Financially Legal

Episode 29: Are lawyers entrepreneurs? An interview with Stephanie Everett from Lawyerist - Lawyer Community Miniseries - Episode #3

Written by Dan Lear | May 19, 2021 12:00:00 PM

The founder of the Lawyerist website, Sam Glover, once told me that he started Lawyerist because he was mad at a practice management company and wanted a place to complain. He gave birth to a technology blog that’s morphed into a large and well-known online legal destination. But Lawyerist is way more than a website. Through freely available web content, its free-to-join Insider program, and the paid Lawyerist community, Lawyerist Lab, Lawyerist provides ongoing strategic and tactical advice to budding lawyer-entrepreneurs.

In this installment in our Lawyer Communities series (see a summary of the series and our broad takeaways here) we dig in to understand how all the pieces of the Lawyerist puzzle fit together and whether it’s a community you might want to be a part of.

 

A number of years ago, toward the end of the calendar year - I made a trip to a smallish to-remain-nameless western city. The occasion was a day-long bar-sponsored seminar for the lawyers in the area to catch up on their continuing legal education, or CLE, obligations. 

To be fair, this was a few years ago, when I had fewer gray hairs myself but the audience at this event was DECIDEDLY male, pale, and frail. A few slept through a good chunk of the program. When I asked some of these folks why they came to this event the answer was “I’ve been doing this for decades - getting my year-end CLE at the bar - what else would I do?”

Personally, I believe that rumors of the death of bar associations are greatly exaggerated but I’m not surprised at all to see communities like Lawyerist emerging to meet the needs of entrepreneurial lawyers who FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS would not fit at the bar-sponsored CLE I just referenced.

In this episode of the Financially Legal series on lawyer communities I talk with Stephanie Everett, President of Lawyerist, about why Lawyerist evolved from tech blog to lawyer community and how they’re helping their paid members, their Insiders, and any legal professional who goes to their website to earn more money, have more time, and help more people. Specifically, Stephanie and I talk about entrepreneurship, the reasons for “investing” in a professional or business coach, the effects of the pandemic on lawyer communities and law firms in general, and how the Lawyerist community is built around their values or ideals of being intentional, entrepreneurial, empathetic, self-aware, adaptable, and tech-enabled.