Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] So in terms of the factors, so I hear the lawyers in the audience saying, well, what about this? What about that? So here’s one for you. So, you know, it’s cool that you move to a new jurisdiction where you didn’t know anybody, but you don’t know anybody.

And you could pull on the, draw the jerk opposing counsel that’s just gonna litigate the crap outta the case. So,

Christopher Anderson: And we do all the time.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you talk about safety valves. So you know how, you don’t have to tell us, you know, the secret sauce, but conceptually, how do you deal with that in a subscription model?

How do you protect yourself and protect a client, get them to the goal? How in that instance, for example.

Christopher Anderson: Two ways. One is sometimes we just take it on the chin. You know, we do draw those lawyers sometimes. And in this for the long haul. I’m trying to shine a light on a practice area that hasn’t been working that well for clients and showing a better way, and I still see good in them.

Welcome to the Founding Partner [00:01:00] 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 and other law firm leaders and hear about their journeys and some of the cool things that they’re doing. And today’s guest I’ve been really looking forward to this, this episode.

And I’ll, I’ll sort of give a teaser, but he is started a firm, he started many firms, but his newest firm is a I call it a family law firm that does family law, litigation type matters on a subscription fee model, which [00:02:00] when I heard this I was really blown away. That, and, you know, a little skeptical, which I’m sure a lot of people are.

But, you know, and when I say subscription, I don’t mean like some family law firms that do, I’ll call it flat fee, sort of staged billing. Which I know a lot of people are skeptical of that. So really looking forward to diving in. Some of this today the guest is Christopher Anderson is, I think he may have more than one law firm, but his family law firm’s called NewLeaf Family Law.

So, Christopher, welcome to the show. Happy you can be here and why don’t you give a little bit of background. You’ve, I know you’ve done a lot of cool stuff. You do a lot of cool stuff. You’ve got your own podcast. Just give us an overview of, of you and, and your firm and what you do.

Christopher Anderson: You bet. So, yeah, the, the podcast may as well, since you mentioned it is, is the unbillable hour welcome people to it. It’s available on all, all, all outlets, but the firm, as you mentioned, I’ve launched several firms over my career operating several now and am on the. [00:03:00] Bored of many, many more.

So, you know, I really do love the business of law. And so, you know, I, and, and kind of like I’ve been a fan of John Maxwell since beginning my career in, in business and have really strived to work my way up through his levels of leadership and consider it part of my mission today to expand that leadership beyond my own firms.

And that’s why I sit on some boards. I serve as trusted advisor to many firms and help them solve a lot of the problems that I have faced. And and, and to get beyond them and to, to continue to manage their firms well, you know, the goal being really just to serve our clients better.

Well run law firms, serve clients better, and that is an important goal and mission. So, but you mentioned newly family. So newly family law [00:04:00] was a project, is a project, it’s an experiment. And a lot of experiments don’t go well. This one has proven many hypotheses and we keep testing things. So, we sat during my partner and I who to whom I’m married sat during the pandemic.

And we’re talking about how family law firms really could be better. Both she and I have been on the client side of being, going through family loss situations and have observed the good and the bad and quite honestly the ugly. And so being a student of business, being a student of lean methodology and agile methodology, the Toyota way and many other thoughts of how to solve [00:05:00] problems in business I said, Hey, if we feel that way and we feel like we could do better, ’cause that’s kind of where we were headed.

And I’d run a family law firm before, but I kind of did it just the old traditional way. We sat down and said the first thing, if we think we can do it better, we gotta really clearly define what’s wrong. Because otherwise we, if we don’t know what’s wrong, we’ll fall in the same traps. So we did and we found a newly family to be better.

It was really fun to be able to act, you know, after practicing law for 30 years, sit down and create a new law firm, clean sheet, right? Just completely clean sheet and say, what if we could start all over again? Because that’s what we’re doing. We do operate other law firms. We didn’t leverage them.

We didn’t leverage the brands. We didn’t leverage anything. In fact, part of our experiment was we, you know, we, we, we knew then that we were five-ish years away from being empty [00:06:00] nesters. And we said, you know, where, where do we want to be? Once that happens, let’s do the law firm there. Because part of the experiment for me was, could we be successful with this model that we created by doing this root cause analysis and finding out what was really wrong in a place where we had no benefit. No referral sources, no people to help us. No office, no relationships with other lawyers. No membership of the bar. No, nothing. Nothing like just dropping in from outer space with a market that doesn’t know what we’re doing or who we are. Can we be successful? And the answer, the first answer actually was no.

So we had a, our initial concept was to solve one of the problems that we saw, which is that people come into family law situations not knowing what they really want. And [00:07:00] so we said, let’s solve that problem first. Let’s just do a thing where we help people figure out what they want. That failed.

And it’s my belief that it failed because people didn’t. Know what it was, right? It’s like, it’s like creating a imagine creating, let’s see, what’s a popular food today? That wasn’t, that. Nobody knew what it was. I’m just trying to think. Swar, imagine going to 1950 and opening a swarm joint on second Avenue and, and 11th Street in New York City.

Like, nobody would come in because they weren’t looking for shawarma. Nobody knew what it was, and you had to introduce them to it. And once, once people knew what it was, then they, they’d go I feel like I’m ranting a little bit, but I’m, I’m just kind of giving the origin story, right? So we said, okay, people don’t recognize this.

They don’t know what it is. So let’s take that piece, set it to the side for a minute, but incorporate it into. And we called that phase one, right? And we call it [00:08:00] decisions. So, you know, we, we, we created phase one. We launched phase one decisions, and we got, I mean, we got some clients, we helped them, but it wasn’t, just didn’t get traction.

