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
What NOT Buying a House Taught Me About Law Firm Customer Service
Ever found yourself making split-second decisions in a high-stakes situation? My recent foray into the competitive Northern Virginia housing market was a rollercoaster of unexpected challenges and rapid decisions. Tune in to hear how this personal experience revealed crucial strategies for helping clients navigate high-pressure scenarios, particularly in legal practice. Learn why it's vital to create a supportive environment where clients can tackle complex issues with confidence and clarity.
Are your clients skeptical of your advice or holding back key information? You're not alone. We'll explore the common barriers at the start of client-professional relationships, especially in law and real estate. Discover how clients' mistrust often leads them to do their own, sometimes misguided, research, and learn effective ways to build trust and transparency from the get-go. We emphasize the importance of handling small details meticulously and managing client expectations to foster stronger, more reliable relationships.
Ever wondered how small mistakes can erode client trust over time? We'll dive deep into the significance of precision and consistent communication in maintaining strong client relationships. By sharing personal anecdotes and actionable insights, I'll show you how setting and meeting small, manageable goals can significantly bolster client confidence. This episode is packed with practical lessons on building a trust-based practice that thrives on clear, proactive communication. Don’t miss out on these valuable tips to enhance your legal practice and client rapport.
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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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Hello everybody, welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot. Exit the traditional bill more hours, model and greet each other with something other than I'm busy, but it's better than the alternative If you want to enjoy life of your own design and take control of your future. Join us as we explore life beyond the briefs. If you're new here, on Fridays I do these solo episodes, and sometimes they're about building your business, sometimes they're about life, sometimes it's just me ranting about stuff that's going on in my life. And on Tuesdays we release episodes where I interview high performers from all walks of life. Sometimes they're lawyers, sometimes they're great business owners, sometimes they're coaches. Today's episode is clickbaity. Episode is clickbaity. Here are the five things that I learned from failing to buy a house last weekend.
Speaker 1:So my wife and I have been in our current house for almost 10 years now. We moved in when we had a one-year-old and a baby. Number two was on the way and we were looking to get out of our townhouse and into some more space, and so back in 2014 or so, we upgraded from a townhouse to a four-bedroom single-family house, and the house has just been feeling a little small lately. Our boys are 11, 9, and 6. They are noisy, they are taking up more space, their sports equipment is taking up more space and we're just looking into the future and thinking like the in-laws come and they visit and it displaces one of the kids out of their room. We don't have a guest room, and as they get even bigger and become teenagers, it would be nice to have some more space. So we've been looking for the last two years Not real serious, but going to open houses every now and then. We're addicted to Zillow and Redfin just about everybody else and the thing is, because we don't actually have to move, because it's a want to and not a have to, we've been pretty selective about what it is that we're looking for. So something with five bedrooms, something with a larger backyard, something in a neighborhood that we have some friends, probably on a street where there are some other kids, definitely. And then the hardest criteria to fit is my wife wants to stay within our high school district, certainly, and probably within our elementary school district. So that really limits the number of houses that come on the market, and one such house came on the market last week and so we went to see it, and if you don't know anything about the Northern Virginia housing market, like it's crazy. So, long story short, we put in what we thought was a good offer. We were of the five offers that were on this house, all of which waived basically all contingencies. We were the lowest by at least $50,000. And we were over asking price. So the market is crazy.
