About Our Guest
Dan Lear
Technology will transform the legal sector and make lawyers’ lives easier. I'm working on the front lines of that change. I'm currently an executive at two legal technology startups: Gravity Legal where we're building the financial engine to power the modern legal economy and Off The Record where we're transforming the way ... Learn MoreDescription
Dan Lear is a lawyer and legal industry gadfly, Chief Instigator of Right Brain Law, and partnership builder at Gravity Legal.
As a practicing attorney, he advised technology companies from startups to the Fortune 100. Since his transition from tech lawyer to legal technologist Dan’s been mentioned, featured, or published widely in the legal industry press and spoken to legal and non-legal audiences in a number of settings including at SXSW Interactive, Ignite Seattle, Georgetown University, Stanford University, ReInvent Law, and the National Conference of Bar Presidents. Most recently, Dan was the Director of Industry Relations for Avvo. — with Mark Homer at GNGF.
In this episode, Mark Homer talks with Dan about leaving Avvo and what drew him to Gravity Legal in the first place. Dan’s passion and dedication to the culture at Gravity Legal and what Gravity Legal does for law firms. Dan is an expert on the payment challenges all law firms face. From large to small, law practices all have the same basic concerns about payment. Getting paid can be a huge pain point, but Gravity Legal can eliminate the days of writing off hours of work when it comes time for collecting payment.
Like, Follow, Comment, & Subscribe! GNGF
Show Notes
Transcript
– Thanks for joining us. This is our extended interview with Dan Lear, the resident legal mind at Gravity Legal. The first part of this video’s from our GNGF Live which premiers every other Wednesday. The second part here is this bonus extended interview where we dive more into like the payment challenges that law firms face and how Gravity helps solve them. If you already saw the Live, up at the timestamp to the exclusive extended interview below. So be sure to like and subscribe to follow along with all of our great conversations on legal marketing and the business side of running a law firm. And to watch this video on your platform of choice, you can find everywhere we stream at gngf.tv. Welcome to GNGF Live, your bi-weekly ask the experts about all things law firm marketing and business growth. I’m Mark Homer, author of Online Law Practice Strategies and founder of Get Noticed Get Found. I’m very excited to have today’s guest, Dan Lear of Gravity Legal. I’ve gotten to know Dan very well over the past seven or eight years. We crossed paths at a lot of legal conferences and you can find us chatting back and forth on Twitter too. When Dan Lear was with Avvo, I spoke at a lawyer economics once where Dan gave me one of the nicest, warmest introductions I’ve ever received. He also contributed a chapter to the last two editions of our book Online Law Practice Strategies. So I’m honored that he agreed to be interviewed on our GNGF Live show today. As always, be sure to like and subscribe to our page, not just the video, so you can get updated when our next episode goes live. Of course, it never hurts for your to show a little love and give a high five with your mouse to the like button to help us out with that Facebook algorithm. During the premier of this episode, we do have moderators in the chat so please ask questions and interact while we’re live. And if you’re watching this in the future, after we premiered, we do monitor the comments on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn and we’ll work to reach out to our guest and answer any follow up questions you have. And on weeks that we’re not premiering a new GNGF Live interview, we drop our videos as part of our GNGF Tips series. These are in-depth videos focusing on one topic at a time. Check it out on our YouTube page. Jo, just link to one of the latest videos we have. I think we have a like, marketing strategy would be a great one. Check them out. Like I said, we drop a new GNGF Tips video every other Friday. All right, let’s get into the interview. Dan, thanks for joining me today.
– It’s really great to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity, Mark.
– Awesome, yeah. So Dan when we first met, I mean you were at Avvo. This is many years ago and it’s been an interesting road for sure watching you since Avvo’s sold and just, I feel like over the last couple of years, everywhere I turn, you’re being pulled into like the center of like some legal innovation conversations. So what’s that been like? Because it’s been fun to watch and just to get involved in all these conversations.
