SeedJura: Decoding Law

In this episode directed primarily towards lawyers, Phyllis helps illustrate lawyers' need to convey the value they bring to a situation, so that clients can better understand the price of lawyers' services.

Geneve and Phyllis highlight where there’s a disconnect between clients' and lawyers' perceptions of legal fees:

• Clients only see the price tag associated with lawyers and not the value and experience lawyers bring to the table
• Clients don’t feel like they’re given options with fees

Next, Geneve and Phyllis propose solutions on how lawyers can better communicate with their clients when discussing their fees:

• Lawyers need to understand the business and services of their clients so they can approach the conversation with insights into clients' specific legal needs
• To help lawyers better communicate their own value, Geneve reviews the Value Chart highlighted in EP03, which explains the many layers of value a lawyer can offer (a further explanation can be found in the the 3rd episode of SeedJura: Decoding Law ( "Why Are Lawyers So Expensive?")
• Understanding a client’s budget is essential when first establishing a client relationship
• Lawyers must communicate both expected fees and any cost overages that arise outside of the initially negotiated rate

Next Week's Episode: Geneve will lead a discussion aimed at clients that asks the question, "What Do Lawyers Actually Do?"

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In this episode of SeedJura: Decoding Law, Geneve and Phyllis are joined Tony Alfonso, another co-founder of SeedJura. The three colleagues discuss past and present trends in the legal industry and share enlightening, 'behind-the-scenes' information about the industry with non-lawyers/clients.

The SeedJura trio explores the traditional structure and flow of the legal industry:

• Previously, lawyers would go to undergrad and then law school in hopes of getting into a large firm (only 1% of lawyers go on to start a solo practice). After years of work, lawyers could hope to be promoted to partner at their firms. And, partners could offload work onto younger associates. But none of this is universally the case anymore.
• In the past, potential clients would only have word-of-mouth information for evaluating the efficacy of lawyers, and were subjected to the fees and expenses of the currently available pool of lawyers.
• Law firms are more of an aggregate for individual businesses than they are a conglomerate of legal minds. Individual attorneys at firms are responsible for acquiring their own clients.
• Clients belong to attorneys, not the firms. If an attorney leaves a firm, their clients are more then likely to leave with them.

Geneve, Phyllis, and Tony reflect on the traditional way that attorneys were trained:

• Landing a job at a law firm can feel like a fish-out-of-water scenario for newer lawyers. Lawyers need an apprenticeship to learn how to apply their legal studies into the practical world.
• Even at a law firm, attorneys function as solo practitioners, trying to generate business and billable hours for themselves as opposed to working holistically for the firm.
• Often, attorneys work for years at firms and either get promoted to partner, or work for a company and become in-house council.

Traditional marketing in the legal world is complicated:

• Marketing has been all about personal connections and going out and meeting people.
• Lawyers have had to be salespeople, otherwise they wouldn't generate new business.
• There were historically no standards for providing services or marketing, it was all at the discretion of individual attorneys.

Next Week's Episode: Tony joins Phyllis and Geneve again to discuss the future of the legal industry.

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

An introduction to SeedJura and hosts Geneve DuBois & Phyllis Shuster, plus a discussion of why (and when) businesses need lawyers.

After hosts Geneve & Phyllis briefly introduce themselves and introduce their company SeedJura, Geneve dives into the topic of why and in what circumstances your business needs a lawyer, using a 4-point “checklist” to determine whether the situation would benefit from legal counsel.

The 4-point checklist is abbreviated as “GMCD” – to help you remember this abbreviation, you can think of Driving a GMC truck to your destination (where your destination is legal protection)!

GMCD:

• Giant – when you need a Giant in the marketplace to represent you (=credibility & not being bullied)
  • Small companies facing lenders/venture capital companies (who is the other side?)
  • Foreign companies
  • Advocacy + Knowledge
• Money/Lives – when you are dealing with other people’s $$ and/or Lives (= high risk situations)
  • Highly regulated industries
• Challenge – when what you do can be challenged (or is being challenged) by officials/governments/other entities (= formal legal procedures concerning taxes/estate tax/ litigation/ investigation/ownership)
  • • Situations in which not getting procedures and formalities done correctly will have serious legal impacts or invalidity
• Domino Effects – an action will have domino effects on your business (= need overall planning and strategies
  • e.g. Corporate and tax structures
  • Buying property (think about sale in the future – e.g. you maybe OK with some issues when you buy, but would the future buyer be OK?)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

In this episode directed primarily to lawyers, Phyllis discusses how to ensure your clients know why they need you.

Problems with today’s legal industry that causes clients to not understand why they need lawyers:

• "They should know our value” mentality
• Nobody actually knows what lawyers do
• Lawyers = messy and expensive (everything becomes more complicated)

Solutions:

1. Know their business/background
2. Understand what others in their business (with similar background) do and need in legal process
3. Don’t be reactive (don’t just ask –what can we do for you?)
4. Help them evaluate at what point they actually need lawyers (use: GMCD method - listen to EP01. For Clients: Why Do I Need Lawyers?)
5. Give them clear steps based on their current business path and show them their legal needs from this point forward → have an honest discussion with them of when they actually need lawyers throughout those steps (investment)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

In this episode directed primarily to clients of lawyers, Geneve helps to explain why lawyers and legal services always seem so expensive.

(A note from Geneve & Phyllis: we are not trying to justify that lawyers should be expensive, but this area is the biggest gap between lawyers and clients, so we need to look at this from both sides' perspectives.)

In this episode, Geneve & Phyllis first discuss common perceptions about lawyers and legal fees:

• They charge you for everything, even a phone call
• They charge everything based on hourly rate
• Hourly rate is all over the place – some lawyers are $300 per hour and some are $1,200 per hour
• They spend so many hours on everything (and how would clients know how many hours a lawyer should spend on a specific task?)
• Bottom-line: the perception is that lawyers are expensive (and that the charges ≠ value)!

Geneve explains how this perception is an industry problem:

• What lawyers do is often invisible and not easy to understand
• Lawyers are not salespeople – they're usually not good at explaining their value in exchange for what they charge
• Law firm structure – based on billable hours and have many ethical boundaries (this means little flexibility)

Next, Phyllis explains the different ways lawyers can charge you (there's more than one!) and how you can explore different options that fit your business model and that are within your lawyer's’ law firm and ethical parameters:

• Flat fee
• Hourly rate by hours worked (most common)
• Cap fee
• Contingency fee

Finally, Geneve and Phyllis discuss the value that lawyers do actually bring their clients, specifically, the 6 Layers of value that lawyers can bring their clients.

The 6 Layers of Value:

1. Branding
2. Insurance
3. Strategies
4. Representation (negotiation & representing you in the market place)
5. Education
6. Producing Documents (secretarial tasks)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)