#178: The Resilient Lawyer With Sam Glover

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, And master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel. I am winding up a day, wonderful day, really beautiful day, and had a couple of shows already. Spent some time mentoring a few people that are new budding public speakers. I always love to do that. And folks that are Getting ready, actually a couple of people that are just getting ready to get on a TEDx stage, which is super exciting for them and they're all nerved up about it, which is normal to be expected. I know I was tied in knots before my TEDx talk a while back and I'd been speaking for a lot of years before that. So I'm really thrilled that I have a guest on the show today that I've gotten to know just recently and love the energy that he brought to a show that he invited me to be a participant on. And that was cool. And then I love the way they produce that show. And so it's really, really great to turn the tables on him. Now I'll get to be the interviewer, ask him questions and all that. Let me spend a couple of minutes reading— won't even be a couple of minutes actually. I'll read a little bit about him and then we'll dive right in as we always do. And buckle up, I think it's gonna be a really fun and sort of conversation going in some interesting directions. You guys will enjoy it. So Sam, Sam Glover is the founder of lawyerist.com. That's right. The host of Lawyerist Podcast, that's the show I was on actually, and co-author of The Small Firm Roadmap. Lawyerist supports lawyers building client-centered, future-oriented small firms with information, ideas, coaching, curriculum, and community. And you can find out more about that in the show notes. There'll be links and things about where to follow Sam on social media. But Sam, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you. Good to be here.

Thanks. And it's good to be talking to you again so soon.

I know it is. It's almost like we're continuing a conversation.

Exactly.

I'm going to be the questioner now.

Fantastic.

So funny, the training that we get in law school, right? It's a funny thing because you and I are both, for those in our community that will soon get kind of the symmetry and the gag even, you and I are sort of recovered lawyers at this

point. Sure. Yep.

Yeah, I was recovering for a number of years. I am now, I'm going to declare it out loud, fully recovered. Like, all the scar tissue is still on the inside, but I think I'm pretty good. How about you?

I think I'm fully recovered as well. Yeah. I mean, having talked with you and heard your story, like, I don't think I had as low of a low as you did. And so, the recovery was probably a little bit easier for me, but no less happy for it.

You look smarter than me. And so,

it's

just—

I'm sure that's true.

Yeah. No doubt it's true. But it really, it could just be the fact that you came to a similar decision without having to endure as much pain, or I don't know. I mean, why don't we dig into that for just a second? I didn't expect to start there, but it'll be fun today to have a colleague, fellow colleague. Like, I'm still a lawyer. I'll be a lawyer forever.

Yeah.

I just don't practice anymore. I got enough practice for my, uh, for this lifetime, I think. So what was it that that had you— maybe give us, why'd you go to law school? Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the Resilience Assessment That more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free Resilience Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Cool. Why'd you become a lawyer in the first place? And then give us a little bridge to why you ultimately pivoted out of that.

I thought I was going to be an English teacher. I was an English major, classical studies minor. I love that stuff. Then I took a teaching class and realized I didn't want to teach. I had a— in my junior year of college, I was like, oh shit, that was my plan. I better do something else. I think I took What's the test you take if you want to get an MBA?

Oh, I can't remember. The GRE? Is that the one?

Yeah. I took that one and I took the LSAT and I did okay on both. Did some research and I decided that law school sounded harder. And so I was going to do that because I didn't really know what else to do.

You wanted to pick the tougher road?

Yeah. It sounded like more fun. It sounded like a better challenge, I guess. So I went to law school and I showed up without a clear reason for being there other than that it sounded like it might be a challenge.

You know, this is really interesting, and maybe there'll be research we can do and then report back on this data, but I didn't have a clear reason for going to law school either. So I go back to that time in my life. I was a middle school English teacher because they needed middle— they needed teachers in New York City, and they were willing to give a job to anybody that had a degree. Right. So if you had a college degree in English in New York City, you could get a job as an English teacher, which is what I got a job as. My wife, who'd been studying to be a teacher all through college, This is— she knew from the time she was 8 years old, she knew I'm gonna be a teacher like my mommy, you know, like her mom. And so I got a job before she did. She was so pissed.

I bet she was pissed.

And I think I made more money than her too at the time. Like, I think it was $25,000 was my first salary.

Which is totally a living wage in New York City.

Well, it is, especially like after 10 years, I would have been making $25,800.

Oh, man.

