First Flight Series: How Specialization & Structure Prevent Future Headaches for Lawyers

Welcome aboard New Solo: First Flight! In this special series, hosts Adriana Linares and Rio Laine of ALPS Insurance are your captains, guiding you through the ups and downs of launching your own law firm. 

To soar as a solo attorney, you need financial stability, a clear flight plan to attract the right clients, and a reliable system that delivers the best ROI, while setting you apart from the competition. In this first episode of the First Flight series, Adriana Linares and Rio Laine dive into the essential habits that can make or break a solo practice. Inspired by Marco Brown’s “Eight Commandments” for solo attorneys, they discuss the importance of structuring your practice from day one, managing trust accounts responsibly, and developing good financial habits before unsustainable ones take hold.

They also explore why specialization can help streamline your firm and even lower malpractice insurance premiums. Plus, they tackle imposter syndrome, the importance of mentorship, and how technology can lift the burden of running a law firm. 

Transcript:

Announcer:

So if I was starting today as a New Solo, I would entrepreneurial aspect, change the way they’re practicing leader, what it means to be, make it easy to work with your clients,New Approach, new tools, new mindset, New Solo, and it’s making that leap, making that leap

Adriana Linares:

Hello and welcome to New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m Adriana Linares, a legal technology trainer and consultant. I help lawyers and law firms use technology better. I want to thank our partners in developing New Solo first flight series for solo attorneys presented by Alps Insurance. This new series is part of their effort to help solo and small firms launch their practice as well. We curated the best 12 episodes for new solos and today we’re highlighting a portion of my episode with Marco Brown and his eight commandments to help you get paid a good checklist for any attorney. Stay through to the end. When I sit down with Rio Lane from Alps Insurance, Rio and I will dive into the systems and habits you need to run the business part of your law firm so you get paid and avoid trouble and make more money and finding your specialization because there are both personal and practical benefits for you. And now my interview with Marco Brown, a divorce attorney who figured out eight things solo should do to be getting paid. It’s so nice to have you on New Solo. Thanks for coming on. I’m always happy to have real actual practicing lawyers on. So you’re divorce lawyer, but you love helping lawyers figure out how to get paid.

Marco Brown:

I do because it’s such a rampant problem. I mean it amazes me when I actually looked at the statistics, I always knew it was bad, but when I looked at the statistics, I realized how bad it was and I thought, okay, what can I do to try to help my friends who were really a lot of these people to live a better life and get paid more and decrease their stress? So I started putting together a CLE on a matter, so the time it takes lawyers to get paid, we’re going to go through and talk through this a bit more because there’s at least one commandment that’s specific about this, but it takes the average lawyer 87 days from the time they work on something until they actually bill for it and then send it out to their client. So it’s almost three months and then it takes on average 83 days to get paid on the invoice, which is a turnaround time of 170 days, almost six months. Oh my gosh. From the time you work on something until the time you get paid. But once you get past about 60 days on an invoice, your likelihood of getting paid on the invoice goes down to I think somewhere around 25%.

Adriana Linares:

And it’s true if you think about ourselves when let’s say we hire someone to paint our houses or just a contractor, if they’re not standing with their hands out for you to pay them when the job is done and they say, oh, I’ll send you an invoice, and then the invoice comes via email, three weeks later they finally got around to it. You’re not in a hurry to pay it either. I mean, I just feel like this is a very typical problem that consumers and businesses have and then here we are lawyers who are providing a critical service, giving critical information, hopefully changing lives and saving lives and it’s taking you 170 days to get paid. There’s got to be a way to make things better.

Marco Brown:

There is a better way.

Adriana Linares:

All right. Well, before we start talking about all those commandments, which I love that idea, Marco Brown’s eight commandments for getting paid lots of money. So Marco, what’s commandment number one?

Marco Brown:

So commandment number one is you need to change your mindset about getting paid and the first people we learn from as attorneys about being a lawyer are our law professors. Our law professors, bless their souls, tell us to do things like do good. I don’t even know what that means,

Adriana Linares:

Right? Who’s out there telling you to do bad?