But so we said, all right, let’s try phase two, which we call transitions. And this is what most people would recognize as a family law firm, right? We’re now attracting people that know they want to change and are ready for that change. And we’re gonna help them with that change. Whether that change be a divorce, a separation, change in custody even premarital agreement or, or pre prenup for most of the country.

You know, some sort of change. And, but we’re gonna take that phase one thinking and make sure it’s part of it. So, in other words, we went back and stayed true to our root cause analysis. Now I need to tell you what the root cause analysis showed us. The root cause analysis after we asked why, and asked why again, and asked why again, and asked why.

Again, led to two very important [00:09:00] problems that was causing family law to not serve clients as well as it could. One absolute standout, and I think everybody kind of knows it, but they don’t know what to do about it, is the billable hour, and particularly in a consumer facing practice, particularly in family law, on the billable hour, runs contrary to excellent client service.

Now, you know, here’s where all the lawyers go get up in arms and, and I understand I probably would too. Because we’re all ethical. We are all called to this, this is a profession. And we can rise above the. Problems that the billable hour causes, but lemme talk about what the problems are. The problem with the billable hour is that it becomes very, very clear to anybody who’s paying attention that [00:10:00] you can derive more money per client, more money per case, more money for your practice by uncovering more issues, more conflict, more drama, and lawyering it to the greatest extent possible.

There are some firms, I won’t name any, who actually have that as their policy that you know, we will leave No stone uncovered. No issue unresolved, no, no matter unintended to. And the problem is we’re dealing with consumers with very, very limited budgets. And this leads to the first problem, which is that. The desire to do that, to be excellent lawyers, which is what we’re talking about. That’s what I just defined, runs contrary to the client’s need. And that sounds weird, right? Like you’re saying what you mean? We should be not excellent lawyers for some clients, just ’cause they’re of more limited means. And the answer is no. We need to be even more [00:11:00] excellent. We need to remember what we are because we’re not just lawyers and attorneys at law, but we’re counselors at law And the billable hour sets up this conflict. And as ethical and noble as we may be, this leads to one of two things. One is that my colleagues are humans, all of them.

And most of them are excellent lawyers and most of ’em are excellent humans. Like this is not to disparage anybody. But they are humans. And when that very powerful incentive is there, along with some ethical guidelines that say, you know, be a zealous advocate for your client’s interests it leads to outcomes that are not necessarily in the client’s big picture interests, right?

Maybe they’re legal interest, but you as a counselor at law, I gotta think about their big picture interests. And so it leads to things like huge withdrawal rates, right? Attorneys across the country [00:12:00] withdraw from their ca family law cases prior to completion at an alarmingly large rate. And this oftentimes leaves clients worse off than if they’d never hired a lawyer at all. And you know, so that’s not in their interest. And, and, and it’s also disheartening to lawyers. I mean, it’s not fun. To take someone’s problems, load them up into your pickup truck and say, I’m gonna solve these for you. And then, you know, start driving down the road to solution and then halfway dump everything out of the truck.

’cause the, the client can’t pay anymore. That doesn’t feel good for the lawyer either. So, like, in this way, like it’s the whole hourly billing thing isn’t serving anybody. And so we said we had to fix that. then the second thing, the second root cause was this notion. And, you know, I, I’m, you know, guilty as charged here, most family lawyers are trial [00:13:00] lawyers. I came to family law after being a prosecutor myself and, you know, did other litigation trial work before going to family law. And so we come to that because, you know, when you, when you’re a good trial lawyer. Yeah, we all have a sense of wanting to win. Right. That’s, you know, zealous advocacy thing again, but also just, you know, we like to win.

We don’t like to lose. We put it the other way. And when you’ve got a client coming to you with a divorce, I don’t know what winning is, right? Sometimes it’s easy, you know, the one spouse is abusive and has really put the, the, your client under their thumb, and you’re really helping them escape a terrible situation.

And it’s clear that you’re helping ’em move on to something better. That can feel like a win. But in most situations, there’s already a loss. I mean, there’s, there’s a lost family. There’s a lost vision. You know, they, most of our clients years before they met us, had a vision of the future [00:14:00] that was very beautiful for them and that they loved. And it’s gone. And so winning in that environment becomes very difficult to define. So we redefined it. So that’s the second root cause is, is we said we’re not going to start from that perspective. We are gonna start from the perspective of defining the client’s future and more clearly having the client define their future.

Jonathan Hawkins: So.

Christopher Anderson: We are not gonna talk about what motions we’re gonna file. We’re not gonna talk about strategy. We’re not gonna talk about all those things. We’re gonna talk about where you’re gonna live in two years. We’re gonna talk about where your kids are gonna go to school. We’re gonna talk about where you work, what’s your relationship with your ex spouse, what’s your relationship with his parents or her parents?

What’s your relationship with yours? What’s your spouse’s relationship with your parents? Where are the kids living? What’s your relationship with the children? What’s your spouse’s, [00:15:00] all these things. Big picture, detailed thing because, and this is where I think a lot of family law firms get this wrong. Most of our clients come to us running towards something or running away from something. But not neither of those things being their future. They’re running away from their past, they’re running towards a present. And nobody’s, not nobody, some people are more self-aware, but very few people have, if you ask when, when we first ask them that question, they don’t know the answer or they don’t know it clearly. ‘ cause nobody’s given them time to think about it and to hear it. And once you know the answer, now you know what winning might look like. But you know something even more important, which is. The answer to the question that we ask with everything else we do from that moment forward, which is, does this action move our client [00:16:00] closer to that goal? And if the answer is no, we don’t do it. If doing discovery doesn’t do that for them, we don’t do it. If filing this motion doesn’t move them towards that, we don’t do it. If moving for contempt against their spouse doesn’t move them towards that goal, we don’t do it. If it does, we do, but it, it streamlines and again, aligns the lawyers with the clients.

