A brief history of my 15 years of experience in creating the New Law Business Model, and how all lawyers can use it to have a lucrative law practice they love.
In this article, I’m going to give you a brief history of the trainings I created, and why we upgraded the New Law Business Model curriculum, and then I’ll show you screenshots of the upgraded curriculum, so you can see what it will be like for you.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve been training lawyers in my systems and creating programs, one by one, as I was struck by inspiration or the need of the marketplace.
The first program I ever offered to lawyers was my Client Engagement System. First offered in 2006, this program trained lawyers on how to engage 97.5% of the clients they met with, using our system. Lawyers learning that system immediately shifted from “free initial consultations” that resulted in people shopping around, leaving confused, and maybe never coming back to lawyers bringing their clients into a pre-scripted 2-hour educational meeting that was informative, educational and empowering for their clients. As a result, the lawyers got hired on the spot, and often for fees that were double, triple and quadruple what they had been charging. And the best part is, the clients chose their own fee!
Immediately after launching that training, we got feedback from lawyers, such as this:
"I must say that it was probably the single most successful meeting I’ve ever had with clients. At the end of the meeting they were saying things like: "We really loved filling out the questionnaire." "We are really thankful that you have taken us through this process." "This is the best thing we’ve ever done."
I have got to tell you, I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I’ve never had anyone say that." – Stephen O'Neill, Rhode Island
I knew I was onto something and in 2007, created the Personal Family Lawyer® program in which I gave the lawyers who enrolled with us everything I was using in my office to market my practice to families, including the use of my best-selling book on legal planning for families that came out in 2008, and all the TV appearances I did as a family, financial and legal expert to promote that book over the years.
I also created a number of marketing trainings for lawyers who wanted to learn to use direct response marketing in their community.
Up until about 2012, my trainings were really best for lawyers who already knew how to do estate planning, but one of the problems I was running into is that I was teaching lawyers how to market their services + get hired by the clients, but many of the lawyers I was training were not serving the clients in the way that I knew actually justified the fees I was teaching them to charge. And that felt like a big problem to me that I needed to solve, because I didn’t just want to help lawyers make more money, but actually make a real difference in their clients’ lives.
So in 2012, on the encouragement and in partnership with my best friend at the time, who had used my teachings to build her own estate planning practice from scratch and right out of law school, I created the Estate Planning Bootcamp.
The First of Its Kind
The Estate Planning Bootcamp was the first online training program of its kind that taught lawyers the foundations of how to do estate planning for families in their community, and make sure the estate plans they were creating would actually work.
And then in 2014, after creating my system for educating business owners on what they needed to have in their business to have a solid legal, insurance, financial and tax foundation (because my own failings in these areas cost me over $1,000,000), I decided it was time to start training business lawyers on how to serve business owners as a true trusted advisor, instead of a one-off transaction provider who wasn’t really helping their clients build businesses they could count on.
So along with Denise Gosnell, a lawyer I had informally supported to shift from one-off transactions to a full practice serving just 13 monthly recurring clients at an average fee of $3,000 per month recurring revenue, we created the Business Practice Bootcamp.
We had all of these individual trainings, but found that it was most impactful when we only served lawyers who wanted to serve families and/or business owners as we teach, so we began to take any training that was not that off the market one by one, and consolidate to only serve lawyers who wanted to transition to next-level, highly impactful and valuable estate planning and recurring revenue-based, trust advisor-style strategic business counsel services.
How the Estate Planning Bootcamp (+All of My Trainings) Became a Streamlined Curriculum
A few years ago, it began to dawn on me that it was time to combine all of these teachings and courses into a single streamlined, step by step, curriculum, though that seemed like a completely overwhelming idea and I was resistant to doing it for some time.
Finally, I hired a COO to work with me to run the company and he hired a project manager to work with me on the curriculum, and I had the time, energy and attention to do it.
As a result, together with my team here at New Law Business Model, we completely upgraded our entire curriculum, put it all together into one streamlined program for serving families with next-level estate planning, as we teach, and an upgrade for serving business owners as a strategic business advisor.
I share all this history with you because we often get questions from lawyers who wonder if we are too good to be true, or the real deal, or if we are even just a fly by night training company, as so many online training companies for lawyers these days are popping up.
I’ve been training lawyers for over 13 years. I’ve trained over 3,030 lawyers, many of whom now have high 6- and 7-figure law practices they love.
