Who Does What In Your Law Firm

Who does what in your law firm? There are many different roles in law firms, and I think most people conceptually understand the distinction between a lawyer and a paralegal and a legal assistant and a file clerk.

 

There are three categories of behavior required in every law firm, finders, minders and grinders. I’m sure you’ve heard of these before, but I wanted to give a perceptual frame for them that might be a little different than what you’ve heard before.

 

It’s so important as a solo law firm owner that you divorce yourself from at least some of these roles.

 

Tune in to learn how!

 

In this episode we discuss:

  • The roles in a law firm and the three categories that you require, being Grinders, Minders and Finders.
  • Recognizing the characteristics from each category.
  • How solo law firm owners also require some degree of compliance for themselves.
  • The importance of creating enterprise goodwill that will carry your business forward.
  • Being a solo lawyer and its challenges.
  • Considering the time you are spending in each of these categories.

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your host of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:29] Hello, everyone, I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor, and welcome to another episode of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast where this week we’re going to be talking about who does what in your law firm.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:41] Ok, so let’s dive in. There are a lot of different roles in law firms, and I think most people conceptually understand the distinction between a lawyer and a paralegal and a legal assistant and a file clerk. So those are actually not the roles that we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about three categories of behavior that you require in every law firm and the reason why it is so important as a solo law firm owner that you divorce yourself from at least some of these roles. Ok, so the three categories are finders, minders and grinders. Now, I’m sure you guys have heard of this before, but I want to give you a perceptual frame for it that might be a little different than what you’ve heard before.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:25] So first of all, a grinder is the person who grinds out the work, right? The person who does the work. So for most roles in a law firm, you are typically going to have most people be grinding the work right? They are going to be doing the work. So I want you to think about it from the perspective of first, you as an attorney, right? When you are drafting a motion, when you are advising a client, when you are emailing an adversary, when you are preparing a form, when you are checking off a box, when you are evaluating legal documents, right, you are, you are performing the service that your business sells to the marketplace. You are grinding out the work. But even when you take it beyond Lawyering, think about the other things that are necessary in order for good lawyering, to happen in a law firm, think about a paralegal, right? A paralegal is in a state of doing the work on his or her desk all day, right? They are, they are preparing financial affidavits, they are preparing discovery demands, they are auditing discovery demands, they are evaluating legal work. They are, they are performing legal research. They are doing a whole host of things that support the Lawyering, work, but they are essentially in the role of doing the work as the day goes by. Right? So when we think about grinding, I want you to think about this role is really what keeps the business moving, right? If you think about gears on a train, right, the wheels on a train, they turn round and round and you ultimately need the gears in order to move the wheels in order to keep the vehicle moving forward. If you did not have the vehicle moving forward, the primary function of the train would not be fulfilled.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:21] Same thing in a law firm, if you did not have people grinding out the work, you would not have the primary function of the law firm, which is to deliver legal services. You would not have that be performed in your business. And then at some point, obviously you would go out of business. So grinders are very important. Right? These are the people who work in the business, not on the business. And these are the people whose functions are necessary in order for you to optimize the efficiency of the work because these are the people that ultimately are going to be doing the work. So when you hire a grinder, you’re looking for how efficient that person can be. You’re looking for what are the KPIs or key performance indicators to which you can hold that person responsible in order to make sure that the work is not just being done, but being done as effectively and cost-efficiently as possible. You always are going to be seeking the highest rate of production from your grinder. Now when we say the highest rate of production, that does not mean you’re looking to enslave your people or you’re looking to get as much out of a human being as humanly possible. The highest rate of production in a law firm, you know. Well, putting aside for a moment, kind of the value system around what is the quantum of work that you should be expecting from a human in general, is inherently in a law firm tied to the highest rate of production at the highest level of quality. So you’re always going to be looking for how much work can be done at a high level of quality.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:59] Now, the high level of quality is going to be impacted by a whole host of things, whether or not you have systems in your law firm and what types of training you provide in your law firm, how much information you’re giving to people in order to achieve that high level of quality. What level of experience you are expecting of people. How much training and development is needed on an ongoing basis versus an onboarding basis. So you’re always going to have that question of quality, not just because you want your business to be a high-quality business, but also because you’re going to want your business to meet high ethical standards in order to ensure you don’t have a problem with ethics, right? So grinders in a law firm have not only a need for having work to do and having someone oversee those key performance indicators, but they also have to have a certain level of professional competency in order to do the work that is being asked of them. Right? So it’s, it’s not as simple as when you’re hiring for, say, food service delivery, right? It doesn’t take a whole lot of skill to be able to pick up an item of food and deliver it to another person. Right? Even though that can be a critical function, that function does not require years of additional training. It doesn’t require a professional degree and so forth. So for a lot of grinding and law firms, you already have a minimum standard that you can hold people accountable to in terms of what they are most likely to be able to do based on the minimum criteria that you would expect for that role. Right? So there’s with grinding, you’re always looking for a person to do the work and you’re always thinking about how efficient you can be with that work so that you get the most work with the highest quality performed at all times.