Emery Wager: [00:00:00] they're going to send out an invoice after the work has been done. And I think that's the first mistake. The best firms that we work with are implementing what we've called kind of a collect early billing model. So you're either doing flat fee work where you can take that payment up front and drop it right in your operating account, you know, or you're running kind of an evergreen retainer model where you're always work working against money that you already have in the trust account. We had, one firm that it was a bigger firm that transitioned to that model and all of a sudden, I mean, it's a big firm, but they all of a sudden just found a million dollars in the bank 


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MPS: Hey, Law Firm Owner. Welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast. We're your hosts. I'm MPS. 


Richard James: And I'm Richard James MPS. We've got a fantastic guest today. Emery wagers is with confido and we use them in our world. So we have a personal relationship for what they [00:01:00] do for us, but really they get to where the rubber meets the road in a law firm. And that's in this idea of getting paid. 


And so we're going to From Emory and his journey as a founder and his entrepreneurial journey. So hopefully we can share some insight there, but now he's worked with countless small law firms to understand how to improve their overall collections process to ensure that they get paid. And this is such an important topic when dealing with the concept of running and managing a law firm. 


So Emory, thank you for being on the call today. A pleasure having you here. 


Emery Wager: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. 


MPS: Well, Law Firm Owners, if we didn't say it enough open the ears. This is about getting paid. So this is a good episode to listen to. Emery, we like to kick things off by just learning something about you. So what's maybe something not everybody knows about you? I know. 


Emery Wager: Yeah. So, I was in the Marine Corps and I was an infantry [00:02:00] officer. And one of the things that not many people know about me is I like to, just find that whole institution very fascinating and I like to write about it. I wrote a novel about That kind of closely follows my time there. 


And now I'm working on a musical about self discovery and leadership in the military. So we'll see how that turns out, but that's something that doesn't come up too often in sales calls with law firms. 


Richard James: Hey MPS, I didn't realize this, but we may very well be talking to the next Jack Carr. Are you kidding me? 


MPS: So I mean, this, this is the starting point. it's public now if it wasn't already. No I'm, excited. First off, appreciate your service. Thank you for that, and secondly, if you're open to sharing, is this like a novel, like you published, or is this just a project you worked on? 


Emery Wager: It's available through Amazon. It's called how to name a generation. And it's about a, kid who [00:03:00] grows up and takes a, you know, a very different path from his, peers. And it's about his journey along the way. 


MPS: I'm writing the title now. 


Richard James: Well, I put it in my phone. I'm already ahead of you. I'm buying it. I'm buying it as we speak. 


Emery Wager: All right. 


MPS: Well, I appreciate you sharing that. That's really cool. That, find the military background and the stories coming out of the military are so fascinating to me and I think there's endless lessons that come out of those stories. So I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you for giving an outlet to everybody to grab a copy for those who are interested. So talk to us a little bit about that then. So you were in the military and now we're here at Confido. Talk a little bit about the high points of the journey. 


Emery Wager: Yeah. Yeah. So I was, in the military before that I was a mechanical engineer and then joined the military. And so my default was to come back and do that, but kind of realized that wasn't what I wanted to do. And so I did some soul searching and ended up getting connected with another founder [00:04:00] who at the time was running a payments company that eventually I worked for, but he had heard about this thing in the military called the, XO or the executive officer that's, he's kind of the one that, you know, gets stuff done. 


So he basically said, I need me one of these. So he was networking in the veteran community to try to find a, you know, an XO, which happened to be the last role that I added. And so we got connected, hit it off. And you know, I ended up working for his company for, 10 years. And, that's you know, about six years into that role, I started managing kind of on the side, all of our outside, you know, outside counsel, you know, the relationships we had with all the different law firms that we worked with. 


There and so I was doing that kind of on the side. And then for the, for my day job, I was helping businesses build these really integrated, optimized checkout workflows to try to reduce friction in that payment process, reduce attrition, use a lot of those kind of. modern e commerce best practices. [00:05:00] And when I compared that, what we were creating there to my experience as a client of all of these law firms where I reviewed and paid millions of dollars worth of bills I'd never seen an industry that seems so far removed from these best practices. 


