Episode 361 | Plan 2027 Like a Law Firm Leader and Owner, Not Like a Solo Lawyer
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 two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina 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. 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.
Intro:Now here's Devina.
Davina:Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm attorney Devina Frederick, founder of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a law firm growth strategy and business coaching company focused exclusively on women law firm owners. This podcast and our program are for women law firm owners who want to build firms that generate wealth and run without their constant presence. If you are feeling on the verge of burnout because you are overworking and under earning, you are in the right place. You're also in the right place if you are already making good money in your firm but want more.
Davina:We love ambitious women around here. It's November, which means the year is almost over and most of us are starting to think about the year ahead. Some of us may have started long before now, whether you have already begun making lists or telling yourselves you'll figure it out over the holidays when things slow down, or are so deep in client work that 2027 feels like a problem for another day, I think you'll love this topic because it applies to every law firm owner. One of my favorite quotes relevant to this topic is from Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Davina:I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. For a long time, I kept this quote pinned up in my office. To me, it means the highest value of a plan is in the process of planning. Plans can change, but during the planning process, we can gain so much clarity about our truest desires and the beliefs behind them. So, without further ado, let's talk about strategic law firm growth planning by first examining two different types of planning.
Davina:A solo lawyer plans her year around her own labor. She asks how many cases she can take on, how many hours she can bill, and how much she can earn if she pushes a little harder than last year. Every goal on her list depends on her personal effort. She may have a beautiful office, a few staff members, and a firm name on the door. But her plan tells you she's running a practice built around herself.
Davina:A law firm leader and owner plans differently. She starts by asking what she wants her life to look like, then what her business needs to become to support that life. She thinks about the team she needs to build, the decisions only she can make, and the work she needs to hand off so that she can lead. Her plan describes how the firm will grow, not just how much harder she will work. Most women law firm owners I meet were never taught to plan like owners.
Davina:We were trained to be excellent lawyers. As high achieving women, we learned that success comes from preparation, hard work, and knowing the case better than anyone else in the room. Those habits serve us well with clients, but when we carry them into business planning, we end up writing plans that keep us at the center of everything. Here's a simple way to tell which kind of plan you've been writing. Look at your goals from this past year and ask yourself whether each one depended on you doing more or on your firm becoming more capable.
Davina:If nearly every goal came back to you working harder, you've been planning like a solo lawyer. Good news is planning like a leader and an owner is a skill you can learn. I've used the same process in my own businesses and with the women law firm owners we coach, and today I'll walk you through each step. There are five steps and the order is important. We start with personal goals, then move to business growth goals.
Davina:Next, we prioritize those goals because, let's face it, we can't do them all at once. Then, we develop a strategic approach for each of the top priorities. Finally, we get down to the tactical level, which is what you and your team will do this week, next week, and the week after that to achieve your most important goals. To help bring these steps to life, I've created another composite woman law firm owner. We'll call her Yolanda.
Davina:She's based on many of the clients I've worked with over the past almost fourteen years, and thousands I've met through this podcast, my socials, and in person. I do this for illustrative purposes and to protect any client's personal details. Details are meshed together, but the situations are true and common. Yolanda runs a family law firm. She opened her practice after several years at a mid sized firm and built a strong reputation in her community.
Davina:Clients trust her, referral sources send her cases, and her revenue has grown steadily. If you were peeking through her windows, you think she was doing well. She has two non attorney staff members. One is a paralegal who had been with her for years, and the other is a receptionist who also handled billing. Yolanda handles everything else, including every consultation, hearing, strategy, decision, new hire, and much more.
Davina:When Yolanda first came to us, she described her planning process. Every December, during the week between Christmas and New Year, she spent one afternoon at her kitchen table writing down her goals. She set a revenue target a bit higher than the year before, decided to take on more clients, and wrote the same goal at the bottom of the page she had for three years in a row to hire an associate attorney. She wants to grow, but she's also feeling burned out and a little depressed about flipping the calendar to a new year of doing the same thing over and over again and never seeing the results she desires. She's tired of answering client emails from the sidelines of her children's soccer games, so called vacations that are really work trips in a nicer location.