– Yeah. You probably don’t go enough places, Mark, because I don’t think I’m in that many conversations, but I appreciate you saying that. You know, it was really interesting, especially kind of my last few years at Avvo. I kept bringing all of what I thought were these really interesting projects to my team there, so the executives there, and say “Hey, we should be involved in this conversation.” Or, “Hey, we should be involved in that conversation.” And they kept saying to me “These are “all really interesting projects Dan, “but it’s not clear how they relate to our business.” And so, for me I think, when I finally did leave and when the company was sold which was great, happy for them, did not put me in a position to not ever work again because here I am, but still super grateful. I just came out with a ton of energy. I felt incredibly fortunate to have been able to land what I thought was a pretty awesome job there where I basically got to evangelize kind of the legal technology movement and Avvo, and so the opportunity to just kind of really indulge in a lot of those conversations and push forward a lot of the things that I had been working on at Avvo but also others that maybe were a little more tangential to our business there. I don’t know. I thought it was really fun, I loved the space, so for me, it was really a treat.
– Yeah, and it’s interesting too I mean, because I think we’ve done CLEs together and stuff, and I feel it was always, you know, I get up and talk a little bit about marketing, and then you would get up and then basically, when you were at Avvo just spent half an hour to 45 minutes taking questions about why people should even care about Avvo. It was an idea that people, like, there was definitely people like you were not in the middle ground on Avvo. You felt this way or this way, right?
– Yeah, I used to say that a big part of my job was apologizing for the existence of the internet. Which was always fun, but yeah, it’s true.
– That was great. So the other thing is like, you were always helping, for the past couple years, I mean I always saw you at all different conferences, when we would see each other and get to hang out, but you’re always with all these different legal tech startups, running around and helping them kind of understand the legal market, understand lawyers better, so which was awesome but so now you’re with Gravity Legal. What attracted you to the team at Gravity where you kind of said “Hey, I’m not gonna be working “with a thousand, but legal tech startups “and helping everybody I can, but here’s a team “that I really wanna get committed to.”
– Yeah. So trying to answer this question without giving you a monologue or more to the point, the listeners, a boring monologue about my own career sort of challenges and emotional ups and downs, but a couple of things. Having seen a bunch of different legal technology companies and having worked, obviously, at Avvo, one thing that I was really interested in was scale. No disrespect to any of the other great companies out there, but to both frankly see kind of significant financial returns, but also like even more to the point to really be able to make an impact. I wanted to be part of a business that I felt like could influence the sector in a really massive way. And this relates, well, this relates to a fascination frankly I’ve always had with finance but every law firm, large, small, even governments like, everybody’s gotta get paid. And sort of layering on top of that, if I can just for a minute, one of the other things I discovered in my sojourn kind of post Avvo, but even leaving Avvo a little bit, is that I think, and this is a much longer conversation, kind of the legal innovation ecosystem is very very dramatically underfunded. I just don’t think that we’re getting enough resources into that ecosystem in order to realize the kind of potential that I think technology has for the future of the practice of law. And so, anyway, the ability to better understand finance, the ability to have an impact on a business or be a part of a business that I think can have a really broad impact on the sector, and then I really have always been really fascinated by finance. It’s not something that I think my natural skills are inclined to, but I took an economics course from a really great professor in undergrad and took a couple of finance courses in my MBA, and just the notions of sort of time value of money and leverage and like spreadsheets. I’m kind of an excel nerd which is a little weird for someone like me. It was a really interesting opportunity and I’ll layer on top too the business Gravity Payments which we can talk about or not. It’s always a company I’d really admired and so the opportunity to work closely with them was really exciting too.
– Right, because Gravity Legal is related to, like Gravity Payments is like the parent company–
– Yeah, so currently we are a division of Gravity Payments which is a well-known Seattle based payment processor. And Mark, I know I gave you a question to ask about it but I’ll just launch into it anyway. You may have heard of Gravity Payments because, now almost five years ago, the CEO gave everyone at the company effectively a raise so that everyone was making, at least, $70,000 on an annual basis. And again, for another episode or another time, or maybe over drinks, this falls out politically in a number of different ways, and I’m always happy to have that conversation, but someone who is willing to be that bold and brave, and someone who is willing to like really stand for what they believed in and really live that, and it’s created a really really powerful and interesting culture at Gravity.
