in front of the TV and I'd run Google searches and try to figure out what the next thing is. I always was how can I make more money? Because I thought that that was the answer Now. Because I thought that that was the answer Now I've transitioned to I don't need more money, I need more time. How do I get more time? I delegate, you know that type of thing. So that's really what's important to me now is time, not money. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, the issue with systems is that most entrepreneurs we love the idea of systems but we hate being bound by and actually operating within any systems. But it doesn't sound like you have that problem.
Speaker 1:I have to force myself to follow them. But when I follow them they delight me. But it's hard. I mean I don't really handle cases anymore. I do pardons and expungements hearings one morning a month, just because I enjoy that and I think it helps me feel good about what I do for a living. So I will do that. But then I will sit there after those hearings, because they are remote, and I'll be typing in my notes. I'll be like I got to get this done before I can break for lunch, because if I don't I'm not following the system and I got to sort of chain myself to the desk and make that happen. But I know the success I've had relies on those systems, so I just have to keep reinforcing it. But so many people are just like oh, I love this idea but they never actually implement it.
Speaker 2:All right, let's talk about buying back time. So you are, you're what? 50? 51, 52 at the end of the month, and you have kids.
Speaker 1:I have four kids 14, 12, 10, and eight.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, okay. So I have 11, 9, and he'll be 6 on Friday, so kind of the same age range, right. And so you're staring down the barrel of like there's only so many more years in summers that they're going to be hanging out at home with dad. So what are you doing to buy back more of your time and be able to spend more time with the kids and less time in the courtroom more?
Speaker 1:of your time and be able to spend more time with the kids and less time in the courtroom. So about I don't know, probably a couple of years ago now, but definitely after COVID, I just said you know, I don't want to be in the courtroom, I don't find joy in it. And so we went out specifically to recruit people that do find joy in it, love to talk about law I don't mind talking about law. I've got an attorney in my office, you know who's a veteran, who's really fired up, and he comes back into the office every day and he comes into my office and says got a minute, got a minute, let me talk to you about this issue. And he's literally jumping up and down in my office, fired up over stuff, and I love that. I love the enthusiasm. Fired up over stuff, and I love that. I love the enthusiasm. I've got a couple of guys in my office that are like that. I've got a couple of women that are just rock stars, and so I've recruited people who are truly passionate about going to court, like my father is and was. I mean I couldn't keep him away if I tried, and he's 75 and he's still got cases and he won't let them go. I keep saying, let him go, let somebody else in. No, no, this is me. I love doing this stuff. I want to talk about this stuff. We get in the car and he'll talk about a new case that was decided in our state Supreme Court and how he thinks he can apply in a new way. He loves that stuff.
Speaker 1:I know that if I find people that love that stuff and I can put them in that role, I can then step back and do the stuff that I like, which is A running the firm, b doing the marketing and C spending more time with my kids as a parent. You know, for us, I mean, it's basically from April 1st until the end of June. It is a mad dash of sports and concerts and a million doctor's appointments and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and everything. Every night there's two or three things going on.
Speaker 1:And so my consciousness is what do I do to? What can I do to spend more time in these years with my kids? And it means giving up money, absolutely. I could get rid of two attorneys. I could save you could save hundreds of thousands of dollars if I ran those dockets, but I want my attorneys so able to focus on the stuff they love, and I will overpay them and give them fewer cases. I mean, I probably don't need two lawyers in every pod that we have, but I'm going to overpay them, overstaff them and give them good work-life balance so I can have even more.
Speaker 2:Where are you guys hiring from, If you were to bring on a new lawyer? Who's your avatar experience level and where have they been for the last couple of years?
Speaker 1:So it's really interesting In the last couple of years we've hired both right out of law school with no experience and then lawyers with two to four years experience doing other types of law. So what we have found is that either people are born to the cloth criminal defense lawyers. They'll do every criminal defense thing they could possibly do in law school and that's the type of law they want to practice and they know it. Maybe they have family in it or they have a particular call to this area. But then we also find people who are like you know, I did a little bit of everything and then I went into family law. Yeah, two years of doing family law, I don't like it, I want to do something else. And so they'll come.