So you take these two things, eliminating the billable hour and having basically what I call a coaching forward or future forward representation changes everything and it aligns us. It reduces withdrawal rates dramatically. It keeps clients in control of their future and the process. It leads to happier clients and better outcomes.

And that was our theory and our, our hypothesis. And you know, here we are now four and years and change [00:17:00] later, almost five. And I think the, the hypothesis is proving true.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so before you go into that, I just wanna circle back on a couple things.

Real quick, if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, please check out my book, the Law Firm Lifecycle. It’s written for law firm owners and those who plan to be owners. In the book, I discuss various issues that come up as a law firm progresses through the stages of its growth from just before starting a firm to when it comes to an end.

The law firm lifecycle is available on Amazon. Now, back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: So first, you, you don’t sound like a typical lawyer.

Christopher Anderson: Thank you.

Jonathan Hawkins: 2 ways. More than two. But the two I wanna point out is number one you approach this as an experiment with a hypothesis, which in most lawyers, they’re not open to that.

They’re like, this is the way it’s always been done. That’s the way I’m gonna do it. So that’s the first thing. And then the other one, you know, you talk about root causes. That sounds more, you know, first principles Silicon Valley talk. And I’m curious, I know, I think you, you’ve done some, you [00:18:00] know, stuff that’s not law too.

And, and I’m curious if that, if you’re just this way or if some of those other experiences helped you think differently than sort of a traditional lawyer. And you can go into some of the experiences if you want.

Christopher Anderson: absolutely. No, I mean, I think that’s a great question and, and when I, by the way, when I said thank you, so you don’t sound like a typical lawyer, I said thank you. I would say that it’s not, that’s not a ding on typical lawyers at all. It’s a neurosis of mine. That I don’t do. Typical. And, and like we, we, we have a little joke with our kids kids.

They’re 22, 18 and 18 now. But from the time they were very little, if anybody said, you’re weird, the response was always, thank you. And you know, ’cause I, I, I think the world’s beauty is found in the weird in the, in the, in the different and progress is made by thinking outside the box. And it’s never made by doing things the way they’ve always been done.

And, and I’m just a contrarian, so I’ll give you this that you said. Is it [00:19:00] just the way you’re built contrarian? This? Yeah. That’s just the way I’m built. Yeah. From, from a very young age, you know, just find out what would, what would tick someone off or, or poke the bear. That was me. And it helps you learn about the world.

But to your other question. Yes. You know, I, I, out of law school, I worked to build legal software for mass tort businesses. I worked for New York City District Attorney’s office. I then helped to get, build again, build other businesses. So I was constantly with one foot in business, one foot in the law and always looking again to change things.

I remember when I was at the DA’s office, the district attorney, the elected district attorney, came by my office one day. He is like, this is or seven, maybe 7, 19 97, and he’s like, what’s that on your desk? I [00:20:00] was like, that’s a computer. He’s like, I didn’t authorize the purchase of any computers here.

And I was like, you did not, you are correct. That is my computer. Where’d you get it? I bought it. And like, this is like a Windows machine. Like these were expensive. Like it was three grand that used. I bought this thing used, and he is like, what are you doing with it? And I told him because, but you know, in the, in the office what we had this, these books, and if you wanted to write a motion, you’d pull down these books and you were like, all right I need a 22 and a five and a 18 and a 49.

And and then hand write whatever custom stuff you’d put in it, and you’d send it out to the typing pool and a day later you’d get it back and it would be wrong, and you’d make your edits, da da da. And so I’d telling him, I’m doing, you know, I’m putting all that stuff in to a program where I can do that myself much quicker and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he’s like, get rid of it. I was like, what? He’s like, that’s amazing because I had showed him what I was doing. shouldn’t spend your own money on that. I’m buying you one. And, and [00:21:00] then, you know, then I want you to show all the supervisors and then we’re gonna buy ’em for everybody. Like, you know, so that, that’s just who, how I operated.

It’s like I didn’t, I, I was just a guy who didn’t ask permission. I just did things. And sometimes I got in trouble. Sometimes it worked that way. But then really, so that was just my nature, right? But then really I got a chance a couple of chances. One of the software companies that I was working with got purchased by law.com which is a division of American lawyer media.

And so I got exposed to a much bigger world of business. Through that we got, that’s my first exposure to Colorado. ’cause we got moved out to Colorado, joined up with a couple other businesses and, you know, I got my real first exposure to the business world and learned a lot from that. Later on down the road, I went back after that experience and.

Opened another law firm in Georgia was relatively successful with that. Unfortunately, I had elected to put about two thirds of our basket of our eggs in the basket of residential real estate [00:22:00] closing closings. And then Shers Lehman happened. And then the, you know, the great recession and that was difficult.

And initially to help the law firm out. I took some outside work with LexisNexis. They were looking for, I was a, we used some of their software and I was a constructive critic with a loud mouth of that software. And, but some of my ideas apparently had gotten higher and higher in the organization.

I was invited to come talk to their product teams. Then I got invited to talk to their national sales teams and blah, blah, blah. I started working for Lexus on a, on a formal basis. And that’s where I got exposed to notions of pragmatic marketing. Which was my, you said some of these first principles, ideas started to come in and the Toyota Way and, and that kind of stuff.