But we'll leave that one aside. So I was a lifeguard and I was working at a local pool in between. You know, I couldn't be a lifeguard at the beach in the winter, so I had to find an indoor place for me to share these tremendous gifts I had on the lifeguard stand.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally.

I remember changing. I was doing a test of the water in the hot tub and I met this— I wish I could remember the guy's name. And so help me, I think his name was Sam. I'm just gonna say it, Sam. Go for it. I think his name was Sam, okay? This older guy who was retired and he was so nice, affable man. I would always see him. We'd always just have a little chit-chat. And one day I said to him, you know, he might have said to me, what are you doing? What are you up to? And I told him and I said, well, what did you do? And he says, well, I just retired. I'm a lawyer. And I was a lawyer. No, not a lawyer anymore. Go, really? Tell me about that. And then he started to tell me about What have you done and whatnot? And I go, you know what? I'm gonna go to law school. And dude, that's exactly— that is the first domino.

Yeah.

Not an inspired story. Right.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't have a mission. I didn't have like a grand thing I wanted to do. So me either.

Interesting. How long did you practice?

I practiced for about 10 years. I had a solo practice that I shifted gears on several times. And then gradually, as Lawyerist became more and more viable, I shifted gears and did that, including selling my firm and closing it down. So it took me probably a while to filter out all my cases and hand them all off and finish them all up, but it was about 10 years.

Yeah.

Most of it on my own.

It took me kind of 2 and a half years to do the same thing. Do you remember the day that you closed the offices?

I don't actually.

Well, because you sold your practice. So you didn't really close, you just sort of handed the baton off, right?

Yeah, I sold kind of most of the stuff and then Yeah, I can't remember the exact day. There were a couple of other points that were really pivotal, but not that one, I guess. I don't know. By then, I guess it was a done deal. That was just closure.

I only remember mine because it put me on the ground in the fetal position for the first time since I was probably lonely at summer camp. And really, there was a shred-it truck that sat outside my office for like 3 solid days. That's how many files that were older than 7 years. At that point, I was practicing about 18 years. So we were shredding stuff I didn't need to keep. And I don't know, thousands of pounds of documents, paper, people's lives, cases I put my heart and soul into, you know, all that kind of stuff. The clients and the cases I wish I never took. Yeah, totally. Those terrible ones, and then the ones that will always forever be a thing I smile about. But yeah, it was 3 days of the shred truck being out there, and then finally everything being out of the office, and I'm walking in, and just like you, I had created this Plan B. While I maintained my Plan A for a couple of reasons. One, it just was the pivot plan I was most comfortable with, not to scuttle one thing before you've created something new. But I also had responsibilities to all those people that had hired me, and you don't wind down cases just because you decide you're gonna stop.

You got duties.

Yeah, so many things. So, but that was, that was a bit of a painful moment because There's this sort of a— I don't know what it's called, the sunk cost fallacy or what have you, but I had a lot of my life and days and hours missed away from the family.

Yeah. It's hard to just feel like maybe that wasn't worth it. Now I'm just tossing it all out.

Yeah. So The Lawyerist, do you remember where the birth of that inspiration came from?

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, there's sort of a couple of births to it. In the same way that me and my— there were a couple of pivots along the way till I got here. But as I was starting my own practice in November, I'd been working for a firm. It didn't work out. I left, kind of collected unemployment, applied for jobs I knew I didn't want for a while. And I kind of told myself, if that doesn't happen, then I'm just going to start my own firm. And so I finally did on November 25th, 2005, I believe is when I filed my paperwork. Pretty confident in that date. And, you know, so I did all the things you do when you're starting a new business. You try and sort out all your technology, your software, you figure out how to do billing and how your phone system is going to work and all that stuff. And I was just getting so frustrated with the options available to lawyers in like law practice software. And I was using one in particular that was just pissing me off and I needed a place to vent. I've always been a writer and I've always built websites no matter where I've been. I built websites when I worked for an outdoor store, I built websites when I worked for another lawyer, and so blogging was just a natural outlet for me. And turned out I wasn't the only one that, A, had complaints and B, had some visions about where things should be going and what should be better. So I started writing and it picked up traffic, but it was just something I did in my spare time. Earned me a lot of speaking engagements that really weren't calculated to make me any money or— I mean, they definitely helped in a networking vein, but it was pretty indirect. But over time, it kind of got more popular and then my business partner came along and was looking for something to do and said, hey, you want to make this a business? And I said, all right, let's do it. So we did.

