Try estate law for a practice with work-life balance, says ‘Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution’ author

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the A BA Journals Lee Rawles. Today I’m joined by Laura Cowan, author of the book Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution. Live a Life You Love Without Leaving the Law. Laura, thanks so much for joining us.

Laura Cowan:

Thank you for having me.

Lee Rawles:

So I always enjoy talking to people who came to law school and the law a little later on in their career. Didn’t go straight from college to law school. I’d love to hear about your own career journey that brought you to the law.

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, I definitely have a somewhat unique journey that got me to law school. I went later in life. I was think 35 when I went to law school, which at the time felt ancient, although now I look back and I realize it wasn’t as ancient as it felt. But yeah, I had worked for about 12 years prior to law school as a CPA and I graduated from Iowa State University, started at Ernst and Young doing auditing and moved to New York just a couple of years out of college. And so I transitioned into some jobs on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, some hedge funds, et cetera, and did that until I was about 35 and decided to go back to school and go to law school. So that was my prior career. And then I graduated law school and almost immediately opened my own practice here in New York City. So I’ve been doing estate planning for almost 10 years now. It’s a boutique firm. We only serve a few clients per month, but that’s my journey. So it’s kind of a combination of working as a CPA for many years and then adding in the law degree and now we’re just going from there.

Lee Rawles:

And you also now have added coaching to your career. So the two hour lawyer lifestyle, tell us what this program is because a great deal of the book I think references it or refers to it.

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, the Two Hour Lifestyle Lawyer, it’s a program that I put together about three years ago, so kind of towards the end of COVID when lawyers were coming back and starting to revamp their practices with everything being virtual. So the program is all about how to launch and build and market a virtual estate planning practice. And it’s a program that I put together in 2022 because I had to turn my entire practice virtual overnight in 2020 in New York City because of COVID. So the estate planning practice area has really changed a lot over the past few years. So now we can do everything virtually now. We can rely on AI and Zoom and a bunch of other things to really help us deliver our services. But the two Hour Lifestyle Lawyer community is really all about teaching lawyers how to have a virtual estate planning practice. They can run from anywhere. So we’ve had about 500 lawyers through the program already and we’re just continuing to grow.

Lee Rawles:

So as you were in law school, and again you said you felt like one of the older people there, but you probably noticed that law school and the people drawn to it aren’t necessarily business-minded people. And a lot of the struggles I think that people have in launching a solo practice in deciding to hang out their own shingle or have this smaller firm is, but I just want to do the law stuff. I don’t really know how to do the business angle. Is that what you’re seeing from a lot of your clients who want to do this kind of a state practice?

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, definitely. They teach us the law and law school and they do a really, really good job of that, and that’s what law school is about. I think one of the downsides is that so many lawyers are going to be either running their own law firm at some point or they’re going to be part of a small law firm where they’re going to have to be involved with the numbers and whatnot, but they don’t teach any of that in law school. Not all of us are going to go to work for big law. And even if you do work at Big Law, eventually you’re going to have to understand how big law works. So yes, we see a lot of lawyers who are very good at what they do and they’re good at estate planning and they’re learning estate planning, and they have all of that figured out. But what they don’t have figured out is how to run a law firm in a way that’s profitable. And we talk a lot about the word profit at two HLL because profit and revenue are not the same thing. But yeah, this is a long way of saying we do get a lot of people in the program and a lot of lawyers in general that are really, really good at the law, but not so much running their practice. And so that’s what we try to help with at two HLL.

Lee Rawles:

I want to focus on the profit part here because one thing I found interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it this way before is you say there are all sorts of things that have to go on to operate a successful practice, but there are only a few parts of that that only a lawyer can do. And to maximize the actual profit, you should make sure that the lawyer are doing those bits and figuring out ways to devote the majority of your time to that. Can you talk about the areas that you think attorneys need to be actually focusing on?

