We’ll be exploring the importance of teamwork in building a successful law practice, especially with only ten weeks left in the year.
Dive into the world of PI lawyers working fervently to solve cases and wrap them up before the year comes to a close.
Join us as we navigate the busy holiday season for criminal lawyers and discover how they ramp up during Halloween through New Year’s.
Stay tuned for an intriguing discussion on whether lawyer Chris Munley can leverage his large platform to bring in referable cases without jeopardizing his reputation.
We’ll also uncover the story of a Jets fan, a fateful encounter, and the heartbreak of Marino’s infamous fake spike.
Explore the fascinating world of law firm acquisitions as we delve into why most firms aren’t interested in buying others, but private equity firms are snatching up successful ones.
Our hosts share insights and skepticism while discussing a variety of business ideas, including a subscription-based content model.
Discover the challenges of balancing brand building and direct response marketing in a mid-sized firm with a limited budget.
Plus, gain valuable insights into the benefits of having a secondary practice area and the potential monetizable opportunities it can bring. And that’s not all!
We’ll uncover the ups and downs of organizational growth, explore the concept of a “firefighter” role within the company, and emphasize the importance of systems and processes.
Hello, welcome to a new edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your host Jay Ruane and CEO of The Criminal Mastermind and Managing Attorney of Ruane Attorneys, Criminal Defense firm here in Connecticut, with me as always my man down there Seth Price of BluShark Digital as well, he’s got that BluShark gear on today, as well as Price- so you need a BluShark shirt and the Price Benowitz hat, they give you a hat floating around?
They got it floating around, I was wearing that yesterday.
You know, we’re gonna talk about branding later on in the show. I’ve got, I’m just straight up you know, no, no bran- while I got (inaudible) red, but just straight up black on black. I’m as as you know, basic as they come, you know, a couple of years ago, I went with the whole idea of a state standardized wardrobe, blue jeans, Nike Dunks, black T shirts, and I’ve been wearing it ever since. And I have a feeling people might look at me as I walk around town, and I walk around the office and be like, does he only have one set of clothes. But you know, it just takes all thought out of it. And it’s nice.
I’ll go personal for a second, when I was traveling on an exchange program, the counselor I was with asked my mom is your son ever changed his socks, because she sent me with like 10 pairs of the same exact matching socks.
Well, you know, that’s, that’s a genius move. I mean, that’s a system of itself. My, my, my wife and I have done that for our, for our kids, where, you know, my older boy, he’s got gray socks, and my younger boy, he’s got white socks. And so-
Why would you like- I’ll point (inaudible), like I am sitting here. If there’s one thing in my personal life, that drives me crazy, we have household help, that helps with some of the laundry, this and that, the odds of getting socks that I have worn back and clean on a shelf, again, first world issues, right, a lot of real issues out there. But if I had to do it all over again, I would get rid of all socks and just have the same sock so that they would just, that way no matter what happens, they weren’t separated, they weren’t two different loads, one got lost, took you three years before you realize you didn’t have the mathcing sock. Like basically, I would go to one sock.
Well, that’s what we did, each boy, who, those are the ones who are the culprits.
I would go a step further, I would just go for a sock for the all the kids in the family all, that all-
See if you do that, then you can’t yell at the kid for leaving their socks in the playroom. Because this way, you know, which one left the sock.
I think it’s a small price to pay, I would give up the ability to yell at my kid, if I knew that, like you weren’t dealing, the inefficiency of non match socks and the fact of how much time and effort we spend tracking them down. And like it just it blows the mind.
So maybe we should just change the theme of our show to be The Law Firm Blueprint and Family Systems. Because you know, these are the types of things that can drive you crazy.
Well, you brought this up the system, of from the, hate to bring up this person, but like the Epstein household checklist.
Yeah. And it’s available in our in our group, we rebranded it.
