Richard James: [00:00:00] law firm owners stop wearing the $30 an hour hats and start earning 3000, 5,000, even $10,000 an hour.

Richard James: I worked with a particular law firm, a client of mine for a long time, and I helped him go from $55 and 38 cents an hour to $3,358 an hour in just a couple of years. And how did I do that? Well, I use this seven step system about to share with you and after this video, you're going to be able to do the exact same thing too.

So let's break into it. Shall we?

Step number one is we have to set the baseline. Now, how do we set the baseline? How do we identify where ground zero is for you? What do we mean? Well, we have to figure out how you're currently utilizing the time you have on this earth. You're not likely spending or investing your time [00:01:00] wisely. It's most likely there is waste and that's why you're earning such a low dollar per hour.

You're doing the 30 an hour hack. Let's pay attention to this. How do we do it? Well, we have to do a time study.

So, real quick, I know, time studies don't sound super sexy or super exciting. I get it. But when I was a young entrepreneur, I hired a consultant and he happened to come on the day when we were putting together new desks and when he walked into the office, I was underneath the desk with my DeWalt screwdriver, screwing in screws, putting together my IKEA desks for my team.

And he introduced himself, took me into the back warehouse and said, look, if we're going to get started, the first thing that we're going to do is make a rule. You're not allowed to put desks together any longer. And I thought to myself, well, why [00:02:00] is this such a big deal? And he went on to educate me that I'm taking the hour of time to put together that desk and I'm wasting the company's 3, 000 hours from my time or 5, 000 from my time.

So what did he have me do? He had me do a time study. Well, what did we discover when I did the time study? Well, we sat down and we just started saying, exactly, when do we start every single day? And what do we do in 15 to 30 minute increments? And we're asking ourselves, how many emails do we receive?

We're asking ourselves, how many meetings are we on? In our day and age, how many Zoom calls? For you, it'd be how many client meetings do you have? And then also, how many interruptions do you have from what we call time vampires? And then, how often are you interrupted by things like [00:03:00] Slack or other personalized interruption time vampires like technology offers us today?

And fundamentally, we just want to add it all up. And we want to get a total, and we want to be able to do it by category, so we understand where we're spending our time on revenue generating activity, or we're spending time on 30 an hour hats. Here's a little inside secret. When I did my time study, you know what I found out?

I wasn't spending most of my time fixing desks, but I was spending most of my time being the chief technology officer of our firm. I happen to be pretty good with computers, and a number of my team were older, chronologically accomplished, let's say. They were wonderful at what they did, they just didn't know much more than, you know, monitor, mouse, keyboard.

And so, anytime something broke, I would hear, Rich! And I'd come running to their office and fix their computer, because [00:04:00] I didn't want them to not be selling, or to not be doing whatever operation they were doing. And I found out that I was investing over 30 percent of my week in being the Chief Technology Officer.

What did I do? Well, that leads us to the very second point.

The second step is to prioritize.

What do we have to prioritize? We have to prioritize the work that we do and make sure that we're only working on those things we should be working on. Let me illustrate that for you. So if you look at your work like a pyramid, the work at the very top is the most important work that you should be doing.

Now, some of that work is being the attorney. And right now, for many of you, that's the top level at which you earn. Maybe you earn 400 [00:05:00] an hour. Maybe you earn 1, 300 an hour. Trust me, I've got clients who do that. It doesn't really matter. As working as the attorney, you're limiting yourself. Because you can make so much more money. As a business owner. Here's the next place you could be making money. You could be starting to specialize as a marketer, a marketer that also understands the whole sales process. If you start learning to become a marketer and a salesperson or train salespeople, you start to be able to earn 3, 000 to 5, 000 an hour because it's all about leverage You start to become the CEO.

Now, all of your hours start to be worth 10, 000 Why is it this way? Well, let me illustrate that with a story. So, Elon Musk talked about, [00:06:00] in an interview recently that I watched, about the decisions he has to make in any given day. I'm not voting towards Elon Musk. I'm not giving him my allegiance. I'm just illustrating a story for you.

So put whatever feelings you have about Elon Musk aside, good or bad, because this point is just about leverage. So Elon Musk, if you don't know, owns companies like Tesla, SpaceX, right? Twitter, now known as X. Or formally known as Twitter. And so when he bought these companies in the early days, he said, you know, I was making $10,000 decisions.

And now he says, on a regular basis, I'm making billion dollar decisions because they're generating whatever, a couple hundred billion dollars a year in revenue. Decision it has a billion dollar ramification and all he does at this point is go from company to company as the [00:07:00] CEO of three different companies identify their most pressing bottleneck and then he goes and works with the person in charge of the engineer in charge of that bottleneck and he figures out how to solve it.

