S5:E16: Let’s Discuss Virtual Offices

S5:E16: Let’s Discuss Virtual Offices

In this episode, Seth and Jay discuss how to envision what you will need for space in 2030 as you think about long term leases and Jay asks if you can follow the medical industry model and segment your staff into defined roles to minimize a lawyer’s involvement in the representation.

Transcript

Jay Ruane

Hello and welcome to this edition of the law firm blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane. I run the criminal mastermind, a mastermind group for defense lawyers. But with me, as always, my man down there in our nation’s capital, Seth Price of BluShark digital, SEO for law firms as well as managing partner of Price Benowitz. DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina and soon to be Florida? Florida. You know what? Why don’t we do this? Why don’t I retire to Florida? I’ll sit and take the bar. and I could be Price Benowitz’s man.

Seth Price

Really? He’s pushing me to get to get some Florida lawyers.

Jay Ruane

Oh, really?

Seth Price

Yeah.

Jay Ruane

Wow. Yeah. I mean, think about it. You’ve got a lot of people to compete with, you know, in the Sarasota area, you’ve got our friend Haenel. Orlando area, you’ve got our boy, Umansky.

Seth Price

Exactly that. That part of the issue. I got to stay away from all my friends.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, absolutely. Plus, I mean, you know, your tribe tends to retire to Florida. So, if you’re gonna do that, the last thing you want to do is retire to work. So how you been this week? There are a lot of good feedback on the podcast last week, tons of downloads back from vacation. But how’s this week? Oh, now that you’re back in.

Seth Price

Things are good. I’d say, you know, we’ve got a couple of things to talk about I got to figure out post COVID. We got a big lease coming up after 10 years at the law firm got to figure that out. You know, stuff you and I’ve been talking a lot about, with where to place virtual offices and how to make a substantial enough so Google likes it but not so much that, you know, you end up affecting bottom line and all those good things.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, I just closed a couple of days ago on an office condo, I got it for like nearly nothing. It’s in an office building, literally across the street from a major hospital in Hartford, where the only law firm in the building, because it’s all physicians’ offices and that type of thing. I think eventually the building might be bought by the hospital at some point because they just need the space. But, you know, I’ve always been reticent about opening up virtual offices using things like Regis, because we hear about…

Seth Price

You should, you should, but that’s a hard no.

Jay Ruane

Okay, but then there’s the question of sharing space with other lawyers, sharing space with other professionals, and are you going to be seen, so let’s sort of just talk about that a little because I, you know, I’m of the opinion that, you know, as, as a criminal lawyer, it’s okay for me to share space with a PI lawyer. But I definitely don’t want to share space with criminal lawyers. That’s the thing is, every time I want to expand into a new area, I got a buddy of mine who does criminal who may not even have any sort of established presence of some. no, maybe he’s got, I don’t want to take it, I don’t want to take his, I dominate and he wouldn’t be seen on maps. And then I’ve just…

