Leadership In Law Podcast

S02E100 How a Subscription-Based Law Firm Works with Andrew Legrand

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 2 • Episode 100

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The billable hour has dominated legal practice for decades, but Andrew Legrand is pioneering a different approach that's transforming how entrepreneurs interact with their attorneys. As founder of Spera Law Group, Andrew has built one of the country's leading subscription-based law firms, charging clients based on value rather than time spent.

Andrew saw how hourly billing discouraged clients from seeking timely advice and created constant pressure for lawyers to chase transactions. This inspired him to develop a subscription model that supports both clients and attorneys.

The subscription model encourages clients to seek advice early, preventing costly mistakes, while steady monthly revenue reduces lawyer stress and supports a more balanced practice.

Perhaps most exciting is how this model embraces technological innovation rather than resisting it. While AI might threaten hourly billing models, it becomes a powerful ally in value-based pricing. Andrew's team uses custom AI assistants for contract review, proofreading, meeting summaries, and more, delivering faster service without sacrificing quality. "I'm incentivized to use it," Andrew says of AI, "because it allows us to deliver more value to the client."

Reach Andrew here: 
https://speralaw.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlegrand/

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SPEAKER_00:

The Leadership in Law Podcast is there to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. I'm your host, Marilyn Jenkin. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Andrew Lynrand, to the show today. Andrew is the founder of Sparrow Law Group, a fractional general counsel law firm that helps entrepreneurs proactively avoid stupid legal mistakes and protect what they're building by leveraging automation and artificial systems, automation, and artificial intelligence. The firm charges based on value, not time spent, and is one of the country's leading subscription-based law firms. Andrew has been recognized as Super Lawyer's Rising Star for 10 straight years and has been featured in Forbes, Local Media, and the ABA Journal and other publications. He is presented at the ABA Tech Show, Clio Cloud9 Conference, and other local national conferences. I'm excited to have you here, Andrew. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you, Marilyn, for having me. I'm excited about this and excited to be on your roster of past participants. It's a great list.

SPEAKER_02:

All right. Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm excited to talk about the what you're doing and the value-based pricing. Tell us a bit about your journey and how you got to where you are.

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. So I graduated, I started law school in 2008. I'd like to think of ourselves, my me and my classmates is kind of the last class that went to started, applied, and started law school prior to the financial crisis. So I vividly remember being a one L and having that traditional law firm experience and a job that hearing from the older students who had just graduated, how hard it was to find a job. And that was the first time we had heard that. Law school before that was go to law school, get a great bang job. It's easy. And so that was kind of the first moment of I started thinking, oh, it might be tough to find a job. And it's going to be even harder to find a job that I like. So about halfway through law school, started looking into can I start a firm for myself? I don't like the idea of going downtown and working at a desk every day necessarily. Law is now something technology was advancing to where Dropbox was new at the time. I was like, there's clouds coming out, there's paperless, there's scanners, still pretty new technology, but I guess you could say I was seeing the seeing that come before it was really mainstream. And so started looking at what sort of practice areas might work. I like business. I was from New Orleans, and Katrina happened in 2005. I was at college at the time, actually Florida diploma right here behind me.

SPEAKER_01:

I thought they looked like a gator.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it's a gator back there. So I said, hey, how can I move back to New Orleans and help the city rebuild, but with a law degree, right? Not the traditional literal build with hammer and nails, but how can I help contribute to the rebirth of the city with a law degree? And business seemed to make sense. I can help people build businesses and grow the economy and protect jobs and sell businesses and just create, okay, create opportunities for people. So I decided to embark on the world of business and started right after graduating law school in 2011, after planning for my last about year of law school said, Hey, can I make this work for myself? And found a lot of resources that said I could. And luckily, my parents were in New Orleans. So I was able to move back in home and lower my expenses for a while.

SPEAKER_02:

Nice.

SPEAKER_03:

That was now almost 15 years ago. So now we are here today with where we are. But that's a big background.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow. And you're in New Orleans now.

SPEAKER_03:

Correct. Yep. Still here.

