Join law firm marketing pros, Seth Price from BluShark Digital and Price Benowitz, and Jay Ruane from Ruane, Civil Defense Attorneys, as they cover a deep dive into the future of law firms’ abilities to hire talent and how you can take advantage of it. Seth discusses that EOS is in place which is the Entrepreneurial Operating system. This is a simple set of concepts and practical tools used by a lot of companies that focus on people, data, issues, traction, vision, and process. With the number of people coming into the market, they discuss that maybe bringing in people straight from law school might be the best. Find out what the future of law marketing holds in this video.
Jay Ruane my friend, Cool Guy Paul from The Office, your friend Seth Price wanted to send you a video to congratulate you on the rebrand of the Law Firm Blueprint. There’s some things that everybody knows they could do through email. But listening to your podcast, your advice on how to run a law firm, how to market a law firm, you are one of the best, you are certainly cooler than me in that space. And I think what you guys do is amazing stuff. I’m glad to call you my friend. I am excited to watch the rebrand of your Law Firm Blueprint, excited to watch what you’re doing and how you’re teaching law firms how to crush it in their marketing, but more importantly, just all about their business. I appreciate you, I am only cool because of the friends I keep and the people I know and you are one of them. And your friend Seth wanted me to send this to you. Take care my friend.
Hello hello, and welcome to another edition of Max, whoa, I almost messed up the name, Seth. It’s the Law Firm Blueprint. You know, you go for four years and you say one thing, and then boom, you change up the name. And I got to change my little Post-it note up here. I got into the flow. How are you doing this week, Seth?
I’m doing great. I loved our cold open. That was awesome.
Yeah, that was really really good stuff. Love seeing Paul. That was a fantastic little thing that you were able to put together for us. It’s cool. That cool guy Paul is now on Cameo. It’s nice having him part of our community that we run into him at events and can talk. My wife is obsessed with The Office so she watches it every night before bed. And every time that episode comes out I’m like, Hey, I know that guy. She goes, yeah I know you know that guy. But I think what we should probably try to do is find some affliction T shirts and wear them to the next conference that he’s going to be at and be like the Cool Guy Paul fan club. But other than that, how is your firm running this week?
You know, it actually, pretty pretty well, I hate to say it aloud, you know, you don’t want your words to come out. But EOS is in place. You know, I was able to take vacation, we talked about last week, we’ve had, you know, sadly, a death in the family, the significant other one of our key employees. And, you know, we got together, the team met the day after this happened, figured out a plan. And you know, now I know, redundancy is the wrong word, but we are able to stretch in a way as we’ve added layers of support, so that, you know, these eventualities are not catastrophic.
Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting for us, you never really know what’s going to happen next, as a law firm owner, you can plan for the best or plan for the worst. And neither one of those situations actually happens. It’s always something that comes out of left field. One of the things that, one of the challenges that we’ve been having recently and I want to talk to you a little bit about this, is you know, we obviously constricted during COVID, revenues dropped precipitously, some people left the firm of their own accord, choosing to do something else, relocate, that type of thing. We did downsize in a couple of departments. But things have come back, you know, and pre COVID… we are probably about 25% above pre COVID leads and intakes. So we’re in a good spot, right? Things are starting to hum back along and we’re making up for lost time, and I like it. But one of the challenges that we’re having is, we were, I guess, understaffed coming out of COVID for the speed up that we were having, and of course…
You and everybody else, every restaurant, every airline, I mean, that’s what’s going on with the airlines right now, they don’t have baggage handlers, they don’t have staff.
And one of the challenges that I have dealt with is the availability of legal talent. I know you’ve dealt with that as well. So you know, and this is all a lead up to my question that I want to discuss with you today. I saw a news article that only 25 people, 25 lawyers, were admitted in my state, after the February bar, they got sworn in in late June. And it was a very small ceremony. Now when I sat for the bar back in the late 90s, there were 1000 people taking the bar exam and I think 800 of us got admitted. Now granted, it’s February bar not the July bar.
So what is the baseline for July? Do you know?
I think they have 200 people taking the test.
No, no what would it normally be, pre COVID or whatever generally?
