Entrepreneurial Development for Lawyers

From Kirsten Osilind's re:invention blog comes this post about the Women's Venture Fund (and Martha Stewart's proposal to work for them in exchange for reduced jail time). The Fund has a 6 Stage Entrepreneurial Development Model that Kirsten summarizes thusly:

stage 1: Desire - a woman entrepreneur has an emerging idea, with no clear sense of what needs to be done.
stage 2: Friends and Family - the entrepreneur has developed a product or service, but they only serve a limited market (friends and family members).
stage 3: Indigenous Neighborhood Market - the entrepreneur continues to evaluate the market opportunity through personal preferences and shopping experiences but begins to extend their product and services sales to strangers.
stage 4: Local Market - the entrepreneur begins to encounter an objective market that has no affiliation to her.
stage 5: Trade Show and Conventions - the true beginning of a stabilized small business coupled with critical evaluation of the entrepreneur's marketing concept, the larger competitive industry, and larger scale opportunities.
stage 6: Mass Market - the last and final developmental step when an entrepreneur recognizes a mass market and chooses the final form product or service she will supply based upon market demands.

The stages mirror what most lawyers go through when deciding to hang out their own shingle. Take a look at the WVF site. There is some great stuff there.

Missouri Solo and Small Firm Conference

I'm attending the Missouri Solo and Small Firm Conference at the Lodge of the Four Seasons again this year. For the money, this is the best legal conference in the midwest. Great speakers, wonderful collegiality, a great location, and a golf outing make the conference so popular, it regularly outdraws the regular Missouri Bar convention, and is sold out this year. If you are going to the conference, drop me a line as I'd love to meet you, and invite you to come go-karting on Friday night!

Great Productivity Tips

Legal Coach Ed Poll has five productivity tips on his Coach to Lawyers Weblog from a presentation he attended by Nido Qubein. Nido's tips:

1. Call or write 4 people every week (Monday to Friday).
2. Get the "clean desk" habit -- do today what you can, don't leave it for tomorrow.
3. Return all calls on the day received (still the number one complaint against attorneys in State Bar Disciplinary Boards around the country!).
4. Read one hour every day.
5. Read the newspaper at night (it's faster because you've heard some of it already and you'll know what's important ... and you won't start your day depressed by the murder and mayhem reported daily).

I met Ed at the ABA national convention in Atlanta about ten years ago. He writes some great stuff for lawyers and has started posting more to his blog. He needs a link from his blog to his main website though.

Welcome to Samuel Lamere Schaeffer

A belated congratulations go out to Evan at Notes from the (Legal) Underground and his lovely wife Andrea for the new addition to their family, Samuel Lamere Schaeffer. A brand new copy of The Happiest Baby on the Block is on its way from Amazon. A book that saved my wife and I countless hours of sleep with our daughter Grace.

The Weekly Five (Week 4)

The new edition of the Weekly Five is up in my sidebar. Some creativity-related links this time to keep my brainstorming weekend going. Have fun.

Comment from Former Legalmatch Salesperson?

This comment showed up today as a response to my original LegalMatch post, Why I'll Never Use Legalmatch. I express no opinion on the comment's validity, but food for thought if true:

Unfortunately, I was one of the salespeople at Legalmatch. For a very short time. (There are hundreds of us, and most of us were lied to as much or more than the attorneys.) Most attorneys did not have great success with the service, although they hid that from the sales people. The reason? People shop for free advice or post their cases for fun. They rarely hire an attorney. Yet, there is enough volume of these non-cases being posted to keep justifying the demand for "more attorneys" - i.e., more "allocations." With high volume/high pressure sales tactics, extreme turnover of commission-only salespeople, and the real difficulty many attorneys have in getting clients, Legalmatch keeps getting people to sign up and hand over thousands of dollars. (Non-refundable once you've used the system - read the contract. And just try to get your money back from them if you're unhappy.) Not a big surprise to me that Shubov was indicted.

Can Lawyers Innovate?

Quick, in the last decade, what has been the most significant positive change in the way lawyers do business? How about over the last twenty years?

Seriously, apart from technology making us available 24-7, I can't think of one way the legal business model has changed in a positive way for lawyers, their staff, or clients. Do lawyers work fewer hours? Are working conditions better now than in 1995? Or 1985? Is the average second year law firm associate encouraging everyone they know to become a lawyer? How about the clients? Are they happier with their attorney now than fifteen years ago? Have legal services become cheaper? More widely available? As a profession, are lawyers more respected now than a dedade ago?

