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
Conference Season is Upon Us... Here's How to Win It
Join me as I recount the proactive steps I took before a legal seminar, from sending my team the agenda to ensure pressing issues were addressed to putting away distractions for undivided focus. Learn the immense benefits of engaging with diverse attendees and gain insights on the vital role of creating an environment that retains talent within your firm. Whether you're a senior associate, a junior partner, or a law firm owner, this episode offers invaluable advice on fostering a fulfilling and supportive workplace.
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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 and welcome back into another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live a life of their own design and get out of the traditional work harder so that I can make more money, so that I can work harder so that I can make more money model. So this episode is a little bit of a reboot from an episode that I did and released last year about my tips and tricks for maximizing your times at conferences. I am just back from Lex Summit in Salt Lake City, utah, which is Fiobine's annual conference was the first one. That was much more about the interactions and the relationships that went on outside the room than the ones that went on inside the room. There's a lot of good stuff that went on inside the room, inside the sessions, but my plan going into this conference was much more about having conversations and developing relationships with people who I've been interacting with on LinkedIn and by email across the nation, who I've never met in real life before, and so I got the opportunity to hang out with some people who are doing things much bigger, better and faster than I am, and I'm really genuinely grateful for that. And I'm also really grateful to Filevine my friends there for letting me come and speak on their stage.
Speaker 1:One of my goals coming into 2024 was to speak on two other people's stages. I'm at three right now, as we sit here in September, hoping to get one more in before the end of the year and grateful to everybody who's let me run my mouth to their audience. Grateful to everybody who's let me run my mouth to their audience, and so a lot of the things that I said back in 2023, when I initially recorded this episode, are still true. I think there is tremendous value in getting your ass out of your office, off of Zoom and into rooms with people who are doing things bigger, better and faster than you, and just asking them how, because most of them will tell you. In fact, almost every successful lawyer who is out there will just tell you what they are doing, because it is in the doing that the real magic happens, and there really are no secrets that anybody is gatekeeping that is preventing anybody else from being successful. With that said, I want to leave you with this episode with all of the tips and tricks and tactics for maximizing your time at conferences, as conference season kicks off, just a couple weeks between the time this episode is going to release and the Great Legal Marketing Summit. Still tickets available at glmsummitcom and if you check out my LinkedIn or if you're on my email list, there probably is some amazing deal going on when you download and listen to this episode. It's going to change a couple of times as we run up to the conference, to the event itself, but check out my LinkedIn, send me an email if you're looking for the latest bonus If you don't see it at GLMSummitcom. All right On with the show my tips and takeaways for how to maximize your conference dollars and how to get the most out of every interaction that you're having with people as you go off to conferences and seminars.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let me just quickly set the stage for what this was an eight and a half hour event Friday afternoon, and then cocktail hour Friday, and then Saturday morning was the rest of the event. I love these CLEs where you can show up and get all of your hours, or most of your hours for the year in one fell swoop and hang out with people who are smarter than you are. We have gotten in the last couple of years into this habit and I certainly know I'm guilty of this, of taking all of our CLE credits in the last couple of years into this habit and I certainly know I'm guilty of this of taking all of our CLE credits in the week before they're due from our desk and by Zoom, and a couple of problems with that. Number one it's almost never in a practice area where you actually give a shit about right. So the stuff that I took towards the end of the last year was the stuff that was available. It really, for the most part, didn't have anything to do with auto accidents or injury and some of it didn't even have to do with civil litigation. Like you just take what is on the schedule in the last two weeks of the year as you are coming up against a deadline. So that's mistake number one.
Speaker 1:Mistake number two is doing all this stuff by Zoom, because while the programmed stuff is important, most lawyers who've been doing this for a long time, most of the program stuff, and so of the eight and a half hours of programming that I went to, I probably only came away with two or three practical things that I can implement in my practice. That'll move us forward. Now it's a $600 conference package and those two or three tips that I got are worth well more than $600. So the ROI is there on that, but the more important interactions are the ones that take place outside of the room, and this is true almost everywhere you go. It's true from mastermind events to conferences, to seminars, and you miss 100% of that when you do these by Zoom.
