Embarking on a new chapter, I bid farewell to "Time Freedom for Lawyers" and embrace the dawn of "Life Beyond the Briefs." This transformation reflects a profound shift in my vision for a legal career intertwined with the essence of life itself. No longer confined by the trappings of status and wealth, I delve into the heart of personal satisfaction and the pursuit of a fulfilling existence that transcends professional accolades. As we peel back the layers of what truly constitutes success, I unpack the recognition by Above the Law, celebrating our journey into harmonizing work and life.
Setting sail into uncharted territories, I stand at the crossroads of my career—poised between the world of law and the burgeoning influence sphere. I outline an ambitious blueprint for the future, shifting gears from direct client service to embodying the strategic mindset of a CEO. We navigate through the intricacies of robust marketing strategies and the indispensability of a digital footprint, even in a referral-driven industry. Join me as we traverse through LinkedIn triumphs, gratitude epiphanies, and the kaleidoscope of mastermind sessions and collaborations that await. Together, we confront the existential conundrums of growth, staffing, systems, and the overarching enigma of what success truly means.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Embarking on a new chapter, I bid farewell to "Time Freedom for Lawyers" and embrace the dawn of "Life Beyond the Briefs." This transformation reflects a profound shift in my vision for a legal career intertwined with the essence of life itself. No longer confined by the trappings of status and wealth, I delve into the heart of personal satisfaction and the pursuit of a fulfilling existence that transcends professional accolades. As we peel back the layers of what truly constitutes success, I unpack the recognition by Above the Law, celebrating our journey into harmonizing work and life.
Setting sail into uncharted territories, I stand at the crossroads of my career—poised between the world of law and the burgeoning influence sphere. I outline an ambitious blueprint for the future, shifting gears from direct client service to embodying the strategic mindset of a CEO. We navigate through the intricacies of robust marketing strategies and the indispensability of a digital footprint, even in a referral-driven industry. Join me as we traverse through LinkedIn triumphs, gratitude epiphanies, and the kaleidoscope of mastermind sessions and collaborations that await. Together, we confront the existential conundrums of growth, staffing, systems, and the overarching enigma of what success truly means.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Welcome back and happy New Year. New Year, new you, new Year, new Title. If you noticed, over the last I don't know, maybe the last half of the year as I was putting out episodes of Time Freedom for Lawyers, I really stopped introducing it as Time Freedom for Lawyers and the reason for that is that the name just kind of stopped resonating with me and I wanted to create a space where, if I wanted to transition the name and the branding, I could. And so I'm relaunching this podcast now, in 2024, under the name Life Beyond the Briefs, because for a couple of reasons. Number one I had a lot of resistance when I was explaining that I had a show called Time Freedom for Lawyers, because at a certain point the name just kind of felt a little bit douchey to me, because the goal is not to be free and do nothing right. The goal of that show and the goal of the reason that I'm putting this out and really everything that I do in my own personal branding, is to do good work for people that you like doing work for, with a team that you like doing work with, and have a life outside of work, right. So I say over and over and over again, the goal of building a law practice or legal career is to design the career around the kind of life that you want to live, be that the amount of money that you want to make, where you want to live, the kind of activities you want to be able to do with your spouse and with your kids, the kind of travel that you want to go on with your friends, instead of the way that most lawyers do it, which is chase these career accolades and chase more money in such a way that creates a life that boxes you in to your career. And now you've got the career that you thought you wanted and the life that you didn't want because you didn't plan it the correct way around.
Speaker 1:
I heard somebody say and it might have been Bill Hauser on an SMB team 3-day event, that you nobody actually wants a $10 million firm. Right, you want the way that you think a $10 million firm is going to make you Feel, and so we shoot for these financial targets or profit targets or revenue targets because of the way that we think it's going to make us feel. And I'm going to circle back to that because we're going into, in the next week or so, my firms annual EOS traction retreat where we're going to be resetting targets. And one of the things that's been in the back of my mind the last 12 or 18 months is we keep pulling these numbers out of thin air and saying we want to do five million, we want to do eight million, we want to do 14 million and at the end of the day, the number is not all that important. What's important is I want to do five million so that I can X. I want to do eight million so that I can. Why Z a right and so many of us stop at I want to do five million or I want to do eight million, without focusing on the thing that actually matters, which is the reason that you want to do Five or eight or 10 or a hundred million dollars in your law firm.
