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 EXACT Math Needed to Run Your Seven Figure Law Firm
Can you imagine transforming your law firm into a million-dollar revenue machine? Discover the precise formula to achieve this milestone with actionable strategies from our recent Great Legal Marketing Boot Camp. I'm Brian Glass, and in this solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, I unravel the essential math behind generating $83,000 a month and emphasize the importance of focusing on high-value tasks. Learn how to increase your average case value, streamline case management, and optimize your time for maximum growth.
Uncover real-world examples and practical tips on case selection, client follow-up, and leveraging your team to prevent cases from going south. From enhancing client communication to instituting vital stop gaps, this episode equips you with everything you need to refine your approach and boost your firm's revenue. Whether your average case value is $5,000 or $20,000, these insights will ensure you're not leaving money on the table. Tune in now and start making strides towards a million-dollar 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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Hello and welcome in to today's solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass, and this is the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live a life of their own design and not live a life by default. Now, I know that you went to law school because you don't like math, but stick with me, because today's episode is the precise formula that you need in your firm in order to make a million dollars in revenue for the first time ever. Many lawyers and many law firms never break this barrier, and I've found that it's critically important for you to have the type of cash flow that you need in order to hire the teammates that will allow you to step back and focus only on the highest and best uses of your time. Today's episode is an excerpt from the most recent Great Legal Marketing Boot Camp event, which is hosted in my office in Fairfax, virginia. We have lawyers from all over the country, including Arizona, colorado, nebraska, texas and, of course, virginia and Maryland, learning how to become better marketers and build better practices. If you want to make sure that you do not miss the next boot camp event, I need your email address. You can go to greatlegalmarketingcom, subscribe to our email list and make sure that you do not miss our next event. Now on with the show.
Speaker 0:In a solo practice, you're selling your time. The first goal in a solo practice, I think, is to get to a million dollars in revenue. To get to a million dollars in revenue, you need to generate $83,000 a month, or $19,000 a week, or $4,000 every day that you work. If you work 52 days a week, 52 weeks a year, or almost $500 per working hour. If you're working 52 weeks a year and 40 hours a week, right, and the thing is, if that's your goal, then you can't be focused on doing things that you can get somebody else to do for $100 an hour.
Speaker 0:This is basic math. Here's the impact of average case value. So average case value in this room is anywhere from $4,000 to $40,000. And it makes a serious difference in the number of cases that you have to handle to get there. If your average case value is $5,000, you have to close 200 cases a year in order to make a million dollars. How many leads do you need to generate to close 200 cases? So for us, we're at about one to seven. So for people that call us, we can help and we will take one in every seven cases. I've got to generate 1,400 phone calls in order to make a million dollars if my average case fee is $5,000. Ours right now is somewhere around 20,000. And so that math is 50 cases, right, which is only 350 auto accident phone calls. Makes it a little bit easier, right? And so there's two ways to increase your average case value. You can cut out all the low dollar ones, right? That would free up some of your time. If you just found somebody else who's downstream from you in your market and referred out the bottom 20% of your cases, how much of your time would that free up? The other one is to dedicate more of your time as the smart thinking brain powered lawyer to increasing the value of your cases. So one of the ways that we've done that in our practice is institute all of these stop gaps that prevent a case from turning bad.
Speaker 0:What makes an auto accident case worth less money? Client stops treating. Client treats forever with a chiropractor or physical therapist without getting an MRI. Client doesn't see an orthopedist. Client doesn't get care in an immediate period of time right after the crash. So we've instituted, with our case management system, all of these phone calls that go out from my team, not from me to the client In the first four weeks after the crash.
Speaker 0:They get a call a week. Are you in care? Tell me about the care. Have you had any problem getting into a doctor? Is there anything we can help you with? Then, at 12 weeks after the crash, they get a call. Hey, if you're still in physical therapy, I'm not your doctor, but you need to have a conversation with your doctor about whether or not the physical therapy is helping. And if it's not helping, we got to get you to an orthopedist or back to a primary care doctor.
Speaker 0:Wave a magic wand over the chiropractor's bill and say it's all okay. Right, it's not managing the care, it's not telling the client what to do, but it's putting stopgaps behind all of the things that clients screw up in their cases because they don't know any better. Right? How many of us have handled a case where a chiropractor treated somebody for a year and we didn't find out about it until a man landed on our desk? I've had that happen a whole bunch of times. Now the chiropractor's pissed at you because you're asking them to cut the bill. Client's mad at you because you never told them about it and you're probably trying that case right Because the insurance company is not going to settle it, and so by instituting that and preventing cases from turning sour, you're able to increase your average case value. And there are things like that in estate planning. There are things like that in tax.
Speaker 0:Everybody in this room has little ways that we can increase the average case value that stack up. So here's the people who call you and hit your voicemail and don't leave a message and just find the next lawyer on Google. They're the people who call you and talk to your intake team and the intake team doesn't sell them on your firm being the best place for them to land. And then there are people who call you and just get lost somewhere in the process. Right, we send a retainer agreement and we don't get it back and we don't follow up. And so you can increase your number of cases without doing any more marketing or without generating any more qualified leads, if you just get better and fix your intake. Second half of it is cases times. Average case value equals revenue. It's two sides to that. You can increase the number of cases. You can increase the number of the average case value. Either. One of those is gonna have a significant impact on revenue.
Speaker 0:First thing we're gonna talk about is how do we attract more qualified leads into our law firm. I define a qualified lead as a case that I want to handle, which is broad, and if you define a qualified lead as a case that you want to handle, your team will never be able to figure out how many qualified leads you have. Second step to that is drawing what I call a deal box around the cases that you want to handle. For us, clear liability in Virginia emergency room or immediate presentation of primary care doctor plus some physical therapy that's it. Anything beyond that's a case I want to handle and we'll pass around later today our long-term disability deal box that the intake team has and knows where they can sign and knows where they can't sign. But the important part is that you very clearly define for you who your avatar client is and what kind of cases you want to work on.
Speaker 0:Hey guys, as always, I want to thank you very much for listening to the show. I know there's plenty of ways that you could spend your time and plenty of podcasts that you could listen to. It means a lot to me that you listen to this podcast. It would mean a lot to me if you would leave me a rating and review. Wherever you listen to podcasts Apple, spotify, whatever. If you have a specific question about your practice or you have a topic that you want us to address on the show, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Let me know what you are struggling with in your practice that I can help you with, and have a great weekend.
