Building a Practice with Purpose: How One Former Police Chief Built a Client-Centered Law Firm | First Flight #6

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

So if I was starting today as a New Solo, I would be entrepreneurial Aspect, change the way they’re practicing Leader, help young Lawyers, a small firm, what it means to be fulfill, make it easy to work with your clients, New approach, Entrepreneurs In your tools. You said something really interesting in another interview, New Solo. And it’s leap. Making that leap. Making that

Adriana Linares:

I’m Adriana Linares, a legal technology trainer and consultant. I hope lawyers and law firms use technology better. I want to thank our partners in developing the New Solo first flight series for solo attorneys presented by ALPS Insurance. They’re interested in helping solos and small firms get the best start to their practices. We’ve curated the best 12 episodes for new solos and partnerships with Alps. We’re highlighting a portion of the episode with Andrew Sheer. He had a full career in another profession, attended law school at night and opened his practice as a second career. Amazing. We hope hearing his thought process and experiences gives you an insight or two to improve your practice. Stay through to the end. When I sit down with Rio Lane from a’s Insurance Rio and I will get into how defining your practice area is an ongoing process.

You’re never done. What to think about when hiring staff to help you out. They can bring much needed help, but also some real risks to consider. And now my interview with Andrew Schierberg with an elder law practice in Kentucky as a second career. Well, it’s very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your pearls of wisdom with listeners about how you managed to launch your solo practice as a second career. So when I learned about you, I thought it was so interesting because you were a police officer in a previous life and a completely different side of the law.

Andrew Schierberg:

Yeah, I was a police officer for 20 years. I just retired in December of 2022, so the full-time law practice is brand new. But yeah, I’m lucky. I got into the system here in Kentucky when we had a 20 year pension system. So I started my career as a patrol officer. I became an investigator. I did computer forensics for a while and kind of internet crime investigations and then became a police chief at sort of my parents’ hometown city small agency here in northern Kentucky.

Adriana Linares:

So are you in a rural part of Kentucky?

Andrew Schierberg:

I’m not. We’re basically the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. So I can, from the roof of my house, we have a little porch. I can see downtown Cincinnati and my office is just about 15 minutes from there.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, that’s great. Okay, so you had this career in law enforcement and did you start that thinking, okay, I got 20 years, this pension is going to time up and I’m ready to retire. Or did you think when you started you were going to be there forever or did you have a hardcore plan?

Andrew Schierberg:

Yeah, no, I really did think about it. It’s funny, the pension’s been a topic of discussion in recent years and it really doesn’t exist anymore here in Kentucky. And one of the things that was talked about from the politicians is, oh, nobody really considers that. I definitely considered it and definitely thought at 42 years old I’d be able to start career number two. Truthfully, when I started at the police department, at first there wasn’t a fantastic culture at the department I was at. I decided to go to law school. I thought, well, you know what? Maybe this isn’t the right career for me and

Had an interest in law school at the time. Anyway, so I did part-time law school. Chase College of Law here in northern Kentucky has a night program, which is really no kidding. There’s so many attorneys I’ve talked to around here who would not be attorneys if it weren’t for that program. Nurses, other professionals, people with families, all kinds of people that have the opportunity to go because that program’s here and it’s been here for a long time, but it was kind of an exit strategy at the time. But the culture of the police department changed, and I got moved into investigations, which I really enjoyed, and by the time that was done and law school was done, I was already seven years into a 20 year career and I thought, let’s see where this goes and we’ll practice law when it’s done.

Adriana Linares:

So you’ve had your law degree for years and years before you started using it

Andrew Schierberg:

Sort of. So I graduated law school oh nine. I did practice part-time for a little bit after I graduated. I did some bankruptcy, consumer bankruptcy law, which was fantastic to do part-time because the creditors meetings are scheduled for 15 minutes and they happen during that time. They happen on time and last 15 minutes and you’re done. And mostly a paperwork type practice. I think I took on two family law cases and realized that was not for me. And then I bought an old house that needed to be remodeled with my wife. And in the process of that, we also found out we were having our first kid, so didn’t have time for a part-time law practice and really didn’t pick it back up until I had my eye on retirement.

