109 - Efficiency & Outstanding Service Is Key to Earning Good Fees

Peter owns The Partnership, an award-winning property law firm he founded 15 years ago, based in London and Guildford and employing 90 people.  With his new firm, Legalito, he is sharing with other lawyers the benefits of technology that genuinely improves effectiveness.

In this episode Peter breaks down how efficiency and outstanding service is the key to charging good fees, reducing risk and maintaining profitability. He will also explain how he has achieved this and how his latest venture, Legalito, is changing the way that lawyers look at technology.

About Dan:
Dan provides law firm owners with the skills and capital investment to increase their profits while reducing their workload. Over the last five years, Dan’s clients have grown their revenues from 20% to 392% in one year while more than halving their workload.

To find out about Dan's availability and programs, click here: https://www.danwarburton.com/

Proudly edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real ✨

Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I am your host, Dan Warburton. If you are a law firm equity member, partner, CEO or MD who wants to increase your profit while reducing your workload, then you are in the right place.

It's the skills that I needed to become a leader. Yeah. I'm so happy that I've met you, Malef.

You've spoken about the revenue increase. It went from like 70,000 to nearly half a million. What percentage increase is that? It's over 400% in that range.

Our monetary returns have been insane. And what we have made in extra profit as compared to what we spent on you is incomparable. You've just trebled the firm's profits in one year.

Yeah. Are you getting what I'm saying? After working with Dan for a few months, my income is up. My happiness is up.

This has changed my whole life. Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast with your host, Dan Warburton. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking to Peter Ambrose, who is the CEO at The Partnership and Legal Eto.

And Peter owns The Partnership, which is an award-winning property law firm he founded 15 years ago. It's based in London and Guildford and employs over 90 people. With his new firm, Legal Eto, he is sharing with other lawyers the benefits of technology and genuinely improves effectiveness.

In this episode, Peter breaks down how efficiency and outstanding service is the key to charging good fees, which I totally agree. Also, reducing risk and maintaining profitability. He will also explain how he has achieved this and how his latest venture, Legal Eto, is changing the way lawyers look at technology.

Peter, it's brilliant to have you here. I'm delighted to be here. I've seen a lot of your videos, so it's great to be here.

Fantastic. You were just saying that you've rolled out some new technology at Legal Eto. We have.

We've been going for about 15 months now. And the idea behind it was that I had lots of lawyers come to work for me and said, your stuff's amazing, the technology's amazing. And I felt we needed to share it with other people because it was really clear that most law firms don't do terribly well with technology.

So we started Legal Eto about two years ago. And we've sort of gradually... We didn't do any sponsorship of any events or roll out or anything like that. We've actually just sort of crept it out over the last 15 months.

And in that time, nearly 2,500 lawyers are registered to use it, which is amazing. And we're trying to overcome the myth that people who produce technology don't know what lawyers know about because, obviously, I run the partnership, as you said. As I said, we rolled out our second major release over the weekend.

And it's a bit of a game changer because it's connecting lawyers with their clients, which is... That's just, yeah, mind-blowing. In what way? Explain how that works. Well, the problem that we see is lawyers have been working the same way for the last 30 years.

And that is emailing each other, emails and so forth, and emailing their clients' documents and so forth. At the partnership, we had a fraud about eight years ago where a client was in a man-in-the-middle fraud. Someone pretended to be our client, sent us an email with new bank details but with the client's signature, and we sent them £330,000.

So at that point, I decided to throw all my toys out the pram and said, we will never use email again with clients. So we haven't. For eight years, we've used a portal, which is brilliant, but it's not for everyone.

And it is for our clients, but we know a lot of lawyers struggle with it. But we still think this is the future. So that's what we've just rolled out, a portal that allows clients to actually interact with lawyers.

I see. I see. Yeah, brilliant.

And so this is something that you basically had built to operate in your own firm to begin with? Exactly. I've got like a nice testing bed because I've got about 50 lawyers that work for us. So we'll try stuff in-house first of all and go, does that work? Doesn't it work? Especially with clients.

Yeah. And then what we do is we generalise it and then we build it for Legalito. So as I say, this is our second rollout now.

But we knew that clients love having a portal. They really do. And it's safe as well.

Yeah, great. And also because the client can just log in and see where their case is at on stage. Yeah.

