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
3 Constraints EVERY Law Firm Faces (and How to Solve Them)
Brian Glass shares the three primary constraints that prevent law firms from growing: leads, sales, and production—and why solving them one at a time is crucial for scaling from $1M to $5M in revenue.
• Most law firms think they have a leads problem, but actually struggle with sales
• Front desk staff and paralegals often undermine sales by not believing in your value
• Ghost call testing reveals even top firms have serious intake conversion issues
• Properly trained sales staff should build trust and share success stories about similar cases
• Implementing automated follow-up sequences through CRMs like Lead Docket increases conversion dramatically
• Answering calls live in-house increases sign rates by 14% compared to web forms or answering services
• Standardizing case processes with clear timelines compresses case duration and improves cash flow
• Regular client contact (monthly phone calls) helps identify treatment gaps and opportunities to increase case value
• Paid lead generation works but is expensive ($2,500-$3,000 per client vs $1,600 through organic methods)
• Capital constraints usually result from trying to solve all three problems simultaneously
Get Brian's new book "Renegade Lawyer Marketing" for just the cost of shipping at renegadelawyermarketing.com to learn how to build a practice that attracts clients at $1,600 acquisition cost.
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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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Happy Friday and welcome back into another solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of law practice they actually enjoy showing up to on Monday, because if you spend your entire week looking forward to 5 pm on Friday, you have wasted 40, 60 hours of your life. I'm Brian Glass, your host. I run a personal injury primarily car crash practice here in Northern Virginia and also help my dad run Great Legal Marketing, the number one organization for teaching and coaching solo and small law firm owners how to build these kinds of practices, how to build the practice that you enjoy showing up to on Monday, that turns out high profit and is relatively low maintenance, although is not easy. Right, everybody in this space is talking about how to work half as many hours and make twice as much money, and that whole concept is bullshit. But what we teach at Great Legal Marketing is what has worked for us and what we've seen for hundreds of other law firm owners, and so today I'm going to be talking about the three primary constraints that I've seen lawyers face while they've been growing their practice, and these are the three constraints that I faced as we were growing our practice from one that consistently did about a million dollars a year in the late 2010s I joined the firm in 2019, to one that will generate $5 million in revenue in 2025. So if that's interesting to you, if that 5x growth in five, six years is interesting, this is an episode to hang out and listen to. But before we get started, a quick ask of you if this is your second or third or fifth or more times that you've listened to this show and you aren't subscribed, could you do that? It's really helpful to the distribution of the show to have subscribers, and if you can go in and leave a rating and review, that would be even better. It helps me reach more lawyers, just like you, and help them build better lives.
Speaker 0:Okay, now that we're done with the self-promotion, let me tell you about the three primary constraints that I see law firm owners face as they try to grow their practices and that's leads, sales and production. And before we dive in, the one that you may notice that is not a constraint that I see people facing is capital. As a small law firm, I think we rarely face these capital constraint problems, and if you do face a capital constraint problem. It means you're over leveraged and that you need to focus in and solve one of these problems leads, sales and production and it probably happens because you're trying to solve all three at once. My thesis is that you can only solve one of these things at a time, and if you focus on solving more than one at a time, you're going to run into problems.
Speaker 0:The problem that most lawyers think that they have, and for that reason, the problem that most vendor partners are trying to solve, is the leads problem, and the leads problem, I think, is actually the easiest one to solve, because if you have some money, you can just throw some money at it, and if you have money and you have a problem, you don't actually have a problem, and so that's not where I'm going to start. I'm going to start with sales. The problem that I think most lawyers have and do not want to recognize that they have is a sales problem, and the reason that I say most lawyers either don't recognize it or don't want to recognize it is that every single time I talk to lawyers and I tell them you have a sales problem, they say no, we sign every case that we want and I say how do you know? How do you track that? And they say either we most of them don't track it or they track it in excel, or they track it in the back of their mind, which is the wrong way to do statistical tracking. On, are you actually signing all of the cases that you want to sign?
