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
You Did Not Spend Six Figures on Law School to be a SERVANT
In this episode, Brian also uncovers efficient time management and communication tools that can revolutionize your workflow. He highlights the game-changing potential of tools like Calendly for scheduling and offers tips to minimize lengthy email exchanges. Nutrition and sleep are emphasized as essential for maintaining productivity and mental clarity. With insights on setting boundaries with clients and colleagues, Brian provides a comprehensive guide to ensuring focused work hours and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Whether you're running a busy legal practice or juggling multiple commitments, these insights will help you rethink productivity and maximize each hour for financial and personal rewards.
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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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Guys, welcome back to the show and to another Friday solo episode. It is that time of year, right, seems like earlier and earlier every single year my kids are going back to school, more traffic on the roadways, everybody's back from vacation and now kids' sports are filling up basically every day of my weekday and most of my weekends, and so I thought I'd come on here and do an episode today about time management, especially time management for lawyers, law students and busy high achieving professionals. Everybody's got the same 168 hours in a week and there's no way to expand that. So how are you maximizing your time? Let's dive in, okay.
Speaker 0:So if you don't know me, my name is Brian Glass, I'm an attorney in Fairfax and I hate the word busy. I think that lawyers and other high achieving professionals can get into this competition. Where you go, how are you doing? Oh, I'm busy. That's better than the alternative, right? And so I like to think of my life as full, and right now, my life is very full of activities that I've chosen and that I'm actively choosing, that I want to do, but it is very full. I have three boys under the age of 10. They're all involved in sports. I'm running a multimillion dollar law firm and I'm the president of a multimillion dollar law firm coaching and consulting business. In addition to that, I'm putting out two podcasts a week, working out six days a week and spending intentional time with my wife, and so my life is very full.
Speaker 0:And one of the questions that I get a lot from parents on my kids' sports teams because I coach soccer and I coach baseball is how do you do it all? And really the response that comes back in my head is how do you not? Right? You have one life to live, and so how can you not take all these opportunities that are in front of them and maximize your 168 hours? But I get that question enough that I thought it would be worthwhile to come on here today and go through how I do it all. And so really it starts with having the end in mind, with understanding that you've got 168 hours in a week. 56 of them are going to be devoted to sleeping, 40 are working, probably more than 40, but let's call it 40 working. You got some time commuting in there. You're probably spending at least 14 hours a week eating, at least seven hours a week getting ready, showering, brushing your teeth, using the restroom all of that stuff, and so now you're down to about 50, like just off the bat. We're down to only 50 hours of free time with which you can commute, you can work out, you can go to your kids' sporting events or you can lay on the couch and watch TV.
Speaker 0:And so, understanding that there's a finite amount of time and we've got to fit all of the things that we want to do and that's important, the things that you want to do onto your schedule first, and so the very first principle that comes to mind when I think about time management is blocking time for myself and prioritizing my own schedule. So my favorite tool for this is a 365-day calendar. You can find these. I just go on Google and look for a year-long calendar that gives you all 365 days in one place at one time. And I go through and I say where do I want to be taking time off, what vacations do I want to go on, what trips do I want to go on? That stuff gets blocked out first for me, and then we go back through month by month and week by week, and I block out time for myself to do the kind of deep thinking that's required to run large organizations. Because if you are always in the doing of the business and you are always chasing the next fire and you are never thinking about how do we grow, how do we scale, how do we acquire more customers at a lower cost, how do we run cases better, faster and cheaper, then you're always chasing the next fire and you're never growing the business, and so it's important to have dedicated time. For me, it's usually a morning once a week, out of the office, off of email, thinking for myself.
Speaker 0:Now, this is completely anathema to most lawyers, because most lawyers bill by the hour. If you're not working, you're not earning. Well, I think, if you're not thinking, you're not earning. And the thing is that there's only two ways to make more money. You're not earning. And the thing is that there's only two ways to make more money. One is to work longer, work more hours. Two is to make your hours worth more money per hour, and so that's where I focus my time. I am not interested in working a 50, 60, 70 hour week. Have I done it? Yes? Do I like it? No? And so the thing is like how can we make every hour that we're in the office more productive and worth more money.