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:56] Now, the next category of worker in a law firm is a minder, and this is probably the area of lawyering, and in the area of law firm business orchestration that people neglect the most, which is the management of the work. OK? A minder is somebody who oversees the production of the work. This is a manager, this is somebody who is counting the eyes, who is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s right? They’re counting the beans, they’re making sure that the trains are running on time. They are ensuring that people show up to work and that people work during the time that they are here. They’re ensuring that the work is being done to a quality standard that is defined.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:44] In other words, once we know what that standard is that we’re going to hold people accountable to the minder is the one that oversees that standard. So think of this person, such as a managing partner or an office administrator, as really someone who checks the reports, someone who oversees the implementation of new systems, someone who writes systems right. Part of your grinding work can be writing systems. In fact, we talk about this a lot in our master class. And for those of you that haven’t attended the master class, our next one is coming up December, December 8th. But the master class is designed to teach people how to create systems in law firms. This class, by the way, is absolutely free. I’m very much committed to ensuring that people have this information because this is going to ultimately transform the legal community into a place where we see a law firm as a business, the same way we see any other type of business as a business and good business of law leads to fewer ethics complaints, leads to less malpractice allegations, and leads to more professional satisfaction for the lawyers and the people that they employ.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:57] But when we talk about the minding of the work, oftentimes the grinders are doing so much grinding that they’re not systematized as they go, which is something we teach you how to instill in your law firm. Most of the time, it’s a manager who’s actually writing the systems, and once your systems are created, whether in a systematized law firm or otherwise, the minder is the one that ensures compliance with the systems. So when I say that minders tend to be the least, the least well-considered role in a law firm, it’s usually because a minder is somebody who we see as an enforcer. And a lot of lawyers don’t want to be an enforcer in their law firm. Now, to people that don’t understand lawyers and don’t understand legal mind psychology, they probably scoff at that and think, well, wait a minute, lawyers fight for a living. Of course, they want to be the enforcer. And of course, they want to like pound the, pound the pavement and bang on the table and ensure everything is done. But to the contrary, most lawyers that I have encountered do not like to fight for themselves. They like to fight for other people. They like to have that thrill of securing the right result, that the client desires, right? Because in that scenario, you are suspending yourself, you are not your cause, you are asserting a cause for someone else. In fact, our rules of ethics even say that the fact that a lawyer asserts a certain position does not mean that he or she espouses that view personally. It means that they are representing a client. So when you think about that just pragmatically, when someone is overseeing work in a law firm as a minder, they are in that scenario having to fight for themselves, right? Because they are having to ensure that work is done for their reasons, not necessarily for the reasons of the grinder.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:55] Now there’s a whole host of different ways we can shift that narrative in terms of creating a culture of coaching and training and developing people instead of enforcing and ensuring compliance from people, right? And the HR industry has gone through somewhat of an ideological shift about that. In fact, there’s an organization that I spoke for a few years back called the Society of Human Resource Management, also known as SHRM, that provides human resources, resources to different businesses, including law firms. And one of the things that I’ve seen in just kind of the literature of what SHRM is offering in terms of courses and manuals and things like that have changed over to now being much more about coaching and developing your people rather than enforcing and seeking compliance from your people. But either way, whether you are in a more autocratic form of management or you are in a more collaborative form of management. Either way, the management function has to be performed because most people in a law firm are going to fall somewhere on a bell curve. You’re going to have your super uber independent folks at one at one end and your super needy and dependent folks we’ll call it at the other end. And then you’re going to have a smattering in between. And your goal is to get as close to a high-level, independent, free-thinking, but free performance folks as you can, so that those people will be able to take the role and run with the role without a whole lot of management.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:33] But even if you get exceptionally good people, the bigger your business, the more opportunity you’re going to have for a human being to seep in who cannot just self-manage right. They’re going to require some level of oversight, some level of compliance. And frankly, a lot of us, as solo law firm owners require some degree of compliance for ourselves, right? If we don’t have someone who is counting the beans, so to speak, we oftentimes kind of go off of the grid and don’t necessarily get everything done that we need to get done. And there are some strategies that we have for kind of up-leveling your beliefs and your behavior in a law firm as a business owner so that that doesn’t happen. But we know that we need to have some structure, some guidance, some compliance for ourselves. Why would that not be the case for most humans that you’re going to hire? So the minding function becomes really critical, and now we’re going to pause for a word from our sponsors. We will be right back.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:42] Imagine going to the office for just five hours a week… Ah… Imagine creating systems and hiring people so that your law firm can run without you. Imagine feeling a sense of calm and fulfillment when you realize you’re well on your way to building a business and a life you’ve dreamed of. Now imagine getting there, doing what you’re doing right now. Exactly. You can’t. But we have the tools that can.