And that's how he wears the billion dollar an hour hat. Because he's just found the ultimate form of leverage. Now your company's not going to do a billion dollars. Probably. But you certainly can get to the point where you're working on the 3, or 10, 000 hour. Now, here's the secret. Your job is to maximize doing this at all times.

And then, you push every other job down. That's the key. There are other people on this pyramid who are great humans, they're great people, love them, love to work with them, we need them on our team, but they're not you. And the way that you make [00:08:00] sure that you maximize your result is you pass work to everybody else.

Now, if you're like most attorneys, you say, yeah, rich, I tried that and they just screwed it up ever happened to you. I'm sure it probably did. And guess what? That just means that we're the wrong leader. my mentor told me, if my team sucks, I suck as a leader. That was hurtful. But it was true.

And so we have to up our game as being leaders if we're going to get to the 3, dollar an hour hours. Okay? The only way we can do that is by being better leaders. The only way we can do that is by clearly identifying the tasks we should be doing and shouldn't be doing, do the things we should be doing, and constantly pushing down the things we shouldn't be doing.

Now, here's a pro tip. Pro tip.

Look, if [00:09:00] you're a small and solo, this isn't going to be as relevant to you. But if you're a firm that have other attorneys or other high level players on your team, You let them do the same. You allow other players to also elevate their work. So if you've got an attorney and he's or she is here work that requires a bar card. All other work should be pushed to somebody else so we can maximize their billable hour. That's how we make sure they're elevating their work. That's how you take yourself from where you are to the CEO level to that 10, 000 an hour plus.

Okay.

Hey, look, if you'd like to learn how to go from 30 an hour to over 3, 000 an hour, but you're not sure where to start, I created a really simple tool. Go to MyLawFirmSecret. com and just download this free law firm time study [00:10:00] tool. It'll get you started. It'll show you to break it out into categories and it'll help this whole process be a little bit easier for you.

Go ahead and go there now and grab that free tool.

Step number three is who so when we look at this pyramid and we say we're going to push work down Right. And that shouldn't be like down like less than don't misunderstand me. It should be lower skill, right? So it's either lower license, lower skill, whatever, but it's not like they're not less than humans.

I want to be really clear about that. Sometimes I try to refer to this as an arrow rather than a pyramid so that we're pushing the work over rather than down because I don't want that negative connotation. But ultimately, to give you a good view, we are pushing this work down. But the question is, who [00:11:00] is going to do that work?

Right? And you've already stated in your own mind, some of you, I can't trust some of my team to do this. and I get that. And so, you've got to make sure you have the right who on your team. Which means, as a leader, you have to have the ability to attract good quality talent. But most importantly, you have to have the ability to build a farm team.

Here's what I mean. When you attract good talent, rather than trying to attract good talent up at the top of the pyramid, what I want you to do is I want you to attract good talent down here at the bottom couple of rungs. Because then they show themselves to have excellent character, they show themselves to have excellent work ethic, and then we can start to rise them up.

Sure, some of these [00:12:00] roles require a license. I understand that, but most law firms that I work with do anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of the work. with non licensed attorneys. Yes, it depends on the practice area. But an awful lot of work gets done by the non licensed attorneys behind the scenes. Sure, in an hourly billing firm, we need attorneys to bill.

I get that. But they still need all of this support staff. to do all of the non billing activity. Don't go out and try to hire somebody with experience that's going to come in and change and win the day. That rarely works. I know people say we should go hire a talent. Do you know how much a talent there is like, if you thought about it, like what percentage of the population is an a player, the answer I most usually get is like 5%. [00:13:00] And so that means you are competing for the same 5 percent that everybody else is competing for. And in a small business like a law firm, that talent is usually overpriced and very, very difficult to acquire.

And oftentimes they want to be working for a business that's growing and gives them massive growth opportunity. That may or may not be who you are. And so if you want to get great things done and push work down to somebody, my suggestion is find really good people at the lower levels and then raise them up.

We call that building a farm team.

And when you build your farm team correctly, Just like the Yankees have done for many years, I know, I'm a Yankee fan, sorry, hate me if you want. But just like they did for so many years, you end up with great quality teams. I get it, I'm living in the 90s. But hey, I was born [00:14:00] in 1970s, so like, when that happened I was in my mid 20s or almost 30.

So I still have fond memories of the 90s in the New York Yankees. So if you want to get results and you want to be able to figure out your who, you're going to have to push your work down to somebody that's on your farm team that you're raising up and finding good quality talent and training them to be the best that they can possibly be.

Which brings us to our fourth most important point.

The fourth point is that you must delegate.

Now, delegation is not abdication. So we're not suggesting that we're giving this to somebody and we're going to forget about it. The art of delegation is really, really important to understand. And so when you're delegating something to somebody, we have to make sure that the person knows how to do the work.