– I was curious about that. Like so the culture, I mean, right? It’s a fascinating thing and we’ve had a lot of great conversations on our GNGF Live show with other people about law firm culture. In fact, Jordan Couch, recently we talked about, you know, he’s like the culture person over there at Palace Law and we talked about culture a lot. I mean, I have to imagine because everything I read about that and it’s been a couple of years now. They’ve even kind of done follow up pieces on Dan Price? Dan Price?
– Dan Price, yep.
– Yeah, Dan Price and is that like, after doing all this, profits actually went up, customer satisfaction went up, obviously, employee satisfaction, people would assume that like just everything else along with it went up. So in addition to just kind of culture of your working for a CEO that ultimately does what he believes with his pocketbook too, right? I mean, like that was pretty powerful, but has that permeated culture, when you were interviewing or talking or however this happened, what was that like?
– Yeah, there’s lots to say here and I’ll try to keep it relatively brief. Man, lots to say. I’ll give you one really interesting piece that I think, as a digital marketer, you’ll find interesting or as a marketer in general. So they were completely, so Dan has made this decision. He’d always been interested in kind of wealth and equality. And so he’d made this decision about the business at some point and they invited like local press, like The Seattle Times or whatever. They had no idea that this step was going to have the kind of impact that it did. Like they were, and one of my colleagues that I work with now at Gravity Legal worked fairly closely with Dan and really does a lot of that kind of strategy for Gravity Payments, or had historically done that, and he said “If we had been prepared “to harness even 10% of the visibility “that this opportunity brought “to us, it would’ve dramatically “even more changed our business.” So just this one like really interesting, I mean they told me crazy stories about this Dan Price flew out to New York to be on the Today show and Good Morning America showed up at the airport to try to basically steal him from the Today show. Like get him into their car so that like, as if like he’d show up and be like “Wait a second. “This isn’t the Today show.” But anyway, the craziness about that is just really interesting too. But I mean, to answer your question, I think they also made some really smart business decisions and I think they have continued to do that. But it’s also this weird chicken and egg thing about when you invest in your people, do they therefore feel more inclined to invest in you? Again, I’ll share two other like more specific examples. We’re borrowing a lot of the kind of playbook for sales from the Gravity Payments team, and I’ve actually had a conversation, and again shout out if people wanna listen to it, I’ve started a podcast called Financially Legal as part of my work at Gravity and I actually did an interview with Dan Price and we talked about kind of sales incentives and how you create a culture that isn’t, particularly, a sales culture that isn’t driven purely by sales incentives. And really a situation in which they say, you know, “We actually leave money. “We leave prospective customers on the table “because we’re not willing to do things “in bringing them into our business “and making them partners of ours as customers “that other payments processors, other competitors are.” And he said, “And we know that costs us business, “but the other thing is people stay with us.” And I thought that was really interesting. And then the final piece I’ll just share is when COVID hit, Gravity Payments has a fairly significant portfolio of restaurants.
– Right.
– And so that’s obviously been really hard on their business and they, basically, the executives there had a very honest conversation with their employees saying “We are in this bind “where we’re gonna run out of money pretty quickly “and we need to figure out what to do.” And the employees, and I haven’t gotten, I’m still a little bit separated from it, so I’m getting some of the second hand but the employees basically got together and all took a voluntary pay cut of a self-determined amount to give the company a greater runway. And again, I’m not as intimately involved in the day to day there, but I personally have to believe that when a CEO does something like that to invest in his people, that when the going gets tough, people make really bold and meaningful decisions like that. And so like those are just a couple of examples of things I’ve seen that I’ve been really, just really impressed by and really pleased to be a part of an organization like that.
– That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean like the, being able to build that culture where your team knows that you’re gonna say no to a potential client that isn’t gonna be a good fit and, or it’s the same kind of culture where I think you’re gonna get employees come to you and say, “We all want the company “to just continue being here, “so here’s what I can afford and for the next “how many months.” That’s awesome. Switching gears on you though, specifically for Gravity Legal, what payment challenges are you guys trying to solve for law firms that may be different than just somebody going to Gravity and walking in the door and saying, like a law firm before Gravity Legal, the division, I mean I assume could have talked already.