Speaker 1:My wife is disappointed that we didn't get into this one, but I learned a lot about the client experience in dealing with professionals, in being outside of your area of expertise, from buying this house. That, I think, translates a lot into creating a better client experience for your law firm, and so this episode is five things that I learned about running a law firm when I tried and failed to buy a house. So the number one thing is that your clients have been thrust into your world, which is the law, involuntarily. Certainly, if you're an auto accident lawyer or criminal defense lawyer, like nobody asked to be in a crash, it doesn't exactly track the criminal defense, but they didn't ask to get caught, and so now they're having to make decisions quickly that they didn't think they'd have to make at all and even if they are planning on coming into your world, if they're planning on doing some estate planning or if they're planning on getting divorced. The decisions that they're having to make when they engage you are going faster than they thought they would, and so for us this is I wasn't really planning on buying a house, but I'm at an open house and we're making an offer, and so I'm scrambling to figure out. How much capital do I have that I can bring to call? What's my cashflow situation? How much house can I actually afford? Going forward, would I keep my current house and rent it out? Would I sell it? What would that transaction look like?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of math that you have to do, being thrust into this world, and you're being asked to make decisions faster and faster than you really want to, and for almost everybody, like, the timing just sucks. There's no good time to have been in an auto accident or to have been in a crash, and there's actually, like for us, the timing of buying this house or putting an offer on this house really is bad. Like my kids just went back to school, I've got a very busy fall between conferences and events where I'm not of town. Rates are high, at least compared to recent history, and they're about to drop. And then, of course, when they do drop, like more people are coming into the market. So timing is never good.
Speaker 1:And so, knowing that somebody has been thrust into your world when the timing is not good, the challenge becomes how do you put them into a situation where they're comfortable making decisions at speed, decisions that are normal for you in your everyday running of the business, but is the first time that they've ever been asked to make that decision in their life? Now, for us, we bought three different houses so far. This would have been the fourth, but, like I've only done one every five years, these are not decisions that I'm being asked to make on a day-to-day basis. And so how can you get clients more comfortable with whatever their problem is and for us, the problem was the math and the logistics, and there's almost no effort on anybody's path to make those numbers any more comfortable Understanding the problems that your clients actually have and solving for those problems.
Speaker 1:Number two your clients are skeptics, right, and they don't actually want to give you all of the information because they probably don't trust you, especially at the beginning of the relationship. So what happens when you go to an open house. You're probably avoiding the realtor who's the listing agent because you don't actually want to engage with them and you don't want them to know that you either like the house or that you don't like the house because we are skeptical that we're going to be sold something else. In fact, the realtor who has helped us now buy three houses and sell one of them, we met him at a listing at one of his open houses. It wasn't the house we ended up buying, but brokers use these listing appointments as ways to get more clients, so you're skeptical of that number one. You're also skeptical that they're using it to sell a product to you, and so you don't want to tell them all the things that you like about the product, for fear that the product is going to be then more expensive.
Speaker 1:If you tell somebody that you have an urgent need and that you want to get that need filled, then there's no price flexibility, or we assume that there's going to be less price flexibility, and so your clients who are calling you for the very first time, who may have a very urgent need, they often don't want to tell you all of the details Because, even though it is an attorney-client relationship and because we're supposed to be on their side, they just don't want to tell you all of the details because, even though it is an attorney-client relationship and because we're supposed to be on their side, they just don't believe you yet. Number three, because they are skeptical. They are doing independent research At the beginning of the relationship. They don't believe most of the stuff you say, and we engaged also with a mortgage lender to run rates for us, and the rates that he gave us were incredible rates in this market, and I became incredibly skeptical, especially in an environment where we were being asked to do things like waiving the financing contingency so that we could have an attractive offer so that the house could be purchased. So then, even though I have a professional on whose advice I'm relying about what the mortgage rates are, what the points are, what the closing costs might be, I'm doing my independent research on Google, which all of your clients are doing, no matter how much they trust you, and every personal injury lawyer who's listening to this has had the experience where you have a good offer that you give to the client, the client goes, but Google tells me that the way that pain and suffering is calculated is three to five X my medical costs and you go no, that's not the case. It's never been the case.
Speaker 1:I don't know why people on the internet who are not lawyers think it is the case, but they've gone and they've done their independent research and a lot of our job is getting out in front of and re-educating clients on things that they found online. That is just not true. And it's hard to do that in a phone call with them only right, because what happens when the phone call ends? They go back online and they do some more independent research and that either supports their worldview or it doesn't. More often than not, they're finding that confirmation bias information that is supporting their worldview. The trick for lawyers is how do we keep pumping information that tells them the truth of the law as we understand it, keep pumping that information out to them in a repeated way where we're saying the same thing over and over again until it finally sinks in, because if we don't do that, they're just going to go find something online that tells them something that's not true and they're not going to listen to our advice.
