Jay Ruane  0:07  

Hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of the Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, and with me is my man Seth Price. Seth, we’re both working from home today. I got this fancy little backdrop here because I don’t want you to see my dirty laundry behind me.

 

Seth Price  0:22  

Hold on, how do you have a Riverside backdrop? Is this a new thing?

 

Jay Ruane  0:27  

Yeah, I clicked on a little window and it popped up. I was like,

 

Seth Price  0:30  

“Let’s roll it. This out, I got to figure out. I feel like left out.

 

Jay Ruane  0:34  

If you click on, oh wait, there goes my video. Wait, there’s got to be a there was a button before. Let’s see here.

 

Seth Price  0:41  

Oh, let me can’t change background while you’re on camera. So next week you’ll come with a background.

 

Jay Ruane  0:46  

Fantastic. So how’s your week going?

 

Seth Price  0:50  

It’s going really good. Had a great trip to New York. Got to see the parents. Spent some time in the city, and then some some other celebrations up there, but it was you know it’s interesting. Whenever I’m in New York, you know I want my kids to see as much as possible, and I’m always looking at different like, touristy-type things. Even though I’m a New Yorker at heart, they’re not. I want your spirit, and fascinating. We did a tour of Lower East Side with a retired police detective showing us mafia spots and mafia history, and it was fascinating because, obviously it was it’s a lot of out-of-towners, and they it’s one of those ones where it shows you they’re a couple degrees off from awesome, and it was good. It was good, but it reminded me of something. The guy who was a retired police officer, very nervous about presenting to a very large group, 31 people. We started at this John’s of 12th Street, an old-school place, over 100 years old. Had a bowl of spaghetti there, you know. It was, you know, and then wandered through the city of Italy, where he had a cannoli. But what struck me was something that was that as this guy spoke, and all I wanted was his war stories for being a, you know a cop in the heyday, you know, and being a rising detective. And he’s trying to throw out facts about Lucky Luciano, which, yeah, it’s interesting, but not really. I mean, the stuff that carried, and it was just a powerful reminder that you know facts get you know you can Google it if you ever want it. Nobody really cares about what you’re there for is his perspective on the relationship with the mob and anything that he can add, like what year something happened, who was there? It was the anecdotal stuff of the fight between the FBI and the NYPD, and how, you know the NYPD is staking out one of the social halls, and the FBI guy goes and knocks on the window and opens up the curtain to look in from the out. It was you know, crazy; those are the things that are memorable. And so, how can we, as people that are projecting out to the world, or social or otherwise, eliminate the stuff that’s a lot less interesting and try to focus on what’s going to be memorable? What makes us different?

 

Jay Ruane  3:22  

Well, I think that I mean, sort of interesting, kind of dovetails into a topic that we wanted to talk about today. What you’ll find on platforms like LinkedIn is that a lot of people post a lot of stuff, but it’s the stories where you talk about what really happened to you or what’s really going on in your firm, rather than the platitudes and here’s generic business wisdom that I’ve gleaned and I’ve matched you with.

 

Seth Price  3:55  

And I agree, and that’s been I’ve been sort of doubling down on LinkedIn of recent because a lot of people don’t post. That’s the amazing thing. Yeah, I was at this engagement party for a friend’s kid. Everybody there knew about me, what was going on. They read my LinkedIn. These are one guy hadn’t picked up the phone to talk to me in 10 years, but he knew everything about me from hasn’t liked a single thing, hasn’t commented on a thing. There, so I would say the opposite in that there’s very little on LinkedIn, which is why anything you post gets quite decent visibility. Like the topic we want to talk about today, the post that you made about you know you put something out on when about hiring, which I think was brilliant. But putting that aside, that I like the stories, and I do well with them. Don’t get me wrong, but I am amazed at the you know I was broke, and now I’m not. I finished last in my class and now I’m great, and I don’t get it, but it resonates. It’s unbelievable how the rags-to-riches thing does ridiculous. Maybe it goes to this thing. Nobody wants the facts; they want the emotive, and that is emotive.