And then to lean Agile and Scrum. And then [00:23:00] to the Lean startup movement that was happening out in Silicon Valley at the time, Eric Reese and, and others. And like this was just like, I heard Angels sing when I would, would read this stuff and I was like, this is, this is the way. And then of course my brain starts going like, how could this work in law?

And I started to formulate this and it’s formulate this and formulate this. And so went from that to actually first helping other law firms with it. And then. The pandemic and we’ve got this idea, let’s do this. My wife, my partner, had already owned a, a law firm that did wage and hour work, and, but she’s like, let’s, let’s do that.

I wanna do this with you. And so we decided to do this. So I think that’s a really long answer to the question, but I think it’s important, I think to kind of where, where did these crazy ideas come from? Well, they came from these places that were just eye-opening and revelatory. I didn’t invent VA’s ideas.

Like I just have applied them to law in a way that that made sense to me.[00:24:00]

Jonathan Hawkins: So, I, I do want to, you know, as much as you’re willing to share in terms of sort of the way that you charge the clients, the subscription model. I want to get into that. But the other thing that I think really impressed me and that really piqued my interest when we first talked was, you wanted to, this goes back to the experiment thing. You’re like, I’m gonna move to a place and start this in a place where we’ve got no connections to really see if it works from a concept perspective, versus it’s just people that know me and they refer me stuff or whatever , which was cool.

So you moved to Colorado, you say, we’re gonna start this thing. And so, I’ll hand it back to you. I mean, there’s really two questions and you can work it in however you want. Number one, you had to come up with sort of, the billing model and there’s a whole host of things that go into that, I’m sure iterations and whatnot.

I’m curious how you came up with it. And then the other part is how do you communicate that to the market in a way that people say, yeah, that’s different. I want to hire you and try that, versus sort of the historical model. How did you both of [00:25:00] those.

Christopher Anderson: So the market’s easy. It makes sense. It’s how they buy everything else these days, right? So it makes total sense. It’s how they’re paid, that’s what they can budget, what they can’t budget as a retainer and an unknown replenishment at an in an unknown time. And. I won’t name any other firms, but you know, the firms that are out there with these phase based or flat based fees are really in much the way that my BMWI don’t have A BMW, I used to have A BMW, this is why I don’t have A BMW, why I now drive a used car.

But you know, the, when I would go to the dealer, they had a flat fee. When I would come in with a radiator problem, you know, radiator problem is $550. And I asked about it. I mean, I was curious like, how did you do that? How did you know? Like, well, truth is they have a book in the back says, well, all the things that go into this are this many hours.

So that’s how we’re gonna charge. And so, you know, when I looked at that, because I, at first I did look at, you know, let’s do flat fee. That, that, that, that [00:26:00] sounds like a good way to go. You know, with, you know, flat fee, this flat fee that just flat fee, the different components of, of everything. As there are a couple, you know, big firms out there that are doing that.

But when you peel that back, that’s just the billable hour again. It’s all the same problems, right? Because more drama, more conflict, more problems, more issues, more money. Exactly the way the hour, the billable hour works because it truly is the billable hour. It’s just the billable hour chunked up into, into discernible pieces rather than, we don’t call them ours, we call them.

I’ll charge you this to do your initial pleadings. We call them, I’ll show charge you this to show up for the initial conference. I’ll charge you this to file up this motion that, to file that motion. I’ll charge you this for trial. It didn’t address the root cause analysis. How you come up with the pricing is actually very simple. acquire 30 years of experience and then you use [00:27:00] that experience to have a deep understanding of. What it takes to deliver a family law case. And so what we did is we sat down again, and we looked at that, we said, well, every case is different.

Like, well, yeah, every case is different. But they fall into these levels of complexity. And within, if you just break ’em out into a certain number of levels of complexity, they start to look similar enough that on average you can say this one on average, the average total billable amount on this case would be X dollars. And on average, they sit on the desk from beginning to end. For Y months, X divided by Y is a subscription. And instead of, and then there, there are a couple people out there that I’ve seen that are doing the, almost doing this. They’re saying, well, the average case, total revenues is [00:28:00] usually x. And I’ll charge that X over a certain number of months. But these are, what we decided to do with the subscription is we, you know, there are a lot of things we don’t know.

And so the subscription helps us. When the case gets more complex, it tends to last longer, and so it tends to even out. There are a lot of nuances to this. We built in things to protect the client. We, we move almost all the risk to ourselves. So let’s say for instance, one problem with a subscription might be that there’s delay, right?

And so now you’re taking money month after month after month, and there’s not much going on. We have a way to protect the client when that happens. We’ve developed a way to protect us if we get the complexity all the way wrong. And, and other things. So, you know, the, the, and some of these things we’ve had to iterate and, and we’ve learned a lot of it we came up with from the very beginning.

Just based again on all that experience, like we, like just started going over, [00:29:00] well, what would it be like? You know, we, I’d, I’d handled hundreds of cases in my prior career and I then talked to some of my colleagues who’d ha hired, handled hundreds of their own and said, so what, you know, let’s talk about some of these cases.

What would’ve happened with this case? What would’ve happened with this case? What would’ve happened with this case? We just gamed it and gamed it and gamed it and gamed it and came up with an idea and then I’ll tell you what, I got it. So very, very wrong. The first iteration I was losing money handover fast, and we had to learn.

