Maximum Lawyer

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE


Atlanta family law attorney Regina Edwards has been flat-fee for 15 years in one of the toughest practice areas: contested family litigation. In this episode, she breaks down how she uses automation, tight client selection, and a no‑phone policy to protect her time, deliver better results, and actually enjoy practicing law again.


You’ll hear how she intentionally stretches out her intake process to filter out “lava and piranha” clients, why she signs most divorces without doing a traditional consult, and how she trains her team to sell the process instead of selling access to her. Regina walks through her tech stack (Lawmatics, Pipefile, Motion.io, Airtable, portals, and more) and shows how she uses guides, portals, and automated updates to keep clients informed while dramatically cutting down on interruptions.


If you’ve ever wondered whether flat fees can work in high‑conflict family law, or how to build a practice that supports vacations, boundaries, and deep work, this episode gives you a complete playbook you can start adapting today.


Timestamps

  • 00:00 – You Don’t Have To Bill Hourly Forever
    • Regina’s story, 15 years of flat‑fee family law, and the “Lawyer on the Beach” mindset.
  • 02:00 – Stop Letting ‘Lava Clients’ In The Door
    • Building a clear client avatar and stretching intake to filter out bad‑fit, high‑drama cases.
  • 05:10 – Flat Fees Only Work With Rules
    • Paperless‑only firm, payment expectations, and why the team (not Regina) runs the intake machine.
  • 07:40 – Write The Rules Before Clients Do
    • Communication policy, no desk phone, redefining emergencies, and using autoresponders to hold boundaries.
  • 10:30 – One Guide, A Thousand Fewer Questions
    • The tinyURL client guide that covers timelines, portals, mediation, discovery, and vacation expectations.
  • 12:40 – Make Discovery Suck Less For Everyone
    • Using Pipefile, reminders, and organized folders so clients actually finish discovery on time.
  • 15:40 – Turn Your Case File Into A Client Portal
    • Motion.io + Airtable + Google Drive powering automated updates, status views, and task lists.
  • 18:20 – Build A Business You Still Love
    • Her tech stack, Profit First, value pricing, lifestyle design books, and why she still enjoys practicing law.

Connect with Regina:

Resources:

Creators and Guests

Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Regina Edwards 00:00:00 Regina. I'm from Atlanta. I've a family law firm. I've been flat fee for 15 years in family litigation, which people kind of find surprising, but we have found a way to make it work. I usually kind of always start with the slide. This is how I feel like my clients picture me. I, I absolutely never look like that. That was a photo shoot. And this is definitely what I look like most of the time. And that's where I am most of the time. So if some of you may be familiar with my Facebook group, lawyer on the beach, where we talk about life, work balance and tech tools to help, you know, lawyer from really anywhere, it's a euphemism. I actually don't really like the beach. I like to sit on a balcony looking at the ocean. So this is what we'll talk about today. We don't have a ton of time, but I'm going to talk a little bit about intake and my client avatar because the topic is communication through automation.

Regina Edwards 00:00:49 How we connect with our clients with with it taking less time from me, which is my ultimate goal. But we're trying to make it personal at the same time. So in order to do that, we kind of have to pick our perfect client from the beginning. Guide them through the intake process so it's not a jarring shift from intake to the actual representation. So this is my ideal client. So you can see the husband says I want half the value of the house and the kids over the weekend. And she says, I want him thrown into a lava filled with special piranha that can live in lava. So I do not want her. And you'd be amazed at how many people will pretty much tell you that up front in the intake. They'll just. They'll tell you. I just, you know what? My ex to burn in hell, or I want to get 100% of everything. And, you know, he slept with my cousins. I don't want him to ever to see our kids again in life.

Regina Edwards 00:01:42 I can't help you. I don't have the bandwidth for that. And those usually end up being kind of lose lose cases. So this is a sort of stretched out intake process. I'm not going to go through it step by step, but in general I intentionally stretch out the intake process. And that's for a couple of reasons. Family law can be kind of long and tedious, and the clients that want to talk to an attorney right away, they want solutions right away. They want answers right away of how their case is going to turn out. The inpatient ones end up not really being my best clients, so we kind of put them through some paces. They're going to have to send up some documents there. Talk to my intake team. A lot of times I don't even do consultations for divorces. And, you know, if they fit within that client profile, then we can move forward. This is obviously not recommended for some practice areas like P.I. or criminal. You have to get those people signed up right away.

