.png)
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Audio Book) – Chapter 10: The Secret Is the Mental Thing
In Chapter 10 of Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Second Edition), Ben Glass shares one of the most powerful truths in this whole book: your mindset determines your business success. That’s not just feel-good talk—it’s backed by results.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why mindset matters more than tactics in long-term success
- What a national champion cross-country team teaches us about mental conditioning
- How to train your brain to spot new business opportunities
- Why exposing yourself to bigger rooms and better ideas transforms your firm
- How Ben turned a $7,500 ERISA case into a six-figure profit strategy
- Why most lawyers never see opportunities right in front of them
Shout out to our friend Jay Henderson of Real Talent Hiring. Jay is a long-time GLM Summit speaker and hiring expert. We’ve relied on Jay's system for years at Ben Glass Law—and so have many of our most successful GLM members.
🎟️ Join us and Jay at the Great Legal Marketing Summit this October near Dulles Airport.
📘 Grab the book + bonuses at RenegadeLawyerMarketing.com
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast and this is another episode in the audio version of my book, great Legal Marketing. We're on chapter 10 today the Secret is the Mental Thing. But before we go there, I just want to give a shout out to our good friend, jay Henderson. Jay's coming back this year to the Great Legal Marketing Summit this October out near Dulles Airport. Jay is a performance expert, speaker and the author of a great book, the Ultimate Guide to Hiring Superstars in Any Small Business. He's also the creator of the performance process, a proven method that accelerates any business result you seek. Jay is coming back to speak at our group and for years and years, both in Ben Glass Law and Great Legal Marketing, we have relied upon Jay's expertise as a significant part of our hiring process, and he is that for many, many, many of our members, particularly our most successful Great Legal Marketing members. So if you are looking for help in hiring, if you want to vet someone before they come onto your team, reach out to Jay Henderson jayhendersonorg Real Talent Hiring he will help you.
Speaker 1:Okay, chapter 10, the Secret is the Mental Thing. You know, each year our Great Legal Marketing Tribe gathers for our National Summit and you can find out information about this year's summit at glmsummitcom. Our keynote speaker, of course, is Dan Kennedy, my longtime friend and mentor. At one of these events, an attendee came up to me at the end of the first day and he had this complaint. He said this was all about mindset. I'm looking for the newest version of the secret sauce. Well, he was wrong about what he had heard us talking about that day from the stage and he'd come in late, beer in hand, to the marketing expert roundtables we heard after dinner, at which some of our top members answered every question posed to them. But I offered him our immediate on-the-spot refund. He declined. We didn't see him much on day two. Well, you know, so often like someone who just has the wrong attitude I mean, they're real losers, right, and they come to an event like ours and then they complain. We know who they are and we pretty much don't let them register anymore. Anyway, I remembered that conversation when my son, david, pointed out an article in the Wall Street Journal. He was 17 years old at the time. He was adopted into our family when he was 12. And he was running cross country and we read the Wall Street Journal every morning together, and David had a ton of questions about politics and international relations and the news in general, and today, as a 26 year old, he's doing some really cool, interesting work in the world.
Speaker 1:The article in the journal was about a high school cross country team in New York that consistently produced teams that ran in the national cross-country championships. Now, if you don't know, cross-country is a team sport and in a race, the winner gets one point, the second two points and so on, and the team consists of seven runners. The team with the lowest point total wins, and so that's how the schools compete. Thus, you have to have a bunch of good runners, not one or two stars, to win a race. Now, this school had won nine national titles in boys and girls in nine years.
Speaker 1:National titles, and what was incredible was that it was a public school drawing students from within its own boundaries. As the article pointed out, the secret sauce was not a top secret training program that no one knew about. Quoting from a Runner's World writer, the journal wrote that the secret was the mental thing For this team, a mental thing combined a study of philosophy, disciplined eating, sleeping and training, and a devotion to one's principles. Man, you can't get any better than that. Go, listen to that again. I'll read it again. For this team, the mental thing combined a study of philosophy disciplined eating, sleeping and training and a devotion to one's principles. The team adopted a different way of thinking about the world around its members and bought into the reason they existed as a team. The Fayetteville Manlius there in Syracuse, new York, cross-country team had a set of unwavering rules that the leader coached from and insisted on, and he dismissed those unable to comply with them, much like we dismiss people who want to hang out with great legal marketing but have bad attitudes and just want to complain about things. You can decide that mindset doesn't matter, as this attendee did, but I challenge you to show me an organization that is consistently successful but pays no attention to the mindset thing. What you expose your mind to matters.
