Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] So I wanna switch to sort of, we’ll call it strategy questions about strategy. And more specifically I wanna talk about sort of your firm and, you know, you guys, it sounds like we’re all mostly former big law, doing big corporations, big corporate type work. I assume you’ve maintained a lot of that kinda work.

You know, I’ll call you a corporate firm. But what are the practice areas you guys have and then, you know, as you guys think strategically about growth, whether it be another office or bringing in another practice group, you know what’s the thought process that you guys go through?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, so in terms of practice areas we do a lot of the corporate leaning stuff. So we have your traditional corporate transactional functions, anything from building the corporate foundation, you know, your organizational and foundational documents. All the way through the operations, cash flowing growth of a company leading [00:01:00] to the liquidity event, the M&A deal.

Along those lines, you know, there are other practice areas that support, we support one another. We believe in that multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary model. And I start with corporate just because that’s where I live within the firm.

Welcome to the Founding Partner Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating stories of successful law firm founders. We’ll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you’re in the right place.

Let’s dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. This is a podcast where I get to interview founding attorneys hear about their journeys, and hopefully learn some lessons that they’ve learned along the way. So [00:02:00] excited about today’s guest. This is a new friend of mine. I say new.

He’s relatively new to lawyer a lawyer to Atlanta, I’d say relatively a few years, but did not originally start here. His name is Adam Marshall. He started in Florida. So Adam, welcome to the show. Maybe

Adam Marshall: Thank you

Jonathan Hawkins: a brief, brief overview of, of your firm and, and, you know, sort of what you do and what your firm does.

Adam Marshall: Yeah, no, I’m happy to do that and thanks for having me. You know, my story has started very traditionally, you know, went to college, went back to my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio for law school. Started my career in Cleveland and then. My big move was about a year and a half into my legal career.

A Major AM Law 100 firm hired me for their Miami office, and that’s what, what got me and the family down to Florida. So, I went through big law. I started my career as a

Jonathan Hawkins: on, lemme lemme pause there like, And we’ll talk about this, but, you know, ’cause [00:03:00] you were in Cleveland, man, you’re from there. That’s a big move. I mean that’s, especially if you had your family, you’re moving. So there’s more to that story I think. I mean, that’s a big move to make cross country.

Adam Marshall: It, It was

Jonathan Hawkins: what was the thought process? What and how’d you get the buy-in?

Adam Marshall: There were a couple things going on at the same time, you know, and a common theme in, in, in my life is balancing the professional with the family, with the professional. So what was happening professionally was I became a lawyer in Ohio in 1999 and I was on the cusp of the tech bust.

And what happened was, as a young restructuring lawyer, we were going gangbusters. So I was at a really amazing, at the time, very regional, great Lakes, Cleveland based law firm. Now they’ve since expanded. But I was working my tail off learning the restructuring stuff, learning from really great people.

[00:04:00] I had a couple mentors I still stay in touch with. But what happened was two things. One was. My family’s momentum was moving south, very close to my sister after she went to school and through law school. You know, she settled in, in South Florida. My in-laws, my mother, there was a lot of sort of family momentum driving us south.

But then when this law firm started recruiting me, you know, it was very odd back then and even a little bit today for a young lawyer, fresh outta law school to be brought right into a restructuring department. Normally the path is you start in corporate, the economy tanks, they repurpose you for restructuring or if you’re on the litigation side, they bring you in for adversary proceedings and you know that was the, back then at least the typical path for a restructuring lawyer.

So, as a second year associate, I had only done restructuring. So this major [00:05:00] New York based law firm with. A heck of a name recruited me for their Miami office, and then one thing led to another. And so the buy-in from the family was the easy part for that move.

Jonathan Hawkins: They probably yeah, like more sunshine and probably some uh, arrays there as well, I’m sure as part of that.

Adam Marshall: No, absolutely. Absolutely. So that’s, that’s what got us down to Florida you know, and started that 21 year journey. So,

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So, okay, so you moved down to Florida, sorry to interrupt. And you’re with that firm for a while, and eventually though because I want to get it to where you, you decide you’re gonna go out. And start a firm. So maybe bring us up to sort of that point and I’m always curious ’cause there’s a lot of people out there that say, Hey, I’ll do this one day or some people they, They don’t, they, maybe they think they will, but they never do. So, you know, it, what pushed you there?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, so, so early in my legal career I went through the sort of ups and downs that every young associate goes [00:06:00] through. You know, on the one hand you sort of have a little bit of that imposter syndrome. You know, all I’ve done is briefed cases and gone to class a couple hours a day, and now all of a sudden some client is paying me hundreds of dollars an hour for my, you know, legal acumen.

But over time, obviously you get over that. You get comfortable with what you’ve learning, comfortable with what you see in the market. And as I went from firm to firm, I kind of saw the inner workings of the business model, the interplay between, you know, client service and the law. You know. Not the same thing.

You know, being a technically brilliant lawyer is not the same as being able to relay it to a client or have the client trust you. And I quickly learned the difference and learned how to meld the two. And then it was, you know, over the course of a couple of years, I realized, you know what? I learned a lot from these really talented, brilliant people at Big law, [00:07:00] but there’s gotta be a better way to fit my personality and my client profile and do it in a more humane way.

And that’s when, you know, it sort of gained momentum with, you know, my business partner then and still we started flirting with that concept of can we build a better mouse trap? Can we do it together? What do we want to be when we grow up? You know, do we want to be cogs in the machine? Do we want to.

You know, experience more. Do we want to be business owners and entrepreneurs? Again, knowing your craft as a lawyer is communication, reading, critical thought that has nothing to do with being an entrepreneur. That has nothing to do with being a mentor or an employer. So we decided that we were ready to give it a try.