If you go back, if you go back 20 years…
Not 20 years, but like five years when we were hiring people,
500, 600 people…
And that’s 10x if that’s in fact the case, right? And it doesn’t surprise me, you know, I assume that I’m heading where you’re heading, which is we are having a very hard time, my sweet spot, the model that I have used is hire people third, to eighth, to tenth, you know, third to tenth year is our sweet spot, which means people graduate, they get a couple of years experience, and then they’re in our crosshairs. And you know, right out of school for things like law clerks and a few select pieces, we’ve gone back and forth on the show about right out of school versus a little bit experience. But either way, that means that the talent pool is shrinking dramatically. And we are definitely, it is much harder hiring. Hiring everywhere is tough. But those numbers mean, we’re constricted by people with the local bar. And that is a significant risk factor.
And that’s one of the things that I wanted to discuss. Because, you know, as a larger, medium sized firm, you know, 10 to 15 lawyers, I have the bandwidth and the work, and essentially the revenue, to be able to when I see a young lawyer that can fit in, hire, bring them in, train them slowly. And then when we lose somebody slot them in, and it actually happened this month, you know, we had, I tried to do your way, I tried to bring in somebody who was a fifth sixth year lawyer, and she lasted seven months before she said, I can’t deal with this volume, I need to go back to a boutique firm, where I handled one file a week. I think her ideas were a little different from what the reality of a type of practice that we have is, but we had somebody waiting in the wings that we had recruited and we’re training and we just accelerated their training, and Brighton is a future rockstar, and that type of thing. But what I’m thinking is, what if I was a one lawyer shop and I said, you know, I always want to have an associate, I want to have another attorney. And I don’t have the revenues to be able to have a backup to my backup, and that type of thing. I think there’s going to be a problem with these smaller firms being able to find talent, what do you think about that?
No, I see it. Look, in one sense I’m this firm, I have 42-43 lawyers wherever we’re at right now. But by practice group, I have practice groups with one and two lawyers in them. And that’s where I see it, I see that that up and coming talent, my ability to market, for example, family loss, so outstrips the talent that I can get or can functionally work with in our organization. Are their bodies out there? Yes. But the number of people, for us to get a person that can work with a Jay or with a Seth’s organization means you need x number of people, somebody who’s going to want to be on their own, somebody who wants to be government, all these different things. So you need to get enough population so that you can find the right Jay perfect match. And right now, you know, obviously your bar drops dramatically. But you’re saying for a solo, I get it. You know, history is written by the victor, you get somebody who’s great and sticks with you, awesome. They leave the ability to find new talent, especially when you start talking about the numbers you’re talking about, of people coming into the market, dramatically changed.
Yeah, and so I don’t know if there’s a solution for that. Other than to, you know, start recruiting law clerks in their first year of law school, and hope that you get them to stay with you for two or three years. And just keep that revolving door going. And if that’s the case, then I think as a smallish, and I don’t want to say small, but smaller law firm where there’s one lawyer or paralegal and maybe an associate, I think maybe what you need to do is start investing in talent much earlier, because you’re not gonna be able to cherry pick anymore. I mean, we could go back a decade, and you’d have an open position and you’d get 100 resumes.
Well, we both started to scale in the 07, 08. There were no jobs, right? We put a resume, we put a job thing out, you get hundreds of resumes. It was crazy. And I look at it… look, it’s tough sitting here because we do have infrastructure in our firm similar to your firm. But I’ll look at the Personal Injury department. Right now, we have the best talent we’ve had in the history of building the firm in that department. It’s awesome. All the major drama is not there right now. We are in solid shape. That said, a personal injury paralegal seems like it’s playing Russian Roulette trying to find talent that isn’t drama filled, that wants to be there, that needs the job, that’s willing to do the the amount of in office that’s needed for our team, yada, yada. And what I would say is, and I think this is not, this is what big law figured out a long time ago, right, because they’ve dealt with this issue for years. Because not only do they want people, but they want them trained in their methodology. The summer class, which I used to think of as a luxury, really is becoming the smart thing, and I saw it at BluShark, we created a Fellows program that’s up to almost 15 people, of those people who are in college or just graduating college, those people become the next class. And that’s what’s trained in. And that’s worked remarkably well, I’ve seen and we’ve talked about this, if you put an ad up for an SEO person, you end up, at least in my market, with people who’ve been at AARP or other associations, they don’t know the first thing about SEO, but they’re commanding $120,000, because the word SEO is in their title. So it is a very, and which I think equates to, Jay needing a criminal lawyer, you know, the person who has it in their title is going to command a number that’s not worth the actual substance they have, and you’re back to, you know, I guess, when you’re in your state contracts, you had a little bit of luxury of bringing people in, but can you do something, whether it be law clerks on up, which I love when possible, but are you, you know, is the luxury of finding the dream third to eighth year to slot in something that there’s not enough talent pool out there? And that we have to start going back with the risk that somebody could leave, which goes back to how are you going to pay them? Because it’s not law clerk of 40,000 1st year or 50,000 anymore. You have to look at it like, hey, this person that I’ve invested in and done all this work to, I needed 80 to 100 within a year, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But if you don’t, you’re gonna put all the work in, they’re going to be gone. So yeah, I think that looking at, for everybody from solos, you know, one or two people up through larger scale firms. The idea of getting people earlier in training, I don’t love but I think is a necessity at the moment.