Marco Brown:

It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Then the second group once we become attorneys is theBar and I don’t know any bar in the United States that really looks out for their attorneys and tries to get them paid more. What they do is they tell us, look, you need to do pro bono work all the time, so give away your stuff for free. So these are the two groups that really tell us how to think about being an attorney and about how to get paid well. They’re totally wrong. They don’t have to kill stuff and take it home and eat it and pay mortgages by trying to sell so they don’t know what they’re talking about. Your number one job as an attorney is to get paid. Your number two job as an attorney is to do exceptionally good work for your clients. You getting paid less than a hundred percent for the work you do is actually unethical because you have a contract with them and that is, I’m going to do excellent work and you are going to pay me a hundred percent. Now if you don’t do excellent work as an attorney, then you need to go to lawyer jail because you’re not very good at your job,

But let’s assume that you are doing this amazing work. Then they need to pay you a hundred percent. It’s no different than if your client came up to you and just started taking a hundred dollars bills out of your pocket. You would never allow that sort of thing to happen. Doing that, allowing them to do that is unethical, but that’s what lawyers allow their clients to do every day when they don’t get paid.

Adriana Linares:

Do you think lawyers and especially young lawyers, maybe young lawyers that are just coming out of law school and decide to hang their own shingle as many of them do, do you think there’s some sort of weird guilt or weird feelings associated with sending out an invoice and asking for the money? I mean, I feel like even I have that problem sometimes 20 years later in billing my own clients where sometimes I’m like, oh, I feel so bad sending this bill. They were so great to work with. It really wasn’t that much work. It sure was easy. And do you ever see that or hear that from them?

Marco Brown:

Yeah, I do hear that from them and good for them for being human beings and caring about other human beings, but really you need get

Adriana Linares:

Over to think

Marco Brown:

About it. It’s unethical not to get paid, so you need to understand that you’ve done the work and now you need to get paid because you need to pay all of these other people for the work they’ve done. You need to pay your paralegal and you need to pay the person who answers the phones, and if you don’t get paid, then they aren’t getting paid what they’re worth and that’s not okay. The way I think about this is we do use the word ethics a lot as attorneys and if you are unethical, you will get disbarred. I want to convey to attorneys that this you changing your mindset about money is just as important as you doing anything else as an attorney and keeping your ethics. This is just as important as all of those other things that we don’t violate.

Adriana Linares:

Great. Commandment number two.

Marco Brown:

Commandment number two is bill regularly, at least once a month. So we see, again, going back to the data that doesn’t happen, the average is 87 days just to get an invoice out the door. That’s absolutely unsustainable. You can’t do that sort of thing. So you need to have systems in place where you are sending out bills at least once a month. I have a friend, she bills every week and gets paid every Monday. I tried that once. I tried it for about a month and everybody threatened to quit. So we don’t do that. We do once a month, so that doesn’t work for me, but it worked for her and everybody needs to kind of find that. But the longest you can go without sending out a bill is one month.

Adriana Linares:

No, I agree with you and again for any business, but really for lawyers, you have to send out your bills at the end of the month or mid month. I would love to see lawyers sending out bills twice a month. Every week might be a little too much. Like you said, it might not work for everybody, but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with trying different billing processes and systems until you find one that works for you, but at a minimum, I totally agree with you, Marco, it’s got to be at least once a month.

Marco Brown:

I do it on the first. So I wake up at 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM on the first every month and I do all of the billing and then I’m done with it. So it’s all done by the time I get in the office and every ever, I have to think about it again because if I don’t do it at that point, I know it’s going to be the fifth of the month or the seventh of the month and I will have not done it.

Adriana Linares:

How big is your law firm?

Marco Brown:

We have five attorneys.

Adriana Linares:

You do all the billing?

Marco Brown:

I put together the billing, I review the bills, and then I have an office manager who actually sends them out and collapse on

Adriana Linares:

Them. So when you say I get up at four o’clock in the morning, bills are ready for the office manager to get them out the door. How are you doing that? What’s your system?