Right, not that we want to emulate anything this man did. But the idea that when you have household help, are you getting what you need? Is there something where you go and like, you know, a guest came the other night and there was no sheets on the bed, the blanket was up. And I was like, middle of the night. I’m like running around trying to find them a sheet. And it’s like, you know, if those things are done, a metaphor for what we do every day at the office.
Yeah, you know, that’s, you know, and that’s actually one of the stuff that I want to talk about in our second segment. So we got a lot of stuff. I mean, it’s been a while since we’ve had a show, you’ve been traveling, I’ve been traveling, and it’s nice to be back. But the first thing I want to talk about Seth is, I was traveling, I got stuck on a- well, not stuck on a plane, I was gonna be on a plane, and I had six hours and I throw on the threw on the TV on the screen in front of me and I got in, I got engrossed into Shark Tank, which is something that was very popular a number of years ago. And a lot of great products have come out of it. It’s an interesting, very interesting, show premise. I’m sure everybody who listening knows about it. So I’m not going to go into what it is. But it caused me to think would my firm either when I started it or where it is now survive a Shark Tank pitch. And I’d like to think that I would now, based on our revenue and our systems and our approach to certain things. I don’t know I don’t I mean, I know my numbers, and that’s something that they’re big into is knowing your numbers. And I think a lot of lawyers unfortunately, don’t know their numbers as well as they should, because they mask poor numbers with larger returns. I mean, the truth is, you know, you could charge more as a lawyer for a lot of things, I mean, PI, for sure you get some outsized recoveries. And, you know, you can mask some bad habits with, with, with extra revenue. So that’s, you know, that,
I would argue that most law firms would not, that there’s a reason I know private equity is buying some very large firms, you know, that are looking at, like, firms that are jamming on all cylinders, but law firms generally buy, from one to three times, you know, you know, profits. And you know, that that’s scary stuff. So I would argue most law firms, like if you were smart, you wouldn’t go into this. And I get pitched a ton of stuff. I was just pitched it was outside of law. But it was funny. It was a, it was a somebody who had a really good intent of creating content for good in an area that really needs it. And they wanted to do a subscription model. And I’m just like, my mind starts blowing up. So I’m going through all the questions from Shark Tank, and they can’t answer any of them. And so I was like, to me, I’m like, if this thing is so great, go and put the content out there, God forbid, you get 100,000 views on YouTube. Okay, now, let’s start getting elite content, putting it behind a paywall. But until there’s proof of concept, the idea of building out the infrastructure, the development, the E-commerce component, and all that would be needed to be done. That’s pretty freakin tough, and not that you just want to give stuff away. That’s not the point. But then until there’s proof of concept or critical mass. So I think that many law firm owners, present company included, is sophisticated VR, would have a lot of trouble with a lot of their issues.
Yeah. And so what I what I tasked actually one of my assistants to do is actually go through and sort of make up the questions that they’re asking people, because I want to make sure that I can answer those questions. So I’ve got somebody who’s watching, you know, 20 episodes of Shark Tank so that they can, they can pose those questions to me.
And I got to think, Jay, that there’s something out there on this, that there’s a, that this has been done? And if not AI could tackle it.