So how do you make sure the person knows how to do the work? You [00:15:00] have to mentor them. Yeah, you've got to mentor them and in most smaller law firms, you the owner of the firm is the one that's going to have to do the mentoring. Why? Because when your firm started, you probably did everything. Heck, you probably still do everything to a certain extent.

You're the one who answered the phone. It went to your cell phone when you were in court and you went to your voicemail when you were in court and you answered at night. Until you found somebody who can answer the phones for you. And then you were the one who filed all of your documents. You were the one who took care of making sure that you timestamped all of the mail that came in.

Until you hired somebody to do some of these things. Hopefully, we've identified these things that you're doing right now and we're going to get rid of them. But my point is, you're the one who likely knows how to do everything. You understand your CRM, you understand your order entry and billing system, you understand your matter management system, you understand how the court system works, and you understand what, if [00:16:00] you do this, then that happens.

So you need to mentor them. Otherwise If you don't mentor them, you're going to make sure that whoever you mentored before, whether you did it right or did it wrong, or somebody else who mentored them, is going to then going to give them a copy of a copy of a copy, right? And what I mean is, if you ever took a piece of paper and put it in a copy machine, and then you took the copy and you put that in a copy machine, and you took a copy and put that in a copy machine, the next result is always worse.

And so unless they start getting the mentoring from the top, they're not going to know how to do this the right way. Eventually, if you follow the rest of the steps I'm about to give you, You could make sure that they stay as pure as possible and on task as possible, but it has to start By you making sure you mentor people So here's a really simple formula on how you mentor. Right? It's basically, you do it, and they watch, [00:17:00] and then you review. And, the next step is, they do it, And you watch.

And then you review. And then you score them doing it on their own.

And then you leave them alone. So you do it and they watch, you review it together. They do it and you watch and you review it together. Then you score how well they did. And then you get to leave them alone once they pass based on the score you [00:18:00] want them to have. And you do this over and over and over and over again until they've got it.

Now that they've got it, you can trust that they can actually go do it. Which leads me to the next point.

Step number five is inspect.

You should always inspect what you expect by report. And that's the biggest point here. You have to have a report. to make sure that you know what's happening, right? You want to make sure that what you want to be happening is what is actually happening. Because oftentimes, what you think is happening, what is actually happening, are two completely different things.

And the way that you make sure you maximize your value and your billable hour is that you get to a 10, 000 hour by making sure everybody else is doing exactly what you expect them to do and the way that you do that is by having a report. This is why you develop systems so that systems can kick out [00:19:00] the reports on the different tasks that your team are doing.

As you get bigger, you end up having managers that inspect these things and then the managers report to you. But for now, in the beginning, your job is to develop the reports. But this brings me to my next point.

In order for you to be able to do this. You absolutely must time block.

You must time block your calendar. The secret to this is doing the work that you're supposed to be doing. What is the 3, and 10, 000 dollar hour hats? It's working on marketing. It's working on sales. It's working as a CEO and building a team and building systems. This is the real value of a work. For some of you are saying, well Rich, what should I do about the legal work I [00:20:00] have to do?

I get it. For now, you have to probably do the legal work. But at some point, we're going to have to replace you in the majority of the legal work. Don't worry, if you like being a lawyer, we can have you do the work that you want to do and not have to do the work that you don't want to do, and we can time block for it.

But we absolutely must lay out time on the calendar. How do you do that? Well, the first thing that we do is we time block for emails and phone calls so that we only do them during these blocks. The second thing that we do. is we make sure that we time block for clients. So no more, hey boss, a client's on the phone, can you talk to him?

No, here's a link to my calendar, book an appointment for them for 15 minutes and I'll have enough time to be ready for their call. Open up time every single day for client calls if that's what you do. Then you have to time block [00:21:00] for staff. Because otherwise you have time vampires walking by your office every single day going, Boss, you got a minute.

You should have a sign on the front of your desk that says, Do not knock unless there's a fire and I'm the only man with a bucket of water. That's it. They shouldn't interrupt you. And the only way they know that is if everybody lives by a calendar and they don't bother you. I used to think open door policies were good.

I'm here to tell you, you need to take a 2x4 and put it across your door and don't let anybody in. The only way you're going to get to the 3, or 10, 000 on our hat. is if you can actually do the work you're supposed to be doing. And you can't do that if time vampires steal your time. The way around that is to make sure you time block.

Now, if you sell, you may have to time block. For selling. But again, after all of this, what is the highest, most priority work you should be doing? Well, the highest, most priority work you should be [00:22:00] doing is working on marketing. So we need to make sure that we're working on marketing and time blocking for it.