How can an industry populated with as many intelligent and clever people not implement positive change? Profitability has risen, but is that a positive change when so many lawyers hate what they do and how long they have to spend doing it?

Lawyers can innovate. Look at how amazingly brilliant and imaginative lawyers who do estate planning, M&A work, intellectual property, and criminal defense can be on a daily basis. Why don't those same lawyers apply their vast talents and creativity towards changing the fundamental way we lawyers practice? Is it because time spent on the practice -- as opposed to time spent on clients -- does not have an immediate, tangible financial return?

Since I've started my new firm, I've fallen victim to the same pressures that keeps all of us from innovating. I've been so overwhelmed by the time I need to serve my clients and get my new firm off the ground that I've failed to move forward on the innovation front. I know I need to get back on track and thinking about my firm's future, so here is my weekend agenda for renewing my creativity and recommitting myself to making my practice better:

Friday:

Buy a magazine I've never read before (courtesy of Eric Heels).
Use the Sentence Completion exercise from The Nub to answer the following questions:

If I were a client I'd want my lawyer to...
My business would be more fun if only I could ...
My office would run more smoothly if we ...

Cook something for dinner I've never made before.
Write down twenty five ideas.

Saturday:

Get up early, and spend the first hour brainstorming with my KnowBrainer cards.
Take a walk with my daughter.
Go pick strawberies.
Write down my ideal scenes.
Take a nap.
Finish The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler

Sunday:

Help my dad barbeque. My father has a commercial smoker and he bbq's for the entire neighborhood at least twice a year. We'll be smoking ribs, chickens, and hams for nearly 30 people. We'll start around 5:00 a.m., because the hams take nearly 11 hours to cook. Mmmm good. As far as I'm concerned, you can't innovate on an empty stomach.

Monday:

Install MindJet's MindManager on my Tablet PC and learn how to use it.
Write down twenty-five more ideas.
Complete my firm's guarantee and give it to my seven year old neighbor to see if he understands it.
Relax, have fun, and get psyched for Tuesday morning.

If you have ways you innovate, let me know and I'll post some more ideas on Tuesday.

Idea Management for Lawyers?

Continuing my thoughts from my previous post ...

Mark Cuban has a great post on his Blog Maverick weblog. If you haven't made Mark's blog a daily read, you really should. He writes about his team, the Dallas Mavericks, but he also writes about his life, investing, and how he's succeeded in business. In the fourth installment in his "Success and Motivation" series, Mark writes about the making mistakes and the competitive advantages he has realized by consuming as much information as he could:

You never quite know in business if what you are doing is the right or wrong thing. Unfortunately, by the time you know the answer, someone has beat you to it and you are out of business. I used to tell myself that it was ok to make little mistakes, just dont make the big ones. I would continuously search for new ideas. I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, 3 bucks for a magazine, 20 bucks for a book. One good idea that lead to a customer or solution and it paid for itself many times over. Some of the ideas i read were good, some not. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson.

Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didnt want it.

I remember going into customers or talking to people in the industry and tossing out tidbits about software or hardware. Features that worked , bugs in the sofware. All things I had read. I expected the ongoing response of “oh yeah, i read that too in such and such”. Thats not what happened. They hadnt read it then, and they havent started reading yet.

I think this stuff happens to blog readers all the time -- I know it does to me. We are exposed to an exponentially greater amount of information distilled from the blogs we read and the writers who write them then the average person. As a consequence, I think blog readers have a lot more ideas.

My question is what is the best way to manage this tremendous amount of great stuff? It doesn't seem like a problem of managing knowledge, but rather ideas. For me, ideas are the hardest thing in the world to manage. Google "Idea Management" and you get 11,700 results. Google "Knowledge Management" and the results top 3,000,000.

For me, one of the ways I manage my ideas is with this blog. Sharing the cool things I come across is just one side benefit to having a great place to store all of the things I find. Another way is by using mind mapping software (pay) (free) However, I need a better way to keep track of my daily ideas.

Great Stuff from The Nub

The guys over at The Nub picked up my post the other day about Value Billing, and added their thoughts:

One can take the question further and ask: How much have we helped our clients succeed? And get the client to determine this. Then build in some sort of payment that is dependent on how much the solution helps the client achieve success. For example, I've been paid the final 25% of my fee upon hitting performance targets. Other times I've received an extra % upon my client's satisfaction.

