The Evolution of Legal Practice: Navigating Expertise, Specialization, and Accessibility

Law Firm Growth Podcast Episode 42: How to Win in the New Law Firm Ecosystem With Mike Whelan

Narrator: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Law Firm Growth podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.

Jan Roos: Hey everybody, welcome back to The Law Firm Growth podcast. I'm your host as always, Jan Roos, and I am here today with Mike Whalen, the author of Lawyer Forward. So I actually heard Mike on Ernie Spenson's podcast. I thought it was a really awesome story. And fortunately, since then, we've had a lot of things happen in the world.

Jan Roos: So I think his message was good then, but it's actually also super prevalent now because he's been talking about how things have changed the law. I think we're in an area of a lot of change. So thanks for taking the time to be on our show, Mike.

Mike Whelan: Absolutely. What I loved about when you started was your chatty voice, switched to your radio voice and people who don't do these kinds of things, do not understand how we all want to look at our podcast mics and [00:01:00] be like back, welcome to the show, do the whole shtick.

Jan Roos: So well done. Thanks for having me. Thanks Mike. All right. Yeah, we usually like to get started with a little bit of a backstory. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey and how you got here?

Mike Whelan: Totally not on purpose. Everything was a total screw up. Nobody has a plan.

Mike Whelan: Stop believing that fiction. I think I'm, I don't know if I count as a success yet or how that's measured, but I think I'm one of those 10 year overnight success people where now that I'm where I'm at, I'm writing for a living. This is, I'm doing exactly the work that I want to do. It's looks. Like I did all this on purpose, but none of that is true.

Mike Whelan: I had a pre law background in logistics. I worked in supply chain stuff. Then I went to undergrad for a Middle East studies degree, obviously. And then I wanted to go to dental school, but then I found out they use needles on each other in their feet. I was like, no, and then I pretended to have a plan, like I was going to go get a PhD.

Mike Whelan: But my wife said that's too much debt for bad job [00:02:00] prospects. So instead we went to law school in 2008 and got into way more debt for way worse job prospects. Yadda, to use a Seinfeld ism, here we are. Just like

Jan Roos: we planned it. Yeah, it was a very logical progression. Exactly. If I had a nickel for every person that was a dental school alums, I wouldn't be doing this.

Jan Roos: Alright. Obviously a pretty interesting background, but the other thing is that you've had one of the best takes I've ever seen on the evolution of, law as a field. That was originally what sort of caught me from that thing on Ernie's podcast, but, just the overview of this whole kind of concept of the churn and, how we got to where we are with an industry.

Jan Roos: And afterwards, we'll talk about where you might be going. So by giving us a little bit of background on I guess how the profession got here.

Mike Whelan: And I would really point people to, there's a great piece Ray worthy. Campbell wrote a piece called the end of law schools, which Is a very clickbaity title, but it's a really cool article if you want the short version of how the way we [00:03:00] practice made a ton of sense before the age of a lot of complexity.

Mike Whelan: So the practice model that we use and the way we do legal education all came before in the age of scientific management around 1900. At a time that there was no administrative state, right? There was no, there weren't corporations. We didn't have these kinds of corporations that we have now. Domestic relations weren't as complicated.

Mike Whelan: There just wasn't that much law, frankly, at the time. And so a lot of the education at that time was teaching people to be legal scientists. And the idea was you could teach them this method, this sort of way of thinking, and then they could handle it. Whatever the freak, right? They could just be really broad.

Mike Whelan: They're legal scientists. There's a really good book called too big to know that talks about this sort of thinking. And it says that what we did in history was we took capital K knowledge, this big, massive knowledge. We divided it into human brain size [00:04:00] chunks, and we just gave it to people. We said, you're the law person and you're going to be the dentist person.

Mike Whelan: And when I need you, I'm going to pay you some money. And when you need me, you're going to pay me some money. And here we are. But the problem is now, expertise just doesn't make sense that way, right? It's too big to know. The network, the system, knows way more than any person can know. And so we've responded by specializing and getting narrower and narrower.