Davina:She feels like she works for her firm instead of her firm working for her. Yolanda's plan is a solo lawyer's plan. Let's walk through the five steps and see how it changed when she started planning like the owner of the 7 figure wealth generating law firm she wanted to build. The first step in my planning method is the one most attorneys skip entirely. Before we set a single business goal, we start with your personal goals.
Davina:The reason is simple we want to build a business that supports our personal lives, not the other way around. Otherwise, why do it? You didn't take on the risk and responsibility of owning a law firm just to create a more demanding, high stress job for yourself, did you? You did it because you wanted something more for your life, whether that's financial freedom, flexibility, security for your family, or the ability to make a bigger impact. Many women law firm owners have come to me with businesses that didn't support their personal goals.
Davina:Some weren't taking home enough money to invest in their families and their futures, even though their firms brought in substantial revenue. Others came to me because they had built businesses that have left them stressed out and on the verge of burnout. And I've seen women use their businesses to recreate traumatic relationships so that they now feel abused by the very business they created. Their firms demand everything from them and give very little back. None of those outcomes happen on purpose, of course.
Davina:They happen because the business has been built without a clear picture of the desired outcome. When you don't define what you want your firm to do for you, the firm will define it for you and it will usually ask for more of your time, more of your energy, and more of your peace of mind. Before you dive into business planning, understand not only what you want your law firm business to do for you and your life, but also attach dollar figures to all your goals and dreams. This is where many women law firm owners get tripped up. They'll tell me they only need to take home a certain amount of money.
Davina:Then a few minutes later, they'll go on to list several very costly personal goals and dreams. They want to take their entire family on international trips at least four times a year. They want to pay off their student loans or their home. They want to buy investment properties. They want to pay for all their children's college tuition.
Davina:Shockingly, most never even mention retirement, selling the business one day, or some other exit strategy. It's never crossed their minds what the end goal should be. I love hearing people's ambitious personal goals. I want every one of those dreams for you. But when we add up what they cost, the number is almost always far higher than the income the owner says she needs.
Davina:That gap is everything that's wrong with your plan. If you plan your firm around a number that's too small, you'll build a firm that's too small to provide the lifestyle you say you want. You may hit your revenue goal and still feel like you're falling behind because the goal was never connected to true costs. Long story short, you have to be willing to look at true numbers, not guesstimates, and do the math. When Yolanda did this exercise, she wrote down what she wanted for herself and her family.
Davina:She wanted to be home for dinner most nights. She wanted to take two real vacations a year without checking email and then a few short trips in between. She wanted to pay off her home early, fully fund her children's college savings, and begin investing in her own future instead of pouring every spare dollar back into the firm. She didn't put a price tag on each item until we sat down together and discussed it. When she added up those numbers, she was surprised.
Davina:The income she needed to fund the life she wanted was significantly more than she had been taking home in draws. It was also far more than she could earn by working harder on her own, and it was more than she could ever make working for another local firm. For the first time, she could see in black and white why her old plan would never get her where she wanted to go. Business planning follows clarity on your personal goals and what they cost. Once you know those numbers, the second step is to translate them into business growth goals.
Davina:Now we know how much money the firm needs to bring in for you to achieve your personal goals. That means we can work backward. If you know what you want to take home and invest each year, you can determine your paycheck, the profit your firm needs to produce, and the revenue it needs to generate to create that profit. Your revenue goal is no longer a number that's a bit higher than last year. It's a number with a purpose.
Davina:We also know who we need to hire to free up our time for some of these personal goals. This is where many firm owners underestimate what it will take. If you want to be home for dinner, take real vacations, and stop answering email at soccer games, you'll most likely need more than a right hand paralegal or a remote virtual assistant. Those roles are valuable, but they don't replace you. If you're the only attorney in your firm, you'll probably need to hire another attorney.
Davina:You may also need someone to manage the firm's operations so you're no longer the office manager on top of everything else. For Yolanda, this step made her growth goals concrete. She knew the revenue and profit her firm needed to support her personal goals. She knew she needed an associate attorney to take on a meaningful share of the casework. And she realized that she eventually needed someone to manage the day to day operations so she could step into the role of leader and owner.
Davina:Notice how different this is from her old plan. Before, hiring an associate was a vague goal at the bottom of the page. Now, it was directly connected to the life she wanted. It had become a necessity rather than a wish. By the time most firm owners finish the first two steps, they have a long list of goals.