And so got really interested in the business of law and dug in and learned about. All these crazy things like a trust account, you know, what an iota account was and how money needed to be handled and why law firms can't In many cases, use a lot of the best in class tools out there. So what I didn't know because I was coming at it from the client side was how that impacted that experience impacted the actual financials of a law firm. 


And you look at, you know, the average law firm has like a collection rate. So the, you know, What they actually put in the bank divided by what they invoice of, you know, low 80s, so a million [00:06:00] dollars, a law firm sending out a million dollars of invoices. Is only, you know, they're leaving basically, you know, 180, 200, 000 on the table every year, basically pure profit because you've already done the work to earn that money. 


So that money just drops to the bottom line. So, it seemed like a major, major problem that we could help solve not fully but, we can make a big impact by kind of bringing best in class, integrated e commerce experience too. to the legal world in a way that complied with the rules of professional conduct. 


Richard James: Well, I tell you what, there is so much to unpack in that One statement that you just made. First and foremost, I think the new line around here for law firm owners is going to be, I need to get me one of them because uh, because, because I bet almost every law firm owner feels like they need an XO. I do have a question about [00:07:00] that. did the military choose you because of something they saw in you and your personality to be a good fit for that role? Or did you volunteer and naturally migrate towards that position because of who you are? 


Emery Wager: I didn't have any say in the matter. 


Richard James: Okay. So did they, so did they Make you into this person or did you already have the skillset and you think they do a good job of recognizing that? 


Emery Wager: I think it was a combination. I learned a ton about kind of, leadership, but the XO position is much more about, you know, the doer than necessarily the leader. You're kind of supporting the leader. And so I learned a lot about what it takes to support the leader and make sure that they can focus on them most. High impact tasks and I could make sure that everything else was running, you know, smoothly. And so I think that was a big reason why I ended up in that role. And then. A big reason why you know, I was successful in that role [00:08:00] and then, you know, transitioned out and basically started in the private sector in, a similar position. 


Richard James: Well, you know, so for the law firm owners that are listening and by the way we're in this boat, we're growing rapidly. 


I'm older, not younger, and I'm looking for a replacement in my world and operations and understanding that XO. Position is actually going to be helpful for me. It was a writer downer for me. But for you law firm owners that are listening, if you're looking for this operations person in the EOS world, entrepreneurial operating system world, they call it the integrator, right? 


That's that role. But this is great insight for them as to where they might be able to start to look to fill that position. So thanks for that insight. MPS. I'd love to have you touch on, oh my gosh, this idea. That if I do a million dollars in invoicing and only collect 80 percent of it, I'm leaving 200, 000 on the floor. If I'm doing 5 million and I'm only [00:09:00] collecting 80 percent of it, I'm leaving a million dollars on the floor. I mean, MPS you know, you're, you work so hard at helping people get their sales process in place. And a big chunk of that is making sure you set the collections process up, where What do you see as you're coaching people and the impact that making sure they're getting paid better does to their bottom line. You know, 


MPS: to collect as much as they can during the initial consultation. And so it starts there and what I find is that, and I'm curious to hear Emery's thoughts on this, but what I find is that many firms think in many cases it ends there too. 


And they don't really have any process in place for collections or at the [00:10:00] very least some version of, You know, yeah, we'll send you out an invoice at some point if we get to it great we don't get paid though And so I find that there's really no process at all or if there is it's not really a process It's just like a little simple task that they go and do so Yes, I absolutely think we can influence collections at the start of the sales process And getting that initial consultation to maximize the dollars down and make sure they're set on a payment plan if there's a remaining balance and actually have that payment plan scheduled and make sure they're set up, there's a card on file and it's ready to run and the whole nine there, that in of itself is probably a lesson for many firms. But Emery, I'm curious to hear from you. Would you agree that from a collection standpoint, many firms don't have much of a process, or if they do it's, very little at best, 


Emery Wager: Yeah, totally agree. You know, there's relying on, like you said, they're going to send out an invoice after the work has been, done. And I think that's the first [00:11:00] mistake. The best firms that we work with are implementing what we've called kind of a collect early billing model. So you're either doing flat fee work where you can take that payment up front and drop it right in your operating account, you know, or you're running kind of an evergreen retainer model where you're always work working against money that you already have in the trust account. 


