How to Hold Standards and Build a Sellable Law Firm (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Chad and I'm Zach and this is episode 605 of the lawyers podcast part of the legal talk network Today Stephanie talks with Andy Hayes a labster of ours for a law firm case study. Yes

[00:00:15] Speaker 2: I love Andy. I work with Andy. Oh

[00:00:18] Speaker 1: Okay. I mean, I guess that would make sense. You do run the the Lawyers lab over there. That is true Chad you guys guys, we just had an affinity leadership team meeting. I think it was in Chicago. That tells you that I wasn't there. I'm not really a leader of, I know, missing you on our freezing cold morning runs. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad I didn't have to lead any of those, man. Well, so one of the things you were telling me about before we got started here was that a theme in that was holding standards and kind of like accountability, right? And I think that's something that in people's law firms, especially small law firms, where we're a family, we're friends, we're, you know, it's really tough to have accountability conversations sometimes. So what was the framing of like holding standards in the firm when y'all were talking about

[00:01:23] Speaker 2: it? I'll start with saying that the idea of we're a family, I think is a mistake in a business, right? Because ultimately, if in most cases, maybe this isn't always the case, but in most cases, if somebody leaves the business, they're probably not coming to Christmas dinner, right? So they're not really your family. So I think we have to be careful with that when we start calling our work team, our family, And because you, and you kind of nailed it, right? It blurs the lines a bit when it comes time to hold people to standards. And so one of the core themes of the leadership retreat this week was it's okay to hold standards and there's nothing negative about holding your team to standards and having consequences of falling short of those standards.

[00:02:15] Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously KPIs are a way to do that. weekly check-ins are a way to do that. I'm gonna push back slightly on this family thing, Chad. Because I can, if you're using it as an actual, like we are like a family, great. But if you're using it as a method to say, we're really nice to each other all the time. You know, I think that's the problem. Like, I can get mad at my family. I can hold my family to standards. and accountability, and so I don't know that that's the issue as much as not, and I think this gets to the guts of holding the standards here. It's that I don't want to be confrontational. I don't wanna irritate somebody. I just want everybody to get along in the office, and if that's the mechanism or the method for that, then that's not fair to everybody. That's not fair to the people that you're working with, the leaders that you're training, the people that you're training. So I don't know that it necessarily is like can't think of it as family, it's just don't use that as an excuse. Don't say that and mean, well, we're just nice to everybody all the time and we have no confrontations. I confront my family all the time.

[00:03:40] Speaker 2: That's true. And ironically, we don't all the time, when it's necessary, confront our team. Right.

[00:03:48] Speaker 1: Right.

[00:03:49] Speaker 2: We tend to shy away from those conversations.

[00:03:52] Speaker 1: So how can you frame it? Let me kind of give myself as an example here. I am somebody who will, if you don't give me feedback, good, bad, indifferent, whatever it is, I'm going to think it's the worst in the world. And I put that out there because that's to say, even if you give me, hey, Zach, you're doing this really poorly or you're pushing back or you're holding that standard, it is so much better for me if you'll just do that than if you're like, things are great, Zach, you know, and I know they're not.

[00:04:33] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I've also heard it the other way, where no news is good news, right?

[00:04:42] Speaker 1: Right, right. So some people are gonna go that direction. So really be consistent, right? Like give people the feedback. You don't, and now people that I work with know how I am, because I tell them about that. But that's a way of like giving people permission to push. But even beyond that, like holding standards is really just, are you getting the things done that we were expecting you to do, that you're supposed to do? I think a lot of times, though, firms have an issue with that, not like an emotional or internal issue, but they have an issue with that because they don't actually have KPIs.

[00:05:22] Speaker 2: Well, that's what I was gonna say. The first step is you have to define what those expectations are, and that's the foundation of it, and that's what a lot of firms oftentimes never establish. Mean that goes to like job description is the only time that we ever look at the job description is when the person is hired Right, that's probably what happens. Yeah, like what are you supposed to do?