Mike Whelan: And now we're at this place where even a tiny niche of a subject is too big to know. It's just huge. And the practice model. As it's worked out now as we've practiced it is what I call the capital c churn It's the bad guy of the book lawyer forward and it's this idea that we have to be everything and this is particularly poignant in the solo and small firm world Where you don't have in your company a team so you're everything right?

Mike Whelan: You're this super generalist swiss army knife handle and [00:05:00] everything And there's a lot of science about this that we can get into but the short version is that wearing 20 hats Means that you can't spend if you believe in the 10 000 hour rule 10 000 hours on anything You Basically, you're never going to get really great at anything if you do too many things.

Mike Whelan: And a lot of lawyers are doing that. They're combining this expectation that we be experts with this expectation that we be always available and constantly accessible. Those expectations that clients have are informed by things like Amazon and Law Order. We're putting all that on top of lawyers and saying, Okay, now go do that.

Mike Whelan: And what the book is basically about is the terrible outcomes that come from that.

Jan Roos: Yeah. And I feel like this is one of those situations with everything they have going on in the world where some of these might be a little bit more exposed than usual. And I've said this on a couple of shows leading up to this, but one of my favorite, I think it's a Charlie Munger quote is, when when the tide is out, you get to see who wasn't wearing swim trunks.

Jan Roos: And I feel like a lot of those solos, which may have been coasting [00:06:00] along for a while, might be in a serious position where they need to reevaluate how it is, what they got there and maybe be in a situation to start fresh. I think a lot of the people who might be in that situation are feeling the crunch right now, no pun intended, but with the whole situation and, there's also thoughts about the legal supply chain and what, where these things might end up going, which, which might be a little bit more cognizant for people at this point in time.

Jan Roos: So what would you say to somebody who might be in a position where they might be having a look at shutting down their solo practice before things are and, how it might, somebody want to get back into the way things should have been going the whole time.

Mike Whelan: Yeah. You see right now, these are the chickens coming home to roost of a cashflow focused business model.

Mike Whelan: What lawyers have worked in, what I talk obsessively about in the book is this distinction between a cashflow focused business and an asset focused business and the Traditional law firm model is a cash flow business. The churn is you're as good as your next case your next hour. You don't have [00:07:00] Marginal cost benefits things don't get cheaper as you do more of them Your five millionth hour costs the same amount to you as the first hour It costs you an hour and so you constantly have to be creating new hours.

Mike Whelan: And so right now When the cashflow slows down, you're like, what is this business? And the answer is essentially nothing, right? There's a really good book called built to sell by John Warillo, where it's this guy who decides he wants to sell his business. He's got a creative agency. He wants to sell his business and his mentor goes back in and is bro, you don't have anything to sell. All you have is a cashflow machine, as long as you get the next sale and the next thing. And so nobody values it. Now you see these chickens coming home to roost that people built these cashflow businesses, but didn't turn that into anything that could weather a storm.

Mike Whelan: Storm and really in the book again to me. There's a human cost to this There's it's not just the business viability, right? [00:08:00] there's a when you are in this churn it is eating you up and I tell the story of Myself trying to figure that out and a senior lawyer that I talk about in the book trying to figure that out You're just grinding, right?

Mike Whelan: And it's really unhealthy. A different model, there was a, an article I read today on Bob Ambroji's blog that talked about the economics of mutuality, right? Where if you've got a supply chain, which is, most of us have a supply chain sort of one, right? We're doing all the things, all the steps that are required to deliver somebody what they want.

Mike Whelan: But we're not doing that on purpose. And really we've got other things in our supply chain like where the words come from, right? What are our research tools? Where are we getting the legislation? Where are we learning how to do the different skills that we have? Our supply chains are actually much more complex than just one, but we don't do it on purpose And what this economics of mutuality talks about is no, we need to create these chains of creating [00:09:00] Collaborative diverse, in terms of heuristics and perspectives These different players who work together to one common end.