One of the ways we learn is that we still track time religiously and. We do it for two reasons. One, you mentioned, I think it was pre-show, but you know, what do you do when there’s a fee dispute, you know, the arbitrators and then at the end of the day, the bar don’t have much experience with subscription billing. Don’t even have that much experience with flat fee billing, though, at least flat fee billing is in most of the state’s, [00:30:00] adapt adaptations of the model rules, subscription billing’s not, and then with flat fee billing, unfortunately there is wide disparity with how states handle it. There are some states, I believe Illinois, which requires firms to when they, when they’re doing a flat fee, to accept that fee into their operating account as earned fees. There are some states that forbid that, and then there’s variations between and so. How do you, you know, how do you navigate all that? And you navigate all that by still enabling yourself to speak the language that the regulators are going to use in making sure that you’re treating clients fairly. And so we do, right? We, we track every hour. We make sure that the clients know that they can do you know, ask for their hours et cetera, et cetera.

We never bill by the hour, I shouldn’t say never. We almost never [00:31:00] once in a while we’ll take a case that is either wackadoodle un unpredictable, or most commonly a lawyer will join the firm, bring some cases that they were under billable contracts, we’ll honor them. But we track it. And so that every, so everything’s above board, we all know they were being fair.

And like I said, we move all the risks to ourselves. So. If there’s a big delay or whatever, we have safety valves for the client to make sure they’re protected. I think I lost track of what question I’m answering, so I,

Jonathan Hawkins: well, I’ve got another one. So, So in terms of the factors, so I hear the lawyers in the audience saying, well, what about this? What about that? So here’s one for you. So, you know, it’s cool that you move to a new jurisdiction where you didn’t know anybody, but you don’t know anybody.

And you could pull on the, draw the jerk opposing counsel that’s just gonna litigate the crap outta the case. So,

Christopher Anderson: And we do all the time.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you talk about safety valves. So you know how, you don’t have to tell us, you know, the secret sauce, but conceptually, how do you deal with that in a subscription [00:32:00] model?

How do you protect yourself and protect a client, get them to the goal? How in that instance, for example.

Christopher Anderson: Two ways. One is sometimes we just take it on the chin. You know, we do draw those lawyers sometimes. And in this for the long haul. I’m trying to shine a light on a practice area that hasn’t been working that well for clients and showing a better way, and I still see good in them. And I can turn them from the dark side and, and, and bring them, you know, bring them into the Jedi order.

I, I do, I I just think that if, if you treat everybody the way you want them to treat you I think it was, oh, was it Bob Berg? I’m gonna mess this up, but No, it was Jay Berg. Jay Berg, a legal author that was really instrumental in my early days of practicing law. Great guy. I read early on, read two, read his books and came away with two key concepts that have served me all these years.

One was, he said, paper your clients. Like for communication. Any [00:33:00] communication that goes in or out, copy them. Your clients wanna know, and even if they don’t wanna know, they wanna know you’re thinking about them. And the other one was when you write bills, write bills that clients want to pay by describing what it is you did in the language of why it was valuable for them, rather than, you know, stood at copier.

Right. You know, drafted motion. They don’t care what, how did that serve them. But he, he came up with this thing called the Platinum Rule. You know, everybody knows the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto u and the platinum rule is due unto others as you would have them do unto others. Right. And I know I’m messing it up a little bit, but it’s, it’s like another level up. So that’s how, I mean, you know, we just, and it’s sometimes hard, man. It’s hard. I, you know, I, I’m a big fan of the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Sometimes I have to break it out and reread it with regularity, particularly the, don’t take anything [00:34:00] personally aspect of it. And then we understood that on average it works out and we can take it in the chin once in a while because of no, I said there’s two ways, because of way number two, at the end of the day, you just gotta think about the whole model differently.

Like, this is a different way to think about the business of law. So when you think about it this way, you have your different levels of complexity. And so let’s say they range from one to five. so each case carries a number, one to five. then you say, well, a lawyer can carry, and this comes, you know, this is a bastardization, but it comes from some of the agile scrum thinking about how to organize teams.

You say a lawyer can handle 40 points, 45 points. I’m just making numbers up now. Don’t no, nobody go model your business after the numbers I’m throwing out there. Just, this is for concept. [00:35:00] So say a lawyer can handle 45 points, so maybe they, they could handle nine, five cases or 45 1 cases or a mixture, and I’m gonna pay the lawyer a salary. Well, if a lawyer can handle 45 points and I’m paying them a salary, then I know my cost structure. So if I’ve got one pain in the ass, yeah, we’re not, we’re not on broadcast, right? I could say ass, if we’ve got one pain in the ass, opposing counsel that chews up a case, it’s okay. The lawyer still can handle 45 points and it, so it doesn’t break us on the cost side. And of course the other trick is scale this thing, right? The bigger you scale it, the more lawyers you’ve got work in, the less the, the outliers hurt. Right? In the beginning they did hurt and in the beginning I practiced two and you know, I would draw some of these lawyers and they hurt my soul. But because of the model that’s manageable.

Jonathan Hawkins: So another thing you mentioned a minute ago the, the time tracking and some of the [00:36:00] reasons behind it. I’m curious and, you know, we had this discussion pre-show, it’s, you know, courts, when you, when you do a fee petition, all they know are hours. It seems like they, they, they can’t even barely conceive of flat fees anything outside of the hours.

They, they don’t know how to deal with it. Subscription probably blows their mind. They don’t know what, what to deal with. But

Christopher Anderson: And opposing counsels too,

Jonathan Hawkins: them two and then you’ve got the bar regulators. And so, because you were on, you were on, you know, the bleeding edge here of, of this concept for law. You know, you’re, you’re gonna be pushing up against all these sort of external forces.