Adriana Linares:

That’s so interesting because did you ever feel like, oh, I’ve forgotten so much, I’m totally out of it. Or were you doing enough during these fits and starts where you could keep the wheels greased? Is that a term?

Andrew Schierberg:

Yeah, I definitely realized I did some and certainly I think being in law enforcement, I had interactions mostly obviously with criminal law.

Adriana Linares:

Good point, obviously,

Andrew Schierberg:

But I try to keep up with it would go to keep up my hours for my license. Kentucky’s fantastic. Our bar does basically once a year you can get all your CLEs for free, which is fantastic. So I did that, but I did have to really reeducate myself on a lot of stuff. When I began the process of, okay, I’m going to start my own firm, the first question is what am I going to do? And once I solved that, then it was, okay, now how do I get myself up to speed on this area of law because it had been a while.

Adriana Linares:

Okay. So you decide you’re going to launch this practice, you have support from your wife, you’ve got three young kids.

Andrew Schierberg:

Yes, 3, 9, 7 and five at the time.

Adriana Linares:

Okay. So this is a big deal because you’re pivoting, transitioning, it doesn’t sound to me like you considered any other career. You’ve known forever that you were going to be a lawyer.

Andrew Schierberg:

I really did actually. So kind of back in 2020 is really when I started thinking about, okay, retirement is end of 2022, what am I going to do? At the time, I was actually serving as not just police chief for the city where I worked, but I was also acting city administrator and so on. My mind was I could parlay this into some kind of operations VP position or something like that in the corporate world. But the more I thought about things and truly part of it was discovering your podcast and a lot of others and realizing there was just such an opportunity to start my own practice, be my own boss. The mayor of the city where I worked was an entrepreneur. He had his own business and I saw his ability to focus on the things he wanted to. He had his main business and he started another business and the freedom he had in his schedule. So all of those kind of things just really led me to what I’ve got my law degree, I enjoy service, let’s find something that I can do to be my own boss, start my own thing, hopefully grow something for me and my family.

Adriana Linares:

You mentioned to me that being able to spend time with your kids was going to be really important. I think everyone with children has that desire and that plan. So that sounded like a very important reason to be able to control your own schedule and time and the way you did things, right.

Andrew Schierberg:

It was so I’ll tell you a funny story, which is that, so after I retired, I worked the cafeteria at my kids’ school every Friday in January, and I’ve done it once a month since. And it was just something I was like, I’m going to do this. It’s Really fun to see them in their element during the day. But yeah, part of what I did, so sort of my methodology or whatever when I was making these decisions, once I decided, okay, I’m going to practice law, then it was like, okay, what am I going to do? And at first I had to narrow down that practice area for me. I knew I didn’t want to do a wide variety of things. And partially to your point, you mentioned before I was in what, seven or eight years, 10 years, whatever it was, 10 years out of law school. So I knew trying to get myself up to speed on a lot of areas of law wasn’t necessarily the most practical. And I don’t remember where I heard this, but it was a podcast, maybe it was yours. There was somebody who was talking about thinking about your goals, thinking about your priorities, and finding a practice area that fits with that.

And so as a police officer, I thought, well, I can do criminal defense, but then number one, you’re on the schedule of the court, that’s somebody else’s deadline and somewhere you’ve got to be and you can’t sort of schedule around that and go work at the cafeteria. I thought about personal injury, car accidents because I’ve been on my fair share of car accidents and sort of understand how they operate. But again, you’re looking at just court schedule and depositions and all these things that sort of are out of your control. So I took a step back, thought about my motivation being service and how I could help others. And I think the answer was with me all along in finding elder law, an estate plan, primarily elder law. When I grew up, my mom and dad both worked and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, particularly my grandmas.

