Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Why Emotional Intelligence (Not Legal Skills) Is the Key to Winning in Family Law | Zachary Ashby
Most attorneys think legal expertise is what sets them apart. Wrong.
In family law, emotional intelligence is the real superpower.
In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, Brian Glass sits down with Zach Ashby, a family lawyer who’s built a thriving practice by focusing on client relationships, strategic sales, and firm growth.
They break down:
- Why most lawyers are terrible at sales and how to fix it
- The secret to handling high-conflict clients without losing your mind
- How mentorship, branding, and systems help scale a firm the right way
- Why the zero-sum mentality in family law is hurting your clients—and your business
Want to learn more about Zach and his firm?
Visit PNWFamilyLaw.com to see how they’re redefining family law with a client-centered approach.
Zach and his team are also rolling out new attorney bio videos to help clients connect with their lawyers before they ever step foot in the office—check them out on the website!
🎧 Hit play now and learn how to transform your approach to family law.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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.
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One axiom for family law that I cry and repeat and teach is that our family law clients are really bad at relationships. If they were good at relationships, they wouldn't need attorneys, they would just stay in a relationship right, and so there's something fundamental that that's broken down. So they need they need attorneys to help them create a new relationship with this person, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Family lawyer, who knows that emotional intelligence is just as important, if not more, than legal expertise. We're diving into why most lawyers are terrible at sales and how to fix it. How to handle high-conflict clients without losing your mind, and why mentorship, branding and systems are essential for scaling a law firm the right way. If you're ready to go beyond just knowing the law and start using strategies that actually get results, this episode is for you. Let's get into it. Hello everybody, welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build law firms that support that life. And today's guest is a lawyer from the Pacific Northwest who's done exactly that. So Zach Ashby is a family lawyer from Washington State, works with his dad from the Pacific Northwest, who's done exactly that. So Zach Ashby is a family lawyer from Washington State, works with his dad at the Pacific Northwest family law firm, and we're going to be talking today about growing your practice, the power of brand and how to make sure that your processes and procedures all align with client goals and, as importantly, owner satisfaction. Zach, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you. Zach. Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you, it's good to be here, hey, man.
Speaker 2:So I want to start with this, but just before we recorded, you told me that you are five years now into a rebrand from Ashby Law Firm. This is one of the things that I see in our future. As you know, ben Glass Law has a named owner, a co-owner, who will be a 70 in three years, and I look around at everybody else who is branding their firms and I'm like I wish I had done that a decade ago, and so you know, the expression is, if you best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, next best time is tomorrow, so maybe that ought to be on my 2025 plans. But how did you all think, kind of early on, early adopters, of branding for law firms, how did you go through that? What mistakes did you make and what kind of things are you still dealing with today?
Speaker 1:So I really like this question because we are well. I'll get to that in a second. But so dad started the firm in 2012,. Right, and when he did it, he has told me he knew nothing about it. He just everyone names their firm after themselves. So he named it Ashby Law and I hadn't even started law school at that point.
Speaker 1:Fast forward to 2020, we changed our main location and decided it was time for a rebrand.
Speaker 1:We had been going under, by that time, ashby Law, a Pacific Northwest family law firm, and dad had gotten he'd been the victim of one of those scams where they captured his website essentially ransomware, and they held it ransom. And he did the math and decided that at that point, his website wasn't worth as much as just starting a new website and got the URL pnwfamilylawcom, which is what we use now familylawcom, which is what we use now. And then he adopted Ashby Law, pacific Northwest family law firm as part of the DBA and then, when we moved, we said let's just go all in and say Pacific Northwest family law. So it just kind of it fell into place little by little, but what we've found now is I think that the biggest power of that was naming our firm with the practice area that we focus in or that we focus on, and then, but as we grow, we're actually reexamining the firm name again and thinking and none of my staff have heard about this. So this is a high level secret.
Speaker 2:So here's the secret is the staff never listens to the podcast that the owner is on. Okay, so this will remain a secret between you, me and our audience. Awesome.
Speaker 1:So we're examining again what makes a good name. I think that, from my perspective, the biggest thing is having what you do in the name, because when people look you up or hear about you, they want to know what can you do for me, and so, whatever our name is, it's going to include the words family law.