 

Jay Ruane  5:04  

I think there’s a lot. I think there’s a lot to, and I think that’s why my post got a bit of much more traction than other posts I have put up recently was because I talked about I hire when it’s painful not to, and so I think a lot of people, having read that, are like, “Yeah, I’ve been in pain over hiring. Whether it’s the pain of having bandwidth that you need to fill, so you got to hire, and then people make the rush decision to hire instead of the right decision, or they’ve overhired, and they don’t have the capacity yet, and then they’re the pain of paying somebody who’s not functioning at 100%.

 

Seth Price  5:27  

Look, but I think it’s it’s it’s a little bit more nuanced. And what I loved about the post, and I literally was just on a call with a lawyer from Georgia who literally asked me about this, not having read your post- but, you know, in the same breath as we’re talking about it here, he was sort of struggling with okay, if you go ahead of time, that’s great, but if you, you know, but if you do that, then your profitability falls,

 

Jay Ruane  6:14  

right

 

Seth Price  6:15  

And if you wait too long, then all of a sudden you’re in a position where your staff is getting crushed, and then God forbid you have natural attrition before you get to hire, and now you’re down two people essentially. That’s when hiring mistakes get made, and/or you squeeze your current people and then lose them and have a spiral.

 

Jay Ruane  6:37  

It’s such a tough thing to do to hire at the right pace and the right people at the right time, it’s like it’s almost you need like the perfect storm of conditions because you’re either bringing somebody on too early or bringing somebody in who doesn’t really fit or bringing somebody on who’s not ready for the role that you have. You know, let’s take

 

Seth Price  7:01  

a step back from that for a second because I’ve seen it. Like, BluShark was a great case study. I saw when profitability got a little bit too high, right, which would mean not enough hiring potentially. That I saw quality fall, and then I could see you could staff up tremendously. Sort of like, let’s say you’re saying, “Hey, I’m anticipating this, and then all of a sudden you’re giving great service, but you don’t really feel that until you talk to somebody about what your company is worth, what’s your law firm worth,

 

Jay Ruane  7:32  

right

 

Seth Price  7:32  

And it’s very humbling because all of a sudden you realize, I mean, that’s the downside of private equity. They’re great at squeezing, and that’s that one. I’ve been very blessed to predict the BluShark deal. You know, they’ve left us alone, right? Our profitability has doubled in the time we’ve been with them to art with our techniques, not even theirs. But the piece that I know is that you know they just say, “Hey, let us know if you’re making a hire, just so we know. And I find that just having a check and balance-it’s almost like an accountability coach, where you’re like, “Hey, we have a problem, but is another hire? How does that feel? And I, you know, I’m going to pivot by analogy. When the kids were little, I went to a pediatrician. They had after-hours help if your kid was sick, and it was like a 15-dollar copay. I don’t know if they actually charged you if you did it, but you were told about it, and I still remember. Do I call, or don’t I call? It made you pause and think before you just picked up the phone with nonsense. And I kind of feel like lawyers need that, which is, hey, I’m going to make a hire. I need somebody to. It needs to be a pause and think, and I need permission from my godfather to say yes. You’re blessed to do this in the sense that you’re in a vacuum. You know you have pain. You don’t want to go too far because we both know if you wait too far, there are real problems with it.

 

Jay Ruane  7:56  

Yeah.

 

Seth Price  8:20  

And so figuring out that balance is not nothing. And I think one that probably needs more discussion and more talk amongst your peers, amongst your group than normal. And most of us just keep it to ourselves because we don’t want to talk about that.

 

Jay Ruane  9:12  

Yeah, I mean that’s one of the biggest challenges in. I mean, I guess you call us the legal entrepreneurial space, the business-minded lawyers, and I think there’s probably, I mean, look, the truth is, Seth, we’ve known each other for 20 years, 20 years now, right? And we’ve known the same names crop up in a lot of conversations. They crop up in podcasts that we listen to or have been featured on. But there’s probably a whole segment of the society of lawyers who run functional businesses that we don’t know, and we don’t talk to, and you wonder, like you know, are they having these same conversations?

 

Seth Price  9:50  

Well, they’re certainly not having. There’s, I think, there’s a lot of dysfunction out there in general, and so people.