More inspiration.

Yeah. But we were both doing this in our spare time for a really long time. We bootstrapped this casually in the background for many years before it started. So I think, I wish I could remember the exact year. Aaron is so good with dates and I'm so bad with our story, our company story. But eventually I decided to take a flyer and there was sort of a moment that led me to stop litigating and start doing transactional work because I couldn't deal with The stress and pressures of that and being in the emergency room billing time while my first daughter was born. Like, and I kind of vowed never again. But I converted to representing small businesses and just that bored me. I couldn't do it. And so I wound that down and closed down those files at about the same time that Lawyerist was starting to look viable.

Hmm.

And so I said, let's give it a shot. And my wife said, okay. And she had a good solid job with benefits. So she supported me for a few years while we were revving things up and making it work. And then eventually Aaron came on full-time and we started hiring other people and now it's a bigger business and that's cool. Yeah.

You just gave us a great roadmap. I mean, there's a lot of people that are listening to the show, watching on YouTube that are in transition. And one of the scariest things I really believe about being in transition is just not having a plan. And that's kind of a funny thing in the book Pivot where I sort of say at the beginning, the plan can be your enemy. Because we have to go back to a foundational start point for the kind of transitions that our heart is calling us to. And the planning stage is a lot of the head and lawyers are— it's very much a heady profession, right? So

a very conservative profession, right? We're very risk-averse. It scares us to do anything other than what we're doing in a number of different ways. So yeah.

Indeed. Yeah. Do you get a lot of lawyers that have seen this, Your Pivot? Again, forgive the reference to the book. I can't help my self-promotion. I got to stop that. It's a good word for us anyway. No, it is. I'm trying to think that transition, what would— have you called it anything? Do you have a word that you describe that transition?

I don't really, but I've been reading social science literature, behavioral science, because I'm trying to figure out what helps people actually do it finally. What is the difference between Monday when you woke up miserable and Tuesday when you woke up miserable, but you decided to do something else? Or You've been trying to get out your door and form a running habit for years, and one day it's that the first day in your new running habit and you run for years. You know, like, what is it that really triggers that difference? And I haven't really found a cohesive answer, right? There are lots of things that do it, but there's no like one answer that works for everybody. I think everybody's a little bit different. And so I tend to be somebody who's not very sentimental, isn't all that tied to the background, and when things aren't working, I look for something else. And so like taking my closing down my litigation and selling my litigation practice and trying something else out for me was a small step, but I see lots of lawyers who are so afraid to reach out and do something different all the time. It's kind of a constant refrain for us.

Yeah, it defies logic on a certain level. I want to come back to that question you asked because I was raising my hand like yeah, I know I saw like pick on me, Mr. Carter, Mr. Carter. You know, I do, I do have my answer to that, but it defies a bit of logic. And that's what's ironic on some level for the lawyers that are listening to this, because we're trained in logic. We're trained in the premises that lead to a conclusion. Right. That if A plus B, then C, whatever that is. And if you are waking up, fill in the blank, for me, anxious, angry, dreading the day, miserable, like a lot of pretty extreme words that I would wake up feeling that way for Many, many days. I would dread Sundays because they were the thing that led into Mondays. I'd start to feel that anxiety sort of in the middle of the football game.

The logic is like, that is going to happen again.

Exactly.

If you don't change anything, that is going to be your life.

Brother, you got it. Like, what do you think is going to be different 10 years from now?

Yeah.

And I didn't have any answer to that because I don't know that there was an answer to it other than you must— to change the output, you have to change the input on some level. And so when you ask that question, my own experience is that pain is the greater of the 2 catalysts. Yeah. Pleasure is certainly a catalyst, and the prospect of waking up passionate about what you're going to do and feeling great is certainly an alluring thing, and it can get the attention. But there's something about pain. There's something about the way us as a species learn. We learn not to touch the hot pot by touching the hot pot. And then we get a distinction and then our belief system kicks in. So it may not be that you never touch the hot pot again, it's that you don't touch the pot without gloves, without the mittens, right? But lawyers in particular—

Although, and I think we talked about this on our podcast as well, but like the trick is touching a hot pot absolutely is painful and you won't do it again. But if you stick your hand in the water and then turn the heat on and boil it slowly, you're going to leave it in there for a really long time before you even notice the pain. I think that's where most people are, is they've been warming up to the pain slowly and it's hard recognizing that it's actually painful. I think that's where many people struggle.