I’m sure I’m sure they’re gonna find it online and just wind up, you know, copy and pasting, and giving it to me, but that’s fine. I mean, the reality is, is I need to take steps like these, you know, because it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. I was talking to, I was out at dinner. And I ran into a lawyer that I used to work with at a firm, now this lawyer, he’s the one who turned me on to the Jets, right. I mean, I came back from college, and I’ll make the story short, but it’s relevant. I came back from college, I was working at a law firm, he was, you know, a third or fourth year associate at the time. This is before I went to law school. And he was newly married, and he had season tickets, to the Jets. They had a baby. And his wife said, I’m not dragging my butt out of bed at 8am on a Sunday morning to go down and tailgate with you. And so, I often got the call Saturday afternoon, like five or six o’clock, hey, what are you doing tomorrow? Do you want to go to the Jets game? And I was out of school and it was a day of drinking and hanging out. And I didn’t have to drive and I was all about it. So I I jumped on it. And so I was going to every Jets game imaginable for you know, a three year period, which was awesome. And you know, I was there, when Marino faked the spike and broke my heart. You know, all of those wonderful things. But I ran into him. I was out to dinner with my wife and family. And he was out with his wife. And we happen to be in the same restaurant. And I hadn’t seen the guy in maybe a decade. Right? So he is, I am 51, he is 63. And he came up and he goes, hey, how you doing? I said, oh, great. You know, we’re just cruising along. And he’s like, yeah, he’s like, he’s like, man, he’s like, how’s business for you? And I was like, steady. I don’t like to tip my hand. I don’t like to gloat. You know, we’re up 33% This year, you know, we’re doing really well. We’re firing on all cylinders, right? And he said, You know, I just I go to the office every day, and I wait for the phone ring. And that’s all he does is, he waits for the phone to ring. He’s hoping for a referral. He put nothing into digital. He did nothing to build a marketable brand. That who he was, he was jack of all trades solo lawyer, did a little low level criminal, did a divorce, a PI fell in his lap. He handled it. And he’s 63 now and he’s like, I’m thinking about taking my Social Security early, and just closing up shop because I don’t really have any business coming in. And after he left, and you know, my wife and I started talking and she said, you know, and this is funny coming from my wife. She’s like, well, what would you send him like, well, you know, I like him. He’s a nice guy. You should send him work and I’m like, I don’t really have anything I could send him because number one, I’m not getting those calls. But number two, he’s not really known for anything. He’s like a jack of all trades, but master of none sort of situation. So I want to talk a little bit about the value of branding yourself as something. Because I think there, you know, we always talk about digital marketing and referral marketing and how to get that hot lead in the door. But there’s got to be a value in creating a brand of who you are,
Well agreed. But let’s go a step further back, just to clarify, this guy’s issue is not brand, it’s substance, because he was a badass divorce lawyer, even though it wasn’t his main thing, you’d be sending him morem likely, right? It’s not going to-
Yeah, but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even get divorce leads anymore. I mean, I might get-
You did, whatever it was, but whatever it was that you, get enough, that would be a referral here or there, a throw away from a dinner party. But I think that what you bring up is something I am actually pretty interested in, which is, it’s very hard to be known by, for more than one thing. I’ve seen it at Price Benowitz, we started with criminal, and we pivoted to PI, I was trying to get my big firm friends to think of us for their PI cases, right that’s that’s the referral from a PI is worth a lot more than a one off criminal case. And I’m with a friend in the lobby of her K Street building. She’s Senior Counsel, at one of the big firms. And she introduced me to her partner. Oh this is Seth, his firm got my friend off on a misdemeanor criminal charge, I’m like, ah, it was the pain and nothing wrong with criminal. That’s not, that’s not the point. But it’s like, if you want to be known for PI, it muddies the water by doing a number of different things, which is why I think a lot of people, niching down is tremendous, because it keeps that focus. It’s very hard to be known for a lot of thing. So much so, I’ll tell you, I’ll leave you this story before I pivot back to you, which is I’ve given talks on digital marketing, like, or I’ve explained to people, the intricacies of local SEO, I’ll do a 45 minute speech. I’m introduced Price Benowitz, BlueShark, Seth Price, I finish. It’s like, really, where do you think we should go for our SEO, you seem like a great lawyer. And it’s like, this is I mean, these are speeches, I’ve videotaped them. I’ve watched them. The words are said, it’s just very hard for people to conceptualize more than one thing, which is why I think those guys who sort of just put a shingle out, it’s good in that people come down the street, but so much of what you get is not monetizable versus okay, serious injury, a DUI, a divorce, there are people that say, hey, this is me, when you get this niche, I’m that guy, or girl. How do you, how do you, can you do more than one well? And what are some of the tricks, or tips or tricks that help you do that?
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. And then the question I have for you is, how much value? Or how much? Should you be spending just to build that brand? I mean, once you know, we all we all target those hot leads, you know, with with pay per click and that type of thing. And obviously work our referral sources. But, you know, it’s it’s tough to measure the return on brand investment. But it does have a return, doesn’t it?