And, we’ve now made that training even better, easier for you to apply in your life and law practice, and I am beyond excited to share it with you.
Meet the next-level Estate Planning Bootcamp: The Life & Legacy Planning Program w/ Strategic Business Advisor Upgrade
Now, I’d like to take you through the new program we’ve created to support you to build a law practice serving families with next-level estate planning and/or strategic business counsel services.
I’ll do that by showing you the 15 modules, and explaining why we’ve included each one and how it will support you to create a life and law practice you love.
Before I do that, one thing it would be valuable to understand is that over the course of my 15 years in business, I’ve come to discover that most business owners, especially lawyers, seem to get stuck or not create the success they want in business as a result of one primary factor: focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time.
So I’d like to share with you the six steps for success in any service-based business enterprise.
This applies to all service-based businesses, but especially law practices.
- Step 1: Get clear on the service you provide, and get confident delivering it. This is why we recommend you focus in one clear practice area, and not try to be a “door lawyer” taking whatever comes in the door. You cannot get confident delivering on your services if you are constantly needing to learn new areas of law.
- Step 2: Get clear on who is the ideal candidate for your service, primarily focused on the nexus between who benefits the most from your service that you also enjoy serving the most.
- Step 3: Get clear on the highest value outcome of your service, and price and package your services so you are able to get well-paid to deliver on that outcome to the people who need your service.
- Step 4: Create an intake and engagement structure so you are easily able to get hired by all the people who need your service, while at the same time not wasting your time with anyone who cannot or will not hire you. Ideally, you will have a 90% or higher enrollment rate for anyone you meet with, who needs your services. Many of our lawyers report very close to a 100% engagement rate in their law practices, when using our system for intake and engagement of their clients.
- Step 5: Get clear on both the minimum number of clients you need to serve each month to meet your personal and financial time goals at your average fees, as well as the maximum number of clients you have the capacity to serve. This is critical because lawyers are far too often scrambling to have “enough” clients each month, but do not know what enough actually is and are wasting a tremendous amount of time, energy and attention worrying about not having enough instead of focus lasering in on only the activities that will generate the exact number of clients they actually need. If you do not know the minimum number of clients you need and the maximum number of clients you can serve with your current capacity of time and team, try out our Money Map for Lawyers, a free program I created to help you determine this.
- Step 6: Use the right marketing strategies to book just enough new prospective client appointments on your calendar so that if you got hired by 95% of them (because you have an intake and engagement system you can count on), you would meet your personal time and money goals for your life and law practice. And don’t get distracted by shiny object syndrome of every marketing pro out there who promises you they have your solution. Instead, know what the right solution is for you based on the number of clients you need and want to serve each month, so you can stay FOCUSED.
These steps are not steps I just made up or theories I read about in a book. They are the cumulative knowledge I’ve developed over 15 years in business, serving lawyers, families, and business owners, with multiple businesses, business models—and bringing in a total of more than $30 million in revenue over those years in my businesses and many multiples of that if you take into account the businesses of the business owners I’ve served.
Given all that, I decided that the best way I could serve you lawyers who want to offer next-level estate planning or strategic business counsel services is to systematically guide you through these steps, so you’ve got the foundation you need for your law practice, so you can then build your law practice to any level you want.
Our new Life & Legacy Planning Program With Strategic Business Counsel Upgrade does just that. I will always probably refer to it as “the Bootcamp”, though that’s not the official name anymore, for ease and convenience in the rest of this article, that’s what I’ll call it.
How the Bootcamp Gives You the Foundation for an Estate Planning or Strategic Business Counsel Law Practice You Love
I will show you each part of the new 15-module, streamlined curriculum, in sections, so you can understand why we’ve put it in the order we did, and included each of the training modules that we have.
Life and Legacy Planning Program, Modules 1 and 2: Your Foundation for Success
Modules 1 and 2 of the Life and Legacy Planning Program give you the foundation that you need to have a life and law practice you love by supporting you to develop the mindset of a business owner + the money goals and time blocking calendar to take complete control over your time and money. Regardless of what business you are in, you need to have a business owner mindset and clear time and money goals.
In modules 1 and 2 of the Bootcamp, we walk you through setting up your mindset, time and money goals so that when the going gets tough in the learning/Bootcamp process, you keep going.
We don’t rely on you to provide your own accountability though. We give you the accountability support of our Core Program Coach as well.