SPEAKER_02:

I love the idea that you wanted to give back and help her help the city grow after the tragedy. That's amazing. Let's talk about you decided to do business law and you're doing a value-based pricing. Can you explain what you what your flat rate pricing is? So explain what your pricing model is.

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. So starting out in business law, we definitely we did hourly. We didn't really eliminate hourly until about 2019 or 2020. So I was doing the traditional hourly work for a long time. And one of the problems I kept running into, I've kept running into a few problems, but one of them was this situation where I felt like my hourly rate, I would have clients come in with a mess of the situation, and I would talk to them about the situation and would reflect back and realize that the mess that they were in could have easily been prevented with minutes of legal advice. Right? Just don't do that one thing that you think you need to do. And that continues to happen to this day. And so I realized that there was this problem where people couldn't go and get small amounts of legal advice from lawyers. It was really prohibitive. And to me, it was that this the hourly rate was a big part of that because if you're an entrepreneur, A, you might not see the legal problem. So you're definitely not talking to a lawyer about a legal problem that you don't even know exists. And then if you recognize you have a legal problem, a lot of entrepreneurs wait until it hurts enough to go get the lawyer. And in the world of business, by a lot of times, it's then too late for the lawyer to do anything other than clean up the mess. And sometimes the mess isn't cleanable. It's just the business is done. I can't bring the business back. And so I started to see that over and said, hey, can we start to switch models to a way that would encourage people to contact us that would not penalize them? The hour they rate penalizes a business owner for talking to their lawyer, disincentivizes that. And the other problem I had with my own problem is that every month I was looking for more work, new transactions, another contract to draft. It was very stressful to every month try to generate new revenue, a new transaction, a new contract draft, a new consultation. I said, this is it's really was not sustainable for me to try to generate that much work over and over again. So the subscription model fixed a problem my clients were having and a problem that my that the firm had. Subscription and value price, we use those terms. Value price kind of refers to we we use it internally more to refer to a one-off transaction or a case or a matter, whereas subscription is it's value price, but every month really all it means is that there's no end date, the client pays a set monthly fee. But at their core, they're very similar in the sense that there's a scope of work and a price, and the lawyer and client need to agree on those ahead of time.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. I love that that so then now they're not going to hesitate to ask before they consider something that might go sideways in the future.

SPEAKER_03:

Or again, the other point is sometimes I'm just talking with my clients, just having a normal human-to-human conversation. They're paying for it. So I'm engaged, they know they're paying for it, so they see the value, and they mention something that they don't even is not even on their lay radar as a legal problem. And they say, Hey, we're doing this. And we'll say, wait a minute, that's a thing. That that is a thing you need to be aware of. Whereas we talk with business clients and they're like, wait, I don't want to talk about the football game or your how your kid is doing right now. Is this on the clock? Am I having a personal conversation with you that you're charging me$600 an hour for? So we we do find that there's regularly there's an issue that we spot that we bring up because we're just talking with somebody. So it's really is proactive on that front. And I don't think you can do that by the hour, at least not for most of them.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think having those conversations though, and people knowing, okay, person in my back pocket that focuses the conversation more instead of it being what happened at the football game, you might have a little bit of that rapport conversation, but it gets you into the real business conversation quicker because, yeah, everybody understands you're paying for the time. And this is a professional that has my best interest at heart.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, it leads the better. Ultimately, I find that the business relationship is less contentious and conflicting, if I will. The more time I spend with a client, I look at it as I'm adding value and I'm showing them value by spending time with them. And they don't have to see it as Andrew's just spending time with me because every minute he spends with me is an extra 20 bucks on this or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_02:

True. And I think with the when you're talking about business transactions on a subscription model, if I'm thinking about doing something in the future that maybe was similar to something in the past, it's a bit more of a brainstorming, not coaching, if you will, but you're the asset that I can reach out to and say, these are the things I'm thinking about doing. And then whether I think it's a legal issue or not, you see it from a different perspective.

