Community Table: Alternative Fee Structures, Virtual Receptionists, and a Second Office

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

This is Unbillable Hours community table with Clio, a monthly virtual round table where lawyers discuss issues their practices are facing, and receive feedback from lawyer and law firm management consultant Christopher T Anderson. Join the conversation live every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Our first discussion centers around the rising trend of alternative fee structures and how law firms can begin to adopt them.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I remember at Clio Con, which was in October, you released the overall legal trends report, and there were some really amazing findings there. I remember one of the things that was most interesting for me anyway, was the consumer, the legal law firm, customers desire for alternative fee structures, and then how law firms are beginning to respond to that.

Joshua Lenon:

And that’s actually one of the things that we’ll continue to explore. But we found that 71% of legal consumers were interested in paying a flat fee for their entire matter. And what we found the opposite was that 40% of law firms thought that clients preferred that, and 70% of law firms instead were offering hourly billing. That’s what they thought clients most preferred. And where it got really interesting is when we compared firms that were offering flat fee matters versus firms that were using or adopting artificial intelligence technology, what we found was there was a strongest correlation between firms that were widely adopting AI and firms that were offering flat fee matters. They were learning that it’s not about billing time necessarily, but about having efficiency in relation to the amount you’re charging.

And that client’s preferences could actually lead to a real big business opportunity. So for three years now, we’ve been doing some different breakdowns of our legal trends report information. We have a mid-size law firm report and a solo and small firm report. And that one will be released later. And there are a couple of topics that we’re investigating, most of which related to our full release that happened in last October. We’ll be taking a look at how widely is AI un adopted by mid-size law firms? What are customers telling us about flat Ps versus what mid-size law firms are actually charging? And we are taking a look at some of our annual benchmarks as they apply to mid-size law firms versus smaller law firms. So we’ve always seen the mid-size law firms have a much higher utilization rate, for example, because they have the back office operations to offload a lot of that administrative work. But we’ve started to see that technology is enabling smaller law firms to raise their utilization rate. We’re starting to get closer and closer between the two. So how are law firms going to leverage technology better and keep that edge as a mid-size law firm? We also know that mid-size law firms collection rates are actually much lower than smaller law firms, especially law firms that have been adopting different types of billing technology like online payments, things like that. And so will that disparity continue?

Christopher T. Anderson:

You said mid-size are doing worse, their collection rates are lower,

Joshua Lenon:

Rates are historically been lower.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I don’t think that people think that that’s not what intuitively,

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah, and this is a big data view, and so there’s always more questions raised by the data than answered. Part of it might be how we’re defining the collection rate. We use a rolling collection rate that looks over a bill that had been issued in the past three months and has it been marked paid, voided or reduced? And that definition just might not be the right definition for midsize law firms and their collection rates. And again, big data, big questions. And one of the things we’ve always published is the average hourly race for across the United States, but in looking at mid-size law firms, I’m beginning to think a single average is not the right view. But instead, should we be looking at breakdowns? How many fees are they charging across different roles? What is the difference in the amounts being charged? What is the spread of fees? And are we seeing, we’ve seen with the Cravath lockstep system in AMLO law firms, are we seeing midsize law firms leaning into a certain type of hourly fee amount and ratio? And does that differ from the rest of the legal market? And I’m really excited to where that research is going, and I look forward to talking about it once we get it all together.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So Andrea, let me ask you, so based on some of this conversation, one of the things that we’ve been talking with Clio about, with Joshua about on the show and elsewhere, is this movement among law firms to consider billing in a different way than the billable hour. Also to look, once you do that, the incentives for efficiency become much more powerful. When you build by the hour, there’s really limited motivation to be efficient because efficiency is fewer hours. So in thinking big, which we talked about on the show, the entrepreneurial mindset, what thoughts do you have about this consideration about whether something different than billing for time is under consideration?