Neither of us were getting any younger, so at some point you’ve gotta make the move or not. And we did. And of course then the thing that we always said was, goodness gracious, we [00:08:00] should have done this a lot sooner.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah that’s, a common, common response there. So is this somebody you worked with or was this person you were a partner at a different firm?

Adam Marshall: Yeah. So we had met at one of the big law firms that we both, you know, you know, did time at, did time with and we just hit it off and were friends. And what ended up happening was our careers sort of veered. On different paths, but came back together, meaning I tended to work for larger corporations and sometimes needed conflicts.

Counsel, I, you know, obviously when you represent a company, you can’t represent the individuals or give board members or the C-suite legal advice. There’s a conflict inherently. So what’s, what happened was we started to bring each other into each other’s cases. You know, he might represent some sweet C-Suite folks.

The company needs representation, he’d bring me in or vice versa. And [00:09:00] that led to some long hours of getting work done, sitting around waiting, you know, having a beer or a glass of wine together to sort of recap the week and the successes. And that led to the conversations of what do you want to be when you grow up? So we knew each other quite well when we decided to pull the trigger.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, it’s, you know, I talk about this a lot. I think about it a lot. I deal with a lot my is, you know, partners and you know, choosing partners and how do you know, but it sounds like you guys worked together for a long time. Personality fit all that. Another question that’s always curious to me particularly when someone leaves a big firm. To start their own firm. The reaction internally I’m curious about that. You know, I hear different stories. So there’s you know, if you’re going in-house, everybody’s your best friend. They’re throwing you a party. The partners that that, that never talk to you, all of a sudden they’re like, oh, sorry, let’s see you leave. But if you’re going to compete, you know that you’re dead to them. [00:10:00] And then there’s also those that they’re like, oh, that’s the dumbest thing in the world. I can’t believe you’re leaving this. And then there’s others that are like, please, I wish I could do it too. You know? So what was the kinda reaction you got?

Adam Marshall: Generally very positive and not surprised. So, you know, I, you know, going way back in my history, I am actually an introvert and a homebody, and most people don’t see that about me because I tend to be very upbeat and love crowds and love meeting people, and that’s all very genuine. But my default is to throw on my you know, Cleveland guardian’s baseball hat, my, you know, crappy t-shirt and sit on the couch with the dogs and Stephanie and my family and, you know, just live in our little universe.

But what happened was a lot of my colleagues really saw that I was developing that, that personality and leadership mentality. I don’t think a lot of people were surprised. [00:11:00] Even internally at some of the firms I was with, I was always having conversations about. How did you get on the executive committee?

How did you get on the management committee? I was always interested in the business of law and that part of the practice. You know, and again, I’ve said it a couple times already in our short time together, Jonathan, but the legal knowledge and being brilliant at your craft is different than getting clients and delivering that service and delivering the message in an appropriate way and advocating in an appropriate way.

I kind of liked the nuances and the spider web that it wove so, so not a lot of surprise. When we did it I think the thing that surprised me the most was client reaction. One of the things that I always said to myself was, I can’t go on my own. ’cause I’ve always dealt with larger companies. You know, what company is going to hire, you know, [00:12:00] two schmuck’s law firm as opposed to big law firms that have a brand and a reputation and a market presence.

The reaction from clients is what surprised me the most. A lot of them flat out said, it’s about time, you know, because That’s like music to your ears.

Now we control both sides of the balance sheet. Now we can control the, the rate and fee structure as well as our expenditures. So now we could give some real thought to what our billable rates were.

We could give some real thought to alternative fee arrangements and you know, may moving some projects to a flat fee basis. Because now we didn’t have to answer to anybody. We didn’t have to answer to an accounting department in some city, you know, in a different time zone. We could do things on our own.

And I think the response from clients was really positive. So much so that six months into our little experiment, we moved into these, I mean, at the time, [00:13:00] irresponsible offices, we tripled our square footage because we just could see the writing on the wall that this is where we were going. And you know, kind of took the field of dreams mentality. If we build it, they will come.

Jonathan Hawkins: And I think they did eventually come. So we haven’t met, we haven’t mentioned it, I don’t think. But what’s let’s talk about the name of your firm now and then, but it wasn’t always that, so what’s the name of your firm now?

Adam Marshall: The name of our firm now is Lorium Law. That’s how we do business. I mean, in our various jurisdictions it’s Lorium, PLLC, or Lorium PC or Lorium PL, depending on what state we’re qualifying to do business in. But Lorium is how we’re known and that’s, you know, obviously the key word as I’m wearing the branded, you know, Nike shirt?

Jonathan Hawkins: And you know, so, but you didn’t start out that way. You started out with sort of a traditional name, you know, with names in the firm.

Adam Marshall: Yeah, it was Marshall Grant, both of our last names and that’s that sort of the convention.

Jonathan Hawkins: [00:14:00] And so, you know, I talk to a lot of people about the trade name stuff. You know, I like it. I’m a believer in it, but the question comes down a lot of times it’s a firm that’s been around for a while with a name you switching midstream to a new name that nobody knows. And so I guess first of all, you know, where did you come up with the name?

And then what was it like switching, and maybe you have to take us back to how long you’ve, how long you’ve had the name and what was the reaction to with the clients and publicly and all of that.

Adam Marshall: so I’m gonna reverse your questions. The interesting thing for us was, Marshall Grant was one of the predecessor firms of war. What happened was about four and a half-ish years ago, Marshall Grant, Boca Raton, Florida based firm, started off as again, the two schmucks with our names on the door. And then we grew organically to around seven, eight lawyers, depending on, you know, the lifecycle of our firm.