 

Neil Tyra: [00:14:06] Hi, I’m Neil Tyra from the Tyra Law Firm in Rockville, Maryland. You know you’re not learning from an academic. You’re learning from somebody who’s put the practices into effect.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:16] Here at Law Firm Mentor, our B.A.D.A.S.S. Program supports you with the tools, mindset, and personalized coaching necessary to systematize your law firm and crush chaos in its tracks. Text CONNECT to nine zero eight two nine two three five two four. Again, that’s nine zero eight two nine two three five two four. And let’s talk about your goals and how we can get you there faster.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:45] All right, we’re back and we’re now talking about the third category of people that you need to have in your law firm. We’ve talked about grinders who are the people that do the work. We’ve talked about minders who are the people that manage the work, and the third category is finders.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:02] Now the finding category is the sourcing of the work. These are the generators, right? These are the people that bring in the clients. And in a law firm, in a solo or small law firm, the finder tends to be the owner of the law firm. But if you create the right systems in marketing in your law firm, you can absolutely create a law firm that finds work, quote-unquote without the independent and direct involvement of the owner, right? So that really does require that you ascend your law firm from being a professional practice into being a business. Because businesses have KPIs also known as key performance indicators where they are, they’re in a role of seeking the work. They’re bringing the work in, but not necessarily through the direct contact with the owner. The owner is typically what is marketed in a law firm, especially if you are the sole owner of a law firm and you don’t currently have partners or you don’t have kind of a global brand. And I know that there was a movement at one point in time. I’ve seen it less so now, but there was a movement at one point in time in terms of shifting away from having the names of the principals of the law firm be on the firm.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:20] Now you have trade names such as the, the DWI Defense Firm or the Family Matters Law Firm, right? Lots of different trade names are out there, and in some states, they are absolutely permitted. Some states they’re not permitted, and some states have this hybrid where you can have a trade name, but it has to include the principal name somewhere on there, such as the Criminal Defense Law Firm by Smith, right? But wherever you are in the country, wherever your, your state is with regard to trade names, the whole idea of it is that it’s easier to create enterprise goodwill when the entity is separate from a person because as we know, people shift their level of involvement in business as they age, as their interests diverge, as they start to expand the business. And at some point, even though the firm could be Smith, Jones and Jackson, we know that if you come into the Smith, Jones and Jackson Law Firm, you’re not going to see Mr. Smith, Miss Jackson, or Mr. Jones right? We know that that is not likely to happen. You could be going into a department that none of those attorneys practice in. And one of those attorneys could be deceased. One of those attorneys could be not practicing. So the idea of having the names on the firm really has, has a value in where we started, but not necessarily for where we are right now. So that continues to shift and evolve.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:51] But in terms of finding work, at some point, Smith, Jones and Jackson stops being Mr. Smith, Miss Jones and Mr. Jackson. And it moves over, by the way, I just changed the name of the law firm. I changed it from whatever it was before, I can do that because I’m not going off of notes. Just know that that’s kind of how we roll here, right? But you know, there are times when you think about the name of a law firm, right? And the firm, the principles are not really what is being sold right? What’s being sold is the service associated with the brand of those lawyers. And the more you customize your branding to be about the service that your firm offers and the quality that is associated with that service rather than you, the individual, you start to get into a greater level of independence, right? You stop being necessary to your business. We talk a lot about not being necessary to your business here at Law Firm Mentor, you start to shift out of being necessary to your business and you start to create economic value in your business, regardless of whether or not you were there.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:02] So I remember I recently had a conversation. Very good friend of mine decided that she was going to phase out of practicing law in the way that she is. She doesn’t, she no longer has her law firm open, and we had a lot of conversations about what she wanted to do with it. Did she want to sell it? Did you just want to close it? Like, what? What is the process? And so just kind of being alongside her as she was going through that process, I learned a lot about valuation of law firms. Now, as a matrimonial attorney and family law attorney for many years, I of course knew about valuations of businesses and periodically we would have a client who owned a law firm. But the valuation of law firms, was almost always treated like the valuation of the mom and pop shop because the mom and pop shop had mom and pa. And if mom or pa decided to discontinue working in the business, the business no longer had a client base, right? So people that go to Steve’s Dry Cleaners store were used to going in and seeing Steve. And so there’s always a concern by someone buying a business. If Steve is not here anymore. Are people still going to come to Steve’s Dry Cleaners store? Same thing is true in a law firm. You know, if if it’s Smith, Jones and Jackson. And Smith and Jones are not there, and the only one that’s there Jackson and Jackson doesn’t have but maybe a few clients a month on average to service. Do you have a sustainable entity that will continue to generate the same level of revenue? The answer is probably not.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:34] And more and more lawyers are starting to realize the importance of creating enterprise goodwill, i.e. creating a business that does not physically require you and where clients will come for the business and not for the individual. So why are we kind of on this tangent about enterprise goodwill and talking about the people in law firms? Well, the reason is because when you think about the finder, right? I just said that at the very start of this episode, we talked about the fact that with these three categories, you’re going to have to divorce yourself to some degree from some of these jobs, right? If you are the chief owner and you are the one who has to physically go out and get the work, you have to network with people in order to get client referrals. You have to go out and do speaking engagements in order to get client referrals, you have to go to events and put up a trade show booth in order to generate clients. When you have to physically be involved and you have to do the work that is generated from you physically going out and generating the work, and you have to manage and oversee all of the people in a law firm that are necessary in order to provide reasonable cost legal services and by reasonable costs, I’m talking about ethically compliant costs associated with delivering the service, right? You’re probably not going to prepare a financial affidavit with the hours that are required for that at the at the attorney rate, you’re probably going to do that as a paralegal rate and so forth, right? 