Speaker 0:My goal for the last couple of years has been to make my dollar productive activities the things that I'm actually doing to drive revenue to the law firm worth a million dollars a year, and so that's not including cases that I bring in, that somebody else is working on. That's cases that I'm working on, and so when you break that down, if you want to take, let's say, just four weeks of vacation a year, you have 48 weeks left and you want to work 40 hours a week. Well, now, while you're in the office, your hours have to be worth an average of $520 an hour, and that means every time that you're doing a task that's worth $25 or a task that's even worth $200, you're losing money. And when you start to think about it like that, you really start to think about how can I leverage other people's time, which is the big unlock, how can I get somebody for whom this $25 or $200 task is exciting, who wants to engage in that kind of work and who's better at it, frankly, than I am, and that allows me to lever up and to focus on the $500, $700,000 an hour tasks. So I've identified my highest effective hourly rate as talking to new clients. I'm really good at explaining in a short period of time why we're the best place for them, at segmenting off the people for whom we will not be a good fit and for getting them out the door, and so I like doing that. I think that's a really high, effective hourly rate for me.
Speaker 0:Training my team on how to handle the quote normal cases and, yes, every auto accident case is different, but a lot of them sound the same, and so there's normal cases that the team of paralegal case managers can run for us, that have attorney oversight but don't require me to be involved in every phone call, don't require me to read every medical record and then really focusing my time and effort and energy on how do I maximize the value of our abnormal cases, the things that are just outside of the box. How can I spend my best dollar an hour is spent on figuring out how to turn a $10,000 case into a $50,000 case, and there's several levers that we can pull there to make that happen. And whatever your business is, I'm sure that it's different, I'm sure that you are better at different things than I am and you're worse at different things than I am and you have other levers that you can pull in your business, but it's worth spending deliberate time thinking about where are you undervaluing your time and in what spaces are you losing money? So for me, it's every time that I'm talking to somebody that I can't help. I'm losing money Every time that I'm talking to a client in the middle of treatment and they don't know what the next medical step is going to be, because a doctor doesn't know. How can we expect me to figure that out? That's probably a waste of my time. Is it a good comfort thing for the client to be able to talk to a lawyer? Yes. Is it a good use of Brian's time? No, if your doctor can't figure it out, how the hell am I supposed to know what the next step is? And so then, at the law firm, knowing that now we've put in a whole lot of steps and a whole lot of client interaction, that comes not from me but from the other people on the team, because that makes the client experience better and it keeps my time protected. It keeps my time working on the highest dollar value things that it can be working on the other two kind of small but easily actionable things that I do that I think most lawyers don't do is that I don't take any unplanned inbound phone calls from anybody and I schedule all my phone calls through Calendly.
Speaker 0:It really is startling to me the number of lawyers who I call because I do. I make unplanned outbound calls. It's on my time, so that's fine, but it's startling to me the number of lawyers that pick up their own phone with no screening and have their direct dials just on their website. If you're focusing on a million dollar case or you're crafting a bet, the company kind of brief how can you be interrupted on somebody else's time at somebody else's will? That just doesn't make any sense to me, and so I've trained my team really well to handle 95% of the inbound client questions Because, again, every case is different but a lot of them rhyme and a lot of those questions that clients have the staff can either answer, and if the staff can't answer it, then they just go ahead and schedule a call with me.
Speaker 0:But before I get on the call I've got to know what's the question, what have we tried before and what issues are there that the client might not be telling us about? Because if I'm getting on the phone with a client and finding out for the first time about a problem. Now I've got to get off the phone, go into the record, find the answer, get them back. It's a whole thing, but the better that we can get at narrowing down what is the actual question before I get on the phone. Number one, I might just have the answer that I can have my staff send back to them. But number two, I can actually provide, in a meaningful way, legal advice to the client. Like a totally novel that I'd be able to provide legal advice when you call and not have to go back into the file because I actually knew what the question was. And so one of the things that we don't let happen is clients call here and say I need to talk to them about my case, about my case doesn't mean anything to me. I don't know if you're asking for a generic update that somebody else could give to you, or if it's something that requires my specialized skill, knowledge and legal acumen, which the first time you say it and as I say it here, I sound like an asshole. But you will not get to the highest leverage on your time if you aren't militant about that.
Speaker 0:The other thing that drives me nuts is the back and forth scheduling of anything phone calls, meetings, whatever. I use Calendly for all of that. It syncs with my schedule. When I send you a Calendly link, you only see the times that are available. You can go ahead and book. I can set parameters. So if I only wanna do phone calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I can do that. If I only want to do podcasts on Wednesday afternoon, I can do that. But that allows somebody to schedule with me without me having to say are you free on Monday? Okay, no, how about next Thursday? Okay, how about September?
Speaker 0:Calendly for me has eliminated all of the back and forth on that. Now what I don't do is I don't put a widget out there where you can just come and find me on the internet and schedule a time with me. I only send it to people that I actually want to talk to. But Calendly for me has eliminated the three emails back and forth to schedule a phone call, which are a complete waste of time. The other piece of email control that I do is if it can't be answered in two, maybe three emails, let's just get on a phone call.