What happened though was we merged with a [00:15:00] Fort Lauderdale firm. They were folks that, you know, both firms, we had worked on a lot of similar matters together. Small Eagle community, we were friends and for a lot of strategic and cultural reasons, just made a lot of sense to merge. I tell you that because when we did that merger, we had to sort of rename what we were becoming anyway, so were we just going to take the two firm names and jam, 4, 5, 6 partner names on a letterhead or we were we gonna take that opportunity?

To rebrand, we had to do it anyway. So the conversation was interesting because we have, you know, as would be expected, a lot of very strong and varied opinions on how we should do that. But ultimately, what prevailed was we had this really cool opportunity to create something from scratch. So [00:16:00] we came up with a word.

Now to get to the second part of your question we made up a word. It’s sort of our, you know, trade name, our Verizon, our, you know, just take any brand that makes up a word, but loosely, we took a lot of artistic license, we took some Latin words that with some mental gymnastics basically means client service.

So we love saying that client service is our name. It’s in our name. It’s. Part of our DNA and that’s what we named the firm. Now what’s interesting is a lot of our branding was legacy from the old firm we loved. We are in love with our orange color. We are in love with our tagline, uncommon perspective.

So we thought there was enough continuity from the old brands that, that people knew in, in South Florida to sort of meld it into the new brand and tell that story of two really [00:17:00] like-minded, but fun firms coming together and creating something better.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, that’s really interesting story there. And, you know, because, and this is one of the reasons why one of several reasons why I like sort of a brand name that doesn’t have people’s names in it. Because firms change all the time. Somebody dies, somebody retires, somebody leaves, you merge.

All these things. And it’s like, whose name’s gonna be first? Who’s gonna be second? Oh, all of a sudden we’ve got 10 names in the firm. And it’s like, what’s the URL? And it’s just like constant change. And, And it’s like if you don’t have names in the firm, it just eliminates all of that.

Adam Marshall: It does, and it, and you’re hitting the nail on the head. But these are all things that we thought really analytically about. For example, we, and it’s all over our website. We don’t believe in ego. Well, how do you say that there are no egos in this firm and that we’re down to earth, really smart, but good people when the firm is [00:18:00] named after us.

And then of course, that leads to the nonsense in the marketing. Well, Marshall Grant is amazing. Well, coming from Adam Marshall, that’s by definition, very self-serving. To speak about Lorium though is different. We’re creating a North Star, an entity, a legacy, something that has meaning outside of me and the rest of the partnership.

So we really, we’ve really come to like, it. Even those partners that I think if you gave them truth serum at the time, would say, eh, I don’t like this. I think everybody’s kind of come around to it for all of those reasons.

Jonathan Hawkins: That was gonna be my next question. How, well, lemme ask, how long ago did you do this name change?

Adam Marshall: It was about four and a half, five years ago, give or take.

Jonathan Hawkins: And, you know, look trade names for law firms are fairly new thing. I think on the West coast. They sort of led the charge, but they’re, they’ve made it to the East coast but still, even today it’s. Not, it’s somewhat [00:19:00] unusual and law lawyers are traditionalists. So what were those discussions like in terms of, you know, who was pushing it, I guess you were pushing it and do people say no, we want the names. How do you get to that? Especially when you’ve got, like you said, four or more strong, smart you know, people.

You gotta convince everybody that everybody’s, you know, we’re lawyers, you gotta, it’s, we’re all convincing. Well, lots of us are.

Adam Marshall: So the conversations at the time were really fun and heated. Not in a negative way, but in a, in an emotional way. But at the end of the day, we all understood that we were building something together. We all understood that we were creating something new and different and better and wanted to scale it.

We wanted to do something that would be a legacy play. The other thing is both firms had this really cool class of up and coming lawyers. And we wanted to make room for them at some point. Well, guess [00:20:00] what? If your letterhead already has 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 names, what do you do with all those folks that have really put in their time, built up a client base, serviced your clients fit into the culture?

How do you fold them into the mix? Because we didn’t have, you know, we don’t have the history that a lot of firms have. You know, if your firm was founded in New York City in the 18 hundreds, and the two names on the letterhead are long deceased and have conference rooms named after them, it, then it really is a trade name at that point because the individuals aren’t walking around the office, you know, having water cooler chitchat.

It’s a different vibe. So, so I think ultimately we all came around to the idea like, look, we’re building something new. Let’s just do it. Let’s take some chances and, you know, the worst case scenario is what would’ve happened if we didn’t get market traction? We renamed the firm and throw our names up [00:21:00] there. Yeah. I mean, you know, we could have done that, but we didn’t need to, thankfully.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, well, I’m impressed with you guy, what you guys did. I’m impressed with that decision. So what was the, what’s the market reaction been? Or do you know?

Adam Marshall: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. We certainly didn’t lose any clients and I think from the relationship acquisition and client development standpoint, it really provides us the ability to tell a great story. You know, if our names were on the letterhead, no one’s gonna ask, well, what’s that mean? Or Where’d you come up with that?

Or, why is your firm named that? It’s kind of a nice icebreaker. When you enter a boardroom or you have your client prospect sitting across from you and they’re like, tell us about the name. And it allows us to tell a brief history of, of the firm and our dedication to our clients and how we wanted the name to be reflective of that [00:22:00] culture and philosophy.

And already, you know, even now when I’m talking about it, I can see my hands on the screen. You get excited and emotional and that becomes infectious. So I think that the name has served us incredibly well. It also allows us to move into different markets and have a name that, that we can as assign some meaning to without having people that aren’t in the market on the letterhead.

