Leadership In Law Podcast

S02E70 Leveraging AI for Law Firm Growth & Mindset Shift with Ryan Gregerson

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 2 • Episode 70

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Ryan Gregerson's leadership journey offers a masterclass in transforming from successful attorney to visionary law firm owner. From his early days building a family law department from scratch to founding RCG Law Group, Ryan reveals the critical mindset shifts that enabled his success.

Ryan stands apart by embracing purpose-driven leadership, inspired by Simon Sinek’s “find your why.” He built a firm culture focused on helping clients rise above their challenges and live their best lives, a mission that shapes hiring, client interactions, and a thriving community. 

The conversation gets interesting as Ryan shares how he’s using AI in family law, not just dabbling, but building custom agents that analyze financials, fill forms, and calculate expenses, cutting down on time-consuming tasks. Using ChatGPT, his team also maintains case memory for consistent, high-quality work. 

Ryan challenges the billable hour with flat fees and hybrid models, creating “three-way wins”: better client value, higher team pay, and stronger firm margins. His approach encourages lawyers to rethink pricing in an AI-driven world.

Success in the entrepreneurial journey hinges on two key skills: selling and delegating. From winning clients to securing early hires, attorneys must learn to sell. Just as vital is building systems to delegate, embracing Dan Martell’s motto: “80% done by someone else is 100% awesome.” 

Reach Ryan here: 

https://www.rcglawgroup.com/
https://www.facebook.com/rcglawgroup
https://altium-advisors.com/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573088450667

This episode is sponsored by Wealthy Woman Lawyer® 

Wealthy Woman Lawyer® is a law firm growth strategy and business coaching service exclusively for women law firm owners. Ready for a practice that funds your dream lifestyle and gives you time to enjoy it? 

Visit https://wealthywomanlawyer.com today.

Join our private community, Law Firm Growth Guild, Your Shortcut to Marketing Mastery and More Clients at
https://checkout.lawmarketingzone.com

Ready to level up your law firm marketing? Book a FREE Discovery Call with Marilyn Here: https://lawmarketingzone.com/bookacall

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, ryan Gretterson, to the show today. Ryan is a law firm owner, leadership coach and serial entrepreneur. He started RCG Law Group two years ago and recently launched a law firm coaching business, altium Advisors. I'm excited to have you here, ryan Welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, it's a pleasure to be with you here today.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Great. Tell us a bit about your leadership journey and how you got to here.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so when I first started in the law, I went the route that a lot of people do and initially got a prosecutor job and then jumped pretty quickly into being in a law firm and moved kind of through what was a very, very new law firm at the time. I was actually their first associate hire and as part of that process I ended up becoming a partner and I was a partner at that law firm. We grew. When I started there, it was the three partners that were there at the time and then me as an associate. When I left it scaled up to 35 attorneys and so it was a good team and they gave me kind of that freedom and flexibility to build the department that I had, which was in family law. That's what I did.

Speaker 3:

Nobody there at the firm did family law and they gave me kind of the sandbox or playground to build a family law department there. By the time I left there, we had built the family law firm to 10 attorneys. I was the most profitable and largest revenue generating group in the firm, which is a lot of fun and a lot of leadership learnings. Along the pathway there there was lots that I learned. I experimented with things that worked, things that didn't work, but again I had that freedom and flexibility to experiment with those things there, which was a lot of fun in learning how to kind of transition from that kind of brand new attorney associate into what it was like to have at least partial ownership in a law firm.

Speaker 2:

That's fascinating.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Then I decided to experiment with other things. I actually got out of being in a law firm, out of practicing law, and I went and joined a legal tech company is actually here, local in Utah, called Filevine, and tried my hand at that for a little while to see what the tech world was like and if I could scale up in leadership in the tech world. And as I was doing that, learned a ton some great people over there at that organization. But what I learned is that, while I really liked owning a business, I really liked being in a law firm and what that journey was like and a bit smaller of an organization right, fileline's a big organization, 500 plus people so there was a lot of people, a lot going on, and so I jumped back into and just started my own firm.