Seth Price

Been there, done that. So, the first thing is, and we’ve talked about this here, but I’ll just repeat it for anybody who hasn’t heard it recently, Google only allows one type of law per address to be shown, the other one will be suppressed. So, if you’re in a building, with somebody else doing criminal at the same address, and criminal, as opposed to injury, or some other area, is, is the area so for the same exact primary category, they’re gonna show one. And that means it’s a risk if you’re going into a building with that, or in the case. So that’s one thing if somebody’s the dominant player, and you’re going in, it could be weeks, months, or years before you surpass them. It’s a risk factor. Or, and I’ve had this before, if there’s a guy in the building, who doesn’t play the digital game, that GUI they’re still on Google, at some level, Google has a has a Google business profile, it’s automatically created for them, that what you’re going to do is going to smush them, and you’re going to come up every time and it’s going to annoy them. And if you had goodwill before, it disappears quickly. So, both reasons, both selfishly and benevolently. You want to make sure that you aren’t going to a building, in my opinion, that has somebody else doing your exact same area of law. Look, this goes way back. There was a point in Virginia not that long ago, we started our firm that they didn’t allow for virtual offices at all. They required brick and mortar that you couldn’t even have a virtual office that has changed and basically criminal lawyers were up in arms because if you’re a solo, and you don’t have an office and you go to a Regis and legitimately that’s your place, you are like being forced to put your home address and that’s not a good thing. You know, and if you put a peel box which gives you like a joker like it was it was no good answer that so now the question and Google has to deal with this. There are guys everything we think about doing. There’s some guy in California that takes it, and does it 10x. So, there’s some guy with 30 offices across the state of California that are all bullshit, right? And Google’s trying to protect itself from that. Because there are guys who just signed a lease with COVID, with Regis, and we both know, like, pre COVID. They knocked all of that out algorithmically. If you type the address of a Regis, or WeWorks, or any of those into a search bar, you will see pop up in the upper right-hand corner, shared suites, like it, or virtual offices, like Google already knows are much smarter than us. It’s not like do they know, of course, they know because that’s their job. So, I think that the what’s happened is, you know, the shared space becomes a assuming it’s not somebody doing your area of law is natural, because it’s noncompetitive, you have conference room space, you’re already sending work back and forth. That’s, that is the greatest sort of like, no brainer, out there, because it checks a lot of boxes, right? It’s not like you’re going to a tattoo parlor, or, you know, an auto mechanics place and try to throw your office in there. It makes sense to good user experience, you know, from the bar issue, you got to make sure your your files are secure, you don’t file anymore, it’s all in the cloud. So, you know, all the old reasons that you couldn’t share space have sort of dissipated. And as long as you can demonstrate to Google, both now, look, there went from postcards, you know, from phone calls, to postcards, to photos, to video to real time video, as long as you can demonstrate a genuine presence there, Google will verify it, but it’s getting more and more stringent because people keep pushing the envelope, and they just want to make sure that people have some real nexus to that property. And then it’s not fiction.

Jay Ruane

Yeah. So, here’s, here’s a little tip or trick for the people in the audience who are listening to this. We’ve got a town close to us, where the post office is right next door to the courthouse. And a lawyer solo lawyer has set himself up and verified it, that his GMB is at the post office address and his Pio box is his suite number. Eventually, he is going to get caught.

Seth Price

No, it’s not even get caught. I think, and that pause it, you have to double check. There was an issue because this was way back. We saw that with, when Virginia had its issue way back the post office was not pleased with that. They were that that you couldn’t legally do it. But you know, all those bullshit awards that are out there, like the best of the best of the best of the best lawyer that, you know, you pay $300. Now you’re in.

Jay Ruane

It’s basically you’re buying a plaque. That’s…

Seth Price

And I always say if I’m shortlisted, I then make a graphic just saying I’m shortlisted and send that off into the social sphere. Like, I don’t need to pay the $300 I’m shortlisted I’m perfectly happy. I don’t need to pay more. I’ll make my own plaque. But the thing about that is one of the ones that was advertising everywhere. It was a UPS store in the gentrifying part of DC. It was the greatest sort of it was like so nonsensical. That, that, you know, yes, you can get away with anything you want short term. But you know what, that like every one of those quarters, you cut some short-term game, but it was short term positive. But like, our goal is to find stuff that is like, that makes you money over time, not the little spike, who cares? If you have a great month, what you’re looking for is great revenue year after year.

Jay Ruane

You know, it’s interesting, because we talk about this a lot. I remember, at a conference a while ago, Billy Taurasi talked about looking at demographics and identifying areas where you should be putting your offices based on how many people are there and that type of thing? What are some of the things that people can do to identify where they should expand their offices to? Because if Google, my business, or Google business profile is going to pop on the maps for people within a 5 or 10-mile radius, or I don’t even think they go to a 20-mile radius?

