T H E
N AT I O N A L
N E W S P A P E R
F O R
S M A L L
L AW
F I R M S
JANUARY 2, 2006
www.lawyersweeklyusa.com
Seminar Helps Lawyers
Chart A Course To Big Profits
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Photo/Nora Lockwood Tooher
plement as soon as they return to their offices.
“Most practitioners have the capability to double
their business,” Riley said. “We provide the thinking, technology and coaching.”
After offering the workshop on his own for a
year, Riley partnered in 2004 with Atticus, the Florida practice management and coaching firm. Over
the past two years, about 300 attorneys seeking
their inner entrepreneur have attended the workshop.
Riley and Atticus president Mark Powers now
take turns teaching the workshop,
which is offered twice a year to
lawyers in a wide range of practice areas.
To qualify, an attorney must be the primary shareholder the firm and have a personal income of more than $100,000. Participants are usually mid-career attorneys with
some experience managing their own law
firms.
“These are very successful people who have
gotten comfortable,” Powers said. “It challenges
them to go the edge, look at new things and
try new things.”
Firm owners pay $1,000 to attend the class, with
reduced fees if they bring associates or staff members and also for returning students. Each class is
limited to about 20 participants.
Powers said that participants can expect gross revenues to increase 15 to 30 percent within the first year,
and their working hours to decrease by the same percentage. Over three years, he said, attorneys can expect to double their revenue.
the room, placing a reassuring hand on attorneys’
shoulders.
Shyly at first, then with increased confidence,
classmates took turns describing their thriving practices of the future.
“When our firm doubled our revenue we opened a
kiosk in the mall to produce simple wills,” Frisse said.
“When I doubled my revenue, I opened a restaurant in Colorado,” quipped Manhattan estate planning attorney Glenn Busch.
Busch, who was gently scolded by Riley for showing classmates pictures of his Boston terrier, Sadie, on
his cell phone during class time, then said more seriously that he offered an estate kit organizer to clients
and opened a title company.
Eichenblatt said the lawyers in his firm now
spend more time learning to be better rainmakers by
implementing marketing systems that include everyone, from the runner to the associates.
‘You Just Can’t Lose’
In the final part of the class, each attorney unveiled a 10-step “strategic roadmap” for increasing
revenues.
They were as basic as improving staff and as creative as opening an elder care subsidiary to take care
of clients’ parents by ferrying them to doctors’ appointments and writing checks.
Results, Reilly said, depend on what happens
when lawyers get back to their own offices.
“If they can go back to their practice and carve
out the time and not get sucked back into the day-today needs of the practice, they’ll have tremendous
success quickly,” he said.
Everyone, however, should see some revenue
gains, according to Riley.
“If they go back and implement three out of their
10 projects, they’ll have tremendous success,” he
said. “You just can’t lose.”
To support graduates, Atticus offers a variety of
follow-up help, including a monthly group conference call, a group meeting after three months and
one-on-one coaching.
Over the next year, Lawyers Weekly USA will
track attorneys from three law firms who have completed the workshop. We’ll be checking in to see how
they fare as they try to implement their 10-step plans
for doubling their revenues.
Information on the Double Your Workshop is available
from Molly Hall, at Atticus (1-888-840-4306) or(atticusonline.com) The next Double Your Revenue workshop is
scheduled for March 9-10 in Tampa, and will be taught by
Powers.
Questions or comments can be directed to the writer at:
[email protected]
David M. Frisse
By Nora Lockwood Tooher
Seminar creator
Steve Riley
By Nora Lockwood Tooher
TAMPA – Steve Riley practices what he preaches.
Since founding his firm 10 years ago, the creator of
the “Double Your Revenue Workshop” has used a
constant stream of new products, services and practice
innovations to double his law firm’s revenue several
times.
His firm – The Strategic Counsel – specializes in
estate planning, business law and asset protection –
and now has five attorneys and nine support staff in
three Florida cities.
Riley devotes about three days a week to his law
practice, and spends one day a week teaching other
attorneys how to improve their practices. That leaves
him one workday a week to “goof off and do other
things,” he said.
“The practice of law doesn’t have to be so painful
and tortuous,” said Riley, 42. “We’re trying to give lawyers the opportunity to look at their practice as a business and not be slaves to their practice, but instead have
their practice serve them and serve their lives.
“About 80 percent of the attorneys I’ve met have been
enslaved by their practices – for 10, 15 years,” he continued. “They haven’t thought. ‘How can I get the practice
to work for me, rather than working for the practice?’”
Several years ago, Riley noticed that even attorneys who consciously tried to expand their practices
got mired in small issues, like how to produce a
brochure, or what their letterhead should look like.
“They were trying to figure out how to grow their
practices, but they would be focused on really minor
components of a growth strategy,” he said.
Riley started looking at the methodology he used to
build his own practice and set out to show other attorneys how they, too, could increase their revenues.
The result was the Double Your Revenue workshop.
Going To ‘The Edge’
According to Riley, the workshop requires attorneys to
• Look at their practices with fresh eyes so they can
pinpoint the positives and negatives.
• Brainstorm innovations in about 20 areas of their
practice, from new products and systems to marketing and technology.
• Write out a clear action plan they can begin to im-
The Zen Of Lawyering
Early last month, attorneys and staff from eight
law firms – including Riley’s own firm – attended
the most recent Double Your Revenue workshop at
Strategic Counsel’s Tampa offices.