Mike Whelan: And if you care about everybody and every company and every service on that chain, you actually deliver better for clients. But when you are in a cashflow obsessed model, you don't do that work. You only think about cashflow. And again, this is revealing

Jan Roos: the fragility of that model. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Jan Roos: And, this is interesting, like in addition to all that you've known from being author and being in this space for a long time, I know you also have, pretty developed Facebook group as well. So people presumably who have, done a lot of the work to get themselves beyond this crunch, what have you seen as far as the people that have been able to weather this storm the best, is there any kind of commonalities that you've seen?

Jan Roos: I'll give two

Mike Whelan: examples because in the book, what I point out is that if you've got a supply chain of a bunch of different types. To providers right if you go to walmart and you buy a doll from Walmart doesn't [00:10:00] own the factory in china There's not my daughter doesn't go in there and ask for a doll and some dude gets on the phone with the guy in china Is hey walmart worker send me the doll through a bunch of other walmart doesn't own most of their supply chain on that chain of a very diverse set of players.

Mike Whelan: There are two types that have the most control, and it's because they're the rarest. Those are the people with the point of sale Walmart, in this case. They have the relationships. They are audience builders. They're built on service and accessibility. They care about a certain kind of person, and they serve them in a lot of ways.

Mike Whelan: The other type is deep experts, people who do things that no one else can do. So I don't know if, you irradiate dolls coming from China or something, I have no clue, but the company that does that really weird thing that nobody else can do, those two companies have extreme amounts of control and power and money making ability on the legal supply chain.

Mike Whelan: This same thing is. True, and so I [00:11:00] advise lawyers to pick one of those two kinds of functions either Become the audience building solopreneur somebody really focuses on what's called a vertical positioning. It's an audience It's a kind of person and you just come up with solutions. But then what you do is You bring in experts on that supply chain, right?

Mike Whelan: So the experts are people who have a horizontal positioning. They focus on a kind of problem, not a kind of person. They don't care what kind of person they serve, as long as they're solving the problem that they care about. Those two functions working together deliver better for clients. So I want to give you two examples from people who are in that Facebook group.

Mike Whelan: They're both in, California one is Megan Xavier and one is Erin Levine. Megan Xavier is an expert. She has a horizontal positioning. She cares about legal discipline issues, right? She cares about lawyer discipline stuff, ethical issues. She runs her business and she and I have talked about this quite a bit.

Mike Whelan: She runs her business more like a [00:12:00] consultancy. She's a thinker who delivers some services. She's monetizing her brain. She just added a product that is a subscription based product where lawyers who don't have an ethics team in their small, mid sized firm, they can hire her and for X number of dollars a month, they get to call her with issues.

Mike Whelan: She's like their ethics hotline and she can review issues and give them advice on things. It's really cool because she found a way to productize her brain. Aaron Levine is a different kind of person. She's got a company called Hello Divorce and her whole function is to try to pull herself out of the product, right?

Mike Whelan: She's trying to standardize and systematize and deliver quote unquote, good enough law. She's trying to deliver a solution to her people, to the people who need it, because she has that vertical positioning. These are two people. Who are doing the same thing in the sense that they're both lawyers But they're [00:13:00] coming at it in two totally different ways And they're really illustrative of these two models that I talk about in the book And a lot of people in that lawyer forward facebook group are trying to figure out how to do that They've got to figure out what kind of lawyer do they want right?

Mike Whelan: Do they want to be the deep expert the super nerd who focuses on a problem or do they want to be the entrepreneurial type who scales a business based on a kind of person and that's a huge decision to make.

Jan Roos: Yeah, and this is actually just a kind of a follow up on that like as far as What really constitutes specialty?

Jan Roos: How niche does somebody have to go before they're at the point where they can realistically expect that, they have something that's worth out there that's going to be referred to on like a basis that they can just, basically stake their business on that being the case.

Mike Whelan: Yeah. I think it's difficult because first a practice area is not a niche.

Mike Whelan: That's I say that all the time. Niches are either problems or audiences. And those are, again, if you read David Baker's book, the business of expertise, he refers to these as horizontal versus vertical positioning, but it's just, do you [00:14:00] focus on a problem no matter who encounters it? Or do you focus on a kind of person, no matter what kind of problem they encounter, right?