But also the other thing is, as well as being secure, it means that everything's in one place. Yeah. Even though people talk about milestones, I'm not a massive fan of milestones, but I am a massive fan of clients having one place to look.

Yeah, nice. They really like that. And it probably helps a lot with keeping up to date with compliance, doesn't it? Compliance is massive for us.

Compliance for us is all about writing stuff down. Yeah, of course. Because if you don't write it down, you can't check it.

So we're completely paperless. Everything, we're very data heavy. And the reason we do it is because I don't like surprises.

Well, of course. You know what it's like? I mean, the classic case, the one thing we always quote, yeah? You get a call from a client and they said, oh, you helped me buy a house five years ago. Just a little thing, and you get this little bit of sick in your mouth and you go, oh my God, what is it? Did we not raise the right inquiries? Did we not get the right answers? Or do we not report to you? What mistake did we make? And unless you document everything, and unless you have something in a way that's easy, tracking that down is really, really difficult.

So that's for us is the really big deal. Or for example, when the regulator says, show me how many of your clients are from a particular country. We get all these kinds of requirements and it's just, you have to write it all down.

And of course, having such a technology enables you to capture all that information. You've got to capture it. And this is the thing, I think that the thing that most people struggle with is that the systems they have, they either can't capture the data or capturing is such a pain that lawyers go, well, I've got time for this.

Don't be a tick box exercise, I'm not going to do it. With us, we're pretty rigid. We're like, you've got to collect all this information.

You know, silly things like, I don't know, lender details or other site details. I mean, we always capture the details of the other side, including the bank accounts. So we know that we can't send money to a wrong bank account because someone sent us a spoof email.

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Yeah. Really good.

I'm actually at a point where I'm looking at buying my first law firm right now. Oh, buying a law firm? Yeah. Do you do diligence? Well, this isn't exactly it, but I'm learning so much from just speaking to you about the importance of capturing everything and creating systems where both the lawyers and the clients can work really efficiently together and what difference that makes.

In all seriousness, due diligence on law firms, especially property, is really difficult because everything is buried. It's buried in emails, it's buried in Word documents, it's buried in PDFs. Yeah, yeah.

And trying to find out a case, you don't know where the body's buried until it goes wrong. Yeah. And that's why, I mean, we would never buy a law firm.

I know law firms do. We wouldn't because we were like, well, we don't know what's going on. Yeah.

And lawyers, because especially in property where it's such high pressure, they haven't got time. If something doesn't work, they move on. Try to use that technology, can't use it, move on.

So you have to make things work and you've got to make data capture easy. Yeah. You have to.

I'll give you an example of this. We do all our onboarding electronically. Okay.

We built our own portal, we have our own onboarding. But when lockdown came around, we basically used to put PDFs on our portal and people used to download them, fill them in, scan them and upload them. And of course, when they weren't working, they couldn't download them.

So we quickly changed it so they could be fillable PDFs, which sounds really easy. Okay. 16 days on average to onboard, which is crazy, right? All electronic, but we switched it to a form-based system.

In other words, they type into a form, got it down to six and a half days. Right. So even though we gave it, we knew it was a stock gap.

Yeah. But even though we knew it was a stock gap, we're like, okay, but clearly people didn't like it because it was taking them, as I say, we shaved off 10 days off. It was amazing.

Coming back to it, breaking down efficiency and outstanding service is the key to charging good fees. Yeah. What do you mean by that? You know how you read online that everyone says, oh, lawyers aren't charging enough.

As if they're just going to wave this magic wand and suddenly they're going to double their fees. They're all going, oh, that's all right. We love what you're doing.

It just doesn't work. All right. When we started out, just to give you an example, when we started the business, we charged 795 for a transaction.

Yeah. Okay. It was, we were undercutting everybody in the area and that was okay.

Within three months, we'd already increased it to a thousand pounds. The only way we were able to do that was because we were able to deliver really good service and the way that we got work was a recommendation so therefore we can increase our fees. Our fees have now gone up to 1,800 pounds.

Okay. The only way, I mean, yes, we're brilliant. Don't get me wrong, but the only way we could do this was to give really good service.

What is good service? That's not picking up the phone and saying, hello, have a nice day. That is having the data at your fingertips so that if someone calls in and says, I'm really frustrated. The other side said, they haven't heard from me for three weeks or whatever.