With participants seated at long tables in the firm’s conference room, Riley asked the lawyers to turn off their critical mindset along with their cellphones and Blackberries.
Lawyers, he said, are not only among the “fastest
learners on the planet, they are also trained as skeptics. As soon as they hear an idea, they’ll say,
‘I know that already.’”
Riley folded his lanky frame into a director’s chair
at the front of the class, sprinkling his PowerPoint
presentation with quotations about capitalism, the
professional services industry and even Zen Buddhism.
Encouraging the class to tackle the tough business
issues they may have been avoiding in their practices, he said: “Life is suffering. If you adopt the suffering, it goes away.”
Each attorney was then asked to share the “bad
news/good news” about his or her own firm.
“Tort reform has not only affected the value of
our cases, but also public perception,” said Steven
Eichenblatt, a personal injury attorney from Orlando.
The good news, however, is that he and his partner,
Gregory Page, have diversified by adding a construction law practice, he said.
“The good news is that we have met our revenue
goals,” said Dave Frisse, an estate planning attorney
from the Midwest. “The bad news “is that we don’t
generate enough revenue. One of the reasons we met
our financial goals is I didn’t get paid.”
Frisse explained that he has not technically received a salary from the firm, since he supports himself with investment income.
With offices in Terra Haute, Ind. and Paris, Ill., Frisse
said his biggest challenge is finding a way to boost revenue in a conservative market.
“The Paris we’re talking about is not the City of
Lights,” he said wryly.
‘When I Doubled My Revenue, I ... ’
During a series of “Brainstorming Sprints,” Riley
asked attorneys to project themselves into the future
and explain how they doubled their revenue through
increased fees and improved marketing, reduced costs,
technology and any other strategies they could come
up with.
“Imagine it is now sometime in the future,” Riley
told them. “We’ve now doubled our gross revenue.”
As the students wrote down their plans for doubling their practices, Riley slowly moved around
T
his was the second try for
David Frisse.
Two years ago he attended
the Double Your Revenue workshop and returned to his Midwestern estate planning and business law practice full of energy
and ambition. But Frisse acknowledges that he failed to implement
the ideas he came up with in his
first revenue-building plan.
“After six months, it’s mush,”
he said.
So this year, he returned to
Florida with his partner, Rick
Brewster, and three assistants, determined to put his new revenuebuilding program into practice at
his offices in Paris, Ill., and Terre
Haute, Ind.
The firm’s main goal is to increase marketing so it can boost referrals and revenues in a region
that is generally conservative.
“Our goal has to be to spread
our net wide to bring people in,”
Frisse said.
His overall goal is to reach $1
million in annual revenues by the
end of 2007. Here are his firm’s top
five steps for increasing revenue:
• Schedule 22 financial advisor
meetings a month for the attorneys.
Meeting with financial advisors will help introduce the firm
and its services to new clients and
remind advisors why they benefit
by making referrals.
Target date: By end of 2007.
Revenue impact: $260,000 a
year, assuming an average fee of
$3,000 and an increase of six estate planning clients per month.
• Schedule two speaking opportunities a month.
Two employees have been assigned the task of finding and scheduling two additional speaking opportunities a month for Frisse and
Brewster. Speaking at professional
seminars and local civic, social, fraternal and charitable organizations
will increase their visibility and generate new seminar attendees and
David Frisse attended the conference with his legal assistant, Sue Ann
Cary, and other members of the firm, hoping that having more people
involved will make the implementation phase more effective.
clients quickly. The firm has been
doing three to five seminars monthly.
Target date: Immediately
Revenue impact: $60,000 a year,
assuming two new clients a month.
• Obtain more referrals from existing clients.
The firm will identify what
types of meetings with clients are
most conducive to asking them
to refer friends, families, and organizations with which they are
involved.
Target date: Jan. 1, 2006
Revenue impact: $72,000 a year
by the end of 2007, assuming two
additional clients a month.
• Offer a Christian heritage estate
planning process.
According to Brewster, there is
already interest in adopting “biblical principles for estate planning.” They plan to contact local
churches to schedule meetings
and workshops to discuss “scripture and God’s expectations regarding planning for the people
and causes we care about.”
“We work with Christian families to help them structure their
estate plans, taking into consideration God’s expectations for their
planning and their families
according to the Bible,” Brewster
said. The Bible, he said, “lays out
certain expectations for Christians. That includes expectations
that people will use the resources
that God’s blessed them with to
take care of their family, take care
of others less fortunate and further God’s ministries.”
The firm would incorporate
counseling within its estate planning practice to explain Christian
estate planning.
Target date: Immediately.
Revenue impact: $216,000 a
year, assuming six additional
clients a month.
• Simple will production.
The firm plans to offer “simple
will planning days” at area financial planners’ offices. Frisse said the
firm’s “wildest idea” is to open a
kiosk they can use at area malls during busy shopping periods to produce simple wills for customers.
Target date: Early summer.
Revenue impact: $9,600 a year,
assuming 24 simple wills each
month.
Questions or comments can be
directed to the writer at:
[email protected]
Reprinted with permission from Dolan Media Co., 41 West Street, Boston, MA 02111. (800) 444-5297 © 2006 #00583vw