The 3 Types of Law Firm Owners – Which One Are You?
Are you running a law firm… or just running yourself into the ground?
Most attorneys never break free from the daily grind because they don’t realize they’ve already chosen the path they’re on. There are three types of law firm owners and only ONE of them builds a truly profitable, scalable business.
Which one are you?
The 3 Law Firm Owner Types:
- The Priest or Rabbi: Sees the law as a calling, not a business. These attorneys dedicate themselves to service but often struggle financially and have nothing saved for retirement.
- The Professional Practitioner: A highly skilled lawyer who still operates like a solo. They take pride in their work but remain trapped in client work, with no real exit strategy or scalable growth.
- The Business Owner: A law firm owner who builds systems, teams, and profit. These are the attorneys who take control of client acquisition, workflow, profitability, and hiring so the firm can grow without them being in every single case.
If you’re tired of working long hours and not seeing the financial results you deserve, this episode will challenge you to shift your mindset and finally build a law firm that works for YOU.
In our next episode, we’ll break down the four levels of business ownership, helping you identify exactly where you stand and what it takes to reach the next level.
Transcript
YPM EP097 - The 3 Types of Law Firm Owners – Which One Are You?
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Richard James: [:Richard James: That's right. I'm talking about you, the attorney that owns the law firm.
Richard James: The reason, it's because you make a decision about the type of owner that you are or the type of attorney that you are, and it comes into three basic categories.
Richard James: I'll tell you, After working with a thousand attorneys for over 15 years and building a law firm myself from zero to three and a half million dollars in annual gross sales, we've determined that deciding which type of lawyer you are going to be. Determines the trajectory that you're going to be on.
Richard James: you want to know exactly where you're headed and what makes up these three different categories so you can make the proper decision and be able to head in the right direction.
Richard James: So there are, as I said, three types of law firm owners that I usually see, and the first is what I call either the priest or the rabbi.
rm owner actually sees their [:Richard James: Many of those attorneys that I've met through the years, especially when they're in their seventies or eighties, we'll call that chronologically accomplished. I find them at the end of the story and they have nothing saved.
Richard James: while they serve their community, their community really isn't serving them. And they're wondering what they're going to do. because social security just isn't enough for them.
Richard James: So my advice to you is raise your prices a little bit
Richard James: If that's you, I wish you the best, but we're probably not a direct alignment because I see a law firm actually as a business, and so if you see the law firm as a calling, we're on opposing sides necessarily.
Richard James: So that brings me to the second primary type of law firm owner.
e call this the professional [:Richard James: ~The challenge that my grandfather had is he really built himself a job.~
Richard James: ~I. Much like my grandfather, my father did the same thing. he built a professional practice when he went to exit, the valuation wasn't as high as it could have been had he built a business.
~
Richard James: ~professional practitioners face two primary obstacles. ~
Richard James: The first is time.
Richard James: They are facing this ticking time bomb of a clock that at some point they're not gonna want to have. Another client, another consult.
Richard James: Another trial.
Richard James: They're not gonna wanna draft another brief.
Richard James: My good friend Steve Dega, who was a professional basketball player in Australia, drafted by the LA Lakers likes to say that you only have so many jumps in your legs at some point you just can't jump. one more time. You can't make that one more basket.
Richard James: } And so that is problematic when you run out of time.
rving their client and their [:Richard James: The business owner is paying attention to acquiring more clients, making sure they're wildly profitable.
Richard James: And building capacity by having other lawyers serve their clients.
Richard James: And what happens are the more and more business owners there are in your community that happen to be law firms, each one of them take just a little bit from your practice.
Richard James: And so your practice either stagnates or starts to erode over time until what's left, isn't quite much
Richard James: or
Richard James: I'd give you two pieces of advice if you want to remain in the professional practitioner stage.
Richard James: The first is to raise your fees.
Richard James: You just [:Richard James: I've worked with enough of you. You're not charging enough whether you charge per hour or you charge per flat fee the second, get yourself a excellent executive assistant, somebody who's great with basic technology.
Richard James: Things like Excel or Google Sheets and Google Docs and those types of things, who can manipulate numbers and put things together, and hopefully they came from some sort of business background or business education because they're gonna help you def fend against those number one threats and they're gonna help you manage your business better so that it can be more profitable and you can start to push off all of the work that's not legal work to them.
Richard James: So the third choice the owner of a law firm has to make in order to get out of their own way is to whether or not they want to become a business owner.
m an attorney who happens to [:Richard James: This is when it starts to move in the direction where we want to be. Because law firm owners who see themselves as business owners, have systems that run their law firm and people that run their systems
Richard James: for the business owner, the four areas that they have is new client attraction. That's the first pipeline and system they pay attention to.
Richard James: The second is workflow, because once the clients come in, you have to serve the clients in a way that makes them satisfied. But three, most importantly, they do this.
Richard James: Profitably, so they're paying attention to profit.
Richard James: And the fourth, they're looking at talent and they're building and leading a team.
Richard James: So the business owner is really the secret sauce when running a law firm because it allows you to ascend to the next level.
you, if you're stuck in some [:Richard James: I get it. There's a reason for that.
Richard James: But right now you gotta make sure that your pricing is correct.
Richard James: You've gotta have an incredible executive assistant that helps you take all of the admin things off your plate.
Richard James: And you have to focus your attention on marketing and sales in the new client attraction.
Richard James: That's where it all starts.
Richard James: If we get our pricing right. We pay attention to new client attraction pipeline that leads to profitability so that we can hire the people to actually get the work done.
Richard James: I hope this was informative for you.
Richard James: You understand what decisions you have to make as a law firm owner as to what type of owner you're going to be.
Richard James: In the next video, I'd really like to share with you the four types of business ownership levels so that you can start to understand where are you at as a business owner.
nd then ultimately, where do [: