Episode 262 3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Hanging Out My Shingle
Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers? Ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or 2 to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Davina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love.
Intro:Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Devina.
Davina:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And recently, another woman lawyer asked me what I wished I had known before I opened my own law practice. So I thought that would be an excellent topic for today's episode. As I know, if one of you is asking, then others are probably gonna benefit from knowing my answers to this question as well.
Davina:But before I share with you what I wish I had done, I wanted to share a client success story with you. Devony Wells Gibson is the founder and CEO of Wells Gibson Family Law and also the founder of the prenup queen brand. When Devony decided to start her own law firm, she wanted to make sure she built a strong foundation. So she joined the wealthy woman lawyer league pretty soon after hanging out her own shingle, and that was about 3 years ago. Since then, Devaney has scaled her law firm significantly.
Davina:She now leads a team of 5, including 2 other attorneys in addition to herself and is on the precipice of achieving her $1,000,000 law firm growth dream. Devony says, I'm it's absolutely crazy what you can do with the right guidance and support system on your side, and I could not agree more. If you wanna know more about Devonni, Wells Gibson family law, and the prenup prenup queen, then follow her on Instagram at wellsgibsonfamilylawandaddtheprenupqueen. Adequate guidance and support were things that I felt were missing when I opened my law firm straight out of law school. And I wonder how much more successful I would have been sooner had I had the right guidance and support in the early days of growing my law firm.
Davina:So this leads me to the the the three things I wish I had known before hanging out my own shingle. The number one thing I wish I had known was that being a baby lawyer, even though I was 42 years old at the time and had already had a whole other career prior to becoming a lawyer, and being a baby business owner at the same time is a whole lot harder than it looks from the outside, and it leaves little room for other priorities at that stage. Truthfully, if someone had told me that, I probably would not have listened to them because I'm pretty hard headed that way. And I went to law school with the express purpose of starting and owning and growing my own law firm. Still, with almost 2 decades of hindsight and wisdom, I realized I probably should have explored support options before making this leap.
Davina:I naively thought that by joining all the lawyer associations out there, I would receive that support. But all those organizations did were sort of pile on to my workload by pushing me into volunteer leadership positions before I even had my feet under me as a lawyer and a new business owner. And I see people make this mistake a lot when they're first starting their law firm business. I was told I needed to join these organizations for, quote, unquote, networking purposes, but I quickly discovered that they did not yield, as many results, as as many referrals as much as they required in time and effort. So it wasn't really an even exchange.
Davina:And though I did not realize it at the time, I was not in the phase of growth in my business where I had the capacity for volunteerism. There is a time and place in the growth of your business where you may have more time to participate as a board member on a bar association or in an end of court. But at that time, I had no team, I had no systems, and I had no experience in running a busy law firm practice. So at that particular phase of my business, I really made the by volunteering for leadership positions in business and legal organizations. I really let my ego make those decisions, truth be told, for me because I was so thrilled to be picked.
Davina:I was so thrilled to be a part of the legal community, to be asked to join, and then to be selected for leadership positions so early in my career in those organizations. It was really my ego that was making those decisions because I was just, you know, happy to be picked and be a part of the team. Right? What I did not realize at the time was that the people in those organizations were not wrapping me up in some more support and community as much as they were passing along responsibilities that they no longer wanted to bear. I was fresh meat.
Davina:Basically, someone who they could offload offload work to. I don't think it was malicious on their part and I don't think they even realized the negative impact that that would have on me and my mental health that it would hasten the burnout that I felt. Maybe they thought they were helping me. I don't know. The the only thing I know is that it was not the right time and place for me to focus my attention on the larger legal community and volunteering.
Davina:I wish for those first few years, I had just said no thank you and focused on what I needed and what my business needed at the time. I really needed to learn how to be an excellent lawyer and be an excellent businessperson without that added pressure. The second thing I wish I had known ties into the first thing, and that is that I needed more than subject matter mentors. I did manage to cultivate relationships with a few other lawyers who provided guidance and insight in helping me become a better lawyer. So shout out to the family law attorney extraordinaire, Terry Bledsoe, Prevere adoption law attorney, Linda Barnby, and the honorable Deborah Nelson, to name a few of the women who offered me guidance and support.
Davina:And there were a few men as well, to be, frank. I honestly do not know where I've been without these amazing men and women who offered me, guidance when I sought it out. But I feel like I probably didn't seek it out as much, in a much organized way as I should have or intentional way as I should have. So with the benefit of hindsight, I would have changed 2 things. 1, I would have leaned more on the knowledge and experience of more experienced lawyers and reached out more often with more intention, rather than trying to go it alone all the time.