 

Jay Ruane  9:57  

So let me ask you this, right? Fee-for-service, not PI; fee-for-service. At what is your what is your what’s your metric? Should a lawyer be covering generating 3x their salary, 5x their salary, or 8x their salary? I mean, obviously the or the better, but like what’s the minimum? Where?

 

Seth Price  10:21  

I would say the ideal is like 3x’s historically. Look at big law. I mean, that is the number that most people are playing with, right? That’s the generic. You know, you and I think that when people squeeze to get better, very often they end up with the issue that we talk about a lot, which is you’re not paying market, and somebody’s going to grab somebody. Just sort of the profitability I talked about a minute ago. If you, when you start to drop below a third, and there are plenty of people out there that are closer to a quarter, and you know my model is 25,25, 50, but there’s an opportunity to make more with that. That as you drop below a quarter, and you see people at 20%, there’s generally a lot of flight risk, and so you’re constantly trying to figure that out. So I would say aim for a third. A quarter works and is more aggressive, but as you get beyond that,

 

Jay Ruane  11:16  

Now is the third total compensation or just selling?

 

Seth Price  11:20  

Compensation and most of us don’t think of it that way. Because that’s why I’m

 

Jay Ruane  11:24  

I’m thinking about it now. Like, I don’t. I mean, I am putting a marketing team behind individual lawyers to build their brand. I am giving them kick-ass benefits. They’ve got all the support staff that they need. So if I’ve got a pod that’s generating, you know, a million dollars,

 

Seth Price  11:45  

and that’s when you can go down to a quarter when you’re doing all of that. But that, you know, that extra 8% is essentially being spent on support. You know, this year we didn’t change our numbers, but we went to a sales attorney. That’s another, you know. That’s another cut. So if the attorney is doing their own sales, right? You know, you put it in that bucket. 

 

Jay Ruane  12:07  

Well, let me ask you about that. Let me ask you about that. How did the attorneys respond to that? Because I would assume the ones who were good at closing already,

 

Seth Price  12:16  

and we left them alone. If you’re great at closing, we we left those guys. We have guys doing 1.5. God bless you. Do your own thing. Right. But we had a guy who I great lawyer, you know, good culture fit, the worst closer in the world. And he was dying on the vine, and we’re going to lose him. And we put a sales attorney in. His numbers not only doubled. He’s now rivaling his mentor and is doing real numbers because he is a grinder, and he is great in court. But he could not. I mean, I did a call with our director of ops years ago when she first came, and we both looked at each other like this is not salvageable. And two things happened: one, sales attorney, and second, we brought in sales training, and it took a lot of years. That is again, this took me from the time we thought about it to the time we did it was probably a five- to seven-year process. But we finally brought some sales training in for the lawyers that are actually selling themselves, because there are certain cases, as you know, in fee-for-service that have to get to a lawyer; you could say you’re not. Having a sales machine is great for misdemeanors. As you get to higher-level felonies, it’s right. So when you’re

 

Jay Ruane  13:27  

doing the federal stuff and the higher level felonies, right? You need a lawyer to sit across.

 

Seth Price  13:31  

At some point, the lawyers are doing some closings themselves. There, it’s not 100, and that’s where that person started beating their mentor. They took it seriously, and that’s the piece. Just like my daughter’s 12-year-old girls’ soccer team, there are kids that are coachable, and you watch them excel. And there are those that are not who have raw talent, but are not going to get much better. And you know that to me has been a big eye-opener. Is that if somebody is willing, and we have one we have one lawyer who’s a great lawyer? So far, he has been resistant to the coaching, and likely will not be a long-term player with us because he’s not going to get the numbers. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t buy into the process, if you don’t buy into the system, you know it’s not going to work.

 

Jay Ruane  14:19  

And so he was perfectly acceptable in the system prior to saying, “Hey, look, we have sales available. Sales help. No, I think sales training.

 

Seth Price  14:26  

He was below the Mendoza line.

 

Jay Ruane  14:29  

Gotcha.