It just gives you a lot of flexibility and, you know, you know, storytelling.

Jonathan Hawkins: Great point. So I wanna dig in a little bit about the growth of your firm. So firms can grow in all sorts of ways. You’ve already talked about the first merger, we’ll call it. And so, but you’ve got more offices now, including one here in Atlanta. So why don’t you sort of take me through a little bit the history of sort of the growth and the adding of offices or groups or however you want to, however it makes sense [00:23:00] for you.

Adam Marshall: So let me say this, some of our growth is very strategic. Some of it is you’re better lucky than good. So for example, our Chicago office, we had zero intention of opening a Chicago office or penetrating that market. But what happened was we had make or break litigation for a client that involved an issue in Illinois.

So we needed co-counsel in the Chicago land area. We started working with this small firm, and through that process of working with them on this really important litigation for a client, we became friendly and we were doing client prep and client development and trial prep and corporate work together and getting to know each other.

And, you know, the conversations naturally got around to, well, what do you guys want to be when you grow up and [00:24:00] we work well together, why don’t we figure something out? And we did. So lo and behold, south Florida, Chicago that’s so, so that was, I want to call it luck, although I do, I’m a firm believer and you create your own luck.

You have your, you work well with someone. You have conversations you’re not afraid to bring up. Interesting and difficult topics and you know, you build a really deep and true relationship. Yeah. Okay. We created that relationship, we created that luck together. There’s our office. Atlanta was a little different.

A couple things happened to to get us here. One was, even though we’re a South Florida firm, a lot of our clients weren’t looking to Latin America for growth. A lot of South Florida firms looked to LA Am for capital, for clients for business development. Our clients tended to look North Atlanta, New York, Chicago.

So we already had a foothold in the Atlanta [00:25:00] market with some clients that grew. And of course, the Florida, Georgia line it gets blurred. There are a lot of businesses, a lot of individuals, a lot of C-Suite folks. That have feet in both states. So it, it made cognitive sense to have a presence.

The other piece of it was personal. You know, my wife Stephanie and I were staring down the barrel of being empty nesters. We were trying to figure out what, where we wanted to be for the rest of our lives and grow up and grow old. And we’ve always had a connection to the Atlanta area through seminars and client meetings that I’ve attended over the years.

And lo and behold, we decided to to give this a world. And of course, you know, my partners were incredibly supportive. You know, I don’t think, at least not to my knowledge, there were no conversations about, oh goodness, this guy scares us, let him go and do his own thing in Atlanta. It was always sort [00:26:00] of supported and expected that.

We’d grow here together and, and continue to build the legacy. So that’s what brought us here almost three years ago to the day.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so you were the pioneer that came up to Atlanta to open the office.

Adam Marshall: Yeah, in terms of the physical space and putting the name on the door and all of that, yes. But without my partner’s support, obviously, you know, you know, I had my safety net. I have partners in Florida, I have infrastructure in Florida. We have clients in Florida. You know, it wasn’t as though I was just coming up here sight unseen with no support network.

And that’s why having partners, you know, concept that we’ve talked about a couple of times on this podcast already, you know, having partners that you like and trust and know are rowing in the same direction, even if you don’t agree on every little thing, makes all the difference in the world.

Jonathan Hawkins: It, and I’ll just [00:27:00] say partnership. it’s it’s like a marriage. It’s not always easy. It’s it gets hard. So.

Adam Marshall: is not. It’s not.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, okay. So, you know, there’s different ways that firms will expand geographically. You know, one of them is like you did in Chicago, they were already there. You brought them into the fold of your firm.

The other way is the way you did Atlanta. You maybe had some clients, but you physically came up here to seed the office, right? Is that correct?

Adam Marshall: That is correct.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so take me through you know, what is that, like, what was that like for you? I mean, you’ve been here, you know, three years or so. Now you’re a, you know, Cleveland into Florida. You probably know a few lawyers here, but it’s like you’re starting fresh. You didn’t go to school here in the city or in the state. So what’s that been like for you?

Adam Marshall: It was really scary and really exciting at the same time, you know, so in my 21 years at Florida I, I invested a great deal of time and mental energy [00:28:00] and money into building relationships, building friendships, building client relationships, you know, the whining and dining the. You know, attending charity events, you know, being involved in the community.

And so after 21 years you feel pretty comfortable that when you walk into a restaurant, you’re gonna walk into a room of a lot of friends and a lot of people that you know. That’s very comforting to me. That’s the Midwestern kid in me. You know, I don’t like anonymity. I like walking into a room and hugging it out with a lot of, a lot of people and familiar faces.

So that was the difficult part for me in coming here. After 21 years of doing that and building that, I’m coming to a city where I know a handful of people and knowing how geographically diverse Atlanta is, you know, everything is a drive to everything else. You know, some of these friends are 40, 45 minutes away.

It’s not as though we can see each other that [00:29:00] often. So, but that’s where the excitement came in for me. You know, the idea that I could. You know, walk into a room and introduce myself and meet new friends. And I was, the other thing is, I’m older now. I’m unabashedly honest. So I would literally walk into a networking and event event and someone would say, what do you need this week, Adam, what do you want this week?

I’m like, I literally want friends. I want relationships. I want people that I know that I can, you know, lean on for a meal or a beverage and, you know, can, you can introduce me to your social circle and I can do the same for you. And, you know, oh by the way, if you need resources in Florida, Lori’s got you.

We’ve got relationships in Florida so I can horse trade with, you know, our strength of relationships in one market and build them in another market. And that process has been really fun. Really fun.