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, I’m so glad that you asked this. This is a really big piece of the puzzle. One of the things we teach in the course is our ACE model, attract close, execute, right? There’s three whatever part of law you’re practicing. Estate planning is the same way. You’re going to have to bring in leads. That’s the attracting. You’re going to have to find a way to close to get people to say yes, to hire you, and then you’re going to have to execute the work, the actual legal work, all of the things that happen around that. And you as the attorney should be focusing on the attracting and the closing because this is what generates revenue. So for example, if you’re doing estate planning, I spend a lot of time hosting workshops and doing really targeted networking like A BNI group, and I spend a lot of time dialing in the close and learning how to educate your prospects and your leads.

So they say yes at the end because those are what generate revenue. A lot of what happens around that can be done by a paralegal or a virtual assistant or some other team member because then that frees you as the attorney up to go focus more on generating revenue. And what I see a lot of is lawyers that spend too much time in the weeds of executing and doing all these different things that an admin could be doing and not spending enough time doing what the lawyer should be focusing on. So they’re both working too much and not making enough money, which is the worst possible combination.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers. One year turn, I’ll still be speaking with Laura Coen, author of Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Laura Coen. Laura, you mentioned building a team and you spend a lot of time talking about that in the book. A lot of people launching their own practice, I think to themselves, well, until I start making a profit, I can’t hire someone. I need to just be able to do everything myself. And you encourage people to think differently about that. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about that advice?

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, I would almost flip that. I would almost say you’re not going to have profit until you hire someone, right? It’s a complete reversal. And I get that it’s so hard. I say in my book, and for those of you who are reading it, this, I bootstrap my practice from day one. I did not have a cash cushion, so I needed to start getting business as soon as possible regardless. But it takes time to get to that point. And so yeah, it just takes time.

Lee Rawles:

One thing that people are seeing is something they can use to amplify the amount they get done is AI products, but there’s also a lot of fear of ai, and I think a lot of it is justified. You need to be careful with your work product when AI has contributed to it. But you have an excerpt in your book where you talk about this, and I would love for you to read it to our listeners.

Laura Cowan:

So we have an excerpt to read starting on page 1 22, and I’ll read this and then we can chat about it. So clients value long-term counsel, not quick fixes. AI generated estate plans or a brief consultation with a financial advisor might seem attractive at first, but estate planning is an ongoing relationship. Laws change family dynamic shift. Clients need long-term support to keep their plans current by emphasizing the value of a long-term relationship. You show clients why working with you is far better than working, than relying on a quick and personal solution. And then we go on to say, you might be thinking, I know this is true, but my clients don’t. You have to tell them the problem hasn’t changed and neither has the solution. So the problem being AI is taking over or legal Zoom is taking over. The problem hasn’t changed. The solution hasn’t either. Educating your community through seminars and webinars so they understand the problems that estate planning solves and why these problems are best handled by an estate planning attorney, not chat GBT. That’s why education is a core value of two hour Lifestyle lawyer, and it’s going to remain that way. An attorney who prioritizes education and relationships in their practice will never be replaced. So go ahead and use AI and other tools in your law firm, but rest assured that they won’t replace you just like Dorothy. You already have everything that you need.

Lee Rawles:

So you talked a couple times about workshops and community engagement, community education. What does that look like for you? How do you put these events on? How do you publicize them? I was really interested to hear more about that.

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, workshops are such an important tool in the estate planning attorneys tool belt because there’s a couple of reasons here. Your leads need to be educated when you’re an estate planning attorney. And what this basically means is if you get in a car accident and you get your third DUI or something like that, you really know why you’re hiring the lawyer. Well, estate planning leads don’t necessarily know why they’re hiring you. They’ve got some general idea that they need an estate plan, but they don’t really know why or how much it should cost and the value, et cetera. So education is always going to be a really, really big part of this. And that means getting out into your community, hosting workshops, hosting seminars, hosting webinars, educating people and driving them to your office for a consultation. So these work because your leads need to be educated and also because people are not necessarily ready to hire you right away, they may not be ready to come in for a consultation.