 

Seth Price  14:29  

And we we liked him, and that’s why we put a sales attorney in place because it just wasn’t viable. It was the definition of insanity. The numbers weren’t great. We were burning leads, and we put a sales attorney in place, solidified him as a real player, and we went to sales training, and it took him because then it was a double whammy: the lower-level stuff was closing, and the higher level. Then, you know, that’s the dream,

 

Jay Ruane  14:56  

right? Right. So when so okay, so let’s get back to the. Let’s get back to the topic du jour, right? When when do you hire? Do you wait till it’s painful, or do you do you get it when you’re at 80% capacity and you know that if you ramp it up, you can be at 120, and then you’ll have to build from there. But you’re willing to take a haircut on profitability to have another butt in a seat, like what? Like what’s what’s the point where you say, say I’m a solo, right, or say I’m two partners, and we’re at a point now where we’re like, caseload is draining, we need another body. But when do you make that determination? Is it a strictly a numbers thing? Is it the number of hours you have in a day track your time. What is it?

 

Seth Price  15:44  

I’m laughing because you know the word that’s going to come out. Right, but put that aside. Assuming you are in growth mode, I think it’s obviously earlier. If you’re, you know, sort of, it’s a continuum, right? Versus if you’re in survival mode, it’s later. So if to me, assuming that you’re in a situation where it’s growth, like you want because you have the demand. You know, I mentioned this before on the show, but it really resonates on this topic, which is if you look at it like the person. Take for example, let’s take the working case that you had. How much was the salary of the spot you were looking to fill that you were holding off on,

 

Jay Ruane  16:21  

buck 50,

 

Seth Price  16:22  

buck 50, not nothing, right? With benefits,

 

Jay Ruane  16:25  

and then with benefits, and and you know, you’re you know you’re probably looking at 200, yeah. You know

 

Seth Price  16:31  

so 40. Let’s let’s use 45,000 a quarter. If you look at it as 200, you’ll never do anything, right? You just can’t. But if you look at it, 45, you know, 45,000 for a quarter, real money, but it’s your numbers. Not going to make or break you,

 

Jay Ruane  16:47  

right

 

Seth Price  16:47  

And you’ll know. Now that said, like okay, worst case scenario, the person comes in, they’re competent, they’re a keeper, and the numbers are still flat. Very unlikely, because if that person comes in and they’re who you want long term, hopefully they can squeeze more juice out of the arch.

 

Jay Ruane  17:07  

Sure,

 

Seth Price  17:07  

that’s the play. Even if you don’t excel, and so the key is obviously you don’t want to do this prematurely, whatever that means, because you’re going to be bloated and you’re going to have, you know, too much excess capacity is not ideal. But if you, to me, if you look at this like, okay, I’m feeling pain, and more importantly, is your staff feeling pain? Because, and that’s the million-dollar question, right? How much is it verbalized to you as to what the pain is, and you don’t want to get to the point where it’s so much that you lose people,

 

Jay Ruane  17:42  

right

 

Seth Price  17:43  

At the same time, there are people who sort of are great about verbalizing it when you’re just like, you know, you’re not efficient self. You know, there’s a lot of pressure now to make sure our team, with AI tools, etc., is more efficient. So the question is, should you be making? Because that’s the truism, especially you see it in the PI AI space. People are like, “Well, I’m not saving people, but there’s so much more bandwidth. Well, there’s more bandwidth. You should be able to hold off longer. And if all of those different tools are there, and you could take X amount off people’s plates, you should be able to wait a lot longer. But if you’re like, “Look, you’re pretty ahead of the curve on AI. You’ve done reasonably what you should be doing, and your team is feeling pain. To me, is $45,000 to alleviate that and create some redundancy. Great, and again, you can’t do this solo, but redundancy is a big deal. You know, when somebody quits, it doesn’t stop your firm. That’s a big life moment.

 

Jay Ruane  18:43  

Well, and that’s you know that’s a challenge. I know in the PI space, people quit, and they take their files with them. 

 

Seth Price  18:48  

We;;, I’m not talking about staff. That’s usually not the case. I’m just saying no

 

Jay Ruane  18:52  

staff. Yeah, okay, I get, I get right. 