Speaker 3:

So didn't have any clients because I left those all behind when I left practicing law and this was in December of 2022. And so it's been about almost two and a half years now and so I decided to start my own firm and family law is what I know. So I started doing family law and I knew you know kind of how to grow and what some of the things that work from the lessons I learned at my last law firm. So I try to implement those and put those into effect and try to grow and scale my current firm to where we're at now, two and a half years later.

Speaker 2:

That's fantastic. I love that. I love that you had the freedom to see what worked and what didn't while you were growing your division in the other firm, did you have a coach, hire a coach, or was it mentors from the partners? What kind of guidance did you have?

Speaker 3:

mentors from the partners. What kind of guidance did you have? Yeah, so the guidance that I had is the managing partner there and the other name partner. They were great to help guide me in that way and to mentor me along the pathway. Both of them were businessmen first. Honestly, both had done things outside of the law despite having graduated law school and had their licenses for a while, and so they learned a lot of core business principles doing other business ventures that they brought to the law firm that they started.

Speaker 3:

So when I came on, it was very much that way the design was. I was going to learn from them. They were going to teach me about what those core principles were, but then let me take my hand at it, and neither of them knew family law at all, and family law is a very different practice area when you're doing other things. They did estate planning and bankruptcy, and so I was able to take the things that they taught me and try to learn how, okay, how can I use these principles, which are really good core business principles, and apply those to doing family law, and what does that look like and how do I grow and do those things?

Speaker 3:

And that was definitely part of my journey, which is there was a lot of mentorship there from specifically those two individuals. I mean and like everything in life, there's always lots of other folks too there was a local family law attorney here in town that knew I was new to doing family law, didn't have anybody else in the firm and really took me under his wing too. A lot. Didn't have anybody else in the firm and really took me under his wing too. He would take me to lunch once a month and he gave me all of his templates and just really, without any reason to do so, took a brand new attorney under his wing and he's still one of my favorite people today. But yeah, mentors along the way was huge for me to really learn and figure out what this law firm stuff is all about.

Speaker 2:

That's great. That's great I love it the mentorship that goes on in law firms. You know other regular entrepreneurs you have to find a good coach or something like that. But finding a good mentor especially they didn't even have family law in that firm and now they have obviously a very highly profitable one. So that's a great story. And you're doing coaching now, so you've turned it around and you're helping other attorneys as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, one of the things that I learned in that journey was the importance of having somebody that could teach me things, even if they didn't know my practice area. The two name partners there both understood the way that business worked, and having them with regular check-ins, having them showing me those business principles, what it's like to have metrics and measure things, kpis, goals, helped me see what that could do to influence my career. And so, as I did this thing on my own and thought I had a lot of the answers and had to adjust and learn from some things as I started my own firm, it helped me refine what that was. And one of the things that I just love is helping other people accomplish something that they weren't sure they could do, and that's part of why I like Family Lies is very much that way Somebody coming to you with something that's really, really difficult, something they're going through that's really hard, but helping to bring to them education, information, advocacy, so that they can see what they have and try to turn it into something better and different down the road entering their new kind of phase of life and what it is. It's that same way as I had the opportunity to build the family law department at the last firm is.

Speaker 3:

I've had the opportunity to work with employees here, seeing that same thing with the employees right Seeing employees where they are at a point in their career where they're joining and they want to take their career to the next level. They want to accomplish things but they don't know how to get there. They're unsure of what it looks like to maybe practice because they're brand new, or what it looks like in a brand new career if it's a paralegal or a staff member, and helping to give them that mentorship and guidance so that they can take their career and their lives to a newer, higher level. And so in in doing that through throughout the last, you know, almost 15 years, it really brought me a lot of like personal satisfaction in what that looks like and helping people through that journey, and so it was a really natural thing, when I had this opportunity to start doing coaching for the law firm owners, to try to take advantage of that and just dive in, because it's something that I found a lot of satisfaction in and I really, really enjoy.

