In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Allison Williams discuss:
- Developing business skills beyond legal training
- Balancing legal work with true leadership roles
- Strengthening sales and client relationships with structure
- Reducing stress through systems, communication, and metrics
Key Takeaways:
- Law school doesn’t teach the core business, sales, and time-management abilities required to run a successful firm. Lawyers must intentionally build these skills to avoid overwhelm and stagnation. Growth begins when practitioners embrace authenticity, process, and systemization.
- Many lawyer-owners struggle to act as both practitioner and CEO, leading to stress and inefficiency. Strong operational leaders and a capable C-suite can restore focus and improve firm performance. Delegating business responsibilities is essential for long-term sustainability.
- Sales shouldn’t feel like auditioning for clients; the goal is to understand needs and build genuine rapport. Structured processes help qualify leads, nurture relationships, and improve conversion rates. Starting with reliable referral sources and existing channels leads to better outcomes.
- Systematized communication—from clear policies to automated updates—prevents client-driven chaos. Tools like workflow systems or SaneBox support better task and email management. Tracking metrics such as conversion rates and lead quality ensures informed, data-driven decisions.
“Being authentic is the easiest, fastest, most profitable way for you to get to the outcome that you desire.” — Allison Williams
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About Allison Williams: Allison C. Williams is the owner of not one, but two multimillion-dollar companies. She is the Founder of Williams Law Group, a full-service family law firm where she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is certified by the New Jersey Supreme Court as a Matrimonial Law Attorney, and is certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in Family Law. After taking Williams Law Group from a start-up to a multimillion-dollar law business in 3.5 years, she decided to help other law firm owners do the same by starting Law Firm Mentor. Today, Law Firm Mentor helps law firm owners across the country grow their revenues, crush chaos in business, and make significantly more money in less time!
Allison is a LawFirm500 award winner, ranking 14th out of the fastest-growing law firms in the nation. She has also been named a Stevie Award Finalist for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 and 2018, voted NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business, and designated as one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners.
Allison has been featured in The Law Entrepreneur, Above the Law, and Modern Solo, along with other leading legal publications. She is also the host of the Law Firm Mentor podcast, where lawyers go to learn how to crush the chaos in their business.
Connect with Allison Williams:
Website: https://lawfirmmentor.net/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisoncwilliams/
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin [00:00]
Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin here, and if you’ve ever wished that law school taught you business development, marketing and time management, you’ll want to hear my new show, future rainmakers. It’s everything they didn’t teach in law school. But you need to know, check it out today, future rainmakers. But for now, enjoy the show.
Narrator [00:19]
You’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin [00:42]
Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin here and welcome back to the be that lawyer podcast. This show is all about helping you to be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled Rainmaker. If you’re enjoying the show and you haven’t picked up the be that lawyer book yet, you need to go on Amazon and grab it. It’s a best seller. We have 50 plus five star recommendations. You’re going to love it. It’s the highlight reel for all the things that you picked up on the show or may have missed from the rainmakers that we’ve interviewed. So check that out. I know you’re going to love it. Allison, so good to see you. I’m really you know, I You had me on you so gracious to have me on your show. We’re doing a pot swap, and just every time I see you, I I feel all warm and fuzzy inside, because they just have this great presence about you.
Allison Williams [01:20]
Well, thank you for that. That is probably the first time I’ve had someone talk about me making them warm and fuzzy and actually being a PG conversation. So I love.
Steve Fretzin [01:28]
Okay, I don’t know where else to go from there that it wouldn’t be only up from here. Steve, all right, it’s only up here. Okay, that’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. Well, I’m super excited. And for those of you guys listening, watching whatever the case might be, you were in for such a treat today, there’s people that, not only that I know personally, but also that I just know their level of competence in a particular space, and Allison, you are, you know, top of the heap. So we’re gonna have a lot of fun today. You guys could expect to get 510, plus takeaways from the show today. Not setting us up for failure. I’m setting us up setting expectations of what I believe will happen, and it always starts with our quote of the show. So let’s jump in with that. And this is a Henry Ford. If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. All right, so welcome to the show and tell us why that quote, of all the quotes.