Speaker 1:In a discussion with another attorney about marketing, I was sharing various initiatives we'd started at Ben Glass Law and new projects we've been working on. He stopped me with a question I hadn't been asked before when do your ideas come from? I had to pause and think. This wasn't about mindset per se, but about the source of ideas. I dug into the recesses of my mind, recalling my philosophy studies at William Mary, to see if I had an answer.
Speaker 1:Where do ideas come from? I told him I don't know. They pop into my head pretty much like storylines. Pop into the head of a writer like Stephen King or a rock group like the Beatles. Everyone has ideas of some sort all the time. It's just that most of my ideas are about leveraging some opportunity or asset to make my life better.
Speaker 1:That's a key principle I live by. I got to be good. If I'm good, then the rest of the world will be good around me. I live by right. I got to be good. If I'm good, then the rest of the world will be good around me. If I could drive more people toward me by leaving a longer string of trust clues than my competitor, my life will improve. The more cases that come down my funnel, the more I get to choose from. We try not to choose the hardest cases. We try to choose cases that will bring in lots of money in the fastest way possible. Our cases are interesting to us. I learned a long time ago that if you do a really, really hard case and take your fee to the bank, the bank doesn't double it or triple it, because it was really really hard. Find the space that you're good at you like doing and go serve those clients and you will be well paid for it.
Speaker 1:But back to ideas for a moment. I'm not sure exactly where they come from, but I can tell you I've made it a deliberate practice to expose my mind to as many smart people as I can. That is mindset. I see my mind. I set my mind to learning and experiencing new things. I read 40 to 60 books a year and listen to another 20 to 30 on Audible. I have one of those almost all-you-can-eat subscriptions for Audible. They exist and it's pretty cool actually. And these days I go out on my bike and ride for 45 minutes, up to an hour and a half, down some quiet road yes, there are quiet roads in Northern Virginia and I listen to books. When I see interesting cases involving smart lawyers, I seek out, download and read their briefs. That's how I learned this ERISA thing that I'm on.
Speaker 1:Recently we were pondering how to effectively handle smaller ERISA benefit cases. I put that thought out there and soon after I read about a lawyer who'd collected over $88,000 in fees. Erisa has fee shifting in a case where the benefits at issue were about $7,500. It wasn't until I found and studied the defense lawyer's brief, where the defense lawyer accused the plaintiff's lawyer of something nefarious even as he was getting to write a check for almost six figures in fees, that I realized exactly how I could tweak one part of the practice to make those cases more fun and profitable for us.
Speaker 1:Developing a machine that can now run even smaller risks of benefit cases profitably has been a game changer for our law firm. Here's the crazy part the smaller the case, the more of a pushback the insurance company gives, because they're dumb as hell some of them. And we have some cases where we're covering four and five and six times the benefit amount in attorney fees, not by unduly running the bill, but just by keeping track and pushing the issue and not letting these guys get away with their BS, which is what our firm does right. And that's one of the points of exposing yourself to a bigger context, a bigger environment, a bigger picture than what's going on right now in your practice. Those smaller risk and benefit cases weren't on my radar until I read the lawyer's brief and the defense lawyer's brief and pondered things a bit, it might turn into a nice profit center.
Speaker 1:Well, this was written several years ago. It has turned into an enormous profit center. We have $45 million of benefits under management and right now, every year, we have $750,000 of automatic income. That comes from the cases that we have already won and we continue to keep the clients on claim. Think about that Three quarters of a million dollars in a section run by two paralegals who are really good at what they do. We provide a very high value for the clients, but that is based on both large and small cases, lots of them, and a system that really works.
Speaker 1:So here's the principle what you expose your mind to matters, and it matters a lot. This is what our Mastermind members experience at every meeting, and this part wasn't in the book. But for years I've been in Mastermind groups, both lawyer groups and non-lawyer groups a mixed breed, as we say and I have learned so much from being in the room with entrepreneurs who are running sometimes two and three and four businesses that are just hugely larger if that's a proper use of English than any law firm or collection of law firms I know, and sitting next to these guys and gals and figuring out how do they think, where do they get their ideas from, how do they manage, how do they scale, how do they hire and fire? It's been really, really valuable to me, so there's lots of good rooms to be in.
Speaker 1:We run some great in-person mastermind groups here at Great Legal Marketing. If you're ever interested in learning more, just reach out to us and it's just a place where lawyers come in for two days. We present problems and opportunities, we talk about ideas and we hold each other accountable for implementing solutions to the problems and implementing the opportunities and the tasks that needed to capitalize on the opportunities. Okay, next chapter, one of my favorites, chapter 11 will be on time management. Of course, dan Kenney and I wrote a whole book on time management, which you should already have, but I look forward to seeing you then. If you're not ready for the summit glmsummitcom October East Coast Delos Airport easy to get in and out, of, all right until next time.