Speaker 2:So was this intentional? From Ashby Law to Ashby Law, a Pacific Northwest family law firm to Pacific Northwest family law firm? Because that's how I've heard you should do a brand transition is old name, you know, and then the, and then the new name, and then you just when you finally cut off the old name. Is that? Was that intentional, or did that just kind of happen that way?
Speaker 1:The way we transitioned was intentional. So when dad so he got advice to name it with a geographic location and your practice area and he already had Ashby Law, he didn't want to rename it completely because that's kind of scary to leave that behind, and so it took five years of a transition. I would like to say I was pushing him to do that I don't know if he would say the same thing and we finally, we took advantage of the big move from our headquarters and to just pick up a whole new name and in fact, it worked out well because we had both the names on our website. For a while. We did big publicity releases at Ashby Laws, now Pacific Northwest Family Law, and we did not see any kind of drop in calls or anything, except that we had finished the rebrand in February 2020. And then everything got shut down for COVID a month later, and so it's a little bit hard. I can't say that we did everything right, because everything the whole world went wrong a few weeks after. We did the rebrand name right.
Speaker 2:So I can't imagine many people are Googling family lawyer in the Pacific Northwest right. They're either Washington State or Walla Walla, and I know that you guys are like every major major in quotation marks, maybe city in Eastern Washington you have an office in. But you also mentioned that you're now looking at expanding maybe in Idaho, which is Idaho, pacific Northwest. I don't really know. Do people consider?
Speaker 1:that broadly Pacific Northwest. It's a very traditional thing. I think dad went to law school in court in upstate New York and in New York they still use a lot of the old geographic terms. So the Midwest is still Chicago because when they started naming geographic locations that was the Midwest and it's separate from the East Coast. And yeah, the Pacific Northwest in very technical terms is Washington, oregon and Idaho.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so is that moniker a prediction of possible expansion into those states, or were you even thinking about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. In fact, when he chose the southern title, I guess it was partly a statement of ambition, it wasn't. I want to be the Washington State family firm. I don't want to be the Northwest firm, I want to be the whole Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2:It's so funny because I think we in our firm, at different times, have talked about world domination, Virginia domination, and well shit, if we just dominated the five mile radius outside of our office, we would be happy. But you have three states cornered up there and before we got on you were talking about you're going through all of the processes and procedures to make sure that it aligns with who you are now. So what does that have to do with the brand and what you guys are doing today?
Speaker 1:So it's all part of the same project that we're considering where a brand should be. What we found is that it's really hard to trademark IP. Lawyers out there could tell you better. But geographic locations can't be trademarked. Practice areas can't be trademarked. Hard to protect a brand if we want to go and be a major player, like like a Amjur 100. But for family law, we need something that we we desire, something that we can trademark and protect and really stake a claim to, and so. But the other thing is we've opened our sixth location now, so. But the other thing is we've opened our sixth location now, and and so we have two locations on the west side of the state, one in Bellevue and one in Olympia, and we have four other locations in eastern Washington, and what we found now with six locations is that attorneys are a little bit like herding cats and getting everyone going in the same direction is difficult.
Speaker 1:I've had to repeat like this is how we do it several times in private emails to people, partly because the technology has advanced, and it's made me really reflect in writing these that when you're in a single, when you're a solo attorney or even two, you can cover up a lot of mistakes, because all the revenue depends on two attorneys and you just go and you work a few more hours. If there's a shortfall, no big deal. We didn't do this notation right in the books. Well, we'll just do a little more work and make sure we'll correct it. No problem, we'll talk with the only other person who possibly could have done this and we'll piece it together. Not a big deal. But when you have 15 attorneys and that much or more staff, that's 30 different people. At least that could have made something. And if they do it in their own idiosyncratic way, it's hard to piece back together and put the puzzle back together.