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:06] All that goes into the doing of the work someone has to manage. So if you are full-time managing the work, full-time doing the work, and full-time going out and finding the work, when the hell are you going to have time to live? And that’s the question that no one really answers for the solo lawyer, right? The solo lawyer kind of goes out and says, I’ll do it all myself. And this was very much my story. When I left my law firm, I was employed by a good firm, I was paid well, I enjoyed the work that I did. I enjoyed the people that I worked for, but I wanted more. I needed more. My, my desire to create a bigger imprint in the world was just not being satiated there. So ultimately I left and I remember when I walked into my law firm, when I first started my firm, I started with a partner. Not the best choice, but we did amicably divorce, if you will, in about seven months. But you know, I remember walking into the building and my partner and I had had kind of set things up to start at a certain point. And after I gave notice, I was kind of cut off from my last law firm. So I had like a couple of weeks in there between when my new law firm was officially going to launch and when my old law firm would not allow me in anymore. And I remember that interim time period was one of deep reflection for me, and it was like getting everything lined up and there was all this excitement. But all of a sudden I had forgotten it makes me sound like, you know, really stupid. But I’m just going to put it out there. You know, I had completely neglected to think about all of the minding and not so much the finding, but all of the minding that would go with a practice of my size, right? So I had I was servicing 48 clients in the law firm where I was, and forty-three of those were clients that I had personally generated. And at that time in my career, I was pretty much generating all my own work. I literally would take clients from the firm when nobody else was available to take clients in the firm because, you know, I just I had gotten to the point in my career where all of my work was my own work, right? So I just remember all of a sudden I’ve got forty-three clients to service and I’m in my office and I’m thinking, OK, I got to do this. I got to do this, I got to do this.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:26] A lot of the management of the work overseeing the work was now on me from a systemic perspective, right? So I didn’t immediately hire a paralegal, my secretary was supposed to come with me. She kind of backed out at the last minute, so I didn’t have staff to oversee, but I did have myself to perform the task of staff, and I had to manage the systems of getting that work done efficiently. And so just making sure that the little assembly line of here’s a document that has to be, has to be drafted, it needs to be proofread, it needs to be faxed, mailed, emailed, whatever it is. I need the confirmation that the transmission happened to go into a certain place, then I have to stick it into a file. It has to go in the order in which it’s supposed to go in my file. So I have like a little assembly line of all these moving pieces, and I had to manage that system. And the time that it took for me to manage that system, to make things that make sure that things were moving from place to place. I finally hired like a Girl Friday, if you will. A guy, I should say my Guy Friday. Still great person who I’m friends with even today, but he helped me out. He wasn’t a legal professional, but he did help me out. And he would come in and like, move things through my system, and I would have to manage whether or not they had moved from place to place in the right location and just trying to keep up with all those details and make sure that things were going in the spreadsheet and to make sure that documents were going into the file in the right way. That took up so much of my time and energy, which probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I had 20 files, but I had forty-three files and forty-eight files in my last practice. Now I should note my practice at that time and still now is statewide. So I’m in the lovely state of New Jersey. It was not uncommon at that point that my office, which was in the center of the state in Essex County, is about an hour and a half from court in the northern part of the state and two hours from court in the southern part of the state. So it wouldn’t be uncommon that in the course of a day I’d start cases at the southern part of the state, I’d stop by my office in the middle of the day. Then I’d head to court in the northern part of the state at the end of the day. So I was always on the go and not having full staff team and full-time managers of team in my office to make sure that things were being processed while I was physically at court was very stupid on my part, just very stupid.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:56] When I think about all of the infrastructures that we have built up in my law firm now and all of the time and energy that it goes to make sure that those systems are running efficiently, that everyone has what they need to work well within that system. It’s just impossible to do. And so I think what tends to happen is we just assume when we are working in a law firm, for those of you that worked in a law firm before you started a solo practice, you’ll, this probably will resonate with you more than people that came out of law school and started right away. But, you know, we’re used to, we’re used to grinding out the work, that’s the skill that you’re learning when you go to law school. Finding the work for me was not a problem because I had spent a lot of time finding I had spent a lot of time marketing myself as an individual almost instinctually and without much of a plan when I was an attorney and then ultimately realized that my survival in working for other people’s law firms really required me to have a substantial book of business, and I knew that when I got fired from my second law firm. So that’s a whole other story for a whole different day, but it was psychologically disturbing to me that I was only generating about two hundred thousand dollars when I was fired, so I thought, Oh my God.