What's going on? Instead of, oh, let me pull the file. Yeah. We put timelines on our screen so we can see, right, well, it's been with the client for three weeks.

I mean that data and that's what service is but the problem with it is chicken and egg. In order to give the service, you've got to employ the right people and you've got to deploy the right technology so you've got to afford to pay it. You can't afford to pay it unless you charge the right fees or you can't borrow a load of money, right? So that's the problem.

It's a bit of chicken and egg but you've got to take a leap of faith and that's what I mean by it because, and I'm sorry, I know people get nervous about technology when they say technology is not the answer good lawyers are. I'm sorry, but they're wrong. I fundamentally disagree.

And I agree because, you know, as you know, I'm all about leadership and management and you can only effectively lead and manage others based on data. If you don't know where you stand or where you're trying to get to and where you are versus where you are trying to get to, how can you lead and manage effectively? It's crazy. When I say to people, because I do all the recruitment, I have the joys of recruitment.

When I ask lawyers, how many cases are you running? Yeah, they don't know. If you don't know how many cases you're running, okay, is it sale or purchase? Don't know. Okay, is it leasehold or freehold? You know, is it auction? How many of these? Have you done any new bills? All these questions, right? And because their emphasis is put on it, people are flying blind.

So they don't know, A, what they're doing. They don't know what their capabilities are. But interestingly also, they don't know how busy they are.

That's it. They don't know. So what we do is, we have like checklists and so forth, which are a bit annoying.

We don't do workflow because that's the devil's work. But we do have checklists. And because we profile the property.

Hang on a minute. You say you don't do workflow, it's the devil's work. What do you mean by that? Okay, workflow is bad.

It's really bad. Yeah, we've never done it. Okay, you've got to trust the people that you have.

Okay, so for the listener, define what do you mean by workflow? What is workflow to you? Workflow to me is, you can't do X until you've done Y. So for example, if I want to open a file, it doesn't let me because I haven't got an ID from a client. Right. That's to me is workflow.

Get the ID, and then you can open it. And then you hear a lot of people clicking a lot of screens because they need to get through screens and so forth. We have checklists to say, you need to do this.

Okay. If you haven't done this, it goes, you haven't done it, you need to do it. We don't want to stop you because sometimes you may want to do that.

The problem with workflow is it increases a lot of stress for people. Interesting. So in other words, somebody might have, of the 10 documents required, they might have six of them at hand.

They can just go and start by uploading those first six. Exactly, crack on. That's it.

And then they feel like they've made progress and then they get notified, you still got four more to upload rather than you can't load up the first one yet. And I'd rather, I would say monitor and manage. Yeah, right.

So for example, if I've got a lawyer and we have these things called service KPIs. So we have a little, I don't do dashboards, but we have a little charts at the top of the screen, but it's not about how you're performing to target or any nonsense like that. It's right.

You've received a contract packing, but I've noticed you haven't raised inquiries on these files. And it's been, and you obviously, you know, green apple, red apple. Okay.

It's more than 10 days. Who cares? 15 days when you need to start looking at it. So you flag it up and they go, actually, you know what? I need to start looking at it because lawyers is particularly get quite caught in the weeds.

You've got to flag it up and go, you should do this. And we're not going to whip you if you don't, right? But you need to see what's going on and there's no visibility. So when a lawyer gets into the data, they go, what am I going to do today? They wait for the phone to ring or they don't wait.

The phone starts ringing, right? The phone starts ringing and they go, right, that squeaky wheel needs to get some grease. And you can't do that. It's so stressful.

So stressful. Yeah. So what have you put in place to be able to, you know, do away with a lot of that stress? It's all about control.

And how have you implemented that control as such? What we've done, and it goes to the heart of what we do actually, it's really important. What I would say to people, I always do a lot of the in-house training of our guys. And what I say to people is when the phone goes, who's on the other end? I don't know.

Okay. So what questions are they going to ask you? Don't know. That's stressful, right? Especially as the middle of something else at the time.

So what we say is we've got to stop the phone calls. You have to stop the phone calls. And the only way you stop phone calls is by pushing information out.

It's the only way. Unless it's in sales. Sales is separate, right? What do you mean the only way you stop the calls is by pushing information out? If you've done something, make sure people know about it.