My one grandpa had died before I was born and the other one died when I was pretty young. But particularly my mom’s mom, Louise, I spent so much time with her and I just really loved and cherish that time and I thought, what a better way to sort of, I don’t know, tap into the core of what motivates me and honor her than to go into this area. So that’s how I got there. And also I realized that it is for the most part a practice area that’s on a flexible schedule. Let’s say there’s not too many elder law emergencies and the elder law emergencies are usually measured in days or weeks and not hours and minutes.

Adriana Linares:

That’s amazing. Well, let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors. I’m going to come back and ask you about how you ended up deciding infrastructure, whether you’re going to work from home, which sounds impossible with three children. Sometimes we can get down to some of the nitty gritty in our next segment. All right. And we’re back. I’m here with Andrew Berg who’s telling us about how he decided to launch his practice. And so Andrew, it sounds like you had been doing some prep work, listening to some podcasts, probably doing some research. So as you sat down to launch, did you have a business plan?

Andrew Schierberg:

It was a rough business plan, but I did have a business plan. I knew you

Adriana Linares:

Wrote it down business plan for my law firm,

Andrew Schierberg:

All

Adriana Linares:

Cap

Andrew Schierberg:

Centered underlined

Adriana Linares:

Like a

Andrew Schierberg:

Two pager.

Adriana Linares:

Okay.

Andrew Schierberg:

Probably wasn’t as thorough as it needed to be, but I knew going into it, I wanted it to be a holistic practice. I didn’t want to just be transactional, do some documents and for lack of a better way to put it, kick people to the curb.

I really wanted to spend some time with my clients, build that relationship from a practical standpoint. I knew I was going to need office space just with the generation of clients that I’m helping. Many of them are okay with virtual meetings, but many of them, many more of them want. So I did decide I needed a physical office. I tell people sometimes I feel like I kind of cheated at starting this practice because number one, I’ve got a pension to rely on. So I don’t have the worry that so many attorneys have about just am I going to make any money? Yes, I want to make money with my law practice and my pension doesn’t cover everything, but I have a little cushion. I also lucked out because my wife’s cousins are attorneys who had some extra space in their office.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, excellent.

Andrew Schierberg:

That worked out perfect. So I share space with them and another attorney that moved in right around the same time. So that’s been good, helps with practical things like when we’re signing wills and need witnesses and notaries and things like that. So physical office for me, but I do work from home sometimes I try to be pretty flexible with my schedule and if I look at my calendar and I don’t have client meetings that day in person, then I’ll work from home. When maybe the kids are in school, it gets a little noisy when they’re not.

Adriana Linares:

Do you have an assistant?

Andrew Schierberg:

I do have somebody on my team. I mentioned before, practicing holistically. So when I was doing my research to start the practice, I discovered something called the Life Care Planning Law Firms Association. And Tim started this way of practicing years ago, but essentially my first hire was actually a care coordinator. Interesting. So when we work with our clients, we don’t just do will trust power of attorney, things like that. We do those things. But Suzanne, my care coordinator, actually helps them to whether they need to find a new place to live if they’re moving from maybe their home, no kidding to assisted living or a nursing home,

Adriana Linares:

You are a trusted advisor from A to Z.

Andrew Schierberg:

That’s our goal. That’s the goal. Our relationships go on for a year, so we stay with our clients for a full year from when they sign up and they have a renewal option at the end of that year. Most of the time the renewal more is to do with Suzanne’s work than my work, but they have access to us for as long as they

Adriana Linares:

Want. So do you have a subscription plan?

Andrew Schierberg:

It’s essentially a subscription plan, so it’s flat fee for that first year and then there’s a renewal flat fee every year if they want to continue on.

Adriana Linares:

How did you decide to go with that angle instead of the typical hourly rate or

Andrew Schierberg:

Honestly, it was two things. Number one, I think flat fee just works better for people. It works better for the firm, works better for the clients. And the sort of subscription part of that is just part of what the way that the life care planning law firms association and the way all the firms that are members work.

