How You Can Put the Life & Legacy Planning Model to Work in Your Law Practice

In this blog post — the second in our series (read the first post here) —I’m going to let you know the fast and easy way to get started with the Life & Legacy Planning Model in the next 60 days, so you can practice law in a way that you love and enjoy… while adding an easy, part-time, $3,000 — $5,000 per client minimum to your bottom line.

As well, in this post, I’m also going to introduce you to a somewhat controversial and contrarian system that turns inquiries into appointments, and appointments into clients… in an unusual, but simple way. And, at an astonishingly high rate.

With this system, your calendar is booked out four to six weeks in advance with prospects happy to wait to work with you. Appointment cancellations are virtually eliminated. And you no longer have to chase prospects or clients for more business.

You’ll also hear about a unique fee quoting system that consistently engages 97.5% of prospects who come into your office, at higher fees, with new pricing and packaging and a fee quoting system that converts like crazy. Best of all, this all happens without you having to sell clients on working with you.

In this post you’ll see how and why, when you use this unique fee quoting system, prospects do not haggle with you, Lookie-Loos and shoppers stop shopping, and engage – because you’re now “unshoppable”, and you collect an average fee of $3,000 — $5,000 per new client for estate planning services you love to deliver.

You’ll even see my personal “million-dollar fee schedule” that took me literally two years and more than $12,500 to develop but paid for itself the very first time I used it. You’ll want to pay close attention to that part of this post.

More about that in just a bit.

By the time you are finished reading, you’ll understand why and how the Life & Legacy Planning Model gives you a meaningful and authentic way of practicing law so you enjoy being a lawyer again, are loved by your clients, have complete control of your schedule, and become the lawyer you’ve always wanted to be.

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In today’s post, I’ve put together a sort of Mini Fast-Start Class for you that quickly lays-out the key components needed to get up and running with the Life & Legacy Planning Model within the next 60 days.

Now let me be clear, there are certainly important nuances to this model that allow you to have even greater freedom, greater fees, and a greater engagement rate, but in keeping with my promise of showing you how to start using the Life & Legacy Planning Model in less than 60 days to add a fast $3,000 — $5,000 per client, minimum, to your bottom-line, I want to give you a simple framework and process so you can experience the beginning benefits of this model right away.

Since building and selling a million-dollar a year law practice of my own, I’ve coached and trained hundreds of lawyers over the last 5 years, from all over the country, on this new Life & Legacy Planning Model.

I believe that… YES! You went to law school hoping to make a great living, but not at the cost of feeling good about yourself, or the work you do each day, or the types of clients you work with and serve.

Maybe you’re taking whatever walks in the door (we call that being a “door lawyer”) because you think you have to and seeing you just cannot get ahead.

And maybe you’ve grown to truly dislike, even at times, hate being a lawyer and practicing law.

Maybe you’ve even gotten to the point of wondering if it may be time to start looking for another line of work.

Or, maybe, right now, you’re at a big law firm and you’ve got a job and the security of a paycheck and you feel like you should really hold onto it even though that firm is just not feeding your ambition or your soul.

Or, perhaps you’re in solo practice already, and you’re spending more time chasing clients than actually serving them. Stuck on that marketing merry-go-round, wondering where the next client is going to come from.

Well, I understand. Because before I figured this whole Life & Legacy Planning Model out, I was there myself.

My Journey and Rise to Success and Freedom

I was an associate at a big law firm, one of the best: Munger, Tolles & Olson — and collecting a six-figure paycheck.

Even though I had made it in every traditional sense of the word, I felt empty inside… wondering what had happened to my original dream of serving clients in a meaningful way — which is why I went to law school in the first place.

So, with two babies at home, and my husband staying at home to take care of them, I made the leap and started my own law practice with a dream of being there for my family, having a great relationship with my clients, and feeling a sense of pride in the work I was doing.

Very quickly, I saw that the traditional “transactional” model of estate planning practice was broken.

I would go out and speak to groups of parents about estate planning, and they told me how grateful they were for my talk and what I had shared with them, but then they didn’t hire me to get their estate planning done.

When I did get hired, it was for form documents that I secretly wondered if they could just by themselves, online.

