The Sterling Family Law Show

Making Millionaires: Law Firm Employee Benefits Model - #180

• Jeff Sterling Hughes

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Law firm employee benefits that turn your team into millionaires—Dana Palmer's 25% SEP system solves retention for good.


Family law firms lose great people because they compete on base salary instead of law firm compensation strategy—Dana Palmer flips this by offering a 25% SEP retirement contribution that makes every team member, even receptionists earning six figures, into millionaires within 20 years.

 

This interview reveals exactly how competitive law firm benefits become your retention moat through building millionaire employees, reducing staff turnover costs, and positioning your firm as the destination for top legal talent who value long-term wealth over short-term cash.


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📄 CHAPTERS


0:00 - Law Firm Employee Benefits: Introduction to Dana Palmer 

0:56 - From Broke Law Student to Building Team Wealth Systems 

6:17 - Opening Palmer Law Group: Accidental Firm Origin Story 

16:20 - Staff Retention Strategies: Hiring the Best of the Best 

17:03 - Finding Key Management: Jennifer Hart's Restaurant Leadership 

24:06 - Law Firm Culture Building Through Coaching Investment 

41:10 - SEP Retirement Plans for Lawyers: The 25% Contribution Model 

41:30 - How $100K Salary Becomes $125K Tax-Preferred With Benefits 

42:16 - Six-Figure Receptionists: Keeping Top Legal Talent Strategy 

42:38 - Building Millionaire Employees: The 20-Year Wealth Formula 

43:18 - Law Firm Team Building Philosophy: Choose to Work vs Have to Work 

45:26 - Dana's Mission: Ending Unhealthy Marriages Through Law Practice


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SPEAKER_02:

It's my mission in life to change the way that people approach the divorce process. We don't take clients that want revenge. And a jerk is a client who wants revenge. We literally define them as a jerk, and a jerk doesn't want a soft divorce. They don't want a healthy divorce, they want to have a hard divorce.

SPEAKER_03:

Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family lawyers build the firm of their dreams. I am your co-host, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our digital advertising agency that works exclusively with family attorneys, born out of our own law firm, Sterling Lawyers, that has grown to over 27 attorneys. Today, uh Jeff Hughes, my co-host and also the co-founder of Sterling Law, joins us as we continue our owner operator series. We are interviewing Dana Palmer of the Palmer Law Group in Texas, who has built a great firm. He has tons of passion, lots of ideas, big time visionary, talking about his firm and what he's done. Some really, really cool insights in this episode. Make sure to check them out. I am sure you will love it. Dana, thank you so much for joining us today. We were uh just kind of talking off the record about some of the things you're doing today, which is amazing. If I could, though, I would love to jump back to the beginning. Uh, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself to us, to our audience. Uh tell us a little bit about your firm and kind of how you got your start.

SPEAKER_02:

So I'm Dana Palmer and I own the Palmer Law Group PC. We're a Texas-based law firm expanding into Florida, and we do a lot of nationwide things. If if we have a divorce case that's uh$5 million net worth or above, I'll go anywhere in the country in order to do that, and I get calls for that. And um, I've been, in fact, uh, we're two days past our 19th anniversary. And when I was in law school, I never thought I was gonna be an attorney. In fact, one of the guys that works with me who went to law school with me specifically remembers the many times where I told him, Yeah, I'm never gonna be an attorney. I just wanted to be a business person. And I figured I I wanted to like complete my business training as an entrepreneur, which it does zero for entrepreneurial type of training. In fact, it does the opposite, it just scares the crap out of you. And you never want to like dare open a business ever again because you're like, oh, all these lawsuits can happen. And but um, but I figured as the CEO of a company, if it only costs me three years of my life and a quarter of a million dollars for three things, then it's worth it. And those three things were to know what the lawyers know, to know which are the right lawyers to hire, and to be able to evaluate those lawyers and know whether or not they're doing the job that they need to be doing, then as a CEO of a company, that's worth that time and investment. But I never thought I'd be a lawyer, and I actually waited tables through law school. And so I and I didn't take the bar straight out. I only took the bar exam because I couldn't have a conversation with my father without the whole the conversation, it was just like I was like, it was groundhog day every time. Like, you know, you you already took you you got the degree. Why don't you just take the exam? It'll be a feather in your cap. Even if you're never gonna practice law, just take it and get the license. That way you got it. And the longer you go, uh the more you're gonna forget or whatever. It's like I got one of the highest scores on I I took it like two years after law school, or and I got like one of the highest scores of anybody that I've I've known. I only know of one guy from law school, maybe, maybe two that were anywhere close. And and but and so I'm like waiting tables, and I uh the my license comes in, and I get asked, hey Dana, will you my girlfriend had her daughter kidnapped by her ex and he won't give her back and let us see her, like, can you help with that? And I was like, uh, okay, I'll do that for you today. And then like tomorrow I gotta go figure out what I want to do with my life because like law school in itself, I was the brokest. I wasn't poor because poor is a mindset. I've never had that mindset. Um, I but I've you know had to sleep in the car, and thankfully I had a$2,500 paid for, you know, 15-year-old car or 20-year-old car at that point that bear, you know, and and the and the uh the driver's side door wasn't opening, so I had to crawl in through the passenger side, and I was like willing to sleep in that one night. And my one of my classmates was like, no, just come stay with me. I was like, Oh, okay, great. And I paid him$100 a week, and you know, and so I I went from that, and I had owned a business before that like it was successful but small, and I wanted to play a bigger game, so it's like I got to go to law school in order to play this bigger game, and so but I I was so beat down by law school because nobody told me, like, hey, by the way, it's easy, just read the horn books, don't fall for that. You got to brief everything crap. It's it's all a lie, right? Just it's everybody gets the same license. Unless you went to Harvard, it doesn't matter. And go to the best law school you can go to for free, and you know, like get through it the easy way. And by the third year, I was realized, oh, you don't even have to buy books. Like, you just like it's one test at the end, and you can either show up and talk about all the stuff that's probably not on the test, or you can like, especially for their first year stuff, just do the Barbery materials and you'll you'll ace the tests, and you didn't even have to go to class. It was all just you know, just crazy prerequisite, but don't get me started on that. But so I'm like, then the next day comes and I'm at the restaurant, or you know, and then they're like, okay, well, Steve Steven just got arrested, you got to go get him out. I was like, okay, well, I'll do that for him today, and then tomorrow I got to go figure out what I want to do with my life. And then the next day, so like six weeks goes by. And by the way, at the same time, one of the guys comes up and goes, Hey, listen, we know you're gonna be in a suit anyway, but um, once a week, do you think you could come in and be our on-call manager? I'm like, so what's the job? And they're like, you touch each table twice, you tell them what a good idea that it was to come into three forks that night, and then you make sure that the steak is perfect when it hits the table, which it like always was. And if it wasn't, oh, that's my time to shine, because I can solve that. I just grab a different steak, you know, whatever, you know, and like solve it and dazzle them and they're amazed. But in the meantime, everybody that worked at that restaurant had hired me for something. Like I represented more than half of this of the staff, and then a lot of the regular clients, like, so what I we I got my license on August 26th or 25th or 26th of 2006. And on September 1st, we opened the Palmer Law Group. It was called Dana Palmer Law Group or PLS, you know, we changed forms, but I opened on September 1st because I had to put a name on the pleadings in order to help try and get this child back. And so after about six weeks of that, I was like, oh well, I guess I own a law firm and here and now I'm the CEO of that. But I did like everything that you can do wrong and kind of figured it out by about year four, you know, and I was able to do about like three, three hundred thousand, three or four hundred thousand dollars worth of work and collect about 80 grand. And I'm like, this isn't working. So I finally hired a law firm management coach. I did the how to manage a small law firm with R. John Robbins, um, which I think is a good program for about the first 18 months. And then I kind of like well outgrew it, and I was one of their top people at the time. And in that program, he said, you got to pick a niche. So I started going through the formula. And for when that week I did no billable work, I was in an excess existential crisis. Like I was like severely, I can't, what do I do? You know, and I think I kind of knew what it was, but didn't I wasn't cool with that because the last thing I wanted to do was be a divorce lawyer. And and finally we're on this call. There's like 10 attorneys, and it's like, press a button, get in line. And I'm like, waiting. I'm like, I'm trying to go last, you know. Like, did everybody press the button? Are you sure? And I'm like, beep, you know, like, and and all these other guys are going, and I'm having this huge argument with my wife Summer about I can't pick a niche. She finally throws her hands up and just just tell them you're not willing to pick a niche and you're gonna do all this, and like you just and I'm like, all right, you know, and now now I'm like really I'm even on my own, you know. I've like feeling abandoned by everything, and like, so and I'm like, all right, well, I'm gonna use the formula. Don't do anything that I'm doing just for money. So personal injury is out because I hate doing that. Like, they're always trying to not pay people, and like it's just all this. I and I thrown a phone through the wall after talking with an