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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zenda, and I'll be your host. Welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jack Zinda, and today we're going to be talking about how to be a CEO and a practicing lawyer and keeping your insanity. And I'm going to use myself as an example. And I haven't always kept my insanity, but I think over time I've gotten better and better at it. And I was just talking to a good friend of mine about this, and they opened their firm two years ago and they were struggling with how do I. I want to be a lawyer, but I also need to run my business.
00:50
Speaker 1
And it seems like every day I set out to do legal work, but every day my business side gets in the way and I can't get to it. And I have dealt with that struggle my entire career. And I'm going to give you a few of the tactics and tips that. That I put together that have really helped me. So the first thing I'm going to say is what not to do? Okay. Don't try to outwork the problem. Okay. Early in my career, I worked 70, 80, I don't maybe 90 hours a week, just insane amounts of time. I'd get up at six, you know, go for a workout, work till five, take an hour break, and then go back and work another four or five hours.
01:26
Speaker 1
That is a recipe for burnout and a recipe to do a poor job in some area because you really. It's really tough to have that amount of focus and time over a long period of time. So you have to realize one, your time is finite. You cannot create more time. That's the only resource that runs out for sure. So you have to recognize that and say, okay, how much time do I have as a human to devote to my practice and the practice of law? And that's going to give you some guardrails for how much total time you have to devote to it. Okay. I typically like to map out 30 hours of work per week. That doesn't mean I'm only working 30 hours. It means 30 hours are spoken for into things.
02:05
Speaker 1
I'm going to be doing either meetings or practicing law or planning the future for the law firm. The next thing that I like to do is divide up what is it that I work on as a lawyer and as a CEO. I call them areas of focus. And there's a really great book called Getting Things Done that really changed my Career. And it really maps out how to think about how to work. And I highly recommend it. They have great courses you can take, and it's a really cool book. And it sounds boring, but it's actually very interesting and really can help you be super efficient and effective. And keep in mind, the idea is not to work more. The idea is to be effective. Okay, so the areas of focus I map out are a few things.
02:47
Speaker 1
I'm just going to use a few examples. One is, you know, as a lawyer, so me practicing law, that's me actually working on a case. I personally work on three cases at a time. And by reference point, our firm has about 100 people in close to 30 attorneys. So we have a pretty big operation. And then I'm going to consult attorneys on another 25 cases, the other 25 cases within the firm, and really help strategize and make sure those cases are on track. And then I'm gonna help mentor a few other attorneys along the way. So first is the practice of law. The second is, you know, getting cases. I call it case acquisition or marketing. Okay. That's a big focus of mine. The third is operations, how the firm runs. The fourth is finances, how the firm's finances are doing.
03:32
Speaker 1
The fifth is people. How the firm's people, systems are doing, how recruiting, hr, that sort of thing. So that's not all mayors of focus, but that's some of them. And then I have my personal ones like father, husband, friend, exercise, health. And those are things that involve my personal life. And so within those different areas of focus, I'm going to have different tasks that I have to do, projects that I'm working on, or goals I'm trying to achieve. If you're early in your practice, in your journey, it's just one person, maybe two, you're going to be filling all of those different hats. If you're bigger and you've grown some, you want to figure out who can help you own that area or hand it off completely.
04:15
Speaker 1
Another good book I read early in my career is called the E Myth, and it stands for the entrepreneurial myth. And in that book, it recommends building an organizational chart for where you want to be at the end of your career or say in 10 years, or when you reach your goal, how many people do you want to have? What departments do you need? And you actually build out the organizational chart, and then you put in whose names you have in each seat. And in the beginning, it's going to be your name in every seat. But as you grow and you get more financial resources. You want to figure out what's the order, I'm going to hand off these responsibilities to other people. Okay, so we talked about our areas of focus.
04:54
Speaker 1
The next is we want to figure out what is my goal as an attorney, what am I trying to achieve? Okay, some lawyers prefer running the company to practicing law, and some lawyers prefer practicing law to running the company. But one thing is for sure, you got to do both. And then you got to figure out, where am I going on this trip? Am I trying to be the best trucking attorney in the country and be in a one to two person shop? Am I trying to focus on helping my town and just focus on regular, you know, motor vehicle or premises liability cases? Am I trying to scale and make a very large organization? But that's critical because if you don't know where you're going, you don't know how to get there. Okay?
05:35
Speaker 1
So that takes a lot of soul searching and you have to be honest with yourself. You know, do you really want to run a large organization or do you really want to practice law most of the time? If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things. Any case in particular. Okay. So now I've mapped out what I want to be doing. Now I want to put in what's the amount of time I want to be spending in each area.
06:19
Speaker 1
I personally want to be spending at least one third of my time practicing law, which is a challenge, I'll be honest. I struggle with that a lot because we're growing and a lot of things come in the way of doing that. But I try to make it a priority because it's important to me that I'm connected to the cases and connected the clients. And I can tell when I stop having fun at work, when I'm like, gosh, I've been in a bad mood this week. I'm just not having a good time. It's usually because I haven't been working on cases. Then I start talking to clients, I start dealing with depositions and I'm like, oh, now I'm having fun again. This is, this is the good stuff. So I like to say one third of my time going to practicing law.
06:53
Speaker 1
So it's easy to say that as a goal. But how do It? This is a next key step is you have to map out your time. So in each area of focus, you need to figure out what are the things that I have to get done. So let's just use an example. Under the people area of focus, okay, I need to hire an additional associate. I need to hire another paralegal. I need to give a raise to, you know, Steve the paralegal. And you've got a list of things that you need to achieve. So that's under my people areas of focus. And then there may be things that I have to do routinely, such as make payroll, okay? But luckily I've been able to hand that task off to somebody else now, so I don't have to worry about payroll.