Allison Williams [02:15]
Well, so I love that quote, and thank you for having me on the show. I should start there, because it’s always great to be with you, Steve. You know that quote really symbolizes, for me, the idea that you need to speak to your audience, but you need to be true to yourself, and you always have to go in the direction of what you know is what you want to deliver to the marketplace. So a lot of people have ideas. They don’t really bring those ideas forward. They kind of test the water, see what’s working, and copy and paste and really being authentic is the easiest, fastest, most profitable way for you to get to the outcome that you desire.
Steve Fretzin [02:47]
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love that. And everybody. Allison Williams is the CEO of law firm, mentor LLC. You’ve got a crazy background, and just like all the things that you do now, I don’t I we were talking before we hit record that I used to be you a long time ago, and if I had stayed the course, who knows what had happened, but you’re running 1000 miles an hour, doing all these amazing things, and I’ve kind of like streamlined down to, like, being a one man band with a full time VA, and that’s kind of it. So I want to, I want to hear your background and share that with everybody, and then how you know what you’re up to now, and and all the different moving parts.
Allison Williams [03:20]
All right, well, so in a nutshell, you know, I started a law firm very quickly realized that being a great lawyer, being that lawyer, has nothing to do with being great in business. So law firm almost ran me over, quite literally. Had a near death experience when I fell asleep driving after pure exhaustion, realized that I had to get myself under control, systematized the stew out of my law firm, learned how to crush chaos in business, and then created law firm mentor, where I help lawyers to do the same. Both of those companies I created and scaled into multiple seven figures in three years, and I now run both of them, in addition to multiple other companies, including a motivational speaking company, Allison speaks, as well as my real estate investment company. So I’m kind of in a lot of different places. Most recent venture is that I have written a book that is going to be published on March 12 I’m really excited about, which is called crushing chaos, the law firm owner’s guide to more money, more free time and less stress. And very much fits with the idea of finding what works for you and systematizing the heck out of it. And ultimately, Steve, that’s what you did. So you and I are very much kindred spirits in that we both decided what we wanted, and we went for it by creating the path that worked for us.
Steve Fretzin [04:29]
Yeah, I found that I so I had a sales recruiting company, an executive coaching business and a networking website all at the same time. And I guess it just it sort of hit me that I wasn’t happy because I was managing people. And I love love, love coaching people. I love working with clients. I didn’t find myself a very good manager or enjoying the craft of managing teams and managing all the moving parts. Maybe that just, I just maybe had never really excelled at that particular. He’s like, you know how they take, like, the top sales guy, and they say, now you’re going to be the manager. And he’s male, right? I think I feel like that was me to some degree.
Allison Williams [05:08]
Yeah, I’m right there with you. You know, leading and managing are not the same skill set, yeah? And most lawyers prefer one or the other. You know, we are tactical, meticulous, thorough. We want to be in the weeds. That type of person is not the same type of person who is lofty and inspirational and aspirational and looks to motivate people. And so if you don’t find what works for you, typically you hit a ceiling where you can’t take in more people because you’re so frustrated by managing the ones you have. Yeah. So getting the right second in command, the right COO, is the first critical step in building on a C suite that really is key.
Steve Fretzin [05:43]
That’s probably why so many managing partners are stressed out, because they’re building all the hours and they’re managing the team, and they’re trying to, like, you know, business develop, and like thought leader, and like all this, they’re wearing like, a dozen hats, and they’re wondering why they’re burned out, or they’re wondering why they’re just so stressed out. And it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Allison Williams [06:01]
Yeah, it shouldn’t be at all. In fact, one of the things that I always tell lawyers, in fact, one of the coaches on my team, Wolfgang, is brilliant at saying this that you know, when you become a lawyer, you have a job, and when you become a lawyer who owns a law firm, you have multiple jobs, but the critical ones that you cannot excite yourself from are CEO and lawyer. And typically, if you try to do both of them, you’re going to do both poorly, or you’re going to do the one that you love great, which is lawyering. You’re going to be that lawyer, turn around and do a crappy job being a CEO. So that’s typically where people find us, which is we help them to pick a lane and master that lane until they get to the place where they can choose to be in both spaces. But most people can’t choose that until they get much bigger in size and have many more systems in their companies.
