Welcome Back to The 1958 Lawyer

Voiceover: Welcome to the 1958 lawyer the show for attorneys who know the old model isn't working anymore, the billable hour, the 12 hour day, the expensive office. No one visits your hosts, Ron boxdollar and Clinton ind are here to question all of that and more by exploring smarter, healthier, more flexible ways to run a law firm, no more burnout, no more outdated expectations, just real conversations with attorneys who are proving there's a better way. If you're ready to build a law firm that's profitable and livable, you're in the right place. Now. Here are your hosts, Ron and Clinton.

Ron Bockstahler: Welcome to the show. My name is Ron boxaller. I'm the founder of a model Office suites and my partner,

Clinton Ind: hey, I'm Clinton end I am a partner of Ron, and looking forward to talking about how we're running our law firms here at Amata.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's kind of go back to things we talk about on the show are really the business of law, not necessarily practice of law. But how do you run a law firm? From a solo practitioner to adding your first few employees, to bringing on associates and future partners to grow in your firm? We lay into some of the mechanics of what we're doing, what you need to be doing, or just some advice as to some of the stories we've seen. So we'll go through some we'll bring in some interviewees. So we'll be talking some of our clients, which we have just over 800 law firms as clients right now. They range anywhere from solo practitioners to firms of 20 plus attorneys. We'll be bringing a few of them in to talk to us. We'll bring in some of our strategic partners that actually support law firms to give up some new advice, new ideas what we're talking about. And then we're going to tap on Clinton, who's been practicing law for 20 years and as a solo practitioner in house company, a couple different positions, Clinton, you want to talk a little bit about your

Clinton Ind: background, yeah, yeah. So I've been a lawyer for 20 years. I was in solo litigation practice for 10 of those years. I've been at a big firm. Know the pressures of needing to build 2000 hours in a year. I've also been in house with a few different companies, including Amata now, and you know, through all of that experience, it's been very interesting to get to know how different businesses were run, but particularly now working with Amata and reflecting on my own experiences having run my own solo practice with the new cases that come in, trying to Get new cases, it's been very, particularly interesting to meet new solo attorneys who are our Amata clients, and really understand where the struggles are and be able to relate that back to what I used to do and how I used to overcome them or not overcome them in some circumstances, because it's not easy. It's not easy. And really at amata, what we really want to do is make sure that our clients are enjoying their law practices as much as possible, to the extent that's possible. I know I just got a whole bunch of eye rolls, because there's a lot of people who aren't enjoying law practices. But to the extent that we can make it easy at amata, to the extent that we can build community and give suggestions and be a resource. That's really what we want to be able to do, and that's a big function of this podcast. So we're really looking forward to making sure that we really get this out to as many people as possible, not only our clients, but anybody who's who's practicing in a solo firm, or is thinking about practicing by themselves or with some other small people.

Ron Bockstahler: Let's hit a couple questions, because you were at Amata for about eight years, practicing with your practice before you joined me. So we built a relationship over those eight years. But early on, you weren't a real talkative like, Hey, I got this problem. I got this issue. In fact, I can't ever remember you coming and say, Hey, I got a problem. Can you help me? Why is so many attorneys are so protective or so tight lipped when it comes to all the issues? Because we know there's so many issues involved in running a law practice, but what is it that that makes them so hesitant to really talk to anyone about the issues they're going through?