Marco Brown:

I use Clio. I go through every one of the bills and I review it just to make sure that in place and when that is done, I send a slack. We use Slack to communicate within the law firm. So I send a slack to my office manager and say, billing’s ready, let’s get it done. And then she does it that day or the day after.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent. Commandment number three

Marco Brown:

Is don’t chase money. So money is a really powerful motivator. The promise of money is also a really powerful, so the idea of chasing money is the idea that you do things that you wouldn’t normally do as an attorney to get paid. So example of this are helping people in different case types that you don’t normally do. So I do divorce, I’m not going to take a PI case, but I sometimes think about that and I think, well, how hard can it be? These guys over here are doing it. I can do this sort of thing. But then I think to myself, no, no, I’m just chasing money. I am thinking about the payday and I don’t know anything about this. So that’s an example. Discounting your hourly rate or your retainer to get a client helping a friend of a friend do something. None of this stuff ever works out well and then we’re all amazed when it doesn’t work out well. So all of these things are examples of chasing money.

Adriana Linares:

I have two comments and or suggestions and you can help me either support them or say that’s a terrible idea. Adriana, obviously a lot of lawyers, especially maybe younger lawyers and new lawyers don’t have a specialization yet, so they have a general practice when they come in to see me and I ask them what kind of law do they practice? Let’s say they give me three different areas, family, law, personal injury and real estate or wills. I say, okay, well which one is your most profitable? They know. So my suggestion is if you do have that type of practice using a product like Clio or one of its very good competitors, you’re able to log what kind of matter you’re working on and then if you track your time, even if you do flat or contingency, I still, and look, we all hate tracking time.

I’ve never met a lawyer that’s like, oh, favorite part of my job is billing in six minute increments. It’s what I live for. Nobody says that, but you still should have an idea of how long a case lives from cradle to grave. Then at the end of the year, if you’re using these technologies, systems and programs and statistics and dashboards and analytics, you’ll be able to look at your practice and say, wow, well the most profitable area, the practice area that I made the most money on this year was X. And then you can make decisions about whether to change your practice, focus on your practice, or like Marco suggests, maybe don’t take on certain types of cases, whether it’s because they might seem like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or because you once thought that they were and it turns out that they’re really not.

Marco Brown:

I think you’re exactly right. We need to track all of these things. Even if you do flat fees, I dunno about other parts of the United States, but even if you do flat fees, you need to track your time because if you have to give what we call a rule 73 affidavit for attorney’s fees, you have to lay all of that out. But beyond that, you really need to track it so you can figure out where the problems are and where the opportunities are in your law firm. If you’re taking too much time doing mediations or whatever else, you need to be able to look at the data and figure that out.

Adriana Linares:

Or maybe you can figure out how to either outsource, offset or hand off some of those parts of a matter or a case where your time is better spent elsewhere. And a lot of it I think is the E-Myth, right? So the E-Myth means a lot of people think it’s something about electronics, but it’s not. It’s the entrepreneurial myth, which is if you’re spending more time in the business, you can’t be working on the business. So you really have to think about where you as the CEO of your company, of your law firm is spending your money and your time and tracking all that stuff through programs like Clio and practice management programs can really help you get a good look at that. I like commandment number four, the banana stand commandment.

Marco Brown:

I do like this one. So that’s from Arrested Development. People don’t know that the commandment is always have money and trust, and there was this great joke on Arrested Development. I’m totally going to mess it up now, where the dad who was in a federal penitentiary would always tell the son, there’s always money in the banana stand, and no one knew what that meant. And then I think in season two or three, the son gets upset and burns down the family banana stand and dad says, you’re a moron. There was $250,000 in the banana stand.

So it is this idea that don’t burn your house down and go to zero, have money in trust, always in trust because relationships change when your clients go below $0 when they owe you money, then the relationships change. You don’t, you are no longer an attorney at that point. You are a banker and everyone hates their banker. I mean no one thinks, oh, I want to take Bob the banker out for lunch. No one says stuff like that. So the relationships really do change. So you have to have money in the trust in order for it not to get down to zero or below zero. And the vast majority of attorneys, what they do is they take that retainer, they get two or $3,000 and then they let it go below and then somebody owes them two or $3,000 and then they want to get back up to zero. So they’re always at zero or in the negative. You have to change that. You got to get 2, 3, 4, $5,000, however much it is above that and keep it at that rate. It’s called an evergreen trust.

Adriana Linares:

And I want to also just, again, another tip. When you’re using practice management programs, when you take in that retainer money, you can put a reminder in there that says, Hey, when this retainer amount drops below $800, let us know. And by us I mean whether it’s you, the solo or whoever is helping you support your practice so that you can send out that retainer request and keep it evergreen.