insurance agent about like this guy's gonna die before I can get him money and help him, and like all I'm gonna do is get money for his family, but he's gonna probably die because I can't even and like it's just like I just hated it, right? And then criminal defense, I was really good at it, but I can't sleep tonight before trial, and like you know, and I don't I didn't really just want to be in that. And I was like, you know, out of all the clients, it's the family law clients are the healthy and happiest ones, but there's no way I'm gonna be a divorce attorney. I don't even believe in divorce. I hate divorce, I wouldn't wish a divorce on anyone. But I was like, but I had a mentor early on that goes, you know, every other area of law, you can measure win or lose in criminal defense, death penalty or life, life or probation, you know, jail or probation, probation or not guilty completely off. You can measure that. There's a clear win or lose. In a money case, there's a clear win or lose. How much money did you get? Or how much did you money did you not have to pay out? Like where you can measure it in dollars. If you're measuring in dollars in a family law case, and that's the metric that you use, well, I guess you need to put a dollar amount on every non-tangible that there is in family law. Like, how do you what's the what's the dollar amount on whether or not your kids hate you for the way that you treated the other parent? What's the dollar amount? Like, what how what's really a win in that? And so I'm like, all right, all right, so okay, divorce doesn't have to be so hard. That's what I said. Well, let me see if there's a website. Like, let me see if I can even, you know, may is is this a viable, let me see, and then because if I can't find a website or whatever, that's a good reason and not. So I like look and I'm like, okay, easy divorce.com. Oh, that was taken the day the internet was invented. Okay, what's not hard? Softdivorce.com. It's available. I'm like, I buy it. And I go, okay, summer, ask me what I do. Because that's the prompt that R John's gonna do. And and she goes, Okay, um, and we call each other Palmer. I had this case early on with a female soldier, and she called me Palmer, and Summer has always worked with me since the first month that we were married, and and she just got typical pink. So she's called me Palmer ever since. So then therefore I call her Palmer. So we call each other Palmer. She goes, Palmer, um, what do you do? I go, I help people get a soft divorce. Oh my god, I am just done. I'm like, no, no, no, no, wait, ask me what a soft divorce is. She goes, Okay, what's a soft divorce? I go, because divorce doesn't have to be so hard. And now she's like, she's like out. Because the last thing she wants is for me to be a divorce lawyer. Right then, right, I mean, like, I couldn't have planned it better. So, all right, next, Dana. Dana, are you on? I'm like, oh, oh, oh, are you on mute, unmute? Okay. All right, can you hear me? Yeah, all right. So, what do you do? I go, I help people get a soft divorce. I like it. Wait, wait, wait, no, no, no. Ask me what a soft divorce is. He's like, okay, what's a soft divorce? I go, because divorce doesn't have to be so hard. I like it. Like, I was the envy of everybody in that program, all like the other hundred lawyers in there, they're like, and and and so the only person that I've ever said that to that didn't like it was Summer for the same reasons that I was having a problem with. I can't be a divorce attorney. And I'm like, look, but it's it's it's it's a and here's what turned it around is when I realized if people like me don't go into that area of law, then when everybody who who ever has to face that has to go through it, who are they left to go to? So I was like, oh, okay, it's mission work. It's God asking me to do this. It's my mission in life to change the way that people approach the divorce process. And what I really mean by soft divorce is healthy divorce, which I bought that domain name. I think I spent 20 grand just to buy the name. I've also since bought hard divorce, and hard divorce is really the same thing. What this really gets down to, it's also client screening. It protects us from having a bad client because we don't take clients that want revenge. And a jerk is a client who wants revenge. We literally define them as a jerk, and a jerk doesn't want a soft divorce. They don't want a healthy divorce, they want to have a hard divorce. Here's the message for hard divorce: has your spouse threatened to take your child away from you, ruin you financially, and make your life a living nightmare? We call that a hard divorce. If that's not what you want, we're here to protect you from that. But if you want a hard divorce or you want revenge, do not hire us. We are not the right law firm for you. You will fire us or we will fire you, and we will definitely hate each other. Don't even come to us. But if you want a healthy divorce, that's us. I also own Christiandivorce.com, which was like another$20,000 domain name, I think. I also I also own divorceadu.com, which I pay$10 a year just to tell that joke, and all my Jewish friends think that's hilarious. So that's and those principles are those are our guiding principles about what we do. We we're a multi-million dollar a year law firm. The way that the firm is structured is we pay based on uh percentages and commissions, essentially, with but and but we've also structured it to where if lawyers help out on each other's cases, it doesn't affect their money one way or the other. Everything's fine because of the formulas that we use. It's really magically balanced out. And if anything, we're high on labor. We work remotely and don't have fixed office space, which that money we give right back to the salaries and compensation packages that we pay out with our firm. It's an incredibly good place to work. We have, and I invest heavily in administrative help. I hire restaurant managers from the highest end restaurants. And why? Because I was looking for like, you know, you promote a paralegal to be your office manager, right? And like there's a concept called rising to your level of incompetence, and that's what happens when you promote most lawyers into people management positions or most paralegals or whatever into like office managers. And I kept trying to hire lawyers or different things. Lawyers can manage cases well, but they can't manage business and they can't they can't manage like the internal employees as well. So, what did I do? I went out and found restaurant managers who are good at two things managing their staff amazingly, and managing the customers and the relationship among the customers and keeping client relations at a tremendously high five-star level. That's where the concept of five-star comes from. Restaurants, they get that. And what do we provide? The business of a law firm is selling legal services. So it's a service business. We provide service, they are in the from the service industry. And to come in, especially me who worked in high-end restaurants through law school, to understand that your your attorneys are your waiters and your your like sous chefs. Your managing attorney is your executive chef. The the I'm the owner of the restaurant. The the your your receptionists, those are your maitre D's. And and um the your paralegals are your busers and your line cooks, your legal assistants are your dishwashers and your prep crew. Like it's a restaurant, it's the same exact thing, and our standards of service match with those standards. We are there's some some law firms are McDonald's, some law firms are high-end steakhouses. Our law firm is a high-end steakhouse. You're gonna come in, we're gonna treat you amazingly, you're gonna