Financially Legal

Of course you can.

Abraham Lincoln once said, "A Lawyer's Time and Advice is His Stock and Trade.” While it’s true that an initial consultation has that word “initial” tacked in front of it, it’s still a “consultation.” And that means it’s a period of time in which a lawyer dispenses advice. If Lincoln thinks it’s OK, it’s probably OK.

But you already knew that. The bigger questions are really, should you charge for initial consultations? And, how to charge for initial consultations?

Confido Legal is pleased to announce that our Zapier integration is now in beta. Not only that, but we're the first legal-specific payments provider with a public Zapier integration.*

Judie Saunders doesn't take the easy way.  

Whether you're talking about her efforts to go to law school as the child of immigrants, her chosen practice area that combines criminal defense and representation of abuse survivors, or the lengths to which she's gone to build a consumer friendly law firm using technology, Judie's all in.

Many lawyers have no problem billing by the hour until it comes to initial consultations. Then things get complicated really quickly.

It seems like every time you turn around some company is offering a new practice management solution. We tried to count them recently and got tired after about a dozen.

Note: This article was originally printed in the January/February 2021 issue of the ABA GP Solo Magazine.

This episode of Financially Legal is a departure from our usual. Normally we talk about law, economics, and even finance as applied to the practice of law. Today, we’re talking about one specific legal issue that has some financial underpinnings. Specifically, the GameStop short squeeze.

Last week I joined Kristin Tyler from LAWCLERK to talk about how lawyers can use subscriptions to build a healthy law firm.

In a weird way, eCheck or ACH payments are an anachronism. Or the name "eCheck" is, at least.

We've been talking a LOT about subscription legal services lately. In fact, check out our recently launched Subscription Legal Services Resource Center where we've collected a bunch of our best subscription-related content all in one place.

Note: This article was originally printed in the November/December 2020 issue of the ABA GP Solo Magazine.

“I was told there’d be no math.” It’s a common joking refrain for law students and even practicing lawyers. “I went to law school to help people,” so many lawyers tell me. But a firm needs to pay for you  - and itself - in order to keep helping people. Let’s face it: law firms are businesses. And the better a firm runs, the more people it can help. So understanding the finance and economics of a legal services business is crucial. That’s where Kenna comes in. 

Ernie “the Attorney” Svenson has been thinking about law, tech, and making law practices work better for lawyers for a long time. So, we were stoked when he invited our own Dan Lear to be a guest on his Law Firm Autopilot podcast.

The occasion was the recent release of Confido Legal’s subscription legal services white paper and the topic was . . . wait for it . . . subscription legal services.

Dan and Ernie talked about subscription fatigue (fact or fiction?), the importance of a solid value proposition for subscription legal services, how to get started with subscription legal services, how subscriptions can allow you to leverage your highest and best use as an attorney, the economics of law firm subscriptions and how that’s related to niche marketing, and how Confido Legal is different from LawPay.

Check out the episode here and a big thanks to Ernie for the invitation!

We're very pleased to announce the release of our subscription legal services white paper. Six months and over 40 pages in the making, this is every law firm's guide to getting started with subscription legal services.

Getting paid electronically is more relevant than ever in our current pandemic moment. It's no wonder, then, that lawyers have lots of questions about how to get paid without cash or paper checks.

Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. You can find our first post “What are subscription legal services?” here. Our second post, "The 'why' of subscription legal services (Part 2)" is here.  The third post, "The ethics of subscription legal services (Part 3)" is here. Part 4, "How to launch your subscription legal services offering (Part 4)," can be found here.

We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make offering subscription legal services easy. If you'd like to learn more about the tools we’ve built, contact us.  

We also have three episodes of our Financially Legal podcast featuring lawyers who have built and are offering subscription legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin, Beth Lebowitz, and Kimberly Bennett. You can also hear me and Megan Zavieh discuss the ethics of subscription legal services on her Financially Legal podcast episode.

Allen Rodriguez is a legal product development strategist who has been serving the legal industry for over 18 years. He’s currently the Founder and CEO of the law innovation agency One400. Before that he was the Director of Attorney Services at LegalZoom, where he helped LegalZoom figure out their, now very successful, subscription and lawyer-assisted offerings. He got his start in the legal sector running operations at the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service.  

Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. You can find our first post “What are subscription legal services?” here. Our second post, "The 'why' of subscription legal services (Part 2)" is here.  The third post, The ethics of subscription legal services (Part 3) is here. We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make offering subscription legal services easy. If you'd like to learn more about the tools we’ve built, contact us.  

We also have three episodes of our Financially Legal podcast featuring lawyers who have built and are offering subscription legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin, Beth Lebowitz, and Kimberly Bennett. You can also hear me and Megan Zavieh discuss the ethics of subscription legal services on her Financially Legal podcast episode.