The Nub also has a pointer to a great excerpt from the John C. Maxwell book Today Matters.

Trapped by Overwhelming Demands?

In this HBS Working Knowledge article titled The Trap of Overwhelming Demands, authors Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghosha take on a problem most lawyers face. Does this sound like you?

[Y]ou deem some aspects of your work important, but you can never find time for them. Or you might feel under constant pressure. The most dangerous of all is believing that you are indispensable

If so, read the article, an excerpt of the authors' book, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time.

Entrepreneurism for Teens

The Small Business Administration's Office of Business and Community Initiatives (part of the Office of Entrepreneurial Development) has a great site for teens titled The Teen Entrepreneur Guide to Owning a Small Business. There is some great information for all entrepreneurs there.

Law Firm Naming (Again)

Wordlab has a great post on law firm naming. From the article:

As today's law firms grow or downsize, merge and emerge, keeping the letterhead, website, and collateral marketing materials current with the legal partnership name can be a regular challenge. And maintaining consistent brand awareness in a firm's marketplace can be frustrated by a naming strategy that is focussed on the partnership roster, and not on the firm's brand from the customer's point of view.

Business-minded lawyers name their law firms with their customers in mind--not to assuage the partners--and thereby protect their investments in the business. Better to have a partnership interest in a law firm with a strong brand than to have one's own name listed with many other partners on a "shingle" few customers can remember. The classic parody of traditional law firm naming is Jerry Seinfeld trying desperately to remember the name of the firm where the beautiful lawyer, Vanessa, works; repeating the mantra "Simon, Bennett, Robbins, Oppenheim & Taft" over and over.

Wordlab is a free naming thinktank that's worth a look. Some really fun things there, including my favorite, the Band Name Generator. Thanks to Abnu for the heads up.

Are you doing too much busy work?

Duct Tape Marketing is one of my daily reads. In this post, author John Jantsch argues that marketing is your highest payoff activity. John writes:

I don't know about you but most small business owners are do-it-yourself types and get sucked into doing the littlest silly work faster than you can say "Oh look, the copier is jammed again." If you want to achieve any of your goals and finally start making what you are worth then you’ve got to stop doing $5/hr work. Period.

John suggests that you calculate what your time is actually worth per hour (your Personal Average Yield, or PAY) and delegate everything that doesn't contribute to your business' growth. John continues:

So I ask you. Is fiddling with the copier, chatting with the mailman, running to the office supply store, making deliveries, or returning meaningless email paying you $72/hr? For that matter, doesn’t mowing your own grass, washing your own car, cleaning your own windows take you away from marketing your business? I know, now I’m asking you to give up most of the fun things you like to do everyday but hey, if you can get the neighbor kid to mow your grass for anything less than $100/hr, therefore giving you 3 hours to write a killer sales letter - it’s probably a steal

Figure out your PAY number, paint it on the wall in your office, and then go about setting up your business in a way that allows you to focus on the only things that can really pay that kind of money: marketing, innovation, and customer service. – cause everything else is just a cost.

Cool Tech Tools

It has been a blogging day today, and I'm trying to post a bunch of stuff I've saved up over the last few weeks. Here is a cool web-based utility called "Mail to the Future" that allows you to e-mail yourself a reminder anytime in the future. Works great and, best of all, it is free!

Another cool, free tool is AnyBirthday.com. Type in a first and last name and zip code (if you know it) of someone who's birthday you want to know and you'll likely get the answer here. To save you the trouble, mine is August 7.

Stephen Nipper tipped me off to a program called Adobe Reader Speed-Up that does what the title suggests: it helps Acrobat Reader open PDF documents much more quickly.

Quote of the Week

Saw this quote on Evelyn Rodriguez's Crossroads Dispatches:

"A Native American Elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: 'Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.' When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, 'The one I feed the most." -- Original Source Unknown

Ron Baker is in the House

I have written about Ron Baker before, the author of several books on value pricing. This morning, Ron left the following (edited) response to some of the give-and-take in the comments to a recent post. To get a flavor of the debate, and to whom Ron is responding, read all the comments. Here are some choice excerpts:

Hourly billing is not the cheapest way for a client to buy legal services, since the lawyer always has an incentive to bill more hours. There is no correlation between inputs and activities, and output and results. To think otherwise is to fall prey to Karl Marx's Labor Theory of Value. Many large companies now insist on fixed prices up front, and when "scope creep" occurs change orders are used. Houlry billing is not here to stay, it's only being kept in place by the apathy of the professions.

