Management Tips for Running A Personal Injury Law Firm: Part 2

00:10 Speaker 2 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. 00:22 Speaker 3 Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. My name is Kevin Tully. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Zynda Law Group. And with me today is our founder and CEO, Jack Zinda. And we're going to be talking about more management tips. This is a part two continuing from a previous episode that we did. So if you haven't had a chance, go back and find that first episode. But, Jack, take us away. Where do we want to go next? 00:47 Speaker 2 Yeah, so I really felt like we could have talked about that for a lot longer, and there was a lot of things that we didn't hit that I think are really helpful when you're thinking about how to manage your team. And like we talked about in the first episode, management to me is how do you get the most out of your team members, whether it's your paralegal, your associate, your legal assistant, so you can get the best results for the client and for the law firm? And one of the things that I think is really important is that you set clear goals for each of your team members. Now, those could be either professional goals where you want to see the person improve, or it could be goals on a particular case, or it could be goals for key performance indicators. 01:36 Speaker 2 But part of it is like establishing what those are and then getting the team members agreement that they're going to take a shot at achieving it. And sometimes it's helpful to even have the team member come up with what the goals are they're going to try to achieve. And some of those examples, say, for an associate might be, hey, I want to see you become really great at taking expert witness depositions. Now, how do we define what that means? Well, let's say it means you could take a deposition of a medical expert witness involving spine surgeries in the state of Texas. 02:13 Speaker 2 To do that, you would need to get up to speed on the medical information, understand the best tactics to take those depositions, attend several depositions, and then take depositions under the guidance of a more senior person and get feedback and someone to say you're at least an 8 out of 10 on these types of depositions. So I took kind of a broad topic and then I made it very specific with clear milestones, outlines, and how to achieve that. And then I might tell the associate, if you do these things, then you might get an increase in compensation. You might get a promotion to a different type of attorney within the firm. You might get to work on more important cases, or you might get recognized by the firm and by your peers as being, you know, above and beyond other people within the firm. 03:03 Speaker 2 And so by setting those clear goals and setting a time frame by which they're going to achieve them, you want to make sure you have a process to follow back up with that person at certain intervals. Like, say, monthly probably is the longest amount of time frame to follow back up on how someone's doing their goals, but it could be as short as weekly, just depending on the situation. But the next you want to thing you want to make sure you're doing is creating an open and professional atmosphere where people feel comfortable sharing their opinions, both good and bad, about the organization and about the management and about the way you're working on cases or your approach to law or anything really. 03:44 Speaker 2 Now, what's key to that is you don't want to take uninformed decision opinions and use them to make decisions, but you want to open the door to have having as much opinions from anybody within the firm. And there's different ways you can do that. One can be anonymous surveys. Another could be having different managers ask questions. You could develop a good enough relationship where you get that feedback from individual people. But you want to make sure that people don't get their head bit off just for having an opinion about something. 04:12 Speaker 1 Right. 04:13 Speaker 2 What have you seen, Kevin, are ways that you found to create an open atmosphere with your team? 04:19 Speaker 3 I often try to keep my opinion till the end and allow other people to speak first because I don't want to influence the room and I want them to be honest about their opinions, especially if it's something that I've been working on. If it's a project that I've owned or had a big part in. 04:43 Speaker 1 I'll. 04:43 Speaker 3 Try to just talk as little as possible and hear from folks that way first. Now, to your point, I don't think that just because someone has a particular critique or opinion on something that's necessarily democracy in all instances. But you do want to create that atmosphere where people feel comfortable sharing their feedback. I'd say that's probably the one that's been top of mind for me most recently. It's hard to fall out of practice with that one. Are easy to fall out of practice with that one. 05:19 Speaker 1 Yeah. 05:20 Speaker 2 And were talking last time about Ray Dalio's book principle. He has a good notion called weighted opinions, or I forget the term he used exactly. But the idea is if you have more Experience in an area your opinion counts as more counts more than someone has less experience. So let's say I've worked on a lot of trucking cases and you've worked on a lot of premises liability cases. My opinion would count more when it came to trucking cases and your opinion would count more when it came to premises liability. But both of our opinions would be considered before making a decision on a case. Yeah. 05:53 Speaker 3 The other thing I'll note about the approach of trying to let you know others speak before you tip your hand in one direction or another is it provides another opportunity for you to assess where they're at in their career path and just in their knowledge. Sometimes they'll surprise you and sometimes you'll make a mental note that this person maybe needs to be exposed to this a little bit more or something like that, which then helps with overall management. 