Steve Fretzin [06:45]
Yeah, well, in an area that many lawyers struggle with, and you and I really step into the fold to assist them with solving is the, really the sales piece, and even the fact that I’m using the word sales, some of them just went not the people listening to this show so much, but like, it’s a cringe word for so many attorneys. So, you know, there’s a lot of different areas we could focus on, but what, I guess, what’s the biggest sales mistake lawyers make, just generally? And then I want to go a little deeper on a couple other points.
Allison Williams [07:14]
Yeah, so there’s several things that I point to, but the biggest mistake that lawyers make is approaching sales as a audition for their clients. Right? They get they get there and they they kind of give out all of the goods. They tell everybody how smart they are, and they show off that they know this statute, or this case, most of the crap that people don’t really care about, people want to know. Can you help them? And if so, what is that going to look like? Yeah, and most of us focus too much on ourselves and not the other person. So we audition, and then we hope that they like us. So if you happen to have a great rapport with an individual, or you happen to have a very charismatic personality, and you happen to have a person that was already sold on you before they got there, then you can sell them, but you’re really just transacting. And if you can’t sell them, it’s because you didn’t really have a sales conversation in the first place. And that’s really where the shift has to happen. Yeah.
Steve Fretzin [08:02]
I think sometimes, too, when you have a sales approach, you’re not really developing the trust and the relationship, the understanding and empathy that can come from having a good process. What are some of the parts of a process that lawyers should be thinking about when they’re approaching a new like a consult type of a situation?
Allison Williams [08:20]
Yeah, so process is key here. And I always tell people, you have to think about the sales process as a part of the entire service delivery process. So you start with some form of reception, some communication that gets the person through the door. Then you move them to intake, which is the first signal that that person is able to engage. They’re giving information to get qualified. If they are marketing qualified lead, you can then move them into having a sales conversation with a salesperson, whether that be a lawyer, preferably not, or someone trained in sales. And then ultimately, you’re going to follow up until they become a client, and then you’re going to start serving them. And the process part is just to understand that conveyor belt and move people through the data that you have to collect in the manner in which you have to manage that data in order to get better at it. So most people start at the top of the funnel. I need more leads, and that’s the worst place to start. Start at the bottom, get better at the sales conversation, and then get better at getting people booked for sales conversations, and then get better at qualifying people. And if you do those things with the existing amount of leads you have, you can make a lot more money without doing anything other than getting better at what you are already doing.
Steve Fretzin [09:25]
Yeah, I teach sales, free selling, and it’s the title of my first book. And part of the problem with that’s where you you’re actually meeting someone that has a need, and how you walk a buyer through a buying decision. And that that’s a really important part of like the conveyor belt in the process and everything you said. But the other piece is even more challenging, which is, you know, getting someone with a problem in front of you, and that’s where lawyers really struggle. How do you work with lawyers to help them with the piece of I need to get in front of more decision makers.
Allison Williams [09:55]
Yeah. So getting in front of decision makers will vary depending on your type of practice. You’re a B to B or B to C, right? But if you are in a B to C model, what we typically say is you need to figure out where you are already generating leads, and you need to double down there. First. Most people say, let me just go pay a marketing company, and then they can generate leads for me. But they have to get so much glut into your system, which oftentimes will break the system, because you’re now talking to all these people, many of whom don’t have a problem. That you can solve, many of whom don’t want your service or are not qualified for your service. So if you just start with, where did your clients come from in the first place? Did they come from personal referrals? Did they come from business relationships? Did they come from previous clients? And that’s where you can get the easiest traction, because people who already sent you, someone that you served great are more inclined to send someone else, and clients that you already served who had a great experience are more likely to come back, and they’re more likely to send more people. Yeah, if we start where it’s already easiest, we can get the most traction again with the least amount of effort and the least cost. And that’s really what’s really important.
