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
What Successful Law Firm Owners Obsess Over
What separates thriving law practices from struggling ones isn't always what you'd expect. Drawing from our firm's recent EOS quarterly meeting, I'm peeling back the curtain on the three critical obsessions that drove our personal injury practice to grow by over 400% in just five years.
The first revelation might surprise you: most law firms think they have a marketing problem when what they really have is a sales problem. We've become relentlessly focused on our sales process, ensuring our team genuinely believes we offer the best solution and communicates that conviction to potential clients. This obsession extends to regular call reviews, script refinements, and streamlining the signing process—all of which dramatically improve conversion rates without spending an extra dollar on marketing.
The second game-changer has been our fanatical approach to client experience. We recognized the dangerous gap that forms when firms are hyper-responsive during acquisition but seemingly disappear afterward. Our solution includes welcome boxes arriving within 48 hours of signing, automated yet personalized status updates, and a carefully orchestrated communication schedule. The result? Clients never wonder what's happening with their case because we've already told them. This approach generates authentic five-star reviews without gimmicks or manipulation.
Our third obsession might be the most pragmatic: making it ridiculously easy for insurance companies to pay us. By understanding adjuster workloads and organizing our demand packages with crystal clarity, our files naturally rise to the top of their stacks. This collaborative rather than obstructionist approach accelerates settlements and maximizes outcomes. Interestingly, this contrasts with our long-term disability practice, where a more confrontational style sometimes proves necessary—highlighting that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to law firm success.
What would you say you obsessed over if looking back on your perfect law firm years from now? Take some time this weekend to reflect on the obsessions that could transform your practice into exactly what you want it to be.
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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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Hello, my friends, welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers and law firm owners choosing to live lives of their own design and not be bound to the traditional bill more hours, work on more cases, make more money, but spend it all back in your marketing model. I'm your host, brian Glass, and on Fridays I release these solo episodes where, in general, I talk about something that's going on in my life or some event that I've been to or something that's going on in my law firm, and this episode is going to be about something that's going on in my law firm. We just finished last week our EOS quarterly meeting with our implementer. We've been running on EOS for five years now almost a full five years. If you're unfamiliar with what that is, it's basically an operating system for your business. Has you focus on what your core focus is, what your target is over the next 10 years three years and one year and then helps you to set accountability across the organization in terms of rocks, goals and metrics that the company is supposed to hit week in and week out, and, primarily, it gives you a framework for thinking about who's accountable for these things and for having discussions that help move the company forward. We talk about EOS a lot in Great Legal Marketing and I talk about it a lot on this podcast, so it'd be surprising if you hadn't heard of it before, but if you hadn't, there's really two books where you can check out to get an education on it. There's Traction, which is kind of the rule book and is a little bit heavier of an explanation of how to implement this, and then the better kind of parable written book is called Get a Grip. It's really the parable of an organization going through the implementation of EOS, and I think that's the easier read if you've never heard of any of this stuff before.
Speaker 1:All right, so how did we get here? During our quarterly meeting, our implementer asked us to think about this um as part of a team building exercise and and the prompt was what is one thing that you obsess about? And the first time he asked this question I took it negatively, like cause. I think most of us um, or at least me I think about obsession as a bad thing, and so you asked me what do you obsess over? And, like I obsess over, why didn't we do that thing 10% better? Or if I were doing it again, what would I do next time? And my wife would tell you, like every time I run a race or compete in an event within, or even go on vacation just everything I do within 24 hours of having finished the thing I'm thinking about. How do we do it better next time? Maybe it's a blessing, maybe it's a curse, maybe it's a feature, maybe it's a bug, who knows? But that's where my mind went when he first gave us that prompt what do you obsess over?