– Yeah, so super interesting story there too. So Gravity Payments went down this path because they received an invoice from a law firm that was there outside council, from a relatively well-known payments processor in legal, and they looked at the experience and they said “This is as good as it gets. “This is best of breed.” We think we can improve this experience. And I think the other thing that they realized is they had already been helping law firms. They had two or 300 law firms that they’ve been serving on an ongoing basis. Offering a lot of the same features and a lot of the same functionality that again, sort of, a lot of the legal specific payments processors had been offering, just as a matter of course, and so they kind of said like “Wow, the bar must be fairly low “for payments processing in legal “if like this is what you have to do “to kind of make lawyers feel comfortable “or ensure that they feel comfortable with the payment.” Now I’ve totally, in answering your question, I’ve totally lost track of my, your question was? Oh what are, yeah, different. Okay, yes.
– Challenges. What’s different
– Yep, confused.
– that caused this division?
– Yep, yep, yep. Sorry, thanks Mark. So two things. One is, so again, we sort of recognize like “Hey, we think we can come to market “with a product that is relatively competitive “with the existing products out there, “and with lots of headroom to grow.” So a couple of specific things that we brought to market initially, with more to come, then again, we’re not arguing these are life-changing, but we think they’re symbolic of the kinds of opportunities that are out there. One is, nearly all, I haven’t done a universal survey, but nearly all payments processors in legal or payment processors in legal cannot allow a client to pay both an outstanding trust, kind of fulfill a trust request and pay outstanding costs for operating fees
– Okay, yeah.
– through one payment link.
– Okay.
– You have to normally either say send two invoices or at the very least two separate payment links, and that’s just like a bad customer experience, right? Like they don’t understand the difference.
– They don’t understand why trust accounting and yeah.
– And that shouldn’t be there problem.
– Right.
– And so the opportunity to just like, so we now, we have a technology that allows you to send one payment link, and if you wanna route $500 of that to trust and a thousand dollars of that to operating, you have to put that in the upfront, of course. That can all be done automatically, and we’re taking all of the fees out of the operating account, it’s all done in compliance with the rules of professional conduct, but that’s just one incremental example. Another one is we’re enabling people to move money from trust to operating within our platform and ultimately, more importantly within our integrated partners platforms. So for example, if you use Clio as your practice management, and you wanna move money from trust to operating, you’ve gotta move it on Clio, if your, depending on the accounting system you have, you might have to go to your accounting system and move it there, and then you’ve gotta go to your bank and move it there. And we have technology that’ll enable you to move it effectively from one place depending on how many integrated partners we can get on board, but at least limiting that to two. And those are just two examples of the kinds of technology. Like looking forward, we see opportunities in subscription services that’s not a market
– Right.
– that’s being served very well where like we think there’s an opportunity there.
– What about payment plans? Do you guys handle payment plans?
– That’s another example. Yeah, but those are the kinds of things that we’d really like to do better. But more broadly, just quickly Mark, kind of again, going back a little bit to what I think the opportunity of this space is. I have worked and I know you know a lot of the same people I do and also probably lot of your clients, I just get so excited working with entrepreneurial attorneys. There are so many interesting attorneys out there doing so many amazing things. And I know this may sound a little cheesy, but like I feel like they deserve more than to just get paid. Like I feel like we can build an ecosystem that integrate, with integrated payments and with better payments technology that will help really fuel and power their law firms, and so we’re really focused on like, we wanna talk to all of those crazy entrepreneurial lawyers who have, and I did a podcast with Jonathan Tobin, subscriptions, and like yeah, we want them to bring us their craziest payments problems because again, going back to it, like innovation is dramatically underfunded and I fundamentally believe that if we can help power and fuel kind of the entrepreneurial spirit of these innovative law firms, that’s gonna be one of the ways we can really move the needle on the profession.
– Love that. Yeah, I mean it’s almost full circle back to my first question about, you just always try to be there and that’s basic innovation, so–
– I’m a good interview, Mark. I’m a good interview.
– So, but right now the big focus is on like the trust accounting, I assume.
– Yeah.
– IOLTA and yeah.
– Yeah.