06:21 Speaker 1 Yeah. 06:22 Speaker 2 And we do case valuation committees where we talk about the value of cases and the more high value the case, the more senior people that are in those meetings. But even if it's a very large case, we always have junior attorneys in the room and I always ask their opinion first and ask them why they feel that way so I can get a sense of how they're evaluating and what they think of the cases. 06:44 Speaker 3 Yeah, makes sense. 06:46 Speaker 2 They get a little nervous, but I think it's good to hear from them as well. 06:50 Speaker 3 Well, that's a good thing to learn to overcome as well. Right. Speaking in front of a group and everything that goes with it 100%. 06:58 Speaker 2 You know another thing that I think is really important is that you recognize team members, especially people that do jobs and aren't always recognized. You know, we have one of our core principles is we all take out the trash. And at all, at each of our all hands meetings, we always recognize people that maybe went above and beyond and we tie it back to a core principle. 07:24 Speaker 1 Yeah. 07:25 Speaker 2 And show like, okay, this person, you know, we just settled a case for multi millions of dollars and you know, the medical records team got this medical record that was really critical to the case and this person did this part of the job and that's why were achieve this big result. The attorneys always get the recognition. So tying it back to what individual people did goes a long way to increasing the morale of folks within the firm. 07:52 Speaker 1 Yeah. 07:52 Speaker 3 And I've always really appreciated that we do the core values bonus award where team members can nominate another employee at the firm who's shown those core values. It's kind of going back to the idea of getting people involved and letting people have a voice. It's an opportunity in those all hands meetings for them to stand up and congratulate somebody on a job well done and provide a story or a joke to go with it usually. Which makes it fun. 08:20 Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. And when we do this, we always put the picture of the person up on the screen so people recognize them. And then we like to have the person that nominated them say why. So it's not just coming from, you know, a leader, it's coming from the person that actually saw the impact of it. 08:36 Speaker 3 Yeah, makes sense. 08:38 Speaker 2 Another tip on recognition is when we're ever talking about cases, I always list the legal assistant and paralegals first and then the attorney second. So, you know, recognizing that everybody played a role in that case. 08:51 Speaker 1 Yeah. 08:52 Speaker 2 And that goes a long way. I mean, non compensation recognition can be really valuable then Also paying your people well is really important if you want to have a good team to manage. I believe that you want to have A players throughout your organization. And A players are typically more expensive than B or C players. And I can't tell you how many law firms I've seen where they're underpaying their people and then wonder why their people aren't very good. And they just, they don't understand that the amount of money that you pay someone is going to coincide a lot of times with the level of person you might get. Now that's not everything, but it does pay a role in the type of candidates you can attract and keep on your team. 09:35 Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. 09:37 Speaker 2 Another thing that you want to do is give feedback as soon as possible. If it is something that's not going right, you don't want to save up and wait till the end of the month to give a list of all the things that didn't happen or didn't. 09:52 Speaker 1 Go the right way. 09:54 Speaker 2 So I like to give immediate coaching. Now you got to be careful if you're someone like me who's a little fiery at times because it can be perceived as a little more aggressive than you want it to be. You know, one of my biggest problems is I'm just a go, go person and I'm always going a thousand miles an hour. And a lot of times my energy can be perceived as aggression. When it's just energy, you know, I don't yell, I don't scream, but like I'm just going so fast that I'm like, hey, this wasn't right. That may be perceived by a new person in their mind as oh my gosh he's so upset. So to diffuse that, you want to make sure you joke around with the team that you maybe circle background. 10:34 Speaker 2 If it was something that was coachable, that you make it clear. I like to use numbers. I'll say, hey, this is a 2 out of 10, it's not the end of the world. I just want to let you know this is how it should be corrected. If it is a 9 out of 10, maybe you want to hit the pause button, think about how you're going to approach it before giving that feedback. 10:52 Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, I've heard you say that a lot and that is always helpful to kind of. 10:58 Speaker 2 Put it in. 10:59 Speaker 3 The right context and perspective, especially when it's not a major mistake, but something that does need to get corrected. 11:09 Speaker 4 This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zynda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us@re referralsindalaw.com we'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zynda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case. 11:48 Speaker 2 And you want to listen to see why they think that whatever went wrong did not go right. Another key piece is pay attention to the A players and try to invest as much of your management time in the A players rather than the C players. And this is very difficult to do, I mean, because the C players are the ones that are making mistakes that aren't doing performing at a high level. They're forcing everyone to work more. And you're spending all the time, quote, coaching them when maybe they just can't do the job. And your A's are over here just begging to, you know, be given some coaching so they can jump 10 levels in half the time. But you don't give me attention because you're like, well, they're already producing. Well, I don't need to talk to them. 12:35 Speaker 1 Right. 