family law

This week we're going to talk about family law firms and what are the nuances with working with a family law attorney. I'll start first with the job and the typical psychological M.O. of an attorney that works with law, with family law, is they have to have tough skin. They deal with a lot of emotion. They tend to be very busy. Hard to nail down when you want to talk about finances and things like that. And there are also attorneys that are exhausted. They get emotionally exhausted because they're dealing with divorce and maybe child custody or some things even worse than that. So a lot of times when you meet them, just be prepared for the fact that you're gonna have a hard time getting their attention on things. You might have to follow up a lot with them, and you might have to come up with a creative way to discuss their finances with them. Many of them just kind of so busy Know that when you're pricing family law firm work, there's gonna be a lot of transactions, a lot of smaller transactions. These attorneys tend to use credit cards 'cause it's the only way people can pay them, their clients can pay them because they're typically in crisis mode. So you will see credit cards. A good tip is to maybe get them involved with Gravity Legal because Gravity does have that payment plan option and it really has a beautiful dashboard. So we're able to really see who paid and A lot of times you're gonna see that as you do this work that the names are the same. So you're gonna have similar last names. You really wanna have the software built out with custom fields so you can have opposing party, opposing attorney, children's names in there somewhere, anything that has to do with maybe custody or things of that ilk. A lot of the law firms that we work with that are family law firms, they tend to be in Clio because they need that all-in-one practice management. They need that place to have their calendaring so they don't miss any deadlines. They need to have a place for the emails to be kind of housed, all the documents to be housed. So they really need that type of platform that's gonna handle all of those things. That's probably the most important parts of this. Now, make sure that if you are working with a family law firm attorney and their staff, you want to make sure that they're using the product to the, the fullest extent that's possible. Make sure they're using all the parts. Set up those custom fields, connect them to custom fields in QuickBooks. Make sure you're being able to extract the data. That's gonna be very important for them. Mm-hmm. I also find that family law firms tend to spend some good amount of money on marketing. So you're also going to want to have with that family law firm, maybe have them talk to them about adding Clio Grow if they're using Clio to track the lead from the beginning to it becomes a client. And that way you can track that customer journey. If they're not using Clio Grow, a good tip is to maybe add a Mailchimp to it so that they have that piece of it. Maybe HubSpot or Salesforce. It's kind of overkill, but you could use Salesforce as well. Those are important pieces. So start to think on put that advisory cap on. So you're gonna advise them on the different software they're gonna use. Ask 'em their pain points. They might have pain points with calendaring. So maybe they have a way that their clients can use Acuity or Calendly to book in consultations. How do they handle consultations? You wanna ask that question too. Sometimes a consultation comes with a fee, maybe $150, $175. And if the person doesn't become a client, if they're not a good fit, they pay the fee, they're one and done and gone. How does the client wanna see that in the books? Do they wanna have the track, track that as a client? Do they wanna kind of bundle that all in and make sure that it's in one place? It's really how much of that do they really want to track? You wanna talk to them about that. Some of them just wanna pay that consultation fee and they don't want all those details inside of QuickBooks or into the product. So you have to— you can maybe make a consult customer, but I prefer to keep the name and get the name attached. So if they do end up becoming a customer down the road, you've got that detail in, in there. So know this is a large volume of transactions that you're gonna track if you're using Clio. And remember, we'd like to see that full view of the sub-liability account built out, especially because there's a large volume of transactions. There tends to be a lot of clients, a lot of names there. You might have 2, 3, 400 clients at any given time kind of floating around even in a small practice. You want to track the ins and outs, especially if they have trust accounting. You want to track that trust accounting, which means if you're using Clio, you got to go use it once, at least once a month, go into that client trust header account and push those details into the sub-liability account. I know a lot of people say just use the customer feature and track it that way, but if you use the sub-liability account, if the— then use those micro ledgers. If the client does get audited by the bar, you'll have the ledger ready. So when you have to present it to the bar in an audit, you've got it already preset, which you don't really get with a customer view. It's not, it's not as clean. So you want to have that as well. And it's just easier to track the clients that way. You will find if they're using Clio that sometimes things get readjusted along the way. Maybe they readjust a fee or something like that and they may even go back into that original invoice and tweak it. When they tweak it, it sends another transaction. 'Cause remember, Clio is a one-way sync. Synchronization, just one way. You want to make sure that you track that. And anytime you see that extra transaction sitting in undeposited funds, handle it right away. That's one of the things we see a lot of times is that happening. You may also see that they have a lot of filing fees. You wanna track those advanced client costs for them. Make sure you have a system in place to track that so that it's in that asset account and it comes in and goes out. It's not income, it's not expenses. That's another part of working with family lawyers. Just know that when you work with them, they have a tendency, maybe they had a bad day and then you might find that they take it out on you or they're short in their tempers a little bit. You could feel their, the emotions are running high and know that it's part of their day. They have a very tough job. That's why a lot of attorneys don't get into that. You have to have the right DNA or makeup to be that kind of an attorney. Thank God we have them out there. But we do find that those are the attorneys that seem to be in a higher stress level. So remember that when you have, wanna send a client gift, send this, spa day or something for them. They'll really appreciate that kind of a gift because they need it in their life. They need it in their day because they're very— they work a lot of hours and they take on a lot of emotions. So remember that when you're working with them directly. I hope this video is helpful. If you've got— if you've landed that family law firm or you're in the process of maybe scoping one out and doing the discovery call, when you do the pricing, make sure you add enough in there because there's a lot of transactions, a lot of similar names, a lot of work. So it's a little bit more work than your typical standard attorney and factor that in your pricing. Have a great day.