– And if I remember, Gravity, I mean they’ve full open API and things, so I guess if you wanna work with these other entrepreneurs like people can plug in and–
– They can plug in, they come talk to us. I’m heading up partnership so if folks wanna reach out to me
– That’s awesome.
– if you’re a platform or a legal technology company out there that wants to figure out payments, and yeah I’ll just quickly say on the trust accounting piece. That’s another like sort of acute problem that we’ve recognized exist very specifically for lawyers. And actually, again, the Clio trends report suggests that lawyers, this is from the 2017 report, lawyers who actually use their trust account end up recognizing more revenue on the time that they bill, because they get the money upfront. But a lot of lawyers, they wanna use their trust accounts because like the regulatory burden, and so we think we can, again, this is coming down the road. Some of the features I told you about are the beginning but we think we can build more features down the road that will make it easier for lawyers to use their trust accounts and want to use their trust accounts, so they can actually get paid for more of the work that they do, but also worry less about the regulatory overhead.
– I mean it’s awesome, right, because you’ve found an area that has massive ability to have change, because that’s not a significant amount of lawyers. I think we’ve talked about this before. I mean, there’s probably less than 50% or something, right? I mean not all lawyers are using credit card, payment processing, ACH, whatever. I mean, most people are still expecting a check and then handling everything that way and so I guess when you’re dealing with your bank and you’re systems to do trust work, I mean I get why people maybe haven’t done as, like you’ve said, like with the Clio trends report that they should be doing, because it’s just hard, right? So if you’re with a company that can help, one, bring a whole bunch more people into the market of something that they should be doing, I’m assuming, we would all agree that people should be making it easier for consumers to pay. I mean, if I’m a consumer and like you make me pay by check, probably I can’t get a check for one, because I hardly ever write checks, maybe once a month, if I remember. Everything’s in credit card. So by getting more lawyers to do that, and by like finding these little frictions points, I love that, it’s like this is hard, it should be easier, and then have you connect all those things, you know, giving people time back in their day, making things easier to get paid, making consumers happy or having a raw experience. Like that’s opportunity for really cool scale, so that’s fascinating. I’m so happy for you, man.
– Fingers crossed, man. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s fun.
– So we are running out of time here on our kind of live show, but if you’d stick around, I do have a couple more questions to talk about, some of the stuff with lawyers we’re thinking about and some of the challenges they think maybe they have around payments and then what they could be doing. Kind of more like the tips of “Hey, if you’re not doing this “at least, maybe start here.” And we can post that on YouTube on Friday, if you’re cool with that sticking around.
– More than happy to. Yep.
– Awesome, okay. So before we cut out though, where can people find you?
– Yeah. My biggest presence is on Twitter, so you can find me at @rightbrainlaw, R-I-G-H-T-B-R-A-I-N-L-A-W. You can also hit me up on LinkedIn. For folks who wanna track me down on the Gravity site, Dlear, D-L-E-A-R, @gravity/legal.com.
– And then your podcast and stuff, we have a link to that. We’ll throw that in the chat as well.
– Awesome, thank you.
– And then, I think you had sent me like a blog post as well that I’ll make sure we get up there as well. So with that, hang there with me one second, we’ll wrap this up and we’ll get back to continue on and push that to the YouTube channel.
– Cool.
– All right, thanks for joining us today. As always, be sure to like and subscribe the page, the video, all the good stuff. Help us with that Facebook algorithm and stay tuned for Friday, we’ll drop the extended interview here on our YouTube page and find out more about what Dan thinks are some steps that all lawyers should take to kind of like move forward their payments and receivables. All right, have a good day everybody. All right, thanks for sticking with us, Dan. So I do wanna talk a little bit further because in marketing, we’re always talking about, we’re kind of crossing that point where we kind of get marketing into business process right in the beginning there, and consumer experience, and I’ve been on a number of panels with like legal technology, legal payment vendors and stuff right in, and I’m always surprised by a little bit of the pushback, right, you get from lawyers, and one of the questions I had thought about was for Gravity Legal coming in the space and really focusing on legal, it’s not like just trying to be competitive against the other vendors. Like you said, you can do things a little bit different, but it’s also being competitive against people who just aren’t accepting payments, right? I mean like there’s a challenge there. What are some of things you see when people are kind of like questioning like, “Why do I need to accept credit cards or ACH or something?”