Okay. If you reported to the client, okay, the way we do it, we automatically flag that we've reported to the client. When they produce a report, we send it, we put a little flag on the screen.

So, okay, this has been done. So if an agent logs in and has a look, they can see that. If we've received money on account from a client, we send a notification to the agent to say, hey, just let you know we've got money on account.

We review every single case every week. So what you mean is by notifying everybody involved is you avoid the phone ringing and interrupting everyone. Got it in one.

And it's all about control. Okay. Got it.

But people say that and go, oh, you should notify people. Do they know how difficult it is? And most people say that who don't do conveyancing, right, or property law. Because you go, right, it's like, for example, always copy in the agent when you apply to the other side with your replies to inquiries.

Yeah. It's a great idea. Stops the phone calls, right? Nine times out of 10 we do it.

One time out of 10 we forget. Yeah. It's the way it is.

But, so what you have to do is you have to take away, you've got to stop lawyers having to remember to do stuff. So what you've done is you've created a system with checklists that when people complete them, built into the original application is everyone's emails that needs to be notified of what at which stage. So when a certain box gets ticked, that individual involved in that automatically gets sent an email to be notified of that stage.

Exactly. So you haven't got to remember it. But the key, this is where people get it wrong, all right? The key to this is you can't over notify.

I call this signal blindness. Yeah. If you start getting loads of emails, people go, oh, I don't care, I'm going to pick up the phone.

Okay. It's like, we never use red on our screens, apart from an extreme emergency. Don't use red because red's, oh, flipping heck, yeah? You can't over notify and you can't over automate.

If you over automate, people get lazy and they go, oh, it's fine, the system's got this. Yeah, but the system might not get it. So you've got to be very, very picky about what you notify.

Give an example, all right? We have a lot of estate agents who join us as salespeople. And they always say to me when they join, what you should do is you should notify the agent when you've received the local search. I said, that's interesting you say that.

I said, because a lot of agents want to know that. Yes, they do. And after three weeks, they go, yeah, you should never notify the agent when you receive a local search.

I'm like, and the reason it isn't is because it generates a phone call. If the agent gets this bit of information and there's a general point, you've got to be very careful. They get this information, you go, yeah, you got the search, so you're going to raise inquiries and start reporting.

Well, no, I only got it this morning, so no. Terrible service. Outrageous.

I'm going to call back tomorrow. When you are, can you get off your ass and start doing it? And they put the phone down. So you've got to manage the communication.

It's not, it's quite complicated. You'd think it'd be really simple, Yeah, right. So you basically have some of those updates sent out seven days after the actions.

Yeah, or maybe not. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a delay.

I'll give you an example. Like, for example, when we reply to inquiries, okay, we don't send a notification to the client, say, hey, we've replied to your inquiries. We leave it for three hours because we might want to reply to some more inquiries.

Yeah, I see. And they'll be over notified. And also, as soon as you notify them, they'll go and have a look at it.

A little bit like, for example, we'll get replies in from the other side. And especially what LegalEater does is that transport, yeah? And it comes in automatically and it updates automatically, which is really cool. Except if the client happens to be on there and says, well, why haven't you replied to those answers? Well, hang on a minute, I've just looked at them.

So you've got to be able to hide it from the client. So one of my colleagues was like, no, we always hide them. And so what we did is we changed it, but people would forget to hide them and then the clients would go, that's outrageous.

So then what we do now is whenever we get replies in, yeah, we hide it automatically from the client. And a big red banner goes, you're hiding this from the client just so you know. What I'm interested is to hear at your firms, how do you handle performance? Like, do you have targets that you set team members, heads of department, individuals? We do.

We don't target on revenue. Okay. We target on exchanges for the simple reason the lawyers don't do the quoting.

So why should we target someone on something that they're not quoting? The sales people do that, yeah? Yeah. And it's variable. So we would expect our lawyers to do anywhere between 14 and 16 exchanges a month.

Okay. That's what we would expect. And that's what they're targeted on.

And they're incentivized on it as well. But you've got to be very careful with incentivization. How have you incentivized? With money.

Yeah, I get it. But is it an individual? Is it firm-wide? Team-wide? It's individual and then the team lead based on their team's performance as well. Okay.