probably love us, or we're gonna have to kick you out of the restaurant because you're throwing food on the floor. Like, you know, it's like, and and I mean, like, not like you've spilled something, sir. We'll get that no problem. You dropped a fork and we've picked that up, and now we're getting our Michelin star. It's that you're taking and and grabbing handfuls of mashed potatoes and throwing it at the staff. Like it takes a lot. There's for somebody to not like us, and by the way, you can go to our you can go to our Yelp and you can count every bad client that I've ever had, because every single one has left a one-star review. I have a one-star review from someone whose case I won. Um, long story, but and there's not many of them. Um, and we're on client number like 6,775 or something like that, and over 19 years, just celebrated 19 years. And when you have a niche and you can be the best at something, and you're mission driven, it it becomes really easy. And we have the best of the best in every position on our team. We have the actual like cream of the crop, top of the top. And um, it doesn't get any better than the lawyers that we've got that are working for us, and it doesn't get any better than the paralegals that we've got. And especially because of the management, I one of the keys in me being able to grow was finding that one key pivotal manager. Her name's Jennifer Harr. And she used to be the general manager of the Bob's Steak and Shop House in the Omni Hotel in downtown Dallas. That was Bob's Steak and Shop's number one store. And I went into the store on her last night there after we had hired her. And the it was like the it was a giant, oh my god, love and crying fest in their staff meeting that they had at the beginning with like 70 people at it before the shift that night. Of they they they were like, we don't want you to go, but we realize how much better that this opportunity is for you than you staying here, and we know and we will not allow you to stay here and not take this job. Like you're going, but God, do we miss you and we love you? And and now we've brought that because I I don't manage people well. I'm a great visionary. I don't know if you can see by the, you know, like I haven't y'all haven't gotten a word in edgewise, I guess. One of these days I'll ask you, I'll let you guys talk. But just kidding. But she, but I I I'm really good at at being the visionary and inspiring, but on day-to-day management and all that, like I know what needs to be done, but I have to like specify that to Jennifer and other people, and then they deal with these different things because I'm always having to be on that bigger picture thing. And and when I do practice law, and if and as I bill, I'm$800 an hour. And for a lot of the different things, like if and my wife complains about this for me too, is like if I try and do a little project or something around the house, we literally have to go through why are you doing this? Is it are you do you just need to feel like you got something done and you have to do something with your own hands, or you need a mental break from doing the other stuff that you do? Or are you stealing the job from the housekeeper? Like, because if I can make$800 an hour this hour, or I can clean my toilets, I could have paid somebody$100 to clean my toilets who would go home and go, honey, we're saved. I I made$100, we can eat today, right? And and I've cost myself$700 to do their job. Like, so it's it's all there's a lot of that. And so why am I gonna try and do a job that I do badly? Most of the paralegal work in the firm, I don't do very well because I don't do that work every day. And why would you pay me to do that? Like attorneys who are like they call them true solos. I I call them the for the sake of this podcast, I don't really call them this uh a lot, but you could call them like the true cowards. Why? Because you're afraid to take that level and operate at the level that you need to. You're doing everything yourself. You're afraid to hire someone, you're afraid you're not gonna be able to pay them, you're afraid that you're gonna that you're gonna be ruining their life, you're afraid that you're not gonna have the business that comes in, you're afraid that they're gonna be a tax on your time, you're afraid, you're afraid to hire somebody. But if you don't take that risk as an entrepreneur and hire the person in order to do that, you can't leverage yourself up. You can't, you're certainly not helping them, you're not giving them a job. And I'm able to handle hundreds of clients at a time because of the team that we have in place, versus how many clients would I be able to hire just on my own? Like 20? Because most of if you're a true solo, you're maybe billing 20 hours a week. More than half your time is on administrative other stuff. Even me as the entrepreneur, my like I've gotten it to where our systems are down, but I still only maybe do 20 hours a week worth of legal work. Most of the stuff that I'm doing is on the entrepreneurial side and administrative side and management side and then coaching, because now not only do I have Jennifer who I mentioned, I have two more, Keith and and and Leo, who are like clones for that. And even then this past year, we intentionally have we're opening up in Florida. We've opened and we're killing it by having actual expansion in Houston. We've handled cases in Houston, but now we actually have offices that were that are there. And again, these are just locations that we commonly rent office space for and we and we work and we have somebody that's willing to meet at that. We have uh a head of our Houston uh office that goes to our two offices that we established there. But we've like just in in bringing that on, I mean, our Houston office would be enviable to most business owners just on its own. And that's like our kind of you know secondary to and and the and the other thing is I'm also I'm personally willing to go pretty much anywhere in the country, but especially anywhere in Texas. The reason why is I'm uh years ago, I started about three years ago, or maybe four now, three or four years ago, I started competitively shooting ski. And every weekend I travel across the country. I've gone as far as as California and Florida and up to um um uh Chicago and and uh Illinois and everywhere in between. I think I've shot it like 19 or 20 states. Last year I shot the number one, I shot more competitive ski targets than anyone else in the world for American ski, and I'm working on going to the 2028 Olympics. I have like I'm just that guy, as my uh as one of my coaches says. Um, like I've taken lessons with multiple Olympic, three three different Olympic gold medalists. Like, you know, I'm I in order to train myself to do to be the best of the best, and I've won two world championships, I won those in the rookie category and rookie concurrent, and uh I I shoot extremely well. I'm rated in the top hundred uh uh shooters in American skeet in the world, and now switching over to the international and Olympic skeet. I've got my first Olympic qualifying event in November, and I do that on the weekends, but even with that, like I go out to the field, I shoot an hour and a half event, I come back and I'll do like new client calls in between, and then I'll go out and shoot the next event, and then I'll do like another client call. And you know, like I'm just like I'm severely I drown myself in workahol. I like to go from the moment that I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. I I I completely like Elon Musk's work ethic makes total sense to me. I like I feel like I'm like, oh, I get that. You know, I I I love hearing people talk about him. And I'm like, all right, somebody else, like I'm not the only one.