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:09] Well, I can’t go start a law firm now without giving myself a substantial pay cut. Who wants to do that and who wants to add all that work of running a law firm? So I wasn’t ready to go work, to go have my own law firm when I was fired, so I had to go to another law firm first. And then by the time I was leaving that law firm, the work, the work had swelled to a $500,000 book of business. So I wasn’t so much concerned about finding the work. In fact, I pretty much knew that I could just not go out and not pound the pavement, and the work would still come because I had built up a strong enough reputation by that point. But there was still this very omnipresent fear that the balls were not all in the air, right, that I was going to drop the ball. And I knew I was going to drop the ball because there was no one minding the shop while I’m at court grinding or the few times that I was still out and about finding, you know, I was on a lot of committees, so I couldn’t immediately just drop everything, even though I really thought about it after the fact, I could have dropped a lot of things, right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:10] I didn’t psychologically feel like I could. I felt indebted to people. And that’s a whole other story for a different podcast. But before I started getting myself all off of all these committees, I had that finding quote-unquote responsibility out there.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:25] And so I just want to implore all of you, even if you only have a few clients, right? You might be at a stage in your law firm where you have enough people to serve that you can pay yourself and enough people that you need help. And maybe you have gotten your first virtual assistant, or maybe you even haven’t even bitten the bullet on that yet but you know it’s coming. I want you to seriously consider the time and energy that it takes for finding, for grinding, and for minding. So if you just do like a very basic brain dump, OK, this does not have to be something sexy on a grid and all that stuff. But think about finding, grinding, and minding how much time are you spending going out to source work, whether it’s networking or communicating with a marketing company so that you can generate some leads online or the time that it takes to prepare for and physically go to a trade show and ultimately set up a booth and connect with people there? You know, that’s the finding work. How much time are you spending with the grinding work? This is not just how many billable hours or how many hours you’re spending on flat-fee work or contingency practice work.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:32] But it’s how much is going into the total output, right? So the grinding is not just the actual doing of the work. There’s also time to prepare for the work, right? There’s time for evaluating getting your, your ducks in a row, right? If you’re meeting with a client, it’s the time to schedule the client. If you are going to court, it’s the time to travel to and from court. If you are, if you are preparing and delivering an oral argument, it’s the time to outline it, it’s the time to research it, it’s the time to speak with other people about it, right? So all that time that goes into the actual delivery of the work, whether you’re billing someone for it or not.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:15] And then finally, the minding. The minding is the area where we are probably least likely to accurately reflect the time that it really does take. And when you start to see how much minding time can make your grinding time more efficient. Right, the systematizing time the overseeing of systems time. When you start to realize how much more efficient you can be with that work so that you can be more cost-effective with your grinding work, you start to realize that you really need to spend more of your time minding, especially when you are newer in solo practice, you need more of your time minding so that that grinding work can make you more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:55] And hiring people is usually not universally, but usually, the fastest route for you to get there. Whether it is getting some part-time help, getting some virtual help, or even a full-time person, right? 