Marco Brown:

Exactly. That’s a fantastic way to do it. You have to have systems for these things and that’s one of the systems. One thing I did want to talk about here is that this is counterintuitive, but when you let people go into the negative, you are going to get more bad Google reviews and Google reviews are ultra, ultra important nowadays, but you’re going to get more bad Google reviews because that relationship has changed and they don’t like you nearly as much anymore. When you get one star, Google reviews is when somebody owes you two or $3,000 and you keep going on their case and you get it done and you’ve got ’em a great result, but they still owe you two, 3000, 4,000 bucks at the end and you have to come after. That’s when you get a one star Google review. If you tell them, I’m not doing any work on your case until you get me the trust and then I’m going to do really excellent work, that’s when you get five star Google reviews.

Adriana Linares:

What’s number five?

Marco Brown:

Number five is related to number four, if your client doesn’t pay you or you don’t have money in trust, stop work. Stop now. Stop right now.

Adriana Linares:

That’s mean, Marco.

Marco Brown:

It is mean. That’s terribly mean. I like to think of it as compassionate because it really is insurance for everybody involved, but really if people don’t pay, then don’t do the work. Get paid. So there’s a guy named Lee Rose and he talks about this. He says, get paid like a casino boss. A casino boss will literally do anything legal or illegal for you until you don’t have any more money. So get paid. Now to do this though, you really have to have clear triggers for stopping work. And the way we do it in our law office is on the 20th of the month, we run credit cards. So everybody has credit card authorizations and we run the credit card authorization. If that doesn’t go through, if they don’t replenish, then that is a clear trigger that we stop work, our office manager gets declined and she sends out slacks to everybody involved saying Stop work on the case until we get paid. So you have to have systems in place and you have to have clear triggers in place to make this function.

Adriana Linares:

And I’m going to guess you must have some very polite but stern language that you send either via email, snail mail, or over the phone saying, we’d love to keep working on your case. We’re so sorry your card was declined. Surely there’s a problem with your bank. Please let us know as soon as this problem has been rectified and we will happily keep working on your case.

Marco Brown:

Exactly. So we do it by email, we send that out, and what we found is that about probably half to three quarters of the time the credit card has been expired in the last month. So they just call in and give us a new credit card. We very rarely ever get beyond about 48 hours when a credit card gets declined. So there’s really not much downtime in this. Everybody kind of thinks that, oh, well, if the credit card gets declined, they’re out of money. No, they’re not. They just go find other money and then they pay you. When you force people to pay you, they pay you.

Adriana Linares:

They find the money.

Marco Brown:

Yeah, exactly.

Adriana Linares:

They go chasing the money.

Marco Brown:

Yeah, instead of you chasing the money. Exactly.

Adriana Linares:

Good tips. Okay, number six is one of my favorites. I suggest this to lawyers all the time. You can’t be a door law lawyer.

Marco Brown:

Yep. You got to specialize. So what I mean by specialize is you do one thing and you do it exceptionally well. Now, this doesn’t always hold if you are an hour outside of Fargo, North Dakota, if you’re there, you can’t do that sort of thing. But what you need to do is you need to choose two things. You can do maybe, maybe three things, but I wouldn’t suggest it. I would suggest two things. If you’re in a city though or a place of substantial population, then you need to do one thing. And the reason for this is specialists get paid more money. And we know this is true because we can look at doctors. So a general practice doctor in America makes about $150,000 a year. A general surgeon who’s a mid-level specialist probably makes four to $500,000 aYear. You get the guide. That’s the brain surgeon that only works on one particular thing. He or she is getting paid 900,000, a million dollars

Adriana Linares:

Specialists

Marco Brown:

Get paid more money. So you’re going to do less work and make more money if you specialize.

Adriana Linares:

Have you ever fired a client?

Marco Brown:

I have fired a client. Yeah.

Adriana Linares:

Just today.

Marco Brown:

No, not today, no.