We had one firm that it was a bigger firm that transitioned to that model and all of a sudden, I mean, it's a big firm, but they all of a sudden just found a million dollars in the bank, 


MPS: crazy how that 


Emery Wager: um, By making sure they had a key performance indicator that was. What percentage of our revenue this month came from the trust account? 


And they were trying to maximize, you know, they're trying to get that as close to a hundred percent as possible. And then you know, another method is, just putting a payment method on file, basically. It's, kind of the evergreen model without having to deal with all the trust account stuff. 


So, you know, Hey, we're going to send out an invoice on the second. And if we don't hear from you by [00:12:00] the, you know, by the 10th, We're going to charge this payment method on file that you're taking in the sales process. So, you know, I think it really starts, yeah. Like you said, early on and implementing one of those collect early billing models. 


Richard James: here's the thing. The smaller firms don't usually recognize the impact. This has on them. I mean, they do, you know, when you have a larger firm that's moving five, 10, 20 million, whatever it is a year, and they start to recognize doing business like this vice versa, doing the business the way they did before. Like you said, they all of a sudden wake up and find a million dollars in their bank, right? And 


It's it's crazy. What's crazy is that they don't know this, right? And I mean they've been around, you know, we could argue that law has been around since Leviticus, right? So it's been here for a minute And so it isn't crazy to me That they haven't figured out that [00:13:00] the way that they get paid is to have a competent collection system. 


I understand now after working with lawyers for 15 years why this is, but it is still a little crazy. That idea of having a credit card on file for an evergreen situation. You know, so my mentor, Dan Kennedy told me many years ago, he said, Richard, cause we were talking about invoicing in the way we should do things. And I was talking about when I was launching my consulting business, I'm like, so should I, you know, invoice them, you know, after the first month or whatever he said, and he looked at me, he goes, Richard, wealthy people. Are paid in advance for the work that they do and I'm like really I go you could do that He goes not only could you do that? You should do that. It's just good for everybody, right? and so this is what we try to get through to the law firm owners that we work with now If you're a law firm [00:14:00] owner and you struggle with this idea, I get that. There's a lot of the things you've been through law school, ethics training, your peers, whatever that have told you, maybe it shouldn't be this way. But if you own a law firm, you own a business. And if you own a business, your number one job for that business is to be profitable. Yes. You have a mission to help your clients. I get that, but we have to help all three C's. We have to help the clients. We have to help the company and we have to help the crew or the staff of the company. 


And the only way to help all three C's is to make sure the one C the company is profitable. Otherwise we can't help everybody else. That's the way to help the most clients possible. And so Emory, I mean, as you know, look, but I think it's so easy for. Small business owners to get caught up in this, because as you see, as the XO of your company there's a lot of moving parts in business, right? And when you're caught up in doing all those moving parts, it's sometimes really easy to get so far into [00:15:00] the forest. You don't even, or into the trees, you don't even see the forest, right? You're getting caught up in the weeds and the little things. They are the product. They're doing the work. They're being the lawyer. 


They're getting paid for their hours. And so they don't take the time to pay attention to these other things. What advice, if any, have you given them to get them away from their thinking of being a technician and moving them towards running their business like a business? 


Emery Wager: Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of these things aren't necessarily any, any harder. And. If you know, if you are successful, if you're feeling successful, it's so easy to have this. initial conversation basically saying, Hey, we're going to put your payment method on file, or we expect to always have money in the retainer account. 


And if we don't, we're going to stop work. But if you're not confident and it just becomes harder to have that, you know, conversation up front. So I don't think it's necessarily, you know, mechanically that much [00:16:00] more of a challenge, but it, you know, I think it does take some confidence to, implement those. 


Collect early billing models. Yeah. 


MPS: I think it comes down to just the root of it, is just the perspective of them viewing their law firm like a business, right? Because if you view your law firm like a business, you're going to make sure that it gets paid and you're going to make sure that you're profitable. But when you view your law firm as solely just the practice of law, It's easy for some of those things to go on the back burner and their focus is on the practice of law and not on the business. 