Speaker 1:And so the way that I maximized my time and my interaction outside of the room is in a couple of different ways. Number one I was able to get the attendee list in advance. Not all organizations will give you this, but VTLA was kind enough to send us the list in advance of who's going to be there, and so I looked at the list. Is it who do I not know? That I want to know. Going through LinkedIn, going through people's various websites, trying to figure out who had experiences and skills that I could learn from and what relationships could I cultivate with people who are outside of my geographic region, who, when they have crashes and claims that come up in my geographic region, they would rather refer me those cases than try to handle them on their own. So, getting the list in advance and then making a plan for yourself of who you're going to talk to and what you're going to talk about when you get there, I think is really important, and so I made a point of meeting a lawyer at cocktail hour who I knew about and he knew about me, but I don't think we'd ever actually met face to face and then having breakfast Saturday morning with another lawyer.
Speaker 1:Some are running larger practices than mine in a different region of the state than mine, so it's a twofold relationship. Number one it's a mutually beneficial referral relationship. Number two there's a lot to learn from these guys about how do you hire, what do you look for in new associates, how do you train new associates? Because the problem that you have as you grow past a certain size is, unless you have a set way of doing things and in personal injury cases it's hard to have a set way of doing things because every case is a variation on a theme you have to have some structure of training your associates and your other lawyers on, either like the methods that we're going to use in every case, or at least here's the framework that I want you to be thinking about as we approach every case.
Speaker 1:And so what I want to know from these guys is what's the routine of going through case files that you're not actively working on? What's your routine of sitting down with your team and making sure that all the information that you learn this weekend is being translated to them? How are you bringing back information and translating it to the paralegals and to the legal assistants and to the associates, who are spending the vast majority of the time talking to your clients and who are the ones that really need to know this information? Some of the stuff that we get is very valuable, but it's of lesser value if it's only in our head. If I come back and I don't tell anybody what I learned and I'm the only one that learns it again, I'm the bottleneck and people have to come to me for the question. I would rather figure out the best practices and the best methods to disseminate all of that information to my team so that the team can then be the ones on the front line talking to the clients.
Speaker 1:On that note, the other thing that I did before I got there was I sent my team the agenda. I've got a really great team of lawyers, paralegals and assistants on the auto accident side of the law firm and what I wanted to know is are we having any problems in the firm that I don't know about that are maybe being addressed by the speakers at this event. And sure enough my team's like, yeah, we have this big problem with governmental liens. Can you make sure that you pay attention and ask for the models and ask for the pleadings in this Medicaid program that they're putting on? So I did that and this is a thing that I would not have known to ask about and to get for the team had I not asked. I didn't realize that this is as big of a problem as the team thinks it is.
Speaker 1:Third thing I did and people make this mistake at every single conference and every single seminar that I go to put your computer away, put your phone away. Single seminar that I go to Put your computer away, put your phone away. There's nothing that's coming through emails or Slack or Teams or whatever it is you use to communicate with your team. That cannot wait until Monday. Right, be present where you are. If you're dividing your attention between the office and the speaker, you're going to miss something important that either the author or the speaker, and probably both of them, say, something important that either the author or the speaker, and probably both of them say it's shocking to me how many people go and pay this wasn't a very expensive seminar, but how many people spend a shit ton of money to be in a mastermind group or go to high-level seminars and then sit there and respond to work emails all day.
Speaker 1:Be present where you are, because the thing is that other people in the room notice. I had a professor in law school who hired a TA just to sit in the back of the class and report to him, who was on at the time AOL Instant Messenger, and it's the same thing. It's like you can't help but being distracted by the guy or the girl in front of you who's emailing or texting back with the office. And people notice who's paying attention to everything and who's not paying attention. They also notice who's asking questions and who isn't asking questions, and so for the first probably decade of my career, I was the last guy in a room who was going to ask questions. But now I'm like my ego has got to the point where I don't really care if you think I'm stupid. I'll ask the stupid question that most of the people in the room are probably also wondering about, because I no longer have that worry that somebody is going to be judging me for not knowing something.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I think is really important when you go to these kinds of events and they have happy hours and they have breakfast the next day where you can interact with people is to go and talk to people that you don't know, who aren't like you, and so most of the lawyers that I talk to these days are lawyers that own their own law firms. Right, they're responsible for business generation. They're responsible for management. I don't have an awful lot of interaction one-to-one with associates, and so one of the things that I wanted to do going into this event was talk to associates. I wanted to know from the younger people who were there and there were a lot of younger people there what problems are you having, what training are you getting or not getting, and what things do you wish that the partners or the owners of your law firm knew? What are we missing out on that? Our team isn't telling us about my team, I guarantee you there's something that they are afraid to tell me, but somebody else's team is not afraid to tell me that they have this problem or that problem with their law firm partners or owners, and so that's a good way for you to gather information about what's going on.