Even if the consultation is free, they still may not be ready for it. So it’s a nice way to get people into your ecosystem. And this is another little nugget for all of you listening. You want to get people out of the internet, off of the internet, off of wherever they are and into your ecosystem. So even if they’ve just signed up for a workshop or a webinar and they haven’t shown up, they’re still in your ecosystem. You’ve got their email. So there’s a whole bunch of things that are great about workshops. I just listed the three, but there’s a lot of benefits to it.

Lee Rawles:

And do you post about these at senior centers? Who are you targeting when you put out, Hey, I’m holding this workshop and I’m going to explain to you some basics about estate planning?

Laura Cowan:

And that’s a great question and the first thing to think about there is, well, who’s your ideal client? You’re exactly right. So if your ideal client is a senior citizen who has the estate planning needs that a senior would have, well then you’re going to target those senior centers and nursing homes and places where seniors would already be gathering. If your ideal client is a young family, a parent of minor children, then maybe you reach out to parents groups in your community. If it’s entrepreneurs, you go to the local Chamber of commerce. The really nice thing about this is that I’m a big fan of Google Ads and Facebook ads and spending a lot of money on advertising. I’m a big fan of that. But the nice thing about estate planning is that you don’t really have to do that to promote your workshops. What I found is promoting locally with local groups in your community that already exist and just offering to get on their events calendar, just offering to do an informal workshop is much less expensive and usually results in a better ROI.

Lee Rawles:

So let’s talk about the program that you run, the two Hour Lifestyle Lawyer. What is two hours, what takes two hours? Explain the concept to people.

Laura Cowan:

I know it’s funny, we’re three years old now, and so much has happened in that three years. The name comes from when COVID hit in March of 2020. I moved to Rhode Island to shelter in place with my dad. And during that time, I literally went from, I was in New York, I was in person to overnight, completely virtual. And so what ended up happening during that couple of months that I was sheltering in place, I still had to get my law firm running. I had a business to run in bills to pay. So I made everything virtual and I really streamlined everything. And what I found was that I could make pretty easily $10,000 a month working just a couple of hours a day. And so that’s where the two hours comes from. So that was what I put into the course. Now the model is the same, and it works for everyone regardless if you want to work two hours a day or if you want to work 15 hours a day, but that’s where the two hours comes from. Now what we found is that there’s a lot of lawyers who are happy working a lot more than that and are happy earning a lot more, but the name of the business really comes from just this idea that you can still be a really great attorney without working 10 hours a day and you can make a nice living without working 10 hours a day.

Lee Rawles:

I think a lot of attorneys are looking for the flexibility and they may not have been drawn to estate planning in law school, but you found that this is a practice area that allows some work-life balance. Can you talk about why that is? What estate law can do for you as an attorney who’s just looking for more flexibility with your work-life balance?

Laura Cowan:

And I completely agree with you. Flexibility I think is what lawyers are looking for more than ever. And in fact, probably every single profession I think is kind of catching on to the idea of working all the time is not great. So yeah, estate planning is a nice practice area for a lot of different reasons. And you’re right with the flexibility for sure, we now have flexibility in terms of you don’t have to go to an office ever if you don’t want to. And of course that’s the same I would imagine for pretty much every profession at this point. But with estate planning, we used to really be tethered to our office. That’s not the case anymore. So it’s flexible in that sense. It’s flexible in the sense of how many clients do you want to take on each month? What we teach in the program is each client is going to take you about a month from the beginning.

They hire you all the way until they sign their documents. So you can start to think about, well, do I want to serve two clients per month or do I want to serve 10 clients per month and maybe the next month you don’t serve any because you’re traveling. That’s what we mean by flexibility. So there’s a lot of opportunities as well in terms of just being entrepreneurial. This is a really great practice area to scale it up or not scale it up. You can decide how many hours you want to work. And then estate planning is nice too because you’re not dealing with people who are fighting. There’s no divorce, there’s no litigation, there’s no anything like that. It’s really a practice area that you can automate and streamline a lot of it so that when you do sit down in front of the client, you’re in really good shape and you’re in a position to really counsel and advise them. It’s the best combination, I would say, of both artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence. If you’re good at entrepreneurial stuff and being a business owner, but also really great at working with your clients and counseling them, estate planning is a good practice area for them.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take another break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Laura Cowan, author of Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. So Laura, I’ve certainly picked up lawyer self-help style books before where the focus seems to be start that million dollar practice rack up those big numbers. And Lifestyle Lawyer revolution was not that kind of book where it said, oh, hit this number, hit it as fast as you can. Can you share more of your philosophy around why lifestyle is much more important to you as a lawyer than hitting a certain number?