07:35
Speaker 1
But all of the thing on our people are in my area of focus. And then I figure out how often do I need to do these things and what's the frequency I need to get them done. And I'm doing that with each area of focus for the case. One, I have a list of the cases that I'm working on. And then I have, what is my role in that case? Sometimes my role is to try the case. Sometimes my role is to take a deposition. Sometimes my role is just to strategize the case with another attorney. But I map out what am I expecting of myself in this position? And I get all of that down on a piece of paper. Okay. Or several pieces of paper.
08:08
Speaker 1
And then I just put it on a table and I look at it, I say, okay, here's all the stuff that I've that I think I want to do. And then I'm. I look at, say, is it realistic for me to achieve all of these things in the time frame that I've laid out? Most of the time it's not. Okay. Now comes the hard part. You got to either delegate or eliminate the things that you can't get to. And you have to be realistic about how you're going to approach it and how you're going to do it. So I'll go through that list and I'll delegate the workout, or I'll eliminate things I can't get to, which can be painful because you kind of feel like you're crushing a dream sometimes. But you have to know, do I have the money to do this?
08:43
Speaker 1
Do I have the time to do this? And can I actually get to it? And you're going to be much happier if you do this on the front end, opposed to getting to the end of the quarter or into the month. And you have all these things that you were supposed to do but you didn't do. Oh, I didn't get back to Steve on his promotion. Oh, I didn't hire a paralegal man. And I ended up doing this stuff over here that didn't even matter. Opposed to being intentional about it and having this list and choosing what you're going to do and not to do. So once I've done that, now I need to create some hard edges. I believe what gets scheduled gets done. So what you want to do is put into your calendar the times and dates.
09:17
Speaker 1
I'm actually going to work on things and I like to set meetings with myself or meetings with my team to work on certain projects. So each month I have a top five meeting with all my attorneys, one one. Well, not all 30, but the ones that work as lead trawlers on the bigger cases. And we have a weekly meeting where I go through their top five cases, our monthly meeting, and that is scheduled each month. It's on the calendar. I give myself 30 minutes to prepare for it and an hour and a half for the meeting itself. And that way I know it's. It's on there, it can't get blocked out. And I'm going to get to it. Now you've got to make sure you treat your calendar items that are appointments with yourself as if they're appointments with other people.
09:58
Speaker 1
Otherwise the system won't work. So I'm calendaring out all the different work I'm going to do and also the areas of focus I'm going to work on. So maybe Wednesdays 12 to 2 is my people system days. I'm working on HR and recruiting stuff. Maybe Monday, you know, 1 to 5 is my casework day. And then think about what is it that you need to do ahead of time so you're organized. So I would actually have my people area focus list ready to go on the day. I'm going to work on people stuff so I can stay focused on it. Another tip is you want to make sure you batch your work and not jump around a lot. Like, don't go from marketing to cases to marketing to HR to finance all in the same day.
10:35
Speaker 1
Try to batch similar topics so you can get on a roll and you knock out a lot of stuff. The other thing you want to do is at the end of the month, you want to inventory. How did I do? So here was my plan, here's how it turned out, and is it lining up with what I expected and be honest with yourself. If you didn't get to half the things, you put too much on your plate or you got distracted and pay attention to that. You know, a lot of attorneys try to force themselves to do everything when in reality it'd be much easier to delegate it or think, do I really need to do this? Is this something super important that only I can do? Or, or is it something that I don't have to do it at all?
11:11
Speaker 1
And that way you can get an idea like, where should I pivot, what difference should I make? I also think it's really important that you have a clear start work time and end work time. And I think that can be tough with people that own their own businesses, you know, because you don't have a boss, you don't have someone telling you what to do.
11:25
Speaker 1
And if you work at a law firm where you have all the autonomy in the world and your firm doesn't care when you start working, when you stop, that can be a problem because maybe you end up working till 10pm at night, every single night, and that becomes your pattern and all of a sudden you've adjusted your workflow so you're working till 10, maybe you're not getting to work till, you know, 10am and then you're set back for the day. I like to have hard edges for when I start and when I stop. And if I have to work extra, what I'll do. I still like to take a break to separate myself from the work and then come back to it later.
11:57
Speaker 1
But I've found that having those hard edges, I'm actually getting more done now than I did, you know, 10 years ago when I was working way more hours than I do now. And I. It took me a long time to realize the number of hours I put in didn't necessarily lead to a better result. I've had some of my best ideas on cases at the gym or when I walk away from the office for a few hours. And rarely does it come when I'm sitting at my desk and making myself grind out a 14 hour day because I have an important deadline I'm trying to hit. So to summarize the things we covered, number one, figure out what you want to be. What do I want to be doing? What's my future look like?
12:32
Speaker 1
Number two, map out your areas of focus, what projects, things you have to do, what tasks, what goals do you have for each area? Number four, come up with a schedule that makes sense. Create hard edges. Number five, review at the end of the month to see how you did. Did I do well? Did I not do well? And I have all sorts of documents and playbooks that I use for this, so if anyone's interested in sort of the forms I have, please feel free to reach out. I've got copies and templates and things like that. And check out that book Getting Things Done. It's super effective. Hope this has been helpful and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Until next time, thanks. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer.
13:11
Speaker 1
You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.