SPEAKER_03:

Correct. Yeah. And there's a lot of things that people you want to sell a business, is I'm sure a lot of people in this world know is that selling a business isn't just getting to the end and drafting the paperwork. But a lot of people wait until that coin, like, hey, everything's done, lawyer. I just need you to draft the paperwork. I think a lot of people do that from the perspective of I want to spend as little as possible on a lawyer. Whereas the people that we've seen and helped exit, especially in our subscription model, it's a conversation that can take years and it's not really a transaction at that point. It's, hey, you're a business owner and you're a couple of years away from retirement and you don't want to do this anymore, and you have no plan whatsoever. That's really hard to do on an hourly basis or even a fixed fee because I don't know how much help you're going to need. So that's actually a conversation we have with a lot of our subscription clients, is encouraging them to think about a succession plan and sometimes bugging them or annoying them in a way or just reiterating the topic to say, hey, last time we met, we talked about this a little bit. You said that Maryland might be a great person to take over the business one day. Have you talked to her about that? What's going on? It it helps us coach our clients through a business issue that maybe like today is not a legal issue, but absolutely will be a legal issue one day in the not too distant future.

SPEAKER_02:

And that's something I think a lot of business owners, and it's something that I've been having conversations with other business owners in my network, is I don't think any of us really thought about how long it really takes to set up an exit plan. I was speaking with someone recently and it was fast and it was a 10-month process. And during that period, the first two months was like this real scramble of getting everything together and then five month no conversation window, which was total panic on the business owner's side because the other person was doing their due diligence, and then it finished, but it was just completely stressful. But had they started getting their ducks in a row earlier, like you said, the subscription model, I can constantly have this conversation and make sure I'm in on track, I would he would have been ready quicker. And it could have been a faster transition, transaction.

SPEAKER_03:

And I'd also argue you might be able to charge more for the business as well, because the things that we encourage our clients to do that adds value to the business for a sale, like getting yourself out of doing the day-to-day, right, has other benefits as well. It means that you write processes, you write procedures that adds value to the business. That also means that you can go on vacation for a week and not have to answer business calls. It means that you can you're hiring better people, and maybe one of them is an ideal person to take over the business. So it's and it prevents stupid legal problems from happening. When you build a process to do something, you're preventing some of the mistakes that might happen that lead to different types of litigation. So it's a very wholesome approach to say, hey, the you getting ready to sell your business is not a go find a buyer right now and draft the paperwork. It's a sometimes years-long process of building things, but there's other benefits to it that I just expressed.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, the roadmap of the SOPs, I think, are undervalued when you're starting a business because as a business owner, you're doing everything yourself. Now you want to start stepping away and having, like you said, taking a vacation, having that kind of processes. So what types of tools do you use? Because I know we're hearing AI everything, and everything seems to get that bigger and better and more and faster. What types of things are you doing to help you spend, if you will, less time doing a project and with the assistance of AI perhaps, and still delivering high quality service to your clients?

SPEAKER_03:

And I think AI is a really interesting part of value pricing because now I'm not, if I'm billing by the hour, AI is a massive threat to my financial model. And so either I have, if you're doing that and using AI, now you have to, I think I've seen some firms like they increase their hourly rate if they're using AI, right? Which I mean, lawyers already have probably an hourly rate that most people say, what the hell? Uh so increasing it does not really make that any better. But AI is now our friend in the sense that I'm incentivized to use it because so far we disclose to all our business clients we're using it, we have not had anyone give us any sort of objection so far. Now, to be fair, we're not working with multinational conglomerates that have really valuable trade secrets. Most of our clients are, I call them the unsexy businesses, architects, engineering firms. They're not the next Uber, the next startup necessarily, but they're the mom and pops that are doing great financially, seven and eight figures, and have traditionally gone to law firms where they're spending several hundred dollars an hour. But for them, it's they want good work product and they want it quicker. Right now we're dealing with a situation where one of our clients said, Hey, we sent off our contract to another party and we're waiting for red lines and just be ready for the red lines to come back because we want a quick response from you. I say, okay, sure, acknowledge that we open a project on our system, so we have that kind of open and ready. I followed up with them last week. I was like, hey, what's going on with that? And it's been three weeks now, we haven't gotten the red lines. And you talk to a lot of business clients about red lines on a contract, and three weeks is not unheard of. It's actually a common answer to send it off to the lawyer and get it back. You're able to turn around red lines to a client and we promise it within 48 hours, 48 business hours. So if it's Friday, we'll get it to you, usually by like Tuesday at lunch. And we have multiple lawyers review it in that time to give a client a completely marked up contract. And AI is enabling us to do that. So now our interests are aligned is you send us a contract, do you want it in three weeks or 48 hours? And one business owner is going to say, Yes, I'm willing to wait three weeks. And oh, I have no idea how much it's gonna cost me to do that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So AI is a massive tool there. We're using it for a lot of just transcription and meeting notes. And we're finding that because we're one downside about the pro about the business practice is it is a lot of practice areas in one. And so we think of ourselves as experts on the 101 of business law. So it's HR, it's IP, it's equity transaction, it's contracts. We explain to our clients, yes, I can talk to a talk to you about HR, but I'm also not going to litigate a discrimination case in federal courts. So we explain to our clients how we have a broad base of knowledge that goes fairly deep on a lot of topics, but we're not really experts in one particular field. And we're finding that for most of our business clients, that broad base of knowledge is actually more valuable than going this super deep route because you don't need the super deep expert knowledge the vast majority of the time.

SPEAKER_02:

And you always have a network for that, right?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, we have a network for that. And that's always, hey, Marilyn, you got this issue. We think we need to bring in an expert, and we're probably better suited than our clients to figure out when they need an expert. So we think you need an expert. I'm gonna go to my list and help you find the expert. You're gonna have the final say, of course, but I can bring this person in and then I can help you translate from this expert to the business sense, and I can be your the second cent of eye. Is this is it normal that it takes 18 months to get a trial date? It's probably a little long, but not outside. I don't think the lawyer's done a bad job necessarily. So we're having these conversations that are very detailed and we're finding that AI is very good at we're loading all our transcripts into the client file, and now we can use AI to start to query to say, hey, how many employees did this customer have two years ago? Or where did we discuss? I know we discussed XYZ. Where is that? And it can lead me to the transcripts of the meeting. And so AI is creating this kind of database in this profile of the client. I feel like we're still very early on in that, but it's not hard to imagine that eventually just in these conversations with the clients, we'll have a ton of data about them to be able to query the AI. So I'm not always going back to the client and saying, Hey, what's you told me this and I didn't write down that detail. What is that? So we're capturing all of that information. And again, I'm not spending hours after each meeting transcribing my notes or taking my notes. I don't really take notes anymore. I make notes to the AI translator. I say, call this out, make a note of this, and it gets noted, and now it's in the file and it's there.

SPEAKER_02:

The other thing I like, well I really love the summaries with the note takers. You've got the transcript and then the summaries and then talking points. But yeah, so are you doing, and I know I don't know your secrets and stuff, but you're doing like a project so that everything is what I found with past very long chats, if you will, the memory was lost. But when the opportunity for projects came along, then all the memory is contained in the folder. But now they're talk a lot of people are talking about agents, and you'll make an agent for one client. Is are you seeing and can you share what type of system?

SPEAKER_03:

Quite there yet. A lot of, to be honest, a lot of the AI is, I'd say we're using it a lot, but we're not super far out there because I think we're implementing AI on kind of a almost an as needed basis. So on that front, like we're just using we use Zoom and the Zoom AI worked great. So we at one point we had one of the note taker apps and it was coming into the Zoom meeting and doing that. We said, Why are we paying for this when Zoom does a great job? Right. The transcript dropped into Google Drive, and now Google is we've been on Google Apps since I started because the Microsoft product wasn't really great in 2012 and Google was. So we've been in Google Apps for that long, mostly for that reason.

SPEAKER_01:

Same year, same year.

