Turn $30 Tasks Into $3000 Hours for Your Law Firm
What if the key to making $3,000 an hour was simply stopping the work you're doing right now? Most law firm owners are trapped in $30-an-hour tasks, drowning in emails, distractions, and low-value work. But what if you could flip the script—prioritize like a CEO, delegate with confidence, and scale beyond what you thought possible? In this guide, I break down the exact system I used to transform my earnings and my firm. The question is: Are you ready to step up and take control of your time?
Transcript
Richard James: I worked with a particular law firm, a client of mine for a long time, and I helped him go from $55 and 38 cents an hour to $3,358 an hour in just a couple of years. And how did I do that? Well, I use this seven step system about to share with you and after this video, you're going to be able to do the exact same thing too.
So let's break into it. Shall we?
nding or investing your time [:You're doing the 30 an hour hack. Let's pay attention to this. How do we do it? Well, we have to do a time study.
So, real quick, I know, time studies don't sound super sexy or super exciting. I get it. But when I was a young entrepreneur, I hired a consultant and he happened to come on the day when we were putting together new desks and when he walked into the office, I was underneath the desk with my DeWalt screwdriver, screwing in screws, putting together my IKEA desks for my team.
thought to myself, well, why [:So what did he have me do? He had me do a time study. Well, what did we discover when I did the time study? Well, we sat down and we just started saying, exactly, when do we start every single day? And what do we do in 15 to 30 minute increments? And we're asking ourselves, how many emails do we receive?
u interrupted by things like [:And fundamentally, we just want to add it all up. And we want to get a total, and we want to be able to do it by category, so we understand where we're spending our time on revenue generating activity, or we're spending time on 30 an hour hats. Here's a little inside secret. When I did my time study, you know what I found out?
I wasn't spending most of my time fixing desks, but I was spending most of my time being the chief technology officer of our firm. I happen to be pretty good with computers, and a number of my team were older, chronologically accomplished, let's say. They were wonderful at what they did, they just didn't know much more than, you know, monitor, mouse, keyboard.
fix their computer, because [:What did I do? Well, that leads us to the very second point.
The second step is to prioritize.
What do we have to prioritize? We have to prioritize the work that we do and make sure that we're only working on those things we should be working on. Let me illustrate that for you. So if you look at your work like a pyramid, the work at the very top is the most important work that you should be doing.
[: So, Elon Musk talked about, [:So put whatever feelings you have about Elon Musk aside, good or bad, because this point is just about leverage. So Elon Musk, if you don't know, owns companies like Tesla, SpaceX, right? Twitter, now known as X. Or formally known as Twitter. And so when he bought these companies in the early days, he said, you know, I was making $10,000 decisions.
om company to company as the [:And that's how he wears the billion dollar an hour hat. Because he's just found the ultimate form of leverage. Now your company's not going to do a billion dollars. Probably. But you certainly can get to the point where you're working on the 3, or 10, 000 hour. Now, here's the secret. Your job is to maximize doing this at all times.
u. And the way that you make [:Now, if you're like most attorneys, you say, yeah, rich, I tried that and they just screwed it up ever happened to you. I'm sure it probably did. And guess what? That just means that we're the wrong leader. my mentor told me, if my team sucks, I suck as a leader. That was hurtful. But it was true.
And so we have to up our game as being leaders if we're going to get to the 3, dollar an hour hours. Okay? The only way we can do that is by being better leaders. The only way we can do that is by clearly identifying the tasks we should be doing and shouldn't be doing, do the things we should be doing, and constantly pushing down the things we shouldn't be doing.
Now, here's a pro tip. Pro tip.
Look, if [:Okay.
his free law firm time study [:Go ahead and go there now and grab that free tool.
Step number three is who so when we look at this pyramid and we say we're going to push work down Right. And that shouldn't be like down like less than don't misunderstand me. It should be lower skill, right? So it's either lower license, lower skill, whatever, but it's not like they're not less than humans.
wn. But the question is, who [:Right? And you've already stated in your own mind, some of you, I can't trust some of my team to do this. and I get that. And so, you've got to make sure you have the right who on your team. Which means, as a leader, you have to have the ability to attract good quality talent. But most importantly, you have to have the ability to build a farm team.
Here's what I mean. When you attract good talent, rather than trying to attract good talent up at the top of the pyramid, what I want you to do is I want you to attract good talent down here at the bottom couple of rungs. Because then they show themselves to have excellent character, they show themselves to have excellent work ethic, and then we can start to rise them up.
Sure, some of these [: %. [:And oftentimes they want to be working for a business that's growing and gives them massive growth opportunity. That may or may not be who you are. And so if you want to get great things done and push work down to somebody, my suggestion is find really good people at the lower levels and then raise them up.
We call that building a farm team.
s. But hey, I was born [:So I still have fond memories of the 90s in the New York Yankees. So if you want to get results and you want to be able to figure out your who, you're going to have to push your work down to somebody that's on your farm team that you're raising up and finding good quality talent and training them to be the best that they can possibly be.
Which brings us to our fourth most important point.
The fourth point is that you must delegate.
