Don’t Be a Door Lawyer: Do This to Get to the Income + Impact Instead

Ali Katz:
I want to encourage everybody who's hearing this to know that money debt is way better than time debt. We don't think of time debt because culturally, people don't tell you not to go into time debt. They tell you not to go into money debt. But time debt is way worse because you can always make more money, but you can't make more time, as Chris is showing you today.

Ali Katz:
Hello and welcome to the NewLaw podcast, where we guide entrepreneurial lawyers to build law practices into businesses they love. I'm Ali Katz. In this very brief episode, you are going to hear directly from one of our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders, Chris, about why it doesn't make sense or what he wish he would have done differently when he was starting his practice. When it came to taking whatever walks in the door. Chris felt that he needed to take whatever walks in the door. And in some cases, he wanted to take whatever came in the door because he wanted to help his friends. But it delayed his progress significantly as a result. And he didn't want to go into money debt. Instead, as a result, he ended up in time debt, pushing out the success of his firm several years.

Ali Katz:
So imagine this. Imagine that instead of taking whatever walks in the door, which causes all sorts of problems, it creates a reality where it's very hard to become an expert. It's very hard to focus your marketing on a very specific niche, which means that your marketing is scattershot and expensive. It creates a reality where you are constantly having to invest in learning, and it's really hard to move out of the hourly billing model. When…

Ali Katz:
So imagine this. Imagine that instead of taking whatever walks in the door, which causes all sorts of problems, it creates a reality where it's very hard to become an expert. It's very hard to focus your marketing on a very specific niche, which means that your marketing is scattershot and expensive. It creates a reality where you are constantly having to invest in learning, and it's really hard to move out of the hourly billing model. When you focus on a specific practice area, whether that's estate planning, using life and legacy planning, like we teach at NewLaw, or whether it is divorce, or bankruptcy, or personal injury, or any practice area that you choose. When you focus in on a specific practice area, number one, you get to become an expert in that practice area, meaning that right away, people view the value of your service as higher. Your potential clients see you as somebody who provides more value than the person who is a generalist. So that's number one. Number two, you invest so much less in having to learn new areas constantly.

Ali Katz:
One of the biggest challenges when you're going out on your own or you're building a business is the learning curve. And so the shorter that you can make that learning curve, the better, because that just saves you so much time, energy and attention. Those are your non-renewable resources. When you focus in on a specific practice area, you are able to package your services where you make it very clear to yourself and to anybody that's going to invest in your business, what the returns on your investment can be. Because when you can package your services instead of trading your time hourly, what happens is you begin to be able to set goals and metrics, key performance indicators. Okay, if I'm going to engage clients at three, four, five, $6,000, how many clients do I need to engage each month to hit my financial goals? Now I have a metric. Okay, I need to engage four new clients this month, eight new clients this month, twelve new clients this month. Based on the average package rate that I'm charging that I'm able to receive now, I can work backwards. Okay. How many people do I need to speak in front of? How many people do I need to mute through networking in order to engage that many clients? I begin to be able to structure my entire marketing intake, engagement and service around that specific practice area.

Ali Katz:
Now, let's take it even farther. Let's take it to the place where you're not only within a specific practice area, but you niche down to a specific group of people that you are serving with that practice area. So let's say that you're doing estate planning and you're offering life and legacy planning. Well, there's 33 million mass affluent people in the United States. You can search in your town, you can search in your community, you can search in your state to see how many people are in the mass affluent. That's a term of art. You can search for, you could go on chat GPT, you could go on perplexity AI, you could go on Google and you could search the term how many people are considered mass affluent in my town? Give the name of the town, in my zip code, in my state.

Ali Katz:
Go find that out. What you're going to discover is that it's far more people than you can possibly serve, and it's far more people than you can effectively reach with your marketing. Because you don't have an unlimited marketing budget, you don't have unlimited time. So what you need to do is niche it down. Niche it down to a specific group of people within your community, within your state, within a specific psychographic. Like business owners, like parents with young children at home, like caregivers with senior parents that they're caring for, like sandwich generation, like Gen X. These are all different markets, like families with kids who have special needs. These are all very specific niches within a practice area that you can extremely effectively reach with your education based marketing.

Ali Katz:
That's why we give our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders education based marketing in all of these different areas so that they can focus on that specific group of people in their community. By doing that, you are very easily going to be able to get up to about 20 to 25 new clients a month. Once you have the capacity for that, and certainly get to your baseline of four to six new clients a month, which you can serve as a solo, when your time, energy and attention are used in a very focused manner. And what is that focused manner? It is specifically focusing on a practice area with a model for intake, engagement and service that your marketing ties into as well. And that is all specifically designed for your practice area and the specific niche within your practice area. I will acknowledge that it is one of the most challenging, most difficult decisions that I made when I first started my practice because it felt terrifying. It felt terrifying that if I didn't take whatever came in now, I wasn't taking whatever came in the door cross practice area. I was only taking estate planning clients.