But we've only... It's really simple, yeah? If you get this many exchanges through, you've hit target. A simple scheme's a good scheme, right? Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course.

The challenge I've found is that when at law firms they give reward based on an individual performance, you can end up with, you know, certain associates just hoarding work to themselves, you know, and not being a team player. It's very difficult. I mean, that's it.

So for start with, we don't allow the lawyers to allocate the work. We, say we, excuse me, the sales team allocate the work. Right, okay.

And that's based on a couple of metrics. One, whether it's from a referrer. So for example, every referrer has three lawyers and paralegals assigned to them.

Okay. So we get the relationship. Secondly, we look at the type of work.

So if it's like very complicated or they've already got a lot of new bills, we have something called matter intelligence, which is super clever, yeah? It looks at what sort of work it is and whether they've got too many bits of that work and find it looks at how busy they are. Yeah, which no one else can do this because they don't... And what they don't do is they don't match checklists to property profile to lawyer experience. It's a three-dimensional model, yeah? Yeah, right.

Basically, if someone's done a load of work on a case, there's not much more to do, okay? Then that case has got less weight in the one where they've only just maybe got started. Yeah, yeah. So we have these very clever models which basically says, yeah, this person might have 20 cases, but actually they're 95% capacity.

Yeah. If someone has got 50 cases and they're actually, they're near the end of their stuff, so they're actually not very busy at all. But we don't allow lawyers to hold cases.

We have an upper limit where it doesn't go across. It's normally about 55 between two. Yeah, interesting.

It's much lower than most. We are lower, which again comes back to the price and the service. And how do you feel, you know, a law firm owner can elevate team performance and have people work as a team? It's really difficult, especially with lawyers.

I think what you have to do, the first thing you have to do is you have to build trust in law firms is in quite short supply. Yeah. It is unbelievable, isn't it? Yeah.

It's bad out there. I mean, I hear some horrendous stories, people being hit, people being threatened, people being bullied, working Saturdays. It's awful.

I think people have got to want, they've got to want to be part of something good. So my view is we're doing something new and something different. Be part of it then.

Yeah. Be part of something new. And without getting cocky.

I can hear two things in what you're saying. The first one is be respectful towards your team members and employees. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Greet them kindly, listen to them, get in their world, find out what matters to them and support them. Genuinely support and succeed in what matters to them. I think that's a really good point.

I'm amazed. When we get difficult clients, I always step in. I disinstruct clients.

And people say to me, oh my God, no one's ever done that before. And I'm like, well, they should have done. Yeah.

They should have done. And they don't. Or like, we binned one of the largest agents as a referrer a few years ago in London.

Yeah. Because they were being really, really rude to my colleagues. And I told them, I said, stop being rude.

We're not doing that. And when we binned them off, everyone knew how important it was to us. I said, no, we're doing it.

And that built a lot of trust. And funnily enough, people have gone on to other places and said, oh yeah, we don't have that kind of support. Support is more than just, oh, did you have a good weekend? And how's everything at home? It's, we're here to defend you.

And that is to give you the data to do the work, to protect you against abuse. Yeah. Your working hours are not crazy.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Brilliant.

And so, you know, and I can see why you built so steadily in numbers, because you've got that culture in place that makes people feel at home and want to stay there. They do. I mean, do people leave? Yes, of course they do.

What's our turnover like? It's all right. I wish it could stay on. People stay there forever.

Well, I don't wish that actually, because it's good for people to go out. We do, we do, we do take a lot of young people on and we train them up. The greatest thing for me is, and I say this to people, they get a bit upset.

I always say, look, I said this to someone the other day who decided to change. And I said, we've turned you, we qualified you into a really good lawyer and you're going to take that knowledge and you're going to go elsewhere and that's fantastic. Well, you decided to leave and that's okay.

She'd been here for about four years. I'm like, that's fine. Hmm.

Fine. And, and I think that's the goal of what we do. It's tiring because it does mean that you bring in young people, you train them and then they go, which is, but that, that's what we, we think the world needs better lawyers.

Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, if you don't bring in youngsters and don't train them up, then, you know, within a few years, you end up with a big gap in your workforce. Yeah.

It's a tricky one. It's, it's a big, big challenge. I mean, obviously we see the challenge now of, um, you know, people on remote working, they want consultancy, they want a bit more freedom and so forth.