It does, look, it does, and at the highest end. You can see it Morgan has demonstrated you spend enough money, people are going to know this. And I’ve always struggled because when you look at Amazon, clearly a brand right? The first time you heard it. A great one in the legal space is a mass tort case averaging group Broughton Partners, they had an IP issue. Three years ago, they changed their name. And now it’s ubiquitous within certain circles. It means something. The idea before that, I was like, what the hell is Broughton? I didn’t realize it was this big street in, down in Savannah. So brand can do things. I’m always concerned on how much is it a crutch for or, you know, a negative meaning, I’m not getting cases that I can attribute versus there is something there because clearly there are PI lawyers in every market, every market has a handful of them, that have built brands that have done well. I’ve been dabbling, I say dabbling, a year of radio in my market. The number of people that call up said I heard you on the radio I’m calling, is rather small, but our cases are up. Is you know, and so is that, but is that, is it brand, is it messaging, because if it’s just brand, right, where are you, we talk a lot about Facebook ads that are just out there putting brand out I know you’ve played around with that a lot. I know there’s potential benefit, but is it you know, it’s one of those things you better get to the mountaintop because you know, should a lawyer, throw this at you, spend every dollar on direct that they can spend where they know there’s a good ROI before they get to brand potentially, in that part of that will build brand right? You have the ads out there it’s around, but does brand itself unless you get to critical mass. Is it going to really be able to monetize and provide a reasonable ROI.
And that’s and that’s the question that everybody has to sort of think about in the context of their own firm. I mean, I can tell you that a number of years ago, we started a speeding ticket brand. And we consciously put 20% of our spend into just putting brand out there in our market, because nobody knew we existed. Nobody even knew that, you know, in our smaller market of our state of, you know, three and a half million people, there was nobody positioning themselves as the speeding ticket lawyer. And so we said, we got to, we got to invest early in brand, because otherwise people won’t know that this, this exists.
But at least there, every family is going to have a speeding ticket issue every two to three years, somebody in their extended family. So versus, you know, when you’re branding for something, wher like, that’s so specific, you know, God willing, you’re not going to have some of the more niche issues as often. And so it’s a struggle. I mean, as I’ve looked at a midsize firm, like we got 40 plus lawyers, you know, part of it is every dollar I can, I want to spend on the direct response, because I know that makes money with a guaranteed ROI. The question is when that, when you get to the point where you can’t spend more, then does brand start to come into play, you know, where, where is that? And, you know, it’s it’s also risk because you build a brand, if you’ve been building this Mr.Speeding ticket right before, it’s been huge brand money, right before COVID, you’re done, you put the money in, and it’s not coming back out.
It’s definitely not coming back. And that’s actually one of the problems, we actually got delisted by Google in the first days of COVID, as somebody marked us as closed, and then I had to battle it back and get that you know, and find, you know, get my 250 some odd reviews back and it took forever and it was driving me crazy and that type of thing. But, you know, the it’s one of those things where you really need to sort of pay attention to how, not necessarily the brand that you’re putting out in the market, but what the market is viewing you as, I think, you know, and that’s one of the things, one of the challenges we had in our own office. I mean, we’ve shuttered our civil rights brand, because it was diluting us from from our core product, you know, DUI and criminal defense. And I think it was even sending mixed signals. So that’s something that you might be able to speak about, you know, I see people online, they’ll add a, they’ll add a silo to their website saying, you know, oh, I’m a family lawyer. And they’ll say, oh, let me throw up a couple of pages of how PI, so I can have a line in the water just incase that PI case hits my website. I mean, are they really going to ever get a PI case?