[00:05:47] Speaker 1: So job description and then KPIs and then I mean that's processes Also, if you because I find that a lot of people not everybody But a lot of people will will come into it and be like well They didn't they weren't they didn't do this because I didn't tell them clearly enough or they'll they'll kind of internalize the blame And so they won't go and hold that standard Because they maybe didn't write it down well enough So write write your SOPs Yeah SOB

[00:06:19] Speaker 2: you know and I'll say another thing too is this came up in our retreat this week is is sometimes policies will get created out of mistakes because it's easier to create a policy than it is to have a hard conversation.

[00:06:40] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:42] Speaker 2: Yes, establish your standards, establish them ahead of time, but don't shy away from having hard conversations. And that was another thing that we talked a lot about was, you know, we have to, holding back feedback does no one any good, right? And so we have to be willing to have those tough conversations.

[00:07:05] Speaker 1: Well, hopefully, this next conversation is not tough between Stephanie and one of our Labsters, Andy Hayes. So stick around. Yes.

[00:07:16] Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Andy Hayes with Stazza Law, we're a small boutique firm in Chicago. We specialize in estate and trust administration and litigation.

[00:07:41] Speaker 4: Welcome to the show, Andy. I'm excited for us to talk a little bit about your business today. And maybe you were just sharing with me, you've had your own firm now for about 18 years.

[00:07:51] Speaker 3: I didn't even realize it was that long until I was kind of doing the math before this conversation. So yeah, almost 18 years in a couple months.

[00:08:00] Speaker 4: Congrats. What would you, if you had to go back to that 18 years ago, what would you tell yourself that you know now that you didn't know then?

[00:08:08] Speaker 3: You're not gonna go out of business. So relax during that first three years. And once I hit the three-year mark, I was like, okay, I kind of see how this can go. But it was very stressful. I had two small kids at the time. I still have those kids. They're no longer small. But yeah, just try to relax. I guess that's what I would try to do with every part of my life, right? But yeah, I mean, we grew super slowly. So it wasn't really like I got over my skis or anything in that way. But we're still trying to do the same thing, trying to still grow smart, smartly. And if that's slowly, that's fine.

[00:08:49] Speaker 4: I think that's super helpful. And I know you're kind of going through another evolution of your business right now and specifically rebranding it. And maybe I'd love to hear more about that journey and what that looks like.

[00:09:02] Speaker 3: So we've kind of rebranded. I started out a long time ago, all offices of Andrew Hayes. And then I went to Hayes firm. That was like a kind of a minor rebrand. And we've changed the logo a couple of times, but, uh, we are now in the process of, or we just did change the name of our firm. So our firm is now Staza law and it's, it's owned by my wife and myself. Uh, I wanted to get our name off of the firm. I kind of always thought that was an antiquated way to have a business. In Illinois, there's no barrier to taking your name off a law firm. The word means path in Croatian, though I don't think that's not a super important part of it because people start to think of firm as the name of that firm. Whether that's a person's name, it's its own entity. I don't think people are going to examine too much where that name comes from, but it does play into the branding and the photos on the website and it is a big,

[00:10:05] Speaker 4: big move for us. Why specifically did you decide to rebrand and get your name off of it? Kind of talk about what you were thinking about and thinking about the future of the business.

[00:10:17] Speaker 3: The idea came to me in LabCon. It was one of the exercises and I was speaking in a small group and And we were talking about how to envision your, your business in X number of years and selling your business specifically. So, um, as I sat down and, you know, you, you kind of go through what you would need to put in place for that to be something you would be able to accomplish. Certainly systems are in place. Certainly brand awareness is in place, marketing systems, et cetera. But then I was kind of stuck on the fact of who would want to buy a business with my name on it. So then that would be a whole, this would have to happen eventually. You know, if you're going to transition someone, transition the business to someone else, if they're unrelated to you, you would have to go through this whole process. And so I figured it made sense to go through the process now. And it's just one part of what we're trying to do with build the business so that we could sell it and so that we're not not every client that calls wants to talk to talk to

[00:11:24] Speaker 4: me. So two important things to unpack there. One is you started thinking about maybe one day I want to sell this and I think you even said to me I don't know if I'm going to sell it but I'm going to build a better business in the process and I agree and love that but then also logistically clients may not be so inclined to insist to talk to you if your name isn't on the door.