Um, we don't really subscribe to that. Um, we subscribe to teaching people. Yeah, I agree.

With a consultancy model, then you've got consultants who are only half committed and they're looking at other opportunities. They've always got their foot in another camp. Whereas somebody who's on a full-time employed contract, it's much more likely to be in the boat, rowing together, going somewhere.

This is it. I mean, I've noticed a very noticeable trend in the last year or so is consultants going to multiple consultancies. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is what I've discovered as well. It doesn't, it doesn't, you know, from, from somebody that's really interested in inspiring great teams to operate at levels of performance and all together going places, I just don't see that you could build a successful law firm brand as such with a consultancy model. I don't get it.

People have built brands, you know, there are some very, um, successful proven brands out there. Yeah. In the consultancy model.

Um, and that's fine. How many of them? I don't know. Um, we, would it scale to, is everyone going to go that way? I don't think so.

I was starting to think that God, everything's going consultancy. And, um, but to me, the idea of work is being in a place where you're supportive, you learn and you enjoy yourself. It's not, I get, I get so frustrated when people say, I can be far more productive when working by myself.

Um, I can build this match and I can earn this much. And you're like, life's not just about billing, you know? Yeah. And it's a tough job.

And I, I worry for the younger people without being patronizing, uh, younger people joining these remote setups where it's just then. Life's about enjoying and learning and hearing things and having a laugh. I hear people laugh in the office.

How many people do you, how many conveyances do you speak to? Right. They go, Oh yeah. They have a laugh in the office.

No, the phones are ringing off the hook and you know, or they can't get hold of people because they're working remotely and it's life's life's for the living. Yeah. It's a good point.

You know, I aspire to leading a firm where, where the employees have the freedom that like they're not overly controlled. It's like, this is the target and I don't mind how you hit that target. Just that's the target, you know? But at the same time, if you, if you do it all from working at home, then as you say, you don't create that team spirit.

And so maybe a hybrid of the two could work well. Well, we do hybrid with our lawyers. So they have three days in the office two at home, which is fine.

The problem is, of course, then other people go, well, why can't I do hybrid? Which I totally understand. I totally get it. I understand it.

It's not what you're learning and you're here to learn and so forth. And you know, with an experienced lawyer, it's a bit like, well, you've earned your stripes in a way. And I can see from older, more experienced lawyers, it can work because they've done the rounds.

Yeah. It's the June. It's the newly qualified.

It's the junior. We saw a definite dip in quality, uh, of candidates, um, where they'd been working remotely during their training and everything like that. They're definite.

No, no question. No question. Yeah.

Brilliant. I think that's really great advice. It's counter.

Well, I say it's counterculture. I mean, it's certainly coming in. Now that people are saying there's more to work than just billing, you know, than exchanging and completing.

Right. I just, that's my view. I've always, the philosophy of the business is respect your colleagues.

Yeah. And we spend more time in the office than we do at home. Yeah.

So you better enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, if you don't enjoy it, leave. Yeah.

We're not for you. We're not, we're not for everyone. We're very exacting.

It's like, we want you to care. We want you to give the best service you can. Yeah.

We're not going to flog you. You go to my office at 25 to six. It's the Marie Celeste.

And that's fine. That's fine. Yeah.

I don't mind. I don't want presenteeism. I don't want people.

It's like you come in, you do your job and you go home. Yeah. Yeah.

Great. Fantastic. And again, that just feeds into creating a great culture.

Culture is very difficult. And I think it's under threat at the moment. I think it's under serious threat.

In what way? In that younger people coming through have not been taught the value of it. Ah, okay. The value of being part of something that's really good where everyone really cares and seeing other people really care as well.

Yeah. And I think that people say, and when I interview candidates, I always say, what's the most important thing to you? Sometimes they say that it's close to where I live. It's okay.

That doesn't go well. But they'll say, if they say, for them, if it's the environment that's important, then that's it. But it's probably 50% of people say that.

They'll often say, I want a wide variety of work so I can develop my skills and grow in my career. Yeah. Great.

I mean, you get that, but it's not what I'm looking to drive people. If I want to be somewhere where I can enjoy it and I can learn that's supportive and feel I'm on the same side, to me, that's important. As I say, unfortunately, we don't see that in a lot of candidates, unfortunately.