12:35 Speaker 2 When that's actually who needs your coaching. You know, how do I get that person to the next spot? 12:42 Speaker 3 Yeah, makes a lot of sense. It's the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Right. But there's probably a higher delta between making your A's and A plus than there is between making your, you know, C minus a C or something like that. 12:59 Speaker 2 Exactly. And I always go back to sports. You know, Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State warriors, you know, spends a lot of time coaching Klay Thompson's, you know, Steph Curry, Draymond Green. I don't know if he's coachable, but you know, that crew. And probably not as much time coaching the journeyman player that has a 10 day contract. 13:20 Speaker 1 Yeah. 13:21 Speaker 2 You know, because they're going to have a bigger impact on the team. 13:24 Speaker 1 Right. 13:26 Speaker 2 And I, I make that mistake all the time and it's really tough. You just keep coming back to and remembering what it is that I need to solve. Another thing, if you're dealing with performance issues with employees, you want to come up with a plan to solve the problem permanently. So let's say you have someone who's not coming to work consistently or performing at low, not performing a high level. We'll come up with a plan. Okay. What do we expect of the person? What do we want to see improvement by what time? And what are we going to do if they don't improve? What are we going to do if they do improve? That way you're not coming back to the same issue 10,000 times. 14:01 Speaker 2 You know, if Beth doesn't show up to work two days in a row, your HR team or you, as the manager said, okay, what's my plan if it's 3, 4, 5 that we don't have to think about anymore, it's just on autopilot. 14:13 Speaker 1 Yeah. 14:14 Speaker 2 I see a lot of times that managers will revisit the same issue seven, eight, nine times. And it mentally takes up so much more headspace than it would if you made that decision once, which then reduces. 14:26 Speaker 3 The amount of time you have to put into coaching the A's. 14:29 Speaker 2 Exactly. And you know what happens when you have a lot of C player and you don't fix them to either improve or get them off the bus, which is just a management term for, you know, getting them out of the company. The A's leave because A's don't want to work with Cs. You know, if you look at great athletes, they leave bad teams because they want to win. 14:52 Speaker 1 Right. 14:52 Speaker 2 And it's the same within your organization if you have one great attorney and three terrible attorneys, that one great attorney's like, I don't want to be here, I want to be part of winners. 15:00 Speaker 1 Yeah. 15:01 Speaker 2 And the other way around, Kevin Durant. 15:03 Speaker 3 Wants to play with Chris Paul. 15:04 Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly. 15:05 Speaker 1 Right. 15:06 Speaker 2 You know, you know, the last thing that I think I would leave everybody with on some additional management tips is to do Listening tours and go ask people how things are going. You know, not especially. Even if you're a team of, say, 10 people at a law firm, go ask the receptionist how things are going, Go ask another legal assistant, and you will be amazed at what you find out. If you're patient and listen, you know, we have attorneys that come in from out of town from one of our other offices, and I like to take them to lunch and just say, hey, how things are going? 15:43 Speaker 1 You know, what. 15:44 Speaker 2 What could the firm do better? You know, one question that you can ask. It would be even better if. And have them fill in the blank and be open to the feedback. And sometimes the feedback is. Is, like, stuff I don't want to hear. Sometimes. I don't always agree with it, but I'm always receptive to it. 16:00 Speaker 1 Yeah. 16:01 Speaker 2 And then at least you know, where people's heads are at and what they think you could do better. And sometimes it's easy wins. We had some IT issues a few years ago, and it turned out, you know, everything was taking 25% longer than it should. And as soon as I found out, we made a simple switch on the IT front, and all of a sudden people were 25% more productive. And it just turned out people didn't feel like their voice would be heard if they spoke up, because they'd spoke up a few times and no change had happened. And only found that out through listening to her, you know, because the larger you get, and for me, even if you're five people and you're the head of the firm, people are going to look at you in a way that is kind of intimidating. 16:42 Speaker 2 If you're an attorney at a firm and you have four people report to you, they're going to think, oh, I've got to be careful not to step on my lawyer's toes. 16:49 Speaker 1 Right, Right. 16:50 Speaker 3 Any other points on this topic? 16:53 Speaker 2 Well, I think the last thing I'll say is be consistent and have a game plan. I have an outline that I follow on the things I want to do when I'm managing a team and the meetings I need to have. And so find a playbook that you want to follow from either a management book or another manager you work with. There's some really great books out there. One's called Scaling Up. There's another called Traction, which is a model called eos. I'm writing a really great book now called the CEO Within. And they all have management structures and tactics that you want to follow. And they're not that time consuming, but you want to have a plan. Just like you do on a case, you have a plan and you want to make sure you follow consistently and do it over and over again. 17:31 Speaker 2 Being great at anything or just being good at something means you do the same things at a high level consistently over time. 17:39 Speaker 3 Yeah, that's great. It goes back to a point you brought up in the first part of this topic in the previous episode that management can be learned, can be improved on. It's not something you're born with or not. And like anything else, if you work at it, you get better as you go. 17:56 Speaker 2 Well man, it was great talking to you. I appreciate you, all of your help here and all of your help managing our great team. 18:02 Speaker 3 Yeah, of course. Thanks for doing it. And if anybody wants to reach out, how can they contact you? 18:07 Speaker 2 As always, you can reach me@jackindalaw.com or give us a call at 512-246-2224. 18:14 Speaker 3 Thanks Jack. 18:21 Speaker 4 Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our Team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. 18:33 Speaker 2 Thanks.