Andrea Liebross:

I think this happens in a lot of industries, this debate of should this be a flat fee or we bill hourly. A lot of times people go to what’s best for the client that drives what they’re doing, but then they start to look at, well, what’s best for me,

The owner, the firm owner? And sometimes those answers are different, but a lot of times they’re the same. So I think if it’s a legal matter, I dunno if I can use this straightforward or we think we can, I don’t know if anything’s straightforward anymore, but I think the flat fee is actually a great idea. I think that the client knows what they’re getting upfront, what they’re paying for, but from a business owner standpoint, it is really forcing you to look at your systems and processes and see where there are loopholes. And it also helps you plan your time. So when I talk to a lot of attorneys, one of the things that they get hung up on is, well, we just don’t know. We don’t know when we’re going to get a response. We don’t know what we’re going to be doing that week. We don’t know. I mean, only things they really know are deadlines, court appearances. I mean, they do know a lot of things, but they don’t know what’s going to come out of those. So in planning time post deadline, they can’t. So I think this forces you that doesn’t eliminate this problem. Of course, that time thing from external beings, external entities, but it does force you to really examine down to nitty gritty what’s going on. And I think that can only be beneficial.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, no. When you and I talked on the show, we talked about people, and again, to use your parlance thinking big, how part of that involves stepping in order to think more bigly about their businesses, about their future, they had to step outside their comfort zones. And gosh, you couldn’t, for a lot of lawyers, a lot of law firms, you couldn’t talk about anything more outside their comfort zone than abandoning the billable hour. So you say you’ve seen this in other industries as well. How do you think bigger about it? How would you suggest someone feel strong enough to take that step?

Andrea Liebross:

There could be conflict in this, right? Sure. So I think a lot of attorneys have a hard time. They hate entering billable hours. They’re behind on that constantly. Even if they have something amazing like Clio, they’re Notre doing it. So this would eliminate that problem in a sense. Maybe to go back to what Joshua was saying before, maybe this would even increase collections, we wouldn’t have that problem because you can get maybe they’re only getting billed up one time upfront. Josh, are you thinking?

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah, actually, when you talk about that, our own legal trends report data shows that flat fee matters are twice as likely to get paid on the day the matter is opened. They just have money. It’s not a collections issue at all. Am I even going to do the work?

Andrea Liebross:

So I think that helps with that issue. If we go to future you, I’m thinking most future you or the owners three years from now would love to say that their collections are at 90%, right? So that’s something probably they all would want. So maybe this could help with that. One of the things that we talked about, Christopher that day was thought options. So we have thought options on how we want to think about this. Do we want to think, oh no, we can’t do it because this is the way it’s always been. We’ve always done the billable hour. Or do we want to think, oh, well maybe we should explore this a little more. What I see in another industry, so this is kind of interesting. In interior design. In interior design, most interior designers are taught, the way to do it is a flat fee.

So kind of the opposite of attorneys. So the way to do it is a flat fee. However, I’ve seen the most successful interior designers, actually even the ones that have been in business for 20 or 30 years, they never do a flat fee. They only do billable hour. They don’t know where the job might go. Someone says, Hey, can you help me redo my kitchen? And then all of a sudden we’re onto the stairs and the powder bath and they’ve got into the great room, the project, the scope of work is expanding. So they’ve found that billable hour is helpful, but in your world, it’s like we’re focusing on the matter, right? There’s no rooms. We’re not expanding into a different room.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh, you have no idea.

Andrea Liebross:

Well, it goes down those slippery slopes, but you could always go back if you’re structuring your agreement in a way that says, Hey, this is what you are paying for upfront. Now another rock has been turned over and we’ve noticed there’s something else.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, scope of work, whenever you’re doing flat fees, scope of work is so critical. And I would say you the same thing to your design folks, right?

Andrea Liebross:

That’s

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got to be the key. Let’s turn to Rob here real quick, because Rob, you’ve helped law firms implement alternative billing structures other than the billable hour. What are some things you think about that are relevant to a law firm that maybe we haven’t discussed yet? How do you suggest firms approach this?

Robert Leitner:

That’s an interesting question. For firms who either already offer flat fee or who maybe want to transition to flat fee critical that they understand their cost of goods for providing the service. So now we get into profitability. So it’s really important for all the different services our firm provides, what will be the flat fee? And for the typical case, how much labor et cetera will be put into and what is our profit margin per skew? That has to be known, or you’re setting the firm up for a big problem. That’s number one. Number two, even with flat fee, of course, time entry from your billable resources is still critical. 100% critical. In fact, it’s critical no matter how you bill, right? There are three or four different methods, it doesn’t matter. And that has to be stressed to the team as well. Just because we’re flat fee, sometimes it’s more important to make sure that all your time is entered for all the obvious reasons.