[00:11:47] Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I agree. I don't think that was a, it's not like I'm trying to hide from my clients, but that is definitely in order to get to that point where this is a desirable asset for someone else to get involved with whether it's someone purchasing it or a younger attorney that is kind of entrepreneurial and may want to take it over someday. Yeah. Not having my name attached. I mean, I don't think having my name attached to it really does anything. I mean, people are still you're still gonna be able to find me, you know? And it's not like I have a famous name in the city of Chicago.

[00:12:20] Speaker 4: No, but I think to me, what I'm hearing too is so many people listening right now are the bottleneck of their law firm, right? Decisions, work, client calls, client requests, come to them. And, you know, it's like I'm envisioning like all the arrows coming at this one body, and I'm sure that that's how you've felt for many years. Like everything's flowing to me. How do I get myself out of that? And I've had so many conversations with lawyers that are like, oh, if I could just get my clients to be okay talking to my team or talking to someone else, like I don't have to be the only one that answers their questions. Again, you're not trying to hide from them. You're trying to help them, but you can only, you're trying to also scale your business beyond you. And something as simple as the name of the firm can be a huge signal in other people's minds about who it's okay to talk to. That's what I heard when you were saying that. So such a small, small but important, right?

[00:13:22] Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds better than when I said it, but I agree with you. I mean, and that's part of our, what we're trying to convey on our website, because for people that don't know us, is that it is a team and it's not just one person and that one person's, you know, super lawyer status or where they went to law school or whatever.

[00:13:39] Speaker 4: And what else in terms of trying to remove yourself from being the bottleneck are you guys focused on right now, besides the branding, which I think is super important?

[00:13:49] Speaker 3: I've always tried to make sure that I have enough staff and that no one is overworked. What you're always told to do in running a small business is have that operating annual and all of those kinds of things. We've been lucky to not have a ton of turnover, so we haven't needed it for that. So much kind of emergency situation where someone could just fill in the desk and do the job, that certainly would be able to be accomplished. A lot of the automation tools, as a small firm, you are on your own. I mean, literally. And I've got a lot of feedback from folks and lawyers on the technology stuff, because that's not something that I really enjoy or don't have some kind of tech gadgets and you can you could quickly end up with so many that it's like just overload and you have so many things and you're not using any of them. We've kind of gone through that phase a little bit but now we've got it down to where we really do have a lot of these things automated you know task lists a lot of it is has been through Clio and there's many other services that do the same thing. But yeah, just so I kind of come in when the staff can handle a very skilled pair of legals and other counsel here, and they can handle most everything unless it is truly some litigation type of situation or some extraordinary circumstance. So the bulk of what we do, not necessarily my time, but the bulk of our files are regular administration, not litigation, you know, just helping someone get the bank accounts distributed to the heirs or sell the home or settle the debts, transfer the business. That type of thing is obviously not litigation. And a lot of that can be done by paralegals, honestly, and other attorneys.

[00:15:42] Speaker 4: Did you guys have a process that you followed to kind of put some of those systems in place? because I think a lot of people know, oh, I should do that, but it feels like a, it kind of gets kicked down the priority list or feels like, oh, another thing on my to-do list. Now I got to document how we do things and that doesn't feel as important. How did you guys tackle that?