Speaker 1:So the number four thing I learned is that your ability to handle small details does one of two things it either builds rapport with your clients or it destroys it. And so the mortgage lender that we were talking with he's trying to move at speed, right, because his job is to close as many deals as he can, and so he's sending us requests for information. Requests for information. We're fulfilling it, and then I'm getting back from him requests for information that I've already sent him and questions about things which are just inaccurate, probably because he's working on three or four different things at one time and he's texting and he's emailing and he's in his system and I'm sending things by text and by email and I'm uploading things to his system, and so that disorganization causes him to be asking questions about things that I've already sent, or asking hey, why did your salary go down from one year to the next, when it hadn't gone down? He was just looking at the wrong W-2.
Speaker 1:And I think you can be forgiven one or two of these mistakes, but as you repeatedly make mistakes on the small details, people stop trusting you to get the large details, and that's why my practice we are so careful about giving advice to clients and saying no. Here's why your case is good or it's not good. Advice to clients and saying no, here's why your case is good, or it's not good. And by every time we have one of those conversations, having a medical chronology in front of us. Oftentimes that's linked to the point in the medical record, because clients either forget or misremember or misrepresent the things that they actually said to a doctor, and sometimes the records are just inaccurate. But more often than not, if you're trying to tell somebody why they have problems, because you've actually got to show them the underlying data, because they've forgotten about that. But if you get it wrong, if you say one thing and then you go into the record and the client's actually right, if you do that enough times, they just don't trust you. And so your ability to handle small things either builds rapport with your clients or it destroys it.
Speaker 1:And then the corollary to that is number five, which is that you have to communicate expectations, especially on timeline, and you have to meet the expectations that you've communicated. Listen, your clients. They don't understand how long this process is supposed to take. They don't understand what normal is. It's your job to tell them what normal is. But if you tell them, hey, it's normally going to take a week, right, and it takes longer than a week and you don't follow up with them in six and a half days to let them know it's going to take longer than a week, that trust erodes. If they have to call you on day eight and say you were going to call me yesterday and you didn't, that trust erodes.
Speaker 1:And so for us it was like the sellers had asked that offers be in on Monday night. While we were at the open house, as we were working with our realtor to write the offer, they said no, actually we want them in on Monday morning at the very latest. We got an offer in on Sunday night. We didn't hear anything back for two days and had to follow up again and again and found out that it was still open. And it's hard to tell whose fault that is Our realtor, their realtor, theirs, who knows?
Speaker 1:But in your practice you have absolute control over even if the insurance company or whoever's on the other side is not meeting the deadlines that they said they would meet your ability to proactively reach out to your clients and let them know. No, it is going to take a little bit longer, right? And sometimes you got to show them like, hey, I've sent three emails and I've gotten no response. But if you aren't proactively reaching out and telling them that it's going to take longer, they are assuming that it's your fault. So those are the five things that I learned from not buying a house last weekend.
Speaker 1:Number one your clients are skeptical. Number two they are in your world and they don't want to be there usually, and so your number one job is to comfort them and make sure that they understand you are on their side and can help them make good decisions. Number three even after you do that, they're doing independent research, because they probably still don't trust you. Number four the key to building trust with them is to getting all of the little things, all of the things done correctly on a consistent basis. We'll begin to build that rapport, including. Number five communicating expectations and meeting those expectations.
Speaker 1:This is the low bar. The low hanging fruit that exists at the beginning of the case is if you can set up three or four little trust clues. On Tuesday, we're going to do this, and then you do it on Tuesday. On Thursday, we're going to do this, and then you do it on Thursday. On Friday, my assistant's going to call you, and she calls on Friday at the time that she said she was going to call.
Speaker 1:All of those things build trust in the beginning of cases, and they're overlooked as we build these processes and we seek scale in our law firms, when really all you have to do is do the little things right every single time. If you're still listening, I assume it's because you got value out of this episode, and I hope that there's something that you found that you can put into practice in your law firm. If so, I would love it if you would leave me a rating and a review and share this with just one other person so that it helps them build their practice as well. That's how shows like mine grow. Until next time, have a great weekend.