 

Seth Price  18:53  

But, even lawyers like you know, with that, will also that staff creates redundancy. No one, so no one person controls it. You have a little bit of.

 

Jay Ruane  19:03  

We’re going through an issue right now. We had a last-minute staffer who needed to take family leave for some health issues. No notice. I think we got literally like 10 days worth of notice. Like, hey, I’m going out for three months, you know, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, and that person was in a silo of one. Nobody else did that job, and it’s not a job that can function remotely, unfortunately for us, because they are sort of like the pivot point of obtaining our discovery, and you know we’ve got 40 different courthouses we serve. Everyone, we need a body who can you know get on the phone and talk to this person, but then scan, upload, and send a courier to pick up stuff.

 

Seth Price  19:57  

Okay you know what? Perfect, perfect. What I wanted to get to, which is I have been giving a lot of thought to this concept. We had some turnover in the criminal family paralegal world, and just hired some senior people to sort of run those divisions. Right, we raised the game. We went to, you know, some real talent, but I would like to see, as we move to a global economy, everything that we can. That each, you know, instead of having every criminal lawyer or every three criminal lawyers having an admin, rather, you know, sort of like what you see on the PI side, where there’s a case manager, there’s somebody getting medical records. Because to me, the less the meaning, if you can get down to the point where one person is in office, but everybody else could be in Florida or Guatemala or wherever the hell they are, to me, that’s what’s going to allow us to keep profitability in this very tight environment. And so the downside of that theory is that when that one person leaves, who is the person doing the actual logistics to the courthouse? But the real question then is, how much do you know? As you even told that story, how much of that job could be slivered away and not be done in person? I understand you might not have a full job left, but assuming that everything was interchangeable, you could get somebody on demand for hours. How many hours would physically have to be there that couldn’t be done? And that’s what I’m sort of like. I like to get ruthless with that to figure out what needs to be done in the office. And the older school lawyers, who’s they want somebody in front of them, but the turnover is so tremendous, and the people, those two rock stars we just hired, neither is going to be in the office full time. And these are people that would blow you away on substance for non-lawyer fee-for-service work. But I’m not going to get that person if the answer is you have to be in the office five days a week. And John Morgan’s in my mind, back in my mind, saying when they’re out of the office, they’re not working. I have to get over that and say, “Hey, we’re getting good people. We’re tasting activity, and we’re measuring productivity. You know what? What could be done to the point where there’s literally a filings guy who’s doing the bare, bare basics?

 

Jay Ruane  22:19  

Yeah, I mean, you could set it up where there was one person that came into your office and did all your filing. You know, I can remember when I was a law student. You know, my job at the end of the day was to go through a big basket and refile everything, so the next day the stuff was together. Right. No, no, but instead of if I remove all of the other stuff, I mean, part of my issue is is just the bandwidth. You know, we can’t get residential bandwidth the same as we can get commercial bandwidth on the internet, and we’re downloading you know gigs upon gigs of body cams, and then you know, processing them and that type of thing, you know. And I’ve tried, you know, but it just isn’t working the way we would like it to work to turn it around fast enough because we’ll process the body cam to download it, then we’ll upload it, we’ll AI it, then we’ll review it, then we’ll do a whole bunch of things using AI to produce a finished product. But sometimes the mechanics are that they give us a CD-ROM of the discovery because the case, you know, that.

 

Seth Price  23:21  

Well, you’re better then because then it could be taken and anybody could use it anywhere.

 

Jay Ruane  23:25  

Well, but drive.

 

Seth Price  23:26  

God forbid they give you drive. Then we’re back to being offshore.

 

Jay Ruane  23:30  

Yeah, I wish they would. I mean, our our criminal justice system in our state is antiquated. 

 

Seth Price  23:35  

Understood but our job. That’s my point. You meet the justice system where it’s at.

 

Jay Ruane  23:40  

Right.

 

Seth Price  23:40  

But how much of this in a perfect world, to get to profitability? Well, I mean, I want to get great people and pay them the max, right? The way to do that, though, the only way to do because if you got only great people sitting in every seat commuting to that office, it’s like a jungle puzzle. It doesn’t. I mean, it’s just not possible today.