Accountability, bar complaints, calculating cost of goods for the service, capacity, calculations, utilization, all of these in some way or another, rely on accurate time entry for the potential new client. Comparison shopping is a little bit difficult if the firms offer different ways to charge. So flat fee billing for time hourly, when intake and sales are speaking with potential new clients, they’re going to have to overcome that issue because for the typical consumer, I’m not a hundred percent sure how I would compare your hourly, your flat fee, you got to give me a little bit more. So that would be a hurdle to overcome in the sales process. It’s also an opportunity to really excel in the sales process and provide education and information on how this would be better for the clients. And finally, I would just note which we’ve touched upon flat fee billing is maybe not the best for every practice. It really depends and it requires a close analysis and frankly, a lot of financial modeling. Before you would make the jump into that pool,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Where would you see it not being a good idea?

Robert Leitner:

Well, some ways it’s completely inapplicable for personal injury.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Sure. Yeah.

Robert Leitner:

I guess any practice area where there isn’t such a common and consistent skew where the predictability isn’t there a lot of time maybe for criminal matters, if it’s going to trial, obviously the flat fee is not going to work. And that gets into the agreements. And that’s another point. All of our engagement agreements have to cover contingencies. So frankly, the firm is still covering their costs if a matter moves to trial or something else. So I would say for more predictable practice areas, the example would be a non-complex few asset. Simple divorce flat fee would probably be applicable

Christopher T. Anderson:

Because more predictability there. And I think to your point, the more experience that the firm has with those matters, the more risk of the outliers can be undertaken because they understand the business model more. Joshua, coming back to you, Rob mentioned some stuff about making sure you’re paying attention to profitability, making sure you understand your inputs, your labor inputs. I wanted you to speak to that and how firms should be able to do that as well as whatever you wanted to add there.

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah, honestly, most firms don’t track that, at least not in a way that enables them to make these calculations. We see that labor is actually one of the highest costs for most law firms. That makes sense because we’re a knowledge-based business, we’re hiring highly trained people, we’re trusting them with very sensitive information. You should pay those people well, but they don’t always then do a breakdown of those labor costs against their incoming revenue and equate it as a margin as opposed to just now I have cash in the bank.

One of the things that I think we need to get better at as an industry, legal tech industry is teaching lawyers how to calculate things like not just revenue but profit margin and what does that really entail? There’s a stereotype of the law student going to law school because they hate math, but there’s a kernel of truth of that sometimes in a lot of lawyers out there. I do want to go back to a couple of things that Rob said, which I found really interesting. The first of which is that he said personal injury is not an area where a flat fee makes sense. Interestingly, our own data shows that personal injury and medical malpractice are two practice areas where firms that are charging a flat fee are actually getting more on average per matter than the firms that are going contingency.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s really shocking.

Joshua Lenon:

And what I think might be contributing to that is personal injury and medical malpractice are two areas where there has been a huge amount of data analysis investment done by insurance companies and there’s been a lot of litigation around them. And so there is I think data outside of the law firm that can be used for certain types of prediction. So worker’s comp claim, it has this type of injury, we know the insurance companies are going to pay you this much and it’s just done. Or we’re in Florida, the rules of professional conduct actually impose certain limitations on what I can bill, if you sign this form, I get this amount. And so let’s just do that and we’ll be done with it. And so litigation is not immune from flat fees. The practice area with the second to highest use for it is actually criminal defense and pure litigation, but we know because most cases don’t go to trial, they’ll charge to that fee for those types of cases and then switch over to hourly as you move into that unpredictable workflow,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right? So a little bit of a hybrid there. You have flat fee for the predictable part and hourly for the unpredictable, where the risk is too high to suggest a flat fee.

Joshua Lenon:

And what we talked about simple divorces, actually flat fees can be a really good tool to keep divorces simple. I know a lot in Texas it’s a sole lawyer and she has an a la carte menu. You want to fight about the house, it’ll be this many thousand dollars have custody, it’s going to be this many thousand dollars per kid you want to fight about the dog. It can be a thousand bucks. And it actually creates a strategy and an evaluation of how complex your client wants the divorce to be. And if down the line they decide they really want that dog and you give them a thousand dollars bill, you’ll find that their mind changes

Christopher T. Anderson:

Indeed. So

Joshua Lenon:

Flat fees don’t have to be just one monolith bill, but instead can be structured in a hybrid fashion. We’ve talked about it can be done as unbundled with segments leading to different types of costs. And we’ve seen this as a part of complex litigation pricing for bigger law firms for a long time. So now we’re starting to see it now in the rest of the legal industry.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And what you’re talking about really makes sense because it’s doing something that law has done a really bad job of in the past, which is allowing clients to make a cost benefit analysis before they spend their money. Because yeah, usually the cost benefit analysis is kind of like, wow, it wasn’t worth this bill that I already incurred and now have to pay, but I had no idea what size the bill was going to be. Andrea, let me turn this over to you and I will wrap up the conversation about billables or about billing structures. But one thing that in the context of thinking big and the way that you work with your clients is this is a risk management and thinking big sometimes is being willing to take different kinds of risks than you’re used to. So in that context, in thinking big and moving risk from clients onto the business owners, onto the law firm owners, what do you see as opportunities or pitfalls for people that you work with?