Speaker 1:In everybody else's have these very large plaintiff's law firms and the lawyers are constantly changing hands, right, the associates at least, especially if they don't have a book of business. They just pick up and they go somewhere else, thinking grass is greener, money's better hours, better cases are better like whatever. And so every lawyer that I talked to that was from that area, who was not an owner or a partner, had worked at least one other law firm that looked exactly like that. No loyalty among these people. But even at great firms, once you get to about 10, 12, 15 years in, you've got a breaking point. So I talked to three different lawyers who were either senior associates or junior partners who were at these kinds of firms, and all of them said if I ever have another boss, it'll be myself, because all of your associates, when they get to a certain level, think I can do the exact same thing that you're doing. I can keep more of the money because I'm going to do it cheaper in a less expensive place and I'm going to be more tech forward. Right Now, everybody who's made that jump knows okay, there's a lot of money that goes towards staff and case acquisition and networking and bankrolling the cases and risk and making sure that you get paid.
Speaker 1:And so there were people that will make that jump and then decide that they shouldn't have. There were people that will make that jump and will take off, but at 15 years or so, if you've got a lawyer that's been with you for 15 years and you're thinking that they're happy, they're also thinking if I ever have another boss, it'd be myself. They're not going to go work for somebody else, probably, but they might go and start their own law firm and so the job as the owner is to create the environment where you don't want to do that, where, although you could go make some more money elsewhere, I've got a job for you. That's so great that you don't want to. Right, and the thing is not everybody needs to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs many of us want to sell this life to everybody else. We believe everybody should go start their own business, be free, rise of the solopreneur, blah, blah, blah. But it's not for everybody. There are people who just want to be great trial lawyers. That's okay. There are people that just want to be great marketers. They just want to get the case in and then let somebody run it. That's okay. Life is all about carving the path that's perfect for you and staying in that lane. For some of us, it's entrepreneurship, for some of us it's not. But you need to know that your folks, who have been with you seemingly forever, are constantly thinking about would I be able to do this better, cheaper, faster and more money for myself?
Speaker 1:The last couple of things that I'll share is that most lawyers shockingly and I've said this a couple of times in the podcast most lawyers still don't know what chat GPT is and haven't tried it and haven't played with it. So we had a great AI presentation from Dan Hingle at AAJ, and most lawyers still haven't played very much or very in-depth with ChatGPT. Dan shared some statistic that 71% of judges haven't even opened ChatGPT, and so there's still an opportunity to get ahead of the curve on that. If you're among that large percentage of lawyers that haven't tried it, haven't played with it, it is not too late. The last thing is that most lawyers, we don't have any kind of safe space to bring our ideas. So there's this idea that everybody is in competition with us and we are not willing to share our best ideas with somebody who's a competitor, especially in our area and especially in our practice area in our area, and so most lawyers have nowhere to go to bounce ideas off of people.
Speaker 1:If that resonates with you, I will soft pitch again for great legal marketing's mastermind programs, because we bring in lawyers from all across the country, all across different practice areas, to talk about exactly the things that I'm talking about on this podcast People management, information management, digital marketing. How do I get more cases, how do I run them faster, how do I make more money? And the thing is that when you're talking with people who are your quote competitors in the same geographic region and in the same practice area, it's very difficult. Nobody wants to share their best digital marketing tip with the guy whose office is next door. People are very willing to share their best digital marketing tip with the people who are not in the same city and not in the same practice area as they are.
Speaker 1:And so if you aren't in a room where you're able to have these discussions and be vulnerable about the problems that you have in your law firm and get answers for them, but also share willingly the best secrets that you've implemented in your law firm. I want to invite you to come into one of these rooms or at least come to our summit in October. That's how I ended last year's show and guess what? The summit's in October again this year. So make sure that you grab your tickets at GLMSummitcom and I will see you this year in Phoenix. Have a great weekend, guys. Bye.