I remembered back to when my father-in-law had died when I was in law school. He had worked with an estate planning lawyer and paid $3,000 for an estate plan to keep us out of the probate court and from having to deal with his ex-wife, only for us to be stuck in the probate court and dealing with his ex-wife anyway when he passed.

At the time, I thought for sure his lawyer must have committed malpractice, but then it turned out this was exactly the way I was practicing, and it was no wonder I had a hard time getting hired. I didn’t really believe in the service I was providing because I had seen the real-life consequences.

So, I began studying some of what I thought were the most successful lawyers out there.

I say, “who I thought were the most successful” because they appeared to be really successful: they were busy and they had lots of clients, but when I got behind the scenes, what I found is that many of them were more stuck than anyone else.

They had boxed themselves into a corner. They had high overhead, no relationships with their clients, were just processing documents and thinking about the next new client ... discouraged, drained, and disillusioned.

And, they weren’t even able to take a break, because if they did, the whole thing would cave in on them.

No way! That was not the kind of practice I wanted, nor was that the kind of practice I was going to model.

So, I then began to study the leaders in other service-based industries: successful entrepreneurial doctors, auto repair shop owners, even carpet cleaners.

And I looked at what they were doing that could apply to my practice. And, by doing that, I created a law practice model that would give me the freedom to serve the types of clients I wanted to, with the type and depth of legal counsel I wanted to, in a meaningful, fulfilling, and lucrative way, while maintaining nearly total control of my schedule.

The result?

In just 36 months, this new law business model- the Life & Legacy Planning Model— built me a legal practice producing over a million dollars a year in revenue.

And, over the last ten years, I’ve taught this same model to thousands of attorneys, watching them build their own make a difference high-6 and 7-figure law practices.

The Three Keys To Getting Started With Life & Legacy Planning in Your Law Practice

So, let me share with you three of the keys to getting started with this model in your own practice so you can experience its benefits firsthand in less than 60 days.

You can have a life and law practice you love serving families and/or small business owners in a whole new way with Life & Legacy Planning. Here are the first 3 steps:

1. Deliver on an Extraordinary Service You Truly Believe In -- We Call This Getting Congruent

The first issue I had to reconcile when I created a new law business model for myself was that I didn’t really believe in the traditional “transactional” estate planning model. At first that was just because of what I had experienced when my father-in-law died, but then one night, I was out to dinner with my husband, our daughter at home with a babysitter, and it dawned on me that even though I had created an estate plan, and named legal guardians for her in our wills, there was a major hole in our planning that would have her taken into the care of strangers if we didn’t make it home that night.

We had named legal guardians for her, but those guardians were 3000 miles away in Florida, and we lived in California. That meant that if the authorities got to my house and found our daughter home with our babysitter, they would have no choice but to take her into the care of strangers while they figured things out. That was not okay with me!

And that was just the first of many holes I found in the traditional estate planning practice model. I got so riled up about it, that I wrote a book on it! Wear Clean Underwear: A Fast, Fun, Friendly - and Essential -- Guide to Legal Planning for Busy Parents, turned into the best-selling book on legal planning. You can get a free copy of Wear Clean Underwear here, and read all about the holes I discovered in the traditional planning model here.

So, the first step is for you to get congruent too. Get yourself a plan in place that you truly know will keep your family out of court and conflict, your kids out of the care of strangers (or anyone you wouldn’t want) and will leave your loved ones with a legacy of your true love. We teach you how to do that, first and foremost, in our Bootcamp programs.

2. Stop Selling Legal Services With a “Free Initial Consultation”

One of the things I hated most about having my own law practice, in the beginning, was feeling as if I needed to sell my legal services, and convince people to work with me. No one likes to feel salesy, and no one likes to be sold to, either.

The typical “free initial consultation” model is all about “making the sale” and “closing the deal” and telling clients what they need. I couldn’t stand it. And, more often than not, after spending sometimes up to 4 hours with a client, I would hear “thank you so much, we’ll get back with you” or “thanks that was great, and we need to think about it.”

Every time a client I KNEW needed an estate plan for their family left without hiring me, a part of me died inside and I considered going back to the steady paycheck and a job working for someone else. Or, I wondered if maybe I should leave the law altogether.