Speaker 0:And in a small law firm there's an evolution in who does the sales. At first it's a lawyer who does all of the sales and then the lawyer gets tired of doing all the sales because it's the same pitch over and over and you're solving the same problem over and over and for most of us that gets boring. And what happens is we transition that sales typically to our receptionist or to our paralegal to do some qualifying before they send it back to the lawyer to do the sales pitch, and of course that creates a gap in the process where there are cases that fall off. So my friends Chad Kirby and Gary Mueller at Scalable are doing for our mastermind members in April. Hey, this is a surprise and so maybe I shouldn't say this, but if you're listening, I think it's already happened to your firm. They're doing ghost calls and they're just checking to see how calls are getting handled at the front desk and by the sales teams for our mastermind members.
Speaker 0:And I'll tell you that even for people who are at our highest level of membership in great legal marketing there are problems. Problems like hey did you know this is an estate planning firm? Hey did you know that we actually charge for initial consults? And right now we're setting initial consults out two to three weeks as a $200 deposit to hold the seat, and so before we book your deposit, like you might want to shop around, you might want to see if there's somebody that doesn't do that. This is an actual line coming from the front desk of one of the member firms at our top level. These are people that are paying attention to what's going on in their firms and this is happening in their firm.
Speaker 0:And if you're somebody who is not operating at a level where you feel confident that you're paying attention to what's happening in your firm, I promise you this is happening in your firm and it's worse. And the reason that this happens is because the person at the front desk doesn't believe in the bottom of their heart that you were the best person to solve the problem for the people that are calling you. Because if that person believed from the bottom of their heart that the lawyer that she worked for was the best person to solve that caller's problem, then the facts in the script could have been delivered exactly the same, but with a very different result. It would have sounded something like oh man, I'm so glad you called the lawyer here. She solves problems like you. She solves problems for people like you all the time. Now she's really busy because of how good we are at solving those problems.
Speaker 0:However, I have an opening in two weeks, on Wednesday at 10 o'clock that I can squeeze you in for. The thing is that she's so in demand that I do need a seat deposit from you. It's only $200. And we're going to credit that against the package that you buy, and I know that you're going to have such an amazing experience with us. By the way, what are the two or three biggest problems that you're trying to solve right now that I can get in front of the attorney to make sure that she is aware of when she sits down for you, wednesday, two weeks from now, at 10 am? Do you hear how that's different than we do charge a seat deposit? You might want to shop around.
Speaker 0:There probably are some other firms that don't do that and I would suggest that firm actually has two problems. They have the sales problem where the person delivering the pitch doesn't actually believe in the thing that they're selling. They have a production problem where the lawyer can't meet with the person who wants to buy from you for two to three weeks, and we'll get back to that and round back to that and solve for that later. So the first issue that small law firms face is we have our sales delegated to somebody who's not good at sales. Right, they're the receptionist, their intake the receptionist or the paralegal, but they are not a dedicated salesperson, which is that's not what we hired for them for, right.
Speaker 0:But we got busy and we had to transition and in that transition period we asked the paralegal or we asked the receptionist to do some quasi sales, to do some vetting of cases, and there's a stage where you just have to suffer through that because of the capital constraint, right, because you're not going to go to the bank and take out a loan to get somebody else into that seat typically. But after you get through that stage, then most firms will try to solve with a full-time offshore virtual assistant and that is a step up, right, because at least now we've got a dedicated person who spends their entire day selling and so we can train that person to sell. But I think there's a disconnect between that person who's offshore, who isn't more than maybe passingly familiar with the American legal system. We have to train them a lot. They are a lot of effort to train and get up to speed, even if they are good at sales, even if they have a sales background. And for me there's always been a function of having somebody in-house, having somebody full-time in-house who can run down the hallway screaming like her hair is on fire when we have the great client, the big fish on the line and find a lawyer to solve that problem right now, even though lawyers aren't typically solving that problem right now in our office, right, lawyers not jumping on most sales calls, but when the big one comes in, I need somebody who can run down the hallway screaming and find somebody, right? So those kinds of other are the levels to who's handling your sales and your intake Part-time paralegal to full-time dedicated offshore person to full-time dedicated in-house person.