Steve Fretzin [10:56]
Yeah, it’s like, I use an analogy of, I’m going to go apple picking, and I’ve got two ways to do it. One is to carry around a 16 foot ladder and plop it up against every tree. Walk up, grab an apple, come back down, put it in the barrel, versus walking, you know, eye level and plucking apples as I go. And that’s what you’re talking about. It’s the low hanging fruit. It’s the referral sources that have already paid out. It’s the clients that love to refer you. How do we, you know, take a deeper dive into all that, as opposed to, you know, random acts of marketing or business development.
Allison Williams [11:25]
Yeah, the random acts of marketing is definitely one of those things that lawyers do, you know, they’re so busy serving that when they’re not serving they’re like, Oh, crap, I need to serve somebody. So let me go find someone. So they go, hurry up and market, and then they have opportunities again, and now they’re busy selling, and that roller coaster just goes back and forth. And so we really have to get them into a mindset of consistently seeking from the flow of people that are already in your ecosystem. And that then makes it into a process that’s repeatable, and growth happens naturally over the course of time, because you’re serving more people. So if you’re doing a good job with serving the folks that you have, and you’re serving them more and consistently reaching out to them, you’re going to find that you will expand your pie even before you spend any time and money on marketing.
Steve Fretzin [12:04]
Yeah, the driver that I’ve been hitting a lot lately has been you’re out developing relationships. You’re out leveraging meeting with clients, having these conversations, which lawyers need guidance on how to have those conversations and to pull the value out of them. While that’s going on, I also like the idea of getting lawyers to start creating content, get them start being seen as the thought leader, maybe that first weekly post on LinkedIn that they’ve never done before, and then making that a consistent How do you work with within the personal branding and the business development so that they can gel collectively?
Allison Williams [12:39]
Yeah, so I love this question. So this is one of these things that I think is a lot easier than a lot of people make it out to be. So I always tell people, if you have any resistance to creating content, the first thing you want to do is literally just sit down and record yourself talking to your team. You don’t have to make it into a production. They can literally do it on Zoom. You can do it with your iPhone, but just record yourself talking to your team, and then you can get little snippets of brilliance from you about what you do. The easier it becomes for you to talk about what you do, the more you can mass quantify the things that you’re talking about. So you’ve created that one first great piece of video content. Maybe the first one isn’t so great, but get it out there. Get into the habit of getting it out there. Slice and dice. Then you’ve got the video, you’ve got the audio. You can get it transcribed so you have a full transcript that’s great for SEO purposes. Get it on your website. You can chop it up into blogs so that people that want to read the sound bite version of it, they can get that. You can put the short version of it onto YouTube shorts, IG reels. You can put it on Tiktok. Literally, you’ve taken one piece of content where you sat down and talked for five to 10 minutes, and you have now created omnipresence. And the more you do that, the more opportunities you find, and you’ll start to find where your people are right, what kind of ideal clients are on LinkedIn versus on Facebook? What types of content is gelling for people? What do they really like to hear from you? What are they responding with? What questions are they asking? And you can very easily become an influencer by just being yourself and putting a little bit out there.
Steve Fretzin [14:12]
Yeah, and I think the concern may be everything you just said, and then on top of it, like, who’s going to help me with this? I’m a lawyer. I don’t know YouTube. I don’t know how to video at it. I don’t know. We need to start getting people in the mindset of higher, you know, either using internal teams and people, there’s people on your staff, assistants, whatever it might be, there’s vas. I mean, we’ve got a new sponsor hire paralegals.com, they’ve got a number of different VA companies that can help with marketing assistants and admins and things like that, where people know this stuff in and out. I mean, my guy right now that does my stuff. People think I’m this marketing master. Who’s I’m doing the content? Yes, I’m creating the video, and I’m creating the podcast and everything, but all of the posting and all of the newsletters and all the things that are going on behind the scenes that isn’t me. I’m not video editing. Thing. I don’t know what’s going on with that. I just know I want it done and how I want it done. So, you know, I think we need to start to consider that. How do you help and advise lawyers on the back end stuff?