Seth Price

Depending on the competition, they’ll go further, if there’s less competition, if you’re in Manhattan, they go shorter because…

Jay Ruane

They go a block, right? You know, because you’re gonna have multiple things. And then that’s, I mean, for people in our audience that are in large metro areas, is it I mean, do you just avoid where a lot of lawyers are? Because ya know, exactly, there’s going to be suppression no matter what, because remember, lawyers, there’s a lot of lawyers who haven’t done anything really to market themselves using a Google product and so they are GMP or GMP might just be lawyer. And so that could, you know, there…

Seth Price

That’s not gonna bother you, look, let’s talk about we’re talking about just the other real players. So, like in Manhattan, for example, if you’re doing a niche area criminal, there aren’t criminal lawyers all over the Upper West Side, most of them are down by the courthouse. So, you put something on the Upper West Side, you’re gonna get a really good geographic space. The downside is if you have an office by the courthouse, you’re gonna need to have reviews in both, right? You can’t mean, but that’s where what I call it. Moneyball. It’s my own geeky term. But you look at what’s the competition? Who’s around you? How many reviews do they have? And where’s the density? Where is there we are there less people, right? So, you, where’s the density? Okay. And great examples downtown Atlanta, right? Everybody has their office in downtown Atlanta. But if, you know, there are all these other sub markets, right? You have Alpharetta, you have Marietta, you have sandy spring, those are not going to show from one location. So, you’re sort of looking at, okay, I can’t win downtown Atlanta, and look for certain areas like PI, you’re not going to get any of the ones I just mentioned, but short term with time. But if you’re able to say, hey, this side of town has eyeballs, I’m starting out, I can’t say I want Alpharetta, because that’s already saturated. I’m gonna go to this town, where there’s not anybody within 12 miles are the people that are there have less than 10 reviews each. Like there are people that have law, that’s where you can do it. So, to me, you’re looking at population, the competition level, and how of the competition level, how entrenched they are. And then making sure that you’re not in a situation where you’re being suppressed by a juggernaut. And if you follow that logic of, say, again, that’s what BluShark has an entire team, that’s what they do. And they sort of say, hey, here are 10 possible places, these three are saturated, it’s going to be a huge uphill battle, these three are totally not, but the populations light. And I think you sort of want to diversify, get a couple easy wins with some population where there’s no competition, then you have ones that are, you know, you get yourself to 60 to 80 reviews, you’re going to win that market, great. And then you say, look, I’m not going to be able to get to the downtown for a couple of years. But as the domain authority goes up, and as my review generating machine is get gets in place, I may have you know, 1015 reviews where I need that to win in the sub the far-out suburbs, close in suburbs, I’m gonna be able to win that within, you know, nine months to a year. And then downtown. That’s a three-year play. And you know what, very often people eventually say, you know, what, I don’t want to go fighting for 500 to 1000 reviews downtown, I’ll put 100 reviews in three different offices. And I’m gonna make more money because there’s more population out there with less competition.

Jay Ruane

Well, I mean, that certainly makes a lot of sense to me, because we had a we had a geographic area where there were two sort of behemoths each with, you know, 300 reviews, each battling it out, we were at 60. And I just said, why do we even have an office there? Why don’t we just move to another location? And it certainly has helped us see an uptick in cases in that new location where we moved in, and our next closest cop, you know, had like 30 reviews, all of a sudden, we were double our next closest Friday.

Seth Price

Now for you, you have the issue of like, you know, revenue of the clients, right? So, you know, not all locations are created equal. And if you’re doing tickets, yeah, you probably get tickets anywhere. But if you want to get a higher dollar, is, there’s very specific places. And if you have, if you’re looking for domestics, there’s certain areas with pockets of money, and if you want to play that game, but as we were just talking about offline, you know, those come with certain high maintenance clients that take a whole different mindset of, and if your practice is not set up for it, you’re going to have like heads butting all the time. So, if you know your product, and you know where you’re supposed to be, that’s, that’s the best where you say, hey, I don’t want to have the highest income, I want to have, you know, the B plus income, because that’s where I’m going to sell the most Widgets at the right price that fits into the machine that I built.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, you know, and that’s, and that’s part of the thinking that we need to sort of, we started, we need to be thinking about this stuff constructively and long term. Because, you know, for a lot of us, you will see suburbs start to grow and become popular. And if you could place yourself now in those areas, and slowly and grow with them as they grow, you may be in a better position. I, one of the things that always bothers me is that lawyers tend to sort of think of themselves as you know, I gotta get leads now, but they forget that they’re in the business, you know, for 20, 30, 40 years.