Interesting. Yeah. Obviously, though, if they don't take a position with you, they're going to end up working somewhere else.

They're going to hit that bad culture and they're going to stay in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they stay in it.

And most just accept that is how the legal sector is. Yeah. And it's pretty dire.

I mean, you know, we can see when people are working and it's long hours. You know, you can see when emails come in at night and stuff. It's like, wow, you're working, you're working most of Sunday or, you know, it's like, it's not a good look.

And the main reason why, in my opinion, this is happening is because the owners of the business haven't got a control of it and say, no, 50 cases is fine for you. I know you want to do 80 because you want to earn this bonus, whatever and so forth, but that's not good for you. They have to, you've got to be prepared.

You've got to be brave and go, no, we're going to, we've just turned away a whole sector of work, which I decided I didn't like. And it was all right. It wasn't brilliant work, but I didn't want it.

I said, no, we're not doing that anymore. And you've got to be able to do that because it was quite stressful. It was very short period.

It was auction work. I don't want to do it anymore. It's too stressful.

Yeah. Yeah. Very fast turnarounds.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's really, yeah. I'm getting some great insights speaking to you.

Running a law firm is not for the faint hearted. Yeah. Because one of the problems is, is that you're waiting to get sued all the time.

And because you're waiting to get sued, you can never be too careful. And always at the forefront of your mind is, yes, that client's really nice, but wait till we exchange and then they're going to go on Google and give us one star because as someone did the other day, they couldn't use our portal because they didn't have wifi. Okay.

Terrible. Terrible. Okay.

Fine. Um, or someone from the other side will, will slag you off because they thought that your lawyer was incompetent. Yeah.

I had an agent call my lawyer incompetent the other day because, um, uh, the client refused to pay for an indemnity policy. It was no doing us. We're just the messengers and, and, and supporting people in that really tough world.

Yeah. It's not for the faint hearted. And also lawyers typically only listen to lawyers as well.

So you need to be lawyer run. So I run the business. Well, well, yeah, this is it.

I mean, you have to be, I'm not a qualified lawyer, but I'm going to have a good managing partner. You've got to, and they've got to be a lawyer. They've got to be a lawyer.

You've got to be a lawyer, but they also need to be good with people. Yes. And, and that's the key.

And that's good. That thing, that's going to be the hardest position for me to find. It took us nine years.

Wow. Nine years. We were trading for nine years before I put my current COO in place.

She joined me as a solicitor, a few years, qualified. Um, yeah, nine years before we were like, yeah, we think, yeah, that'd be good. And now she's turning into an awesome manager, but by her own admission, she goes, no, I couldn't have done this.

Not as a solicitor. no. Yeah.

Wow. It's really difficult. They're the key person that and a good ops person.

Yeah. Stuff works. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And, and, and of course, you know, we both know Kate Burt, Hive Risk. Yes.

So she's, her and her team are going to get my phone call from the outset. Compliance. Yeah.

Compliance is that, I mean, interestingly, I've just hired someone while I moved her cause she was a lawyer. Um, I moved her into compliance and training. Right.

Cause I decided we need to do more training. So now I have, she doesn't fear now. Yeah.

Which is again unusual. You've also got to be able to bite the bullet and say, um, these people, these lawyers will not be fear. Yeah.

People really struggle with that concept. Yeah. Every fear has got to be a lawyer.

I've got to be, got to be fear. Yeah. Right.

Which means nobody's managing or leading. Well, you've said this. Well, I know you've said this.

Yeah. You're too busy. Yeah.

You're too busy winning work. Yeah. Yeah.

Too busy winning work to run your business. Yeah. You need to stop too busy winning work or more to the point doing, doing the work.

Yeah. Yeah. And people won't do that because they go, well, I can't have, and the problem is the lawyer goes, well, I've got to wear my keep.

Yeah. It works both ways, right? Because that's how they've always gained their value, their stripes. That's right.

Yeah. So I've now got two, I've got Kate who's 10 years PQE and I've got Helen who's eight years PQE, neither of them earned a cent in fees since June. Brilliant.

Fantastic. Brilliant. I bet that the people that they manage are absolutely loving having all that one-on-one time support from them.

It helps. It helps. Yeah.