Speaker 0:It really starts with a people solution, because if you don't have the right person in that seat, then nothing else that I'm going to say here matters. But after you have the right person in the seat, then you have to have a good script. You have to train that person on the science of sales and persuasion. That means that the person should be building in trust clues about you and building up your reputation to the client. Before the client ever talks to you, right Should be saying the things like oh, she's so busy. Oh, we've helped lots of other clients like you. They should not be giving any legal advice. That is simple and basic. But they don't have to. They just have to identify similarities between the person that's calling and similarities with cases that you have worked on in the past and draw parallels. Oh, we just helped a mother who had gone through a divorce, who had to restructure her will because she wanted to take care of the children. Like, we just help somebody like that, I know that, which means that you need to be sharing your successes and the people that you help back with the team. If we aren't telling stories to the team, then it doesn't matter how well trained they are in the script, because every once in a while they're going to have to go off script Like. I've seen law firms that have this dedicated three page script for an intake of an auto crash. That's not how it actually ever goes. Your team has to be able to pivot and answer questions and collect all the information that you need, but has to be able to go off script and tell stories about people that you've helped in the past.
Speaker 0:Third piece is the follow-up. Most firms will stop after one or two attempts. Most firms will call once or twice, maybe send a retainer agreement digitally, maybe follow up once or twice, and then they just poof and disappear into the ether. You can't do it that way and unless you have an automated CRM, something like a lead docket, it's really challenging to make sure that your team is doing this, and so our numbers shot through the roof when we signed on with lead docket and if you aren't on a system like that, you should be, because lead docket now allows me to build in a sequence that requires the team to, every day after a new client has contacted us, call them, text them, email them, and we've pre-written the text in the email and we've scripted it around the practice area and we built in the sales and persuasion. And that took a lot of work, but it requires somebody to tick the box that said I did this every day for five days, and then they drop into a drip sequence. After that and, depending on the size of the case and what we know about the case, they might then get calls not from the intake team but from a lawyer right, because we want to make sure that we are doing what the person on the other end of the phone wants us to do.
Speaker 0:And then the last piece that I'll say about this is we're going a little bit long maybe on sales is that if you don't have a 24-7 answering service around the clock, you need one. There's a small firm in my market who runs LSAs and runs PPC, and we took a case from them recently, and when you call, you get a phone tree, which is shocking. The amount of money that they must be lighting on fire because in 2025, you still have clients Hitting a phone tree is unbelievable, and so that, at the very baseline, it should be your first investment. However, even with that phone tree, people I see in this, like lawyer on the beach Facebook group who's the best answering service? Because I want to start having an answering service answer my inbound calls. I know from our lead docket data that if the only thing that happens only thing that happens in a case is that we answer it live in-house, versus somebody fills out a web form or they hit our answer after hours answering service or they hit a rollover answering service, the only thing that changes is that we can answer the phone. The chance that we sign that person goes up by 14% and you can do the math in your own practice about how many cases you have coming in, how many cases you signed last year, what the average case value is, and then what happens if you add 14% to the number of cases that you signed last year. Does that full-time in-house person pay for themselves over and above the answering service?
Speaker 0:In almost every practice area it does, and if yours doesn't, then you've got to solve either the leads or the production problem. All right, let's talk production next, because I'm going to make you listen till the end if you want to hear about how to get more leads, because I promise you more leads is not your problem. So production comes in two forms. It's actually like who's doing the work and is the work getting through our widget factory fast enough, and it also is average case value. So I think about production and the levers that you can pull in an auto accident case is you can get more cases right, leads and sales. You can make your cases worth more money, which is production, or you can move them through the factory faster, which also is production.
