Year-End Wins: Motivating Your Legal Team

I've got a release , or re-release , for you today for an episode from the end of 2023 that is still as good as it is today , as it was back then , about how to close the year out strong in your law firm and the levers that you can pull in the last I don't know like 25 days now before the end of the year to keep your cash flow strong , finish up and

make sure that you get a good , strong push going into 2025 . So I hope that you do enjoy this repeat episode . I am recording a whole bunch of new episodes , new interviews here in the next couple of weeks and so thank you for sticking through the reruns . There will be new stuff coming out , not only new to you stuff . Probably in the beginning of January .

We're releasing and re-releasing the greatest hits , the stuff that under-indexed or the stuff that people told me they really like , probably from now through the end of the year and while we stockpile a bunch of interviews to release in the beginning of 2025 . So I hope this finds you doing well and making a whole bunch of money at the end of the year .

See you guys . Hey guys , welcome back to another Friday solo episode .

We're barreling down on the end of the third quarter and heading into the home stretch , and if you're an injury lawyer , like I am , you know that this is the critical time to be setting yourself up and your practice up for success for the end of 2023 and rolling into the beginning of 2024 .

So today I'm going to be diving into the things that we're doing in our law firm to expedite cases at the end of the year , close things out , finish strong , pay everybody big holiday bonuses and go out with a bang in December .

So I'm recording this on September 14th , it's going to come out tomorrow , on the 15th , and that marks just over 100 days until the end of the year .

And I run an auto accident injury practice here in Northern Virginia and this next 30 to 45 to 60 days really is the critical time if we want to get anything done and get money into the box at the end of the year . Number one , to get money back into our clients pockets so they can buy Christmas gifts and things like that for the end of the year .

But number two , like I , have this obsession with doing better and better every year , so the bar gets higher and higher , and as the bar gets higher and higher , we've got to meet higher expectations every single year in terms of the amount of revenue that we're bringing into the firm , and so this year we're right on track to do that , but again , we know that

this is the critical 45 to 60 days to get shit done . There's really only three ways to improve the amount of revenue coming into an injury law firm . You can have more clients , you can make cases worth more money or you can run cases more efficiently , and at this point in the year having more clients isn't going to do me any good right .

A typical injury case when it comes into my office , even the smallest cases , aren't going to turn into money for six , seven , eight , nine months , probably because it takes some time for the client to finish medical care , takes some time to collect all their medical bills and records . And then we got to wait .

Right , it takes usually about 30 days for an insurance company to evaluate a case , make an offer . The fastest negotiations go about a week long Checks got to come in the mail , blah , blah , blah .

And now we're like probably 60 days from the time that you send the demand package is the earliest time that you can put money into your pocket and into the client's pocket .

Working backwards , that leaves us really only six weeks before anything that we send out isn't going to turn into money this year , and so it's really a critical time to make sure we have all the medical bills and records and get them out the door so that we could pull the last two levers in an injury practice , make the client's case worth more money , turn

them over faster , and so that's what we're focused on here . So there's an old Peter Drucker saying that what gets measured gets managed , and we know that what gets measured and managed improves typically . So here's what we're measuring and what we're tracking to make sure that the team is doing as we get ready to try to close out a strong year .

Number one I want to know how many medical records we have outstanding that have been outstanding longer than 45 days . What that means is that we've sent a request to the doctor's office that hasn't been fulfilled in 45 days .

That's a pretty reasonable time to get that stuff back to us , and we really want to be tracking , in the cases where the client's done treating , how many of those are beyond 45 days and those doctors are getting a call almost every single day to try to get the record back . Number two I want to know how many negotiations have stalled .

In my mind , there's no reason for us to go more than 45 days from the day that we sent a demand to the day that the case is either settled or in litigation . Deadlines move cases , and so we set strict deadlines in our cases . I want to have an offer 30 days from the time the demand has gone out and I'm okay with one extension .

I can adjust their calls and they say I need a little more time to evaluate the case . That's great , fine , no problem , one extension . But there's a sales principle called set a meeting at the meeting that I make my team adhere to . I don't just give you more time to review the case , I don't give you more time to think about it .

I don't give you more time to go and talk to management about it unless we have a date by which I can expect a response . And what I always tell adjusters is I've got to be able to tell my client yeah , they haven't looked at it , they haven't done their homework yet , but they promised to do it by September 22nd .