Yeah, but I think one of the challenges are if you’re a solo lawyer with a paralegal and you’re thinking, Okay, I want to be able to grow a little bit, you know, the infrastructure and the attention to finding those law students, bringing them in, assigning them work, it’s not as easy as just bringing somebody in, you know, you got to have…
And shockingly, Jay will love this, it takes systems. Use your contact at the law school who can, because it’s great to get one, right? If this is gonna be a law clerk position, you’re needing, at least annually, not to mention the people that flake, break, etc, getting to decide they don’t want to be doing criminal, whatever it is that your issue is. But no, absolutely, I think that that is one of these sorts of, and so, you know, everybody has their sort of, it’s like finding an apartment in New York City, you need an angle. And so whether it’s a judge that feeds you their clerks, whether it’s somebody at the law school to find you the best and brightest, but if you just hope for it, not a real meaningful plan, it needs to be something that you…
It needs to have a system and you need to be making this plan. So what I’m going to challenge everybody in our audience to do is start thinking about what your legal needs are, your staffing needs are going to be in 2027, right? If you are, you know, you’ve hung a shingle, things are starting to hum, things are moving in the right direction, you’re able to take your vacation maybe, you’re getting some money in the bank, and you’re like, Okay, things are working. And now you start saying, Boy, I really wish I could spend a little more time on the marketing and the networking to drive more revenue, or I don’t want to do some of the grunt work that I’ve had to do. You know, if you’re going to be looking to offload some of that stuff, you have to start thinking now about where you’re gonna get your staff from in two or three, five years. And I think that’s important to at least consider that and make a plan for it now, because it’s not like it was, I mean, who knows… you know, and if people aren’t enrolling in law school now, they’re not going to be ready in three years or four years to be able to, and that’s the thing, you know, we can identify if there’s going to be a class of people that are going, at least in my area of Greater New York City area, you know, the smart people haven’t gone to law school for the last decade. They’ve gotten into finance… Whereas when I was in the 90s, when I was doing it, it was if you were the best, the brightest, you went to law school, of course, because that’s what happened… So that just makes sense. But…
And I’ll add something else to it. We’re seeing the squeeze of tuition going up, right. So you know as inflation is, all these schools are raising tuitions to insane non sustainable places. So people coming out, if you don’t have a parent paying for you, college law school debt is now a number that is so significant that I’m seeing this, and that people end up, we lose a certain number of good people to government jobs, where after X number of years, if they go to a DAs officer or public defender’s office, their stuff is paid, which is awesome for them. There are times where I turn people away and say, No, your deal is too good. I can pay you a delta more, but like, you can’t in this market. So all of those pressures mean, and look, I’ve always been a big proponent that recruiting you know, from pretty early on in the firm’s growth cycle, I put an emphasis on creative recruiting. And now that it’s hard, it’s not like it’s, you know, what sucks is it was we built a firm with things like Craigslist, and I hate to talk about the way it used to be. But Craigslist at free, $25 $35 an ad big deal, doesn’t really touch anything anymore, maybe some admin roles in some markets, but isn’t really effective, which means you have Indeed and LinkedIn, and those are effing expensive. So, you know, I used to think never touch a recruiter, again, partly to cycle the firm, but the cost of a recruiter has gone from like, Oh my God that’s outrageous, to you know what, if you need one person a year, you’re probably better off, you know, throwing everything, you know, throwing your lines out and hoping for something. But if you have ended up