Adriana Linares:

So rule number seven, which I think is another funny quirk that lawyers have is lawyers sometimes don’t realize they can be the ones firing the client instead of the client firing them. So your suggestion is fire your worst client right

Marco Brown:

Now, right now today. So when I say the words fire your worst client, there’s a face that comes up in your mind. That person is your worst client. That is the person that you despise as a client because they’re mean to you. They don’t pay their bill, they’re bad to your or legal assistant. Whatever it is, fire that person today. They’re a time suck in your law firm and you aren’t getting paid. So just get rid of them. And the reason for this is it opens up your ability to focus on people who do pay you and to acquire other clients who do pay you and treat you with respect.

Adriana Linares:

Whenever we talk about firing clients, I think about my friend Ernie Benson. Ernie the attorney, he’s well known out there. This guy was walking toward us, a whole group of us were out, and Ernie stopped to say hi to him and the guy was very funny and super nice. As the guy walked away, Ernie said, oh yeah, I used to work with that guy. I had to fire him. I said, why? Why did you fire him? He said, wouldn’t listen to a thing I said, didn’t do one single thing I told him to do. Who wants that kind of client? So aside from just clients that don’t pay you, as you just said, Marco, I think clients that don’t respect you, that even though they are paying you are giving you a hard time and causing you stress, and every time the phone rings, you just look at it and your eyes roll, man, being a lawyer is stressful enough as it is all these other things you’ve got to deal with. I think being comfortable with firing clients in the right way is also just critical to having a successful law practice. So I think that’s a great tip, even when it doesn’t come down just to the money, but just to your sanity.

Marco Brown:

Yeah, exactly. It’s a mental health issue. I’ve talked with psychologists about this. It really is a mental health issue. Your stress, the majority of your stress in your job is caused by a very limited number of clients. It’s called the Pareto principles. So a minority of inputs equals a majority of outputs. So probably 10 to 20% of your clients are creating probably 90% of your stress. So get rid of them. Live a better life.

Adriana Linares:

I think too, go with your gut before you even take them on because how many times have you said, I knew I should have never taken that client on, but you do it anyway and maybe you’re chasing the money or maybe business will slow that that week, that month, but really go with your gut. It’s probably usually right.

Marco Brown:

Yeah, your gut is your instinct, your gut, whatever you want to call it is always right. I would go with it 100% of the time because even if it’s wrong, it’s still only going to be wrong 5% of the times. You’re going to save yourself so much by following your gut.

Adriana Linares:

I love it. Okay, rule number eight.

Marco Brown:

Yeah. Make you your family and your team, your first priority. Clients come second. The idea that we hear all the time is the client is always right, and the kind of sub idea is that you should do whatever for the client and put them first. Well, no, that’s completely wrong. You put yourself and your family and your team first. If you can’t remember the last time you had a vacation, a real vacation with your family or did real stuff with your family or went on a date with your husband or wife or whatever, then you have a real problem and you’re putting your clients first. When you put yourself first and your family first and your team, then things are going to work out. You are going to work the number of hours you should, you’re going to pay your people and yourself, the amounts they should be paid. Everybody’s going to be much, much happier when you put the clients first and do whatever they say and don’t get paid and get overworked. Then everybody’s miserable and you are the cause of it, right? So don’t be the cause of that. Put yourself first.

Adriana Linares:

I think that’s such great advice, and especially for new and young lawyers. And I was just reflecting on my many years of working with lawyers and law firms, and I have to say that I feel like most of the time that is what I see in practice. Lawyers are so protective of their partners and their associates and their staff, and I love that. So when a client is screaming and hemming and hawing and a secretary’s upset or an associate has been embarrassed by a client, I got to say I love the way attorneys defend that work, family, and of course that’s probably going to transfer through to their personal life. But I love that, and that’s one of the reasons that I love working with lawyers and law firms is that it’s a fiercely protective and family environment. Also, on occasion though, there is that grudgey old mean attorney, and if you work for him or her guys go out on your own, you don’t need that kind of stress either. Well, this has been great, Marco. What are frequently asked questions that you get from lawyers or law students when you talk about these things? What’s the most frequently asked question after you give this talk?

Marco Brown:

The question I get asked the most is, how can I determine what my retainer should be?

Adriana Linares:

Oh, good one.