Allison Williams [15:12]
Yeah, well, the same thing that you just said, I always tell people, start where you are, right? Like, don’t go out and spend $15,000 a month on a multimedia company that’s going to promise you the moon and stars start small and start easy. So typically, you’re going to go with offshore vas. You can also do someone who’s in your team already, who isn’t full time dedicated to it, but just to get the content out there, and the first little bit that you get when you start to see people engaging with it, you will find that you’ll be solicited by people. We have a whole process that we teach on and law firm mentor.net is on our website. We have resources to help you actually evaluate people that are selling you marketing services. Because I know that’s a big bone of contention for lawyers, but once you find the right strategy and the right low cost team, then you can start mass multiplying, but the key to all of that is really tracking your results, so that whomever is doing it for you can say, this is working, this is not working. Here’s why. I think we ought to make changes, and then you can start to double down on the strategies. Pretty easy, but again, the content piece is the easy piece for the lawyer, or at least it’s a lot easier than they think it is, yeah. And once you get that going, your team can help you with the with the rest. Yeah.
Steve Fretzin [16:21]
I mean, you can even, I mean, don’t do this without editing. But you know, you can talk into chat GBT for five or 10 minutes, and they’ll pull out five, 610, posts that you can do for LinkedIn, just to get you started. It could suggest images. It can lead you down the path, and obviously, edit that all but and make sure it makes sense and make sure it’s all accurate, but there’s just a lot of different ways to do things today. The stress that lawyers are feeling right now, at the end of the year, they’re busier than they’ve ever been. We don’t know what’s happening with the economy. We don’t know what’s going to happen next in our world. It’s just crazy out there. And you mentioned about your background in dealing and having some major stress issues. What should lawyers be doing now that to start to release the stress valve that might be hitting them?
Allison Williams [17:06]
Yeah, so I think one of the things that we have to remember is that we can only control what’s immediately in front of us. Right? A lot of times lawyers fall, and we have a statistically higher percentage of us that are, you know, suffering from anxiety, depression, alcoholism and other substance use disorders, and it’s because of the stress, right? So you have to remember that focusing on what’s happening in front of you is typically going to cause anxiety because you can’t control what’s in front of you, and all you’re going to do is perseverate and focusing on what’s already happened in the fact that you feel stuck with what’s happened is typically going to call to cause depression, because you feel like you have no ability to excise yourself. The only thing that you can do is really put your north star in front of you, whatever it is that you want to create, put it in front of you and stay focused on that. The people that you’re helping, especially our immigration attorneys right now, they’re experiencing a lot. There’s just a lot of unrest people that are helping people in the business world. There’s a lot of question marks with what’s happening with tariffs and what’s happening with the political scene, etc. Political scene, etc, you can’t control that. All that you can do is control the fact that you show up a certain way, in a certain volume, with the people that you’re serving, and just continue to serve them, and your people will show up for that. Focusing on helping other people will typically take the angst away from you, because now it’s not about you, it’s about what you’re doing for someone else. That really does make it a lot easier. Yeah, easier.
Steve Fretzin [18:26]
Yeah, hey, everybody. As you know, one of the biggest challenges that law firms and lawyers face is hiring many attorneys know they need help, a virtual assistant, paralegal, legal secretary, but just don’t have the time to find and vet the right person. Well, that’s where hirearelegals.com. Comes in, they do all the heavy lifting, pre vetting top candidates who are in your time zone and ready to work. Firms save hundreds of hours every year and can hire for as little as 2000 per month. And for be that lawyer listeners like you, you’re going to get 500 off your first hire when you visit hire paralegals.com and use the promo code, Steve, with proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm. Rankings.io. Prides itself on proof, not promises. Mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io. When they want rankings, traffic and cases, other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get More rankings, get cases and schedule a free [email protected] today. Hey everybody. It’s Steve Fretzin as the you know, I’m the host of the be that lawyer podcast, and if you’re serious about growing your law practice, let’s talk. I’ve coached hundreds of attorneys to build bigger books of business without selling, chasing or wasting time. This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a real 30 minute strategy session to explore what’s possible for you in your practice. Just head over to fretzin.com and grab a time that works for you. And let’s make this your breakout year. And what about the overloaded emails, the overloaded schedules, the things that lawyers are facing that drives a lot. Lot of that stress is just how overwhelming everything is, all the messages and all the things coming at them. Do you have tips for either automating or delegating that you’re advising your clients on that you could share?