paying 20% over under market for a recruiter, you know, 15 to 25, if you have to pay that for the right person to be able to do that, we do that with our firm administrator, best money we ever spent, not that there are bad examples with. But the idea that for the right position, I used to think, hey, the one reason to do your own recruiting, which I still stand by whether it’s small or big, at least having some minor presence on an Indeed, is that the recruiters charge that amount. If you have somebody, it’s very clear, for example, your position for let’s say, a second year plus criminal defense lawyer, and one thing, just being little ADHD, make sure you don’t cap the number of years so that your discriminating against older people, some guys come after you and sue you, if you put, you know, recent college grads only, like, I’m not sure they’re gonna win, but they can make your life miserable. So stay away from that, right. So, but when you’re recruiting for something, the idea that you put your own media out there, even if nominal, because what you don’t want is the guy who is looking for a criminal job, who’s gonna reply to the ad, and if Jay is there, they’re gonna go there, some recruiter just puts out an ad for a couple shekels, gets the person, sends it to you, and takes 20, you know, 20%. So for me, I want to have my cake and eat it too, I need to have an ad out there to make sure we keep the recruiters honest, because in theory, what the recruiter should be getting you is not the person responding to an ad, because you can do that, right? Who needs that, what you need them for is theoretically finding the guy who’s not on the market who’s moving from out of state that you don’t have access to. And that, or where it’s a proprietary search, they’re at one of your competitors, they don’t want to tell their boss, and they’re not going to just call you directly. But that middleman helps it make it happen, great. But what I hate is, if you don’t have your own media, your own ads out there, you end up paying 20 cents on the dollar for stuff that you don’t need to in the sense that it’s really low hanging fruit, because if somebody wants a criminal defense, you know, job in your market, they’re gonna send a resume into you, you might as well take those for free or for limited amount just on the media spend.
So this brings me to the next part of this conversation. And it’s, if hiring isn’t going to be the way to keep your firm growing, is acquiring a solo and their practice a move to make, and let me give you some examples. So what I did is I identified the top 50 solo lawyers in criminal defense in my state, and I track their case loads, right. We can look them up online, I could see who is, you know, maintaining and keeping the same. So that I know, okay, they’re making money, you know…
And you can tell the difference between court appointed and non court appointed.
To some extent, I mean, I know who’s got court appointed contracts and who doesn’t. But they also, the way court appointed works in Connecticut, I can kind of tell and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of people who just live off the court appointed stuff. But what I’m doing is as I start to see their numbers drop, then I start to look at okay, are they doing any other marketing and that type of thing? And I’m using that as a, well maybe they’re ripe to join our firm after, you know, 15 or 20 years, because they’re just not able to do the revenue generation that they probably thought that they could when they hung their shingle, and things may be drying up, or they’re older, and their referral network was even older than them. And so that referral network, those men and women have retired themselves. And so now a person’s in their 50s. And their referral network has all retired in their 70s and 80s. I mean, not every lawyer does, but some lawyers do. And so that’s where I’m looking to start to see maybe acquiring is going to be better for me for talent in the future. What are your thoughts?
Well look, a couple of things. I’m going to take you back to Jay Ruane of like five years ago, we had these conversations pre having a show, there was that time we just talked and nobody would listen.
Listen to our wives in the background thinking we were crazy.