Mike Whelan: Those are the two different kinds of positioning. In either case, what I talk about is you need to become the blank guy. I call it the guy test. Other people, when you're not in the room, need to say, okay. Oh, he's the so and so guy, or she's the so and so gal. When you get focused enough and shared enough, right?

Mike Whelan: Spoken about enough. So part of this is about positioning, but part of it is also about being visible in your positioning. Then other people will talk about you in a way that you're memorable. The issue, and this is what Ray Worthy Campbell talks about in his piece, the end of law schools. If you specialize too much in an area, it makes you easily replaceable.

Mike Whelan: If you talk. To the big firms, they're not worried about other big firms. They're worried about the big four accounting firms. They're worried about consultancies taking what used to be legal work. So if you had [00:15:00] 10 tasks and two of them were filling out forms and dealing with compliance and whatever, and the other eight were law related tasks, a hundred years ago, the lawyer did all of those tasks.

Mike Whelan: Now, we've only got two of those tasks and eight of them have moved on to somebody else because those other companies have relationships with the CEO, not the in house counsel. And the CEO makes the decisions, not the in house counsel. So the risk to us right now is. A it's already played out to a degree because some of that work has gone to other people You see this on the consumer level too.

Mike Whelan: If you look at aba data It says that 80 percent of legal work is not going to lawyers A lot of people say oh that they just can't afford us This is the access to justice gap But mylan markovic did a piece on that about how this is like trying to juke regulation Then in fact that 80 most of those people don't want to hire a lawyer for their law like You They want to go hire somebody [00:16:00] who sees the big picture.

Mike Whelan: So my point is. In your positioning, whether it's around a kind of person or a kind of problem, make sure that you maintain a big picture. If you don't add consultancy skills to that to be able to do law like things really well, you will be Kicked out, you'll become irrelevant to people who need that big picture help.

Jan Roos: Yeah. And you bring up something else that's really interesting. And a lot of the stuff that we do happens to be around the the consumer side of things. And, you mentioned the 80 percent gap and that was actually, first of all, remind me that we're going to have a pretty thorough book list at the end of this this podcast, we'll get all that in the show notes and, but it's great stuff.

Jan Roos: I know there's a lot of stuff I'm adding to my reading list as we go on this Mike, but. Yeah, a lot of these people, it's so you can imagine you might want to go to legal zoom if you have a, simple will need. But if you're the position where, you are in a non traditional couple, maybe you have a special need kit.

Jan Roos: On top of that, you're getting into this area where there's a lot of expertise, even within [00:17:00] that whole consumer law. side of things, which is super interesting. But as far as for people that might be caught in the middle right now, and that kind of seems to be the thing is if you're not specialized enough to really be that guy, when people aren't around and, you don't have the marketing or the relationship to the point where, enough people are coming to you for those people that are caught in the middle, how would you advise people find out which side they should be trending towards?

Jan Roos: Yeah. First I would say

Mike Whelan: the model is to be caught in the middle, right? So most of us really are. Most of us, like I said, you've got this expertise and this accessibility expectation. And consumers are not wrong to want both of those from us. They get to want whatever the freak they want to. And for us to tell them, Oh, you don't get to call your lawyer whenever you want to.

Mike Whelan: You don't call your doctor whenever That's cool, but you didn't earn that, right? Somebody like an Alan Dershowitz, who I talk about in the book before he went off the deep end, but you don't call Alan Dershowitz. That's not a thing. You don't text a lawyer at that level, and no one [00:18:00] expects that you text a lawyer at that level.

Mike Whelan: If your client thinks that they can text you and talk to you, That's your fault because you have not demonstrated your expert method to the point that they see you that way. And then on the flip side, if somebody wants, a really accessible Amazon, give me a bot. I want to type in and get real expertise and real answers.

Mike Whelan: That's not their fault either. They get to think that your issue is you personally cannot do both. You look at the book, deep work. You literally cannot do deep work when you are interrupted every five minutes. Minutes, but lawyers are told this and it drives me crazy Like I talk about in the book how I go to legal conferences and every legal conference you hear those two conflicting messages You're an expert and you're an entrepreneur You need to be doing deep work and you need to be responding to texts in the middle of the night You can't do both one person.