Clinton Ind: Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. You know, I didn't even realize that about myself from until you just said that. You know, everybody has their little community, and I think everybody does a really, everybody does an okay job of asking really discreet questions, like, I've got this, you know, I've got a someone asked me the other day. I've got requests to admit that I need to file or that I need to answer. Do I need to file them right? Or do I need to include a verification? Well, those answers are different if you're in state court and you're practicing in federal court, or if you're in federal court, or if you're in federal court and you're practicing in state court, and maybe you haven't, so it's easy to send out a really discrete question like that to you know, the resources you have, because you don't really need to be friends, you don't really need to have a community so to speak, to be able to get that quick answer, or at least to be able to get an answer that puts you on the right page. But but really the benefit that I've seen, and once I started developing a community and being able to just walk into people's offices and have a casual chat in the office in the Amata centers, it really, it really changed everything for me, because instead of having just a discrete question answered. Every once in a while, it started to really help build a community and that, and that allows you to not only just ask a really discrete question, or, you know, to get a quick answer and something that's nominal, it allows you to, you know, really have some detailed and in depth conversations with other people where you can really explore the intricacies of your case. Because, you know, if you take 20 minutes to do that for somebody else, they do it. They they will take the 20 minutes to listen to your cases. And it really helps, you know, bring people together to fill that void. And I think, to answer your question more directly, I suppose, when you go out on your own run, it does feel like there's a bit of a void there, and it's a difficult thing to overcome, because you're really not, you don't know who your community is, right? You've just, you've set up a shingle, and you know, you're trying to market by yourself. You're trying to run your cases by yourself. And it's really difficult to establish that community. And I think any way that you can streamline that process to build a community and be comfortable in asking the questions, it really will be a huge help to everybody's phone, to your phone

Ron Bockstahler: you just hit on probably our fifth show, we're really gonna be focusing on people, culture and community, because I think that's it's so big, but just naturally, it just came up as we're sitting here just talking. But that is a really, really big piece. Is who are your people, who's your community, who can you go to? You know, besides the chat bot out there, just to anyone which you really know who you're talking to, where can you build those relationships and have someone you can go to? We'll also talk about, like a lot of case studies, we just had a client who's been with us, oh gosh, since 2014 so I guess 2014 was 1112, years getting ready to hire his first employee. He was like, What do I do? I'm, you know. You know, there's all kinds of things you want to be looking at, but let's, you know, let's talk to an attorney about what's the first things you want to do before you hire an employee to make sure you're setting yourself right, maybe you need to set up your your your cash plan or your retirement savings plan, advantageously so you're making sure you're putting away as much as you possibly can, and maybe not the same percentage, to all your employees. But you got to talk to people, get the expertise on that. And then, you know, payroll company, that was one things that we were sitting recommending all these things to Jeff when he was asked the question is, what do I do? You know, here's the first steps you want to take. Make sure you do it the right way. That way, when you're on your third, fourth or fifth employee, you're not going, Oh, crap, I've been doing it wrong, or you're getting sued, or something else goes wrong. Let's just set it up the right way. These are the things we want to talk about. Make sure that the information is out there, very easily accessible, because that's majority of our clients are asking. They're asking those questions, generally, to themselves, many times to us. So we can say, hey, here's how we here's what we recommend.

Clinton Ind: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, a big part of being a solo practitioner is, I've not come across a lot of people who are a lot of solos, who are really just happy being a solo, right? You start with the notion that you are going to find partners and you're going to build or even if you don't find partners, you're going to have associates, and you're going to build a practice that's bigger than just you, and it's a really intimidating process. When you get to that phase of I've got too much to do in order, and I need the help, but I don't have the resources. I don't have the ability to jump in and go out and and just take the leap, because there's so much unknown. And to your point, Ron, you know, we really want to make sure that we are the ultimate resource, to make sure that anybody who has a leap that they're about to take is able to come to us and get some, get some help, and get some get some feedback, and be and so that we can be a resource in that community. Absolutely.

Ron Bockstahler: Couple of things we're gonna hit on. We talk about marketing. We're talking about referrals. We're talking about building your reputation. These are all key things. We got an attorney, got managing partners, like there's 16 or 18 attorneys in the firm. They've always had organic leads, so they always had so much activity coming in. But AI has changed that marketing platform. So what you were getting before is is kind of changing things up, and you got to figure out how you got to change too to make sure you can accommodate that. So we'll bring in, bringing some experts that could talk about how AI is affecting marketing. At some point, we'll bring in and talk about how AI is affecting the research Clinton. You could jump on that for one quick minute, because we actually offer a service that helps people with that.