SPEAKER_03:

And Gemini is just there, right? I don't even know if I can turn it off, it's just there. So it's we're just using it. I'd say it's not we're not using it in really a cutting edge way. It's just Zoom is saying, hey, we have an AI agent. Do you want to turn it on? Yes. Yeah, I don't even think I turned on Gemini in Google Drive. It's just, hey, we're here, it's on now. You're not paying it in there. Well, it's there. We have built, we do, we have used chat, we've used the API platform for open AI for a while, which is, I think, basically chat GPT, and you can build assistance. So we have build built assistance for which which is basically a fancy way of saying we've built custom prompts for specific work items. We do a lot of value pricing, and so we we've built a assistant to help with value pricing. And so we've trained it, we've continued to reiterate the prompt and add to the prompt is hey, this is what value pricing is, and we want to offer a client three options, and these are some of the different options that will go into the bronze, silver, and gold packages. And I want you to take this transcript from my meeting with a client, they need services, and I'll run it through that prompt. And it gives me a pretty good base of what the three options we want to offer that client are. So we're using it on that kind of administrative side. We're using it to take client emails to our group inbox and say, hey, Marilyn just emailed us. She's a we can identify that she's a client. A client just emailed us with a request for work. What is it? And give us a summary, a two-sentence summary, and send that into our Zoom legal team meeting so that these so we don't have to read their big email. We just get the two-minute summary really quickly. So just a small convenience thing for us. Yeah. And we built like a handbook reviewer, right? So we review a lot of handbooks for clients. Hey, here's some example handbooks. We've attached those examples to the assistant. We've told that how we want to analyze it, and it starts to become that first round of review. We're still, as humans, digging into it and figuring out it's still not right 100% of the time, but neither are we. We've got probably about 20 different assistants that I would say we design for specific purposes with a prompt, and it's cool because we can update those prompts to train it to do a better job over time.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. That's interesting. So you're really rolling out AI as the knee, just like you're helping your clients as their needs come along. Oh, I love that. Yeah. And you're are your clients having any issues with you using AI?

SPEAKER_03:

No, not so far. We had one person actually on the opposite end, we had one potential client contact us, and I think they were like, we don't want you to use AI at all. And they were small. And it's like, at this point, if you don't want to use AI, you have to you have to throw some serious money at us because we have to rebuild our entire processes for you to accommodate that. So this was somebody on the lower end of the scale, and we're like, okay, good luck. Bye. We just kicked them out. But now for the most part, our clients aren't doing that. And I think it's because we're using it as a tool to supplement what we do as attorneys. And again, we're using it to add value to our clients. One of our core values is find opportunities to add value. And that means you're paying me a monthly fee. The more value I give you, the more valuable you see the subscription, the more likely you are to continue to renew. So it's a little bit self-serving, but it's also goes back to that idea of the contract. If you send me a contract and I can give you a red line with really good red lines and really good comments, and the AI does the first draft, I look at it after that and I reject some AI comments. I add some of my own. I fix it in. It does a lot of the, I would say, the good standards in contracting and review too. Hey, this contract doesn't have a notice provision. It's good practice to have a notice provision in a contract. Add that in there. That doesn't need to be a lawyer kind of thing. So I feel like it's supplementing the work we do as lawyers. It has not it's replaced some of the work we do, but I'd say it's replaced some of the low value work we do. Allows us to deliver more value to the client.

SPEAKER_02:

I think the direction you're using it in, and you're using it to for the first round as opposed to using it as a crutch to deliver product. And that's what that's what I've heard some of the complaints because there are some law firms in early on were using it to do the delivery as opposed to stepping and instill billing by the hour. One of the I did an interview and they were using it to review contracts like you're talking about. And then when a contract was written, using it to a spell check. Perfect. You don't need to spend 30, 45 minutes spell checking your own or just double checking your own contract. Let it happen. You've done the work. So it can be a business assistant, which is what I think is really helpful.