Marco Brown:

And the way I think about this is in an ideal world, you want a retainer that is equivalent to your worst possible month in a case. So for us, that would be a protective order and a temporary restraining order and some other hearing in a month. So that is going to come up to probably seven to $8,000 of work in a month. So ideally you would want seven or $8,000 in the retainer. That’s a little rich though. So the way I think about it is back that down to the 95th percentile because that’s going to back a lot of money off. So think about your 95% of your worst month, and that’s going to get you in a range where your retainer is one, doable, and then two going to protect you. This is why you need data. You need to be able to look at your cases and say, okay, so my worst month is like this, and then my 95th percentile month is like this. And that’s why Clio and all of these other things are so helpful because you can just go pick cases and go look at those things and determine that data. If you don’t have it, you’re just guessing and guessing ain’t good.

Adriana Linares:

It’s not. And I just want to remind everyone too, that data, those statistics, that dashboard that you have in practice management programs is only as good as the information you put into it. If you’re a four person firm and you’ve got one or two of you that are really diligent and good about logging time, putting information in, and then two of you aren’t, then your data is only half that good. So another thing I would really encourage everyone to do is put these systems in place, put these processes in place and train and push, because you’re running a business here, we can’t have willy-nilly the wild, wild west of data management. Everybody’s got to be committed and contribute to that data pile equally so that you can get really good statistics and information at the end of the year and decide how to change for the next year and grow your firm. That was Marco Brown. He’s a divorce attorney in Salt Lake City, and I hope you liked hearing him and his eight commandments as part of the New Solo first flight series presented by Alps Insurance and joined by Rio Lane. She’s Alps director of Strategic Partnerships. Rio helps a lot of attorneys get their best practices sorted out through Clio, their bars, and now with Alps, insurance Resources. Rio, I know you’ve met a lot of solo attorneys like I have. So what did you think of Marco’s eight Commandments?

Rio Laine:

Oh, I thought it was such excellent, excellent advice. A lot of the things that he mentioned really seem straightforward and very common sense, but easily overlooked. I mean, particularly if you don’t know about running a business, it can be difficult to remember all those things. I thought he summed it up so well and it’s very clear that he put a lot of thought into that and really has a really good understanding of the important things to know when it comes to getting paid. I really loved the emphasis of not chasing the money and understanding the value of the work that you’re doing.

Adriana Linares:

Well, I think an important point to make just in general, but specifically in having something as handy as a checklist for eight Commandments for getting paid is having systems and structure. And it’s something we talk about a lot on the podcast, not just having the systems and structure in place, but you’ve got to do it early on. I tell so many attorneys when I’m helping their launch, their New Solo, you have to form these habits right now. If you wait till you’re busier, you’re only going to be stuck in bad habits that you will literally never unbreak and ask me how I know 25 years of doing this and talking to lawyers who are stuck in old bad habits. Just a reminder out there, if you are getting started, you couldn’t be in a better position to start forming good habits.

Rio Laine:

To your point, it is so difficult to go back and form those good habits. I mean, you think about even just in your own personal life, trying to build a new habit, it’s a challenge. So going back and trying to understand your processes and document them and make them efficient after the fact is very, very difficult.

Adriana Linares:

Lemme touch on another commandment of his that I really appreciate and I know we all sort of get tired of hearing about because trust, trust, trust and managing trust, and you’ve got to have a trust account, but I feel like it’s a point we can never drive home enough. So his fourth commandment was always have money and trust. Well, great, that’s obvious. That means that you’ve got to have a secure and succinct way to request and then get the trust money in. But also, I feel like we never say enough that one of the leading causes of malpractice claims comes from mismanaged money and a lot of issues come out of not knowing how to manage and deal with trusts. I know that from your perspective as Alps Insurance, this is something that attorneys just time and time again keep having issues with their trust accounts. So do you want to give us some more tips or suggestions on how to better manage and deal with and try to really mitigate risk when it comes to trust money?

Rio Laine:

Yes, absolutely. And you’re so right. I think a lot of the times, I mean obviously attorneys aren’t accountants. Some of them are, but a lot of them aren’t. So it’s really, really easy to kind of have this account and you see all of these funds and to get into the idea that, oh, well maybe I can use some of this for my business. Maybe I can kind of adjust things here or there. I think the first thing you have to remember about trust is it is not your money. It is not business funds. It cannot be used for operating costs. You have to, separation of funds is absolutely essential. And not only that, but keeping track of every single dollar that is moving here and there, you have to have, again to this notion of processes and methods in place for keeping track of everything you need to know what is going on in your trust accounts. And another really, really good thing to do is to talk to your bar association, find out what the rules are, dig in and really make sure you understand how those funds are moving. And also to Marco’s point, make sure that you have a process in place for replenishing those funds ahead of time before they dip too low, making sure that really ensures that you’re looking out for the best interest of not only your clients but also your law firm.

