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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
Jack Zinda
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Welcome back. This is the Effective Lawyer. I am Jack Zinda, your host. And with me this week is LG Head of Business development. Hey, LG Hi, Jack.
00:30
LG Pustmueller
How are you?
00:31
Jack Zinda
I'm great. We just had our monthly networking event. We went to the Usher concert. What'd you think?
00:35
LG Pustmueller
So fun. It was amazing. Usher's such a great performer.
00:39
Jack Zinda
Yeah, he was pretty impressive. I think I was out counted by women by like nine to one, something like that.
00:44
LG Pustmueller
His roller skating skills really threw me for a loop. I wasn't expecting that. I was impressed.
00:48
Jack Zinda
Yeah, I was very impressed. We had a lot of cool attorneys from town and it was a lot of fun. So. But today we're going to talk about scoreboards and how you can effectively use those for your law firm. And I will tell you, these are like magic powers that you can use to make your firm more effective.
01:07
LG Pustmueller
Starting off, Jack, will you define scoreboard?
01:10
Jack Zinda
Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing to know is a scoreboard in my book is a data point that you use as a business to measure your success. It'll typically be something that's visual, that is shared with a lot of people throughout the organization. Or it could be something shared with just a division. So for example, for a law firm, it could be fees collected, demand sent, or other things. And you might share them with just the paralegals or the attorneys or different groups of folks. So it's going to be something where you're displaying data that's going to help your company be successful. And a lot of times it does what I call give fame and shame. So someone is like celebrated for doing a great job. And then if someone is slacking off, they.
01:51
Jack Zinda
Everyone kind of sees it to say, okay, I'm not doing as well. This other person. How can I do better and succeed? And then also gives someone within the whole firm the ability to. To get behind it.
02:03
LG Pustmueller
Why have you found that it matters for your law firm? Why is it important for people to have.
02:08
Jack Zinda
That's a great question. So, you know, I want to go back to my days when I was in Round Rock. And at the time, we started off with two lawyers and we got to four and about six staff members. And it was really stressful because we're trying to figure out how to get enough money in the door. We've added a lot more people. I'm used to just me working the cases. And that's the result we get is the work I put in. I know how to resolve a case, and we get money in the door, but we look up and we have plenty of business and plenty of people, and people are working 40 hours a week, some are working overtime, but somehow we're not getting the fees we need to get in the door.
02:49
Jack Zinda
And as you know, that getting paid in these cases is not as easy as just writing the letter. You have to really know what you're doing. So I sat down and looked at a case. Okay, what is going wrong here? How come we're not getting fees in? And that's the first time I decided to come up with a scoreboard because we had to figure out what was causing us not to have the results we wanted. And so first look at the fees were getting by attorney to say, okay, which lawyers are creating the most value for the firm? And once I identified those and saw, okay, there's a couple that are doing better than others said, okay, what are they doing different than the other attorneys? First I looked at, is it the number of cases?
03:27
Jack Zinda
Well, it didn't really make sense that it was the number of cases that really didn't have a major impact. They all had about the same number of cases. So I said, what else drives a case? Well, I thought, okay, the number of resolutions, of course. So I said, okay, there seems to be a tie there to the number of resolutions to fees. And then what leads to a case being resolved? Well, demand letters in personal injury as well as lawsuits, depositions, all of those things. And I got that data together, and then I said, okay, how can I use this with the team members?
03:58
Jack Zinda
So I sat down with each of them, showed them what was written down and how they were doing compared to the other team members, and explained where they were struggling, where they weren't, and got their input and helped them improve their metrics. So one attorney may be high on demands, or another attorney may be struggling to get enough cases into litigation. And that scoreboard helped me to coach them. So we did that. We saw some improvement after a couple months, but then a couple months later, I saw performance started to dip again, kind of a sugar high. We were doing great. And then things started falling off. I said, man, what is going on? So I. I ran the reports again. I had to do all this stuff manually. Pulled it out, all out, went over it with the attorneys and saw an improvement.
04:40
Jack Zinda
Two more months go by later, the performance starts dying again. So you're kind of seeing a pattern Here, right. And I said, well, it seems to be something tied to me giving the people this information. I was like, man, this took me like six hours each time to put this together. And I had to, like, go into QuickBooks and then our practice management and pull the stuff out. So, you know, I'd seen other businesses use dashboards or displays of data. So what we did is we started putting together ways to display the data all the time.
05:10
Jack Zinda
So every day, an expel spreadsheet would go out that tells the team how they're doing, and it includes how the firm's doing on those metrics, as well as a leaderboard that shows how they're doing compared to their peers, you know, and that had a massive impact because no one wants to be at the bottom of the pack. And people love being at the top of the pack, especially competitive lawyers. And one thing I noticed before I did the scoreboard, I had a lot of attorneys, or maybe not a lot. Some of the people didn't think it was possible to hit the results because they weren't seeing what other people were doing. But all of a sudden, if they see their peers are able to achieve that, they said, hey, this is possible. I am going to be able to achieve this objective.
05:50
Jack Zinda
And it was like magic. I mean, we saw a massive improvement almost overnight by just putting this scoreboard together. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about 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 or any case in particular.
06:25
LG Pustmueller
So all the times that you had to go back and redo and you saw dips, what did you learn? And what would you now consider your best practices when it comes to a scoreboard?