And so I really just think that's the root of this entire conversation. I think that's the root of a lot of the business systems in law is that they just have a hard time wrapping their head around the concept of them owning a business and that it should be a business first mindset. I think there's a lot coming up in the pipeline that's going to inspire some of these law firm owners to [00:17:00] think a little bit more business minded in the next few years. that said, Emory, not to necessarily draw parallels entirely and totally back to the military, but I'm curious if, if, uh, there one lesson from military days that you can draw back either to collections or just to the business side of law? 


Emery Wager: Yeah. There's this concept of, always kind of going to the point of friction. So, you could be, you know, commanding a battalion. You know, and that's, you know, trying to take a fortified hill and you, there might be one moment where you know, there's going to be a breach in the, defenses and everything hinges on that. 


You as the battalion commander need to be down, you know, at that moment, making sure. that first, you know, infantryman breaks through that breach. And [00:18:00] sometimes you have to be standing behind kind of the troops and like seeing the whole picture, but you need to be going to that, point of friction. 


And if the point of friction happens to be, you know, we're only collecting, you know, 80, 80 percent of what we're billing. Then you need to go there and fix that. And then take a step back, survey all the troops and then find, you know, where's the next point of friction that I, as the, you know, the leader need to be at. 


So, you know, I think there's a misconception that if you're a leader, you're never. in the trenches or you're never, you know, diving into the details, but you really, you know, you need to identify where that point of friction is. And it really is your job to be at that point of friction and unblocking whoever's around, you know, whoever's in that situation and kind of taking lead on the front line there. 


Richard James: It's such a great point. I mean, so you say point of friction, I hear constraint or [00:19:00] bottleneck from the book, the goal. Right. 


Emery Wager: Yes. Yep, exactly. 


Richard James: Because one of our members, Bert Diener is a partner of ours and another company. And he's got a fairly large enterprise with about. 000 files open and growing. and he needed to figure out how to develop a management system that would start to eliminate the bottlenecks or constraints in your words, friction that they keep coming up against on the everyday life. And none of the existing systems were getting it done. They were, a lot of them were very top down and didn't deal with the day to day bottom up stuff. And so he developed his own and he called it flow F L O W. It's not an acronym, just flow. And that concept has dramatic that, that idea. That you can achieve anything that you [00:20:00] want in business if you can just remove the constraint bottleneck or friction and the idea that the owner is not going to be involved in identifying those friction points is almost ludicrous until you can develop a team around you. Who can start to see through and challenge themselves to come up with new ideas to break through those friction points or constraints, you're gonna have to be involved because you're probably the chief thinking officer of your company. in the early stages. And so I know personally, I I'm right now still on almost every one of our teams as either a process owner, a process leader, or in some cases a team member because it's. My team is great, but we're growing so fast as a company. We're adding new people all the time. I'm having to nurture and mentor them and raise them up and [00:21:00] challenge them to become better leaders and, learn how to overcome these friction points. And sometimes they're really, really my new, like, how should I handle this customer complaint issue? And sometimes they're really, really major. Like, Oh my gosh, our number one lead source just died. And how do we fix it? And because like, we've got a sales funnel, we have to keep full. Right. So, Yeah, that what you said is absolutely positively the truth about what it takes to run a successful business. 


And if you marry that with what Michael said of that, if owners of law firms would start to recognize that they're business owners. So we get them to recognize that they're a business owner, and then we get them to recognize that their primary job is to identify the friction point. And then. Get involved in the friction point at some level so that they can figure out what's going on, whether they're doing it on their own because their firm is smaller, or they've got to figure out how to teach their team, how to figure it out for them, but they have to be involved in order to get it going on. 


had a client the other day, I [00:22:00] won't mention names. They were on an open office hour with me and they're like, man, this system just won't work. They just can't figure it out. They keep breaking it. And I said, I go, oh, I said when's the last time you went and sat in that seat and did that job? And they said, I haven't done that job since I opened this firm. I go, exactly. I go, maybe a good suggestion would be go get involved in your point. The friction point, go to the friction point, figure out what's really going on. So that you can show them in your way, how you would conquer it. So you can lead by example, rather than standing up and down and jumping up and down and screaming, why don't you just fix this? 