Yeah. It's a really interesting thing. My question started out with, do a lot of lawyers come up to you and ask you to give them advice on how to elegantly and gracefully and safely get out of doing work that they know Doesn't feel good, but provides a certain security.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we have put together our small firm scorecard and like the first 3 questions on it are about like, do you know what you want out of your career and do you know what you want out of your business and are you at a firm, whether it's yours or somebody else's, that is likely to get you where you're trying to go in the world? And I think for a lot of people, that's a wake-up call that leads them to want more. And then we work, then we work on it. Because once you've had that wake-up call, you've got no excuse. Now you know, now you've got no excuse. You've got to confront those problems or stick your head in the sand and then come back later.

Yeah. I'm happy to say this, that if I knew now or knew then what I know now, and know is a strong word, but just the awareness of other options, I could have stayed in the law. I'm not saying I wanted to or I would do it again differently because I wouldn't. But it could have. There's not a big population of lawyers necessarily in our Pivot community or the folks that listen to this, but there's always a few dozen and I will hear from them. And often they'll say, so does this mean I have to quit? Is that what I have to do? And my answer is going to be no. Right. It does not mean that you have to quit. And that doesn't mean you have to quit your corporate job or any other job, frankly, or any other sort of profession. that you aren't loving in the moment, there are simple things you can do to change those situations around. So let's for one second look at the way your company supports people. Now it's for lawyers, but I want to say, I think there's a broader application to the principles that would cover accountants, doctors, entrepreneurs, people that are in the mid-career in their companies. Is that fair?

Oh yeah. Most of the people that we bring in to talk to lawyers are people like you who have generally applicable knowledge that lawyers just need to know about. So I definitely think it goes the other way too because that's what we're drawing on.

Yeah. So what are maybe some of the themes or specifics that you've gleaned that really help people to see their options?

I think one of the main things that we spend time on is helping lawyers understand the trends in the world. and giving them a framework and a set of tools for taking advantage of those trends that are shaping the practice of law in particular. I think there's a tendency to look and say, you know, things are going well for me now and not look forward and say, will they continue? And I think most of your listeners will probably have come across at least one article about, is this the end of law practice? Is it the end of lawyers? And many of them are wishing that that will be true, you know. So, but I think if you aren't understanding what is happening in the world that leads people to say this and how it's going to be impacting your practice and why it is that so many people are glad to hear this news and figuring out how can I build a business that is different than that, that takes advantage of all of the potential of the technology that's been developing instead of I'm just gonna keep doing— putting my head in the sand and keep doing things the way things have— people have always been doing them and expect that my business is going to continue to be successful. When that— there's no reason to expect that that's going to be true, right? Every lawyer billing by the hour sitting in their office right now is Blockbuster with Netflix breathing down their neck and we're trying to teach lawyers like, don't sit there and wait for obliteration. Here's what's going on in the world. Here's how to take advantage of those things. Here's what you need to be building towards. And maybe even more directly responsive to your question, like let's just take a look at Not even talking about future trends, let's look at the practice of law itself. We are the most depressed, suicidal, prone to divorce profession in the world, except for dentists, weirdly enough. Our profession is quite literally sick and we just can't continue. The way that the ABA and other organizations are going about addressing this are maybe all they can do, but not helping individuals. It's time to take a good look at why we're sick, And start refusing to accept the things about law practice that make us sick and start building healthier law practices that are healthier for us and for our clients and deliver better service across the board and take advantage of the trends that are shaping the practice of law. And so that's— we're trying to help lawyers get their heads around all that stuff. But one of the biggest things is like, just put your foot down and just refuse to accept the status quo because if it sucks, then move on.

Okay. Well, I want to pick up right there. Let's go with the status quo. So what is What does it look like to break the status quo for a lawyer? Because I want to just play the— I get to play the angel's advocate now.

Yeah.

Since we're both lawyers, and I'm going to tell you, so I hear you, that all makes sense. But with every matter that's sitting on my desk that I haven't even gotten to yet, and the ones that are sitting a stone's throw from my desk that I've been ignoring, and the burning ones that I'm just dealing with right now on the phone, etc. Where do I find time or how do I break the status quo?