Allison Williams [20:10]
Oh, God, tons of things, tons of hills. So first of all, do we have, I know we could be here all year with this one. Yeah. So this is really about crushing chaos. This is the thing that really lights me up into Yeah. So first of all, your email inbox, get something like, you know, the sane box, which filters your email and ultimately can put it in places for you, so that you’re not seeing all of the marketing emails that you signed up for when you bought something at Macy’s. You’re able to put things where they need to be. Then you create file sorting systems. And we actually have a whole video on this on our YouTube channel, specifically youtube.com, forward slash, law firm, mentor, very easy to find us. We have a email sorting video training that we actually give out to people that helps them to be able to organize that information next. When you got a lot of communications coming in, you have to prioritize. You have to figure out what is most important that you have to deal with now, what is not as important that has to be dealt with in a short time period. What’s less important that doesn’t have to be dealt with now or at all. It could even be completely off your plate, or things that are important but can wait right figure out which box they’re in and prioritize before you start working that oftentimes will take away some of the stress. Because you’re not thinking, it’s all right, here to be done. Right now. You’re thinking, I’ve got 40 things, but really only five of them are right now things. The rest of them are tomorrow, next week, next month. Then I always tell people, create a CEO schedule that really optimizes your time. And that means looking at your schedule and not saying, Where can I fit this in, but deciding what you want to spend your time on and making that the priority and then blocking it out, right? So you might do consults still. If you’re still the person who’s doing the consults, you need to have a day and time that you’re doing consults. It’s not Whenever someone’s available, people will follow your system. If you give them a system. If you have a time that you’re meeting with your team, you need to have those on the schedule and a defined time period. They must show up with an agenda. They must come knowing what they’re going to talk about, and you give them that amount of time and no more people have to know. You need to have an open floor policy, not an open door policy. That means when you’re here with me, no one else has access to me. We’re not talking on the phone, we’re not answering emails, we’re not texting. You have my undivided attention, but that also means you have to schedule my undivided attention. You don’t get to pop your head in when you’re curious. You don’t get to ping me and say, Hey, can you chat for five minutes? That’s not how we do business here. We do it in structure, and the more structure you create, the better your schedule is going to be, and the better your life is going to be.
Steve Fretzin [22:37]
And that may I mean, I love everything you just said, and I think we also need to do a better job of training our clients, right? I think they’re not trained in a way that’s advantageous to that schedule. So the fire drills that are happening throughout the day, some of them are actual emergencies, right? There are legal emergencies, and then there’s others that you know, they’ve just got a question, and they’re just going to interrupt your day and hijack your time and your day when you’re in the middle of things. How do you what’s that conversation with clients like to get more control over how you work with them, without them feeling like they’re not important? Yeah.
Allison Williams [23:13]
So the best time to set a relationship standard with a client is at the start of the relationship. So don’t wait until they started texting you at three in the morning to say, hey, I don’t like that. Let’s stop that. You give them rules and policies at the start, and then you have to train them onto those rules and policies. So that usually is going to look like and I highly recommend this scheduling time to communicate right. Clients need to know when they can get a hold of you, and preferred that that actually be a time on the schedule. So if you’re going to talk to them on the phone, have them have an every other Thursday at three o’clock scheduled time period. If they’re going to call and ask for time, that’s also fine, but you need to have office hours when they can have that time scheduled so that you don’t have the issue of I’m in court, and I thought I was going to be available at noon, but a judge held me over, so now I’m stuck and have to move this call that is very frustrating for somebody who’s anxious and was waiting to hear from you, and now you have to move it. So give a block of time when you know you’re going to be available, and make sure you show up for that time. The other thing is, is that you want clients to have reinforcement of your policy, so I highly recommend that you automate FYI updates. Whole lot of things in the law are going to happen on a schedule that is much longer than the average client would like. So you typically want to give them some reminders of that. You know, hey, we don’t have our next conference for three months. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything. That means right now I’m, you know, communicating with the adversary right now. I’m going through discovery and just send them something could be weekly, could be bi weekly. It really depends on the cadence of your work, but just say this is what’s going on in your case right now, so that they don’t start to develop anxiety.