No, two things. I was amazed, I was out at, I visited Chris Munley’s Atlas thing in St. Louis, it’s where I got to meet Ozzie Smith, not at the conference, just happened to be at the hotel. And it was amazed because he brought with him, he, they have a very cool regional firm in Scranton. And they’re all these guys that did real estate, and PI, family law, and PI. And so it was fascinating to me, because I think that’s great advice. I tell all my criminal lawyers, you know, hey, what do you do, criminal lawyer? No, your’e a criminal lawyer and a PI lawyer. Put it on, it’s worth the referral to you, just let the world know that it’s out there. Because, you know, if you go to a BNI event, the odds of somebody needing a criminal lawyer are much, much less statistically then, right? All of that. So to me, it’s not like they’re sitting there, like SEOing it, most of those guys are not like, you know, SEO masters. But when an existing client needs somebody, it’s much harder to say, oh, I do PI when you don’t have anything on your site buried in a silo. So I actually applaud it and think now, it comes down to it’s very hard to do both. It’s very hard to be known for two things. And so that is tough. But I think that they already have the mega brand on real estate, people know, they’re the real estate lawyer. But if it’s just, hey, by putting that out there and saying, hey, this is my secondary area, I mean Google now has this, here’s your secondary practice area, right? They acknowledge that this is a thing, and that you put your secondary practice area in to the world. Because think about it, many, you know, this guy is doing real estate, how many people does he touch? And if each person says, You know what, I’m not doing a big closing this month, but I do know somebody got injured, that work can be can be, can be an extra monetizable piece.
So let me ask you then. Do you think it’s wise? I’ll take your opinion on this to then put that small silo on your website, but tell Google noindex nofollow this is just for our visitors. I’ve been trying to compete for SEO purposes. I want you to focus on my main silo for SEO and and I’ll have PI there for the people who have been on my website, hear my name and look into me and want to know, but I’m not trying to to confuse Google. I’m still criminal dominant, real estate dominant, family law dominant. But I have this pager, you know, five pages or ten pages in case somebody gets my name and finds the website, they at least know that I’m worth of, I’m worthy of the phone call.
That’s not you know, I’m sure that that technically that you know what, at first, yeah, not not crazy. Look, we see this right now with LSAs. Right? I’d love to, you know, I want PI cases for LSAs. I also want these others and it’s like, you don’t want to confuse Google, you want to say, hey, this is what we want to be found for. And, you know, they say, oh, you can do it for multiple? No, because they want to spend the budget. And there’s only so much they can spend on PI, because it’s so competitive. Whereas in DUI, it’s a lot less, and you can spend budget. And so they’re like, oh, well, we’ll make our money, Google doesn’t care where they make their money. In fact, it’s better if they take my money and throw it into something not PI, they’re like, oh, there’s plenty of people already buying PI, that’s going to sell out anyway. So anytime you raise your hand for something other than that, it’s going to it’s going to get taken. So look, the number of people that I’m talking about that are playing the heavy duty SEO game are nominal. These real estate guys don’t have an SEO thing played. But yes, if you if you really wanted to be pure, and just have that there, that’s the idea of noindex, nofollow, it’s like if you’re on my site, you’ll see it, but I’m not really trying to get search traffic for it, you’re not gonna get it and you might as well not put it out there. But you know, it’s of all , of all the concepts. I think the conceptual piece is, you know, these are people that literally have it on their business card, I do both things. And that to me, that’s how they that’s their elevator pitch. I do real estate and PI. And I think that’s fascinating, as well as, really, I don’t see many markets where people have taken that up, but I think it’s brilliant.
Yeah, I just I don’t know, the idea right now of, of trying to be a successful PI lawyer. I mean, you’re
You’re missing the point, it’s not that, you’re, you’re
But are they gonna get the same value of a case? I mean, that’s,
No, no they don’t pretend to do it, they immediately bring it to Chris Munley. That was the point, he brought his people there. You know, it’s like, if you have a Ryan in your backyard, and you’re like, hey, I’m Jay Ruane, I’m a DUI and personal injury lawyer, you know, you’re not opening up a shop to do all that stuff. Well, no, but but at the same time, you’re bringing it to somebody. And the idea is you have a pretty big megaphone. So the question is, can you use that megaphone to bring in cases that are referrable out without hurting the fact like on a national basis, you don’t really want to play that game? Right? You’re so well known nationally. But if you’re at a bar event, right, which is almost all b2b lawyers, and you’re the DUI, you’re the DUI guy, and the personal injury guy, people love you, if they love you, and they have a way of getting the case to you. Is that Is that so wrong? Is that possibly another stream of revenue?