Speaker 2:

And it sounds like you created a company culture, both in that original law firm building the teams and now in your own, so you're, as a learning environment, a teachable spirit type thing.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that I came across early in my last law firm was the work by Simon Sinek, which you probably know. Mary Ellen, a lot of people do talking about a why, a purpose, right, and then also values deriving from that purpose, and so for me at my last firm, I helped to establish their why. And then, as I started mine, establishing that same thing and establishing the purpose behind an organization, so that you have that to go back to and driving it through the values that are there, becomes really essential. And part of that for us here at my law firm and also going to this coaching company, is just that right. My why at the law firm is to inspire into this coaching company is just that right. My why at the law firm is to inspire others to transcend their trials and build their best life, and so everything that I do comes back to that.

Speaker 3:

The things that I do with external clients comes back to that, the things I do with employees comes back to that, and so when you structure your organization around a higher purpose and you work with people that believe in that purpose, you hire people that believe in that purpose, then you do create a much stronger culture and you create people, too, who want to help others right, because I have attorneys here and we hire somebody that's new. If they believe in that same purpose, then they're going to help others that come in and that helps to create the underlying culture of support. You know, one of the things we, the values we believe in, is to build community with internal and external clients. That's one of our values here, and so building that community means that we're taking care of each other Selflessly. Serve others is another one of our values, where we try to find ways to serve those around us and hire people who believe in those same principles.

Speaker 2:

That's great. Build a team of like-minded people Exactly so. And now I know that in your firm that you use AI a lot as well. We're just going to kind of transition because that bit you know give us any advice. That's going to help our listeners. That's great. But I know that you're using AI and you're helping to teach using AI in the firm. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started with that? What?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so you know, ai is obviously been a major, major topic of conversation in the last few years, but a lot of my perception is a lot of people hear it and hear about it and dabble in it, but it's not making any real difference, or not at least a lot of difference as far as when it comes to law firms, when it comes to the bottom line, when it comes to improving their organization for profitability, taking them to the next level and scaling, and so what I started with is experimenting with things. Right, there's so many large language models out there there's kind of the core ones that are out there so I started just diving into those. I also hired recently our current COO, and he came from the tech world. He's an attorney, but he actually helped to create a software in the construction space utilizing AI, and so when I brought him on, the design was okay, let's help take our firm to the next level when it comes to incorporating AI in in real, usable ways that will actually help us scale for the future, help us to make things more efficient, to make things more effective. And so you know, we've used a lot of chat GPT. Like every week, new iterations are coming out with improved usage for it. The major thing that we kind of foresee and project and forecast is that it's vertical agents, right, vertical agents are going to become what people use to actually make a difference in their organizations, and so what we've been doing is, I mean, we're creating certain GPTs along the way in family law.

Speaker 3:

One of the GPTs that we've created is using our own internal best practices and templates as a way for us to be able to upload PDFs, financial documents right In every divorce. That's done, you have to make certain financial disclosures. It's one of the things that's like the biggest pain point for a lot of attorneys and paralegals, frankly, is like oh, I got to get all these documents together, I got to process them, I got to go compile them, I got to create calculations, I got to go add them to. Whatever the state form is In Utah it's called a financial declaration, is what we call it. Whatever the state form is In Utah, it's called a financial declaration, is what we call it, and so that becomes a major pain point for a lot of people. So we built this GPT that you can upload those PDFs to and it'll read them and then it'll populate the information into the state approved form and it's doing things like you put in 12 months of bank statements and it's going to analyze those for the different expenses that are there.

Speaker 3:

One of the things in a financial declaration is like what are monthly expenses, especially if it's a case that's divorced with Alamo, and so it'll run that calculation. We've had to train it and once we have now it'll give us that output and show us how it came up with the calculation. We can add in a whole host of all the different financial documents so it can give us the balances to the bank accounts, the balances to the retirement accounts. It'll give us an analysis on income. If somebody has a variable income right, a commission-based job, it can give us breakdowns for what's their base, what's their average commissions over certain time periods, and so utilizing it functionally that way helps us to be more accurate, helps us to process things through quicker. It helps us to process things through quicker.