Clinton Ind: Yeah, it's fascinating. If I had the AI, we use Lexus AI, right? And if I had Lexus AI, when I was a solo practitioner 10 years ago, it would have changed my entire practice, the five hour task that you hated starting because you pull up, you know, a blank Word document, and you're looking at a blank screen. It's gone, right? You can take the first four hours of that five hour task and have aI generate that for you in in 20 minutes, right? And then you have an hour to two hours at the most of cleaning it up, making sure it's revised. In particular. Particular to your needs. But I don't want to believe it too much, because we are going to cover this in detail. The issue is, I mean, it's just the resource is unbelievable, and if attorneys aren't using it, then they're just going to get further and further behind. You will not be able to compete unless you're using

Ron Bockstahler: AI Absolutely. So we're going to go to those things. We've got space infrastructure. We're talking about hybrid work admins, you know, we'll go through the model of hiring my first employee versus using fractional or part time people from another source. Also work with people overseas. Lot of people are starting to tap into some of those resources overseas. I know we have. It's, uh, if you get into the right group, it's a great resource for you to help expand your practice and keep your costs down. And then you always like talk about wellness, energy and longevity, right? We wrote a book on book on living a balanced life, so we're all going to always kind of come back to that theme of everything we're trying to do is to help others be successful in their law practice, but still live a healthy, balanced life, enjoy what they're doing so they can do it forever. Because you're right. Clinton, how many we talked to there's like, I'm just miserable, yeah. What else can I do with this law degree? And it shouldn't be like that. Let's, let's make it so it's a great it's a great career, but let's just set up the right way.

Clinton Ind: Yeah, judges, clients, I don't know, friends, family, you know, they all make for a lot of pressures, and the more you can take away those pressures, the better it is, for for your for your insanity. And we really, we really want our clients to be sane, that's

Ron Bockstahler: for sure. So So kind of our platform. It'll be Clint and I talking. We'll be bringing in a lot of guests, a lot of other attorneys, a lot of people that are involved in the legal industry. They can give us some insight on the things that they're seeing. What's going on out there. We'll have, sometimes we just kind of go back and forth. Going to keep it very light. We have a lot of fun in our shows and making sure that we're just bringing the value to what people want to hear at the time. Every time you look at a show, everything's going to pause. We will be posting the show once a week. Comes our goal anyway, is what we're setting out to be we'll see if we get there or not, but that's kind of the rhythm that we're going to be looking for. And we're excited to be back on the air. Very exciting. Went back to look at some of the old shows. I think we started the 1958 lawyer back in 2020 so it's good to be back. Those that don't understand where the name came from. It was the 1958 ABA pamphlet that was published in 1958 that actually changed the way attorneys started billables. They started moving to the billable hour at that point in time, which I looked at and still kind of consider that as one of the biggest changes in the practice of law. I would say today, though, we're seeing all these new changes that are happening. We're seeing the way you practice is a lot different than it was even five years ago. So it's a really exciting time to be on the show, listen the show and hear everything that's coming on, and listen to the new guests, or come out and talk to us about how they've adjusted, or how they're using AI or whatever it might be. So that's kind of the background. That's how we're going to run the show. And we look forward to having everyone talking to you every week. Clinton, finish

Clinton Ind: us off. Yeah, this is going to be really exciting process. We really want to keep it light. You're going to have to everyone's going to have to give the multitude of dad jokes are going to be coming out in this thing. It's going to be but really, ultimately, we really want to be informative. We really want to make sure that everybody is getting a solid amount of value. We're always going to be taking suggestions and really look forward to going through this process with everyone.

Ron Bockstahler: I guess we should just talk about our credibility on dad jokes between the two of us. We have 10 kids. So 10 kids between two of us, I think we're qualified to really kick out some great dad jokes. Maybe once an episode, definitely. Thanks for tuning in. We look forward to the next show.

Voiceover: Thanks for listening to the 1958 lawyer. If you like the show, tell a friend and please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron Clinton or amata, go to Amata offices.com that's Amata offices.com All the links are also in the show notes. You.