Laura Cowan:

And I think it is interesting because that’s really what we have sort of presented to us. When I launched my firm 10 years ago, I have worked with a lot of different coaches and I’ve invested a lot of money in programs and whatnot, and we still see this today. It’s always about the revenue. It’s always about making as much money as possible, and that seems to be the care that’s dangled. And I can understand that from the perspective of as someone who supported herself her entire life, I get that people need revenue. No one understands that better than I do. But I also see, and this is why I wrote the book, we see so many lawyers feeling like that as the only kind of path to their happiness is more revenue. And so I think it’s important to focus on, well, revenue for one thing, it doesn’t come for free, is kind of like that part of the movie 300 where she talks about how freedom doesn’t come for free. There’s actually, it’s very expensive. Well, it’s the same thing with revenue. It doesn’t come for free. There’s going to be a cost associated with that time and expenses, et cetera. So this is a very long way of saying it is not just about the money and even the mindset that you have about the revenue may actually not be quite correct either. So we wrote the book because we wanted lawyers to feel like there was another way to define success without actually having to quit the law.

Lee Rawles:

And you say, live a life you love without leaving the law is the subtitle to your book. And certainly we see a large percentage of lawyers leaving the profession because they can’t find that balance. And the A BA has done studies that looks like there is a gender impact there where more women leave the profession. Do you see this particularly being a good path for female attorneys?

Laura Cowan:

Yes. And I’m so glad that you asked that, and I’ll give an example to share why I think this is so important. So when I launched my practice 10 years ago, one of the very first things that I did was I started hosting workshops because that was the best way to get business. We’ve already spoken about that. And I was really nervous about hosting workshops. I was new to estate planning. And despite the fact that I was a JD CPA highly accomplished, I still in my own mind was thinking, am I allowed to even do this? And what happened was I hosted the workshop and only six people showed up. But I was really nervous and I did it. And at the end of it, one of the attendees came up to me, and this was a workshop that had six moms had come to the event because I had promoted it with a mom’s group. And at the end of it, she came up to me and she said, thank you for hosting this. I was really nervous about attending. And I thought it was weird that she said she was nervous about attending because I was the one who was nervous. But she said that she was nervous. And then she said, I was worried that you were going to make me feel stupid.

Yes. And that was the exact same reaction I had. So you can imagine I had just opened my law practice. I had not had a single client at this point, but I had hosted this workshop and at the end of it, someone said, thank you for not making me feel stupid. So this is a very long way of me saying that lawyers have value outside of just writing the perfect rule against perpetuity clause. And if you’re an attorney and you’re thinking, I’ve got this law degree, I want to do important work. I know my community needs me, how can I do that? Well, the answer is estate planning because not only are you writing really important legal documents that will teach you how to write, but you’re helping your community protect what’s important and you’re doing it in a way that’s respectful.

Lee Rawles:

And you brought up the word value. Let’s talk about value-based pricing versus the old Infernal Billable hour because this is a whole chapter in your book you devote to it. What do you think is important for readers to consider about billable hour versus value-based pricing?

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, I definitely have a lot of thoughts on this, and I’ll just start off by saying I get that with litigation, it might be a little bit different. I’ve never actually been a litigator, so I’m just going to say that right off the bat. But when it comes to something like estate planning, right? Estate planning is perfect for value-based pricing for flat fee pricing because most people are going to be able to fall into one of your flat fee categories. What we like about this is that the general public has definitely got this idea that, I dunno if we’ve told the general public or how it’s worked, but just this idea that lawyers bill by the hour. And that’s just how we’ve always kind of done it. With estate planning, it’s very easy to show the ROI. It’s easy to show someone, our $5,000 estate plan that we’re drafting for you, it’s going to save you this much in taxes, this much in probate.