Speaker 0:Now, in other practice areas it's the same thing estate planning. You can get more estate planning clients. You can move them through the factory faster or you can increase the average case value, and that might be in the form of raising your rates, which probably all of you should be doing, or selling more stuff to your existing clients. That might be an annual review package. It might be a subscription program. My estate plan is on a subscription program which gets me a lower, gets my heirs a lower, probate rate on anything that has to get probated when I die. But, more importantly, it gets a review and has me think every time I get new asset, some new asset in, is it in my trust so that we don't have to do the probate thing when we die? And if you're actually an estate planning expert more about this than I do, and you probably know that something that I just said is stupid, which is fine. But you do this in family law as well. Family law if you are in high conflict divorces has got to be the ultimate lifetime value of the customer kind of practice area and criminal law. You hope that people don't come back, but sometimes they do.
Speaker 0:But I'm going to talk about personal injury because that's what I know best, and in the personal injury practice area there are a ton of levers that you can pull to make cases just run faster. So the first thing that I did when I started at Ben Glass Law in 2019 was quantify the problem. Right, we had crappy practice management software and we were tracking medical records and demands and all this stuff in Excel sheets in every single case, and so there was no way to quantify really how long are these cases taking us to work on. So I hired my brother one summer as an intern. He was in college and I hired him to build me a big Excel sheet taking the cases that we'd closed in the last 24 months and itemizing for me what was the date of the crash, what date were we hired, what date was the last date of medical care, when did the demand package go out and when did funds hit our operating account and also, when did the case settle? That was in there, too, and I found these, in some cases, enormous gaps between the last date of treatment and the day that a demand package went out, because we had a sloppy way of collecting medical records. And in some cases, I found enormous gaps between the day the case was settled and the day that the funds hit our operating account because we hadn't done things early in the case collect the liens.
Speaker 0:What happens is most lawyers, when they're growing a solo or a small practice, don't think to systematize this, because they quote know how to do all of this, but then, as you hire assistants and paralegals and associates, we don't properly train them on what's the order of operations that leads to the fastest result. And so if you don't have a good CRM or case management software that has scripts that happen at every stage of the case and populates to-dos and tasks for your team and in 2025, I think everybody should have this but I still find that there are firms that are operating I know a firm that's operating out of filing cabinets for no reason other than they're afraid to invest in the case management software, and so most of you who are listening probably already have this thing. Let's pretend that there's somebody out there that doesn't have this thing. I promise you this will add 60% to your revenue. If all you do is compress the timeline that it takes your team to work on a case right, standardize your processes so that every case moves through predictable steps with minimal friction. Is every case different? Yes, does every car crash case go through the same stages Injury treatment, records collection, demand writing, waiting for a demand to come back, negotiation, settlement, litigation. Yes, it all goes to the same thing, and so things that you can do is standardize in your practice how long you expect each one to take.
Speaker 0:So one of the scorecard items that we keep in our firm is how many medical records requests do we have that are outstanding longer than 45 days? We work with a company called Arc Treval that has really streamlined the speed with which my team can collect medical records. I have VAs in the Philippines who handle the medical records collection now and it gets saved straight into my system. It's amazing it's really compressed the amount of time that it takes for us to get from the client being done treating to a demand getting out the door, which I can then turn around and use as a sales pitch to referring medical providers, right? Hey, I know with a fair degree of certainty that a month after the day that you finish treating a client, I'm going to have a demand package out the door, which means probably 45 to 60 days until I can probably get you paid. Right? That's a pretty good sales pitch for a lot of these doctors that are treating people on assignment. So we track how long it takes to get medical records back. I also have a rule about demand packages. Once a demand is out the door, we know it usually takes an insurance company 30 days to evaluate and make an offer. At 45 days, if there's not an offer, we should be talking about litigation. At 60 days, we definitely should be in litigation, right?
Speaker 0:We don't let things just hang out there. But if the team doesn't have these tasks and these little red buttons popping up on their screen, then sometimes things slip through the crack. So that's how you can increase your revenue just by making things run faster, by standardizing what you expect from your team in terms of timelines, and I'll just touch on increasing average case value. In a PI case, one of our standardized processes is that a team member has to correspond with a client every 30 days, not by text, not by email. Pick up the phone, call them at least every 30 days. What does this do? It triggers us to know when people have stopped going to medical care, triggers us to know when there's a gap in the medical care. And then we've built in things like at three months from the date of the crash.