Davina:I think it's critical as a lawyer to learn how to figure things out on your own. That is definitely one of the things that it's the skill that we're taught in law school is that it's our job to sort of solve the problem. But I've always tended to be more of a low ranger than is probably healthy. I invested a ton of time and money in CLDs and trainings to teach myself, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think important that I think it's critical to your success as a lawyer.
Davina:But I wish I had developed deeper relationships with other lawyers who were experienced in my practice areas at the time. I think I would have struggled less, and I probably would have had a whole been a whole lot less self critical if I understand understood that being a new lawyer is hard for most of us. And one mentor of mine gave me a great piece of advice that was, it's okay to say you don't know. You are not expected to be a walking talking encyclopedia of legal knowledge. It's okay to say, let me do a little research and I'll get back to you.
Davina:And that really was my saving grace and one of the things that helped me as I was trying to figure out how to be a good lawyer without the guidance of an in house mentor or boss. The other thing I would have changed around this topic is that I would have sought out law firm business mentors. At the time, I didn't know that there were coaches for law firm owners. And, truthfully, there weren't very many, at least in my sphere. We didn't have the kinds of things we see on social media now.
Davina:Social media wasn't as advanced as it is. There weren't nearly as many law firm coaches, for well, law firm owners are really business owners of any kind. In fact, I only knew of 2 programs, both of which felt very cost prohibitive for me at the time as a brand new business owner. The these programs seem geared toward larger law firm lawyers, people who had teams of admins and paralegals and other attorneys working for them. And instead, I leaned a lot on the Florida Bar's Law Firm Management training, which had some good points, but it really deals with the basics of law firm management and with the goal of protecting consumers.
Davina:The bar associate bar associations are designed not to protect lawyers, but to protect consumers from lawyers, more than helping lawyers grow profitable, sustainable businesses. If that's something you're looking to do is get some helps, get some coaching with the business aspect of your law firm, then click the link in the show notes to schedule an appointment with me to discuss how we may be able to help you because of this lack when I felt like I needed it. I was really motivated to create a program specifically for women law firm owners, to help you get the support that you need in the business aspect of growing, operating, and owning your law firm business. The third thing I wish I had known before I started my business was that hiring the right people is the key to growth, and the sooner, the better. For example, I probably waited too long to hire a good legal assistant.
Davina:My first assistant was kind and she was sweet, but she was not very skilled. And she didn't expect much of me, and I didn't expect much of her, which seemed to be fine at the time, but really was not the best business move. The better move would have been to hire an experienced legal assistant who could really take some of the things off my plate early out of the gate so that I could focus more on deepening my legal knowledge and also on growing the firm. But I was scared not only about paying someone who would bring more value to the firm, but also about managing a more experienced person. Someone who, although they weren't a lawyer, they might know more about how legal office functions, or they might know more about legal matters than I did if they came with experience working in a law office with similar practice areas.
Davina:And I didn't know that I could manage someone like that. In fact, real growth did not begin to happen until I asked my my friend from law school to partner with me about a year into my business. She graduated, very about the same time I did, and, we had become good friends after law school. And I invited her to join me in the business. And when I did that, we moved to a bigger, better office space almost immediately because my little one room office wasn't gonna be sufficient.
Davina:And suddenly, that made me feel more legit, and that's really when we started cooking with Greece. We were hiring people. We were developing better systems. We were cranking up our marketing strategy and really, scaling our law firm pretty quickly. I don't often advise women to partner up just so that they could feel that they have someone with whom they could share the emotional burdens of growing a business because I think working within to build your own confidence is better.
Davina:But I did do that, and that did work for me for a time. And fortunately for me, I had a great partner. And when we split up, we could rely on our partnership agreement to help us make the transition super easy. Just like with a prenup, we created the agreement at the outset of our relationship when everyone was in love with the idea of being partners. And that served us really well when it was time to make changes because we had clear instructions on how to handle that breakup at a time when our emotions were heightened.
Davina:So I definitely recommend that if you do decide to partner up. I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. I'll be back next week with more content created specifically for women law firm owners because you are my people, And I'm so appreciative for each and every one of you listening, sharing this podcast, reviewing it, reaching out to me to let me know how much you are loving the podcast and the content. It means so much. We are at a 109,645 downloads to date, and I thank you for that.
Davina:I I really appreciate it. It feels great to know that I'm not screaming into an abyss and that you guys are really getting a lot of benefit out of this podcast. So I'll talk to you next week. Bye for now.
Intro:If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthy woman lawyer.com to learn more about how we help clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.