Speaker 2:Just give me an example of what's something that somebody might do in their own way. That's not following procedure. That would cause you to have a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, a big one that we've dealt with recently is we have trust checks. We actually now have a different system where we have a firm credit card and most filing fees and things where we used to use trust checks for can now be done with the credit card. We can make sure that goes through and then fund it later and that gives us an extra protection on our trust account. But we still have those out there and every so often we'll check the trust account and say, whoa, what's this check that's coming out? Don't recognize this. It wasn't following our process, what happened? And so it takes us half a day to track down the partner who signed it and figure out which client it was supposed to go to and update that client file to make sure that the check number is there and remind them that you got to write the client name on the check. So we don't have to spend half a day tracking this down and interrupt your day and things like that I mean.
Speaker 1:Other things that we've discovered is I mean even just getting documents in from like a legal messenger. The process is you're supposed to scan it, then upload it into Clio, you're supposed to name the documents in a certain way and save it in the folder. Well, we have legal assistants who, some of them, will name it in the right way, some of it will just they'll use abbreviations in the folder. Well, we have legal assistants who, some of them, will name it in the right way, some of it will just they'll use abbreviations in the name, and that makes it a little bit hard to find or search, or they get out of order and it's hard to establish whether we have the right, the full file, and or they'll save it to their desktop, meaning to go later and save it into Clio Naming conventions are one of those things that are completely unsexy but can screw up your entire day as you go back and you're looking for something and somebody has just called it something different.
Speaker 2:Or when I started here, you would have medical records, medical record, updated Medical record, new medical record, final. It's like, oh my God, delete the old ones when we've updated it.
Speaker 1:And that's the kind of thing when you're a single attorney or one or two attorneys, it's not a big deal because you know every case and you know what's going on. But, yeah, that exact thing. And I am sure that most of my employees just hate me because I keep saying, hey, you didn't do this tiny little thing and right, you need to do it, right, and yeah. So what I'd really like to do is finish this policy manual so I can say, hey, you need to reread this policy because you have to follow the policy you can't, you have to follow the policy.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so. So then what are you guys doing? Because you have six offices, 15 lawyers, at least that many staff members to maintain a sense of culture and community and core values and retrain on these little things that, like when you get called out on it, it's Zach's being picky, right, but because they don't understand the importance of anybody needs to be able to pick up any file and understand exactly what's going on with it within about 30. So how are you guys supporting and training those soft touch points?
Speaker 1:Well. So I can't say we've been doing it real well. But some of the things that we think are working well is we have a weekly we call it a weekly standing meeting. The whole firm meets via Teams and we do a quick training, we do a quick, some announcements and it's just. Everyone comes together. We see each other Once a week. We just meet with the attorneys. We go over cases, we go over wins that we've gotten for clients, what's working, what's not, new updates in the law, kind of thing. And then dad and I actually physically travel out. We try and travel out once a month. Although that was six offices Now it's become. You can't do it once a month, but I guess once every six weeks we try and go and have lunch with that office.
Speaker 2:Just get some FaceTime We've got to get that helicopter that we were talking about at the last Mastermind meeting.
Speaker 1:You know, what would work is if we just got Teslas, but they could drive more than 400 miles in a day. That could drive more than 400 miles in a day Because driving out to, like Olympia or Spokane, we wouldn't be able to use this, but then just do a self-driving car all the way out back.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, because it crushes a day right If you're behind the wheel. So that's certainly a challenge to the expansion. It's only getting worse when you move into Idaho and Oregon. So along those lines, you know, one of the things that I've always wondered about firms that grow beyond a certain size is how you maintain, like that this is the Pacific Northwest family law way of doing things and this is our special sauce, or our formula, because you do have these lawyers that go rogue for lack of a better term, or think they have a different way of doing it, or taking shortcuts, and once that starts to happen on a regular basis, like your brand falls apart, right, and so you could drill and train and retrain, but unless somebody has got eyes on what's going on in every single case, like, how do you prevent yourself from just operating 15 different solo practices under your umbrella?
Speaker 1:That's actually a huge concern for me, because I know of firms that have had as quick or quicker growth, but I know that they're essentially just solo attorneys who have joined together under a single brand, and the way I know that is they have like 100 different practice areas and if you look at their profiles, each attorney still does their own specific practice area. What we're trying to do one of the initiatives that this policy book I think is going to help us is create a better mentorship program than we've had. One thing that we've realized is that high productive and high accountability people are rare.