Andrea Liebross:

So there, there’s risk management and then that kind of plays into your level of confidence on whether or not this is going to work or not. I always say that confidence is really just your willingness to feel any feeling. Risk is your willingness to deal with any situation that might come up. What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the best thing that could happen? Are you giving each of those equal airtime? This really plays along with what’s the risk tolerance of the business owner. Some of them are going to be sure, let’s go for it. Others are going to pull back because they don’t want that uncertainty. But one of the tenets of thinking big is you have to embrace uncertainty. You have to be okay with the unknown or else you are going to stay in your same, it’s your same patterns. I say small thinking, but it’s safe to do billable hours. That’s the way you’ve always been taught. So big thinkers might say, Josh has some really good points. Let’s go explore that. Indeed.

Joshua Lenon:

One other thing that a lot of law firms don’t realize is that you can experiment with this. You don’t have to charge every client the exact same way. If you are worried about risk and making sure you’ve got the processes in place to perform efficiently, just try it with one client in one matter. So long as the fee is reasonable, you’re ethically allowed to do that. The risk is much smaller than they think to get the evidence they need to move forward. Andrea has a point to go with that.

Andrea Liebross:

So I know that lawyers aren’t usually deep into math, as you said, or the sciences, they’re not the STEM experts. But I like to say too, treat this as a science experiment. Use that word evidence, right? Treat this as a science experiment. Hey, let’s try this out for a six month period of time, a year, whatever seems a reasonable, and then let’s see if our hypothesis was right. But then that goes back to you trying to really manage understanding profitability. So you’ve got to have a good handle on that. But just because you decide to try the so doesn’t mean you have to do it forever. So I like the science experiment kind of thinking. It usually makes things a lot more tolerable.

Announcer:

The next discussion comes from an attorney who is considering not replacing their retiring receptionist, but using an online service instead.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright, we’re going to turn our attention to some from the mailbox. The first question that we’ve got from there is as follows, and I’ll let Joshua, you’ll take the first crack at this one. Rob, you can follow up and I’ll see if I have anything to say at all. The question is this, we had our longtime receptionist leave. I could hire someone new, but do I really need to, it’s 2025. Could I really get away with not hiring and using a full-time service like Posh or Ruby? What do I need to consider without a regular person? So yeah, so the question’s about can we get in today’s day and age, can a law firm get away with not replacing a receptionist and using an online service of some sort? So Joshua, you want to take first stab at that?

Joshua Lenon:

Yeah, I think the answer is yes, you absolutely can replace a receptionist with these online services. And the reason I say that is because there has been a big shift in how clients expect to interact with law firms. They want to be able to interact with the law firm, not just during business hours but outside of it. And these services actually extend your reception like capabilities well beyond the business day. They also can extend your capabilities into different communities that may not have been supported by your previous perceptionist, like language support across multiple languages. And so there is a huge benefit to doing this as well, a very large reduction in cost. And one of the interesting things about these is they oftentimes integrate into your tech stack already. So if you have voiceover ip, if you have practice management, they can take the information that they’re gathering and populate your data set for you. And so it says both you and the potential client from having to do this busy work. So there’s a really large upside to this, especially if you’re dealing with a client base that you’re meeting with virtually. There’s no downside here. If you are more of an office front law firm, I think you do have to ask about the in-person duties and how you’re going to replace in-person duties. Is this the person that is making the coffee and the paper and the copier, right?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Lock it up.

Joshua Lenon:

Not a service that these virtual receptionists can do, but if you’re looking for somebody to answer the phone to answer basic questions by your law firm to help with scheduling, some of these can even do outbound calls on your behalf like, oh, we’ve had to move the time or your bill’s not due these virtual receptionists and should be considered if you’re looking to replace a longtime receptionist that has left.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, so great. I think that gives a lot of thought there. Rob, anything to add to Joshua’s?