Yeah, there are lots of lawyers wondering about that and I think the number one thing is to recognize that you own a business and every time I go to a conference, there's somebody who says law is not a business, it's a profession, which is complete bullshit. It is all of those.

It started in law school because they teach nothing about the business of law. That I can recall.

Almost nothing still. But if you think about like, so when you look at ethics complaints, for example, many of the most common ethics complaints are things like billing disputes and communication problems.

Non-response.

Yeah. None of those are professional things. Lawyering does not involve balancing trust accounts. That's a business skill.

Business management. Yep.

And communication is a business skill. And making sure that you're sending out good bills is a business skill. Those are all business skills. Client management.

It's a business skill.

And if you believe that you are running a profession, not a business, then you are setting yourself up to be an unethical lawyer because you have to run a business too. And so you have to find time to do those things. There's simply no way because if you're running a business without somebody in charge of the business, you're not actually giving it the attention it needs.

I don't know what the— I haven't looked at the rules on this topic, but I believe it's okay. I mean, it's Maybe jurisdiction to jurisdiction, you got to check this out, but to hire a COO, Chief Operations Officer, or operating officer for your law practice is possible. That person does not need, I believe, to be a licensed practicing attorney.

Fee sharing is a different question, but you can absolutely pay someone a salary to run your firm. Totally.

Right, exactly. And operations is an art. It's a science. It's a skill set that I would say most people come out— Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Out of, out of an MBA program don't know how to be operations people any more than lawyers know how to manage clients, but you learn through experience how to operate, how to be an operator, be operationally skilled. So this is a lot more than a CLE course, and I think that's partly the way these things handled, that there are ethics courses or courses that help people to deal with that prevailing, those staggering statistics about depression, anxiety, as you said, suicide, addictions, abuse of trust funds, etc. So let's go back to one of the ways that you break the status quo, let's say, is to ask for support and to hire for it where you're weak. So you've got a blind spot. Your blind spot is in the management area. You can hire out for something like that. That's a change, a significant change. What else can lawyers do? Because I want to get at the root of why it is that, as you said, lawyers and the law, the paradigm of the law is unhealthy.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the answer to that question is really we have an ethic of where we're like proud of ourselves for working all the time, right? Like we are proud of billing 80 hours a week. That's the thing that lawyers wear like a badge on us. We talk about our obligations to our client. We absolutely have to put our client's interests first, but I would say that doesn't mean that you only have to have your client's interests in mind. We're in a service profession and our job is to serve and to sacrifice for our clients. That's part of what we do, but we also get to put some guardrails around that because we don't also have to sacrifice our happiness and our lives and everything to law practice. But I think there is so much pressure to just crank out work product. And the very question that you started with is like, when I'm flooded with paper that I need to get to work on, when my clients are banging down my door asking me to do things, all that stuff, like where do I find the time to work on the business instead of just doing tasks? That is kind of the thing. We hear that over and over again from lawyers is like, I don't have any time to do this shit. I got so many cases that I've got to deal with because we just do the work and we measure our worth by the amount of work and the amount of money we do and we bring in. And when you're doing that, there is no time for self in there. And this is not like woo self. This is just like spend a little bit of time thinking about how you want this business to be and what you want your life to look like. And it doesn't have to be any more simple than if you're a solo, you may not have taken a vacation since you started your firm. And so maybe all you want your life to look like is I want to be sitting on a beach sometime in the next 12 months. Yeah, like just setting a simple goal like that and I don't want to bring my phone. I want to get rid of my email app. I want to drop Slack. I don't want to have anybody bugging me about work for a week. You can do it. We've helped many, many lawyers do that for the very first time. But if you haven't done that, like there's something broken about your business. That's not the point of having one.