Life & Legacy Planning Program, Modules 3, 4 and 5: Learn Next-Level Estate Planning + Get Between 6 and 11 CLE Credits, Depending On Your State
In modules 3, 4, and 5 of the Life and Legacy Planning Program, we teach you to do estate planning the way we believe it should be done, so you can feel confident delivering a service that your clients are happy to pay, on average, $3,000 - $5,000 for you to deliver.
If you’ve already been doing estate planning for some time, you should be able to breeze through these sections and just focus on the “next level bells and whistles” to add to your planning process to increase the value of your planning, significantly.
You may even find that you are already doing some of what we teach, but that you aren’t getting paid for it, or that you don’t know how to talk about it so your clients really understand the value and are happy to pay for it.
And, even if you have been doing estate planning for years, I guarantee you are going to learn some new things that you haven’t thought of incorporating into your work with clients that will uplevel the service you provide, and the confidence you have to deliver on a plan that really works for your clients.
Here’s a peek into part of Module 3 so you can see what I mean:
Best of all, you are going to get your own plan done and updated, and it will be a next-level estate plan with all the “bells and whistles” to ensure it will work for your family when they need it. It’s time for the cobbler’s kids to wear shoes, wouldn’t you agree?
If you’ve never done estate planning before, or just dabbled in it, you’re going to learn everything you need to create next-level foundational estate plans that you are confident to deliver. And, yes, you will get your own plan created as well.
Life and Legacy Planning Program Modules 6, 7, 8 and 9: Learn to Provide Strategic Business Counsel Services With the Strategic Business Counsel Upgrade + Get Between 6 and 11 CLE Credits, Depending On Your State
In Modules 6-9 of the Bootcamp, we focus on those of you serving business owners with our Strategic Business Counsel Upgrade.
Just like in the Estate Planning part of our Bootcamp, where you get your own plan done, so you can be 100% congruent with your service and what you’ve done for your own family, with the Strategic Business Counsel Upgrade, you get your own legal, insurance, financial and tax matters handled.
Yes, you are a business owner, and you should be your own primary client in setting up your business foundations, before you start (or continue) advising others.
There are two pieces of these modules that I am most excited to share with you, and a third that you’ll be most excited about.
The first is that we are supporting you to see yourself not just as a lawyer, providing one-off transactions, documents, or contract reviews, but as a holistic trusted advisor guiding your clients to look at their entire Legal, Insurance, Financial and Tax Foundation. We call that LIFT, and it’s critical for every business.
The second is supporting you to really understand the financial mechanics of your own law practice. I’ve licensed a training created by my own financial management team for you. It’s called SHIFT. And my financial management team sells it on their own for $997, but we’ve included it as our gift to you, because you need it for your law practice. And, to serve your business owner clients.
And, the third piece, that I think you’ll be most excited about is that we are teaching you to shift into recurring revenue pricing and sharing all of our pricing models for doing that with you, so you can start earning $750 - $3,000 per month for strategic business counsel services that you love to deliver.
Life and Legacy Planning Program Modules 10, 11, 12 and 13: Learn to Get Hired By Every Person, Couple, Family or Business Owner You Meet With Who Needs Your Services
This is, in my opinion, the most exciting part of the program, but I really encourage you NOT to skip right to it, even if you are tempted.
Remember how in the 6 steps above I wrote about the pathway for success in any service-based business enterprise, and I said that Step 1 is to get clear on the service you provide, and get confident delivering it and Step 2 is to get clear on who will benefit most from the service you provide. Well, modules 3 through 9 are all about just that. So you need that first! Even if just a cursory and quick review.
And, then I said that Steps 3 and 4 are all about pricing and packaging your services, and creating an intake and engagement structure that ensures you get hired by at least 90% of the people you meet with who need your services.
Well, modules 10 through 13 in the Bootcamp walk you step by step through pricing and packaging your next-level estate planning and strategic business counsel services, and getting hired by everyone you meet with using our tested, proven, refined works for every lawyer who uses it Family Wealth Planning Session and LIFT Business Breakthrough Session.
We aren’t just teaching you how to create your own system, we are teaching you the system that our lawyers use in their own practices, and licensing you to use that system for two practice clients. We do this so you can try it, test it, earn back your investment, make sure you love the way we do business, get your own estate plan done or upgraded, and get your own LIFT Systems in place, BEFORE you decide if you want to go all-in with New Law Business Model and license our done for you systems on an ongoing basis.