Yeah. Because me and you know, 10, you know, sort of, you know, middleweight fee earners billing for one hour is always going to be so much more profitable than seeing your partner billing for that one hour. It's just, I honestly, I look at sometimes I look at firms and I'm like, what are you doing? Yeah.

You do have a lot of law firm owners that are still practicing and you, and you do say to them, you need to stop now. Yeah. You're doing it too long.

Yeah. You need to stop. You're burned of this.

You're tired. You're sulky. You're cross.

You're ratty with other lawyers. Okay. Just stop.

So yeah, no, you do need to do that. But it's also what we do is our team leads. We gave them reduced caseloads.

Yeah. Well, of course you have to. Because you have to.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because you've got to respect that they're managing and elevating the performance of everybody else in the team. But here's the thing. All right.

Normally in other law firms, the team leads the most experienced and I love the higher caseloads. Yeah, I know. I know.

I get it. I get it. I, I, I'm only going in to buy my first law firm.

I, I'm only doing this because the number of law firm owners I've now worked with that have all greatly increased their profits whilst getting their workload down. And I've done it so many times that it, you want to, I mean, do you want to ask me to ask me the question, would you buy a law firm? Well, you've answered it. You wouldn't do it.

I wouldn't do it. No. And I get it now.

It's so difficult. I tell you why it's difficult. Um, apart from things like lenders, it's just awful.

Unless it exists, unless it's existing and it's a decent size. So you've got two or three directors already or partners already that are solicitors. Yeah.

Um, you just don't do it starting from scratch. It's just what, well, that's what, that's exactly what I'm doing. You know, I've, I've got the lenders lined up.

I've got the equity partners already showing interest. In fact, in fact, there's so much money out there that's willing to be invested. They just kind of find a home to be invested in.

Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And so this, this lender, when we got into conversations, he's more like a, a deal broker.

Yeah. He said, he said, Dan, the thing with you is you've got so much experience in growing and building law firms. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, that you've proven that you've done this over and over. If you can get the capital together, you know, I'm in a good position.

But as you say, my, well, what will make it possible is if I find the right firm, it needs to have, I need to be able to see the succession. Basically. I've got to say, I mean, I've got Legalito, which is a totally separate company.

Um, and we, I, I work with law firms. Yeah. I've got a thousand, um, nearly, nearly 1100 law firms that have used the software so far in the last 15 months.

Okay. So it's great. Okay.

But it does mean I'm talking to a lot of law firms. Yeah. Um, the majority of law firms I speak to and lawyers I speak there are really frustrated by the setup that they have at their firms.

Yeah. Yeah. They know that it can be better.

They know the technology, they've undercapitalized on technology and they know that it can improve. They're not paperless, um, which makes a whole world of pain. And getting paperless is difficult because you've got to have people that are happy to scan and you've got to categorize and upload and so forth.

Um, so it is very difficult because typically there'll be paper based. So the stuff will be in people's heads and you won't know what's a good process and what isn't a good process until you change that all. Yeah.

No, I get it. I get it. And the, and the reason why most law firms are stuck like that is because the firm owners are just too busy and exhausted doing billable work to actually get in conversation and find out what their team members need and then work with them to put it in place, which is what I'm so excited to get stuck in and start doing.

Yeah, it is very interesting. And when you talk, what's most interesting when you talk to lawyers, let's say I've got 50, I've got 25 lawyers, 25 paralegals as well as the other, uh, teams that paralegals as well. Um, is when you talk to them, they've got really good ideas.

Yeah. Really good ideas. They say, why do we do such, such? So we have something we did and I'll give you this one for free.

All right, we have got something called an ideas list. All right, which is like a, like a Facebook liking page. Right? So you go on there, you put a little note on there and you go, well, I'm thinking about such and such and other people can go in and like it.

Yeah. Nice. And then they like it and then it's on our intranet so people can see it all the time.

So it's like, yeah, yeah. 25 people wanted to have that. We've always, we used to call it the moan list, but that came across a bit negative.

Well, look, Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure to host you on the show. I've got loads of useful insights and I'm just sure, I'm sure the listener as well is going to very much enjoy this. I look forward to seeing you out and about again in the future and wishing you the best.

Thanks so much. Thanks so much for your time. Cheers.

Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Owners Podcast with me, your host, Dan Warburton.

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