Speaker 2:They're hard to come by they own and operate law firms.
Speaker 1:And they own and operate law firms and expecting every attorney, even people who are top of their class, to come out and think in the same way is completely unrealistic and so having a better mentorship. So I've actually taken it on myself. The last few legal assistants I personally trained for about two weeks and we have, I've set up training scenarios, just basic stuff like here's some documents Go file them in Clio. Here's the facts of the case. Go enter it in our software so we can generate documents. Here's, you know, set up the file and then I'll give them feedback using Loom and after that try and check in about once a month with every paralegal personally and do just a random audit of a file. It takes about an hour. I meet with them and go over it and then when we meet back again, look at those same files and then do another audit and check and see if they're just one or two files. They'll have like 30 cases or more.
Speaker 1:Now I just pick one at random. What's going on here? 30 cases or more? Now, I just pick one at random. What's going on here? You're doing a good job at organizing, or hey, have you thought of this for the naming? Because it's hard If I'm looking at the name. I don't know what's in this document and I should know.
Speaker 2:Are you practicing at all? Do you have your own?
Speaker 1:caseload. So that's the other tricky thing. I don't have a personal caseload, so I don't. So that frees me up a little bit. But if we get a new attorney in, I essentially second chair or first chair cases and work with them until they know the ropes. I mean, this is another thing. When I started even though I started at the same firm my dad was at I was just thrown a bunch of cases and said to get to work. It wasn't. No one took me by the hand, wasn't? Uh, here, here's what you do, abc and a checklist. It was here. Here's, here's some cases, go go help them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I don't know which one is better. Right, because here's what you do abc and the checklist. Well, you can't have a checklist for absolutely everything that happens, because every case is different and sure they all kind of all the problems rhyme, but there's, you know, if this is I think we talked about this at some point it's like the difference between checklists and core values is the core values helps you fill in the gaps, of like when I don't have a checklist for what to do when the family is separating and dad wants to move out of state. You probably do have a checklist for what to do when the family is separating and dad wants to move out of state. You probably do have a checklist for exactly that. But when I have that fact pattern that the checklist doesn't exist for where do I look in the firm lore or culture to find the answer without having to go to Zach and ask him how do I do this?
Speaker 1:So that's another thing that dad and I have discussed quite a bit, because I want to have more checklists, because he resists this very thing. He says we don't want to be a paint by numbers law firm, because that's what a lot of family law firms tend to be is oh, I have this client, so what I need to do is file a protection order and file temporary for a parenting plan and go straight to court and beat this other person up and then we'll go to mediation. He doesn't want that because he says well, sometimes you just want, you don't want to do a motion, you want to start out with discovery, or maybe you're at the point where you need to do, where you should start with a mediation or what have you. But if you do a checklist and you're going to treat every client in their unique situation, you'll shoehorn them into your checklist. And so what I've been one project I have on the horizon that I'm going to complete this year is kind of a philosophy behind approaching the family law case, where the ultimate goal is the long-term health of the client and their relationships with family members, because one of our big we have core values that we name, but underlying all that is, that we truly believe that family relationships don't end because of a divorce, but they do continue. They just change.
Speaker 1:And the problem is that many people, when they approach divorce or when they approach family law and by people I mean attorneys and parties alike think of it as a zero-sum game and so that I'm getting out of this relationship, I'm never, never going to speak to my wife, or I'm never going to speak to my husband again and I need to grab as much time with my kids and as much property as I can, because screw them and attorneys are happy to do that because that's an easy case to litigate you just go at it tooth and nail and you don't care what damage you do along the way, but instilling in them a way to do declarations and approach mediation and all the hard work, the discovery and hard work that goes into prepping really prepping for litigation in a way that doesn't burn the bridges behind you or burn the ship, so that you can have some, a working relationship.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be friends, you don't have to be nice. You don't have to be nice necessarily, but you can be professional and cordial with your soon-to-be ex, especially if you have kids, because you're going to be part of their life, whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2:For the rest of your kid's life, at the very least, yeah, and you know and I've thought about this in our car crash firm also which is a lot of your cases really are susceptible to checklists, right, and so in our world, clear liability rear-end crash where you went to an emergency room and 12 weeks of physical therapy like checklist all the way Doesn't require really any independent legal thought unless you're going to go to trial and can probably be run by a paralegal with some attorney supervision on value, right, and I imagine there's a family law analog to that.