Steve Fretzin [24:46]
It makes a big difference. Yeah, I had a lawyer for a big incident I was involved in. I think it was like over a year where there was no communication, and I ended up leaving like, two or three messages for them before they got back to me. And, you know, I really felt like a second class.
Allison Williams [25:00]
Citizen, yeah, that’s a horrible feeling. And I’ve, I’ve had to experience lawyers in the course of settling my parents’ estate. I had to experience lawyers in the course of dealing with IP issues, any number of things, and just the level of precision, there were very different experiences. One firm, everything was automated. I knew exactly when things were going to happen when I had to do something. I could schedule it far out. The other one, very professional, very good lawyers, but they left me in a lurch. And so I would tell them, hey, I need to know about what to do. And then I wouldn’t hear from them. So I would go do what I thought was the right answer, and then I get a chastising email saying, Hey, you shouldn’t have done it that way. You should have done X reach out to us next time. And my answer is, I did reach out and you didn’t respond, right? So lawyers, we have got to get better with that, but part of that is just making sure that you give yourself realistic timeline. So if you can’t do something for two weeks, don’t promise your client end of the week, because that’s what they want. Give them a realistic timeline, and then if you want to over deliver by giving it to them early, great, but don’t start making promises and breaking your promises. It’s the best way to terminate a attorney client relationship in a way of grievance or malpractice claims.
Steve Fretzin [26:08]
Yeah, fantastic. So we started talking about business development, sales and marketing, and then we kind of went back to like, you can’t do that without having those gaps of time and having things really positioned properly. Let’s go back to it and share with everybody what your take is on the metrics that every Managing Partner, firm, leader, business developer, Rainmaker, whatever, what they should be tracking to sort of evaluate how they’re doing with their sales performance.
Allison Williams [26:33]
Yeah, so sales metrics are super important. If you don’t have a sales manager on your team, then you functionally are the sales manager, because sales is the most important area of your business. So of course, you want, you want to understand your funnel from from bottom to top. And I always say, start with the bottom. So you want to know what is our conversion rate for every person that is selling in the company, what is the percentage of people that are going to become clients? If I give the client to Susie versus to David, you need to know that. You need to be optimizing for that regularly. Then you want to be looking at your intake scheduling rate, how many people of the folks that call are going to statistically most likely land at a scheduled appointment. You need to understand that, because that deals with a lot of things like scripting and pricing and a lot of things that you have control over that can actually get more people. Then you want to know your qualification rate, and that’s really evaluating your leads, right? So if 80% of the people who call your law firm are not qualified, they don’t have a problem you can solve, they are not in the area where you handle legal matters, or they don’t have the funds. And not having the funds doesn’t mean I’m not willing to part with them. Not having the funds means that your minimum retainer is $25,000 and this is a person who is indigent or somebody who could never have come up with that amount of money. That’s a problem, right? Your marketing is not working effectively. Wrong messaging, wrong company, wrong strategy, wrong platform, something is wrong. So you need to be tracking those things regularly, and then you need to optimize what is going to be happening in each of those areas to drive the percentages up. So in sales, what is our sales training protocol? How frequently are we listening to our recorded calls? If you’re not recording calls, you should be, and if you don’t have consent to record, if you’re in a two party state, you need to get consent, but you need to have a real strong handle on what we are saying and how. And then, of course, an intake, same thing, right? What’s working, what’s not working? How are we overcoming objections? Are we overcoming objections, or are we simply at a loss leader, because we’re just not on the phone with the right folks? You need to be tracking that regularly and checking in on that every single day, but in particular every single week, so that everyone has a level setting. Here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going, and here’s what we have to do to get there.
Steve Fretzin [28:42]
Yeah, and it’s again, it’s a lot of things that lawyers aren’t trained for in law school or at the law firm level at all. And so they’re hearing this for the first time, sort of as an aha moment. Or they’re hearing this, and they need to think about, you know, can they bring you in? Can they bring me in? Can they bring can they get some help to create the structure, the processes of to make the law practice into the law business. And it’s very hard to do that. If you have just a straight up lawyer mentality, you have to have a entrepreneur business mentality for you to build a business. It’s just the fact, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Let’s wrap up. We’ve got what’s Allison’s big mistake?