And I’m curious let’s focus on the bar regulator piece. You know, what sort of pushback or, you know, what sort of issues, if any, have you encountered on, on that front?

Christopher Anderson: because I mean, I anticipated this fortunately. And track time from the very beginning. And am very familiar with the, and try to stay familiar with the [00:37:00] rules of professional conduct. You know, there’s the rules of professional conduct has some underlying themes, and what I’ve found from bar regulators is they’re not out there to trip you up over a technicality. You know, if what you were doing was right in spirit and there’s no bar rule that covers it and you’ve tried to figure out a way to keep things transparent and keep things fair, reasonableness is of the fee is, you know, one of those major themes. Then they’re going to be okay with it and they may have suggestions and they’ve had suggestions and we have followed their suggestions.

We’ve also, because this was new, taken the step of hiring. And having what we do reviewed by outside counsel who have experience with the regulators and not just in our state, but in other states where we’re now branching out. And so, you know, we try to [00:38:00] prophylactically, ’cause the bar will never bless a fee agreement.

They’ll never say, yeah, you can do that. But, you know, it’s not fair to say that, you know, they’ll, they’re only there to catch you when you do it wrong. That’s not true either. They’re, they’re helpful, but they’re not in the business of, of being our outside counsel. Right. We had, we hire our own outside counsel.

And, but that’s been very helpful because, you know, you, again, you, if you try to do things the right way and you pay attention to things like fairness and reasonableness and transparency and candor, like you back to the court, you know, to court fee, fee what, what’d you call it? The court fee.

Jonathan Hawkins: A fee petition or.

Christopher Anderson: Fee petitioner fee award.

So like when we do a fee, petitioner fee award for us are against us. We give them the truth, right? This is what we charge the client, here’s the fee agreement. And we give them the hours we say, but you know, had we billed them by the hour, this is what would happen. Now I [00:39:00] keep things in such a way that across the board we’re almost always charging less than what the hours would suggest. And so that whenever we have to go through the process, through a petition or a fee dispute, the first thing we could say is do is stand tall and say, had we been hourly, here’s what it would’ve looked like. And yeah, and we never say so cough up the difference. Right? We never, ever, ever, ever go back on like, it’s like, that is your benefit, but you know, just since we’re talking about it, right?

This is, this is what it would’ve looked like. And we always keep track. And it’s a pain, right? It’s because you have to keep this whole team, all the lawyers, all the paralegals keeping their time when they, they don’t bill it. And and, but it’s just, it’s just a rule, right? So we, we keep that stuff, but that’s how we do it.

I mean, we just candor and leading with candor [00:40:00] and fairness and being unafraid of the consequences of, you know, because you can, if you can hold your head high and know you’re not doing anything underhanded, nefarious, trying to pull a fast one or taking money you didn’t really earn, then there’s not much to be afraid of.

Jonathan Hawkins: So,

Christopher Anderson: Except it’s still you, you’re still always afraid.

Jonathan Hawkins: yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Anderson: But, but you know, we, we were, what’s, what’s the word my grandfather used to use? We’re, we’re living right? We’re trying to live. Right.

Jonathan Hawkins: So another aspect of this, so you’ve got you know, you, the leader, the innovator came up with this you’ve, you’ve explained it to the market. They loving it. You, you’ve figured out a way to explain it to the courts and the bar regulators, et cetera, et cetera. Let’s talk about recruiting attorneys and staff and training and retention.

So how do you deal with that aspect of this model?[00:41:00]

Christopher Anderson: so again, I’m, I’m, I’m a, I’m a pretty predictable guy, right? So it’s the same way, like I don’t invent different ways to do the same, the different things. Candor, transparency, fairness. Um. Everybody we hire, we review this system with them in the hiring process. And some people don’t like it, then they don’t come work here.

And that’s okay. A lot of people who come work here look at this and say, I don’t want to figure this out. Like, so they weren’t looking for a job solo. Like one of, one of the greatest sources of new team members here has been solos or small firms who look at what we’re doing and say, wow, I’d love to work in that environment. I don’t want to invent it.

And by quite honestly, I’m sick and tired of marketing. I’m sick and tired of payroll. I’m sick and tired of compliance with regulations. My, you know, not, not, not OERC regulations, but like, you know, we’re talking [00:42:00] about just like. Zoning and buildings and all this stuff. And like, I love practicing law and this seems like a really great way to align my practice with the client’s interests.

And so they just come work with us and we give, we liberate them and help them to do that. But, you know, to answer your question, like, so we’re, we’re very transparent about the system. Whether and whether it’s that solo that’s coming over or we’re recruiting and actually hiring a lateral. Or we, we also take, you know, we, we, we raise new lawyers too.

So we take law clerks and raise new lawyers through the firm. And if it doesn’t float their boat, they don’t come. Right? There’s no, there’s no bait and switch. There’s no trick. It’s just a different way. And, and there, as you can imagine with me, there’s a lot of things that are a different way.

Our compensation structure is a different way. Our, show up to work Rules are different. Everything about this firm is different. ’cause again, we got, we got an opportunity. How many times do you get this in life? Right? I didn’t have to change my firm. I didn’t have to e evolve [00:43:00] it, I didn’t have to revolutionize it.

I just started over with, with a clean sheet. Now the, you know, the firm that my wife and partner had started, it still operates. It’s doing its own thing over there. But they don’t interact. And, and so we really did have a clean sheet. We said we we’re just gonna do things the way we want to do them, the way we think is right, and we don’t have to fix or carry the baggage of the way that didn’t work.