We have to make sure we're building systems. So we have to create strategy time to build out systems. We've got to find time to make this work. The good news is many things can be done one to many. The other good thing is, is that. Pareto's Law, right? We know Parkinson's Law, 80 20. Pareto's Law basically says the amount of time we give something to happen is the amount of time it'll actually take us to do the task.

So a lot of times we give things an hour when it really only would take 20 minutes. Just get a little timer, put it on your desk, set the timer, and you'd be surprised how much work you can do in a short amount of time. Start time blocking if you want to find success in your life. And the only way you can time block is if you can start to identify all the things that you are doing, so you can get rid of the things you shouldn't be doing, and prioritize the things that you should be doing by putting them inside of a time [00:23:00] block.

And anything else you need to do that you maybe you shouldn't be doing because there's nobody else to do it, stuff it into these different blocks and you'll be surprised how much you'll get done with a tremendous amount of focus. But none of this happens unless you get to the very next step.

The next step is that you must Trust. At some point, you're going to have, identified what you can do and what you can't do, what you should do, what you shouldn't do, what your maximum hours are made for. At some point, you're going to clearly identify the who that you can start to give these things to.

You're going to start to delegate and you're going to mentor. You're going to time block your schedule. You're going to go through this entire process. At some point, you just have to trust that it's all going to be okay. A lot of times, lawyers You know, look, arguably so like things to be perfect and I get it and I understand it.

I'm not a lawyer, but I worked with you now for 15 years and so I've [00:24:00] started to come to understand what you've gone through. You are oftentimes the smartest person in your class, or at least you got the best grades. You excelled in just about everything that you did and you had a perfection mindset, whether it was.

Pressed on you or you had it from birth when you went through law school, from what I understand, they trained you to mitigate risk and tried to be perfect at every possible turn. Business isn't like that. Business is messy business. We oftentimes make more mistakes than we don't make mistakes, especially in marketing and sales.

We have to have trial and error. And at some point we have to trust. The majority of the work that you're going to do in your firm is not actually the legal work. The majority of the work that's going to be done in your firm is going to be everything but the legal work. And the way that you get there is that you have to do everything I said and then you have to trust [00:25:00] and just let people fail.

Sure, protect your license. Of course, don't put your license at peril. Don't misunderstand me. But most of the things lawyers stress about are not a licensing issue. Most of the things they stress about is just whether their opinion is, was it perfect? Not everything is going to be perfect. Perfect is the enemy.

of done. Trust, and I promise you, you are going to be much more successful earning much more dollars per hour than you did before because you developed leverage with your team. Now I've got a bonus for you. I hope you like bonuses. I like bonuses. Let's see if we can give you a bonus piece of information.

Let's talk about your bonus work on the business W O T B when you [00:26:00] start to block your time after you've done everything I said to do and you've identified your highest working and your highest billable hour.

The highest billable hour is that you work. On the business and you start to block out time where allows you to maximize your dollar per hour because you're working on systems, you're working on marketing, you're working on sales, working on the business. Here's a new formula for you to think about. The old formula was.

You had the amount of time available to you minus legal work equaled W O T B. That's the old formula. Here's the new formula. The time available to you Minus W O T V equals legal work. For some of [00:27:00] you, your mind just went phew. You're like, Richard, nobody has ever said that to me as an attorney. Everybody has always told me the legal work is where I should spend all of my time.

That's what I went to school for. I own a professional practice. I should be focusing. On the legal work. I understand that. And I can sympathize with you. But at the end of the day, most law firm owners aren't making more than 80, 000 a year in profit. As a matter of fact, the other day I was talking to a law firm owner who did 160, 000 a month in gross sales and kept 000 to themselves.

That's 72, 000 a year for nearly a 2 million practice. How is that possible? Because they didn't focus their attention correctly. They were paying attention to wearing the 30 an hour hats, they couldn't see the forest through the trees, and they had their formula [00:28:00] all screwed up. If you want to make a profitable company, if you want to take your current earnings to 55 an hour, to over 3, 000 an hour, the way that you need to do it is follow the seven steps I just gave you.

If you do, and you did that right now at the end of this video, you're going to start earning more money today.

Hey, look, if you'd like to learn how to go from 30 an hour to over 3, 000 an hour, but you're not sure where to start, I created a really simple tool. Go to MyLawFirmSecret. com and just download this free law firm time study tool. It'll get you started. It'll show you to break it out into categories and it'll help this whole process be a little bit easier for you.

Go ahead and go there now and grab that free tool.

what is the bonus? Here it is W T O B W T O B. This is your bonus Work [00:29:00] on the business wait Damn it! I spelt it wrong!

That's really funny. That's really funny. Alright. Okay.