Exactly, well then we were at the office, so I wasn’t even getting that, I was sitting in my own office. But one of the things you told me then, was that was problematic because the guys just didn’t have the drive, you know, you could bring him in, it looks great, put lipstick on the pig, but it just, they weren’t going to be able to fit into your, into your ecosystem. You know, I’ve looked at this, trust and estates should be a no brainer. Pre COVID, a couple years back, I went through this exercise, and I met with 15 different firms. There was an intermediary, the market was quite good, brought me into these. And the valuations were just crazy and not ones that, you know, were desires. So it’s almost, you know, you don’t want to say it this way, but, and part of the downside of lawyers is they wait till there’s nothing left, you know, you’re watching those curves go. And while they’re in the middle of it, they’re like, I don’t want to give this up. And by the time they’re willing to, everything’s dried up and there’s nothing. One issue. Second, you know, personalities. But I have a buddy who joined one of the more prestigious suburban firms in my region, and he does trust and estates. And I say to him, like I’m pretty blunt, he’s a B lawyer, on a good day, but he is an A plus networker business person, he, you know, he had a membership at Equinox, he’s the only guy who made money on the Equinox membership, just going there, knowing its people with money, built at 20-something a trust and estates portfolio of clients. And he’s built himself a nice seven figure practice. And I’m hoping for him that as he builds and grows, he’s going to be able to just be a business generator. And he has been successful finding those people, I think these are the issues. One, if you’re in something like trust and estates, my dad is now 87 still practicing. And he’s part of one of those firms in New York that brings people in, in their later stage of practice. If you’re set up for it, and you can bring them in, and there, the difference in trust and estates is, your business is worth more as you get older. Whereas in criminal, as you just pointed out, it’s worth less, PI, everybody was talking about, you see a lot of people didn’t make it during this time, some bigger firms in our market had to be acquired. Smaller guys clearly had issues, ports being closed, etc. So academically, there should be much of it. I have seen less of it in reality, like people talk about, there are a lot of things we talk about, does it happen? So I am all for continuing to prospect. And again, I would like to have an entire overseas staff person who does nothing but looking at whose potential, you know, whether it be… for that group, it may be direct mail, it may be that email isn’t the way to go. LinkedIn certainly isn’t. How do you touch people and start that dance? I think the, you know, like everything in life, if there’s a motivated seller, you will have a shot. If it is somebody who is like, I’m fine, then it’s going to be much, much harder. And the last piece is when it comes to acquiring, you don’t really want to acquire their practice, you really just want that book of business and phone. I’m using phone number generically. But you really just want that, you don’t want their leases, you don’t want their legacy employees, generally, with the inflated bloated salaries after 40 years where the lady can’t even type anymore, but they have to keep her because of loyalty. So I have seen and looked at ones, and be careful what you ask for is what I’m getting at. I think it’s Andrew Finkelstein talked about the fact that like, just the cost to bring in and put those people into your system, and we do the cases means that yes, you can pay someone in the back end on a PI case. But I would be suspicious that the value of that firm to you, by the time you finish transaction cost, unless they, and it’s not gonna happen for you, unless they’re on your case management system and seamlessly can be integrated. There’s a huge pain in the ass factor which shouldn’t be minimized and really is significant. So look, come back… Yes, yes, yes. Love it. I personally wish I had more resources. And if you are networking, and you have that land in your lap, God bless and really take it seriously, especially if it’s somebody later in their career… but know that it is not a free lunch, and that you’re gonna kiss a lot of toes.
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, in some of the corollaries that you brought up there. This is unrelated to law whatsoever. But I have a good friend of mine that was looking to acquire a funeral home here in Connecticut, and it was a senior, it’s a funeral home that had been around for 50 years. And so we reached out, we made them what we thought was a fair offer based on the revenue that we saw that they generated, because, you know, where people get their funerals? You know, he did 50 funerals last year in 2021, right. And so we figured out what the average profit, is what the revenue would be, multiply that by three said, here’s an offer, right? It seemingly fair. Guy comes back with an offer, with a demand of five times what our offer was on this, saying, I’ve built this for 50 years, it’s worth a lot more. And I’m saying, but you’re not doing the business, you have no website, you have a crappy website, you have three Google reviews, you’re in an area that the demographic of your customer has moved out of, and people are just coming to you out of loyalty. And the guy won’t listen to reason. And I’m thinking…