– Yeah, you know it’s funny. My formal role with Gravity Legal began like basically March 1st. I’d been doing some work with them before that, but we kind of formally launched this business like right into the mouth of the pandemic, and–
– What better time.
– Well, and on the one hand, again, we can talk about this, but like when it’s time, it’s time, and you know,
– Yep, yep.
– you might as well, if you can pick your challenges, right? Like why not just go at that thing that’s gonna be the biggest but also potentially could reveal the most opportunities, and again, if we had our game on a little better, we might have been able to be more successful, but one of the very first conversation, excuse me. One of the very first conversations we had was a fellow who called us up and said, “Hey.” So my lawyer, solo practitioner, “The great news “is my clients are still paying. “I still got plenty of work. “Everything’s awesome. “The bad news is I’ve never accepted electronic payments “and I’m in California and I’m currently sheltered in place, “and all of my checks are going to a P.O. box “to which I don’t have access. “So, can you help?” And it was like, if you needed ever a better example about why you might want to, even if you don’t like use it on an ongoing basis, you might wanna be ready for that. And more to the point like, may want to condition your clients to expect it. Like that’s a perfect example of, I mean just as like a best business practice from a redundancy perspective. Like why not just have that in place? I think there are, yeah, and you’ve heard these too, Mark, it’s expensive, you know, objection.
– Right.
– Again, the Clio 2019, I believe it is Clio trends report, says that lawyers who accept electronic payments get paid like, I think it’s, some significant portion gets paid within the first 24 hours and it’s like 80% gets paid within the first week.
– Yeah.
– So again, like from a cashflow perspective, why wouldn’t you want to have that money for, again, particularly in a time like now when everything like. Again, I was involved in another deal that kind of stretched into COVID and unfortunately, deal ended up getting shut down and we’re not even sure that the money wasn’t there. It was just like people were like, “Ah, I’m so nervous. “I don’t know what to do.” Like I’ve gone into sort of like hibernation mode.
– Yeah.
– And had we been just a little more eager in getting the deal closed before March 1st, we very well might have gotten our money. And so the more you can speed up that accounts receivable process, the more you can get paid for the work that you do, the better as a small business and healthier as a small business you’re likely to be.
– Yeah, I mean the cashflow side, just bringing the payments but the other part with that Clio report was that it wasn’t just that you got paid faster, but sometimes you just got paid versus not getting paid
– Totally.
– by accepting credit cards, right? So there’s like you know, okay once your receivables kind of start crossing months and we’ve talked about this, for lawyers, like tend to just kind of writing stuff off. And it’s an accepted practice that you just consistently write a book of business off.
– Well and just a setback for a minute too. Like humans are rationale. And if they get a bill, I mean there’s so many different like sort of interesting psychological triggers, right? Like if I get a bill and it comes right after the work is done, and it’s electronic, and it’s easy for me to pay, and I have the money in my account now, I could make a decision to use that money to pay the lawyer, instead of being like “Well, I gotta find my checkbook “and I don’t even know where that is.” And like you know, and three weeks later that money’s gone, right? Spent on something else, right?
– Yeah, right.
– So opportunistically, you’re not leveraging that. But yeah, the notion of sort of just writing money, or writing work off, receivables off as a practice is crazy. And again, it’s like I’ll hear a lawyer say “Oh well, “my rates are already inflated 20 or 30%.” And to me, actually, you know what, that’s a sign of just a crazy business practice.
– Right.
– Like if you’re kind of charging some inflated rate only to discount that rate, I would actually be asking myself an honest question about like, if I really think that I’m worth that higher rate, then I need to figure out a way to monetize that better, right? Whether that’s, and to collect on that better. Whether that’s, again, introducing the subscription business model, whether that’s introducing flat fees, whether that’s getting leverage by using associates or paralegals. Like the first question is, why are you out of the gate saying, “I’m actually worth 20-30% less “than I tell the world that I’m worth.”
– Right.
– And then the second is, why would you do that work? And again, it’s probably why I’m happily not a practicing lawyer anymore, but that would drive me nuts to be sitting there at work thinking there’s a one in five chance that I won’t get paid for the minutes that I’m spending right now.