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:08] Now, if you are somebody that has a question about whether it’s time to add team members or how you can add team members to generate the most profit from your grinding while you are minding, or whether it’s time to add a full-time minder, an office manager or, or paralegal slash office manager, somebody who can actually take on a management function in your job, in your law firm. Then I want to invite you to have a call with us here at Law Firm Mentor. We have a growth strategy team where they do nothing all day, every day except to talk to lawyers across the country about the problems that they have in law firms. And these calls are absolutely free. They’re exploratory in nature. If there’s a resource for you, if there’s something that we can do to help, we do that. If it is time for you to really invest in getting some true help and getting someone to hold your hand as a guide through the process of building and scaling your law firm, we can offer you that too.

 

Allison Williams: [00:33:01] All right, everyone, I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. And this week we have been talking about who does what in your law firm. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Allison Williams: [00:33:25] Thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast. To learn more about today’s show and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you enjoy today’s episode, take a moment to follow the podcast wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating and review. This helps us to reach even more law firm owners from around the country who want to crush chaos in business and make more money. I’m Allison Williams your Law Firm Mentor. Everyone, have a great day!

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Allison Bio:

Allison C. Williams, Esq., is Founder and Owner of the Williams Law Group, LLC, with offices in Short Hills and Freehold, New Jersey. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is Certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney and is the first attorney in New Jersey to become Board-Certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in the field of Family Law. 

Ms. Williams is an accomplished businesswoman. In 2017, the Williams Law Group won the LawFirm500 award, ranking 14th of the fastest growing law firms in the nation, as Ms. Williams grew the firm 581% in three years. Ms. Williams won the Silver Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.  In 2018, Ms. Williams was voted as NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business and was designated one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. In 2019, Ms. Williams won the Seminole 100 Award for founding one of the fastest growing companies among graduates of Florida State University.

 

In 2018, Ms. Williams created Law Firm Mentor, a business coaching service for lawyers.  She helps solo and small law firm attorneys grow their business revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.  Through multi-day intensive business retreats, group and one-to-one coaching, and strategic planning sessions, Ms. Williams advises lawyers on all aspects of creating, sustaining and scaling a law firm business – and specifically, she teaches them the core foundational principles of marketing, sales, personnel management, communications and money management in law firms. 

Contact Info:

MasterClass December 8th

Text CONNECT at 908 292 3524

https://lawfirmmentor.net/speak-with-a-growth-strategist/

Scheduler: https://meetme.so/LawFirmMentor  

 

Snippets

00: 19: 02 (38 Seconds) 

So I remember I recently had a conversation. Very good friend of mine decided that she was going to phase out of practicing law in the way that she is. She doesn’t, she no longer has her law firm open, and we had a lot of conversations about what she wanted to do with it. Did she want to sell it? Did you just want to close it? Like, what? What is the process? And so just kind of being alongside her as she was going through that process, I learned a lot about valuation of law firms. Now, as a matrimonial attorney and family law attorney for many years, I of course knew about valuations of businesses and periodically we would have a client who owned a law firm.