Jonathan Hawkins: you know, one of the good things about Atlanta is that there are a lot of [00:30:00] transplants. You know, the sort of, the running joke here is, you know, there aren’t many native foreign Atlantans or atlantians, whatever they call ’em. And so, in that sense you’re sort of on an even playing around with everybody else.

But, you know, obviously relationships and things take time. I mean, I always tell younger lawyers, at least, you know. At least five years of constant being out there, developing relationships before you really start to see them bearing fruit. Now you probably had a head start ’cause you, I mean, you’ve already been practicing a while, but so you’re about three years in, so you know, you, you’re probably hitting your stride about now.

Adam Marshall: Yeah, no I, I’m at the point now where I’m really comfortable when I go to events, I’m always gonna know people. I have plenty of people that I can rely on and that can rely on me, whether it be professional or personal. Yeah, I mean the other thing is, you know, the New South to me is very much like the Midwest.

You know, people wanna get to know you, they wanna, you know, talk to you. You [00:31:00] know, my wife and I have made friends just, you know, sitting at a bar ’cause we weren’t in the mood to cook. And you know, by the end of the evening you’re friends with 10 strangers at the bar. That kind of culture and community really sings to me. And that’s really helped the transition. And then look it helps that, you know, as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve built relationships, I know what to look for. You can kind of trust your spidey senses when you can really connect with someone on a meaningful level and you know that’s someone you can invest time in because a friendship is gonna result.

So, so yeah, in, you know, the three years, although I can’t believe it’s three years, it’s gone by in a flash. It’s still a, a nice amount of time and I just, I feel a lot better about things. And then of course, that translates into, you know, business success, building a client base here, looking for new lawyers to hire, you know, the same things, same [00:32:00] considerations that we would have in any other market or in the, you know, at the mothership in Florida.

You know, how do we continue the legacy, you know, our clients want certain. Services. Maybe we don’t have enough folks that do it. Who do we hire? Who do we look to? All that stuff becomes relevant again in every market and firm wide.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it’s funny, you know, the way we met was not locally or through a local connection. We have a common connection from Florida.

Adam Marshall: True.

Jonathan Hawkins: it’s funny how you meet folks.

Adam Marshall: That goes to the point that look, you know, between Zoom and LinkedIn and all these wonderful technological advances and tools, the state lines don’t matter. You know, you can meet somebody and become friends and realize, wow, I think we’ve only been in the same room two or three times, but that’s okay too.

And yeah, you’re spot on. I mean, it was a common friend in [00:33:00] Florida that put us together.

Jonathan Hawkins: Shout out to Frank. By the way,

Real quick. Thanks for listening. If you’re getting any value out of this podcast, please take two seconds to hit the subscribe button and leave a five star review. It would really mean a lot to me. Now back to the show.

Adam Marshall: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: another question that I have a lot. So when you expand geographically especially the way you did it, coming to Atlanta is really the integration of all the different offices. How do you stay integrated culturally and just professionally, all of that?

So, you know, you’re up here now, you know, how often do you go back to Florida. How do you communicate? What’s the cadence? How have you, how does that work?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, so, so that’s still a work in progress. I don’t know that, that we’ve got it down cold yet, or we’ve perfected it. Even if we think we’ve perfected it, we probably haven’t and are always gonna look to improve. You know, it’s funny, when I moved here, I said [00:34:00] to myself and my business partners, you know what, once a month I’ll be down in Florida.

Yeah. I turned myself into a liar. Once a month is difficult. And again, with all of the technological tools, a lot of my clients candidly didn’t care where I was sitting. And if anything, if it’s less social and more get to the point business, we’ve gotta matter to discuss. People prefer Zoom because you can get on, do what you need to do, get off, and then both go about your day.

So what’s ended up happening is I typically go down to Florida. One of three reasons, reason one, and this is in no particular order of importance. Reason one is. A client wants or needs me there, and that could be anything from a matter that, that we’re working on that’s heating up to, they’re sponsoring a charity event and would love to have me in attendance.

Two, somewhat related to that is I’ll go down for [00:35:00] big charity events because one, I love supporting the community. And two, it’s a great way to be in a room with all of your friends at once. You get a lot of bang for your buck when you go down on a trip and you’re spending quality time with a lot of people at the same time.

And then the third reason I’ll go down is simply for firm reasons to see everybody for, you know, typically at the end of the year we still do, and this is part of our culture, we still do a traditional. Everybody and their spouses fly in for a holiday party. But what we do with that is we’ll backfill and we’ll do strategic planning meetings and performance reviews and things like that so that we can see everybody and stay in front of everybody.

Are we perfect at it? We are not. Truth be told, the pandemic and Zoom and some of these things impact the culture even in the same market. You know, there are some folks that, that work [00:36:00] remotely prefer to work remotely. You know, we don’t just have three or four offices. We really on some days have 20 or 30 offices if everybody decides to work from home.

So we’re still. I don’t wanna say struggle because that’s a negative connotation, but we still think really hard about how to maintain, build and keep our culture across multiple markets. You know, the old, you know, we try to avoid the cliches of, oh, it’s, you know, one firm mentality, one office.

You know, everyone likes to say that we try to live it. Not always perfectly, not always well, but that’s the goal is to have similar philosophy, do things socially, get to know each other’s families, you know, sort of a reaction to being at, you know, very big institutional law firms. Kind of bringing that, let’s do it a a, a better way for us.[00:37:00]

Jonathan Hawkins: I like that. So I wanna switch to sort of, we’ll call it strategy questions about strategy. And more specifically I wanna talk about sort of your firm and, you know, you guys, it sounds like we’re all mostly former big law, doing big corporations, big corporate type work. I assume you’ve maintained a lot of that kinda work.