 

Jay Ruane  24:02  

No, I think you need some. I think you need just some low-level grinders to you know do the do the shit work. I mean, I hate to say it, but like I need a C plus player to you know, walk down to the mailbox, get the mail, scan it, and identify what for a while it was a positive.

 

Seth Price  24:23  

Well, we’re a new firm. We use that Earth class

 

Jay Ruane  24:26  

Earth class mail.

 

Seth Price  24:27  

Yeah, and you know, I I wish it was reliable enough because at some point that will be the answer. Right.

 

Jay Ruane  24:35  

But right now, what I do is I have I have you know in my staffed offices, you know, I have people. I have a person in each staffed office every day. They have multiple jobs, but one of their jobs is to be there for the mail.

 

Seth Price  24:49  

Right, but if that’s the case, could you then this person leaving? Could you then have all those staff scan everything in? Boom, everything else is off. Is off is is no longer. Needs to be in office, you know. If the person, if you, that is what I am focused on. My fourth quarter goal is to try to figure out how we could minimize the need for having in-office support, so that I can get a better, stronger person who might not make the commute and is more stable. Frankly, when you lose somebody, part of what you’re freaking out about is you’ve created a unicorn that has to be in your office, and unless they’ll go to that zip code, you’re out of luck. If we could have the people that are currently in the office scan above and beyond their current job to allow for this to be done from anywhere. You’re creating flexibility that’s pretty dramatic,

 

Jay Ruane  25:49  

right. I mean, you know, that’s the thing. It’s really identifying the strengths of the people that you have and plugging the holes on the people that you don’t have. And I don’t want to be, but here’s another perfect example, right? My firm administrator and my COO have come to me in leadership and said, “We like our current vendor for bookkeeping. They are attentive, but we have situations where we need to, you know, call them up and say get this done, and they are, you know, they’re accessible by phone call, but it would be a lot easier if we could walk down the hallway and say, “Hey, I want these numbers. And so the question is,

 

Seth Price  26:31  

but you say that, but the person you’re going to get coming, like, like I could give you my experience on the accounting side, bookkeeping side. You know, the problem is at a number you want to pay. It’s going to be a revolving door. So the idea that you, if you have a solution that works, and and the worst thing is they have to wait a few minutes. To me, no

 

Jay Ruane  26:51  

I’m talking they have to wait a few days, a few days.

 

Seth Price  26:54  

But but I think that that’s where you go back to the vendor and say, look, I need, I’ll pay you X amount more, but I need to because giving them a few extra shekels is going to get you a much better answer than hiring an entire body that may or may not survive. The biggest issue is delay. You go to me. That’s a hopefully a solvable problem.

 

Jay Ruane  27:19  

I mean, right now I think the the role that they want to replace is costing us about 80k externally, and they’re like, you know, we could probably get a bookkeeper for about 80k to sit at a desk 40 hours a week in the office.

 

Seth Price  27:33  

Yeah, and what I’d say is be careful what you wish for. There, it is that is a I’m going back to when I had my real estate company. That position is so freaking hard. And talk about what happens when that person leaves. Devastating. So the idea is that you have a system. I would highly encourage you to go back to them and say, “I love you. I’m paying you 80. We’re going to raise it to 85, but I need same-day answers. You know, whatever it is, or you know

 

Jay Ruane  28:05  

It’s only 100 bucks a week. That’s reasonable.

 

Seth Price  28:06  

Yeah, I’m just saying, whatever it is, but that to me is like the easiest fix compared to like I I would not wish managing that position on anybody. Like, it’s bad,

 

Jay Ruane  28:20  

It’s that bad huh?

 

Seth Price  28:21  

It’s that bad. Like, yeah, I mean, our biggest look because anybody worth their salt in that space at 80,000 is has you know so 80,000 after tax is 50-something, right? So for 50,000, they’re schlepping to your office twice a day to get 50,000. They pay some taxes, but how many fractional clients would it take in order to offset that salary? So anybody decent with gumption is sitting at home, not commuting to your office with a handful of clients and making the same money, right? Right. So I mean that’s what they’re.