Speaker 1:But then he helped refine it by talking about the EOS conference that just happened earlier this month, actually in DC, although we didn't attend and at that conference Gino Wickman, who's one of the founders and the authors of Traction, gave a talk on the 10 things that he obsessed over that helped him build his business. So, to refine the prompt, the question is if you were looking back on the sale of your business or you're looking back on a successful business five or ten years down the road and you were giving a speech about how you grew it or how you sold it or how you made it more successful. What are the three things that you would say that you obsessed over as an owner? And one of the things that I found interesting about this prompt is that as we went around the room with the members of my leadership team and on that leadership team we have a long-term disability lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, my HR director and then my dad and I, who sit as the visionary and the integrator in the firm, and our marketing director is out on maternity leave so she was not in this meeting. But as we went around with those five people, each of whom said they obsessed over three things, there was zero overlap, and I'll go through mine and then I'll kind of talk about a couple of some other people's. But it's just interesting that maybe it's because we're siloed and we're looking at our, looking at our own verticals and what we were obsessed over and maybe that's the benefit is that everybody's obsessing over something a little bit differently. Um, but it was really interesting that there was no overlap between the things that people said that they obsessed over and so the things that I said I had obsessed over in the last five years, as we grew our car crash practice by a little over 400% now and as we'll grow it again by about 20 or 25% this year, I really obsessed over three things, and if you've listened to the podcast you probably could predict with some accuracy what those three things are. But number one is sales, number two is a client customer service experience and number three is making it as easy as we can for insurance companies to give us money. And when I say sales, you've heard me say this, unless it's your first time ever listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:But most law firms think that they have a marketing problem and they think that the solution to getting more clients through the door is to do more marketing either a different channel or a larger spend in channels that already exist, or referral marketing or PPC or better SEO. More better, more better, more better. Almost all talking about marketing and very few of us think about our sales process, and most sales processes actually suck. Most law firm sales processes suck because we delegate them to somebody who doesn't actually believe in the thing that we're selling. And a couple episodes back I talked about Chad Kirby, who came into our mastermind group to do a ghost calls sales audits of our teams and he played those for the icon mastermind group two weeks ago and by the time you hear this episode, we'll have played it for the hero Mastermind or actually we're playing it for the Hero Mastermind group next week and the things that you hear when you listen to your sales team are really scary.
Speaker 1:Because they don't some of them don't firmly believe that you are the solution to the client's problem. And if they don't firmly believe that you offer the very best solution to the client's problem and if they don't firmly believe that you offer the very best solution to the client's problem, then there is no urgency to make the sale, then there is none of the soft selling skills that build the lawyer up as the authority in the area and there is not the feeling that if that person wandered into somebody else's office, we'd have done them a disservice by not selling them on our services. First, and the easiest way to increase your ROI of your marketing, lower your cost per acquisition of a client and make more money in your law firm, both top line and bottom line, is to get better at sales and have a team that's better at sales. And the only way to do that is to become obsessed over sales script, have them watch videos of salespeople and then for you, as the owner, to periodically go back and listen to some of those calls to make sure that your scripts are being implemented, to make sure the proper level of empathy is there and to make sure that we've done things like incorporate DocuSign or Vinesign or whatever your flavor of electronic signing of the document is, so that we've made the client buying experience good. Now, the second place that I've been obsessed over is the client customer service experience, because the temptation not temptation, but what happens in an environment where everybody's hyper-focused on speed to lead and we're answering the call on the first ring and we're making sure that we've expressed empathy and we've understood the client's position and we've sent them a DocuSign and we've moved them all very quickly through the system is that after you sign, sometimes the client feels like nothing's happening, even if there's all this back office stuff going on that they don't even know about right, and so there's this almost buyer's remorse from the fact that you were very, very quick and responsive when you wanted them as a client, but then they became a client and it feels like nothing is going on. So how do we solve for that? And one of the things that we've pivoted from in our firm we used to send these what we call shock and all boxes to people who had reached out as a prospect and while we were waiting for them to come into the office physically and meet with us, they would get a shock and all box that had all this explanation about who we are, what we do, all this authority building books, teddy bears, stuff like that. Post-covid, that process is so fast that the mail won't get it to them quickly enough and nobody's coming into the office to do in-person meetings anyway. So post-COVID, that has become a welcome box, right? So you are getting now in the mail, within 48 hours of retaining us as a client, all of the things we used to send as authority building beforehand.