Speaker 0:Let's cut out all the back and forth, and so what I've told my team is every message out to clients when we're evaluating a case or evaluating an offer or trying to resolve a case needs to be here's what they've done. Here's what the law firm recommends. Do you agree? Do you disagree? If you disagree, let's schedule a phone call. Right, we don't need emails back and forth debating facts, debating medical care. We don't need communication that doesn't drive the conversation forward. Either you agree with my assessment of it or you think I've gotten something wrong. But email is a terrible medium for explaining why you think I've gotten something wrong. We just there's no tone in email, there's no inflection. It's, and so many things get misunderstood when we're writing back and forth on email. And so my whole thing is if you agree with everything I said, just tell me. Yes. If you disagree, let's get on a phone call. Let's not do three emails back and forth over the course of a week, because now we've lost a week. We could be either moving forward on settling your case or we could be moving forward on filing a lawsuit. Either way, the loss of seven days is critical when you're trying to do a million dollars in business a year.
Speaker 0:The other low-hanging fruit for time management and the one that people don't talk about enough is getting enough sleep and eating properly. If you're going to work an eight or a 10 hour day and you haven't gotten enough sleep and you haven't eaten properly, you're not going to be nearly as efficient as you are if you've gotten a good eight hours of sleep and you've had a good breakfast. So for a long time I was doing intermittent fasting and I still, on somewhat intermittent base, do it, but I don't do it on days when I have to devote deep thought to something, because what I found is, if I'm doing a 24 hour fast, by the time I hit three o'clock, I have this mental fog where I can't process what people are saying to me and get a question back out to them. So I was doing podcasts and, like at three or three 30, I just hit this block where I can't think of the next question to ask and also listen to somebody. And the exact same thing is true if I work late and I only get five or six hours of sleep.
Speaker 0:Prioritizing your sleep and your nutrition and being able to work at 100% capacity when you're in the office is a huge unlock that nobody talks about. And then just putting a button on the sleeping thing. That's another reason I won't send emails to clients or to opposing counsel or to my team after work, because I don't want to get a response after work. I don't want to get something that I'm then up thinking about. That's keeping me from going to sleep and I don't really want you to know that I'm available. And looking at my emails after hours Do I do it sometimes? Yes, my fear is always that I'm going to get something that either pisses me off or excites me at 8.30, nine o'clock at night and then I can't go to sleep and then I'm no good the next day.
Speaker 0:And I think the legal profession, as we've gotten more and more accessible I was talking to somebody the other day about it used to be easy to go on vacation because nobody could reach you, you weren't getting emails and briefs and memos and stuff while you were on vacation and you actually could shut off. And now it's shit. You got to look at your email a couple times a day and it takes time away from your family and from really what vacation is supposed to be. But as we've gotten more and more accessible, we feel the need to respond quicker and quicker. And the thing is that once you start doing that and once you've set up that precedent with a client or with opposing counsel, where you're going to get back to them within 30 minutes, then it's really hard to stop.
Speaker 0:And lastly, on that point about client communication, I think it's important that your clients know that from the very beginning. So one of the things that we tell clients in our office is you should always expect a response within 24 hours, but it's not going to be immediate. We tell them you are not going to be able to get me on the phone anytime you want to. Right, we will schedule calls, we will answer all your questions, but you would not want me, when I'm in deep thought about your case, answering a phone call from somebody else. And so I'm going to honor all of my clients by when I'm in deep thought about their case and figuring out how to maximize the value of their one opportunity to recover money from an insurance company. I'm not going to interrupt them with what do I do next, now that my treatment hasn't worked right? There's a time and a place for that, but it's not when I'm in the middle of thinking about somebody else's case, and so you just have to tell clients and train clients on this from the beginning, and the clients that need you immediately, every single time. You just have to be okay with letting those people go because they're not a good fit for you and your life, which really is why we're here in the first place.
Speaker 0:We're doing all of this for us, and so I think that's the overarching principle is like how can you get more done and do more of the stuff that you want to do without being beholden to somebody else's schedule, somebody else's timetable? Like you didn't go to law school for three years and spend six figures so that you could be there at the snap of a finger. I just don't. I don't think that's true for anybody that's listening to this show, all right. So I got an offer for you If this stuff is interesting to you. We have a product at Great Legal Marketing called Militant Time Management for Lawyers. It's a book. It's a healthy sized book. If you're interested in learning more about this, I'm happy to send it to you. Find me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message. Shoot me a DM on LinkedIn with your email and your mailing address. I'll make sure you get a copy of this. Make sure you get put on our mailing list so you don't miss anything from us. Have a great weekend, guys. Take care.