The model I think is a place to look. When I keynoted a conference for the— for ALM in September, the General Counsel Conference for 2019, We talked about this one particular root cause of what we're talking about here, which is that lawyers are driven by an hourly, meaning that they're compensated often by how much they can charge for their time on an hourly basis. So the compensation structure itself is one that can be reexamined because compensation drives behavior. You know, we said earlier, what's the greater motivator, pain or pleasure? Yeah. Well, in this instance, there's the pain of The calls that you get from your client or potentially even a violation of some ethical standard and the repercussions that come from that kind of thing. That's sort of that axe that hangs over the profession. But there's the daily requirement that you bill enough to pay the bills, right? That you bill enough because if you're in a firm, it's what's required of you in order to meet your standards, get your bonus, and that kind of thing. And so the comp structure itself, and I think that's one of those areas that we could Totally. I'll just say generally that compensation drives behavior in any organization. What are you compensating for? And so, for example, in the tech space, I find it interesting that some of the most successful companies, they actually create bonuses and will incentivize project managers for scuttling a project, for pulling the plug on a project that isn't working. For example, and because they are innovative firms and in the past, if somebody was working on a project and it wasn't going well, the fear that they could be fired or the fear that they'd be wrong and what that would do to their career was so great, they just kind of let those projects go on, hoping, praying, and maybe working themselves to death to try to make them work. But ultimately, when they didn't work, it cost time, it cost resources, energy, money. Right. Etc., only to come to the same conclusion. So, they incentivize through the compensation structure, which includes money and advancement as well as other accolades. They incentivize people to just go, you know, this project is not going to work this way, and they pull the plug on it.

When's the last time a lawyer got awarded for dropping a client?

No kidding. Dropping a client, saying, you know what, my mistake, bad call here. You get a lousy case. This is a lousy, you know, it's not a winnable case kind of thing.

That's something we've actually done at our conference in the past is like, we've had a session where it's like, figure out who your worst client is and fire them right now.

And fire them right now. It makes people rage. It is a break in the status quo, right?

Yep.

Performance-based fee arrangements is an example where that's possible. Again, it more, I think, incentivizes the focus on an outcome versus on how much time you can bill, et cetera. But at that conference, they didn't bring me in there to speak about that. Right. What we were talking about there was resilience, was knowing that structural changes need to be made in the profession. It seems that's what's required. What do we do today for people that can't necessarily change those structures by themselves and there's no paradigm shift happening in the moment? What do we do to just show up? And perform better and at a higher level without the cost of our families or the cost of our health, etc. So I'll put that question to you. When you're advising folks and you're bringing people in to talk about this, what are the options for lawyers when it comes to managing a 70, 80-hour billable week and they've gotten— they're married, they got a couple of kids and the rest?

I think—

And the coronavirus is hanging around. What do I do?

I think lawyers are outstanding at endurance, right? Just going until you break, which is fine in a marathon and terrible in your life and your career and your business. I think what resilience needs to look like, it's like the sense of optimism that you're changing something, right? That you are doing something that will make it better next time. And so like figuring out and identifying the things that aren't working and then trying some things to figure out how to make them work. One of my goals, which I've never quite accomplished, but I've almost got to it, when I was practicing law, as I said, I want to get paid for 40 hours a week and I only want to work 10 a week.

Hmm.

I never quite got there, but I could probably do it if I really wanted to at this point because I'm not practicing law anymore. But I know lawyers who have the same goal and are doing similar things or who have similar goals because they're trying to build systems around what they do, not just pick up the next brief and then write it from scratch. So I know a lawyer who spends about 2/3 of every year in Bhutan because that's how he wants to live his life and he makes a good living on top of it. firm keeps going while he's gone. And I know a lot, a lot of lawyers who are just refusing to accept that status quo of working 80 hours a week and instead are figuring out, okay, like, if my time is not how I'm going to value my worth, then how do I do things differently? And most of our lawyers are figuring out ways to get away from billable hours because you can't leverage your time in the way that you can leverage other types of efficiency. But anyway, so I think resilience is just Having a plan. We talk a lot about intentionality and you can get woo with intentionality, but at its core, it's just getting up in the morning and deciding, what am I going to do today? Or when you start a firm, it's, what do I want this thing to do for me and what do I want it to look like? It's just taking a moment to decide what you want next. And once you've said that, then you can find paths to it. But if you never stop to question, why am I doing it this way? Or am I okay with this? I briefly alluded to this, but when my first daughter was born, I was a full-time litigator working many weeks, 60 to 80 hours, and I brought my laptop to the delivery room. My wife's a lawyer too, so she kind of got it and that was okay. Once she passed out from the epidural, I opened my laptop and started working.

Oh my God.