[00:16:05] Speaker 3: With lawyers, there's a lot of different coaches that people talk to. I found that I have trouble keeping up with the quarterly coaching sessions, but even having those quarterly sessions is perfect for me. I mean, that, that does give you some quantifiable goal to set because yeah, I mean, it's so easy. That was the story of my whole career before I got this kind of structure in place was, I mean, I knew what I had to do. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to have a business and not just a law practice with other people helping me. Yeah. But having that, that accountability goals for a small firm, it's very, I mean, unless you're hyper-disciplined, And it's very difficult because you don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of or hold you accountable to do these things. So yeah, we would set goals of, so we're going to automate this quarter. We're going to automate these five things. And it's, it's, there's always some, something we can find to do, you know, uh, the low hanging fruit was pretty easy and that's, that's proved to be the best, uh, type of things that we've automated. Yeah, there's always some of those, um, yeah, business oriented to goals. And I've, I've started having meetings with my paralegals talking about those things. So all the stuff that I never did for so many years, um, and thought that everybody liked to operate how I do, where I just kind of do my things. And, you know, I don't, you can use that term siloing or something, but that has negative connotations. usually when you're talking about it in this context, but I realize that not everybody and probably few people want to just be left alone and just deal with things. So I'm trying to figure out ways to communicate with people and make sure people know what is expected of them and having those quantifiable goals placed has definitely helped for that for me. Totally makes sense. What advice

[00:18:07] Speaker 4: might you give somebody else who's kind of maybe in a similar situation, a little bit behind you trying to figure out where they should focus on their business? Maybe they're just feeling overwhelmed and they don't even know where to get started. They still have a practice, not a business. That's something we've been talking a lot about lately. And how do they start shifting to have that business owner mindset that you clearly have adopted now?

[00:18:32] Speaker 3: I went through a situation where I have a rather large office, physical office here in Chicago, and I ended up having to sublet it. My partner on the lease actually went out of business during COVID. It was pretty, to say stressful was like the understatement of my career. But anyway, so I've seen how other folks work because we got a lot of subtenants in here, and I've worked in in these kinds of situations. So I've been around a lot of different types of law firms, you know, not really any experience with larger law firms, though, I can kind of see how that goes just from knowing so many folks in that culture. But the thing that I can see is so many folks are stressed out and it used to say, like they're licking the envelopes, right? I mean, we don't really use envelopes as much as we used to, but they're doing every single thing in that business. And I think even just hiring someone to, to do all of those things, even though it seems like, and this isn't just someone starting out, this is anyone. I mean, every time I've hired someone, the business kind of, cause I'm able to do other things and the business kind of fills in to where they're, you know, they're paying for them, the business grows to where they can pay that salary and, uh, grow the business. So I think when I'm trying to say in a long-winded way is a lot of folk, especially starting out are too slow to hire. You know, I have people are like, Oh, you, you hire for not the business you have, but the business you want. Now, I don't know about that. That seems a little aggressive of a slogan, but I feel like a lot of attorneys are, um, I could just, you know, do it myself and they don't see the value of their time, you know, when they're doing that work that that someone else could easily do.

[00:20:22] Speaker 4: I couldn't agree more, especially, well, I can just handle it. We don't do the mental math to say, well, what's the opportunity cost of, of course, I know how to make photocopies, I know how to seal envelopes, but me spending time there means I'm not spending time doing this other high-value thing that could really move the business forward. And I think, I mean, business owners at all levels get stuck in that trap, right? we have to kind of keep reminding ourselves.

[00:20:49] Speaker 3: Absolutely. And I mean, I even, we recently, we'd always had a full-time paralegal and a part-time paralegal. And then when our part-time paralegal went to law school, we hired a full-time paralegal. So now we have two full-time paralegals. And so we're kind of going through that situation just on the paralegal end, you know, because she's very experienced, my one paralegal. So she can do higher level work. It's not just even attorney or business owner stuff. So you can, that whole kind of thinking be applied to any part of the business. Just getting people doing the right jobs.