Speaker 2:But then there are cases where, for whatever injury or fact pattern, you're going to come across it once in five years and there is no checklist and so figuring out early on which category of case the new caller, new client is in and assigning them to like, okay, this is the checklist team and this is the brain trust team it's something that we've been toying with here and we don't have the caseload to really set up a brain trust team yet, but I think within the next couple of years that's something we're going to be looking at. It's like, hey, here's kind of the simple, easy pre-litigation auto-settle, let me know if it doesn't kind of case. And here's the cases that, like, from the day it comes in, let's prepare it as though we're going to trial until somebody makes us an offer that you just can't turn down. So does that parity of cases kind of resonate with you in family law? Yeah?
Speaker 1:cases kind of resonate with you in family law. Yeah, in fact, what I think I think personally what the best approach is is write out the checklist, write them out and see where they don't fit and where they do. And the way I approach it when I'm creating these is you create, think of it more as modules, like Legos. You're creating the different bricks and they're all going to look different. Okay, but then what you hand the attorneys is you need to build something for this client. And here's all the little building blocks. I don't know which ones you're going to want to use, because each client needs a different outcome, but you might use all of them or some.
Speaker 2:That's great. You might need a red by two and a yellow four by two and you can build different things with it, right? Yeah, but the parts are the same.
Speaker 1:That's a great analogy All the parts are the same. When you go do a motion for child support, it's going to be the same. What's going to be different is well, I mean there's a whole bunch of different parts. I mean you're going to have different income levels and you're going to have different reasons for reducing it or increasing it. But those are different modules, but the core of it, the core of a child support motion, it's always going to be the same.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this about family law, because I've always sort of been curious about family law, because I've always sort of been curious how much of any given couple's dispute actually I'm trying to think of how exactly to ask this actually requires a whole lot of lawyering, except that the two hate each other, right? In other words, your firm and seven other firms took on a case same case. Would you expect the same outcome on the other side of it most of the time, or is there truly in like a two-income household with three kids where they're going to stay in-state, is there really margin to get a better outcome and result?
Speaker 1:So, in very broad strokes, I think most firms are going to come out with similar results. What I do think there is a huge difference in is the Okay. So one axiom for family law that I try and repeat and teach is that our family law clients are really bad at relationships. If they were good at relationships, they wouldn't need attorneys. They would just stay in a relationship right. And so there's something fundamental that's broken down. So they need attorneys to help them create a new relationship with this person, whatever it is. I mean, maybe they don't have kids, maybe they have simple assets. They'll never see each other again. Well, the relationship in that case is going to be.
Speaker 1:What regrets do I have looking back? Did I ask for too much? Did I ask for too little? Did I get burnt? Did I spend too much? I mean, maybe it's or did I spend too much time worrying about this? Whatever it is time, money, reputation how is that going to be affected?
Speaker 1:And those are the elements to the new life that this person is going to have, and where attorneys make a difference is do the attorneys have the skills and the ability to recognize where relationships are going and how to build those? So, when it comes to family law. You have to have those hard skills of litigation and analysis and rationality. But you also have to have those hard skills of litigation and analysis and rationality. But you also have to have the emotional intelligence to be able to guide clients to a quick resolution that's going to be good for them long term, because they're not good at doing that right now. They're too close to it, they're too emotionally damaged by the relationship. Once they've gotten to the attorney's office, they've burned all those nerves that gave them any sensitivity to what created their relationship in the first place.
Speaker 2:Just like a counselor or a therapist, but by a different name. How unique or not do you think that belief system is within the family law bar?
Speaker 1:I don't think a lot of people think about it. There are a lot in Washington. There are a lot of advocates for what we call collaborative law, where you don't go to court, you don't litigate. There are a lot of attorneys who stayed on their website amicable or whatever will take care of you. But when the rubber hits the road, what I see it? Our attorneys taking every advantage they can, every bit of the way, and not because there's a long-term goal or there's any long-term result, but because they can get these short-term wins that their clients, the client clients give the worst kind of feedback.