Speaker 1:We have one lawyer here who was doing trust and estates and he was like ah, you know I'm a street lawyer, I want that's where I belong. And I got to tell you we brought him in five years ago now and I mean he he came in during COVID, right before COVID. He's worked remotely. I see him maybe twice a year. I've never had a complaint from any of his clients. I've only heard praise from prosecutors and judges Like just let him do his thing and he had no experience in criminal coming into this. So it's just finding people that are drawn to this area of law because criminal stuff is unique. You know, we are a different breed.
Speaker 2:I ask that question because you know I have a couple of friends who have had a similar career trajectory to you, like did the thing for a long time, no longer really psyched to do the thing anymore, but still want to operate the firm. And so now we need to find people that just want to practice law right and for the most part at least, in the business firm and the family law firm that I'm thinking about, their avatar is somebody who has tried to operate their own business for a while and hates all of the business stuff. I was curious if that was your.
Speaker 1:You know, I wish it would be, you would think that I could hire criminal defense lawyers who failed at running a criminal defense practice. The problem is is that it's easy, I think, if you're a criminal defense lawyer and you have somewhat of a brain, to make six figures with a cell phone, and so a lot of lawyers don't want to give up that flexibility of being self-employed and making you know 100, 125k and they're like yeah, this is the life. I'm sure some of it is cash that never gets reported. You know stuff like that. So it's been difficult.
Speaker 1:I've actually tried to recruit other lawyers who are like hey, look, you know, you've been doing this for 20 years. It's never really taken off. Why don't you come in and be the voice of experience? So I don't have to be that voice, but it's. But a lot of them are like yeah, I don't want to be the leader. I don't, you know, I don't want to have to manage other people. I just kind of like doing my own thing with no being responsible to nobody. I'm like well, if that's the case, there's nothing I can do to help you.
Speaker 2:I want to ask you about something that you posted on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, or maybe only a couple of days ago, about this happiness KPI that you track. Yeah, so I think that's really, really unique, you know most of us have. How many cases did we sign last week? What was the revenue number? How many leads did we bring in? You've actually got very specific goals around. What are the things that make Jay happy? Yeah, well, I mean, that's on that list.
Speaker 1:So it's it's dinners with my kids and, quite frankly, you know like we were just talking about. You know the April to June run of having, you know, young kids. It's difficult to find happiness because everyone's always out at something and you're constantly in the car. You know so there have been nights where dinner together is my wife in one car with one kid in the backseat sitting at another kid's practice eating McDonald's, while I'm at a car with another kid at a practice, and we're FaceTiming dinner together from car to car. Because I think that's a very important part. It was important to my family growing up and it's something that I want to keep. It was certainly important to my wife's family, so in that respect that is a major happiness KPI. I would not be happy if I was not seeing them five, six, seven nights a week. I hate the fact that my 14-year-old daughter is like I'm going to sleep over at somebody else's house and I'm like, oh, you're missing dinner with us. That's important. And then it's date nights with my wife where we can go out and be together, and sometimes date night is get the kids in bed and we have wine and cheese and we binge watch the Bear from 9 to 11. That's cool with me. We don't have to go out of the house. Now we're older, our kids are older and we can do that. But those are the types of things and then, and being able to take off and be at sporting events and that's not just happiness for me, that's happiness for my whole firm.
Speaker 1:I'm big on making sure that you show up for your kids. We have a paid time off if you're going to go into your kid's school and volunteer and if you don't have kids and you want to volunteer in the community, go do. That Takes your paid time off. Don't have to give up on those opportunities because you have such a limited vacation time. We try to be generous and get people out there with their families. I mean, I have one of my paralegals. I haven't seen her in person since pre-COVID. She just had her fourth baby. She'll be back in a couple of months and more power to her. She said, jay, I can do this if I can work from home. I said, ashley, do what makes you happy, we'll figure this out. We're doing this together.