Ali Katz:
So I wasn't taking divorce or bankruptcy or anything like that. Only estate planning. No immigration, no real estate. Although if you are currently offering services with immigration, real estate, bankruptcy, divorce, you can add on estate planning to any of those practice areas. If you've mastered that model and you've got a steady stream of clients coming in for any of those practice areas now, it can make sense to add on and provide additional services to the people that you are already reaching, that you are already serving, if you've got that stabilized.

Ali Katz:
Now, I was only offering estate planning services and I was terrified to niche down and focus on serving families with young children because everybody told me if I did it, I would starve. They said, families with young children don't want to talk about estate planning. They don't want to pay for estate planning. It's way too far outside of their comfort zone, their budget. But I knew they were wrong because I was a mom and I had young kids and I knew that the most important thing that I wanted to be talking about was the well being of my kids with everyone. And so I invented this niche of serving families with young children, which was scary. But today we know all of these niches exist. Special needs, families with young children, business owners, families with seniors or elders at home. These are all niches that you can choose from. And what I discovered is that when I focused in on serving families with young children, all of a sudden I started getting business across the board from all of the other people. Families with young children who had businesses, families with young children who had senior parents, families with young children who had high net worth parents.

Ali Katz:
So I got a lot of high net worth work as a result. Families with young children who had special needs, even though I was only focusing my marketing on the families with young children. Now all of a sudden I started getting all of the other types of clients within the estate planning reality who needed estate planning and they wanted to work with me because they felt and saw my focus. It was a shock. It was a surprise. So when I speak about not taking whatever walks in the door, that starts with your practice area, from there it goes to your niche, within your niche, you're going to focus your marketing. But if that niche brings in other clients, which it will for your same practice area, yes, of course you serve them because that is within your practice area. Now, if people come in outside of your practice area, so let's say you're doing estate planning, life and legacy planning, and you get a client who needs an immigration case handled, or they need a real estate matter handled, or they need a divorce, or they need a bankruptcy, or they need a personal injury matter handled because that will happen.

Ali Katz:
Now what you want them to do is see you as their trusted advisor who helps them find the right counsel. I had somebody come in to work with me who needed a white collar matter handled and I'm so glad that they came to talk to me about it. They were in fact on my membership program. My Family Wealth VIP program is what we called it at the time. Today we call it Family Care program and it's part of our recurring revenue system that we help our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders install, which again, is something that you can do when you focus your practice area. And they came in, they had a white collar issue and I was able to get them to my former law firm, Munger, Tolles and Olsen, to the best lawyers in town that they may not have gotten access to without me. That was a value add, tremendous value add that they got access to because they were part of my recurring revenue membership.They didn't need to pay me 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500 an hour or whatever I would have been charging at that time hourly, whatever you might be charging hourly to sit down with me, tell me their story, tell me what happened and have me do the research.

Ali Katz:
I would need to find them the right lawyer, and that is a tremendous value that many of you are giving away, by the way, but that you have the opportunity to add value on when you are not a door lawyer and you get them to the right lawyer. So if you really want to help your friends, as you'll hear Chris talk about when we go to the next segment from our coaching call, if you really want to help your clients, your friends, you don't take whatever they bring you. You help them find the right counsel as part of your ongoing relationship service model. So listen in on what Chris has to say about what he wishes he would have done differently at the beginning. And I'll see you on the other side.

Ali Katz:
Chris, when you first started with us, you were brand new to estate planning and your own practice?

Chris:
Yes.

Ali Katz:
Okay. And so when you look back now at the things that you took that you wish you hadn't, can you just tell everybody here now, having been doing this for four and a half years, if you could go back and give yourself the advice from the beginning that you wish you would have had then or you wish you would have listened to because maybe you did have it, what would it be on taking on these things that you are still dealing with now?

Chris:
I think my first piece of advice, I think there's partially, for me, there's an economic part of it, but then the other part of it is just genuinely wanting to help people. So I think maybe the first thing I would say is there are going to be people that come in or that have been friends of mine that have come in and girls from close friends. And that's been a lot of the stickiness that I just really wanted to help in the situation. Felt like I can get into this and learn it and genuinely help, which I think has been true for the most part. But it's also come at a real drag on getting really good at other parts of the business because there have been learning curves on so many different fronts. So I think that's one thing. Just because I can help doesn't mean that I'm the best person to help or that best business decision to help. And yeah, probably the other part is the economic part of it might feel, I think I would have said to myself back then, like, it is going to probably be some months, like a short term hit to the bottom line by not taking on these cases.