Speaker 1:I mean it really is because more, yeah, they want these immediate strikes on on the opposing party and they want the little petty wins because that's all they've known for the last year or two is how can I get a little bit more? Because our relationship is so damaged and they don't know what kind of harms they're doing in building their future. They don't understand that the way you approach the divorce, the divorce is your new foundation. The results of that are your new foundation for the rest of your life, either your next relationship or the relationship with your co-parent or whatever it is. And if you're petty and attorneys are more than willing to do it because there's plenty of clients who want to be petty they wallow in it. You're going to just have pettiness. That follows you.
Speaker 2:How do you all communicate this in your marketing and then in your sales process?
Speaker 1:Well, just like that. I mean, part of what we want to do is talk about what's going to happen in five years, what's going to happen in 10 years if we do it this way Now. The other mistake, by the way, is from these really aggressive attorneys are the really passive attorneys, and so we talk about that too. You can't just roll over on things. You do have to take a stand on things. It has to be strategic and you have to know why you're taking a stand and what that's going to look like.
Speaker 1:For example, we had a client who I love the parenting plans and the kids. That's kind of my life right now. So I've got five kids of my own and it would devastate me to think that I could only see them like every other weekend. And so I really resonate with any parent who wants to have a shared custody situation. And so we've had guys who come in and they're like I need 50-50. And they'll do everything they can to get that. Or I want full custody and they're doing petty moves, they're doing little digs, they fight.
Speaker 1:Absolutely everything that comes across our desk is a fight because they're doing they fight. Absolutely everything that comes across our desk is a fight because they're afraid that if they give an inch there's no way they can get all the time they think they can. They think that everything has to be. They have to have a victory. And so what we try and talk with clients is you know, if you gave up here, what's your priority? If you gave up here, like let's stop fighting this one particular holiday or let them have it in exchange for additional time in this other area and we can see the light bulb go off, oh yeah, that would work. So they win and I win. Yeah, it is possible, but you have to know why you're giving up things.
Speaker 2:You have to know why you're giving up things. You have to know why you're asking for things.
Speaker 1:It can't just be a fight the whole time, and so one of the things- that I think I'm remembering is unique about your firm is you don't actually, as a part of your sales process, you don't talk to a lawyer until you've paid a retainer. Am I remembering?
Speaker 2:that correctly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, part of that is attorneys are not great at sales. Attorneys have a lot of benefits and virtues, but I think I saw a stat that they can convince about 20% or so of people that come to them to eventually hire them 20%. Well, we can double that or triple that with having a non-attorney and we tell people ahead of time you're going to meet with a non-attorney. We train our non-attorney salespeople to talk about relationships, not give legal advice. And the funny thing is and here's the crucial difference when people quote unquote consult with an attorney to hire them, they're not really listening for legal advice. They don't care how smart you are. They just want to know that you're on their side and you're going to do what it takes to. You're going to do everything you can to help them win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nobody actually wants the legal advice. They just want to hear oh yeah, we can get that result.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, can you fix. I have have this problem. Can you fix it? Yeah, we fix that all the time and I know that you've.
Speaker 2:You've gone through and I think your team has gone through, like the whole grant cardone catalog and did. Are you guys on cardone university? You are you training and retraining with that?
Speaker 1:program we currently use cardone university, and part partly that was because it was taking too much of my time to train, yeah, and so I farmed it out to Cardone. And I chose Cardone for two reasons. One is they were the only sales coaching thing that actually followed up with me Taking their own medicine, yeah, which was like okay, like okay, if you guys, you know, train your own people well enough to do this, then, I mean, some others got back to me, but it took days and days. It's like I already made a decision, guys. And so cardone followed. Like the same day they were calling me and saying, hey, when can we talk? Well, I know what what your needs are. They tried to upsell me, they continue to upsell me and it continue to upsell me, and it's super annoying, but it's like this, this is it's what you want, this is what I want my own people to be doing.