SPEAKER_00:

Um hey family law firm leaders. My partner Tony Carls just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from zero to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family law firm will succeed.

SPEAKER_03:

Like, it just just clearly off. Like, love everything you've done and your passion of excitement. It's just like it's oozing from you. I want to, I'm sitting here thinking, how did you get out of your way enough to make that first hire? When did you recognize early on that, like, oh my god, I gotta, I gotta get someone to help me here because I'm all visionary all the time?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I had always been trying to have like at least one person. I I was I knew I knew myself enough that I'm like, I gotta have at least one person. And so, even from like the first month or so, like I hired one of my fellow waiters, you know, and I knew that she also had a job and we could kind of do this in our side time, you know, and and um, and then when I got married, um, I immediately enlisted my wife because she was making about$45,000 a year at the time. I was like, and and she was a project manager. I'm like, wait, you're a project manager? That's like a paralegal. Paralegal is manage each case is like a project, so you just manage that. And look, I'm gonna have to hire a paralegal anyway, so I can either hire you and then we can work together and always be together all the time. Don't do that. That's not a good idea. Like our first year of marriage was like real shaky, and and we've gone through a lot of, and I've had to hire a lot of coaches and a lot of, I mean, I I've definitely spent upwards of between a half a million and a million dollars just on coaching over the last the first coaching program I got in was 2011. And I did and and I went from like I think we grossed$80,000 that year, and then the next year we grossed 200, and then the next year we grossed 800, and then we've been over a million, we we crossed over a million uh there, and and this year we're at probably three and a half or four. Um, and next year I it looks like we'll be at five to six, maybe seven, um, just because of the growth that we've got. And a lot of that management, like you can't get you can't get to those levels um without having a certain amount of management team, lots of predetermined systems and structures in place, um, really great customer service. And um, we we use even we do we do things that I don't know of any other law firm that does. Like, for example, we record all of our phone calls and we provide those to the client. We also use an outlining program that um they can see all of our attorney's notes and it and it as we're entering the notes, we enter it into outline format. So it builds the outline of their case so they can look in and it's like really obvious every single thing that's there. And because we've listened to those recordings and we run them through AI, we get a transcript of it and we get summaries of it. And so every fact that a client ever tells us is useful for some purpose. We we want to make sure that we ask the other side about that in deposition. By the way, if we're gonna do that, then here's how we want to approach the angle. Make sure you'd say this one first, then this one. But it's there from every conversation. And so, what does that do? The clients and and we give a tremendous amount of um oversight and overview because we use a paid secure view version of Google Drive. Well, Google Drive shows you the timestamps of every different change that you made, and we bill by the hour. So, what are we doing? We're showing our work. Like you didn't do anything. Well, here's where it says we did. You can track the hour that I billed you for right here. And and if if a client decides, and there's a lot of reasons why clients would decide this, their friend found this other attorney, and they want to, you know, like so. On the occasions, not doesn't happen a lot, but where they do hire a different attorney in the middle of it, we go share with other attorney, here's everything. Like, well, what did they say on that? What did you say to that attorney? Well, why don't you just listen to the recording or read the transcript? It's literally right there. They don't you don't even have to call us. But and by the way, I would tell you the big picture about everything, but we have a tab where it says status, and like that's like our big picture. You can read that and know, like, here's everything that's happening. Like, here's every thought that I've had about the case in an outlined, useful format. Like, if you're having a c a lot of attorneys, they'll have a conversation with the client, and then the client will you get some questions answered, and then they hang up and like, what's the result of that call? Like, where's the production? Like, you got maybe something, and now you get a little bit of clarity. Like, ours is in the on paper, in the outline. We can trace it out. It's the work was done and progress was made there. And the other thing is when you use a system like that and we use timers for all that stuff, you get to the end of the day, and you're free. You can go shoot some skeet targets. Why? Because I have no thoughts in my head that I'm carrying the stress that, oh, I got to remember and make sure I do this or whatever, tomorrow, whatever. It's all in our system and our calendar stuff. If there's something I need to do, we calendar. All of these little procedures that we do make it an absolute joy to practice law the way that we do. If we didn't do it this way, I wouldn't still own this law firm. I wouldn't be in law. I would go do something entirely, completely else because I've done it both ways. I will never go back. It's too stressful, it sucks, and it's great to work things as a team. It's just the way, the way that we work, it makes us pretty unbeatable in court. Um, and when we go to court, we're just running through the outline. We've already got it all planned out, everything. And so you can pay attention and listen. And then you got, and we always go with at least an attorney and a paralegal. Usually more than that, but at least an attorney and a paralegal. And the paralegal is just sitting there with our outline checking off and making sure we proved everything and got everything done. Like, is this exhibit in? Yes, admitted that, like checklist there, because we've got our exhibit list, that's all admitted. We've got all these things that we wanted to do and show about whatever the case is. We've checked it off in in court. The paralegal's job is to do that and then like go, hey, they said this. I know that's a lie. Pull this, and the paralegal pulls it and go, and then we cross. Cross-examine them there. It makes all of what we do like very easy and reactionary and responsive, as opposed to like, oh, I'm gonna sit there and stress. I got to worry about what it is. So many attorneys just sit spinning their wheels worrying about stuff. It's like, do it, put it in this. If you operate like this and you build it the whole time you have the case, there's never a stress point about anything. And the clients don't have stress points. They can look at it all.