So, and that goes with everybody that joins us. Like this is different. Like if you want different, this is different. And for our team, they love it.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, another question that personally I’m curious. So any firm or any business that’s on sort of a subscription style mo model, you mentioned compensation you know, traditional firms, you know, you hit this amount of hours, you’re gonna get this sort of incentive comp. If you originate this, you get this, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, the traditional elements that law firms sort of base incentive comp on.

If I’m out there thinking about doing a [00:44:00] subscription model, what are some ideas or some ways to think through, you know, incentive comp above salaries?

Christopher Anderson: it’s, I mean, so there origination’s still a real thing, so we still do that. Right? And then it’s around client happiness, so we have a way of scoring that and it’s around caseload. So, you know, I said, you know, I, I threw out that kind of bogus number. But, you know, going back to that concept, right, saying a typical lawyer can carry 45.

And so we just say, listen, if you carry, if the, if the number’s 45, which is not if you carry above 40 for every, every number above 40, there’s incentive. And by carry it’s, you know, that they, that they stay current on their subscription and that you work the case. And if you go above 50, we turn it on, we turn the gas up high, and you on your, you your variable Comcast cost higher.

But the cool thing is we, we actually are trademarking this, we call [00:45:00] it the write your own adventure compensation plan. And because we also have some lawyers who are with us that, like, I’ve got a family I need to make, you know, I need to bring home a check. But I don’t wanna maximize bonuses. I just want, I want to know what it takes to stay here and to do an excellent job for the clients.

And and I don’t wanna do much more than that, and they can do that too. So we, you know, we have this incredibly flexible comp plan. So we’ve got lawyers making a lot, a lot of money because they really want to maximize income. And we’ve got some lawyers that really wanna maximize lifestyle, and that’s okay.

The only, the only challenge, and again, we learn as we go, the only challenge with that is that we’ve had to restrict the number of times you can change your mind in a year. So, you know, once a year you can change your mind as to how, how you want your comp to work. But you know, so we replace hours again because that’s not what we do with.

Things that matter to the clients, how many of them can you carry and can you keep them [00:46:00] happy? Very important part of it.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. So you mentioned earlier, and, and we talked about it, you, you also coach and maybe consult with the law firms and lawyers. So I wanna talk a little bit about that, but also tying into the subscription, do you coach firms on maybe how to design these things to fit.

Different practice areas if they want.

Christopher Anderson: yes, absolutely. The uh, you know, I, I’ve worked with a couple dozen law firms across the country. I think we’re up anyway in various aspects of their businesses. So not just how to build this, but how to market it, but not, and again, my, my, my consulting work and I tend to do more consulting than coaching.

My consulting work is focused on what, where they want to go. Like, again, I’m, I’m a boring guy. Every consulting job starts the same way I just talked about with the law firm. Where are you? Why are we talking? Where do you want to go? Right? What, what, what, what are we trying to change? [00:47:00] And if it happens to be that they want to build a subscription model, that’s fine.

That’s not the most of my clients. I gotta tell you, I mean, I’ll be honest, I’m with all your listeners. This is not for the faint of heart building a subscription model. You ’cause the way I do it here, I’ve learned a lot. And there’s, you know, if I had to do it all over again, I would do things very differently.

And so I always tell people, you know, don’t, don’t say, how did you get there? Could, then you’ll follow those tracks. Don’t do that. You know, let’s, let’s, let’s show you a way where you don’t fall down that shaft as you walk through the fields. And it, it’s just not for the faint of heart. And if you don’t have the data, right, I had a lot of data, but I don’t have a lot of data for Montana.

I don’t have a lot of data for Florida. You know, you have to be willing to learn those lessons. But so really I, when I start with anybody, it just starts with where are you? Why are we talking, where do you want to be? And then I assess kind of like the same thing with the failing law [00:48:00] model. Like, what can I do?

Can I, can I help first of all? And how hard is it gonna be to help you? And, and then we, we, we start to work from that perspective. I only tend to work, so my criteria for clients I work with are clients that want to grow relatively fast. And that they’re starting from a place where they can afford to work with someone like myself and that they want to grow fast.

’cause that’s what I do. I don’t do. Static management. There’s a lot of people who do, and it’s not, and it’s not poo-pooing it. A lot of firms who are happy with where they are in their general market and their general revenue level and their general size, but wish they were more profitable or wish that they weren’t as tied to the business or wish that they had better management with their employees and less turnover.

Those are all other things that are really important too, that, and I recommend other people for them because just what jazzes me is growth. I love helping law firms grow. And if [00:49:00] that’s what they want, then I’m their guy.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I, as I think about subscriptions we’ll tie it back to that. Is it a family law or a litigation practice is probably the most difficult. You may disagree with me, but in my mind, it seems like that’s the most challenging type of practice to implement a subscription into. If you can do that, you can probably do it anywhere.

The co, the,

Christopher Anderson: and not to interrupt you, but that’s the two I have. I’ve done, I’ve done subscriptions with business representations as well. I did that before the family law one, and that was, that was lots of fun.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so for your consulting firm, the firms you consult with and you maybe help this implement subscription or the other services you, you provide, it’s, it, it, it’s not just family law firms? Correct. It’s any type of firm or so any firm that just wants to grow.

Christopher Anderson: yep. State, I’ve worked with estate planning firms, medical malpractice firms family law firms business law firms. I’m trying to think of and like I’m looking at, at all the clients. But yeah, it, it’s, it’s, I don’t need to know your practice [00:50:00] area. Like my medical malpractice firms, like, I don’t know the medicine.