Robert Leitner:

No, I think Joshua hit most of the points. I would only add that I personally would conduct a pricing analysis based upon your call volume. When the calls come in, do you need weekend coverage? Do you need after hours coverage? And you can simply compare, is it cheaper to have someone in the office or to outsource this? I will say this outsourcing to the various companies that we all know has become much more expensive in the past year or two. So we need to decide is it on parity with actually keeping a person full-time as a receptionist? But besides the points that Joshua mentioned, I would really focus on do an analysis last quarter based upon the call volume. If we had outsourced this, what would it have cost the firm? The only other point is this, I’d want to know what the expectations are of your receptionist, especially with respect to answering the phone. Is it just answering the phone and pointing them in the right direction? Is it an intake? Are they setting appointments? Do they have other duties? Then it comes to training and skills and it complicates things a little bit. So I’d want to clarify what the expectations are for your staff.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And to Rob’s point, if you’re using VO OIP or whatever, we actually as a business, we did this analysis ourselves because a lot of these services charge by the minute and you can get the data from your virtual phone system as to how many minutes of inbound calls you’ve had and thereby get an estimate. Now it’s only an estimate because it’ll also count the minutes when calls reached somebody other than reception that you won’t be replacing. So it’s an estimate, but you can get a good idea of what the spend would be by analyzing those minutes. A lot of this is coming online. I think to Rob’s point, I also have seen that price increase over the past couple of years. I also expect there to be a significant turn in that over the next couple of years as these firms begin to compete with one another.

And because just like for us these virtual AI services, they scale, there is is almost a zero incremental cost to additional minutes for these firms. And it’s the setup, it’s the training, it’s all the costs they’re incurring. Now that will become commoditized to some extent I think in the years to come. That being said, it’s going to constantly improve and there’s going to be r and d and there’s going to be a huge amount of ongoing training costs as these things improve. I’m not going to mention the name of the company, but I took a Josh, I’ll definitely come back to you. One of the companies that solicited said, in order to really trust what we’re saying, call us. Here’s the number, call us and interact with our ai. And so I did, and my conclusion this is now 60 days ago was that it was good.

There was no question in my mind that I was talking to a bot. There were cues, there was delays, but I messed with it and it actually responded with some humor. And when I said, they said, what would you be available for a call? And I said, well probably ask sometime after Christmas. And the response was, oh, I see you’re very busy. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be humorous, but I took it to be what it was. But the data to do the analysis you’re talking about, Rob, we have almost all of us have that data and can make that analysis today. Joshua, what did you want to follow up on?

Joshua Lenon:

You talked about training and onboarding for a new system, but you have those exact same costs. Absolutely. Receptionist and a lot of these systems already have personnel who have been doing reception work for law firms for a long time. And so it’s not training them from scratch, but instead making sure that they know the exact thing you are expecting for your law firm and they probably already have the workbook for that laid out. So I think when it comes to telephone and scheduling, these virtual systems are a really good option.

Announcer:

Our last discussion focuses on the viability of opening a second office in a nearby town.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright, we’ll go to a question from the mailbag. Our firm is increasingly getting more clients from the next town over. Travel isn’t a big time factor because we do a lot over the internet and email, so we could keep going as is and keep just one office. Is there a tipping point for when to open a new office to serve those community members? And Rob Joshua got the first crack last time. I’ll give you the first crack this time. So the question is, yeah, I’m getting a lot of clients from the town next door. When does it make sense to open an office there?

Robert Leitner:

Interesting, interesting question. So I’d first want to know, do your clients expect in-person service? Let’s start there. Do you even need an office there? If things are conducted mostly virtual, then you can certainly have a virtual presence versus physical. In addition, I would start probably advertising through digital marketing, open up a Google My Business profile in that locale so you can start catering to those people. You may need a physical presence for that, most probably will, but it could be very small. I would also consider, if you’re really thinking about opening a physical office, consider doing a proforma, do kind of a forecast and consider the office on its own merits. What would it take to open the office? How many people would be there? How would you staff it? How many cases do you think will come in through that office and basically create a budget and treat that office as a standalone division and then see if the math adds up. It may or may not. Those would be my initial points.

Joshua Lenon:

I’m going to play a devil’s advocate and say,

Robert Leitner:

There we go.