Adriana Linares:

Very cool

Andrew Schierberg:

Because there’s value, there really is value in that trusted advisor sticking with our clients, they’re going through something. Most of the families we work with are going through something they’ve never gone through in their life and it’s confusing, it’s overwhelming. You have adult caregiver children who have full-time jobs that are trying to manage, how do I know to trust this assisted living facility? How do I know what’s going on with mom when she’s there? What questions do I ask? All those kinds of things that are not really the legal questions, but we want to be that sort of one-stop shop for them.

Adriana Linares:

Back to tell me the name of the organization again?

Andrew Schierberg:

Life Care Planning Law Firms Association. L-C-P-L-F-A.

Adriana Linares:

So you learned about that organization, obviously website did it, but then just curious, did you travel to any seminars, webinars, conferences, and just get so fired up learning how this was a successful model? I think I always want to encourage people to get out and go to conferences because I think they can be so helpful. Was it something like that or did you do everything online?

Andrew Schierberg:

No, it started online. They have a video series that when you become a member, it’s kind of the first intro. So I did the video series. I will say I regret not going to the conference that first year. I should have gone to the conference that first year. It would’ve set me up, I think for just a better start to things. Had I done that. Interesting. I did go this year and this year they did an unprogram. So it was all sort of user-generated sessions. Some sessions were better attended than others, but the cool thing was too, that sessions could sort of happen on the fly. So you’d be talking about stuff and they’re like, Hey, this issue’s come up, so we’re going to do a session on that this afternoon. And I met tons of contacts there. I met Tim Teis, who’s the guy who sort of started this all, which really led to just a good relationship I think. And I actually was just on Monday and Tuesday this week, myself and my care coordinator spent the two days at their firm in Nashville just shadowing them and seeing how they operate and i’s awesome.

Adriana Linares:

You are a lifelong, lifelong learner. I can tell you’re one of

Andrew Schierberg:

These.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah.

Okay. So you’ve got your law firm, you’ve got a good model and you decide to get an office, which I think is, it’s a tough choice for people a lot of times today because just it’s an overhead cost that some people don’t want to spend, but you made the right decision on that. It sounds like

Andrew Schierberg:

One of the things that I have to think about being a really small office right now is just efficiency. So I use Elder Council for drafting and recently I think they’re a newer company there. There’s a company that’s called Decision that has client intake forms basically, and it interfaces with my case and with elder counsel. So now

Adriana Linares:

Perfect

Andrew Schierberg:

For my clients who are fine with technology, I can email them a questionnaire. My sort of intake process is they get this emailed questionnaire along with my Calendly link. So I ask ’em to fill out the questionnaire, submit that, and then schedule your follow-up appointment. So

Adriana Linares:

Perfect,

Andrew Schierberg:

Just fewer touchpoint lets me not have to answer the phone as much. And then once they move from being a potential client to a client, I can import their information very quickly from Decision Fault into my case and elder counsel and I have to retype things and worry about typos and just that data entry time.

Adriana Linares:

I like the way you try to reduce administrative touch points, but you don’t do that by having someone like a care coordinator and you’re hiring an assistant to make sure that the important touch points are not just overseeing. It sounds like you have found a balance between where to use technology to make things more efficient for everyone, but you also recognize the importance of that human touch and creating those relationships with your clients.

Andrew Schierberg:

I think it’s critical. As you said, there’s certain things that just shouldn’t be automated and those things, we want that personal touch. Our clients, especially many of our clients who are older really appreciate that. I mean that’s really critical to them,

Adriana Linares:

Of course.