Adriana Linares:

And you have to have a modern case management system that allows you to request trust money, manage that, trust money, and then make sure it synchronizes back to your accounting system if it happens not to be built in. So it’s incredibly important for those of you that are out there still stubbornly not wanting to pay that a hundred dollars a month that a case management system might cost you, which is pennies by the way, compared to what something like this would’ve cost you before the internet was just so ubiquitous and wonderful. But these systems are designed to help you prevent errors and minimize risk. And of course, they all help you manage trust money. So I think that’s just a reminder. And I feel like here we are 2025, why am I still saying this out loud? Well, just on Monday I had a conversation with a five person firm who did not have a case management system still. I said, well, how are you doing your billing? We create our bills in Excel, OMG, come on people. So please case management systems, they’ll super help you. They’re really quite

Rio Laine:

Oh, absolutely. And you kind of have to think about it as doing your future self a favor, really protecting your future self from what could potentially be a big dumpster fire of problems if you’re not safeguarding.

Adriana Linares:

One of the other things that Marco recommends, and of course any successful attorney will likely recommend after they’ve gone to the RGA role of launching and practicing what they, not me, but they jokingly call door law. I’ll take any case that walks in the door. Everyone recommends finding a niche, a specialty, something that you focus on and you become a true expert in your community, in your state, in that industry, in that profession. Not just for making sure your practice is successful, but I always encourage attorneys to find a niche that they really love. So I had a guest several years ago who was the bike law lawyer. He was a bicyclist. He entered in races, his firm sponsored races, and it was something he was truly passionate about, and that’s what he did. So that was his niche, that was his specialty, but not just because it was something he sort of fell into, but it was literally what he was passionate about. So I always encourage young attorneys what he like to do on the side, turn that into your legal practice because you’ll love it. You’ll be involved. And on top of that, you won’t get tired of it. You’ll be something you always have room for on your heart. So what do you have to say as far as your experience in talking to attorneys? And of course if there’s ways that this benefits us in unknown ways, I think we’d like to know.

Rio Laine:

I hear the same thing. I hear a lot of pushback and Well, what if I’m missing out on all of these other clients and other opportunities? And it’s like, well, if you’re really, really good at what you do and this smaller focus that you have, you’re going to have plenty of clients. You will have folks coming to you. That’s not really going to be an issue. And from a more practical standpoint, being really good at that one thing means that you can run an incredibly efficient law firm that is less prone to errors. So interesting, fun fact, if you are a specialist and you specialize in a certain area of practice, that can actually reduce your insurance and malpractice premiums because you are less prone to errors and you are more of an expert in that field. So you are more likely to have systems and efficiencies in place that help reduce the errors associated with spreading yourself too thin.

Adriana Linares:

So many times you think I’m going to take that case because it’ll probably be a big win, it’ll be great. Or they’ll try to use it as a learning experience. This is another thing I see sometimes someone will say, well, I’ve never done immigration law, but there sure is a lot of work in it. And man, that’d be a great learning experience. Okay guys, A case is not a class for you to become really good at unless you have a mentor, which I would suggest. And I do see that often when somebody wants to get in a new area of law that might be more complex, they’ll find a mentor. So I think there are a lot of ways to sort of navigate getting to that point that you’re able to say, well, this is the area I focus on and here’s the experience that I’ve had working on it.

Rio Laine:

Yeah, I love that. It’s like clients are not perhaps the best opportunity for learning those things. It’s probably best to double down on what you know. And if you want to expand into a different area of practice, well take some courses, do some outside research. Yeah, that’s

Adriana Linares:

Why we have a mandatory CLE. Well, thanks for listening to New Solo first flight series presented by ALPS Insurance. I hope you find it helpful that you tune in for the whole series. If you like what you’ve heard today, make sure you share the New Solo podcast with other attorneys who might find it helpful. And if you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe to New Solo and Apple Podcast or Spotify. See you next time. I’ve been running

Announcer:

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