[00:21:25] Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. I know so many people struggle with that. And actually I've just developed a new course that we're on that specifically. Because it's about delegating the right way, but it's also about developing other people. It's kind of shifting that you're not also, you're not just getting work off your plate, you're actually giving someone else a chance to grow and strengthen their skills. And maybe it does take more hand, you know, we always revert to, I could do it faster, I could do it better. That's like, well, yeah, and that's always gonna be the case unless you give this other person a chance to do it. I mean, you know, part of it is giving them some space to learn and grow and make mistakes, but then improve upon it. And I think we forget that a lot of times and we deny our team that chance to grow and get better.

[00:22:12] Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it keeps them engaged, you know, what do you like to do about your job, you know, and then you can kind of, if you're lucky and you have the business kind of, you know, craft it to where that's kind of what they're focused on.

[00:22:24] Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. I had someone yesterday on our team actually say, Stephanie, can I do that task? And you know, I want to take it off your plate. And I was like, thinking about it, and I was like, kind of is my job in this case, I said, but if you're asking me, because you want to grow your skill set, then totally that makes sense. I kind of had to work through it in my head. And I was like, actually, yeah, this person's asking for a chance to go negotiate with one of our partner vendors. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, I don't need to be the one to do that. I was like, yeah, let's schedule a little strategy call so we can brainstorm how it's gonna go. And then you do it. Love it.

[00:23:01] Speaker 3: Manage yourself out of a job. You don't want to go that far, I guess, but you know.

[00:23:05] Speaker 4: I don't think you can.

[00:23:05] Speaker 3: Get close.

[00:23:06] Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I know, and it's interesting, right? Like we are, I think, worried about that, but I don't think that line actually exists. And as owners, if it does, I mean, I don't know, there's something always for us to do as owners, maybe.

[00:23:18] Speaker 3: Definitely, yeah, definitely.

[00:23:21] Speaker 4: Cool, well, what's next for you? What are you excited about? Maybe what are you learning?

[00:23:25] Speaker 3: Not really lawyer stuff, but business owner stuff, which is what we're talking about, I guess. I, like I said, have an office here in Chicago. I've been working in the loop, the downtown area of Chicago, the whole 18 years, I've had an office down here. ever since the pandemic. The probate court here has been mostly on Zoom. I mean, we have contested hearings we have to go to in person. So I'm kind of not tied to the loop, not kind of, I'm definitely not tied to the loop as I once was. And rents are not really going down, as you would think, because all these, it's not just attorneys, every business has the same pressures to remote work and things. So anyway, that's a long way of saying that I just bought a building, like a couple of neighborhoods outside of the loop in a place called Ukrainian Village. And so we're moving there in May. So we're going, I just got a text from completely renovating the building. It's necessary. And I just got a text from my contractor, I'm going to go over there. So I'm kind of in the process of that. So aside from the day-to-day of running the firm, what's next for the business is that it's definitely a huge move. It's going to be very odd to be outside the loop, but it's a very cool neighborhood and it'll be nice.

[00:24:41] Speaker 4: Well, yeah, exciting. Congratulations. I know lots of folks. Buying a building, it's a huge opportunity and investment for a lot of firm owners. I know we did that when I was a partner at a law firm, and so congratulations, and that's very

[00:24:56] Speaker 3: exciting. I never thought it was possible in Chicago. I guess I can thank COVID because it was impossible, but you know, in smaller towns, yes, it happens all the time but you kind of had to be in the loop at least in my mind and a lot of other attorneys minds you had to be in the loop I love it well thanks for

[00:25:12] Speaker 4: chatting with us today I hope some folks got some ideas I think it's always great to hear from people in the trenches living it and figuring it out and we're glad to be able to work with you and help you do that and for you to help other listeners maybe get some ideas and some change their mindset a bit so thank Thank you.

[00:25:31] Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean, if anyone wants to call me to ask me anything or give me ideas about something I said or something, I'm totally open to it. I think that's the best part of the lawyer's thing is being connected with not only other small firm owners, but similarly, similar mentality, business-owning law firm owners. So thank you.

[00:25:52] Speaker 4: Absolutely.

[00:25:53] Speaker 1: .