– And then from the customer’s experience perspective, you’re essentially saying, “Thank you for paying. “You’re funding the people I know aren’t gonna pay “because I’m charging you more “to make up for that.”
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
– It’s just a bad, out of the gate practice with a customer.
– Totally.
– Not that they know that, but just the mentality there of that approach, versus “Hey, let me either give everybody “this set rate, knowing that everybody’s pretty much “gonna pay, and maybe I attract more people “because I can be competitive on the rate “that I can even advertise that I’m this slightly fixed fee “or whatever, you can do more.”
– Or even bringing it to your world. Like let me be better in my customer selection,
– Yeah.
– so that I’m only bringing in the people who I know are gonna be comfortable with the fees that I’m charging.
– Yep. Exactly, so that one always fascinates me, is the accepted amount of write off. I had a call once with somebody who was looking for some marketing help and they had big aspirations and we’re talking about budgets and what things are and they’re like, “Oh, it seems like a lot. “If I can just cleanup my receivables.” And I’m like “Well, what are you receivables?” He’s like, “Yeah, you know. “I get about 150, 200,000 dollars sitting out there.” And this is like a small firm, right? And I’m like “Excuse me, if you do realize, “and I’m gonna tell you something that is not gonna help me,
– Right.
– “but as a business owner, “if all you did for the next three weeks was just work “on that with your admin team, don’t even think “about marketing, right?
– Yeah.
– “You’re gonna be “so much more comfortable with, “even if you do write off 20, 30%, I mean, “they’re gonna collect. “They’re over $100,000 that, you know, like pay a bonus “to somebody, make your employee happy, “and then call me about the marketing work, right?”
– Totally.
– And that’s not uncommon, right? And so, this is where I love like the payment stuff where if you make it, and the fact that you guys are gonna go in there, and keep trying to reduce that, those friction points to make it just so easy for somebody, so like all these little arguments, just keep rubbing them away until it’s like you just have to do it and it’s all connected within the ecosystem of other legal technology. The people that are starting to adapt, I had an interview with, you know Erin Gerstenzang.
– Oh yeah, she’s awesome.
– She was talking about how legal technology kind of started doing a little bit to be selfish because she wanted more time back and I was like “Well I heard I can get some time back here “and I get some time back there.” And she goes, “No, I’m addicted to it “because it’s just I run my practice so much better “that my clients have a better experience, I have “a better experience, and I mean, it works.” It comes full circle to this whole ecosystem of legal technology making it better on both sides. Not just like legal payments, right? It’s not just being selfish and getting payments for the lawyer, it’s making it easier for the consumer, so I love stuff like that.
– Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah there’s another Clio trends report too that, again, I’m not remembering what year, where they said like, shout out I think to Nica Cabury, I think she did some of this research, or maybe not I can’t remember, but like 50% of consumers who have had a legal issue in the past few years like might not even consider working with a lawyer who doesn’t take electronic payments. So like, yeah.
– Right. Yeah. The consumers are experienced to be able to pay everything on their phone now, so why would you think that–
– Right. You force them to bring an envelope of cash or write you a check, it’s crazy.
– All right. Well, I appreciate you spending some extra time with me today and well like I said, we’ll push this up to our YouTube channel, and man, it’s always a pleasure talking to you, and usually we see each other four or five times in the spring at legal conferences, but this spring, unfortunately, it’s just been all Zoom calls.
– Yeah. Well, I get to see your office and you get to see mine. This is actually, technically, an office. This is, it’s not my home. It’s a neighbor’s home that’s vacant where they let me come and work, but you get to come into my world, I get to come into yours.
– There we go.
– So there’s a weird level of intimacy that’s kind of interesting, so it’s been a pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.
– Awesome. Well thanks, Dan.
– Yep.
– All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us and be sure to like and subscribe. Help us with that YouTube algorithm, hit the like button, and have a great day.
– Hey what’s up, I’m Josh. Thanks so much for joining us. If you feel like you learned something today, think of how beneficial it would be to chat with myself or another one of our marketing consultants one on one. Go ahead and visit our website to schedule your free consultation. It only takes a minute.