SPEAKER_00:

Dina, are you in a coaching or um mastermind program right now?

SPEAKER_02:

Um, I have the last one that I did was with Patrick Bet David recently from from Value Tainant. I'm not in one now. Um, but that's um probably more of an issue of my schedule. Uh, I mean, we sort of do, I mean, part of the team. So we have executive meetings twice a week, and that's with Leo, Keith, Jennifer, Summer, and myself. We call that's our C-suite for the firm. We do those on Mondays and Tuesdays. One of those is specifically um numbers analysis, another one is marketing, and then we do a variety of different um mastermind things like that. At the but at the I my the most recent actual mastermind that I did um privately was in February, maybe. So I haven't done one in a few months.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And then I loved your idea about the way you execute on hiring support teams from restaurants and so forth. Do you have any markers or personality traits you look for for your lawyers? Any like shortcuts on how you identify the right lawyer for your firm?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. So um you definitely always have to meet your attorneys in person, for one thing. Um, and you definitely you want a system that you go through. Um, by the time somebody gets to me, my job is not to screen them out anymore. It's to screen them in by that point. If I notice a red flag or something, I can and and would screen them out. But you you really want screening out from like multiple levels. The whole the motto of slow to hire, quick to fire is really is very important. Um and um, you know, it's like it's kind of like picking a jury to a certain extent. You want to screen out everyone who's bad for you, and then pick your favorite from who's left over. Same thing you should do with dating, by the way. Um, and we could talk, I could talk a long time about that. But um, you know, if you if you're picking a jury, if you screen out everybody on the panel that's bad for you, then by default, whoever's left over is good for you. Um and so have you know, they've got to go through Keith, Leo, Jennifer, and uh Daniel, who's our uh he's an attorney, but he and he's our managing attorney, basically works purely on the legality and logistics of the cases. And so they they have to get through those four people before they come to me. And it's important that that process happens because I'm more of a salesperson to sell them in and get him excited, as opposed to like you know, building the wall. They've gotten past the walls, but in general, I want somebody who preferably has like charisma is a bonus, um, but somebody that is also coachable and because some people will come in. I've had I've had a guy that came in and like every day was a fight. It was just miserable. I wind up having to fire him. And um and you know, just wasn't responsive to we need people that are responsive to the team approach, um, that like having uh people that they can talk with and and take direction from and and bounce the big picture of. Because you know, when you're stuck in the trees, you're looking at trees, you're not looking necessarily at the shape of the forest and everything or the big picture. And sometimes you got to go get out of that trees and go this way, go another way. So it's part of it depends on big picture, part of it depends on like what specific skill set. Like, are we needing somebody that just prefers to do paperwork, or are we needing somebody that can go into court? And maybe we hire somebody that just does all the pre-litigation stuff and they're you know kind of nerdy and like to stay in their cocoon and antisocial. Like, if you're like, well, I went straight through school, I've never had a job, but I interned at a law firm for for a summer. I'm like, maybe, but but like, you know, and and and as Jennifer says, this is that we can teach for for for certain skill sets, we can't teach caring, and we can't teach how to, you know, customer service. That it's not you're not there for you or your ego at all. You're there for them. We need people that are able to listen really well. I know I'm talking a lot, but when I'm on a consultation, if my lips are moving, I'm losing, and I'm usually just asking questions. I've actually taught sales techniques of try to have an entire conversation and only ask questions for the rest of the conversation. And you can actually do that, and a lot of times the other person won't even notice. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's for that's definitely true. Like, yeah, they'll keep going.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. I'm interested in how you did. Did you notice that?

SPEAKER_01:

What's that?