Speaker 2:And I just need to say no, what we start paying attention to. So we just switched case management softwares or we're in the process of switching. We're moving to Filevine and there's like six different vendors that can help you build your Filevine thing and six maybe is the right number, whatever. But like they all reached out to me once Probably three of them reached out to me more than once the other three just dropped off and of the three that I talked to, like only really one of them asked me anything about my firm or what I was building, and of course that's the one that we went with. But as you switch technologies and you go to these account reps and sales representatives, you get to see a lot of bad sales processes. And then you can, if you're paying attention and you know a little bit of the background, you can use that to build out your good process and then change from your lawyer-based 20% conversion rate to three or four X that with your non-lawyer salespeople.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I think it's a problem of having technicians. I think the big thing is salespeople or attorneys or whoever. They think that the more facts they give, the more they can talk up their product. The more details, the more convincing they're going to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, We've been in business for 12 years. Like who cares.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or even in the family law context oh, we'll do a protection order and then we'll go in and we'll get the kids taken away and we'll close the bank accounts and you know, wow, that's a lot. The reality is, people just want to feel like you're listening and that you will pay attention as you go along.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And so if you're a lawyer listening to this and you've, and you're still doing sales calls yourself, you're going to catch yourself the next time jumping down Cause I do it too Sometimes. Here's the three places we'll look for. You know, it's like no, they don't care about that. Actually, what people care about in the car crash context is get you all the money, help you keep the money, let you go back to your life. It's really only three things. They don't care about where it comes from. Typically, they don't care about. You know, am I going to have to sit for it? Are we going to go to trial? In fact, they're scared right Lawyers, we love to pound our chests about, file the most cases and go to trial and get victory. Like your client doesn't want to go to trial. That's the last thing. They just want to get money and get back to their life, or divorce the spouse and spend time with the kids and get back to their life and start building the next thing.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, they want to put their current problem in the rearview mirror and move on and get back to life before everything went bad. And if you can't just look at them and say I will do everything I can to make this better, they don't care. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you're not caring, train and retrain the team around. That first. It's the feature benefit results. Like this is the results that we, that we provide and here's the benefit that you get from our feature. The features are the last thing we talk about. Right? Not shut down the accounts, it's not file these three times of motions. Here's. Here's the result, here's probably the expected timeline and here's about what it's going to cost and that here's probably the expected timeline and here's about what it's going to cost and that's really all that most people care about.
Speaker 1:Well, and the law school really ruins you for this kind of thing. It teaches you to issue spots, so if people are talking to you, you're like we can do this and this. Yeah, do I get an? A?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah I mean, you can see it like it. We can't help ourselves with that. So we've made the transition. We have a non-attorney salesperson doing all of our stuff, unless a client asks to talk to a lawyer, which is exceptionally rare ask. But I'm shocked how many people don't ask. How many people spend 36 seconds looking at their retainer agreement when it comes in by DocuSign. Now my world's a little bit differently because I'm not actually collecting any money from anybody. When they become a client, You're actually collecting a retainer. What does your sales process look like in terms of amount of time, from somebody's first contact with you to when they sign and fund their trust account?
Speaker 1:So the majority of new clients will sign that day or within 24 hours so it's pretty quick when people talk to an attorney.
Speaker 1:When they take that step, they're usually ready to hire and they just need someone to make them feel good about hiring, because everything else in the world is making them feel bad about hiring. Um, because if you look on social media or the news, divorce attorneys are the worst. They're just there to milk you for all your money and so that's what they expect when they come in and they feel, because of those narratives that are out there, they feel that admitting that they need an attorney is an admission that they fail in life somehow and that's a really hard place to be in. And so as soon as they feel good about the decision, they are ready to move forward.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up. Zach, when can people find out more about you? And we'll link to the YouTube channel. Is there anywhere else that you want to direct people?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, our main website is pnwfamilylawcom. Actually, one really cool project is I'm updating the way we do our attorney bios. I have three of them up there where we actually have a video that we're having the attorneys do, along with the written bio. Hopefully that they'll help potential clients get to know, feel better about the attorneys. They do a little more visual thing. I haven't seen anyone else do it, so it's pretty cool and it's turned out real well so far.
Speaker 2:All right, make sure we link to that in the show description and I will see you in a couple of weeks for the ICON Mastermind meeting. Sounds good, we'll see you then.