Yeah. I mean, I was back at work 2 days later because it was just me. There's nobody to backstop me at my firm. By the time my second daughter was born 22 months later, 23 months later, I had found a path towards winding down most of my litigation and selling off that piece of my firm. I had launched a new practice area that allowed me to work from anywhere and to be less connected to what I was doing, to change the model because I just wasn't willing to accept that anymore. But I also wasn't willing to just— I'm not going to buy a boat and just live on a boat in the Mediterranean. That doesn't actually bring me any advantages. So I wanted to pivot. I wanted to change what I was doing, not just all of a sudden throw everything out the window and run off to the ends of the world. And I think that's what resilience is, is like, I refuse to accept this and I have a plan. Here's what I want next. And then you start putting a plan together for how to get there. And that is on a day-to-day basis and an hour by— you get an argument and you're like, well, I don't want that to happen again. Here's how I'm going to handle it next. It's that repeated, like, how can I improve this next time? I think that's most of what it is, and believing that it can be better next time.

Right. And so much of that, and we get the pleasure of speaking to lawyer groups on a pretty regular basis, which is wonderful, and we talk a lot about not accepting the status quo. It doesn't mean you have an answer. It doesn't require that you have an answer to have an awareness.

Right.

And the awareness is the start of all change anyhow. So you've automatically changed the status quo just by the fact that you've had an awareness. You said something earlier that really hit home for me and used the word backstopping because

we

got 4 kids and our son was the only baseball player with 3 girls and a boy. And the girls started playing T-ball. I was their T-ball coach for a while. I must have been a crummy T-ball coach because they never wanted to play baseball after that. But our son played for a lot of years and it's a basic principle in baseball that you backstop each other at every position.

Behind the ball.

Always running behind the ball. And that's a question for people listening to this now. Who's backstopping you? Because as— whether it's the legal profession or any profession or any area of business, resilience, I find, comes from knowing that people have your back. We're much more resilient when we don't believe we're completely solo on the thing and that there's a way to offload. Or if you just can't handle it, like you got a weekend where there's dance recitals and that's where you want to be, that's where you want to be present, but there's also that same weekend when there's some deadlines or there's some things that have to get done. What do you do? Who's backstopping you in those instances? And not having that backstop, I think it's constantly trying to squeeze more juice out of something that isn't regenerating the juice fast enough. Whereas, if you had to work a weekend and it wasn't a weekend that you had something else that was really pressing as a priority, nothing wrong with that, as long as you're not doing that weekend after weekend after weekend, or you're forced to make that choice between something that's more a part of your value system. As we've looked at research on resilience and done our own, resilience is really 4 things. It's broken down into 4 It's mental for sure, and lawyers are probably more mentally exhausted than almost any other group we've ever talked to. It's emotional, and same thing, there's just a lot of emotional stuff that gets stuffed and not dealt with. And it's physical for sure, and clearly lawyers win on that score because they've got the Rocky model dialed in, right? No matter how many times you're knocked down, you somehow stand up and stand up. It doesn't mean you win the fight in the end. That's the issue, right? You're all banged up after that, after all said and done, but you're still standing. And then, it's spiritual as well. And that's, I think, it fell apart for me. I could handle pretty much all the other stuff, but when my value system was in conflict, meaning I wanted to be a great dad and a great husband and enjoy my life, enjoy my family, and I wasn't seeing them and I was missing them at dinner and missing them sometimes even go to bed at night. It just became torturous on the inside. And that was the pain I was talking about earlier. I mean, that was the thing I couldn't personally reconcile. So I think one of those great areas for everybody to think about is where can you be backstopped? And backstopped, by the way, doesn't necessarily even mean people these days because the world we're living in, there is AI backup. Right.

That's where I was going to go is like, if you build your firm with it in mind, like you can use technology as a backstop for sure.

The possibilities for that are pretty much limitless. Where could AI come into play? Where could AR come into play? Where could any number of other new technologies be that extra person on the field for you? That's just a question. To me, I don't believe you ever ask a question without there being an answer. Just don't know when you're going to get the answer, but one will come if you ask a question. Yeah. Sam, Give us a little preview of what's on the horizon for your company. What are you guys really excited about? What are you building at the moment?

I mean, at the moment, I'm working on helping the team prep for our conference, which will be 2 weeks from now in Atlanta. But that community that we've built that will be at the conference, the Lawyerist Lab, is where our focus is and building more value for them. I have taught myself to code over the years and I do most of our software coding and I've been deep in the weeds today on building some software for our community that I'm really excited to show them at LabCon because it's going to be the kind of thing that helps them kind of identify where is the status quo from our firm and what does need to change. Let's find those levers that we can pull. And so we are sort of constantly working on ways to just help people get a better picture of where they are and where they need to be. And that's what our book is all about. That's what the scorecard is all about. That's what our community is all about. And so just doubling down on that, and we've kind of proved all of the concepts that are at the core of what we do. And now there's just the hard work to do of making all of those things awesome. And that's where our attention and our work is right now.