Seth Price

I’m having a discussion right now with a friend and client and they can’t get out of their own way. And I’m like, you know, they go from I you know, no, no design is good enough to you know, I’m not sure whether I want to be doing search and I’m like, if you’re in your like mid 30s You know, the damage you can do by building authority to a website. I think both of us are case in point. Have you spent 10 years optimizing a website? And don’t worry about business? I mean, obviously, you’re spending money, you’re worried about it. But like the authority you can build with time, the compound interest of authority. It’s so large online, that again, what are your risk factors that Google is no longer dominant, but what everybody’s gonna have to find their stuff somewhere, right? So, you know, whether it’s Chechi, BT or Google, the information has to come from somewhere. And if you’re sending signals that you are authoritative, digitally, over time, that will pay dividends.

Jay Ruane

You know, it’s interesting, I’m trying, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to tell horror stories to my own horn, I was in court covering something the other day, for a lawyer who was stuck in a hearing and couldn’t get out and someone just needed to stand up for a client. And two young lawyers came up to me, one who works in the public defender’s office, one who’s a private lawyer, and they both said, you know, your website is amazing whenever I have a client, and I need to know what the penalties are, what the elements are for a particular offense, and what the exposure is what a person is looking at, I Google it, and I just look on your website, I don’t bother to even go to the statutory section, because I know you’re gonna have it, then, wow, that’s a lot of traffic that I’m not able to monetize. But at least, you know, other lawyers are finding my website.

Seth Price

They know what I know the word Chuck regularly says in a minute, but let me talk about that for a second. It’s funny cause somebody mentioned this to me, that’s why I love this conversation. You know, we’re both bemoaning the ability to get top talent, you’ve had some talent lost of late, you know, one of the ways with you not being in court, one of the ways you do attract talent is being around in court. Right conversations, that wouldn’t happen to you. Whenever I push back on you over the years saying, dude, what do you still do in court? You’re like, I like it. And there’s, there’s positives? How do you simulate that? Because as we see that getting the people a good see how they perform in court and how they carry themselves, you know, is hugely valuable. But that’s one of those things being very, very removed from the courtroom, when I need people. I feel that there’s probably missed opportunities. But it’s not like, you know, do you ever go to court looking for lawyers saying, hey, I now have two open spots? Let me go see who I like.

Jay Ruane

I have not I know lawyers who have done that. When I do randomly appear in court, I’m always on the lookout, who’s this person? What are they doing? I’ll watch it, I’ll see if they’re that type of, you know, if they’ve got the skills and the amount that I see. And, you know, what I was seeing was, since it is August, I was seeing some law students and asking about them, and they’re going into their third year, do they have some potential, that type of thing? So, I think that’s definitely something that, you know, for me with a, you know, a b2c criminal business, I kind of have to have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the courthouses to some extent. You know, and now more than ever, with, with lack of legal talent, I mean, law school enrollment is down, practicing lawyers are down, corporations are hiring more people with jayvees. And you know, and the new generation is more about lifestyle and balance than it is about, you know, the first 10 years of just hustling I mean, if you go back, and you’ll look at what I did, in my first 10 years of practice, like your partner David did, it was trial after trial. It was, you know, slogging every day. And that’s, and that was fun for me. I loved it back then. I’m exhausted by it now. But that’s certainly something and actually, that’s something that I’ll bring up. You know, recently, we moved to a pod setup, and it’s really, really working. Well. We were, we’ve got to functional.