Speaker 3:

One of the things we know with people kind of human nature is that we procrastinate things that are tough. It's not that we aren't smart enough to do it. When it's a difficult thing to do, there becomes procrastination. That's one thing I've seen over the last 15 years doing family law is financial declarations often would get procrastinated by the paralegals or attorneys putting them together, and so by utilizing AI, we're able to help decrease what that time is the turnaround time on what the client's given us documents to get their financial declaration back, which also helps make the whole process go faster and smoother. And so it's things like that that we're building and utilizing AI for to increase client satisfaction, increase accuracy as client satisfaction goes up, and it also has ripple effects across the organization, right. Happier clients means you're going to get more Google reviews, you're going to get more referrals, and so it's things like that that we're trying to enhance the client experience by utilizing AI in that way to make it more effective and quicker and more accurate as well.

Speaker 3:

But I mean, and the other other ways that we're using ai, right, I mean you know when we're, when we're drafting emails, when we're putting together different declarations, right, having it run through either gpt or grok. We started using grok quite a bit. I like some of that neutral language that grok uses in the outputs there to to create more effective compilations of the client's declaration, right, they kind of give us this big, long information and it's hard to sometimes sort through and figure out how to organize things, and utilizing the AI for that helps us to structure it in a way that makes sense, based on whatever declaration it's supporting, like a motion for temporary orders and we can give the input of. Here's what we're asking for. Here's the underlying facts that can help to organize it. We always tell everybody and most attorneys now understand this which is you never just go with what it gives you right, the hallucinations, exactly right it happens.

Speaker 3:

Right, because you know I had a declaration where it gave me give me some fake information was trying to fill the gap on a parent time change and it just filled the gap on some you know location. Actually, interestingly enough, it was a location that was about halfway in between the two parents, but it wasn't right. You can't see where it was. The client just didn't say where the exchange took place and it was trying to fill the gaps, and so you do have to keep an eye on it. Right? You've got to make sure that you're using your professional judgment when you're reading through it and reviewing things. But it really does provide an enhanced ability to output things and to give a really high quality work product. You know it becomes the way we're starting to utilize it. It becomes like our legal assistant as we train it better, as we get better with vertical agents. You know I foresee it being like a pretty darn good paralegal. It doesn't mean that that will get rid of the need for a paralegal, but it might mean that a paralegal can now support more individuals.

Speaker 3:

One of the things during the last 15 years that I've I've decided in in iterating with different combinations of attorneys to paralegals is that in family law, generally speaking, a one-to-one attorney to paralegal ratio is optimal when there's a full caseload. Both attorney and paralegal know the cases, they know the clients, they have communications, interaction back, but also because of the workload, if AI is used correctly, vertical agents are used well. Now you've taken a paralegal that's supporting one and that same level of effectiveness and can easily support two or three because of the quality of outputs they can get by inputting into the AI, making sure they review it with their trained eye right Paralegal should be trained different things that you want and then giving that really high work product quality to the attorney to continue drafting, to finalize, to do the things that is needed there.

Speaker 2:

And that's the sheer saving of time. And, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

Now, one of the things, too, that's interesting here and I don't know, Mariela, if you've run into this a lot, but I get a lot of pushback from family law attorneys when I talk about AI. I get a lot of pushback when I talk to almost any attorney about AI Because of the big mistakes that they make.

Speaker 3:

They make the mistake, but also the billable hour right In PI. It makes total sense Utilize and they will utilize AI. When you're looking at things like drafting documents, contracts or estate planning, utilizing AI can make it way more efficient because of the way they're charging. Pushback I get with family law attorneys is well, I mean, I bill by the hour. It's like I'm trying to bill my clients a whole lot more. That's not necessary. But at the same time, more efficiency doesn't really help the bottom line, and that's usually true.