SPEAKER_02:

Did you notice that I just did that exact technique and I'm doing it again during this sentence?

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't notice that actually. I should be listening for it.

SPEAKER_02:

But it's that technique, and you just whatever it is that you're gonna say, you turn it and phrase it into a question at the end.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So I'm interested in how you're scaling. Do you have um a managing partner that the attorneys report to, and then that person reports to you? How do you set that part up?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. So, so there we we assign cases to to attorneys, but it's not like you might think in most firms. That's a you are responsible to make sure you know what's going on, but whoever needs to work on that, however, it needs to work on it, you kind of determine that. And it's the same way with a paralegal. And we don't necessarily have paralegals assigned to attorneys, we have paralegals assigned to this case is suited for you as a paralegal, and this case is suited for you as an attorney. And so you work on this, but there, but there's always times where, especially in negotiations, because every case really is just a great big negotiation because you're either going to negotiate in front of a judge and they're gonna decide, or you're gonna negotiate with the other side and you're gonna get to an agreement. So a lot of times we'll do good cop, bad cop, or one person will take a position about one thing and one person will be we call it hard versus soft, or good cop versus bad cop. Like they're the hard way, they're prepping for court, and they're not stopping. But you can negotiate with me, and I'm gonna try and get something done and and and negotiate that. But in the meantime, like the hard part is is still going. We're on the hard path until you can get on the on the soft path. And the soft path is helpful. We always, from the very beginning of the case, as soon as we have the financial information that we need in order to decide to be able to draft a final decree of divorce, we draft the final decree of divorce. Well, why would you do that before you even have an assignment or an agreement? Because you can't get an agreement until they sign. They can tell you they agree all that you want, but until you get an agreement, so why not send them the contract? I actually learned this from Donald Trump's attorney in the year 2000. I was remember how I was broke? Well, there was always a free lunch at SMU. That's what I lived on for like two and a half, three years. That and I also knew this magic magic statement from the restaurants I worked at. Hey, boss, what do I need to do extra for you today in order to get a free bowl of soup? I would always and they would, well, you can like clean this thing over here or whatever while I'm standing around doing nothing anyway. So I'd go clean that. I'd be making all the money from the tables. Hey, I know you got to you really got caught, you got tickets to that concert. You want to get it get out early. For$10 today, I'll do your sidework. The more they wanted to leave, the higher my price was. So always a hustler, always wheeling and dealing. Yeah, and I would make twice as much money as all the other waiters because I was willing to look, you get there at three o'clock, you get your first table at five o'clock. There's two hours of waiting. And you go one round and you want to leave. Well, I want to go a second round because there's it eliminates that two hours of waiting at the beginning. And you become my indentured servant if I'm taking your last table from you. I get the money from that. And by the way, I need you to give water to everybody in the section over here before you leave. And yeah, at the end, before I leave, I might maybe I'll maybe I'll I won't finish, but maybe when I'm last table here and they're sitting around, that's when I can do all the side work for everybody anyway. And I've made an extra 50 bucks. Plus, I'm gonna make the tip off of that table that would have been theirs, but they wanted to leave early. I I realize I can make twice as much money being the closer, and I can hustle another 50 bucks and eat for free being the closer.

SPEAKER_01:

So does Summer work full-time with you?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, she's the she's the uh the basically the CFO of the company. And I there's not, you know, now I now I've learned, okay, if I just go to the bank and get cash, then I can spend some money that she doesn't know about. But she knows how much cash I've taken out. But basically, there's like not a penny that I spent. But she's she's great with money. I mean, I you know, uh, you know how you you know one thing, how you can make a uh a small fortune shooting skeet. Do you know how? You start with a large one. So like I spend way more money on on my sport than Summer spends on anything, and um, and and she's good with it. She's also she picks stocks really well. Like I don't even I let her pick all the stocks. Like I I made the decision about Angel Studios, but she she runs our portfolios really well and and she runs and I mean and she's the type that if if if there's a if our system shows a penny difference in especially in an account or our trust account or whatever, she'll spend a day on it and she'll find the penny. You know what this is? Here, you can even I'll let you see. I don't care if you see the account number, it's a check for six cents. Six cents. This has been on her desk. I tried to put it in the shredder. She won't let me. This is for whatever this is, the six cents that's important to her. She's gonna like do an like I've convinced her not to spend the time to deposit. So there's a six cent check that's just been sitting here on the desk, or maybe you know, it's probably got my does it have my home address on it? No, okay, good. But it's a check for six cents. Like, that's my wife, and I'm fine with that. It's it's it's it's good, you know, and and it it causes me to be inclined to make like that much more money and be that much more driven. And you know, one of the things in a lot of the coaching programs that I've done is if you don't have a reason why you need to make a certain amount of money, just oh, I want to make a lot of money or I want to make more, I want to make a million, it's random to you, you're not gonna make it because you don't have the driving force. But for me, I have dollar amounts on I need ammo for this. I need I need a new shotgun uh barrel because international sketch, you know, American ski, you're heavy and long, international sket, light and short. So you have to get totally you know different equipment for that. And I'm like, okay, I gotta spend$7,200 on a barrel, you know, for for my gun. I have cars, several cars that I've owned in my life, they're less expensive than my stupid shotgun. It's not stupid, I love it. It's it's an amazing piece of equipment, by the way. Um, but still, like, and and if it wasn't for the fact of, oh, okay, I gotta cover that, or or and we also do a thing called an SEP uh retirement program, simplified employee penchum. So for every dollar, for or for every hundred dollars that our that our team members earn on their check, you know, a lot of times people offer a 401k, it's like we get a 3% matching. So that means you get$100 on your on your paycheck. You have to put$3 of that into a retirement account, and then the company will add$3. What we do is we give 25% on top of that in our SCP. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that we give to our our staff, and that is tax preferred. So if they've made$100,000, they're actually taking home$125,000, but there's no tax on this, not until you withdraw it. So it's about the equivalent of a 300 of$35,000 extra. And we do that, and that's making millionaires in our firm of our of our everybody, even the receptionists, our matries, which by the way are well paid. Uh, some of those are making six figures for like just answering answering our phones and and and being able to convert new clients that come into our into our and we're we're turning every if you work for our firm for 20 years, you will be a millionaire as long as you like. I mean, theoretically, and it's a self-controlled thing, so you do have to invest it. But there are a couple of people who got that and then quit and liquidated it. I'm like, oh, like, you know, that that's probably a good uh an indicator why you're not still here. Because the people that are here, they're like our managing attorney Daniel Boomer, he's like, that's why I work here, and he tells everybody that he goes, we live off of what I make on my W-2 and all of our investments, that 25%. That's what that's what our money actually is. Because all this other money that I get, it goes to the guy who has my mortgage, it goes to the guy who kills the cows that I eat, it goes to the guy who who mows my grass, it goes to the guy who built my car, it goes to the guy who put who manufactures the gasoline that I get. I all that money goes away. But what do I get? I get that 25% in my retirement account that is growing and earning me money and in investing there. We're making everybody that works for us absolutely rich. And if you work for the Palmer Law Group for 20 years, you will be a millionaire. Even if you just put your money into index funds, you will absolutely get there. And that's the that's the idea. Is the idea is to get it to where you don't have to work, you're choosing to work. And we make the company so pleasurable to work for that it's even when people are like, I don't have to work anymore. I have enough money, I could retire and not have to work. But I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy working with people, and I like I I know what else I would do. I would shoot like that many more targets all day long. And you know, I'm I'm I'm also like 90% into a there's a band that I've auditioned for until I blow it, or unless I blow it. Like I have to really be spot on, and we've got to do a bunch of rehearsals, but it's uh it's a band called Killed the Robot, and we're gonna be going on tour in in May, and it's with uh Stephen Gibb, who is uh Barry Gibbs' son, and Barry Gibbs sings on track three of the record, and it's getting a lot of traction. I think it's been nominated for a Grammy. I was not the I play drums, and so I was not the drummer on that album, but I'll be the drummer playing live and on the next albums going forward, um, assuming that I like it's my I'm in the band until and unless I blow it for some reason. We also have to kind of worry about the the the the the timing of the competitions because I'm like, what happens if we get this major like what happens if we get to open for tool and or I get to go to the Olympic trial, like a qualifying match? Like where's that where's that competing interest? That's the that would be the reason why maybe I don't get in it, but uh you know we'll we'll see about something like that, or maybe I get a substitute drummer who then hopefully doesn't steal my spot. But um and and my wife, yes, she does think that I do in entirely too much, but I I enjoy everything that I do, and I I like and the and the biggest thing is the results that we get for our clients. That that is such a joy and reward. And I have been blessed with an amazing talent of that. I actually view myself as the guard of the gate. And my rule is thou shalt not pass, because if you pass me, you have to get a divorce, and I wouldn't wish a divorce on anyone. And one of the projects that I've been working on, I've been trying to get it to going for years, but we are and we're very close, but I think it's likely to happen, is I own healthy marriage.com, which was another, I think I paid 20 grand for that domain name just to get that. And what that is, it's designed to make a bad marriage good again, make a good marriage great, and keep a great marriage great. It's also designed to help you find and and have a great marriage if you've never been married. And so that's under development. I really would like to launch that um pretty soon. But my really my ministry is marriage. I hate seeing unhealthy marriages. So my goal is to end unhealthy marriages. But there's two ways to that happen. Preferably, they make it into a healthy marriage again. But if not, they need to get as healthy of a divorce as possible.

SPEAKER_03:

Tennant, you have been amazing. You you have so much to say and so much to share. And I really appreciate the time that you've given us and the lessons learned and kind of how you're thinking about your firm. Um, your passion is extremely contagious, and I really appreciate all the time that you've given us today. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to tune in and check out the other owner operator series uh episodes that we have in the queue. We do these about once a week. So we have lots of law firm owners telling their stories, sharing lessons learned, lots of great insights for you on the show.

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Jeff Hughes

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