I mean, it definitely is, I just, you know, I think, for me, at least, my better move is to just, you know, constantly be hammering my mailing list of 12,000 former clients with a, every, every two weeks with that, by the way, if you have a PI case, we can help get you to the right lawyer.
Well, you’realready doing it. So the question is, do you know how do you position it digitally? And does really matter. Because at the end of the day, if somebody comes to you, you’re sort of already doing this. You’re saying we have both.
Yeah, I mean, that’s really what it comes down to. But I really I agree with your premise that it’s hard to be a brand of more than one thing. I mean, you know, Google is search. Amazon is the everything store, you know, Nike-
Amazon has these others, but they actually created, you know, AWS, like you don’t even think of that as Amazon.
AWS. Right. I mean, we know it’s Amazon Web Services. But you know, the general public, they said, no, no, we’re not going to call it Amazon hosting. It’s AWS. And, you know, that type of thing. I mean, I really think you know, you know, sitting and determining your brand is going to help you long term. If nothing else, getting back to what we talked about the top of the show, it allows you to say what you stand for, when you stand up in the Shark Tank, right. And that’s really what it comes down to. So
Let’s look, let’s finish off with, what I want to hear about your new potential position.
Oh, so you know, you know, we’ve been toying, you know, we’ve grown tremendously in the last in the last nine months. And we have one team member who has sat in a lot of seats, but she is not the best person to be a firm administrator. We have somebody who’s great in that role, who’s really forward thinking planning for stuff that we need to accomplish that type of thing. And we were wondering what we can do to really sort of let some of our, our junior people rise and we were like, okay, you know, they’re kind of at a point where there’s somebody in the seat ahead of them, but they’re ready to move up. And so we were trying to figure out where to go with this person. So what we’re what we’re toying with. And we’ve actually used it this week on an issue was a role recalling the firefighter. And one of the reasons why is I try to extricate myself more and more from the day to day operations of this firm. You know, whenever there was a problem, they would come to me. And I would have to jump in and try to solve it. And that’s what that’s another thing that I want to say, you know, people always talk about, you know, oh, you know, it gets easier when I get to this level, or it gets easier when I get, you know, when I get to a million dollars in revenue, it’s going to be easier when I get to having a firm administrator, it’s going to be easier. It never really gets easier, Seth, the problems that you encountered, and conqured, when you were at half a million dollars worth of revenue, seem not like nothing when you’re at $3 million with a revenue because you already have an answer for that. And you can solve it really quickly. You know, but you’re always constantly dealing with new problems that are pushing you to the limits of your creativity, and your budget, and those types of things. So one of the things that I thought about doing was creating this role of firefighter for this person who’s been with us for a while. And essentially, when there’s a problem and, and I can see that this may not necessarily work in the PI context, or in a trust and estates firm, because things don’t happen, you know, at the drop,
There’s plenty, there’s plenty that happens.
Well, okay, but like, in criminal, hey, I’ve got the FBI outside my client’s door, you know, and they’re about to be taken into custody, and they’re gonna have a presentment, you know, in the next three hours, and we gotta hustle and get things done. You know, so we’re toying with this role of firefighter who’s basically going to be sort of like a jack of all trades, touching every, every department. But when there’s an urgent problem, instead of coming to Jay, they come to my firefighter, and that person is empowered, has a budget, has has authority, knows the different ways things operate. And really, it’s a goal, I mean, I’d love to have the systems to solve every problem. But this person can also then develop the systems for if this problem happens, again, this is how we solve it. And and we can check out the hook while my my PJ revolves it.