Andrew Schierberg:

But on the other stuff, I mean we got to be,

Adriana Linares:

And there’s certain things where there shouldn’t be human involvement too much, and that’s like creating an appointment. So you use Calendly. And then the last thing I just wanted to mention is kind of Calendly wise in my cases, did you purposefully or did you just accidentally pick and find programs that integrate with each other? Obviously something I always tell everybody to do is everything needs to talk to the other things that you’re using. So between a Calendly and my case, not docket wise, decision Vault, yes. So are you finding that creating those interlocking points software that integrates with itself is just tell everybody how important that is? That’s what I’m trying

Andrew Schierberg:

To, well, yeah, it’s huge because again, you think about, it’s not a ton of time I guess in each individual case, but when you add it up across cases, the fact that I can send a client a questionnaire, they can fill that information out, and I instantly now have that in my drafting software. And in my case, that’s huge for us, and it’s not just for me, but for instance, with Decision Vault and Elder Law, we have contact with a lot of our clients’, adult children, and sometimes we need to reach out to them. Well, if they’ve put their information in decision vault, it goes into my case. Now my care coordinator has it right away without having to say, Hey, how do I get ahold of their kid? I mean, just the time and the efficiency and it truly ends up allowing us to serve our clients better.

Adriana Linares:

I love it. So you had this first career and I love talking to people who are using the law practice as a second career. Do you think having had all that real life experience made you a smarter entrepreneur in launching your law firm? Or was it just so different, and I mean you had some experience speckled in there, but how did that encourage you or affect your decision making and how does it still affect you now just a couple years later?

Andrew Schierberg:

Yeah, I think it helped the police chief time in particular. I had a budget, I had a staff of 15, so I had experience of managing things even though the taxpayers were compelled to pay my salary, the rest of it, I had to manage a budget. I had to pick software and all that kind of stuff.

Adriana Linares:

Oh yes. So you had all the right background.

Andrew Schierberg:

That really helped. And I’ll tell you off of the business side, just onto this area of practice as a police officer, you deal with death a fair amount and it makes it a lot easier to have those conversations with families. I’ve been the person to literally be the first person to tell a family that their loved one has died. And when you’ve done that, talking about the things that you need to do to plan for that, I think it has a little more authority for one. But I also am just not afraid to have those conversations. I know how important they are. So yeah, that career has helped in numerous ways.

Adriana Linares:

Gosh, it sure sounds like it. That’s pretty interesting. Well, let’s take a last break from our sponsors. We’re going to come back. I’m going to ask you about lessons learned in launching this law firm. We’ll be right back. We’re back with Andrew. So what were some mistakes that you’ve made? Certainly you didn’t do everything perfectly.

Andrew Schierberg:

No, I have not. I think for one was practice management. I think if I’d have settled on something on my case or whatever a little earlier that made more sense for me, that would’ve been smart. Right now, I will tell you that not hiring this legal assistant sooner is a mistake. I should have really started that process about a month earlier than I did because I’ve gotten a little behind on work. And so there’s the stress of being behind and trying to get someone hired and then the stress of thinking, I’ve got to get that person trained. So I think that would be a big thing.

Adriana Linares:

Wait, can I ask you, when did you decide, or how did you figure out it was the time to hire someone?

Andrew Schierberg:

I started to look at what I was doing, and I’ll tell you, I can think of the thing that did it for me was I was preparing

Adriana Linares:

Drafts through the actual straw.

Andrew Schierberg:

It was the actual straw. So

I was sitting down one day and I was preparing draft estate planning documents to mail out to a client and just the process of downloading them from elder council, getting the formatting, which isn’t a huge amount of time, printing them, putting them in an envelope, printing the postage. And I looked down and 45 minutes of my day had gone by. I’m like, I don’t need to be doing this because very good, to be honest. I haven’t done a great job with social media content and that kind of stuff. I need to be doing that more. I could have been using that time for that. There’s so many different things I could have been using that time for, and I just thought, okay, and then the other thing is I’m not great at taking notes in my meetings with clients and I thought it’d be nice to have somebody else there where I can sort of have the eye contact the relationship and express the empathy I want to show to my clients without my face buried in my iPad, taking some notes. So combination of things, but I realize it was time. And truthfully, there’s so much advice that I’ve heard through your podcast and others of the only way you’re going to grow and build your firm is to hire because there’s only so much you can do as one person. So yeah, I think all of that made me say, it’s time, it’s past time. Let’s get this done.