I, you know, I couldn’t jump into court and prosecute a medical malpractice case. Criminal defense has some of the other ones but that’s not important. Like I understand your business model and I understand how the inside of the firm works. That’s where I help. You know, I’m not there to help you be a better lawyer.

Most of my clients, I presume, are just fine in that regard.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so we’re coming up almost on our time here. I have one more question and then we’ll, we’ll wrap up. And,

Christopher Anderson: You bet.

Jonathan Hawkins: For law firm owners out there that are, you know, anywhere in their journey, we can, you can pick a place, but any low hanging fruit or any advice that you would give them if they want to grow?

Well, let’s just say they want to grow, they don’t wanna maintain what’s, you know, top 1, 2, 3 pieces of advice you’d give them?

Christopher Anderson: The first one is, again, you know, I hope I’m not being repetitive on your show, but this is so important. Like, it’s so [00:51:00] critically important. Like nothing else really matters is why. Why do you want to grow? And if it’s a financial reason, like, I just want more money because I want a Bugatti, that’s fine. Right? Most of the clients I start working with don’t know the answer to that question. Again, just like the family law clients, right? I say I’m so boring. But then, so that’s where we spend our time. And the more they spend that time before they meet with me, the better because then we can get a little bit further, a little bit deeper. And the clients that are the most fun to work with are those who have a different reason than their own personal lifestyle.

I’ll work with the personal lifestyle ones.

I’ve helped people achieve some pretty extraordinary lifestyles. That’s not what drives New Leaf family. We’re trying to change the way that people resolve disputes, like consumers resolve disputes in America. That’s what we’re trying to do. We think it’s broken, and we think [00:52:00] that a society that does not have a populace that believes that there’s an effective way to resolve disputes is a society that’s in trouble.

And if we look around us, we may think that. That’s one of the reasons we’re where we are. And we think, you know, I’m not a politician. This is my contribution is helping families and others believe that they have access to a process and to, and to legal advisors who can help them resolve their disputes in a better way. But so bringing it back to your question, it’s the same question for why you want to grow. If you’ve got a big reason like that, even better. If you’ve got a medium sized reason, that’s okay too. Like whatever. But we just gotta be clear on that. Why? Because growth requires change and humans we’re not that good at that. We’re not built to be. We have this thing in our brain called an amygdala that is hard wired into our [00:53:00] most basic. Way of thinking to avoid change. That’s its job. Because where, you know, the, the amygdalas just in and they’re going like, well, whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t killed us. Don’t know that about the new stuff, so let’s just keep doing, you know, like, that’s, that’s so hardwired into us.

So in order to move on from that, we’ve gotta have a powerful reason. So, you know, I’m not getting all Simon Seneca on us, but we gotta get to the why you want to grow first and that, so that’s, that’s the big, big one. And everything falls from there. You know, then I think it’s also important to know what you’re not willing to do. You know, oh, I’m not willing to work 50 hours a week. I wanna work only 30. I’m not willing to. Try a new practice area. I’m not willing to open another office. I’m not willing to hire new people.

That’s a big one. I get like, I don’t wanna manage any more people. So knowing why you want to grow and knowing what you’re not willing to do are two really good things to start [00:54:00] with. But the rest, that’s the art baby. And that’s I should write a book, probably will. But other than that, the people I work with fall into are such individuals that I would, I would hate to paint with a broad brush, but everybody’s gotta know why.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, if you write the book, let me know. ’cause I, I definitely, I’ll be the first one to buy a copy. So Christopher, thanks for coming on. I wanna plug your, your podcast again. Unbillable hour. You know, I remember that, you know, I’ve been into podcast forever, but this one’s been around. I I looked it up.

I mean, at least 15 years, I think. I mean that’s,

Christopher Anderson: It’s, yeah. Could. Yeah. Yeah, I

Jonathan Hawkins: it’s, that’s impressive. You know, and when you started it, it was a lot harder to do a podcast back then than it is today. Way easier. Still, still, I mean. Still takes work, but so 15 years, that is impressive consistency. So kudos to that. Everybody out there, if you haven’t checked it out, you go check out unbillable hour.

Really good [00:55:00] podcast. How, what’s the best way, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, maybe to get on your list for consulting or ask you whatever, refer you a case or maybe even uh, say, Hey, how can I join your firm? What’s the best way to find you?

Christopher Anderson: you bet. If you, if, if you’d like to have a discovery call with me just to consider working with me or just, just. A pioneer future. You can reach christopher@sunnysidelaw.com and or you can check out sunnyside law.com. It’s a very rudimentary website ’cause we honestly just don’t do much with it.

So just reach out christopher@sunnysidelaw.com. When I reach back to you, there’ll be a link we can schedule if you’re interested in working with newly family in Colorado or elsewhere. We are opening in other states. 2026 is a big expansion year for us. We are opening offices and our favorite way to do it is to find a lawyer who just wants to practice law who would like to join the firm.

And, you know, you’ll train with our team or whatever. Just reach out to, me again, Christopher at NewLeaf [00:56:00] family. And those are the two best ways to get with us. Obviously you can check out our websites at NewLeaf family and you know, learn more about the firm before you do that or not. Just get, you know, jump on and we’ll schedule a time to check.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, Christopher, again, thank you for coming on. I, I’m really, really intrigued about what you are doing and what you’ve done. I think that’s just really, really cool stuff. So, thanks for coming on and, and sharing it with me and sharing it with everybody else.

Christopher Anderson: Thanks. My absolute pleasure. It’s been, it’s been a delight and thank you for having me on the show.

 

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 [00:57:00] law firm founders.