Speaker 3:

And so what we've done is we've experimented quite a lot with trying flat fees on family law cases with AI, in the way that you can pull information out, you can start to really fine tune and lock in how long it takes to do certain tasks and certain things and when you can do that, then you can predict better what it's going to be like in certain cases and then you can price it accordingly. You can price flat fees in chunks on a case. There's an attorney in town here in Utah who he's been doing this kind of a model we kind of call it a hybrid model where he has a retainer and then flat fee for certain chunks for a case he's been doing it for years. He's just been doing it effectively because he's had a paralegal for a while and they're really good. But again, trying to understand how things work and how we can utilize AI better, that's a model that's out there that people could utilize in billable hour type cases and billable hour type work is okay. If you have a flat fee for a certain type of task and now and the client gets great value for it, that's first and foremost right. Bring more value than you receive in payment. But if you can do that and then make it more efficient, utilizing AI now, you can actually create a better margin while still giving the client really, really high work, product quality, great value for what they get.

Speaker 3:

One could even argue that over time you could actually drive down where you're actually charging a lot less than other attorneys billing by the hour, but still at a higher effective hourly rate from the work that's spent. You can take your hourly rate from whatever it might be. Let's say it's $300 or $400 an hour and your effective hourly rate becomes $800 an hour or $900 an hour because you've utilized AI effectively, it's giving the right work, product quality and you've priced it accordingly. And obviously, full disclosure in your engagement agreement so the client knows exactly what it is and what you're doing. And you've checked all your ethics with your state bar, right.

Speaker 3:

But by doing that, then now it suddenly becomes something where AI can actually help, be what we call a three-way win, right, three-way win. It's a win for the client because they're getting a great work, product quality and over time the price is actually going down. It's a win for the individual attorney, right and paralegal. They're producing things because they can produce more work and generate more revenue, which means they could actually make more as an employee. And it's a win for the firm as well, because then it's creating a better margin for the firm on the work that they're generating. And so that becomes a true three-way win. And that's what we're always going for, right In an organization, in our law firm and when I coach other law firms. You want to see three-way wins and I really believe that utilizing this in this way that's where it's going. Billable hours need to get on board with what that's going to look like in the future and how to make the adjustments to have those three-way wins.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that is the pushback that I hear often is the hourly the billable? Now, when you're doing, say, a case comes in and you're using your agents, are you using projects and this is getting a little granular about AI Are you keeping an individual case in a project or is your agent? Because I know that we've experienced where, if you're using an agent or a chat over a period of time, the memory is gone. You know you could say remember what our conversation so you can give me intelligent results, but then out of the blue, I don't remember anything, so there's no reference. So but using projects is one way to keep those uploaded documents within the memory and the conversation.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know anybody. My recommendation is everybody's going to use ChatGPT, use the paid version. You don't as an attorney doing this kind of stuff. You don't need the pro or like the really person at $200 a month or you don't need that, but you do need to have the one that you pay and I think right now that's 20, 30 bucks a month, something like that.

Speaker 2:

I think it's 20 right now.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely worth it. Because of exactly what you said, marilyn. It's the projects. You can create those projects.

Speaker 3:

So what we've done is we've created a GPT where you train it, you upload certain documents to say here is the overall.

Speaker 3:

What I want you to do when somebody utilizes this GPT and then we've shared it with the individuals in the firm and then they can create a project based on that GPT, utilizing the information unique to that case, so that it has that memory, it can come back to it and then it stays consistent and learns from it.

Speaker 3:

So the overall system is learning and the GPT is learning how to see what the attorney wants, see what the paralegal wants, but then it's keeping consistent with the information for that case and that's a really great example of the way that attorneys can utilize that more effectively, especially if you have a case that lasts a whole lot longer. It's one of the things that we try to teach people as well is understanding certain KPIs in an organization that a lot of attorneys, especially like solos or small firms, don't do or don't understand. One of those is time on desk. One of the goals is to reduce the time on desk or at least know what it is Right, and so if you've got certain cases that it's designed to be, there's going to be a really long time time on desk. It's going to be a major litigation case or it's just going to drag on for a long time.