Why don't you just fix this? Like some point we just have to get involved. I mean, Michael, you see that all the time, not as much in our company today. But certainly in companies that we're leading, would you agree? 


MPS: Absolutely, I would agree, and go even farther and I will name names because this person did do this, but you have [00:23:00] the Graftons, our EAY competition finalists from last year, and Kelly Grafton recognized that, right? She recognized that um, That there were inefficiencies in several different departments within their firm So rather than just chalking it up to that and trying to from a bird's eye view fix it She went and in many cases literally sat in every seat in the firm and as a result of that they were able to exponentially increase results in just about every one of those departments just because Ownership decided to step in and actually figure out what was going on in that role, or what wasn't going on in that, and move the needle forward. And so yeah, we definitely see that in our, you know, divisions and companies. We've got to be willing to go sit in some of the seats to identify what is or what isn't happening. And it's in those moments that we traditionally have the breakthroughs, right? [00:24:00] Because we're either relying on getting all of the information from our team, as goes for anybody, we're relying on just looking at the data and hoping that the data gives us the full picture without actually doing it. 


It's not until we actually go in and do it that we recognize, ah, that's missing, or ah, we need to change that, or we need to add that. And so just being willing to do that will allow you to certainly move the needle forward. So Emery, I think that was an amazing point that you just drove from the military and I think you got right to the root of where the biggest opportunity lies in most law firms. 


So I appreciate you sharing that. I'm curious. what's got you fired up? What's got you excited? 


Emery Wager: What's got me excited right now is so we've historically, we've worked primarily with firms who bill on an hourly basis or, you know, are maybe doing flat fee, but kind of, they're getting paid by the client. And so we haven't done anything, we haven't gotten to work much in the plaintiff [00:25:00] space. 


And so we, actually just launched a, a pilot of our a disbursements engine to help. Those plaintiff firms who are operating on contingency better manage and digitize the process of paying settlements and awards out to clients. So I'm, super excited you know, to work in those practice areas and with those firms, it's been great kind of building the concept of the product with them. 


And it's Yeah, definitely getting me excited for the future. 


Richard James: I mean, you know, based firms. Are certainly one of the fastest growing niches in law has been for a while. And so if you've developed a product that is going to, for a service that is going to make their life easier and give a system to provide systematic processes to it, I can imagine there's going to be a rapid appetite for this. 


So I'm excited for you. Congratulations. 


Emery Wager: Thank you. Thank you. 


MPS: Yeah. super excited to see where that goes. And I'm really [00:26:00] appreciate you being willing to be on today. Where, can people learn a little bit more about what you guys are doing? 


Emery Wager: Yep. Confidolegal. com is a great place. There's a bunch of avenues to get in touch with us. And I love nerding out on this stuff. So even if you have no uh, you know, you don't have any need for our product. We love to, you know, throw around ideas and whatnot. And we also have a one page downloadable called the Collections Optimizer. 


You can just search for it on our site. And it talks about some of the kind of best practices that we've seen firms implement to you know, to get to frankly a near perfect collection rate. So, 


MPS: That's super valuable. I appreciate you being willing to share that with them and appreciate you being willing to pop on today. You drove home some really awesome points. And it was fun to learn about the background you had as well. And so I appreciate your time on doing that and to the law firm owners listening. Thank you. Thank you for being here and watching today. Geez, plenty to pull from here and we all love the topic of getting paid. So [00:27:00] hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, and this isn't your first time around here, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button. Turn those bell notifications on depending on where you're listening or watching and show Emory some love down in the comments below. Lots of great information today, but Emory, thank you again. I appreciate your 


Emery Wager: thank you so much. It's 


Richard James: it. so much. It's great to be here. I'm in man. That's a great name. Killer name. I love it. I hope everybody goes and downloads it. That's what this is all about getting incremental improvements for law firms each and every day. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. 


Thank you as always for your service to our country and for bringing what you learned from that service time in our, when you're serving our country to the company that you now found it. And we're excited to watch where you go from here. Appreciate you being a part of partners club family and supporting our members as well. Thank you so much. You're appreciated. 


Emery Wager: Thank you. 


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