How do actuaries price earthquake or flood insurance? The answer, of course, is they are pricing risk, so are lawyers. Clients don't buy time, and to think they do is the problem with the professions. Do you care how long it took Porsche to build your car? Do you fly on an airline that charges you $4 per minute? They operate under uncertainty and risk, too, but so what? Who better to scope the project than the lawyer. If you think you are being paid for your time, you have put an automatic ceiling over your earnings. Do you think Tiger Woods has this attitude? You are being paid for your Intellectual Capital, not your time. Time is useless, and you certainly can't leverage it. It's the results you create customers are buying. All living beings, and all businesses, are subject to the constraints of time, so what?

Value Pricing doesn't mean price gouging, it means charging a price agreed upon up-front, BEFORE you do the work, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER BUSINESS ON THIS PLANET. To deny this, and claim professional's aren't subject to the laws of economics, boggles my mind. How many things do you purchase as a consumer that you don't know the price up front? Why do you think clients of lawyers are any different? Humans tend to avoid risk and uncertainty, and yet when you price by the hour that's all they get.

I think highly of Ron's theories and his books. He has kindly agreed to answer a Q & A here at the [non]billable hour. If you have questions, submit them to me and I'll edit them and get them to Ron.

Value Billing by Architects

I found this great position paper (PDF) on the web from an architurcture firm Van Mell Associates titled "Why We Don't Bill by the Hour." Some excerpts:

To value each hour of work equally and to price and manage each hour is as corrosive a policy as any creative group of professionals could devise. To pretend that each hour is worth the same as every other is ridiculous. A brilliant insight can come in a flash, and save a client from disaster or find him millions. Other hours are dull or wasted and lead nowhere. It’s clear that billing by the hour is unfair to everyone.

Of course, professionals, like everyone, must track their time and their staff’s time. But tracking each hour draws the professional’s eyes away from the client’s needs and toward the professional’s own reward. Whether measured by the hour or minute, the client completely depends on the advisor's honesty to price and record their work effort fairly. Of course, professionals, like everyone, must track their time and their staff’s time. But tracking each hour draws the professional’s eyes away from the client’s needs and toward the professional’s own reward. Whether measured by the hour or minute, the client completely depends on the advisor's honesty to price and record their work effort fairly.

Of course, we still need a way to manage our time, both for efficiency and for estimating the work needed in a new assignment. Our solution: a Good Day’s Work. This unit avoids false precision and is based on our honest judgment of worth using even increments of 10%. If we honestly feel we put in 10% of the day working hard on a client’s problem, that’s what we record. If we honestly felt we worked hard, but only for a few minutes, we don’t record it. If we see we’ve helped the client enormously, frankly, we round up.

This is the best articulation of the benefits of value billing by a company I've yet seen on the web. Read the whole PDF to learn more about the Good Day's Work and the innovative ways this Company treats its relationship with its clients.

The Weekly Five (Week 3)

I've changed my Weekly Five again in the right column on the weblog. Take a look.

LegalMatch Founder in Trouble?

I thought I was done talking about LegalMatch (see here, here, and here, and here) but several readers e-mailed me with news that LegalMatch's Founder and CEO, Dmitry Shubov was indicted. Here is the story from the AP:

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- The founder of an Internet-based service that matches lawyers with clients was indicted for allegedly hacking into the voicemail system of an Irvine competitor and deleting messages.

Dmitri Shubov, 31, of San Francisco was charged with three counts of unlawful access to store communications and one count of making false statements, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Stolper said Wednesday. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Shubov is the founder of LegalMatch.com, which matches lawyers with potential clients, Stolper said, and one of his competitors is Casepost.com. Shubov allegedly telephoned the company, used an access code to hear messages and then deleted them, Stolper said.

He also allegedly lied to FBI agents about the activity during an interview earlier this year, Stolper said.

At least he won't have any problems finding a good lawyer.

Specialist v. Generalist

Jennifer Rice, at What's Your Brand Mantra, has an interesting post on specialization:

Trying to be all things to all people is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to attracting and keeping customers. Choosing a target market is tough. It means eliminating entire groups of people from your messages. But without focus, you risk a bland, diluted message that means nothing to anyone.

She has lots more great thoughts, so go to the full post to read them.