You know, I’ll call you a corporate firm. But what are the practice areas you guys have and then, you know, as you guys think strategically about growth, whether it be another office or bringing in another practice group, you know what’s the thought process that you guys go through?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, so in terms of practice areas we do a lot of the corporate leaning stuff. So we have your traditional corporate transactional functions, anything from building the corporate foundation, you know, your organizational and foundational documents. All the way through the operations, cash flowing [00:38:00] growth of a company leading to the liquidity event, the M&A deal.

Along those lines, you know, there are other practice areas that support. we support one another. We believe in that multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary model. And I start with corporate just because that’s where I live within the firm. But our, we, we have a very strong background in corporate restructuring.

We’re very good with the distressed stuff. That’s also good for our business model when things are going well. Corporate and litigation tend to be very strong. When things aren’t going well in the economy, restructuring tends to be doing very well, so we tend to be recession proof, which is very strategic.

So we have corporate litigation, we have a public pension and employment practice area. Even within litigation, I should go back to that, we have various silos within litigation. You know, co [00:39:00] complex corporate, you know, business divorce type cases all the way through contract disputes through helping lenders and institutional lenders with their loan documents and or collection efforts.

So, you know, and we have an intellectual property group, which was the Chicago office. And you know, we’ve tried to be broad based. We typically, the things that we stay away from. We don’t like dealing with the IRS or the SEC, so we don’t give, you know, tax advice. We usually rely on accountants or trusted tax lawyers and we will co-counsel with them. Same thing for public company work. We tend not to work for public companies, so that’s substantively what we do.

Jonathan Hawkins: so, I would call you a business boutique. That’s what I, that’s how I would say it. but you, you, you

Adam Marshall: can say it that way. I

Jonathan Hawkins: basically call it something different.

Adam Marshall: I’m not a fan of the B word boutique. I don’t like that word. We’re a [00:40:00] business growing firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: you go. There you go. Well, I, I, before before I had my firm, I was in two firms that, that I always refer to as business boutiques. We had sort of the corporate transactional, typically a commercial real estate and then sort of a business litigation. And then there are the areas in between. A lot of, you know, you sort of mentioned, you know, some employment, some other things in between, but.

Adam Marshall: yeah. And then, and you know, that’s, you know, we view that through the lens of, you know, the client experience and that’s how we grow into certain practice areas. Again, our intellectual property team came on because we were working on a make or break case for a client, and then we realized, wow, we’ve been referring a lot of intellectual property workout over the years.

These people fit with us, we fit with them. We like each other. We can grow together. Great. Now we can serve our clients in that regard. So we like to grow [00:41:00] intelligently based on client need, obviously. That’s super important. The other thing that’s fun for us, and this is related to your original question on this sort of strategic, what do you do question.

The other thing we like is, and I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but we basically have two baskets of clients. Basket one is the basket of clients that every business focused law firm wants. Operating, cash flowing, growing corporations, the big corporate stuff. But the fun thing for us is the, we also have this, the second basket, which I like to characterize as intelligent startups, growth companies, early stage companies, we can be very nimble and humane when it comes to fees, fee structures, alternative fee arrangements.

So what’s really cool for us is we have a lot of clients that [00:42:00] we started doing work for when they didn’t think they had the budget or the money for a law firm, and they’re getting sophisticated, big law esque documents. At the very early stages of their formation, which one sets them off on the right path.

And two, when it comes around to that liquidity event years later, man, their due diligence room looks really good. And for us, what’s great is we get a lot of those growth clients before every law firm in town wants ’em, you know, we’ll catch ’em on the upswing. And then, you know, through that process, it’s a very personal and intimate process.

When you’re talking to founders and C-suite folks of an early stage company you’re hearing their stresses, their likes, their dislikes, their dreams, their goals. Well, guess what? That makes the relationship really personal, really [00:43:00] friendly and really sticky. Those clients aren’t gonna leave us.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you’ve talked about the sort of the two baskets there, sort of layered on top of that. Are there any specific industries that you guys really focus on, like healthcare or technology or software or whatever it is?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, so, so the big cliche is that we’re industry agnostic. I mean, if I had a nickel for everybody who said industry agnostic, I’d retire. But we really are delving into that a little bit. You know, we tend to see a lot of manufacturing companies, hospitality companies, real estate based companies.

Really, again, it’s easier for us to talk about what we don’t like or what we can’t handle. We’re real honest about that. So, for example heavily regulated industries. We’re not great at, we don’t have a Washington DC office. So if a company comes to us and they, you know, are investing in nuclear power plants, we’re just not the right fit for [00:44:00] ’em.

Companies that, you know, want to form casinos or gambling, again, we’re not great for them because we don’t have that regulatory depth or background. So, your run of the mill main street, starting a business. You know, we’re starting a restaurant now. We wanna create a franchise of restaurants.

Great. You know, we’re a manufacturing company and we’re looking to acquire commercial real estate. We’re looking to hire employees. We’re looking to grow into other markets Absolutely. All day, every day.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you mentioned a minute ago you have your restructuring practice there at the firm. We’re sitting in July, 2025. Let’s get our crystal balls out. Are you seeing anything, anything coming down the pike in terms of the economy? Is the restructuring? You see that warming up?

Adam Marshall: Yeah, it’s warming up. The spidey senses are tingling on that front as well. Look, anytime there’s any [00:45:00] economic uncertainty, whether it’s government policy, interest rate, uncertainty, inflationary pressure couple things are gonna happen. One, consumer confidence is gonna wane and that leads to pressure in service businesses, manufacturing businesses, retail businesses.