Right. And so I, you know, I’d say I hate,
Nothing for Vanilla Ice? Nothing for a little Vanilla Ice dropped right in there? You didn’t even flinch.
No, sorry. I, as I think about this, I hate it, and I love it same time. What I what I love about Jay Ruane, is the fact that he’s the king of systems. And I would rather you push and evolve to create all the systems needed over time to hit what are replicable fires, right? That’s the better answer, right that we do the heavy lifting. And that once you do have the systems, this is the part that nobody really talks about, which is who is going to execute on what needs to be done. It’s great to have a system. But there is a procedure now to be followed, what I love about it, and what I’ve seen, take a toll on our prior firm administrator that I see it now is these fires, which do come up, take a toll. You know, in the last years, we had, you know, a DUI lawyer who ended up with a whole DUI scandal himself, where he was not was not able to service his clients, we’ve had, you know, employees implode and have to be terminated on a moment’s notice, where you have systems to shut things down. But then there’s a negotiation with, with with the next employee. And all of those things are not just labor intensive, but emotionally intensive. And that’s one of the things that where I think the question is, if you find somebody who is good and likes that piece, that’s great, because I think to a certain extent, it will protect potentially your firm administrator who this normally falls on, I know it falls on you, but there’s another person between you and everybody else, who takes a huge brunt. So if you’re able to do, make somebody’s job more sustainable, God bless. But my gut is that the more that you’re able to document and create those systems, that it won’t always be the same person, they’ll be different people for different things. You alluded to off camera, the idea that there was a billing issue where a credit card might not have been updated. Well, I used to be that guy, who would have to call the place and put the new credit card in, we now have those people, when there is a credit card issue, this person in finance is going to call and take care of it, you know, but there are the ones you’ve never seen before. And then the question really is, how much will that person be able to do and how much is it coming back to you, and that you won’t know until you put that in place.
Yeah. So let me tell you how we’re solving that problem. And I thought we had had this problem solved but it was something that predated the system being implemented, is that we created a group on our email provider software at ruaneattorneys.com. That group includes a number of key people from administrator, pod leaders, myself. And when we have cloud based software that takes a recurring payment by credit card, that’s the email address that we use to set it up so that if there is a notice of a failed credit card, multiple people are getting it at the same time. And that way, people are empowered to solve that problem. And it doesn’t just fall on me because what we had in this situation was, an employee who left had used their own personal email. And even though those emails were being forwarded to a new person, they were being filtered and not checked as religiously as they should have. And so that’s where we had the problem, in fact I just got a Slack message, that all of our templates are back. And we are back up online with the provider that we needed. And we’re very happy and everyone’s celebrating, but I don’t want this to ever happen again.
Right. And you know, what, I would argue that the implementation of Slack has been one of the better things that we have done as a firm to move ourselves in the direction of being able to, you know, being able to do all that.
Yeah. So alright, well, there’s been a good show. It’s been a long show, but it’s been it’s been good, because we have had a couple of weeks off, as we both were traveling, so any parting words for the people out there?
No, just we’re, good to be back and know that you’re not in it alone. Any issue you’re facing my guess is Jay and I have faced, feel free to ping us. And hopefully we can continue to push this journey along together.
Yeah, I mean, the reality is, is that this is, you know, it takes a village really to build a build a practice in 2023 and 2024. We are two weeks already into the last quarter. So there’s, we’re getting into the last 10 weeks of the year, folks. So this is either your big push, I know if you’re in the PI context, you’re trying to solve cases and settle them before the end of the year to get that money off the insurance company books. If you know if you’re in the criminal space, this is where we ramp up. You know, as as holiday parties happen, you know, the you know, basically for us it’s it’s Halloween through new years, is our go time. So there’s a lot of action happening in the legal space right now. And so just head down, get your work done, and we’ll see you on the other side. But stay tuned. Come back to us next week for another episode of The Law Firm Blueprint. I am Jay Ruanee, he is Seth Price. Bye for now!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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