Speaker 1:
There's so much hustle porn around building a seven figure firm or building an eight figure form or building a nine figure firm and having an exit right, but at the end of the day, like who the fuck cares? Who the fuck cares what top line revenue you're doing if you have the kind of a life that boxes you in, where you can't do fun stuff with your family and you can't pick up and go and do it whenever you want, right? And so all of that circles about. Is that time freedom? Yes, that is time freedom, but, but the goal is not to build the thing where you don't have to work. The goal is not to build the thing and be the owner and have everybody else do the work so that you can go do whatever you want. The goal is to do fulfilling work in your life and have a life beyond the work, right? And so relaunching this podcast in twenty twenty four under the title life beyond the briefs, because that's what I think this is really about we have to do good work. That's the poker ante to play the game, but you are doing good work so that you can have a good life beyond the brief. So that's the four minute rant at the beginning of the show, if you're still with me, thanks for hanging in there. Let me tell you what's coming up in the next couple of episodes. I had the I'm humbled and honored. Humbled and honored to have been named by above the law as one of the legal voices to listen to for career advice in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1:
If you don't know what above the law is, it's a legal gossip blog not really a gossip blog, but kind of sort. At least that's how it started. When I was in law school in 2007 and 2008, I used to read this blog all the time and it would be filled with stories of dumb things some associates did at some or so shit parties, raises and bonuses at big law firms that I never had a job at, never had a shot at doing a job at, and a little bit of advice on, like, how to get a job, but also interesting things that were happening in the law like they called them, bench slaps. Like a judge would write a pithy, vicious opinion About something stupid that a lawyer did and they would. They would do a write up on that. It'd be interesting. So you know a gossip blog, to the extent that lawyers care about gossip blogs.
Speaker 1:
Anyway, the couple of days after Christmas, I got tagged in this post on LinkedIn from Steven Chung, who's an author at above the law, saying hey, here's Fifteen or twenty people to follow for career advice If you're a lawyer, and I think that's pretty cool, because I never set out to be the career advice guy. I guess maybe I did. I set out to to offer advice to people who are three to ten years Beyond me, but never because I thought like somebody at above the law would recognize more, because I thought there were any monetary value in that. What's whoever? I just talk on here To entertain myself number one and to To try to help somebody, be the voice for somebody that needs to hear what I needed to hear a couple of years ago. So that's why this is cool to be named, and there's a bunch of other people that I'm I'm really honored to be named alongside of and I think I have a different message, because my message is usually and mostly To solo and small law firm associates about how do we either build our own practice or how do we build a personal brand inside of a practice where we want to stay. So that's kind of a cool little accolade.
Speaker 1:
That coincides with something a project that I started over Christmas break For law students, which is an ask me anything style series of episodes. So I invited a handful of law students to do Zoom calls with me. Bring your questions about how do I find a job, what's the right kind of career for me, what should I be actually Doing in my second, third year of law school that will have any impact on my career when I get out of school. That kind of thing is going to be serious of those episodes coming out. I have some episodes coming with marketing folks Tiffany Swadensky and Kevin Daisy in particular and then we're going to be talking to you know, all kinds of people about how to build a practice, how to build the life that you actually want to have, so that you don't hate Sunday night because you know you're going to show up Monday to a firm you don't want to work at and you don't spend all your time looking forward to Friday afternoon and it's funny that I say that, right, I don't spend all my time looking forward to five o'clock on Friday because most lawyers I think my sense is most lawyers are actually working part of Saturday, part of Sunday also, and so maybe you don't spend your life looking forward to any cutoff, except at some point you're going to retire and bleed out the bag of money for long enough until you die.
Speaker 1:
So here's what's going on in my life. We're recording this on Thursday, january 4th, and I am taking off in just a couple of hours to go on a quick three day trip to Cancun with my accountability pod to go over some vision setting and some goal setting for the next year. And you know I'm in this space where I'm back and forth on like what do I want to be when I grow up? What do I actually want to do? Do I actually want to have any hand in the practice of law whatsoever or do I just want to quote, like be an influencer, to be totally transparent about that. And there are times when I'm really excited to be in the practice of law and be in the strategy, and then there are times when I'm answering the 17th question from a client that's the same thing that I've been answering for the last 15 years and so focusing in 2024 on really elevating myself out of the day to day correspondence with any clients working on any cases and into the CEO role where all that I do is help my team strategize, pull the big levers and then attract attention.