The other thing is money becomes more expensive. A lot of companies that have revolving lines of credit are on, on floating interest rates. Well, if interest rates go up, or more importantly, if they don’t come down, debt service becomes more of a consideration.

So look, anecdotally, you know, that’s sort of the intellectuals answer, but anecdotally, I mean, I probably went through a stretch of time where, you know, it was a year where I hadn’t done any restructuring consultations, and now in the last probably six months, we’ve done plenty of them.[00:46:00]

Not to say that all of those companies have to file or need to file or will file. But the fact that the leadership of those entities is staring down the pipeline of an issue or thinking about a problem is different in this cycle.

Jonathan Hawkins: Interesting. All right. We’ll see what happens there.

Adam Marshall: We will.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So, yeah, so moving on. So are you the managing partner of the firm?

Adam Marshall: I’m one of them.

Jonathan Hawkins: okay, so yeah, tell me how you, how you guys structure the governance in terms of managing partners and how you split responsibilities.

Adam Marshall: So, so we do a lot by consensus. In fact, most of what we do is by consensus. There are six of us that are equity partners that we meet weekly by Zoom. You know, and that’s really intended to be, let’s touch base. What do we know? What’s going on firm-wide? That’s really good, really bad, [00:47:00] just newsworthy what issues do we have to talk about?

And sometimes it’s just about telling jokes or talking about what we did on the weekend. Just again, culture, you know, build that culture, keep that culture, see each other, touch points. Then we do longer, I would say quarterly meetings, either in person or on Zoom, where it could be two to three hours where we’re, you know, proactively, you know, tackling an issue, creating a plan going over strategy.

The day-to-day stuff we tend to do, we tend to stay in our lane. So I tend to do a lot of the relationship building client development, mentoring internally. I just, I like that I’m good at it and I volunteer to, to do it. I am not the guy that necessarily knows what our. Lexi Nexus or Westlaw [00:48:00] contract looks like or who we’re using for internet.

Some of that stuff obviously is, is staff driven. And we have an amazing office manager, which is really easing our pressure. But we have one of my partners that’s just really great at the financial stuff. You know, he would be akin to a CFO COO just really good at that stuff. So we all kind of fill all roles and none if that makes

Jonathan Hawkins: Mm-hmm. It does. So I do wanna circle back on the merger stuff. And this is a and some of these are just questions that I personally am curious about. So you’ve had at least two successful mergers that, that we’ve talked about today. You know, the Chicago and then the Fort Lauderdale. Have you had any swings and misses where and you don’t have to gimme specifics, but you know, like you danced maybe with another group or whatever and it didn’t work out.

Adam Marshall: No, I mean, we’ve had conversations in the past. I mean, [00:49:00] especially, you know, being Florida based, a lot of big law firms are looking for a foothold in that market, or were so both predecessors of war the Rice Pug side, which was the bigger half of the firm, I mean, they were larger than we were at Marshall Grant.

Both of us had individually been approached. I think that’s maybe what made our merger possible in a weird way, was we realized we didn’t want to necessarily plug ourselves back into the matrix and go that big, but that scaling this on some level would be accretive to our clients, would give us better quality of life as lawyers and staff and the family members that were involved.

So no, I don’t, thankfully, I don’t think we’ve had any swings and misses. We’ve flirted a little bit and look we’ll sometimes miss on, on individual hires and it’s [00:50:00] rarely because they’re not good people, it’s just maybe not the right mix or the right fit or the right practice area. So, so there’s always going to be some of that that apprehension and Monday morning quarterbacking and analysis, but that’s.

Look, that’s how you learn. That’s how you figure it out.

Jonathan Hawkins: And there’s always, there’s always a timing element, always. I mean, there’s all the other stuff, but even if everything on paper is perfect, the timing doesn’t always work. At least that’s been my experience.

So as you know, you’ve been a big law, you’ve been a, I’ll call it small law. You’ve gone through some mergers.

You’ve had, you have multi-state offices now. So you, you’ve seen a lot you know, as you look back, you know, I’m curious, are there any lessons that might stand out in your mind that, you know, in a way I like to phrase it as, you know, things maybe that you did that maybe you shouldn’t have done, or maybe things you did but you wish you’d done ’em way earlier?

Adam Marshall: Yeah. I mean, look, you [00:51:00] know when I was at Big law, you know, I had the traditional big law life. I was working really hard, really long hours, sometimes not getting home. And that was personally very hard for me. I loved my family, I wanted to be with them. But in hindsight, man, I learned a ton. I learned from some of the smartest people on Planet Earth and I in working that many hours and that hard, I learned a lot of law fast and I think what that allowed me to do was kind of branch out.

So if I’m being self-aware, the pro, the mistake I probably made was, you know, there was a stretch in my career where I thought, okay, Adam, you’re ready to be in management. And the rest of the legal world was like, no, you’re not. You’re not ready to be in management. And I probably wasn’t. They’re probably right.

It was too soon. And those firms were too [00:52:00] big and there was probably a whole universe of information I just didn’t understand about the financial metrics and measurements of a law firm. So look, you said it before every, it’s a lot of it’s timing and everything happens for a reason. So, you know, going through those iterations and figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up as a lawyer was an important process.

Now, what I’ll say and what I say to everybody that, that asked me and whoever I mentor you know, this is unsolicited advice they get from me. You’ve gotta be your own advocate. Your career, you know, and I’m always quick to say, that doesn’t mean disrespectful. That doesn’t mean in, that doesn’t mean you push back on the person sitting in the big chair across the.

