Hi, guys. It’s Billie Tarascio from Modern Law Practice, and today I want to talk to you about what this is going to look like at the end and where you want to be at the end. It sounds so dramatic.
All right, so after coronavirus does its destruction and damage, clients will be in one of two camps, and it’s going to look like a Christmas tree. And at the top there’s going to be people who have money. There will always be people who have money. There will always be rich people. Rich people will figure out a way to get richer.
And then there will be people at the bottom, a big rung of people who have been financially devastated by this process, this pandemic. And the question is, who will your law firm serve? You either will be serving low income clients and you need to adjust your business model accordingly, or you will be serving high income clients and you need to adjust your business model accordingly. For those of us who have been working with the middle class, we need to assume that the middle class will be decimated. And then we need to decide who we’re going to be when we grow up. And for Modern Law, I know I don’t want to serve the low income group of people. That is why I have [inaudible] a sister company and I’ve done it before with lawyers. I’ve provided a low cost law firm and that’s not what I want to do.
I need to figure out how to increase the quality of the lawyering at my office. And this is a style thing because you can manage family law cases in a lot of ways. And I would say right now Modern Law is really middle of the road. We don’t lawyer the heck out of cases. Our average client spends about $7000, anywhere between 6500 and $7000. That’s very middle of the road. There are other law firms who do flat fee cases for $2500. They’re at a different point. And then there are those firms, those boutique firms that have an average client spend that’s closer to $12,000 and that’s where we need to get. And that means that we need to take a look at our style of lawyering. We need to take a hard look at our cases and find out what is it that we could be doing and should we be doing it.
And then it will be a conversation with our clients to determine, hey, these are the options in your case. These are our recommendations. What do you think? But it will be a style shift and it will be an increase in quality of lawyering that we’re providing. And it will mean that our prices, our overall average spend gets higher. But one way or the other a change is going to happen. And you have to decide which side of that change do you want to be on? This is a big deal and now is the time to start thinking about it.
As we go through this, don’t forget to subscribe to Modern Law Practice so that you get updates and let me know. Where are you going to end on this? Are you going to fold? Are you going to be done practicing law? Are you going to serve the low income clientele with limited scope options, pay as you go options, lots of automation? Are you going to try to serve the middle class or are you going to become a more expensive, more sophisticated law firm?
Those, I think, are your options. And if there are other options, you let me know what you think. We’ll talk soon.