Mike Whelan: You just can't do both So what I talk about in the book is don't [00:19:00] right pick one of them If you are debating whether to do one or the other, I would ask a very simple question. Seth Godin talked about an interview on Unemployable that I referenced in the book. He said, entrepreneurs make decisions, freelancers make things.

Mike Whelan: And so I make, I combine these ideas to say, Are you an audience building entrepreneur who makes decisions? Do you want to manage people? Do you want to scale? Do you want to build a team or do you want to be the freelancer? Who's an expert who makes things that your brain is the product. So to Megan Xavier, who I mentioned earlier, I put the question to her for last year.

Mike Whelan: So next week, let's think of the next couple of weeks. Would you rather spend that time managing people or writing a book? And I find that people really are one or the other. They really would rather do one or the other. I think that's a great question. Distinguished between what kind of lawyer you want to be.

Mike Whelan: Megan, she decided she wanted to write a book, so she focused on [00:20:00] her own brain. Aaron living, decided she wanted to manage teams and build solutions and do design work. So that's what she does. So just ask yourself, what do you want to do for the next two weeks?

Jan Roos: Okay. Very simple, but very effective. And I'm starting to see how this could make sense for somebody when we're looking at the solo practice or the individual, but how do these things kind of interlock when we're thinking about either, networks of people or, if you had two of those same people within the same roof, how do these things interact and is it possible to sit on two horses with one butt if the butt happens to be the name of the door, right?

Jan Roos: So the,

Mike Whelan: exactly. So the question is, can a business, we know a person can't do both, but can a business. Be both accessible and expert. I'll give you a very simple example. We just did a virtual event in a lawyer forward Facebook group. And I talked to a lawyer named Chris White. He and his dad have this law firm and they're in the middle of nowhere, Ohio.

Mike Whelan: So it's a rural law firm and rural law firms are really easy to get in the churn. I say, this is somebody who [00:21:00] practiced in one. It's really easy to just. Drive to five counties and just run yourself ragged So what they did was his dad chris's dad wanted to be the expert chris had no desire to be the expert He wanted to be the business builder.

Mike Whelan: And so they got together and they built that business So chris does a lot of design work. He sources work out. He does quality control stuff. He looks at the client Experience the value chain right the whole bigger picture That's what chris does all day and this dad all day is like Reading nerdy books and writing things and speaking at events.

Mike Whelan: They have very different functions. The business works because they pulled the two of them plus a big team together. They have an operation side that is as big as their legal side, their expert side. So they've built that, but you don't have to have all of that in one business in order to do it in the same way that Chris did it.

Mike Whelan: You can build a supply chain where [00:22:00] you purposely say, I want to bring in people to do the different functions that I'm not good at. So for Megan, for example, who is the deep expert, she is really good at connecting with connectors. So lawyers come and hire her for this very individual super service that she does.

Mike Whelan: Those other law firms can't afford to bring in a full time ethics expert, but they can bring her on in a limited way. Whether it's on a case by case basis, or it's a subscription, they buy that connection, they get the benefit of the larger firm, our friend, Jess Birkin does the opposite. She is an audience builder.

Mike Whelan: She serves nonprofits in Minnesota. And so for her, she has this vertical positioning. She has an audience. Her clients kept asking her, we need an employee manual. We need employee manual. And she didn't know anything. Anything about employee manuals, so she went on google. She said I need a team that will help me develop this process [00:23:00] They did and now she has what I call a strategic supply chain, which means Every time somebody asks her to create an employee manual She just turns to that group and goes and gets it done.

Mike Whelan: The network itself has become an asset, that group of people that she identified as providers, as experts who don't want to deal with her clients. She wants to be the audience builder. These people are a strategic asset now that every time she's got a product. That particular product she needs to deliver she goes and gets them and because jess is a solutions designer She just keeps doing that over and over again.