Davina:They want to increase revenue, hire an associate, hire an operations manager, raise their fees, improve their marketing, update their technology, and create better systems. Every item on that list may be worthwhile. The third step is to prioritize because you really can't implement everything at once. It's not realistic or feasible when you are still working so much in the business. Implementation can take a little time, but in the end, it's so worth it.
Davina:Also, you try to work on everything at once, you end up making a little progress on many things and finishing very few. Your attention is divided, your team is confused about what matters most, and the urgent demands of client work fill whatever space is left, at the end of the year, you look back and see a list of half finished projects. Not fully understanding the most important problem you need to solve in your business to create the transformation you desire also leaves you susceptible to every salesperson in your email inbox. If you don't know your priorities, it's super easy to be swayed to purchase the next shiny object. When you are clear and focused on your top priorities, you can easily say no to those opportunities with much more confidence.
Davina:Yolanda's top priority became hiring an associate attorney because nearly every other goal depended on it. Her second priority was adjusting her fee structure and the types of cases she accepted so the firm had the needed capital to hire and support her profit goals. Everything else, including her operations hire and her technology upgrades, moved to later in the year. That was hard for her because she wanted to fix everything at once. But choosing two priorities instead of 10 was what finally allowed her to finish them.
Davina:Once you know your priorities, the fourth step is to develop a strategic approach for achieving each one. A goal tells you where you want to go. A strategy tells you how you're going to get there. Many firm owners skip this step and jump straight from the goal to the to do list, which is one reason their goals stall. Without a strategy, you're making decisions one task at a time instead of following a clear direction.
Davina:For each priority, ask yourself what must be true for this goal to happen? What resources will it require? Who needs to be involved? What obstacles are likely to get in the way, and how will you handle them? What will success look like when you get there?
Davina:For Yolanda's associate hire, her strategy included several pieces. She needed a clear job description that described the role and the type of attorney who would thrive in her firm. She needed a compensation plan that she could afford and that would attract the right candidate. She needed a recruiting approach that went beyond posting a job ad and hoping for the best. She also needed a plan for training and supervising her new associate so the hire would free up her time rather than create more work.
Davina:For her fee goal, her strategy included reviewing which matters were most profitable, deciding which types of cases she would stop accepting, updating her fees and engagement agreements, and preparing her team to communicate those changes to prospective clients. Once each priority had a strategy, Yolanda wasn't facing a vague goal anymore. She had a clear path with defined pieces. And that made the next step possible. The fifth step is where your plan meets your calendar.
Davina:This is the tactical level, what you will do this week, then next week, then the week after that to achieve your most important goals. One of the biggest challenges to goal accomplishment and growth transformation is a failure to implement. Why is implementation such a struggle? There are many reasons, but here are a few I've seen and heard. One, I'm too busy right now.
Davina:This sounds like, I'll start after this trial is over, but then there's another trial and another trial and another trial because you are a trial lawyer. Or I'll start after, insert school holiday, but then there's a holiday every month of the year. I'll start after spring break or summer vacation, or after school starts back or after the holidays. Here's the hard to swallow pill. Life is going to life.
Davina:And if you want to scale your business, you must make the choice to keep moving forward on your plans even as life outside the firm is moving forward. The longer you postpone implementing your ideas, the worse it's going to get. The most successful women law firm owners I know have just as many family obligations, community commitments, and other outside interference as you do. The difference is how they prioritize their time to initiate and follow through on the right activities. No matter what life throws at them, they stay persistent in taking action to achieve their goals.
Davina:Two. I'm too burned out. This sounds like, I'm so burned out that I can't add anything to my plate right now. I dread the hiring process. What if it doesn't work out and I have to start all over again?
Davina:I don't have time to train someone, but I can afford to hire a more experienced person, so I'll avoid it and focus on getting the work done. After it's done, I'll start to think about it. Of course, that never works because the work is never done. Successful law firm leaders understand that nothing changes unless they decide to change it, put in the effort, and persist until they get what they want. In my opinion, these failures happen not just because of a negative mindset or beliefs that no longer serve you, but because you may not be using the right techniques to make implementation easier.