06:34
Jack Zinda
Well, first is you have to figure out what data you want to display. That's the first off. And you have to decide what ties back to the results you want. I cut out some of the things we tested and didn't work, such as medical records or investigations or things that mattered or weren't critical to the results. So sometimes you have data that doesn't matter. So I think step one is figure out the data that's going to have an impact on your case. And does it actually affect it the way you do that is you want to put it on a table, and then you want to graph it and compare it to Your ultimate result, which is probably going to be fees or cases resolved. So you might graph demands in one row, fees in another.
07:12
Jack Zinda
And see, over time, is there a correlation between the more demands you send and the more fees you get, or the more depositions you take or the more cases you sign up? So that'll give you an idea of what matters to your business. And you also want to constantly be testing that and doing that over again. The second thing is you want to learn how to get the data once and then delegate it. So what. What do you do if you don't know where to get the data? Or let's say you do, but you don't know how to delegate it?
07:40
Jack Zinda
Just use a loom to record where you're pulling the data from, and then delegate that to one of the people your firm, if you have a receptionist who has extra time or an administrative assistant or a legal assistant, hand that off to them. So you're not the one having to pull all the information every single time. A lot of software programs will do this for you through an API or automatically. But I typically like to say you want to figure out what you need first before you go pay money for a software program to pull it out of the system. And so step one, decide what you want. Step two, decide how to get it. Step three, record it. Create a step by step list on how to do it.
08:16
Jack Zinda
And then the next thing you want to do is figure out how do you display this data and how do you communicate it to your team. So first you want to make sure your aim is not to make people feel bad. You know, so I told you that the scoreboards help with competitive nature, but it also could make people feel bad if they're in the lowest performers in the group. So I will typically explain what I'm doing ahead of time, explain why I'm doing it, why it matters, why it's important. And I might have a few dry runs where I'm sending it to people, you know, just confidentially or. Or just to themselves and not to the whole group. And. And then I'll roll it out and so everyone understands the purpose and why we're doing it.
08:51
Jack Zinda
And then I'll make sure that we do it consistently on a regular basis. I think there's no problem in, you know, updating a scoreboard every day. You could do it every week. I think doing it every month is probably too long because people can't make a big difference in how they impact it.
09:05
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, that makes sense. What are some common mistakes that you've seen other law firms make. When it comes to tracking this data.
09:11
Jack Zinda
I'd say the first thing is buying software programs. People think that buying software will solve the problem. And first you have to identify what is the problem you are trying to solve. Your goal is to improve your KPIs, like, what are the things that move the needle? And a lot of software programs will overload you with too many options, too many KPIs, too much data. You know, I like to have our scoreboards be very clean and just have a few pieces of information. So that's the first thing is buying a software program that you think is going to solve the problem. The second is assuming people are good with numbers that aren't. I tell our team members that you don't have to be great at math to work here. You just have to understand what the colors mean.
09:56
Jack Zinda
So, for example, we will color code if something is good. Okay. Or not good. And I didn't come up with this idea. It's in a lot of business books. And all these things are things I took from other great leaders that have put this stuff together. But we'll do red if the person's not on target, yellow if they are off track for where they need to be, in green if they're in good shape, and super green if they're just killing it. So, for example, let's say someone is supposed to do $100,000 in fees for a month or 300,000 for a quarter. So at the end of month one, they should be 33% through their fee goal. If at the end of month one, they're 20%, that might be red. Say they're 25, it might be yellow if they're 33 would be green.
10:45
Jack Zinda
If they're 40, it would be super green. That gives a signal to everybody so they don't have to dig into the numbers. And frankly, a lot of times people are embarrassed to admit they don't understand what this is telling them. So I learned the hard way you have to really take your time and explain it over and over again and use things like color coordination to make that happen. Some of the other mistakes I've seen people make is they don't tell the team it's coming, and people think it's a way to call them out or that they're in trouble or it was a way to embarrass someone. And you want to make clear that's not the case. And you want to make sure you're consistent on that.
11:19
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, totally. That makes sense. You've given a lot of great advice and good tips as to what has worked for you. But are there any other. Are there any other tips or tactics that you found helpful that you would like to share?
11:30
Jack Zinda
Yeah, you know, a few other things that I would think about is how you display the data. I think making it clean, making it simple, how easy is it to get the information? What's the administrative cost for doing this process? And that's where I say you have to make sure if it's you doing it, you're going to do it every single week. And it's four hours of time you have to really decide, okay, is that a good use of my time, or do I have too many metrics, or should I do it a different way instead of the way I'm doing it? And then at the end of whatever time period you're measuring, make sure that you recap with the team what the results were and try to bring them along for the journey. Explain how these results measure matter.
12:08
Jack Zinda
So, for example, you might have five metrics. If you're a personal injury law firm, you might have fees, you might have resolved. You might have demands, you might have suits, you might have new clients. Okay, so we have those. I think that's five, right?
12:22
LG Pustmueller
The five core metrics.
12:23
Jack Zinda
Yeah, yeah, they're five. All right, perfect. And so I can tell my team, hey, we need to get new business, because that's how we get to demands. And once we send demands, if it doesn't resolve, then we go into litigation, which is the lawsuit. And once we're in litigation, you know, we have a bunch more than that. But just I'm simplifying it. We would get the case resolved at some point, which will then lead to fees. And so you're explaining how each step in the journey matters. The other thing you want to do eventually is get to where you assign someone in your company as an owner of that metric so they know they're accountable for it. And the rest of the team knows who to go through too, if something's behind.
13:02
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks, Jacques. This was helpful.
13:05
Jack Zinda
No problem. I'm glad. I'm glad you found helpful. Glad you gave a lot of great advice. Until next time, thanks for listening and talk to you soon. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. 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.