Seth Price

We have our six-month roll, but we’ll let you go today.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, but exactly. It’s working well, and we want to iterate. And I was thinking when I was away out in California last week, you know, when you go to the doctor’s office, how much time do you really spend with your doctor, you come in at the end, but you know, you talk to the receptionist, and you see the nurse, then the phlebotomist comes in, then the APRN comes in, and then the doctor comes in with the with the nurse, and then the doctor leaves. And then the nurse finishes up. And I was thinking to myself, you know, we’ve got paralegals and legal assistants in our pods. But I think what we’re gonna do is we’re going to try to add another person to the pots to support the lawyers to do more client care stuff. And if the legal assistants and paralegals are focusing on the law and and a client care person is focusing on the client services, and maybe I don’t need to add more lawyers to the pods today. You know, I can have lawyers just doing lawyer things.

Seth Price

Oh, look, I’ll spoiler alert, you’re gonna go back and forth. Meaning, you know, I’m thinking for the PII side that we’ve not done this on the criminal side, we were pretty lawyer centric. And if you look at the Eat the direction of medicine, if you use every vertical, one medicals in your market, Bezos just bought it. Amazing, amazing doctors, you push a button, make appointments, virtual or in person, it’s Doctor centric. They’re not playing that game, right? It’s not, you go get a bit weighed and measured, but it’s about seeing the doctor. But the thing that you see, and I think that most pie shops, and that’s where the pods come from, and whose ties time has been in fire for the price established it is that it’s a balance, because if you go from free lip, paralegals clients, and you go too heavily their clients Rebel, and you’re gonna need to put more money into the lawyers, the prelist lawyers, or in some cases, lawyers that go through the whole case, depending on how your firm is set up. And I think what you’re going to find is that sounds great. But and like, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked with Fisher and other people in the, in the, in our greater community about having somebody who’s checks in with clients, and I love the concept that I want to do more of it. But the clients that get old, and they like somebody to check in with them, and maybe on a big big case, it’s going on for years. But what do they want? They want a subset of information. And the handling personal relationship person doesn’t have that. Yeah. And so, it sounds great. But I think it quickly collapses to, okay, I’m glad you’re there to be my relationship person. But what’s going on in court? Do we have the right judge? Whatever it is, and that it becomes, you know, if the price difference is not that much, why are you not giving them more lawyers? Because that’s really what they want. Now, there’s a place for everything, right? It doesn’t mean you want an amazing receptionist who’s like they love when they come or can you can you do this, but particularly in criminal, you know, unless that person really is empowered with substance, I think you’re going to end up very quickly with less satisfaction, not more.

Jay Ruane

It’s interesting. I mean, the reality is, is that I’m trying to, I’m trying to sort of respond to what the client needs are. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges we have recently, and for anybody who’s, you know, we talk a lot about intake on the show, what we found was, there was some, there was some sort of rubbing the client the wrong way, because, you know, our intake team is relentless. And so, they were checking in calling every day and text messages every day. And then once there was a conversion to a paid client, you know, you didn’t get one call from a paralegal saying, hey, I’ve read that you were opening up your file, we’ll be in touch, and then you go dark for like, 10 days as things happen. I think that people were getting upset because they were saying, oh, you were on top of me and then you got my money and then I need to hear from you. I’m like, well, we’re doing all the work now. But what I found is that we needed to do some proactive outreach to sort of let people know like the Domino’s Pizza tracker here’s what’s going on.

Seth Price

All reflect perfectly, you know what, that sounds it’s straining for the PI firms are starting to do it really well. Is, videos are having a sequence you’re probably feeling nervous. That screens easier advice to give them detained. But to me, that is like is there a welcome video from Jay that goes out the next day.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, we’re doing, we’re, we solve the problem with that. Right, and then each stage gets a video here’s what’s going on, you, that type of thing.