Speaker 1:
One of the theses that we have going into 2024 with regard to marketing is it is getting really, really hard to do SEO and pay per click well and that if you want to compete with the big boys, you've got to spend big boy dollars, and we don't feel like we have the know how in our firm to even vet an agency to spend big boy dollars and make those kinds of bets. It's just the spot where we are. We don't want to compete really with the Morgan and Morgan's and the Cochran's and the people who are on TV. And so we've been spending time thinking about, well, how can we compete differently for attention? Because we know that 75% of our dollars and 60% of our cases actually come from referrals from other human beings. So how can we get in front of more other human beings who have our pools of clients who can refer us cases? But how can we also build out just enough social media proof, just enough website proof that when you search for us, we exist?
Speaker 1:
So there are too many lawyers out there that say oh, all my stuff comes from referrals, I don't need a digital presence at all Bullshit. Yes, you do, because they are getting two or three referrals. They're looking people up and if you are the only one that doesn't have a website or you're the only one that doesn't have a social media presence, they're not even calling you. So you don't even know how many people you are missing out on. Do all your cases come from referrals? Yes, maybe, but that might be because you don't have any digital marketing presence whatsoever and you don't have any idea how many of those referrals are not even calling you because you don't have any digital marketing presence whatsoever.
Speaker 1:
So my goal going into 2024 is expand the influence, expand the audience, and so the things that I'm doing are obviously the relaunched, the podcast I'm building on LinkedIn. I've gone in the last year or so from under a thousand followers to a little bit over sixty five hundred, but generated almost four million impressions. So I must have something you know, reasonably important to say. It's funny on social media what gets shared and what doesn't get shared, because the stuff that you write that you think is an absolute banger nobody cares about and the stuff that's kind of like generic positivity sometimes gets shared over and over and over my. Really my secret to that is just been putting something up every single day for the last I don't know thirteen months, fourteen months, and there's a snowball effect, right, and sometimes I think people follow me and share myself just because they see other people following me and showing my stuff. And so I'm taking what I've learned on LinkedIn and I'm and I'm bringing it over to Instagram also, project that I'm working on in the beginning of the year is 30 days of gratitude.
Speaker 1:
So I came into this year and all around me people are like my word of the year is this. My theme of the year is this. My big, big goal for the year is this, and I'm sitting here like I don't really have one, and so so I started in this project. You can go watch the first video on this, but the first video is about If I don't really have something to run at like. Maybe that's because, objectively, things are pretty good in my life and maybe I should take some more time and be grateful and happy for the things that are pretty good in my life. So over the next 28 more days, just shooting a quick video of something I'm grateful for or happy for in the moment, posting that that's on the Brian Glass over at Instagram Appreciate if you follow me there and so yeah, so I'm going down to Cancun for a couple of days with my pod to do that goal setting and to do that vivid visioning. That is a little bit lost on me right now, which is a weird thing to say if you've listened to most of my podcast, but I'm kind of in a what's next phase.
Speaker 1:
Sunday I fly back and then immediately drive down to our two day annual planning event for Ben Glass Law. Monday and Tuesday I have Wednesday to actually do casework. Following Thursday Friday we have our hero level mastermind group in the office. Those are folks generally doing under a million dollars in revenue at a law firm, generally focused on more clients, better clients, more money and and starting to scale out of the practice of being in the niches or in the trenches on every single case, starting to hire great staff and build systems. So that's Thursday, friday, following week, following week shit. I have a two day annual event for a great new marketing. And then we have our icon group coming into following Thursday and Friday.
Speaker 1:
Those, those are law firms generally doing seven figures and more in revenue where they I say the owner is trying to self actualize. The owner is a lot of times in a position where I am going, what do I actually want to do with my life? And then I think I have a couple of days to again put in some actual work in the law firm, then at the end of the month going and spending a couple of nights at Great Wolf Lodge Water Park with my family at down in Williamsburg and then taking off for Vermont for a go abundance mastermind at the end of January. So January is jam packed with stuff that all I would have individually chosen to do all of it. It's really hard to do all of it put out a podcast, be on social media and be a lawyer all in the same month. So challenging month ahead, exciting month ahead.
Speaker 1:
I'm excited to get some new shows out to you. If there's something that you want to hear about, if there's a person you think I should talk to, if you think I should talk to you, if there's a topic you think we should discuss, let me know. Just shoot me an email, yeah, shoot. Or find me on LinkedIn and shoot me a text there and we'll get to it. So, guys, I hope that your new year is off to a fantastic start. I hope that you don't hate me for changing the name of the show and I hope that you find all of the things that you want to do and a life beyond the briefs in 2024. See you.