Speaker 2:

Having the project with the memory is going to be huge, so that you don't lose that data and that information. Yeah, it's a great, great point. Yeah, that came up. We were I was in an event and we were talking about building an AI board that can help you see your weaknesses and your strengths and grow your business, and that was one of the things that you can upload different, you know, you choose the personalities, that sort of thing but that's when we really got to exploring projects and I think that's, you know, with that's a relatively new I think it's only been around a couple of months the projects on GPT. So very good, and so with your you're, you're growing your fire, you're being more efficient. You talk about the mindset shift from being a lawyer to a law firm owner, and I do know that there's a there's a step there. So, you know, with my services as well, it's got to be a step there in that understanding that you're not just an attorney, you are an entrepreneur.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the journey from going from being an attorney to being a business person is first off. I guess what I'll say is it's not for everybody. Not all attorneys are going to be able to make that jump. Being an entrepreneur comes with a certain degree of risk tolerance that not everybody has, and you know, when somebody does have desires to do that that's I mean, obviously it's the first step, right, the desire to want to go out and do something on your own or to have a business, and a lot of people will have that and then part of it's understanding yourself and what you need to work on and do.

Speaker 3:

One of the first things that I try to teach people and tell people about when it comes to running a business, owning a law firm and making that step, is to learn to be really good at sales. I think one of the primary driving factors because what we're doing is sales and if you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you're going to have your own firm, you have to be good at that, because you're selling people all day, every day. You're selling, obviously, the potential clients that you have, and when you're in a law firm, you've got the safety net that they're going to give you cases or they're going to help you out and do a lot of things for you. When you have your own firm and it's either just you or just you and a few partners you have to be able to sell, and sell effectively, so that when you pay for those leads you get them in and you get them retained and you charge the pricing that you should be charging. But it's also sales with people you want to bring onto your organization.

Speaker 3:

Once a law firm starts and wants to scale and grow, you have to sell people on the vision, because if you don't have a vision, especially if you're a small law firm, it's a huge risk for some attorney to want to join your organization. The hardest hire is always the first hire. The hardest hire I had in my new firm was the first paralegal hire. The next hardest hire was the first attorney I hired because it's somebody taking a big chance and a big risk on you, because that's what it relies on, because you could be gone tomorrow, right?

Speaker 3:

Whatever the statistics are about how many new businesses fail, certainly that statistic is there for law firms as well. A lot of law firms that start and that try end up failing, and so you have to be confident and you have to be really good at sales to help sell people on the vision that you have for your organization, to help sell people on the vision that you have for your organization. And so once somebody learns those skills the sales skills to retain clients, to bring people on and build an organization, the mindset shift comes in I'm going to do everything myself because I'm the best at it. I'm the best at everything I do. I'm confident, which is great to understanding that you've got to have a team to help you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Understand principles like buying back your time. That principle is such a huge one that I've learned a lot more about in the last two and a half years, which is even if I think maybe I'm the best at something. The reality is there's a saying by Dan Martell who you probably have heard of. Dan Martell always says 80% done by somebody else is 100% awesome. I've had to take that on because if I can bring somebody else on and they can do certain things and take those off of my plate, that are what we call low value tasks, so I can focus on highest revenue generating tasks, the highest leverage tasks. Now I can grow, and that's a really hard shift for attorneys. I found that to be a very difficult like mental hurdle to overcome so that somebody can actually start to be more productive and be more efficient to generate more revenue for their organization. Is that shift in delegating, delegating effectively and buying back your time? In delegating, delegating effectively and buying back your time?