 

Jay Ruane  29:08  

They’re not coming into the office at all, you know. Right. But I’m

 

Seth Price  29:10  

just saying that person’s taking home $55,000 a month, right? $5,000. Right. If you had five clients paying you $1,000 a month each,

 

Jay Ruane  29:24  

and you’re working from home.

 

Seth Price  29:26  

You know, you’re, you know, again. Let’s say you’re declaring it now. It’s seven clients, whatever it is. It’s not a lot. You know, I mean, my point is, it’s very hard to find. You know, I couldn’t find bookkeepers 15 years ago for 65,000. I don’t. I don’t know whether I can’t imagine the 80,000. And it has to be somebody gets to your office. Is there? Is it like number of people we know have had that person steal from us over the years? Right. You know. I mean, I’m just saying they will. I’m just saying all those things. So to me, it goes. My theory, which is, what can I get that doesn’t have to be done in the office? And you know what? If there’s an emergency checkbook in Jay’s locked desk that could be pulled out, or you have Bill.com so that something could be done immediately, right? If you need it, but the idea that you’re like to me, if it ain’t broken and your biggest thing is a delay, figure out the delay. Don’t don’t upset the apple cart.

 

Jay Ruane  30:24  

Okay, good to know. Good to know. But then that’s. I mean, that really comes down to like this is the one pain point that my you know my leadership team is saying. Hey, look, is this something that we can fix? Well, maybe maybe they see it as a pain, but it’s not not it’s not the pain that actually.

 

Seth Price  30:42  

You know look with PI. There’s a lot of last-minute checks that need to be cut,

 

Jay Ruane  30:46  

right

 

Seth Price  30:46  

And we kept somebody employed for a lot longer than we should have, who was doing some really terrible things in order to get checks cut. And now, you know, and literally, we spent hours in our quarterly meeting discussing this very issue. So unless there’s like unless you have people coming to your office, which we did, needing a check that second, but we’re now flipping everything that we can to Bill.com, getting ACH information from people in advance, trying to just push everything electronically, and more and more. And you know what? If once every four months you need to Venmo somebody in an emergency. I don’t love it, but to not have to have that person in house, wow,

 

Jay Ruane  31:27  

Makes a difference. Yeah, it’s interesting. We are now 20 years in my office space, and we start construction tomorrow on a rehab of the rear third of it. At one point, you know, I remember you had your dungeon down at Blue Shark where you had your intake and marketing team. This is what we had built out for you know 15 years ago for our marketing team, and then COVID went and everybody went remote, which has been, you know, great for my team, but the marketing room and the kitchen area has basically been empty for almost a decade now. It feels like so much more. So tomorrow morning we start construction. We’re knocking down some walls, and we’re creating a lounge space to hopefully draw people who don’t necessarily have to be at the office for their work, but they can pop in, and they can hang out, and they will have a better space for having lunches in the office and some continuing education set up with the technology to be able to do it. So, you know, things are sort of changing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess is the you know we just we’re still trying to get people to show up. I mean, we have some lawyers who, you know, are in the office every day because they love it, and we have other lawyers who are like, “Why would I come into the office if I don’t have to?

 

Seth Price  32:49  

Right, and I think that, like, look, obviously, you want it for the lawyers that want to be there and recruiting because, you know, we had a life moment. We thought, “Hey, do we need one floor of our office? Could we go to sort of some fractional space and probably save us a few bucks? But I think there’s also something to, you know, what is there, and you. I think you either go all in on that, which is very very hard for an existing firm, or or you you you have to have some sort of footprint because as you’re recruiting people, like there are a lot of people that like, what is a firm? What how you know what is the what does it stand for? And that is, you know, having something you can feel and touch, even if it’s just interview time, is not nothing.

 

Jay Ruane  33:30  

No, I I agree. No, so let me okay. Let’s wind it up with this because I I you’re interested in your input on that. New lawyer employee, right? New lawyer employee. Your lawyers currently work as sort of a hybrid as they need. They can come in. There’s office space for them. Most of them have an assigned office that sits empty most of the time if they’re not in the office. Do you have a new person start 90 days every day in office? Do you know? Like, at what point do you unleash them and say, “Okay, now you can come and go as you please, or do you start with? I know.