Davina:It doesn't have to be so hard, but it's easy to blow things up in our minds and make change feel impossible. At the tactical level, you break each strategy into specific actions and assign them to specific dates and times. And then you put them on your calendar and hold yourself accountable for doing those tasks during the time you set aside to do them. My mantra is if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't get done. If it's on the calendar, it always gets done.
Davina:For Yolanda, her first twelve weeks focused on her two priorities. In the early weeks, she finalized her job description and compensation plan. Next, she reached out to her network and began interviewing candidates. At the same time, she reviewed her case mix, updated her fees, and trained her team on the new fee schedule. Every week had defined actions, and she checked her progress each week.
Davina:She also had accountability, which is an essential part of making the tactical level work. She had a coach, me, reviewing her progress, providing advice and guidance when needed, and a community of other women law firm owners working towards similar goals which she could tap for support when she needed it. Plus, she had access to my proven framework to help her with the granular details. When a big trial landed in the middle of her twelve weeks, as trials always do, her hiring project didn't disappear because she had involved her team in the process. By the end of her first twelve weeks, Yolanda had raised her fees, stopped taking the type of cases that drained her time, and identified a strong associate candidate.
Davina:Early in her second twelve week period, she made the hire. She then focused on training her associate and handing off a meaningful share of her caseload. By the end of that year, Yolanda had accomplished the goals she had written at the bottom of her list for three years in a row, and she had done it in about six months. She had stopped handling everything herself and instead prioritized her time to work on the activities only she could do. She was home for dinner far more often.
Davina:And for the first time since she opened her firm, she took a two week vacation without checking her email even once. The difference wasn't that Yolanda worked harder. She was already working as hard as anyone could. The difference was that she stopped planning like a solo lawyer and started planning like a law firm leader and owner. She started with her life, connected it to her business, chose her priorities, built a strategy for each one, and executed one week at a time.
Davina:Before we wrap up, let's talk about timing because this is where many firm owners lose a year without realizing it. Most people think of January as the starting line, but quite frankly, January is late in the game to start planning. If you wait too late when January arrives instead of executing a plan, you're just beginning to create one. By the time your plan is ready, a good part of your first quarter is already gone. The firm owners who have their best years are the ones who plan in October, November, or even December.
Davina:When January 1 arrives, they already know their personal goals and what those goals cost. They know their business growth goals and their priorities. They have a strategy for each priority and a plan for their first week. They're executing on day one instead of starting from scratch. Many of the decisions that drive growth also take time to set in motion.
Davina:A new hire can take months to recruit and train. A change in fees needs to be reflected in your engagement agreements and communicated to your team. When you plan now, you can start those wheels turning sooner. So they're already gaining momentum when the new year arrives. So here's what I'd like you to consider.
Davina:If you've been planning your firm like a solo lawyer and you are finally ready to take your law firm to the next level and think differently about how to get there, then I invite you to reach out to Wealthy Woman Lawyer ASAP. Our calendar is booking up fast for the remainder of the year, but we still have one or two spots available for right fit clients. At Wealthy Woman Lawyer, we work with women law firm owners on law firm growth strategy and business coaching, including the planning process we've walked through today. We help you clarify your personal goals and what they cost, translate them into business growth goals, prioritize what matters most, build a strategy for each priority, and execute with focused accountability and community support that keeps you moving forward when client work gets demanding. Spots are limited, and they become harder to get the closer we get to January.
Davina:If you start now, you'll have a jump start on 2027. You'll have a plan already in motion on January 1, and you won't lose your first twelve weeks while you're still figuring out your goals. Here's how to get started. Visit www.wealthywomanlawyer.com and click Apply. Complete the Practice Growth Needs Assessment which helps us understand where your firm is today and where you want it to go.
Davina:Then schedule an appointment with Wealthy Woman Lawyer to talk about your growth goals and whether working together makes sense. As you think about how you want to close out this year and move into the next, consider this: clients will always surprise you, team members will come and go, and life will happen in ways none of us can predict, but the clarity you gain from planning about what you want your life to look like, what your business needs to become, and what matters most right now will help you more easily navigate those changes. You deserve a business that supports your life rather than one that takes it over. That kind of business starts with planning like a law firm leader and owner. Thank you for listening to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast.
Davina:If this episode was helpful, please share it with another woman law firm owner who's starting to think about 2027. I'll see you next week.
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 wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.