Speaker 2:

I absolutely agree, and it's difficult for anyone in any business because I started it, I did it, I can do it. I can do it faster than teaching someone. So one of the things that my coaches and the different masterminds I'm in were really big about is in the beginning is SOPs. Now you know I can, and it becomes this, this dark cloud over your head. I'll never get to it. That's your procrastination thing, right. Until you realize, all I need to do is open, zoom and record myself doing it one time through, and then you could put it in a document. So there's so many shortcuts to doing SOPs now, but that's super important If you want to take something off your plate, if there's something that doesn't fire you up, there's somebody out there that enjoys doing it. That's why we have accountants. Not everybody does that right. We have things that I don't enjoy doing, and so I have someone else to do those things and they love them.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, I love that that method. Dan Martell actually calls it the camcorder method. Right, it's super effective. When you have something that you want to teach somebody, just record yourself doing it, because if you are better at doing it, great, go ahead and do it and record yourself and then provide that information to them. And we try to take it even one step further. So we record it.

Speaker 3:

We utilize Teams, so I'll record it in Teams and I'll have it, transcribe it, and then I'll put that transcription into AI to write the SOP based on what I just recorded in the transcription.

Speaker 3:

That's there. Then I provide the recording and the basic SOP to the employee and that employee can either fully incorporate into your overall best practices or standard operating procedures or they can just use it as a one-off, just to insert in, not making the adjustments to it all. But that camcorder method or just what you talked about recording, just to insert in and not making the adjustments to it all, but that camcorder method or just what you talked about recording is underutilized. I agree, a lot of attorneys don't realize how easy that is and how actually effective it is, because your employees will rewatch those videos way more than you think and that's what I've seen Like. I had one employee tell me that he's gone back to this one video we did like a dozen times and I was like wow, I just thought it was like you watch it once and it was kind of over, but it becomes really effective and that's a great tool to have when you utilize it that way.

Speaker 2:

And it's something you know. It just takes a Google Drive organization and make it available to your teams. But that makes sense. And the newest thing we're trying is new things is using the Fathom note taker in Zoom and allowing it to do all the notes, summary and all that and that goes into the SOP. So, yeah, definitely the recording and doing it. And, of course, when you delegate, you want to give them not only the responsibility but the accountability. You know, grow your, but it sounds like with your coaching and the way you approach your team, you are growing, mentoring your teams to take over your team. You are growing, mentoring your teams to take over your people, to take over those tasks and take accountability for them.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and a lot of that comes back to kind of the really popular model that a lot of businesses use and maybe a lot of law firms don't utilize as much as they should, which is the EOS right, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Because when you do that then you've got your one-to-ones, then your one-to-ones, then your one-to-ones, then you can have the accountability for those things right, reviewing those things did you know, sent you over that stuff? How did the implementation of that go? What's our metric for how we're doing on these things and making those improvements?

Speaker 3:

And so the regular check-ins on the one-to-ones utilizing the eos becomes a really effective tool to ensure it gets implemented, to ensure that people are doing the things that you've asked them to do, because otherwise it kind of floats off and never actually happens or solidifies. And I've seen a lot of attorneys get really frustrated because oh hey, I've taken the time to go create these SOPs and my team won't do it and then nothing happens. Accountability right, it's got to be accountability. It's got to be the regular check-ins with accountability to ensure that there is compliance with that, ensure there's understanding, to ensure they know what that process is, what's supposed to happen.

Speaker 2:

And again taking yourself out of the day-to-day. As the attorney, you are in a sales position, but you can't be the one doing the work all the time. It's just not cost. You can't scale yourself.

Speaker 3:

No, yeah, your time is limited, right, and if the only thing you do is have your time, you have to make sure that that time that you do have becomes again the highest revenue generating tasks, the highest leverage tasks that are there, that somebody else truly can't do.

Speaker 2:

Right, exactly, this has been exciting. I'm so happy to have had you on the show and chat with you today, and I know our listeners are probably going to want to connect with you or reach out to you. Where would be the best place for them to do that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we're on both social media. On social media we're Altium Advisors is our Facebook and Instagram page. I also have my law firm, rcg Law Group, and just dropping a DM in there and then also my email is Ryan at RCG Law Group. Nice and simple.

Speaker 2:

I'll make sure that these URLs are in the show notes and, ryan, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, it's been a pleasure being with you.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzonecom to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.

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Marilyn Jenkins

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