Financially Legal

Recently, our team invited seasoned litigator Diana Siri Breaux, a partner at Summit Law Group in Seattle, to interview Confido’s founder and CEO Dan Price about this very topic. As a longtime business owner, Dan has his fair share of experience with the legal system. In 2016, that experience reached new levels when Dan’s brother and co-founder, Lucas Price, took him to court after alleging that Dan’s decisions as CEO--including the decision to raise Confido’s minimum wage to $70,000 a year--had cost him money as a minority shareholder. At stake was not just millions of dollars but the very existence of the company--and the jobs of its 120+ employees.

Many law firms use QuickBooks as their accounting solution. Some firms even use QuickBooks to send invoices. But QuickBooks as a complete time-keeping and billing solution?

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.

Have you ever been caught in the middle of a case with no idea what your client is thinking? Take this opportunity to get inside the mind of a CEO who's been there.

In this virtual event, Diana Siri Breaux, partner at Summit Law Group in Seattle, interviews CEO Dan Price of Gravity Payments to uncover the answers to these and many other questions:

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.

This September I had the pleasure of speaking to the innovative lawyers, mediators and greater dispute resolution community members at the American Bar Association's Dispute Resolution Tech Expo. 

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.

This is a guest post by divorce attorney and firm owner, Russell Knight, of Chicago, Illinois.  

Almost all lawyers have a retainer or a large initial payment for legal services. Lawyers and clients enter into engagement agreements which specify how that retainer or payment is to be accounted for. Specifically, the money will be applied towards the lawyer’s hourly billing or specifically itemized tasks.

Greg Garman is a busy man. One of the founders of a 20 person law firm in Las Vegas, Greg is also the co-founder and CEO of LAWCLERK, an online marketplace for freelance legal help. In this episode, Greg shared some great insights on how and why he thinks right around 20 lawyers is the sweet spot for a small law firm.

I’ve put it off all week, but the time has come. I need to pay our law firm. They do great work and have helped protect our company during difficult times. But paying their bill is not a pleasurable experience.

Conventional wisdom is that there are really only two reasons that marriages end: sex and money. Sex with a client is frowned on and talking about it - except, perhaps as a part of the representation - is probably not a great idea. However, conversations with clients about money can be some of the most important conversations you have with them.

I've had the luxury of being a member of interview panels for many entry level positions and I absolutely love it. If you set the right tone, ask the right questions, and make sure everyone is comfortable, you end up partaking in a great discourse as opposed to just slamming someone with questions. Because these entry level candidates just want a chance to prove themselves, you end up speaking with a number of creative and clever people. Inevitably the same question pops up in some form or another; "What are you looking for in a hire?"

Jacqueline Horani is a lawyer engaged in integrative consulting and plain language law in New York City. Inspired by the integrative law movement, Jacqueline is building a practice around conscious contracting, which focuses on identifying and integrating the parties’ values directly into the contracting process.

Law firms are unique. They have unique processes and strange, sometimes archaic, rules governing the way to handle money. As a result, it's prudent for a law firm to ensure that any electronic payment processor understands and complies with these rules. Below are the most important items to check.

Collection rate is defined as the revenue you actually collect into your operating bank account divided by the total amount invoiced. Typical collection rates for law firms are around 85%, but they vary markedly by firm. Increasing your collection rate is a great way to earn more without actually doing any additional work. 

In times like these we tend to turn to philosophers, poets, musicians, writers and artists for comfort and direction - wise minds that always have an answer for the trickiest of situations and the most uncertain of times. More specifically, Bob Dylan's "The Time They Are A-Changin'" seems more relevant now than ever.

Your old road is rapidly agin'

Please get out of the new one

If you can't lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin'

We at Confido Legal, while in full support of racial equity and civil rights, have taken a moment to reflect on what we could do to make a meaningful impact. We feel that stating our support accomplishes far less than action. Epictetus stated, "Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it." 

Geri Green and Cynthia Chandler have been fighting for marginalized individuals both in and out of courts for decades. In this episode of Financially Legal we talk about how and why, according to the 2019 Clio Trends report, civil rights attorneys bill for so little of their work (20% - the lowest of any practice area) and collect so little of what they bill (80% - third lowest). 

Dan Lear was recently interviewed by Mark Homer of legal marketing firm GNGF. Dan and Mark dove into many different topics including: 

• Company culture
• A $70,000 minimum wage
• The Confido Legal platform
• Law firm finance
• Alternative fee structures
• Expectations of the modern consumer of legal services

This week Dan Lear and Emery Wager joined Erin Levine of Hello Divorce and Liam Moriarty of Lawgood to talk the future Legal Tech. 

Seth Bloom is the Sr. Director of Attorney Services at Levelset. If you’re not familiar with Levelset, it’s a company that helps all kinds of contractors, but particularly those in the construction space get paid and focus on what they like to do. It’s most relevant for legal professionals because those contractors often file, manage, and – when things go south - litigate liens. Enter Seth and the network of attorneys he’s building to help those construction professionals sort all of that out; but Seth's story doesn’t start there.

Erin Giglia is the Co-Owner of Montage Legal Group. As you’ll hear, Montage was founded more than a decade ago to exploit a “gap in the marketplace between freelancers and law firms.” Since then the model that Erin and her co-founder Laurie established has been emulated, adapted and admired by firms and freelance legal business across the legal sector.