That's wonderful. What's the name of the book? And we'll put all that information, by the way, everybody, in the show notes for this event, for this episode.

It's called The Small Firm Roadmap. And you can actually get the first chapter for free on our website. And like, You should do that because if you read it and you're like, these guys are full of shit, then don't buy the book. But if you read it and it resonates with you, then you will know that the book is something that you'll enjoy the rest of.

Way cool. What's one ritual that you've got to build resilience for yourself these days?

Probably the most important thing I do— no, I don't have a lot of rituals, but probably the most important thing I do is I take my anxiety medicine every morning because without it, I tend to fall into those holes. And with it, I am able to ride out on top of it. And so that's probably the most important thing I do every single day.

Yeah. And are there— we don't have to dive into this too deeply, just— but there are side effects to that, right? Are there— there's always a side effect to a medication, right? And I think it's important that people know. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more. more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Well, for me,

exactly, because when there's something that would help But you decide not to go down that road because of some other reason and think somehow that you can do it on your own. I mean, again, it's that same mentality. I truly believe some people and often entrepreneurs have this gene, genome or whatever, that they think they get more points in heaven for doing it alone, as opposed to what are those backstops for everyone. I just love that theme and you gave that to us today, Sam. Yeah.

So

I very much appreciate this conversation. I appreciate you and the work that you're doing at The Lawyerist. So thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, Adam. It's been a pleasure.

Everybody out there in podcast land, we'd love to get your thoughts. As always, the comments are terrific. You can go to adammarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment, subscribe, and join us on the social channels. And my reminder to all of you and to myself, of course, is We all can decide at the beginning of every day how resilient we intend to be for that day. As Sam said earlier, intentions are really powerful. And resilience is, for me, fundamentally the most important skill that I have these days, the ability not just to weather storms, but to utilize the change that's around to turn those things into something valuable. It's an alchemy of sorts. I have a ritual that I've started the day with forever and ever and ever. At this point, I can say that after 10 years, and it was really the ritual that replaced my old ritual, which was to put my feet on the floor at the beginning of the day. And this was when I was fully practicing law. And I would say something like this. I'd say, fuck. I would start my day with some form of an expletive because It was just, I couldn't believe that I didn't sleep as well as I expected to. And I wasn't sure what the day was going to hold, but I knew I was probably going to get angry pretty quickly. And now I start my day putting my feet on the floor and realizing in that moment that as I'm waking up, there are people who are taking their last breath right then. And it's a wake-up call for me in many ways to just be grateful. For anything, anything that comes to mind in that moment. So, in that gratitude, I follow up with a statement, declare out loud, I love my life. These 4 very simple words that have had a profound impact on me. So, all the folks that are buying into this idea that intentions are powerful, and the beginning of the day is a powerful time to set an intention, wake up tomorrow, feel some gratitude in that moment. And choose to say something out loud. It could be like, I'm going to pretend that I love my life today. Somebody shared that with me the other day that I love my life is a strong statement. And it may be that your mind says to you, that's a lie. And I won't say something that's not true. But maybe you just want to love your life and you could say, I pretend. So that's okay too. Sam, do you have something you say when you wake up or is there something you might say tomorrow?

Sometimes I roar. I find that roaring is an excellent way to wake up and smile. Just like give your biggest, like the barbaric yelp from Dead Poets Society, right? Like get up and roar. Sometimes I do that. I tell my kids to do it too when they're having a really hard time getting out of bed. Just roar. That's one of my favorite things. And that'll open your eyes and get you going because after you've let out a big roar, you can't go back to sleep because you've announced the beginning of the day.

Yeah, that's so cool. I saw this movie years ago, which is a favorite of mine called Meatballs. And there's this great scene at the beginning of Meatballs with Bill Murray, and it's like June, and he's just about to put his feet on the floor of this cabin that's probably been 40 degrees during the night. And he puts his feet on the floor and he goes, oh, I'm your head counselor, as he's trying to stretch his back out. So I do that too, Sam. What a blast. Everybody have a great rest of your day or evening and check out the show notes all about Sam's company and all the great things he's doing. Ciao for now.

Thank you. Bye.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.