Regina Edwards 00:02:36 They're not going to go through all of these things. But this is kind of my stretched out process. And I do that intentionally because I want to kind of see how it will work together going forward. And I want to kind of set the proper expectations from the beginning. It's not going to be bam, bam, bam, bam. And so the reason I really don't do personal consultations for divorce is it doesn't really take a lot of qualifications. It's have you lived in Georgia for six months? Are you married to someone that you would no longer like to be married to? Like that's it. If the answer those two questions. Yes, I can help you. So I can't really answer questions about alimony and custody and equitable division until I get discovery. So we just try to train our intake team to let them know. You know, after 25 years of doing this, there's nothing that you can bring before me that I haven't seen before. I haven't dealt with. So we my goal is to try to sign most divorces up without having to do a consultation.

Regina Edwards 00:03:28 So this is a more compressed intake where you do you just send out a form, you get their information, they immediately go into the client file and then you can send them for the agreement. A lot of P.I. firms in my area are definitely doing that. They're just sending out fee agreements from beginning and signing everybody up. I mean, I don't know how y'all do that. I guess later on they'll qualify the case and and turn some away. But that's a more compressed schedule. So this is my intake form. So I ask things that are important to my practice. I need to know if there's a case filed where it's filed. I'm down to practicing in only two counties now, so I like to know from the beginning if it's going to be in the correct venue. I also ask upfront, how do you plan to pay for your fees? In this case? Some people find that question intrusive. Maybe I don't care. I like to ask because some people say, I have no idea how I'm gonna pay and I don't have any money.

Regina Edwards 00:04:20 Okay, well, we've got some resources for you. Our automatic automations. We use law, Mattox. We'll send them text and emails about sending them to the Atlanta Bar Referral Association or Atlanta Legal Aid or Georgia Legal Services, or somewhere that they can help them. And then I like to and then this is very important in order to provide fair, flat fee billing, we're a paperless firm. You have to be comfortable with email. You have to be comfortable with scanning and using a client portal. Is that okay? That's not going to be okay with everybody. That's fine. That's just not my ideal client. And I kind of send them elsewhere. So this is a map of my intake process. Again I'm not going to go through it in detail, but this is so everyone that comes into my firm knows what the process is, and I'm sort of out of it at most steps. So there's an automatic conflict. Check that law. Maddox runs. My intake team also does it again as a backup.

Regina Edwards 00:05:12 Where I come in is after my intake team talks to the qualified leads, I do a quick scan and then I give them the quote for the fee. That's my only that's my only involvement in the process. So it requires developing a script. My script is at the link. And again if you download my PowerPoint you can just click right on the link. So most people are going to have a follow up drip campaign. This is mine. I only send 2 or 3 emails. I know that you're supposed to send more family law, though I do think it's a little bit weird. And I've had people say, well, I don't want a divorce anymore and why are you emailing me? And my ex saw this message and now I'm in trouble, so I swear this has happened. So I just don't send a lot of follow up emails. I figured people can find me if they need to find me later. so regarding intake, what I do is I have the answering service. They fill out the form, then they get invited to a discovery call with my team, and they receive several emails after that.

Regina Edwards 00:06:17 And this is just an example of follow follow up email. So that's just sort of the process to kind of get them onboarded. And then after they're onboarded, then this is how we kind of automate our communications. So step one is get a communication policy. Step two see step one and then implement it. So if you don't have a communication policy then your clients are going to dictate it for you. And that's not what you want. So this is mine. And I'm not telling you to adopt mine I'm just telling you to get one. So this is mine. Mine is somewhat controversial. You can't really call me. I can give you my number. Go ahead and call me and see how that works out for you. It's not going to. I do not have a phone in my office, so we don't accept unscheduled phone calls. We talk about this during the consultation. All of our clients are given a portal. They send messages through the portal, which allows everybody in my team to see the messages at once.

Regina Edwards 00:07:08 They can get automatic responses. But we do say in order to honor everyone's busy schedules, we do require scheduled meetings instead of, you know, unscheduled phone calls. The easiest way I kind of sell that to people is, you know, when I'm doing deep work on your case, when I'm preparing your case for trial mediation, you don't want me to be interrupted by somebody else calling. So that's just kind of what I say. In order to get people to buy in, then I define what an emergency is. Because in family law, someone showing up ten minutes late to soccer practice is an emergency. So I say, this is an emergency. Your children have been kidnapped, not taken to your ex mother in law's house in Tennessee, but like, literally kidnapped. Yes, that's an emergency. Or de facto, that's children's services is at your door or the police are at your door regarding a family issue. Those are emergencies. The following things may be very important, but they're not emergencies in the true sense of the word.