But then, I figured out a far better solution.

I stopped selling my services through a free initial consultation, and instead, I developed an intake and initial consultation process that resulted in me getting hired by every single client I met with, and at fees that were far higher than most lawyers in my community were charging.

BOOK A CALL TO FIND OUT HOW NLBM TEACHES YOU TO ATTRACT AND BOOK CLIENTS

Best of all, my clients were super happy to pay my fees because they understood exactly what they were receiving and why my fees were higher. And, they wanted what I was offering.

My Family Wealth Planning Session process has now been used by thousands of lawyers across the United States, Canada, and even beyond, to educate, inform and empower clients to make the right choices for the people they love. And to help them choose the right fee for their planning. Yes, I did say “choose the right fee” -- you see, in our process, we don’t quote fees, clients choose their own fees for working with us, based on their desires and their budget.

The initial consultation went from being a dreaded meet and greet, worry and wonder if they are going to hire me into an educational meeting that my clients truly appreciated.

And, I never felt as if I was selling anything again, because I wasn’t. I became a trusted advisor to my clients and prospects right from the start, helping them to make the right choices for the people they loved.

You can do the same, once you learn how to use the Family Wealth Planning Session process in your own law practice, which most of our lawyers are able to learn and implement within just 2 weeks to 60 days of starting with us, depending on if they have prior knowledge about estate planning, or not.

3. Shift From Quoting Your Fees to Helping Your Clients to Choose Their Own Fees

In the traditional law practice model, a client comes in to meet with you, you tell them what they should do, and quote them a fee to do it. They have no basis to determine whether you are guiding them in the right way, and how to determine if the fee you’ve quoted them is a good fee or a bad fee. And they have no way to evaluate whether they are going to get good service or bad service. So, what do they do? They shop around, based on fees.

Giving your clients no way to evaluate your services, other than on fees, isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for them. Here’s an article I wrote for potential clients about why shopping around for an estate plan based on price could leave their family with a big mess. But, you already know it’s bad for them, you just haven’t known any other way to help your clients know whether to hire you, or the cheaper lower down the street.

We teach you how to help your clients choose their own fee. When your clients are choosing their own fee, at the intersection between their desires and their budget, what we find is that our lawyers average fees of between $3,000 — $5,000 per client. We find that when clients are given a choice of what to pay, they often choose more than if you were to just quote a fee. Sure, some clients choose a $1,500 or $2,500 plan. But, far more often, they realize they actually want more for their loved ones.

BOOK A CALL TO FIND OUT HOW TO RECREATE YOUR FEE SCHEDULE

How the Life & Legacy Planning Model Will Quickly Grow Your Bottom Line

Let’s do a little math so you can see just how quickly your bottom line can grow when you start with the Life & Legacy Planning Model.

Let’s say, with the no-cost client attraction systems we teach you, once you’ve learned the Life & Legacy Planning Model and how to conduct a Family Wealth Planning Session, you get just 5 additional phone calls a month. That’s all… just 5, for this example.

Well, at just 5, let’s assume 4 make appointments and 3 engage your services.

At an average fee of $3,500, that’s an additional $10,500 of additional revenue for you each month.

Or an additional $126,000 a year.

With a minimal increase in overhead because once you’ve learned the model, you can then use free marketing resources we teach you as part of our membership programs to generate at least 5 inquiries a month.

Now, let’s use a more realistic example and say that no and low-cost client attraction systems bring you an additional 10 new phone calls a month.

Well, at just 10 additional phone calls, you get an additional $21,000 a month of revenue.

That’s an extra $252,000 a year.

An additional quarter of a million dollars… doing meaningful work, making a real difference in the lives of your clients, with the freedom and autonomy to work when you want, and with whom you want.

What would your life be like if you only had to go into the office 2-3 days a week, yet still had a law practice generating over a million dollars a year?

If you got to decide when you would see your clients and prospects, rather than being at their beck and call, their whim?

And you had a practice that gave you the joy, again, of practicing law?

Now, this is not going to happen overnight, of course.

But if you are ready to learn how you can launch the Life & Legacy Planning Model in the next 60 days… so you can practice law in a way that you love and enjoy, use our online calendar to schedule your personal call today.