Nika Kabiri is a JD, a PhD, a decision science consultant, teacher, and writer. If that’s not enough for you, just know she’s a rock star. Previously Nika was the Director of Strategic Insights at the online legal marketplace Avvo. Whether through market research, tireless and effective advocacy, or her amazing public speaking skills in that role Nika helped Avvo and the legal industry better understand the legal consumer.

Note: This is the third in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. You can find our first post “What are subscription legal services?” here. Our second post, "The 'why' of subscription legal services (Part 2)" is here.  We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make offering subscription legal services easy. If you'd like to learn more about the tools we’ve built, contact us.  

We also have three episodes of our Financially Legal podcast featuring lawyers who have built and are offering subscription legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin, Beth Lebowitz, and Kimberly Bennett. You can also hear me and Megan Zavieh discuss the ethics of subscription legal services on her Financially Legal podcast episode.

Note: This is the second in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. You can find our first post “What are subscription legal services?” here. We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make offering subscription legal services easy. If you'd like to learn more about the tools we’ve built, contact us.  

We also have three episodes of our Financially Legal podcast featuring lawyers who have built and are offering subscription legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin, Beth Lebowitz, and Kimberly Bennett. You can also hear me and Megan Zavieh discuss the ethics of subscription legal services on her Financially Legal podcast episode.

“Subscription-based legal services? Stop right there.”

Subscription-based outsourced fractional general counsel sounds like a mouthful, but it’s not really that complicated. A fixed monthly fee for part of a lawyer’s time offering business advice to a company. The examples of a variety of different types of subscription offerings in our recent five-part series on subscription legal services is all the evidence you need. Beth Lebowitz believes that this outsourced general counsel model is as good for lawyers as it is for clients. In fact, she’s so committed to it that she’s founded both a law firm, Nimbus Legal, and a marketplace/community, Auxana, around the model.

Note: This is the first in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make offering subscription legal services easy. If you'd like to learn more, contact us here.  

We also have two episodes of our Financially Legal podcast on subscription legal services featuring lawyers who have built and are offering subscription legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin and Kimberly Bennett.

If you bill time on an hourly basis for long enough you begin to ask yourself some troubling questions: Should I DIY remodel my bathroom? Or are those 70 hours better spent billing clients at an exponentially higher rate of return, while I pay a plumber to screw the job up better than I ever could? Should I do my own laundry? Or should I bill another client? Should I walk the dog? Or should I set the dog adrift on an iceberg into the ocean, saving myself countless hours that could be used to bill clients in the future?

A couple of weeks back we worked with Tom Lenfestey from the Law Practice Exchange to develop a simple calculator to help legal professionals to estimate the value of their legal practice.  We launched the calculator in conjunction with an episode of our Financially Legal podcast in which I interviewed Tom and discussed the whys and hows of law practice valuation as well as buying and selling practices. 

Lawyers can usually think of lots of possible reasons why trying something new in their practice is “against the rules.” Megan Zavieh is a California state bar defense attorney (who lives in Georgia!) and she’s not messing around. Instead, she’s launching a subscription legal services offering, cheering regulatory changes related to non-lawyer ownership and breaking down the rules around shifting credit card processing fees to clients or selling your law practice. Megan’s got some great takes on all of this plus how to run an ethical, forward-looking firm in the time of COVID and beyond.

It’s common for dentists or doctors to sell their practices but far less common for lawyers to do so. And a Zillow-like marketplace for law practices? Forget about it. And yet, that’s just what Tom Lenfestey is doing. Tom has built his business, The Law Practice Exchange, to increase liquidity in a market for law practices and evangelize the buying and selling of law practices as a legitimate option for the development, growth, and conclusion of a lawyer’s professional efforts. Tom has some valuable tips to prepare your practice for sale, how to get the most out of a sale, how to find a buyer, and much more.

TLDR: Just skip the nonsense and give me a link to the law practice valuation calculator.

A few years ago I was trying to figure out what to do with my legal career.  I met with a friend and mentor for whose firm I'd worked during law school. Perhaps sensing my trepidation about the future this close-to-retirement lawyer said "I'll give you my practice." 

Our recent podcast on how lawyers talk to clients about money inspired Confido Legal’s own Emery Wager to think about how lawyers had talked to him about money. A client of many lawyers at Gravity Payments (our parent company), Emery came up with a list of five things he wishes lawyers would do when they talk to clients about money. We dig in on this mini-episode of Financially Legal.

Listeners and readers have been pretty interested in our recent podcast on how lawyers talk to clients about money and our recent blog post about how one client (and Confido Legal team member) wishes lawyers talked to them about money. So, we decided to ask the experts how lawyers should talk to clients about money.