Regina Edwards 00:08:02 So we kind of tell people from the beginning. Yes, your case is important. Yes, we know these things are important to you. We have a way to triage and respond to these things, but it's not going to be immediate. And again, this is not for everybody. So we try to, you know, pick the clients that are okay with this approach in the beginning. But again, that's really what allows us to do what we do in terms of the flat fees, which is pretty rare in my geographical area and then in my practice area as well. So we sometimes use an auto apply on weekends. Again, just sort of set the expectations. So if you're opposing counsel, you kind of get the point to that. I'm not going to respond on the weekends. So we say, you know, we're not going to respond on the weekends, but obviously new clients can call fill out our new intake form. And then we include a lot of information. They can upload documents to our upload link.

Regina Edwards 00:08:51 Our client guide is on there and they can obviously click to pay. So the next thing that I do is and you can click on that or you can type in that URL. Tiny URL client guide. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you have a clickable link to send to the client as a guide. And the main reason for that is the link will never change. So when you use tiny URL, you can change the underlying link, but the main link stays the same and that allows you to change the content. I'm using Canva for this. At some point in the future I may use something other than Canva, but it doesn't matter because the link is going to stay the same. So I include absolutely everything that they need to know about their case in this one guide. And the reason for that is if they don't read the guide at the beginning, because no one ever does, I can just say, oh, this is in your guide at page X, instead of looking through different materials and different links to send them.

Regina Edwards 00:09:45 So these are just screenshots of different pages. I include my vacation dates. I'm very transparent about when I'm going to be in and out of the office. I am dead serious about my vacation time. People do not call me when I'm on vacation. So the way that we. The reason why it's okay with my clients is we make sure immediately before going on vacation, they get a call, they get an update about their case. We tell them what has happened, what is upcoming, and the next steps in their case after we come back. So it's not as if they're sort of left wondering what's going on while we're gone. We put our communication policy in there. We include the timeline for a typical timeline for a family law case, so they know kind of what the steps are and how long each case, each step is going to take. Typically we usually beat those timelines. So I kind of like to I always get this wrong over no under promise and overdeliver. Yes. So we kind of stretch it out a little bit and we're usually able to beat those those timelines.

Regina Edwards 00:10:45 These are more pages from the guide. These are documents that I want them to give us for their case. This is an explanation about their portal. There's also a video that walks them through how to use their portal. This is an explanation about mediation, so essentially everything needed to sort of walk them through their case is going to be in this guide. Here's an explanation about discovery depositions how to send documents and evidence. So just literally everything that you need your clients to do is going to be in this guide. So when we go through each each phase of the case, we can just point them to that page of the guide. And this list gets longer every year. Do this, not that. So the one in red I had to add recently do not, under any circumstances email the other side's attorney. Do not contact the judge or file things on their own. I really wanted to add also please, you know, calling your ex a keyword in said email to the judge is probably not not the best course of action.

Regina Edwards 00:11:47 But. So anyway, I put this guide in there. I'm pretty adamant about, you know, boundaries and what clients should and shouldn't do. And for the most part, it's not really a big deal. And then I just have a blown up slide of what my timeline is. I think I created this on Canva. So our biggest issue in discovery, and I think where a lot of clients get super frustrated, is the discovery process. It is tedious. It's a pain. Everybody hates it. All all across litigation. But imagine being married to the person that you no longer like, and all you want to do is get divorced from Darth Vader. And you don't understand why they're asking for tax returns from, you know, 2015. You just have to do it. So I've tried to make this process as easy as possible, I do not. Yeah, the video is not going to play. So I'll show you. These are kind of screenshots of what pipe file does. So I use pipe file.

Regina Edwards 00:12:39 It's fantastic. There's a video. They also have their own YouTube. But you can you send out the request and you do it folder by folder. And the client drags and drops the documents into that particular folder, and on the right is what it looks like when it's done. So when I get the discovery back from my client, it's already organized in these folders. It's fantastic. You can also set the settings to reject JPEGs. So if you're asking for tax returns, you don't want a JPEG file. You want a PDF scanned file so you can automatically set it to reject any file you don't want. You can also go in manually look at what they've what they've submitted and you can reject. Like if you can't see something, if it's blurry, you can reject it and send them a notice. The system is also set up where you can put in reminders, text reminders, email reminders for for the client. So when they log in, they see exactly this is what they would see. When they log in, they see what they've done and what they haven't done.

Regina Edwards 00:13:42 They can write notes to you in the portal. You can write notes to them. My point is, this has made discovery just a lot less painful. So for my for what I'm trying to do since I'm flat fee and I'm trying to get these people to a resolution as quickly as possible, getting through the hurdle of discovery is really the main thing. Once I get through this, I can then analyze their case, get them to mediation and get it settled. And this is a real pain point for clients. So making this process easier has made my life a lot easier and I think is really improved client satisfaction. So this is just a screenshot of what it looks like from our view. You can also see when the client views your request. So it's really great to see that they're logging on. They're looking at it. And you can keep track of how far they are. And again this is the result. The result is all of these very neatly organized folders. You also can if you have if you're in a place where you have standard discovery, where all the questions are the same, you can set that up as a template.