 

Seth Price  34:08  

Look, I wish I could give you a finite number. Look, so we just did two people. We hired two senior people in the in the non lawyer criminal and family rather criminal and family. Two senior people to help with leadership, raised the game, paid more, got great people. They came for a week of training, and one of them is not close enough to be able to be in the office regularly at all. And so we took the attitude: we’re going to do a full week of intensive training and then send you out. But they were hired with that in mind. Okay, one person is close enough to spend a day a week in the office, and there’ll be a hustle to see whether how that happens. But it was a we we gain people that we would not have gotten had we you know. And again, when you go to a national fishbowl rather than the people that’ll, and look, we see it all the time. Recruiting is not easy. And again, I will take the same rule I have for you. Six months, I’ll tell you how it goes. But we are cautiously optimistic that we hired some very, very good people. We are giving them the training, and we are setting them up for success remotely because we would not get that level at home.

 

Jay Ruane  35:20  

Yeah. Well, I mean that’s the thing. Like you want to, you want to keep taking chances, keep trying different things. I mean, one of the things that you know I’ve read about that we’re contemplating is an anchor day where you know once a month everybody’s in and we’re all together in in in one space.

 

Seth Price  35:38  

I think that’s great. You’re onto something there, or or it goes. Look, it goes. You know, our executive team gets together. Everybody, you know, even the local people, you know, comes once a quarter. But you know, the big law does three days a week in the office. BluShark does a day that everybody’s, you know. But again, what happens over time as you go more and more remote is less people are even available for them once a week, and then once a month, and then it’s an expense. And you know how do you how do you balance it off?

 

Jay Ruane  36:08  

So a lot of stuff. This is hard, you know, part of me says sometimes I wake up and say, “What the heck am I doing? Let me just, you know, I’ll take, you know, three files a month, I’ll work them out, and I’ll shut down, and it’ll just be me and a cell phone, and I can, you know, and just

 

Seth Price  36:26  

well, look, I was just with some solos, and like you know, they they they have contract lawyers, this and that, but you know, if you can make 50 cents on the dollar, and you’re able to, you know, get you know get it, it’s it’s funny. I was sent it to a dentist on the way back to D.C. last night, and she and her husband bought bought a dental practice, and it was just the economics. The guy they bought from, he was doing 1.2. He took home half of that, you know, and that that’s the model. And in their their business, they pay 90% of whatever you brought in, and then their job is to figure out how to to expand the pie, and I feel like you know. Look, you you already went big. You’re not getting back to solo. So if that cap’s out of the bag, you got to figure out how to make the most of what you got.

 

Jay Ruane  37:12  

That’s what it’s all about, folks. All right, folks, that’s going to do us this week on the Law Firm Blueprint. Thank you so much for being with us. Of course, you can take us on the go anywhere you want to go by subscribing to and liking the Law Firm Blueprint podcast. You know, Seth, I did some statistical analysis using AI, of course, and we are like nine episodes away from our 200 and 50th episode here of the Law Firm Blueprint, which is kind of cool that we have gotten this far with all these seasons. So it’s it’s kind of interesting, but we’ll have to do something to celebrate that.

 

Seth Price  37:44  

We should should be around the end of the year. Let’s let’s make that happen.

 

Jay Ruane  37:48  

So if you’re out there and you have listened to all 250 episodes or 241 now, Tom Tona, I think you’re out there. Be sure to give us a like or a comment on the LinkedIn post of next week’s show or this week’s show, so you can we can bring you on. Maybe we’ll have our top listeners come on in to celebrate our birthday with us when we hit 250. Just like the USA, we should get a cool logo and put that out there for our 250th. Sound like a plan?

 

Seth Price  38:21  

Sounds great,

 

Jay Ruane  38:22  

awesome! Thank you so much for being with us, folks. You can see us live 3p.m. Eastern, 12 p.m. Pacific, live in our Facebook group and live on LinkedIn. That’s it for now. Bye for now.