It’s not a motivated seller. Right, I mean, if God forbid, there was a sickness for him or significant other in the family, and it was like, Okay, now it’s time to go, that’s when you get a real number. And that real number, you could actually do it. But let’s assume you were doing three times EBITA. He’s looking at 15 times EBITA. He doesn’t want to sell… but that’s part of what I saw. You know, again, my classic example that I’ve shared with you before, was a PI shop. It was a legacy. It was one of the early ones on TV, they did a bunch of business back in the day, in a sister market to ours. Guy wanted to sell it, he had bought his partner out for a quarter million five years ago, and the firm had cut in half in those five years. So I’m like, What do you think I should be offering? Right? Well, the guy wanted like a million in cash and a $2-3 million tail and I’m like, again, he set his own price. And then, it’s just, there are…
…irrational. I think that’s the problem. When you’re dealing with acquiring somebody who’s been in business for a while, their entire entity is wrapped up in their business. And they…
…it’s their DNA, right. You know, there have been, yes, I get it. But I guess the key is like anything else. And this is why just like recruiting, it’s numbers. So you know what, you had one funeral home, and the guy was not in a position. You know what, I look at it this way, one of our best… my partner Kush Arora, he does insane volume in one county in Maryland doing criminal, right, there’s more than a lot of PI firms, him alone. And one of the things that this guy does that I love, and I profess, which is you send a retainer, no matter what, the person says, I don’t have the money. The person says, I’m going to shop for a while. Here’s the retainer, it sits there for a bunch of reasons. But a certain percentage of those things come back, money falls in their lap, the person finally wakes up at two in the morning says I need something, it’s there, they can do it, the easier you make it. So just like throwing spaghetti at the wall. If this guy really wants to buy a funeral home, can you make 20 offers, have 20 offers sitting there so when when one guy says you know what, because you’ve had these moments, we’ve talked, I’ve done, I’m moving to Florida, I’m sick of the taxes here, I’m finished. You know, that moment, you want to be there and if there’s an offer there to be signed, you’ll be in play. I mean, that’s the, you know, you’re talking about irrational players. It’s irrational both ways. Because when they’re ready to go, they’re gonna be ready to go and it’s not gonna…
It’s interesting you bring that up, though, we always send a retainer to every client. And now as of yesterday, or actually Monday I guess it was, we are part of a beta program with LawPay to offer financing buy now pay later through a firm called Client Credit. So we can offer, so we don’t have to take credit cards from our clients, we can get them loans, and we’re gonna see how that works.
Let’s let’s talk about that, because that can be our final topic today if that’s okay with you, because I have struggled with this and somebody posted on one of the message boards about this the other day. And it’s been offered to me a number of times, a number of people have tried it, very often the people bringing me the value proposition are a little bit dubious. So Law Pay is a legitimate real company, they probably lost their deal with Cleo, which meant they needed to find some way to make up for lost time. Or at least their exclusivity deal. But the thought, we have always gone against it. I love the idea, right? What’s better? Here’s a number, financing. And I always tell people, to our lawyers, don’t listen to me, but never talk about the number you’re paying. What’s the monthly fee?
You never quote the whole car.
I get it. But the Ginsu knife… do you have any idea what the Ginsu knife costs? No, but it was $29.95 for X number of months would get you and the potato peeler and all that other stuff. Buy now, right. So Ginsu knife, lot of business lessons in there. So what I would say is, I love the concept and LawPay is there, and the idea that you’re not dealing with it, all awesome. You know, the criminal defense bar is so fraught with peril, that, and bar complaints are so, it’s such a personal area, like a family law, that every opportunity, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And we both know that if there’s a real issue in a case, we’re most likely going to be refunding money, and just saying, Here’s your money go away. Some people are holding… my attitude is no, just between reviews, between bar, somebody’s not happy. Again, there are exceptions or times, we’re like, No, we got you the best possible plea deal given that you were facing all this. But to me, the reason I have not done it, besides the fact that I haven’t seen like a mainstream player doing it, it’s always a fringe player, is that I am concerned that even when you do well, the fact you know, we get breakage, and we know we get breakage on our payment plans. It’s sorta like a borrower, you know that there’s 10% graft, if you run a bar, you know, you just don’t want it to be more, I know that I’m gonna have 10% breakage, it’s not good. But I also get clients that other people can’t get. So instead of paying 3% for credit cards, I’m paying 10% on a payment plan over millions of dollars, it’s money that I wouldn’t have otherwise. But does it concern you at all, what happens when somebody has issues paying, there’s now a third party that doesn’t give a shit about your bar license, where they are now obligated to pay, and they’re bitter at you because they’re making payments, even if you did fine. Whereas normally you would have that finger on the pulse of what’s going on. Is there, is that something?
I don’t know, if it’s brand new, we’re rolling it out, we’re going to do a 90 day test. And we’re going to see how it works. I mean, obviously, it’s going to take away the payment plans from us. Because it’s gonna, you know, we’re gonna get paid 96.5% of the fee upfront via LawPay, and…
And if the person breaks, what happens? Let’s say they don’t pay…
The firm chases, we have nothing to do with that.
And it’s zero recourse to you… and only a 4% Vic? … that’s a credit card fee almost, that sounds too good to be true.