Allison Williams [29:22]
Oh, God, I knew you’re going to ask me this question. So my big mistake was that the very first time I decided that I hate managing people the same way that you do, I decided I was going to hire myself a COO, and I now have a brilliant coo in both my law firm as well as my coaching business. But prior to that, I had a misfire on both of the companies, because what I did was I looked for people who were competent in business that did not have enough of a base of law to really be competent at serving lawyers in the coaching business and at understanding lawyers that they were going to manage in the law firm. And so I hired smart, capable. People, but they just didn’t have enough industry experience in a lot of areas. You can learn it right? A lot of folks are competent in healthcare, and then they move over to tech, or they might shift into a product based service or what have you. But lawyering is very particular. We are a unique subset of people. We have a unique profile in terms of what works for us, what doesn’t work for us the ego of a lawyer. And if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the metrics of lawyering, you don’t understand professional associations, you don’t understand how we have to police each other. There’s a whole lot of things that you might be inclined to do that are not going to work or that could cause grievance or malpractice risk. So you have to get the right person, and in law firms, you really have to have someone that is skilled and experience in working with lawyers,
Steve Fretzin [30:42]
Yeah, and I think that’s why it’s very difficult for people that want to get into legal, that are generalists to niche into it. I think it’s challenging because they they’re great in other areas, but they don’t understand the intricacies of legal like, you know, and I had to learn them, right? I mean, I had to, I had to spend two years in legal before I was able to commit to moving fully into it, but that, but and actually be convincing as someone, as a non lawyer, that I could help a lawyer, right? Because there are so many moving parts in legal that are different than other businesses. So really great there, and obviously came out the other side. Now you’re hiring like a champ, and everything’s moving forward. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. All right, well, listen, let’s take a moment. Thank our wonderful sponsors, of course, rankings, io, crushing it for pi, attorneys, the law. Herb, have you been on the law her podcast.
Allison Williams [31:30]
With Sonia? Not but I had heard of it before.
Steve Fretzin [31:33]
Okay, that may be an intro. I think they’re putting together their 2026, schedule. That might be great for the book too. I’ll talk to Sonia and see if I can make that happen. And then, of course, hire paralegals.com. We’re just talking about the importance of VA. Is the importance of delegating to paralegals and other folks. And then, then that’s where you’re going to call I think there’s a $500 discount off your first hire if you use the promo code. Steve, so check that out at higher paralegals.com. Allison, people want to get in touch with you. They want to crush chaos. What are the best digits?
Allison Williams [32:02]
Well, if you want to crush chaos, you definitely want to check out the book that’s coming out in March. Again. It is crushing chaos, the law firm owner’s guide to more money, more free time and less stress. And if you want to just learn about law firm mentor in general, or about me, you can find me at law firm mentor.net.
Steve Fretzin [32:17]
Yeah, fantastic. Well, thanks for coming, coming back to the show. I think this is your second time, and we’ll have to keep that, keep that rolling, moving forward and and just appreciate you and love what you’re doing for the industry I’m very passionate about, you know, the legal industry. And when I meet other people that share that passion and that are you’re in it every day, on a couple levels, you know, it always makes for, makes for, not only a great conversation, but I think, lots and lots of great takeaways for our audience. So thank you so much, and I’m looking forward to continuing to visit with you.
Allison Williams [32:45]
Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Steve and everybody. Please check out the crushing chaos with love for mentor podcast, because I did have the pleasure of having Steve on the show recently, so his episode will be coming out soon. Don’t want to miss it.
Steve Fretzin [32:55]
All right. All right. Well, with that, we’re going to say thank you Allison, and we’re going to say thank you everybody for hanging out with us for the last 30 minutes to help you be that lawyer, confident, organized in a skilled Rainmaker. Take care. Everybody. Be safe, be well, and we will talk again soon.
Narrator [33:12]
Thanks for listening to be that loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fredson.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal, business development and marketing trends, for more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.