Chris:
But in the long run, it's going to be so much better if you really get good at one thing first and then you have options to expand. But I think, I think I tried to get good at a lot of things at once, potentially, and I probably didn't realize how many things I was trying to get good at as I took on different things. And, yeah, it just really has been tough to really. Yeah. The business owner learning curve and the estate planning learning curve and just all the different. Yeah. Just the counseling and scripts and all those things. It's just the more I spread myself out, the tougher it is to really become an expert and really become comfortable with each thing.

Ali Katz:
Would you love direct support to help you grow your law practice into a business you love? Go to newlawbusinessmodel.com/show and sign up for a call with one of our trusted law business advisors. Each of our advisors has been trained directly by me over the past five years plus to help you chart your path from wherever you are now to where you want to go as efficiently and effectively as possible. You're ready to grow. We are here to help.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. And so would you have gone into debt or savings rather than taking on those clients if you could do it all over again?

Chris:
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess that was part of it. I never. I never had to do that, and I had used up some of my savings, kind of figuring out my life before I. I started doing this. So maybe that was part of the crunch.

Ali Katz:
Yeah, for sure. You had to take on that work. It sounds like.

Chris:
At least I felt that way. I'm sure there are other options available to me, and I remember listening to some of your presentations about how to wisely take on debt and plan for that and all that. But I guess I had a mindset of not wanting to take on debt, and. And I think I just had a mindset of wanting to bet on myself, and I can figure this out and I can learn it, and I don't think that was necessarily wrong, but there's just limits of, like, you pay a price for that just in the time that you have to spend and the amount of effort and energy and the amount of things that can go wrong.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. Okay. Well, I want to encourage everybody who's hearing this to know that money debt is way better than time debt. We don't think of time debt because culturally, people don't tell you not to go into time debt. They tell you not to go into money debt. But time debt is way worse, because you can always make more money, but you can't make more time, as Chris is showing you today.

Chris:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that's super helpful.

Ali Katz:
I'm glad. I'm so glad.

Ali Katz:
All right. If you have loved what you heard here in the beginning about not taking whatever walks through the door, plus what Chris said about not taking whatever walks in the door and what he wishes he would have done differently, then you're going to want to focus on a very specific practice area and a specific niche within that practice area. If that practice area is estate planning, we think you should do it as life and legacy planning. Because when you do it as life and legacy planning, as you've heard me talk about before, you are creating a differentiated service model where you can receive fees of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8000 or even more if you get into the senior care planning, if you get into special needs planning, all of which we have help you with at NewLaw, and then you are going to focus in on your very specific niche. And again, we'll help you choose that. The first thing we do is we help you to learn life and legacy planning, which is this differentiated service model and how to get hired by any client in any of the niches that you're going to be working with through our client engagement system.

Ali Katz:
Teaching the process that I've been testing, refining, proving since 2006, almost 20 years, thousands of lawyers have learned this process and we're constantly refining it to match what's happening in the market. Right? So recently we've been hearing from our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders that they're seeing cancellations and reschedules that cost them a lot of time and money from their webinars or presentations. So we've refined the model even more.

Ali Katz:
What do we do differently now? How do we eliminate those cancellations and reschedules? Back when I created it almost 20 years ago, we did it by securing the appointment time with a credit card. No lawyer was doing that. No lawyer was willing to do that. I was willing to do that, but I had to figure out how to do it the right way. And then I taught it to the other lawyers that were in my community, Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders from back then, lawyers who enrolled in my client engagement system back then. And the model has changed over time. Things are different now. So we're constantly refining based on the feedback that we get from our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders.

Ali Katz:
There's 600 of them. So we are constantly refining based on what's happening for them in their communities, whether they're big cities, rural communities. We have the full range, low income, high income, and we really create the best practice. So if you want to learn those best practices and learn life and legacy planning, and then choose a specific niche to focus on so that you can build your practice into a real business that you absolutely love, that your clients love where they feel it was created just for them, using a differentiated service model where you don't compete with the financial advisors coming online providing estate planning documents, or the AI that is providing estate planning documents. Or frankly, even the other lawyers in your community who are just providing estate planning documents. Go to newlaw.co/show and let's get you on board on the path to PFL to become a Personal Family Lawyer Firm leader and love your life as a lawyer. I'll see you on the inside.