Regina Edwards 00:14:41 And then all you have to do is enter the client's email and phone number and you're done. 10s discovery is out and it's phenomenal. So the next thing I'm going to talk about, the last thing I'm going to talk about is a portal. So this is what we use to communicate with our clients, and we try to make it as personal as possible, but it's still got a lot of automation behind it. So the portal that I'm using is motion IO. So the best way to sort of think about the portal part of motion is kind of like a window. So you're building everything behind it on I think it syncs with I know it syncs Airtable because that's what I use, but I think it also thinks syncs with asana and some other project management system. So I use Airtable to run my practice. Everything is there, and then the client just sees what I've coded it to see. And it sounds super complicated, but once you get it set up, it's actually very easy. So the front page of the portal gives the information about, you know, what to expect on their portal.

Regina Edwards 00:15:39 The across the top has all the different headers and these are different pages from the portal. So with pleadings it automatically syncs with Google Drive. I think it also syncs with box. I'm not sure if they've synced with Dropbox yet, so essentially this has cut out a huge step in my process. So how I get documents to my client is this. We just put them in the folder that they were going to go in anyway. So we use just Windows Explorer. All the documents go into the folder. So once it hits that folder there's an automation and Airtable that automatically sends it to the client with the link, and then also link to their portal so they can even look. They can either look at the document then, or they can just log on their portal later and look at it. It doesn't sound like a big deal to not have to separately upload that file later, but when we're processing hundreds of documents a day, it really is a time saver. And then you also know that you're not missing anything because there's no extra step once it goes in the folder it's supposed to be in any way.

Regina Edwards 00:16:37 The client is automatically getting notification. So we find that we're not getting a lot of complaints about we don't know what's going on, what's the next step, because they're constantly getting notifications and they're getting links to pertinent information from their case And how we make it personal is we have these case statuses. So when we update them in Airtable again, the client automatically gets an email saying, hey, this is your case status, so it's not canned. That's me actually telling the status of your case. So we try to make it personal. Hey, hope you had a great vacation last week. Hope Joey had a great soccer game. Whatever. And then just tell them about, you know, the status of their cases. So they're getting this every two weeks. So we have found that when we are proactive in sending these automated messages every two weeks, we're not really getting calls about what's going on because they know what's going on. So the same thing with discovery, we have a discovery portal. This is how we internally keep track of it.

Regina Edwards 00:17:31 But the client is able to see at the same time. So they can click on links to see exactly what was turned over to the other side, exactly what was turned in from the other side without us having to do any additional work to get it to them. These are other pages. The left is correspondence. It's the same thing. It syncs with Google Drive. So any correspondence, we just throw in the correspondence file and automatically gets to them. It also has tasks and we have a task template. So for every type of case there's going to be certain types of tasks that you need everybody do. In every case you can set that up initially and then just deploy them when you want to. So it has a pretty robust task list to the client, and it tells them when they need to do the task and give them reminders. So this is definitely been super helpful. so if you want my tech stack, it's at that link. And these are just some examples of books that I've read that have really kind of changed my practice.

Regina Edwards 00:18:27 Most of you all have heard of Profit First. If you haven't absolutely read it, it's pretty much the envelope system for grown ups, but it really does work. Implementing value pricing Ronald Baker is an accountant, but he's written a bunch of books on value pricing and flat fees, which is kind of my big thing the happier attorney. She was an estate planner. She wrote a book about flat fees, The Four Hour Workweek. So I love this book. I love 75% of this book. 75% of this book is brilliant. The other 25% is a little batshit crazy, to be honest. But the overall theme of you shouldn't wait until you're 65 to retire, enjoy your life, take many retirements, figure out how to delegate. All of those general concepts are amazing. In this book, there's a whole chapter about how to sell T-shirts on eBay. You can skip that one, I promise, but the general concepts really are amazing and changed my life. And then the five hour workday is sort of similar.

Regina Edwards 00:19:21 And then I also have another flat fees page. So those are the kind of those are the books and those are the concepts that kind of led me to kind of where I am, which is running my litigation practice with taking me out of sort of the grunt work and day to day while still keeping the connection with the clients. Because at this point, I really, really do love practicing law. I'm not trying to scale. I love what I do. Eventually that might change, but having these systems in place, I think later on will sort of help me out.