The desk from you, you know? But what it does mean is if there’s a particular practice area where you want to get experience, you need to proactively go talk to [00:53:00] those partners and find that woman or that man that’s willing to give you work and mentor you and bring you along in that practice area.

Because people, especially in the client service world where time is money, you know, people aren’t thinking about necessarily your development. They’re thinking about. How do I make the client happy? How do I meet this court deadline? How do I, you know, get the other side this document in the time that I told them?

So sometimes you have to hit pause and be your own advocate. And that also comes to the sort of non-substantive legal things you wanna learn about the business of law. You gotta ask questions, no one’s gonna spoonfeed you, and you’re certainly not gonna learn it by osmosis sitting in your chair. So I think it’s really important and that’s kind of where I had that period of time in my career where I thought I wanted to be in leadership, but I didn’t actually really know what it mean, knew, know what it meant, you [00:54:00] know, that’s when I had to sort of go out and figure out, well, what don’t I know.

And who do I learn it from and how do I learn it and how do we figure this out? And I had to take some control and I had to go tell people, look, I wanna be a well-rounded lawyer. I know I can sit in the same chair for 16 hours a day and critically think through issues and research and write. I know I can do that, been there, done that, but I wanna be well-rounded.

I want to be able to understand that work fits into the client’s world, how context was always very important to me. You know, what does this issue mean to the client, not to the law firm, not to the partner that assigned it to me, but what does it mean to the client? So you have to ask those questions.

And that sort of led me down the path of, well, wow, if the client, if this is a really important issue [00:55:00] and I’ve only billed four hours to it, the client might think, wow. They didn’t take me seriously. You know, I always tell young lawyers, you’re petrified about overbilling because you don’t know anything when you’re a young lawyer.

Oh my goodness this matter took me 20 hours. Well, what I always tell them is, let your mentors let the senior partners determine what’s appropriate. If it’s a make or break issue, 20 hours may be light. You know, if it’s a, an issue that, that your client could go down with the ship on, you know, so you do right by the client and you worry about the other stuff later.

And that’s how you start to learn about the Venn diagram of substance and business. You know, what’s a client willing to pay? Well, a client’s willing to pay a lot for results. A client’s not willing to pay a lot for a lot of gobbledygook with footnotes [00:56:00] and, and caveat. And that’s how you kind of learn to mesh the two.

Jonathan Hawkins: And it’s it’s an art, not a science sometimes. But you know, that that is something to help. I won’t name names, but recently I saw somewhere, not my firm, somewhere else where the relationship is a bigger firm relationship partner handed it to a younger attorney that the file like, like a big firm lawyer can work it on a matter that was really, really small without, and never asked the question, you know, what did, what was the client’s goal and what did it really mean? And it, you know, that’s part of it too, where I know when I was a young lawyer, you know, you’re so used to digging into the issue and you’re like, I’m going to get the answer or whatever, no matter, you know, no matter how long it takes, even though, you know. It does, you know, the big picture for the client, it doesn’t matter.

So that’s the other side of that coin too.

So, so let me ask we’ve been running for a while now. This, you know, you’ve again, you know, your firm’s grown to, [00:57:00] I don’t know, is it three locations, four locations three states. As you look forward the next 10, 15, 20 years, you know, what is your vision for the firm?

I know you have partners, you gotta take them into consideration too but how do you and your partner see the firm growing or expanding over the coming decades?

Adam Marshall: I think one of the things that excites me is we don’t create arbitrary numbers or geographic locations. I think what we look for and have been pretty good at so far is finding cultural fits. If somebody fits into our model and wants to practice law and enjoy it and have a smile on their face all day.

But work really hard and you know, work through the hairy issues with clients, but do it in a supportive environment. Yeah, we can grow. And again, some of that growth, it will be dictated by clients. You know, we have some [00:58:00] clients, you know, here in Atlanta that had first hired us when we were in Florida, but then needed to bring in a Georgia firm because we couldn’t practice here.

Well now they’re back. Now that they know we’re here. You know, who’s to say that doesn’t happen in North Carolina or Tennessee? Do I think it’s gonna happen? I don’t know. Is it the plan? No. Certainly is not. But would we say no to an amazing opportunity that allowed us to grow and create this legacy and, and culture and serve our clients?

Yeah, we’ll consider it a hundred percent. And I think that’s where the six of us, meaning the, the governing body of the firm, the six partners. I think that’s where, even if we disagree on the details, I think that’s where we are always in agreement. If it’s best for the firm and best for the clients, we’re gonna be unanimous.

Just that simple.

Jonathan Hawkins: I like it. We’re gonna end [00:59:00] on that. Adam, thanks for coming on, man. So it is been real fun. It’s been fun getting to know you

and I, and I enjoyed that Sushi, A week or so ago.

Adam Marshall: No, that place is great. It’s my favorite spot.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So, if anybody out there wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to find you?

Adam Marshall: I am slavishly responsive, so email is fine. Text messaging is fine. Phone is hard because if I’m doing this or in a client meeting, it’s harder for me to see that someone’s trying to get me. But email or text is great.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, careful giving out your cell number, but if you want to give out your email or your website, you can do that.

Adam Marshall: Yeah. The website is Lorium Law, LORIUMLAW.com and my email is just a Marshall Amarshall@loriumlaw.com

Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome. Well, Adam, again, thanks for coming on.[01:00:00]

Adam Marshall: No thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

OutroUpdatedWebsite-1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the founding partner podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on the latest episodes. You can also connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and check out the show notes. With links to resources mentioned throughout our discussion by visiting www.lawfirmgc.com. We’ll see you next time for more origin stories and insights from successful law firm founders.