Well, I think a firm is probably charging them 18 to 29% interest on the loan that they give them and it’s not a credit card. It’s a personal loan. So that’s the way it works. You know, it’s…
I’m intrigued, you know.
So am I, I’m gonna give it a shot.
At scale, it just scares me. And again…
I mean, if I’m running $2 million with a payment plan, credit cards, and we push it out this way. I mean… it’s gonna change dramatically.
Absolutely. And the, it’s awesome from the point of view of that, it’s awesome. From the point of view of your employees, I mean, it’s the word, like so hard to keep and retain good people to do that. You know, we, you know, there’s no good answer on payment plans. Unnecessary evil for me. And when you’re smaller, it’s harder. So to me, you know, in one sense, for smaller guys, this could be huge in the sense that a lot of small guys don’t do payment plans, because it’s too much of a risk on their cash. If somebody breaks, it can really throw them off. So look, I love the concept. Just, it makes me nervous, but I love the idea that it’s sort of a mainstream organization, as opposed to some…
Of the hacks that were approaching us over the last 20 years…
I mean, there way…
They were like, Oh, we take 50% of the money. You know, I mean, it was bad. But this, you know, LawPay and partnering with a firm, it could be a solution. I don’t know. We’re only doing it for people who would otherwise via payment plans, because if they, you know, the majority of my people are swiping that card paying in full. You know? And if that’s the case, you know, I don’t have to worry about that. So this is versus…
What is the… Do they disclose the interest rate to you that they’re charging people?
It depends on the person and their credit history.
So what’s the range?
I think it’s 18 to 29.
Wow, credit card.
But, if you have a potential client, and they have one credit card, and if you hit their credit card, they’ll be maxed out. And they don’t want to do that. But they qualify for this. It’s a solution for them to not eat up their own credit card.
No, no, absolutely. Look, I think that it’s like anything else, you want stuff in your portfolio. I guess, you know, there’s always risk, but I like the concept. But let me, look at what would the, do the math for a second, right? You know, not this second but, you know, at let’s say, an average of 25% interest, or, you know, is the consumer rational? Meaning, if I’m in Connecticut, and I’m competing against you, does a free no interest payment plan, beat this. And I just, you know, that’s the other piece in the back of my mind, which is that, you know, it’s a zero sum game. Now, people are not rational players. I’m not a rational player. I do stuff for airline miles that make absolutely no sense, you know, that are economically between my time and the actual value of points, like I would be better off, I am convinced with a Cashback Card that didn’t ever play a game, bought tickets wherever I wanted to go, and didn’t think twice about how to maximize points here and there. Because it’s almost like the casino, you’ll get it, you’ll hit the jackpot once in a while. But so often, it’s mediocre to negative returns. Anyway, I digress. So anyway, I’ll let you have the last word.
So here’s my last word. And I’m just gonna throw this out there. I know, you get crazy about airline points. Now that gambling is legalized, I had a crazy thought. And so I actually hired somebody to actually run this for me. I was wondering if you could treat the NFL like an index fund, and always bet the, you know, the favorite with the points. And if you did that every week for the course of a season, you know, would you make money? Or if you bet, the underdog against the points, would you always make money? So I have a statistician who’s running all these different permutations for me, and I’ll talk about that on an upcoming show.
I happen to be friends in DC with one of the leading lawyers in that space. So if for some reason this comes to fruition, let me know I’ll make an intro.
Awesome. Cool, cool, cool. Well, maybe I’ll be using DraftKings or whatever it is…to be able to just place my bets and sit back. I mean, I understand the concept of betting that you know the point lines are sent to get even on both sides so the house makes the vague in the middle, but I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes. But okay, folks, that was a lot of babbling for you. But we hope that you learned something here this week on the Law Firm Blueprint. As always, you can catch up with us every week live in our Facebook groups. 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific and then of course, if you want to take us on the go feel free to download our podcast wherever you get your podcasts. But for now, I am Jay Ruane. He is Seth Price. We are the Law Firm Blueprint. Please join our Facebook group, engage in the commentary. There’s a lot of good chatter starting in the group. A lot of good stuff coming on. Of course all in August, we’re going to be posting different sorts of marketing systems and marketing ideas that you can use. So please participate with us, ask us questions. Let us know in the comments what you need to hear from us. Seth any final thoughts?
No, just have a great week and see you soon.
See you next week guys. Bye for now.
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