Now, delegation is not abdication. So we're not suggesting that we're giving this to somebody and we're going to forget about it. The art of delegation is really, really important to understand. And so when you're delegating something to somebody, we have to make sure that the person knows how to do the work.
nows how to do the work? You [:You're the one who answered the phone. It went to your cell phone when you were in court and you went to your voicemail when you were in court and you answered at night. Until you found somebody who can answer the phones for you. And then you were the one who filed all of your documents. You were the one who took care of making sure that you timestamped all of the mail that came in.
and you understand what, if [:So you need to mentor them. Otherwise If you don't mentor them, you're going to make sure that whoever you mentored before, whether you did it right or did it wrong, or somebody else who mentored them, is going to then going to give them a copy of a copy of a copy, right? And what I mean is, if you ever took a piece of paper and put it in a copy machine, and then you took the copy and you put that in a copy machine, and you took a copy and put that in a copy machine, the next result is always worse.
, you do it, and they watch, [:And then you review. And then you score them doing it on their own.
pass based on the score you [:Now that they've got it, you can trust that they can actually go do it. Which leads me to the next point.
Step number five is inspect.
You should always inspect what you expect by report. And that's the biggest point here. You have to have a report. to make sure that you know what's happening, right? You want to make sure that what you want to be happening is what is actually happening. Because oftentimes, what you think is happening, what is actually happening, are two completely different things.
so that systems can kick out [:As you get bigger, you end up having managers that inspect these things and then the managers report to you. But for now, in the beginning, your job is to develop the reports. But this brings me to my next point.
In order for you to be able to do this. You absolutely must time block.
I do about the legal work I [:I get it. For now, you have to probably do the legal work. But at some point, we're going to have to replace you in the majority of the legal work. Don't worry, if you like being a lawyer, we can have you do the work that you want to do and not have to do the work that you don't want to do, and we can time block for it.
But we absolutely must lay out time on the calendar. How do you do that? Well, the first thing that we do is we time block for emails and phone calls so that we only do them during these blocks. The second thing that we do. is we make sure that we time block for clients. So no more, hey boss, a client's on the phone, can you talk to him?
Then you have to time block [:You should have a sign on the front of your desk that says, Do not knock unless there's a fire and I'm the only man with a bucket of water. That's it. They shouldn't interrupt you. And the only way they know that is if everybody lives by a calendar and they don't bother you. I used to think open door policies were good.
I'm here to tell you, you need to take a 2x4 and put it across your door and don't let anybody in. The only way you're going to get to the 3, or 10, 000 on our hat. is if you can actually do the work you're supposed to be doing. And you can't do that if time vampires steal your time. The way around that is to make sure you time block.
priority work you should be [:We have to make sure we're building systems. So we have to create strategy time to build out systems. We've got to find time to make this work. The good news is many things can be done one to many. The other good thing is, is that. Pareto's Law, right? We know Parkinson's Law, 80 20. Pareto's Law basically says the amount of time we give something to happen is the amount of time it'll actually take us to do the task.
utting them inside of a time [:And anything else you need to do that you maybe you shouldn't be doing because there's nobody else to do it, stuff it into these different blocks and you'll be surprised how much you'll get done with a tremendous amount of focus. But none of this happens unless you get to the very next step.
The next step is that you must Trust. At some point, you're going to have, identified what you can do and what you can't do, what you should do, what you shouldn't do, what your maximum hours are made for. At some point, you're going to clearly identify the who that you can start to give these things to.
You're going to start to delegate and you're going to mentor. You're going to time block your schedule. You're going to go through this entire process. At some point, you just have to trust that it's all going to be okay. A lot of times, lawyers You know, look, arguably so like things to be perfect and I get it and I understand it.
years and so I've [:Pressed on you or you had it from birth when you went through law school, from what I understand, they trained you to mitigate risk and tried to be perfect at every possible turn. Business isn't like that. Business is messy business. We oftentimes make more mistakes than we don't make mistakes, especially in marketing and sales.
d and then you have to trust [:Sure, protect your license. Of course, don't put your license at peril. Don't misunderstand me. But most of the things lawyers stress about are not a licensing issue. Most of the things they stress about is just whether their opinion is, was it perfect? Not everything is going to be perfect. Perfect is the enemy.
of done. Trust, and I promise you, you are going to be much more successful earning much more dollars per hour than you did before because you developed leverage with your team. Now I've got a bonus for you. I hope you like bonuses. I like bonuses. Let's see if we can give you a bonus piece of information.
he business W O T B when you [:The highest billable hour is that you work. On the business and you start to block out time where allows you to maximize your dollar per hour because you're working on systems, you're working on marketing, you're working on sales, working on the business. Here's a new formula for you to think about. The old formula was.
uals legal work. For some of [:That's what I went to school for. I own a professional practice. I should be focusing. On the legal work. I understand that. And I can sympathize with you. But at the end of the day, most law firm owners aren't making more than 80, 000 a year in profit. As a matter of fact, the other day I was talking to a law firm owner who did 160, 000 a month in gross sales and kept 000 to themselves.
, and they had their formula [:If you do, and you did that right now at the end of this video, you're going to start earning more money today.
Hey, look, if you'd like to learn how to go from 30 an hour to over 3, 000 an hour, but you're not sure where to start, I created a really simple tool. Go to MyLawFirmSecret. com and just download this free law firm time study tool. It'll get you started. It'll show you to break it out into categories and it'll help this whole process be a little bit easier for you.
Go ahead and go there now and grab that free tool.
O B. This is your bonus Work [:That's really funny. That's really funny. Alright. Okay.