Seth Price

Right. And so, a lot of positives. We’re gonna talk about the problem of lack of lawyers. A great a great guy. There’s a guy who’s been Steve sold his whole career Jameson Kohler, amazing lawyer in our market. I met him I think 15 years ago, when we did something boneheaded online when we were sort of first developing and ruffled some feathers. And he was one of the people that wasn’t outraged by it, but I called him personally to apologize to him. But ever since then, we’ve been, we’ve been good buddies. And you know what, we had a lawyer of about 14, 15 years who raised his hand, he was just burned out, he wanted to be a court appointed lawyer. And his numbers were not such that like he was crushing it. And it was just, it was time for a change for change in relationship. And I called my old friend and said, hey, who do you like, because I’m not important every day. So just a thought to people that even if you’re not in a courthouse on a regular basis, people, you have relationships with our he gave me three names. One was a no one jumped off the page when I spoke to them. And he is now taken over. I don’t want to at least 50% up on revenue, if not double what the former person was doing on a regular basis. He’s not burned out. He loves it. He had he reached the guy who he hired and reached out about five or six years ago when he switched cities. And I didn’t want to take the risk on a brand-new person without any knowing our market. He spent five years learning the market and now he’s, you know, crushing it. So, you know, while there’s nothing better than you going yourself, I think it letting people know when you have a need is it sounds obvious, but there are people that are not real competition to you or that are friendly to the firm that easily could find the person because the person who are Hiring to work within our firm like you is not the person who wants to stay. So, it’s a different person. And that if you can find somebody who is looking for that structure, when you say that there are a lot of people are not going to apply to you, they don’t even know it’s possible, or you may have passed on its years before it’s not the same person. And even though you think why would somebody has reached out again, it’s you get so no one’s you’re not going to be come running back. So, I thought it was that was interesting.

Jay Ruane

So, last point that we want to talk about is the issue of leases, because a lot of people are starting to come up on the end of leases that they signed, pre coded. I think you mentioned something at the beginning of the show.

Seth Price

So yeah, so we are now not pre coded. We have a 10-year lease with our options that is just coming due. And we can track the during COVID. And now we are over, we’re Britain, we have too much we don’t have we have too many people want back in the office. And, you know, in a perfect world. Frankly, if I could wave a magic wand, remove everybody from the office, clean it out and reset it up as pure hotel style. I’d be in, I wouldn’t need as much space, but we need more space than we have. Regardless. The issue, you know, that I’m facing is, you know, you look at the stuff and you know, most commercial leases now in cities, what 10 years. Now their outs, you can get out to 357 years with not that much paid back. But it you know you are trying to anticipate need. And what’s interesting…

Jay Ruane

In 2033, like you’re trying to predict where in 2030…

Seth Price

Right. And I guess that’s the one good thing about the outage because you aren’t going if you God forbid, need a ton of space, or a ton less space that you’d have those options. And what’s so scary as I go through this process is that and like right now people are back. But I again, I’m gonna go a little bit of a tangent, but not much. But what lesson learned, you know, our accounting team is about nine is about nine people, it had been like four or five overseas, and four or five domestics. And we lost a person after nine months’ pay a mid-tier salary in DC doesn’t get you great talent, especially if they have to commute. And so, we had somebody who was required to be in the office two days a week at home three days a week. And they left us simply because somebody said you could work from home five days a week. And I thought to myself, if we’re not paying for a junior position, why does the person have to be in the office at all, we have people in the office. And if there’s an emergency check writing, which is what they had needed in the office for somebody else will be deputized for that one little thing, and 98% of their job, ironically, and you’d be pleased about this, we were able to shift that job as an overseas job. So, it went from let’s say 50k to 7k an hour 50k to 50k years, okay, an hour, and that we just shuffled some stuff. But I think the issue that I see, and it’s that at the lower dollar figure, keeping people employed, if you’re requiring any in office is really tough these days for millions in DC with commuting costs and type metros never recover from COVID. So, I’m sitting there struggling with, you know, basically, I am now one by one, removing people from the necessity to be there, while at the same time overflowing with need. And I’m sitting there touring places. And so, if you’ve been through a commercial lease recently, but you know, you’re dealing with your agent, their agent, building manager, just like the build out, and it’s just it starts to hurt your head when you think about it. And we’re so our build out is so much for the personal injury side, I’m torn, because on the fee for service side, you want to be nice enough to show a good image because of that. Whereas on the on the plaintiff side, you don’t want to be crappy, but it doesn’t have that same level of amazingness. Some of the best firms in our city have rather mediocre facilities. And anyway, that’s my…