Speaker 0:We're not guiding the medical care, but we're suggesting hey, if you're still in pain, it's time to escalate care. Beyond a chiropractor, beyond a physical therapist, let's go see an orthopedist or let's ask about whether we should be getting an MRI. Or, beyond a physical therapist, let's go see an orthopedist or let's ask about whether we should be getting an MRI. So we're not directing the care, but we know that these are problems for insurance companies and so we're just trying to preempt all of that, because everybody's had the case where the chiropractor treats the client for a year and for some reason our team doesn't know about it, right Nobody has figured out that the only treatment this person has had for a year has been with a chiropractor. All of a sudden there's a $30,000 bill and an insurance company is going to offer you eight.
Speaker 0:That's a case you absolutely have to try. You're probably going to lose, right? You're going to have a pissed off client who goes why didn't you tell me? We didn't tell you because we didn't know. Why didn't you? Because we didn't have a process in our system where the team had to call you every month and find out what's going on in the case. And so if you only get better at your processes, you also will increase your average case value, at least in the personal injury space and, I'm confident, also in the estate planning in the family arenas.
Speaker 0:All right, I promised you I talked about leads or I would talk about leads. So here we go. If you have solved all your sales problems and your production problems, you have my permission to go and pay for some leads, to go and get some leads. The easiest way to get leads is to pay for them honestly, to pay for LSAs or to pay a lead gen company. And now that we've figured out sales and production, we are experimenting with LSAs and with paid lead gen. I just want to know what's out there. I don't think it's fair to sit on here and trash these things all the time without ever testing them. So I know that I have really good organic marketing, both in our SEO and with our referral network, and I know that most of my cases are going to come from either my Google business profile or from a referral from a live human being, and in our practice at least 50% of our money is coming from referrals from live human beings. But every once in a while we go out and we test this paid digital stuff and if you are in need of 10 leads next month, the easiest and fastest way for you to do that is paid digital.
Speaker 0:I'll just be honest with you, but it's expensive. I'm hearing about cost to acquire clients of $2,500 to $3,000 in the PI space. When we ran our LSA test from November through January, we were paying, I think, $2,600 per signed client. That's not sustainable in my practice because that's in addition to what I'm already paying the rest of my marketing departments. So in 2024, x of digital, my cost to acquire a client was $1,600 in auto. That's unheard of right, but it's because we've spent years and years getting good reviews, building up our organic SEO without paid help until first part of last year and cultivating our referrals through newsletters and actual on the ground relationships.
Speaker 0:So that stuff takes time. If you need it fast, you're going to have to pay for it, right, and it is hard to give a one size fits all speech lecture podcast on the best way to find new leads in your firm, because I don't know what problems you're dealing with right now. And so the offer that I want to make to you, if you are struggling with marketing, if you're trying to get your firm off the ground, if you need new leads to come through the door, and if you've already solved the sales and production problems, is that our new book, renegade Lawyer Marketing, is available on Amazon, but I don't want you to buy it on Amazon. If you go to renegadelawyermarketingcom, I'll send it to you, just for the cost of shipping, which is $9.95, $9.97. I don't know. Those two pennies probably don't make a difference to you, and I'm going to include a bunch of goodies and free giveaways in the package that my team is going to hand, pack and send out to you.
Speaker 0:If leads is what you need, buy my book. It's less than 10 bucks. Renegadelawyermarketingcom is the best place for you to get it and it'll walk you through step-by-step, exactly what we've done to build the kind of firm that attracts clients at $1,600 a piece which nobody else that I hear about talking from stages at any of these big national conferences is able to deliver. So if you want to be able to have a cost per acquisition of a client of only $1,600, check out renegadelawyermarketingcom by the book, and, as always, if you are ready to take your practice to the next level, reach out to me about joining the Great Legal Marketing Tribe or one of our mastermind programs. There's a lot of stuff you can learn on podcasts and in books, but if you really want to go faster, put your money where your mouth is. Let's pay for.