Joshua Lenon:

Probably never lines up. I think it would be smarter to buy the law firm a car and take those business expenses, something that’s deductible and chargeable and make the travel a part of your business expenses rather than expecting your employees to just relocate every time there’s work and taking their personal car. You have to keep track of that and worrying about is their car in good shape? Does it represent your firm? Well, I would argue that until it basically overwhelms the amount of business you’re getting in your current locale, there’s no upside to opening that second location.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. And I’m going to take the, I don’t know what’s the middle between Rob’s and the devil’s advocate. I’m going to take a middle road here and I think some additional things to think about. So like what Rob mentioned about Google my business, absolutely. But taking a step back from that, it’s like the first question is do you want this business? Do you want more? One of the ways that a lot of my businesses have grown and that have kind of led me is when stuff like this starts to happen, okay, I’m getting spillover from the next town over. What is that telling me? Is that telling me there’s demand there? Is it because all of my marketing is hitting that town anyway? Or is it really just spillover? I want to learn a little bit about it. If I don’t want the business, if it is affecting me and it’s just like, just spillover, maybe I’ll tighten up my marketing spend and focus it back into my town.

But if I do want it and it’s not just spill, I mean, and it is just spillover, what if I did something specific to that town and this is all before thinking about opening an office. What if I just enhanced what the marketing is doing? Let’s test what’s going on. Rob mentioned Google My Business. Well, to be really effective at that, you actually Google prefers and will try to test you on actually having a space there they don’t like particularly that you just try to pretend. So a pretty easy hack is to affiliate with a non-competitive business to be able to use their conference room and receive mail. It could be a non-competitive business, it could be a co-working space though Google, it’s harder with Google on co-working spaces that are kind of gotten savvy to that. So a non-competitive business makes it easier and quite honestly it’s less expensive to be able to do that. And again, to test now I’ve got Google my business, I’ve got an actual space, I can use a conference room when necessary, but it’s a very low investment and you can still go Joshua’s path and invested in travel expenses a car or hopefully self-driving car pretty soon.

Joshua Lenon:

Have them travel to you

Christopher T. Anderson:

As much as possible, right? Because so much today could be done virtually. Beautiful. Yeah. You know what we’d like for you to come visit with us in our conference room. We will send an Uber at our expense. Wow, isn’t that much better than putting your people on the road if you lead up that Uber expense in a heartbeat, putting one of your team no matter what level on the road. There’s a

Joshua Lenon:

Lot of assumptions about the type of clientele and the type of law firm course for something like that. But yeah, there are so many different options. I’m sorry before I interrupted you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Not at all. Not at all. I think those are really good points. And then the last step would be as if the marketing just really does take off and DARS starting to generate a lot of business in that town. I imagine at some point because you had built your firm and built your marketing around the team, you’ve got, as you consider now adding to your team, you can look there so that you can have an opportunistic hire in that new town that may or may not need space, but where you can, as you decide to grow your team, maybe that’s where you might make your growth and then expand your footprint a little bit. But what I think I’ve tried to describe here is a roadmap to getting your feet wet, slowly weeing into the concept as slowly as possible. Because so much today can be done virtually.

The whole transportation thing is really the exception rather than the rule. And I’ll just throw this out there. My personal experience has been that the very small percentage of clients who assist on meeting in person are always problematic and just will continue to be. And so maybe don’t react to that small percentage with too much weight or giving them too much weight, especially if the serendipitous marketing is just giving you plenty of leads and plenty of new clients. Maybe in the beginning you just say, well we don’t do that. We don’t do the in-person meeting until you need to. So those are the items I would add to the conversation.

Joshua Lenon:

One other thing we didn’t discuss is taking a look at existing law firms within that area and is this something that you can create a referral and sharing agreement with? Could you hire them as locum? Could you acquire law firm? There are lots of opportunities to manage this type of over spill business without immediately signing a lease for new commercial office space. Absolutely. I would recommend any and all experiments well prior to that.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Really, really good additional points. Thank you Joshua. Alright, well I think that rounds out the questions that we’ve got today. I’ll remind everybody that you can catch the Community table live every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern next month. Just as a teaser for everybody, our guest from the Unbillable Hour this month is Steve Fretzin and he will be on the community table next week answering your questions about becoming that lawyer. So Steve Frets son’s book is Be That Lawyer 101 Top Rainmaker Secrets to Growing a Successful Law Practice. He’s going to be with us here on the Community table next month, on the third Thursday, 19th of June at 3:00 PM Eastern. So look forward to seeing you there. Of course, remember, if you can’t make it at three live, you can drop your questions right here on the unbillable hour on the Legal Talk network.com page on the show notes, drop your questions and we’ll get ’em answered on the show. Until then, take care.

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Thank you for listening. This has been Unbillable Hours. Community Table with Clio on the Legal Talk Network.

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