SPEAKER_03:

That's a great use case, is we have a proofreading assistant, right? And the proofreading assistant is, hey, we're going to give you some documents and we want you to make sure that the names and the pronouns, we we call it the small things, right? The clients generally don't really know if the legal document does what it's supposed to do. But if you spell their name wrong or you use the wrong pronoun, they notice. And that's what they're all am I paying this person for. And so we have a proofreading.

SPEAKER_02:

No one loves their name misspelled. That's the one you're ill management.

SPEAKER_03:

And so it's the proofreading assistant is spit out a list of all the proper names in the document so that a human can look to double check that they're all correct. Give us a list of provisions or things that are conflicting or create some uncertainty. And so it's giving this basically it's a custom checklist per document for the lawyer to then go look at and investigate. And again, sometimes it's oh my God, I can't believe I spelled that person's name wrong. Let's fix that, done, easy. Or it's that's not really relevant, or actually you're just wrong. I know you think that's conflicting, but it's not conflicting.

SPEAKER_02:

And the one thing I've noticed is that in an example that was given to me by another business owner was taking notes from a meeting with a client and then getting taught action items, and then discussing with the AI, looking at what we've talked about over the last two or three meetings, what should be future action items that we look at. So future pacing with the client. So there's a lot of things that I think I think you're doing in an amazing way using AI to help add value to your clients.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

The last point I'll add too is it's a great troubleshooter for business problems, right? And so sometimes we we have some Google Sheets formulas that do some fun stuff for us that that add value to clients or just help us internally with a scorecard or numbers, things like that. Hey, AI, my spreadsheet is not giving me the results I expect. Here's my formula, here's the input, here's the output, what's happening? I did that the other day and it taught me a new Google Sheet formula that didn't even know existed that fixed my problem within 20 seconds.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh my God. And how many times have we struggled for what 20, 30 minutes trying to figure out why is this formula not working? I never even thought it about asking Jim and I. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_03:

I had a problem with Word the other day where one of the features was grayed out, and I was like, I don't know what's going on. Went into AI. I said, hey, this button's grayed out. Ted said, here's three potential issues. Here was number two on the list. I was like, great, cool. Now that's not even client tracing, right? But it saved me the time of trying to figure it out. And it was a very specific problem that you Google it at and you get way too many things to figure out.

SPEAKER_02:

It seems like tech issues take three times longer than you allocate for them anyway. Even if you've got a tech person in-house. But if you can ask that tech question and be sent in the right direction by AI, it's it saves so much time.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and money if you're paying somebody to do that kind of work.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. What would be your biggest advice or biggest takeaway you'd like someone to hear if they're looking at going into business law, transactional law, should I say, and using the subscription model? Because I love the monthly recurring revenue as far as being able to grow your business and not having to look for a contract each month. What would you say to someone thinking about doing that?

SPEAKER_03:

It's great. You'll be ahead of the curve. There are a lot of lawyers out there. I can think of a half dozen off the top of my head that are using the model. So it's not, you're not the first, but you're still early on in the process. I'd say it it reduces the stress of billing. One of our one of one of our three uniques is upfront and win-win pricing. So our clients know what they're paying. We never have disputes over bills. We're never arguing or having a question, you know. Worse having a client question our bill without us knowing about it. They know what they're paying up front. So it doesn't matter if we spent 0.1 on something or we spent two hours on something. It's A, they don't see that, but B, we're not having the conversations about whether or not that was worth it for them. It's right now it's about 70% of our monthly revenue. So it's less stressful on a month-to-month basis. We're not worried about billable hours. When I go on vacation and I don't bill, my revenue doesn't change. There's a lot of pros from the practice of law and from the client. From a practical implementation side, like what do you need to think about if you're doing that? I'd say the biggest challenge is thinking about it in terms of saying that you're going to charge somebody$2,000 an hour for 10 hours a month. That's not a subscription. That's prepaid hourly. So the trick is thinking about how do you collar the work? And that is still out there. There's no magic sauce there, right? And thinking about how do you make sure that things don't you're not doing too much work. So we exclude from all of our packages litigation or any sort of equity transaction. Those are bespoke engagements, or it might be sometimes we handle litigation, but it's a small claims kind of thing. And we'll say, you know what, we'll do that for you. We'll handle it. This is outside the scope, but as a courtesy to you, we're gonna do it, which is really our way of saying, hey, we haven't done a whole lot of work for you lately. This is a small thing. We can handle this. We're not gonna try to charge you extra. But if you've got to bet the company litigation, I can't really price that into a monthly fee for you.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_03:

So those are two easy exclusions that that we found. And then I'd say just it's a lot of communication. So we have a whole process for regular reviewing our client rates and how much work we're doing for them. We have a process around changing a client's rate and the language that goes out to them when we do that. Hey, Marilyn, here's what we're doing. Here's what we need to think about. And so I'd say those are the big things. Great for the practitioner, but then you need to think about it differently. And the biggest thing is just don't think about hours. You have to stop thinking about hours. You can't use hours.

SPEAKER_02:

You still have to think about how you're billing them. You still have to keep track of what you're doing for each client because you don't want it to the scope creep, right? You don't want it to just go crazy. But I like that you have processes in place. If scope creep happens, the conversation with the client going, okay, we're doing more now. We need to talk more.

SPEAKER_03:

It's honestly pretty rare. It doesn't happen that much. I feel like in the world of business, something that we've learned is business clients are not the kind of people that if I say unlimited phone calls, a lot of people are like, oh my god, unlimited phone calls, you're gonna not charge per phone call. First of all, if I limit the number of phone calls, now I have to have a way of tracking the phone calls and tiny how many they have against that limit. And I need to build processes and procedures for what to do when you exceed that limit, which adds a whole lot of extra work as opposed to just saying unlimited. And unlike maybe clients and other practice areas, business clients don't want to call me all the time.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that makes sense. They're not looking for reassurance for everything they do every day.

SPEAKER_03:

I guess in personal injury retarding contingency, so they might have unlimited calls anyway. Family law might be an area where like I could see unlimited calls being scary because they're at a different standpoint. But from a business client perspective, we've found that removing the caps and just trying to charge a fee. I think the other thing we've learned is that the fee is basically what's fair. That's really what it boils down to is are you doing a fair amount of work for the fee you're receiving? And it's a kind of a regular gut check. And fairness is totally subjective.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. And so it's not as easy. It's hourly rates are objective. This is my hourly rate, this is how many hours I did, rate times hours equals fee. Very objective, doesn't consider value at all. It doesn't consider how quickly you delivered it or how long it took you or how much value that added to the client's business. Fairness is hey, you know what? I charge you a monthly fee and I don't do a whole lot of hourly work. I don't build a whole lot of hours for you each month. And if you're paying me by the hour, you might be paying me less. But if you're paying me by the hour, you're probably not going to get a contract back within 48 hours. You you have to think have that fair what is fair to the lawyer and the client, and that is just involves con conversing with clients.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Interesting. This has been really enlightening as far as doing how you use that and how you're using AI to help do some of the legwork. I know my listeners might want to reach out to you, maybe ask you a few questions. Where can they where can they connect with you or reach you?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the place where I'm most active these days. So LinkedIn, just Andrew Legrand or Spara Law Group, SS and Jam, Peace and Paul E. P's and Paul E-R-A Law. You can follow us on there. You can reach out to me. My email is almyinitials at sparablaw.com. Happy to chat with any lawyer about this. We don't do, haven't launched any sort of consulting or anything like that yet. Don't get so many inquiries that I've felt like that would be something worth my time yet. And frankly, if I launch a second business, it's not going to be in the professional services again. I want to, I'm already in professional services. I don't need a second professional services business. Happy to chat with anybody. I've done that from time to time where hey, I want to chat with you, I got some ideas, and we'll schedule a time and I'll put on my headphones, we'll go for a walk and we'll just we'll chat about what's going on.

SPEAKER_02:

Fantastic. I'll make sure that in the show notes. And thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today, and this has been really valuable.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Marilyn, and I really appreciate this and enjoyed the conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. 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 LawmarketingZone.com 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_00:

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 LawMarketingZone.com. 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 to 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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