Speaker 2:I think those split dinners definitely count. I mean, we have, during sports seasons, practice Monday through Thursday, my wife and I at different fields with kids and uh, and then, you know, usually two games Saturday and a game on Sunday. So Friday night often is the only night that we get to actually all sit down. It's not, you know, not 8, 30, right, yeah, eating eating cereal off the counter. So it's a tough season, uh, as a parent, when you're running around. You have four, I only have three, uh, running around all those fields. So good for you for getting out and doing it while they're still that age.
Speaker 1:And the reality is, if I didn't want that sort of flexibility, I could go take a job, make more money at some other company or some other firm. I have the mental ability to do other jobs, but I've decided that this is the life I want right now. And the life I want right now is more interaction with my wife and kids. And you know it's funny, I have friends who they travel constantly for work and they love that. And me I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to go to that seminar, I don't want to give up that weekend. You, yeah, do we do anything that weekend? Yeah, I sat by a ball field and I watched a baseball game or soccer game or I drove up to a volleyball tournament or or whatever. But it's just that's what I want. I want to be around them because it matters to me at least, and so that one makes me happy.
Speaker 2:So we measure that yeah, and you know you can always go back in five years and make more money somewhere or speak at all the conferences once everybody's out of the house.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. I mean, look, I was very active, very, very active, in the DUI defense community. There's, um, there's a couple of, there's two national organizations. Uh, I was very, very active in one of them and then the other one started up and a few years later I started having kids and I haven't gone to a lot of those meetings. I have a lot of friends that go to those meetings all the time because their kids were older and they are able to travel more, and I can't wait to start going back to those things and see my old friends. But right now I go to one a year, that's it. Well, you're also very.
Speaker 2:I mean you're running two businesses, at least two businesses, right. We're running the third, which we can get into if you want to the social media for criminal defense lawyers. But you know doing quote more than most lawyers are doing and still making it home in time for dinner, and so I just think you know for so many there's so much like hand-wringing and complaining in our profession and the reality is that most lawyers just need to be around people like you to know that it can be done right. Sometimes you just need your thermometer reset, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a good thing to say. I mean, the reality is that if you want it and you put in the time, you can make it happen for the most part. And you know I've structured my practice in a way, you know I did not decide to take on cases and we don't take on massive federal white collar criminal defense. I said you know what that's not going to be good. We had an opportunity to take some very high profile cases in our state in the last decade. Interview with the families. They're willing to pay the fee and I've declined them. And I've declined them because it doesn't really fit our model.
Speaker 1:Our model is get home so you guys can spend your evenings with your kids and you're not spending an exorbitant amount of time being away from them, and that's just the model that I think works for us. Now you know, we this year it's crazy this year in my office of 40 people we have, between June 12th and October 5th, we have six babies being born. I'm like, yeah, one lawyer, one marketing force, administrative staffers, and yeah, we make it work. You know, take your time off, be with your kids, and that's important to us. And so it's important to me and it's important to my people. We support each other to make that happen.
Speaker 2:What are you doing to intentionally communicate that culture to employees and to prospective employees? How do you handle?
Speaker 1:that we talk about it all the time. And in fact it's funny, right before we started recording, I actually it's July 2nd, so I have a mid-five-minute like here's the middle-of-the-year update, here's where we are with our numbers, here's what we're going to be investing in in the next couple of quarters. You know, and I try to do those things but we are active on Slack. Everyone talks, um, you know, we. It's funny. I was part of the um fireproof program two years ago. Um, when, when, when they were actively. In fact, Ryan McKean another friend of yours um, uh, he was like, hey, you got to check this thing out. I went out, I spent some time with them Great, great group of guys and women and got a lot out of that.