In these modules, you get everything you need to get hired by everyone you meet with who needs your services for next-level estate plans at $3,000 - $5,000 on average, or for strategic business counsel services at $750 - $3,000 per month.
Now, you may be saying to yourself, “what do you mean go all-in with New Law Business Model? Wouldn’t my enrollment in this Bootcamp mean I went all-in?”
Not quite. I can’t possibly teach you everything I know about building a law practice to high-6 or 7 figures, even while working part-time if you choose, in a 15-module Bootcamp. That would be silly to think, right?
What I can do is support you to make the smallest investment possible to learn how to deliver next-level estate planning and strategic business counsel services and recoup your investment with your two practice clients, so you can identify if you love the model and want to build your practice around it.
You see, once you know how to get hired by clients for a fee that is high enough to deliver a truly meaningful service that you believe in, now it’s time to ask yourself, how much (or how little) do I want to earn and how much money do I want to earn? Or in other words, which practice model do I want to build? And, what are the right marketing strategies for me to use to build that practice model?
And that’s exactly what we help you decide in Modules 14 and 15 of the Bootcamp.
Life and Legacy Planning Program Modules 14 and 15: Choose Your Practice Model and Leverage Our No-Cost Marketing Strategies to Generate Your Next 5 Clients
We guide you to choose between three primary practice models:
- The Solo Practitioner – taking home around $100,000 a year with outsourced support;
- The Staffed Practice – taking home around $250,000 a year with a team of 2.5 to 3 staff members, and you working only 3.5 days a week, once your systems are in place;
- The Seven-Figure Firm – taking home around $350,000 - $450,000 with a full-time, 7-figure practice that you can take a vacation from 2-4 weeks at a time.
If you’d love to listen in on interviews I hosted with lawyers who are successfully practicing each of these models, join our public Facebook group here, and check out #lawyerinterviews to find interviews with David Feakes, Irene DeJesus, Bill Kilpatrick, and more. Feel free to ask us to point you straight to these interviews once you're a group member, too.
So, in Module 14, we guide you to choose which of these models you want to build toward, and give you the specifics of what that will look like, the team you’ll need, the marketing strategies you’ll use, and the investments you’ll need to make each step of the way.
And, then, in Module 15, we give you our best “no-cost” marketing strategies to use in your local community.
There are ten total lessons on marketing in module 15, and here’s a peek into the first four:
Now, what if you go through the whole Bootcamp and decide that next-level estate planning and strategic business counsel services are not for you?
Well, the good news is that we’ve priced the Bootcamp in such a way that if you do your own plan (or upgrade your plan) and get your own LIFT systems in place, the Bootcamp more than pays for itself.
And, if you create plans for two friends, family members, clients or colleagues, now you’ve far exceeded the value, even if you never do any other planning again.
But, most importantly, you will have invested the time, energy, attention, and money to get one step closer to whatever is the best life and law practice for you, and if that means you rule out providing next-level estate planning and/or strategic business counsel services, and FOCUS on something else, well we support you in that and are glad to have helped you rule out one of your options!
But, what we think is MUCH MORE LIKELY to happen...
...is that you are going to love what you learn in the Bootcamp, and you are going to discover that there is a way to love your life and your law practice and to use your law degree in a way that allows you to have a real business, and deliver a meaningful service, and make a great living, and have full control over your schedule.
If that happens, you will then have the opportunity to get to use our done for you, proven, tested, fill your practice marketing systems to educate your local community, and our automation systems and done for you technology that supports you to create raving fans who love to refer you clients via our Personal Family Lawyer or Family Business Lawyer memberships.
You won’t have to reinvent the wheel to build your practice, but can instead leverage the systems we’ve already created for you, if you choose, because we believe it’s more affordable for you to leverage our trial and error, and proven systems, than trying to go it on your own.
But, if you choose not to do that, and do want to go it on your own, that’s great too—you’ve got what you need to confidently deliver a great service, and receive the fees that you need to in order to deliver on that service as a result of your intake and engagement process.
So that, my friends, is our curriculum in a nutshell. And I could not be more excited to share it with you.
It’s taken our team thousands of man-hours to get it just so, and it will always be a work in progress, getting better and better, so we can make it easier and easier for you to serve people, couples, families and business owners in a truly meaningful way with next-level estate planning and strategic business counsel services, using your law degree to have a life and law practice you love.
Ready to Learn More About Our Core Program?