Adriana Linares:

I said to you, what did you not do right? You’ve said a couple things. What would you say two or three things to someone launching that is just total wins. You can’t go wrong if you do these things.

Andrew Schierberg:

I think the first thing, and you hear this all the time, is finding a niche. I just can’t imagine and trying to practice door law or whatever you want to call it. My mind is not made that way. And in fact, after I went to the recent conference with the Life Care Planning Law Firms Association, I’m seriously considering taking estate planning out of my name and just focusing on elder law. I’ll do some estate planning if it comes along, but I really, I’m thinking abouting down even further. And one of the things I think is important too is reach out for help when you need it and don’t be afraid to reach out to vendors. I recently realized I was doing my own Google ads, so my pay-per-click was all me, and I thought I was spending not a ton of money, but I thought I should make sure I’m spending this wisely.

So I reached out to a couple of different agencies, one of them, attorney sync, I’ll throw it out there if it’s okay to throw it out there please. But the great thing was they were able to do some project-based work, so I didn’t, wasn’t spending enough on my Google Pay-per-click right now to hire them to manage it monthly, but they were able to go through it and say, Hey, you should make these changes to make it more effective. Excellent CPN. When I hired them, it wasn’t like I’m not on an ongoing basis with them right now. It was set up my QuickBooks, make sure that I hired them after I’ve been practicing part-time for a bit, make sure what I did already is and let me know what I need to do moving forward. So don’t be afraid to reach out. You might find out that somebody’s not a good fit, but you might find out that there is a company that is a good fit for you. And that’s why I’ve found managing your schedule, that’s the thing I’m trying to learn now

Is I need to make sure that I have days. It’s easy with Calendly to just be like, oh, just follow my link and you got to make sure you set that up really well. I’m going to start doing a day that’s protected for just work, so I’m not going to allow client meetings on Thursdays. I think moving forward, just so I can get the drafting done, focus on personal development, catch up on the email lists that come in and all the things I need to learn and keep an eye on. Those are the big things for me. I mean, leveraging technology effectively. We talked about that, but I think that’s huge.

Adriana Linares:

One more thing I want to ask you before I let you go, you just reminded me of it. The name of your law firm is

Andrew Schierberg:

Stages Elder Law and Estate Planning.

Adriana Linares:

Okay, so number one, your state allows you to have a type of name that isn’t just your last name because your last name is not Stages. Yes.

Andrew Schierberg:

They no longer disallow it. They don’t explicitly allow it anywhere, but they got rid of the explicit language and the ethics rules that disallowed

Adriana Linares:

It. So I think that’s a great tip right there, which is figure out what your state allows or doesn’t necessarily disallow and if you want to have a creative law firm name, you might be able to. And then I kind of think I understand why it’s called stages, but do you want to explain to us how you got to that name?

Andrew Schierberg:

Yeah, it is just the tagline was your lawyer for life’s important stages. I think we’re going to change that a little bit again, if that last conference we’re going to change it to be like your Advocates for Life’s important stages. It’s not just your lawyer, it’s your whole team that we have here. And my last name’s hard to spell. So instead of having to do law, very

Adriana Linares:

Smart

Andrew Schierberg:

Stages, I have Stages Law as my website, so it’s a very short website. The law confuses people every once in a while, but honestly, it really hasn’t been that big of a deal

Adriana Linares:

And people are going to get more familiar with it. But I love the dot laws. I don’t think you have to have it, but if it’s available and I think they’re a little more expensive, I always say make it easy to remember. Make it easy to spell. So I think that’s always really important. That was Andrew Sheer, a former police officer who opened a solo practice after retiring. I hope you liked hearing how he approached starting up as a second career. This is part of the New Solo first flight series presented by Alps Insurance. I’m joined by Rio Laine Alps director of Strategic Partnerships. I’ve dealt with and met hundreds of attorneys at this point in my career, which is about 25 years now. And I have always found that attorneys who take this approach, which is finding an area of law that they really enjoy practicing in versus one they either got stuck in or thought they would make a lot of money in or just sort of, what else am I going to do?