Speaker 1:But what I realized is they were not set up for a criminal defense firm. In the way we operate. Because you talk about numbers and they say, okay, well, now you need to withdraw from this case because you're not making money. I'm like, no, the reason why I'm in this case is, you know, screw you. That's why. And they're like, you can't really run a business with an FU attitude. You know you have to make business decisions. I'm like, yeah, I don't make the business decision when it comes to trials. If you don't give me the offer I want, we're going to try this case. Screw you, I'll take the loss.
Speaker 1:It's just, you know they were doing a pod system and I said, well, you know, that would be a great way for me to structure my office, but I don't make the the lawyer the head of the pod. I have a paralegal who's the head of the pod, because they've been with me for 15 years and so now the lawyers work for a paralegal, and that's one of the things that we talk about. You're going to, your boss is going to be a paralegal. Are you okay with that? And and a lot of them are like, yeah, I'll. You know, I'm here, I just want to do cases. So if that's what it takes for me to get into your system, I love it. But we talk about work-life balance in our interview, in our job posting. We talk about that all the time. You know we had a.
Speaker 1:We had a lawyer this year lose both his mom and his dad in a six-week period and we pulled him aside and I said listen, dude, you've had a rough year Like your first. Three months of this year were just gut punch after gut punch. Here's what we're doing. Get your girlfriend, tell us when she can get away, I will cover your cases. I actually went to court this year to cover his cases and we just sent him to an all-inclusive place in Jamaica and said you need a week to just decompress, dude, and just take it easy. And so we support our people by giving them the resources that they need, whether it's time off, whether it's a forced vacation, whatever.
Speaker 2:All right, Jay, I want to be respectful of your time as we're wrapping up here, but if there's a criminal defense lawyer in Connecticut who's listening to this and going shit, I want to work for Jay. Where can?
Speaker 1:they find you Well, they can always come to ruaneattorneyscom. I think I'm kind of full up right now with lawyers. I mean we have two that are starting at the end of the month that I'm excited about. I think they're both going to be great additions and I really think that the team we've got in place now is great.
Speaker 1:But I'm always looking for people who want to really do criminal defense work, and if you're admitted in Connecticut and you're nationwide, we may even be able to bring you in on a remote position doing some post-conviction work. We've had two people exonerated for murder charges in our office that they did not do, and we have a third, I think, that will go to trial next year. And so if you feel passionate about that stuff, we take those cases and we vet them and it's how we are able to give back to the community and make sure that the justice system actually works. And so it's been great to be involved in those cases, walking somebody out of jail after, you know, two decades in jail and standing with them on the steps of the courthouse. So if you ever get a chance to do that that's that's probably like a billion dollar verdict for uh, beyond the PI side it's it's you do right by people.
Speaker 2:And how about the criminal mastermind?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the criminal mastermind is is is is really. You know, after years of being able to just talk to people about how to run a criminal defense practice, from being at all those seminars and being at the bars and being in online communities I just decided you know what my passion really is helping criminal defense lawyers. I got into it because I helped my father transition and transform his practice into what we've built today, and so I've been through it and so I decided to start this very small mastermind group. We have members all over the country. I bring in the best speakers I can find on different topics.
Speaker 1:Last month we did value-added selling, which was great from a sales perspective. We bring in people on digital marketing, on employment, all the things that you need to know to run your business. It's like going to a business seminar twice a month and we have a very active Slack community and stuff. So that's the criminal mastermindcom. If you've practiced criminal defense law, you may have heard about it, and we're always looking for new members, just because I find it so much you know, so exciting to be able to stop people from making the hundreds and thousands of dollars and millions of dollars of mistakes that I've made and get them to accelerate their growth in whatever it is they want to do. I got some people that just want to try cases and other people that want to run a business, like mine, so it's great.
Speaker 2:Very cool, Jay. Thank you very much. We'll link to all of that in the show description.
Speaker 1:Brian, thank you so much for having me. I