Speaker 1:We've also implemented automations through HONA to push out case status updates, to push out videos frequently asked questions, and we have a strictly regimented series of phone calls that come out from paralegals and lawyers in the beginning of the case to make sure that clients absolutely know what's going on and what's going to happen next. Because most of your clients whether it's personal injury or criminal or family or something else, most of your clients have hired you because they have some fear of the unknown. The legal process is unknown. Your clients have been thrust into this world. They didn't choose usually to have this problem that you're solving for them, and they have a great fear, and the way to alleviate that fear is to make sure that they always know what's going to happen next. Put yourselves and them in a position where they should never, ever have to ask what's the status of my case, because you've always told them and there's always some resource for them to figure out what's going on next, usually coming from your team.
Speaker 1:Right, automation is a great supplement. It is not a replacement. But that client customer service experience is the thing. Like everybody wants to hack to get more five-star Google reviews. The hack is deliver a customer service experience that's worth leaving a five-star Google reviews. The hack is deliver a customer service experience that's worth leaving a five-star Google review for and then ask for it Like, yes, still ask for it. But if you don't have a great process, it doesn't matter how many times you ask for it or what app pushes out the ask, or if you are gatekeeping the reviews to send the three stars back, you know, to your team managers and send the five stars onto Google. None of that shit matters if your process actually sucks.
Speaker 1:Number three thing that I've focused on is making it stupid easy for an insurance company to give us money. When I talk to my friends on the insurance defense side, most lawyers make this really hard. They don't send complete demand packages, they don't label PDFs appropriately, they don't make it really easy for when your file lands on an adjuster's desk and it's one of 120 to 200 cases for it to be the next one to be picked up and looked at and evaluated and either moved to settlement or moved to hey, we're not going to settle this case, let's get a litigation. I tell my team over and over and over, the more that you can make this easy on the person who's on the receiving end of our packages, the better off we're going to be. And that comes to discovery, comes to demand packages, it comes for even discussions that we're having after depositions. How can I make your job easy?
Speaker 1:What do you need in order to evaluate this case and move it on to the next step? Is it an expert review? Is it a independent or a defense medical examination? Is it more photos of updated scarring? Tell me what you need, don't make me guess. And the more that we can provide those things to the defense, even if it's something that, like some lawyers, would object to for some stupid reason and not play an obstructionist game the more money we're going to make in our firms right Now.
Speaker 1:There are fights to have, and there are. This is everything else right. The fights to have actually, I think, is a very narrow window. So those are my three things that if I were looking back over the last three years, five years, I would tell you I obsessed over Sales, client customer service, experience and making it really easy for the insurance company to give us money. Ironically, the lawyer who runs our long-term disability department says one of the things that he's obsessed over is not worrying about pissing off insurance companies, and it just has to do with the dynamic of negotiation.
Speaker 1:In every case that we take on the car crash side, almost every case, the question is not are they going to give us money? It's how much money are they going to give us? In almost every case, long-term disability side, it's a different fight and it's a fight that's often over procedures and over systems that the insurance companies can never seem to get right, and so we just have to not be afraid, damon says, of calling them when they are 48 hours late on a deadline and not worrying about pissing somebody off because now that you've run over the deadline, there is a statutory benefit to us and we're going to take advantage of it, so he ends up a little bit more entrenched in these $0 versus $150,000 cases In the car crash side. Again, almost every case we take, the question is how much money are they going to pay? And I tend to be far in favor of making it easy for the insurance company to give us money.
Speaker 1:And here's the great thing about this is there's no right answer to this. There's thousands of ways to build a great law firm and infinite ways to build a practice that is perfect for you. The question that I want you to ponder over the weekend and maybe devote a little bit of journaling time to, is if you were looking back in five years, 10 years, 20 years, and you built the perfect law firm for yourself and you were asked to give a speech on the things that you obsessed over while you were building that perfect law firm and that perfect life, what would your answers be? Have a great weekend.