Mike Whelan: She adds products she's looking at what her competitive basis is and people ask her. Hey, I need help with this She looks over what her business design is and says does this fit my bigger picture? Yes, cool Let me go create a team to do it now. I can sell that so now jess can just sell Employee manuals It's not a side [00:24:00] annoyance anymore.

Mike Whelan: It's on her website because now she can deliver that product Not because she is the expert but because she used the network So to get back to your question in both cases, whichever type you pick it is crucial if you want to deliver on both expectations of expertise and accessibility You can't do it alone But you can do it in a

Jan Roos: network.

Jan Roos: And I just want to take a little bit of a step outside of the conversation to anyone who's listening that might be stuck into the churn. Just to imagine two things. The first is the experience that the end user working with somebody like Jess from Mike's example would end up having, which is probably really good and having a really high level of service.

Jan Roos: But the other thing is what Jess's life is probably like. And just being able to stay in an area where she's doing something that she likes. Probably every day, probably not without its challenges, but it's a lot less stressful than probably what she was doing before. So to switch gears a little bit, and this might be fun just to go to prediction time for a little bit.

Jan Roos: So you have one of the best contexts I've ever seen about, the whole profession, the law from its inception, [00:25:00] really. And in addition to that, having a much closer look in the last couple of years. We're heading into some unprecedented time. And I think I saw a stat from the, the SBA that we're probably expecting to lose 30 to 40 percent of small businesses overall.

Jan Roos: I wouldn't dare to say what the actual effect is going to be on law firms, but assuming that ends up holding, we're going to have a lot of these small businesses shutting down. Once everything ends up boiling over, what direction do you think things are going to go? Do you think this is going to be something that people end up reconfiguring in a new for or do you think people are going to go back to the old ways sooner than later?

Mike Whelan: It's a good question and Deloitte did a really interesting study that was a scenario planning study and it took all these factors like how long does the shutdown last? What's the economic impact? What's the social impact? And based on all these different levers, here's what we think might happen in the next five years or whatever.

Mike Whelan: And one of them was what I think is likely to happen. And this has been predicted for a while that basically you're going to see a lot of midsize companies that just run out of money. And so the bigs are going to go buy [00:26:00] them. So you'll see a lot of consolidation at the top. And then what you'll. See that trickles down to a lot of solos at the bottom solo is a nice way to say unemployed in some context but really you're going to see a lot of soul workers instead of the job being the center of our lives Which by the way, I think we're going to end up with a single payer health care system in the united states at some point because We've used employment as the center of all Social identity right how we've done all redistributive wealth how we've dealt with benefits.

Mike Whelan: It's all been done Through employers, but the net effect of consolidation is you're going to have Fewer employers and you're going to have a lot of people who are working as freelancers and solos This has been predicted in law for a while And I think it's really likely in law frankly because the partnership model Is so weird because you pay dividends at the end of the year you pretty much every year are required To get rid of all of your cash And so all of these firms they don't [00:27:00] have cash.

Mike Whelan: They just don't have money sitting around And so when a period in fact what usually happens with a lot of these big firms Is they'll pay their dividends out at the end of the year their profits per part partner numbers And then they're working on lines of credit for the first three months of the year because as mitch kowalski always jokes These firms are starting out the year With less money than an ice cream truck, these major firms, because they just paid it all out.

Mike Whelan: And so they're living on lines of credit and now and then this COVID thing happens, right? So now when everybody was supposed to start getting in the black again, you just can't, right? There's no revenue, the cash flow stops. And so I think you will see a lot of these mid firms just run out of money.

Mike Whelan: The big firms will buy them and you'll see a bunch of solos. The question, and I'm not going to predict this. I'm going to tell you what I hope the question is, do those workers will say at the bottom, if you're talking on a scale of big to small. Do those workers go back to the age of 1900 something [00:28:00] where they relied on the employer for everything on these big companies for everything.

Mike Whelan: Seth Godin always talks about you had one steam engine on the street. And so everybody had to go hook their belt up to that steam engine. If they wanted to run the machine, everybody was really reliant on the big guys. Is that what happens? Or does the power of the network make it so all of those individuals and smalls at the bottom can connect into what's functionally a mega firm, just this giant star Trekkie future, right?