Jay Ruane

Yeah, I mean, it’s one of these things, it’s very difficult to be able to predict where you’re going to be in two years, let alone to 5 years or 10 years. One of the things that we’ve run into a challenge with and I don’t I don’t know, let’s wrap up with this because I don’t want to go too long. But one of the challenges we have is that lawyers tend to think they want an office that they can put their stuff up in. So, I wanted to go full hotel style. But what we found were lawyers were like commandeering an office and being like, this is mine. This is my own space.

Seth Price

What do you, what do you do if the person comes in one day a week?

Jay Ruane

That’s the problem. That, that and I don’t have a solution for that, so I’m looking, if you have solutions for that…

Seth Price

I’m give you a little solution. I have one like this, right? Personal, it’s coming one day a week, we have their paralegal smushed into their office, but they’re never there, right? And essentially have a second smush desk, but they have an office, it’s not a cube as a paralegal, and then they’re there in the one day a week they’re there together, the guy can move out to a cube they need to, but that was sort of one of my ones, but as a business owner, walking around and seeing empty offices kills him.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, I mean, I have two offices next to me where lawyers have their diplomas on the wall. They have, you know, the pictures of their family and their kids on their desk. And I haven’t seen them live, you know, in four or five months, and I’m paying for that space. And I don’t need it, because, you know, we’ve got flex space and all that stuff. But I’m thinking, why am I paying rent for you? So, that’s the next thing. I was debating, and we can talk about this next week, because I think it’s a good tease. total compensation to the lawyers. I’m thinking about including your square footage if you’re in the office.

Seth Price

That’s like I very often do I’m like, you know, if my kids would say is that cringe in the sense that that’s not apples to apples with market, nobody else is putting that in.

Jay Ruane

I know, that’s the problem. But I’m like, hey, man, you’re costing me X number of dollars to keep an empty office. You know…

Seth Price

What you can usually a high-tech office where it has the photos and they get brought in the moment they’re there, they pop up, it’s digitized and it just showed on the wall with a white.

Jay Ruane

Actually, you can do that. You put up like, you put up like some TVs instead and…

Seth Price

Diplomas pop up that whoever’s in there that day.

Jay Ruane

I love it. That’s the thing that we’re going to do. So, now we’re going to look into like we might…

Seth Price

I’ll leave you with a funny because as we come to the end of the lease, so years ago, I got whether it was super lawyers or ABA, we bought a bunch of plaques one year. And you know, I basically put them all over the waiting room has been putting up pictures of DC up I was like, well put some plaques up. And people like them, right? They think the problem is there now 2013. So, I’m literally gonna have to spend money because I was not. I didn’t have the forethought not to put a year on the black. So my next set of plaques are anybody out there building your firm, take years off plaques, buy them from a third party that doesn’t require a year on it. Because otherwise, you’re sitting there with like, you know, antiquated plaques before you know it.

Jay Ruane

There you go. All right. Great news from Seth today. Alright, folks, that’s gonna do it this week in this long edition. I guess, you know, when you’re off for a little…

Seth Price

We started late to be fair. I think you’re; you’re putting your, got you. It’s not quite as long as you think.

Jay Ruane

All right. So, anyway, folks, thanks for being with us. Of course, you can always catch us every week. Live in our Facebook group, the law firm blueprint live at 12pm, 12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern. And if you want to take us on the go, you can find the law firm blueprint podcast wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to give us a five-star review when you’re doing that. And of course, subscribe so that you get all of our downloads the minute they go live. That’s gonna do it for me. I’m Jay Ruane. He is Seth Price. Thank you so much for being with us. Have a great one and we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.

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