How, if at all, do compensation, diversity, and transparency overlap? How can these competing priorities be reconciled? Jim Meadows from Culhane Meadows doesn’t have the perfect answer. But he’s giving it a solid try. With 75 lawyers and 11 office locations, Culhane Meadows is the largest full-service women-owned law firm in the country. And in each of the last three years, the average female partner at the firm has outearned the average male partner. The firm was cloud-based from the jump, is growing rapidly and - most important for us financial nerds - boasts a collection rate above 90%. Cur ..read more

Plaintiffs' lawyers are often bold, brash, larger-than-life characters with billboards, regular TV ads, and ambition to match. But they're also visionary creatives. They excel at building something from nothing and carving out a new and unique path for legal professionals - often where no path existed before. But that creativity needs to be leavened with stability and more strategic thinking.  That's where folks like Lynn Bradley, CFO at The Potts Law firm, come in. In this, our third of a series of interviews with law firm CFOs, we talked with Lynn about the role of a CFO in any law firm ..read more

Two episodes into our four-episode series with law firm CFOs one theme that's emerged is collections. Specifically, how much money lawyers and law firms leave on the table by failing to implement processes that ensure that the firm gets paid for the work it bills out. Kevin Krese, CFO and COO at Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs, is thinking further upstream from that. Krese wants to make sure that all of the work that gets done gets billed. And, more importantly, that that time doesn't get written down before it even gets sent to the client. As one of the executive leaders at Buckingham ..read more

One thing every law firm needs is money. And I don’t think that I’m going out on a limb suggesting that money and financial health are common elements across most successful firms. In this episode, the first of our series of interviews with law firm CFOs, we speak with Scott Shaffer of Winterfeld IP Group. We dig in with Scott on law firm collection rates, collection strategies, whether firms should refer clients to collections agencies, the firm’s tech stack and how it helps facilitate the firm getting paid, Scott's “most important financial metric,” and a bunch more ..read more

What’s a lawyer doing running an offshore virtual staffing firm? Starting in 2011 Brett Trembly built a successful business law firm, Trembly Law Firm, in Miami, Florida. They now employ 30+ people and nearly a dozen lawyers.  Along the way, Brett not only realized that there was a shortage of companies offering law firm staffing, more importantly, he saw that helping law firms staff up was a huge opportunity not only for him for the law firm. In Brett’s case, he was able to dramatically transform his law firm with his first hire. And he never looked back. He now runs Get Staffed Up - a c ..read more

On this special episode of Financially Legal we’re announcing the launch of our integration with Lawmatics. Lawmatics is a Legal Intake Solution, Marketing Automation, and Law Firm CRM software all in one. Today they are announcing the launch of their time and billing module with Lawmatics payments powered by Gravity Legal.  We talk with Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel. Matt's a former criminal defense attorney who, after founding and selling the well-known practice management system MyCase, started Lawmatics a few years back to help lawyers move away from the things they hate to do and focus ..read more

Why do lawyers struggle to get paid for the work that they do? Whether it’s the low collection rates that we see in the Clio Trends Report to lawyers offering too steep a discount, to lawyers refusing to sue their clients, and on and on, “Show me the money” is definitely not the #1 mantra for many of our fellow lawyers.  Julie Steinbacher doesn’t know why . . .  but she’s got some ideas about how to fix it. Not only is Julie the head of a 40 person law firm throughout north-central Pennsylvania, she also runs a coaching group for lawyers called Million Dollar Solution in which she he ..read more

In this, the fourth and final installment of our discussions with RJon Robins on the seven essential parts of a law firm, we move to the 5th and 6th essential parts of a law firm: physical plant and financial metrics and controls. The topic of physical plant naturally brings up the question of “whither physical law firms in the time of COVID?” We also discuss how intellectual property may be the most significant way that you can add value to your law firm. We wrap with a discussion of financial metrics and controls and the one metric that you as a law firm should be tracking ..read more

Have you ever considered the role of profit in a law firm? No, I mean, really thought about what it is, why it exists, whether it should be a part of your firm, and/or how to grow it. If so, then this episode is for you. Brooke Lively is the founder and CEO of Cathedral Capital. Her mission is pretty simple: make law firms more profitable. And she’s written a book for lawyers all about it: it’s called From Panic to Profit. In this episode of Financially Legal we talk with Brooke not only about profit but about how every firm - yes, even flat fee and personal injury firms - needs to leverage th ..read more

In this, our third installment of our discussions with RJon Robins on the seven essential parts of a law firm, we explore the 3rd and 4th essential parts of a law firm: production and people. While we begin with production, we quickly veer into a conversation about people involved in production and whether every solo or small firm lawyer should try to be an entrepreneur. Of course, we discuss the role of non-lawyers in the delivery of legal services and how you should go about figuring out who should do what in your law firm and what lawyer entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t spend their time o ..read more