Mike Whelan: Where all these people are connected by technology in an age of abundance, they can work together in collaborative and interesting ways. That's really what I ask for in the book. I think it's a model distinction. It's not about money. It's not about technology. It's about the way we work together. It's a social change.

Mike Whelan: And that's what I hope will happen. I don't know that I'm predicting that, but I hope that will happen.

Jan Roos: Yeah. It's always fun to do the prediction thing, but I have to say, it's like, [00:29:00] it's tough to see how the entire world is going to go. But the reason that I thought it was so important to have you on right now, Mike, is because.

Jan Roos: Regardless of whether we end up going to the whole network lattice model hive mind thing, people are going to have a decision right now, especially if they're in a position where it's tougher than it was a year ago to really break the chains and then just see, to make these decisions for themselves and hopefully not get into the same stuff.

Mike Whelan: The stakes for this really could not be higher. I talk about in the book, I'm going to give a spoiler alert in the book. At the beginning, there is this senior lawyer who's very much in the churn in a rural practice and he's just running and running. And I. Call him Mr. Anderson, and he becomes an icon for this what I don't want to become, right?

Mike Whelan: I don't want to end up practicing like that because I think it's really risky. In the interim, between the time that I drafted the book and when I wrote the final copy, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport, Texas, which is where I practiced, and this man lost everything, and I got a call one day from the district clerk telling me that lawyer had killed himself.[00:30:00]

Mike Whelan: And for me, That was a gut punch. Not just because I didn't know him. The whole point was that we were all very isolated. I didn't know him well, but because I talked about him as this icon of what I want to avoid, it really hit me. That he took his own life and he did it because he didn't have the reserve It's not I don't write about it in the book Because it's not if he knew what the legal supply chain was he'd be alive today, right?

Mike Whelan: That would be a little gratuitous, but he didn't have the financial reserve. He didn't have the emotional reserve He didn't have social capital. He was only thinking about the churn He was only thinking about cash flow and when that ended he felt that he had nothing to live for And he took his life.

Mike Whelan: We're seeing way too much of this In the model that we use in law. And so for me, the stakes could not be higher. And I think it's really important that as we make these shifts and these lawyers, move into solo practice and try to figure out what to do please do not listen to other people who tell you the cashflow model is the way to practice.

Mike Whelan: It's not [00:31:00] healthy.

Jan Roos: We need to get rid of it. Yeah, that's the thing. It's a crisis, but it's also an opportunity to maybe get some people to, take those right steps moving forward. So as far as if this has resonated with any of the listeners that are there here right now, what's the best way to get in touch with you, Mike?

Mike Whelan: Yeah if you go to the Lawyer Forward Facebook group right now, we did a virtual event about the next Thing so everybody got online really quickly. I moved to the cloud and stumbled through in a panic But then I wanted to talk about what's after that. How do we change business models? Do we change product delivery system?

Mike Whelan: Do we change our actual services? So we're doing something else. Do I go get a job at costco, right? Just trying to figure out what's the next thing and so the conference really focuses on that if you go to the just On Facebook search lawyer forward and you can go join the group and there's details there about the event The other thing I would ask people to do is you can go to amazon and search for lawyer forward And get the book if you are in a position This offer is always open if you're in a position financially where you can't afford the ten dollar kindle book or the twenty [00:32:00] Two dollar paperback.

Mike Whelan: I think it is Then just email me. I'm at Mike at lawyer forward. com. I will send you a PDF copy of the book because I care more about the ideas than the four bucks or whatever I make from a book. I just want to make sure you can think through this. So

Jan Roos: make sure to reach out to me. All right. Thanks Mike.

Jan Roos: That's super generous. And also, thank you so much for taking the time to tell our listeners about the, I think it's such an important thing and you're not alone. You say this is a super important time. Thank you so much for being on the show. Absolutely. All right. And then for everybody else, we'll be back next week with another episode of The Law Firm Growth podcast.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Growth podcast for show notes, free resources, and more head on over to casefuel.com/podcast looking forward to catching up on the next episode.