Or even door law general practices. When attorneys focus on an area that they’re passionate about, they really do enjoy the practice of law more, which again, over my 25 years of doing this, I found that oftentimes it was the older attorneys that were still enjoying practicing law because I don’t know, older attorneys, and remember by older, I mean they were older 25 years ago. So then I’m talking historically, this is kind of hard to explain, but I always felt like the older attorneys who were very focused and had stayed in the same area of law and really enjoyed it, also enjoyed the practice of law longer for that. And that’s more anecdotal than it is what you can help us with, which is actual data and statistics. But for Andrew to be doing this in his second career, I find there’s some wisdom in that.

So he had already lived a whole career doing something else, which is very, very different. And being a police officer and probably came to that point in his life where he is like, okay, midlife crisis or which it’s what I always call what’s happening to me. Or you’ve just done something for so long that you’re like, let me try to do something different and now I’m going to apply all of the things I wish I had done early in my career, which is find something that I love, help people that I want to help stretch those boundaries just a little bit further, like you were saying, reaching out. So I very much appreciate what he has gone through, and I hope that our listeners maybe take a little note in the life notebook from all those things.

Rio Laine:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of like a midlife pivot.

Adriana Linares:

You know what, that’s a way better term. Now, I know we all use the word pivot a little too much today, but yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s a midlife pivot for some of us.

Rio Laine:

I mean, he very easily, Andrew could have gone into criminal law. That seems like a very natural

Adriana Linares:

Transition.

Rio Laine:

But instead he took all of that knowledge and information and he even, I think speaks about that really wasn’t where he saw himself. He didn’t want to do that anymore. But the thing that always resonated with him was the case is that he had to support elders and kind of work with elderly, and those really touched him and kind of bringing all of that information and that experience and then pivoting to an area of practice that he’s really passionate about.

Adriana Linares:

So a few times he was talking about hiring support, which is a question that I get all the time. It’s not my area necessarily sort of HR and humans. My area of expertise is with the robots, but attorneys ask me all the time, when am I going to be ready to hire someone and what do I look for in doing that? I’m thinking you might have some good advice on that too.

Rio Laine:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I think the key to knowing when you need to hire somebody is probably before you’re overwhelmed and buried and behind. Maybe just before Andrew mentioned that he had this moment where he’s printing off these PDFs and he’s putting them in envelopes and he is taking, he’s like, this took so much of my day and I don’t need to be doing this. It’s a really good idea to be very aware of the amount of time that you’re spending on those kind of administrative, non-substantive law tasks like all of your billing, your paperwork, your documentation, all of those things versus how much time you’re actually practicing law. And if you’re spending more time doing those kind of ins and outs of running the practice, stuffing paper into envelopes, then it’s probably time to hire somebody and get some support for yourself.

Adriana Linares:

This idea of hiring someone can be scary, but with a good case management system, it helps you keep track of all the activity on a matter. It says so-and-so uploaded a document, so-and-so may change it to a document. So-and-so added a note for a matter. So I think once you do decide that it’s time, and you’re really right, you want to decide a little bit ahead of time so that you aren’t so busy that you don’t have the time to hire someone, but if your case management system is set up the way you want it from the beginning and the way you think it should be, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to train someone new on those procedures than you saying to that new person, well, I hadn’t come up with the steps to do that. Could you do that? And then they never do this, so I’m just going to pretend that an attorney decided to do this. And then could you document what you did? Yes. Okay. When you’re starting out is when you want to take the time to figure out how you’re going to open a matter, what details are going to be filled out, what details don’t need to be filled out at that time, and sort of moving along. And then you’re the one that’s going to document that process, not someone else.

