Financially Legal

Allison Williams, the Law Firm Mentor, helps law firms grow and reach their full potential. Her podcast, Crushing Chaos, tackles all sorts of issues lawyers face while working to grow their firms. 

Even with the effects of COVID still lingering, we as attorneys have an opportunity to make 2021 our firms' best year yet. Join Confido Legal and law firm financial consultant Devon Thurtle Anderson of Skepsis Technologies as we explore the unique opportunities 2021 offers for law firms. We'll discuss how firms can seize these opportunities to realize both short and long-term growth. Spoiler alert: Our strategies don't require raising rates or working more hours! In fact, we specifically recommend against that.

Some of the topics we'll cover include:

There’s probably no principle more important to growing and scaling a law firm than delegation. Whether it’s identifying the tasks that need to be done, teaching and coaching others to do them, or simply letting go, you’ll be hard-pressed to grow your legal business if you can’t delegate. If you’ve ever wondered how delegation might work in your firm and how to get started, this episode is for you.

With our recently announced Zapier integration we at Confido Legal are excited about the power of automation - and especially automated payments - for lawyers and law firms. 

While Zapier is a technically a no-code development platform, defined in Wikipedia as a platform that "allows programmers and non-programmers to create application software through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional computer programming," it still has a modest complexity, especially for folks who have very little background in programming. 

If you’ve ever wondered how to tie together different systems in your law practice, you need to know about Zapier.

One of the most important things about law practice is getting paid. With the advent of electronic payments technology, the process of getting paid can be easier than ever. Some of you may be saying "Advent?!?!? PayPal is more than 20 years old!" But research suggests that fewer than 25% of lawyers actually use some kind of  electronic payments technology. The vast majority of lawyers are still getting paid by some combination of cash, checks, and wires. But I digress.

Zapier is really powerful. Some law firms struggle to get the most out of it not because they don't know how to use Zapier but because they don't know about everything it can do.

Zapier is a no-code platform that helps businesses and individuals automate work by connecting different applications. But don't let "no-code" fool you. There is a learning curve associated with Zapier. This post explains the basics of Zapier and how it works with Confido Legal. If you want to go one level deeper and see some examples of legal-specific Zaps as well learn more about the "why" of Zapier, check out our recent longer-form post on automating legal payments with Zapier.

On March 8 Law Firm Mentor's Allison Williams and Maddy Martin from Smith.ai and I held a webinar about whether and how to charge for initial consultations called “The Dos and Don'ts of Paid Consultations for Attorneys.” You can watch the webinar replay here. 

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.

A chargeback is a credit card processing term for a transaction that is processed successfully but is later reversed. This article is focused on how to limit chargebacks before they occur. If your law firm has already received a chargeback notification, see How to Dispute a Chargeback for Law Firms.  

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!

For many law firms, credit card processing fees are a sizeable item on the income statement. Because there are a variety of different types of processing fees, it can be difficult to determine exactly how much a firm is paying and how those fees can be reduced.

This event is designed for accounting and financial consulting professionals who work with and advise law firms. We will cover:

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.