And if they don't do it by September 22nd , then we've all agreed that I'm going to file a lawsuit and I'm going to send a letter to their insured telling them why they're being sued because their insurance company didn't evaluate the case on time and twice failed to meet a deadline . So set a meeting at the meeting .

We never get off the phone without having another date by which a decision is going to be made , and that principle applies not only with adjusters but also with clients . So this happens on the back end too . We relay an offer , we have a demand strategy worked out , we know where . At least the lawyers in our firm know where the case probably should end up .

But we need the client's agreement on that , obviously . And when we relay it to the client , oftentimes the client has to think about it . It's their one and only case , so of course they have to think about it . We do these cases day in and day out , so we know what they're worth .

What we don't want to do is get into a cycle where the client's not calling us because they don't want to have the discussion . We're not calling them because we don't want to have the discussion . So we need to be setting the meeting , at the meeting . If you agree with my strategy , just let me know and we'll execute the strategy .

If you disagree with the strategy , then I want to have a conversation about it . Three days from now , five days from now , a week from now . Can we do that ? We always want to be pressing the ball forward and there should be no reason that we get to 46 , 50 , 60 days and the case is just sitting there because somebody hasn't made a move .

Let's either get the case settled or let's file suit , because filing suit gets it off the insurance adjuster's desk . Usually it's going to go to a litigation adjuster . Definitely it's going to go to a defense lawyer . That typically gets cases settled .

The third thing that we're looking at in this timeframe is cases that are settled but they're not closed , and there might be a number of reasons that they're not closed Might be still processing , some outstanding medical balances , might be still tracking down some liens , might be that the client hasn't signed a release .

So we really that's the critical time We've got to have that money coming in so that we can get it back out to the clients so they can buy Christmas , they can buy Hanukkah gifts and so we can close out our year , but if a case is settled and not closed meaning the money's sitting in my trust account and not dispersed then nobody can do any of those things

. So here's the challenge that I always issue to my team this time of year and we've just gone through this exercise this week is let's take all of the cases that are in our portfolio and assign them a value , and what we do is we break them down by value and by case type .

So soft tissue cases get one value , fracture gets another , or a surgery gets another , or a traumatic brain injury gets another . And yes , listen , every single case is different and the value that we assign based on category is always wrong , but it's always pretty close and it's always average and it's based on historical data . So it's pretty

good . Pretty good . Start , break them all down by case type and assign values to them . That's step number one . Step number two is we look at the cases that we expect to settle in 2023 and we put those in one pile and we take the things that we don't expect to settle in 2023 .

Maybe they're 24 cases or maybe they're sometimes after we put those in the other pile . Next we go through the 2023 cases and try to assign a closer value to accurate for that individual case .

Now we know within a reasonable degree of certainty what is the ballpark number good ballpark number for what we're going to have revenue-wise coming in in the next three and a half months of the year . That lets me do some planning , some tax planning , some spending planning , bonus planning certainly lets us do that .

The next step after that is we take the fringe cases for 24 and we see how many of them we can pull into 2023 . I would always rather have revenue this year than next year and it gives my team a challenge to run at towards the end of the year .

Now , of course , doesn't mean that we're undervaluing cases or settling them sooner than they should be , but it means that the ones that are on the cusp , like the January and the February cases , where everything's done clients finished treating and it's just a matter of can we run a little bit harder to pull everything into 2023 for the client and for the firm ?

How many of those can we get into 2023 ? And so , about this time of year , we put up on a big wall with our injury team all of the cases that we have said we expect to settle in 23 . And then all the cases that we might kind of sort of settle in 24 , that we're trying to pull into 23 .

And we make a game out of it , make a game out of crossing them off the list , moving them from one column to another , and the team really rallies around and gets excited about trying to pull these things into the current tax year .

And what you need to do in your law firm , if you're pulling these levers , is figure out how you can make it exciting for your team , because the team oftentimes is going to see just more work .

Maybe it's a bonus , maybe it's a special outing , maybe it's a couple of extra days off around the holidays , but what is it that works for your team that gets them incentivized to do good work for your clients ? That's my challenge to you as we sit on the cusp of quarter number four . I hope you're having a great year .