Those are just dollar amounts. Let’s not even get into your family conflict that’s now going to be avoided, et cetera. At this point, it really isn’t relevant how long it takes us to draft the documents. We’re providing a very positive outcome for our clients that they can’t get anywhere else. In my opinion, you can’t get that from AI or Legal Zoom or whatnot, right? So we’re providing a very worthwhile outcome that is very aligned with what our clients want. They may not know that in the beginning, but they’re going to know by the end. So the outcome is what matters. Let’s charge based on the outcome, not how long it took us to do the work.

Lee Rawles:

And finally, I would love to talk about my favorite, one of your chapter titles, technology Your Frenemy. I read that and I was like, absolutely. There have been so many times when I’ve convinced myself that, oh, well, if I buy this gadget, if I buy this piece of technology that will just solve everything and everything will be fine and I won’t have to worry. And I think that there are plenty of lawyers who they don’t really know what to go out and get to help them in their practice. What is time saving? What is worth it? So technology, your frenemy, talk us through it.

Laura Cowan:

Yes, that was one of my favorite chapters to write. We need the technology, we need to know what’s going on. We need to be ahead of the pack and whatnot, but we also can’t be consumed by it. And that’s the interesting battle I think that we’re all sort of facing. So with estate planning, and I think in the book we’re really kind of focusing on too, the technology and the social media stuff, getting wrapped up in your social media reels and seeing what everyone else is doing is not helpful. So there’s this kind of challenge that we all have of using the technology that we need, but not letting it kind of control our life. So estate planning, you want to have drafting software for sure. Let that do the heavy lifting. We like interactive legal, we like Wealth Counsel. They’re going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

The systems and operations, I would say are even more important than the technology. There’s nothing that A CRM is going to help you with if you don’t have an actual process to put into the CRM. So I think that going forward for lawyers, we’re going to need to be good at both. We’re going to need to know both how to use certain systems, certain technology without getting overwhelmed, but also not forgetting that the real reason that people hire us is because of the connection. And I firmly believe this. People don’t hire you because you’re the best drafter in the world. They hire you because of the way that you make them feel. So use AI and technology behind the scenes to help you get your work done and deliver a really great client experience, but never forget that it’s going to be that makes them hire you.

Lee Rawles:

Well, lifestyle Lawyer Revolution has been out for a few months. What’s the response been? Have you heard from any readers?

Laura Cowan:

We have. We’ve gotten a great response and we’ve gotten a lot of feedback, especially about the exercises in the book. The book is filled with, and I’ll just take a step back and say the book is not fluff. I’m a big believer in the no fluff Rule. I don’t like fluff, I don’t like reading it. If I’m getting a book, I want to know what the tips and the tools are. So there’s not a lot of fluff in the book, but we do have some exercises there that I actually think are going to be very helpful. The very last exercise, I think is the most important one. And when you read the book, you’ll see that. And so the last exercise, I’m going to make you read the book to go and actually see it, but we’re getting a lot of feedback about the book, that very last exercise. And we’ll be actually launching for the Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution, a book club, so that people who have read the book and are interested in sharing their insights and how they’ve started to implement it in their own life can meet with other people who’ve read the book as well. So that’ll be coming out later this year.

Lee Rawles:

And Laura, if people are interested in finding out more about Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution or about your coaching program or your estate planning business, where would you point them?

Laura Cowan:

Yeah, so if you’re an attorney listening to this, interested in learning more about two HLL, go to two our lifestyle lawyer.com. And that’s the number two. And that’s where you’ll find information about our community, our courses, all the different ways you can get involved and become an estate planning attorney yourself. The other option is to go do lifestyle lawyer revolution.com. That’s where you can find the book and the link to purchase the book. And if you’re interested in learning about my law firm, that’s laura e cowen law.com.

Lee Rawles:

Well thank you to Laura Cowen for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a book you’d like me to consider for a future episode, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.