Rio Laine:

Because ultimately, even if a task is delegated, as the lawyer you are responsible for supervising, you have the responsibility. And if you aren’t supervising your staff properly, and especially if you’ve hired somebody new and you’re saying, Hey, create this process and then document it, well, they might not any idea what they’re doing. And that’s going to create all sorts of problems for you down the road because ultimately you’re liable for that. If there’s missed deadlines, if they’re providing unauthorized legal advice, if they’re mishandling client funds, information, et cetera. There’s so many different liability risks that you’re opening yourself up to in that instance. And just an anecdote in my past life, I can attest to how valuable that audit log in those practice management programs are. In my past life, I used to work tech support at Clio, actually, and I had a lawyer phone and he said, my associate is telling me that this matter was deleted and that somebody else, a support staff at the firm deleted it.

And this is a big problem. This is a matter, obviously, this is very serious. We need to get this back. So we’re on the phone and we’re going through the audit log and you can see which user deleted a thing, right? Of course you can see it. And I said, so I was like, what did you say your associate’s name was? And he said the name. And I was like, well, it looks like your associate was the one who actually deleted this matter. And the lawyer was like, so you’re telling me that I’ve spent an hour on the phone with you and that he said that someone else did this, but it was actually, and I was like, yeah. And he’s like, thank you very much. I have to go. I was like, yeah, well, so I mean, it’s a really, really good tool to have because it leaves no questions. There’s no gray area in the audit log. It tells you what went where, when, and who put it there.

Adriana Linares:

And in defense of that person, I will say the following and remind attorneys of this, I always warn people like, look, the technology is not going to lie if it says you open the document at this time and you close it at this time. Someone did. So a couple of things. A lot of times attorneys want to use one account for two different employees.

This is a really good reason not to do that, including yourself. So if you’re an attorney practicing full-time, but you have maybe a quarter time or a part-time person and you think you don’t want to give them their own account, here’s exhibit A as to why you need to. And two, keep in mind that someone else can always be logged in as the other person, which is yet another good reason as if you need anymore to make sure you’re always turning on two factor authentication so that there is sort of not just a security, a safety measure for who’s logging in, but also yet again, another layer of assuredness that the person who says who’s logging in is really the person that’s logging in because they would’ve had to enter a code through their phone or something. So just a couple extra tips as you’re thinking about either starting your practice or you’re listening to this as an experienced attorney, you really want to turn on those security measures and give what we call role-based access. What role are they serving in your law firm and what is the minimum amount of access they need to properly do that job? So think about a receptionist. A receptionist doesn’t need to see the trust accounting unless they happen to be doing some bookkeeping work for you. So that role-based access is just a practice, a protocol that we use in technology long outside of legal, just in general, what access does this person need to properly perform their job? And you don’t give them any more or any less.

Rio Laine:

I can certainly speak to the pitfalls of two people sharing an account in your practice management software. Again, we would get calls, oh, this information disappeared. It’s so common. You can have two people in there at the same time working on different things and information gets mixed up, data gets lost, it’s just a mess. So absolutely, it is worth the investment. Everyone should have their own account. That also kind of goes back to properly supervising, right? If you don’t know who’s doing what, then right there you’re just not in compliance with your duty and your obligation to supervise your staff, and you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of other liabilities like data breaches and mishandling of documents, et cetera. Like the list really goes on and on.

Adriana Linares:

Well, real as usual, thank you again for joining me, and thank you so much for having me.

Rio Laine:

It’s always a pleasure to be

Adriana Linares:

Here. All right everyone, thank you for listening and see you next time on New Solo first flight series presented by Ops Insurance. I’ve been

Announcer:

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