Brian Glass:

The problem that most people have is that their perception of normal sucks.

Chris Dreyer:

They create a business that’s just solely about profit. They have their goals, but they don’t look at the lifestyle.

Brian Glass:

Normal is really mediocre. And so the greatest thing that’s happened to me in the last couple of years has been realigning what’s possible and what’s what’s normal.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the no excuses, no BS legal marketing agency that works harder than the competition. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Before we get started, hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. All right, let’s do this.

Imagine your ideal day. What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you working on? How are you working? Now, think about a typical day at your firm. How much overlap is there between what you imagined and reality? What if your work fit perfectly into your ideal day? Brian Glass partner of BenGlassLaw is living the dream. His day looks like working remotely, no interruptions during deep work, coaching his kids in the evenings and time for running ultra marathons. Everyone’s ideal lifestyle looks different. Just know whatever your dream looks like, it is possible.

On today’s episode, Brian will help you get one step closer. He created his ideal lifestyle by putting his employees first, redistributing his workload and joining communities that pushed him to be better. Here’s Brian Glass, partner at BenGlassLaw.

Brian Glass:

My dad was a medical malpractice and injury lawyer growing up, and I just never was interested in doing anything else. And if you told me, Chris, that I had to go out and operate in a different industry, I have no idea what I would do.

Chris Dreyer:

I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Somehow ended up with a history education degree, and now I’m a legal marketer. But we all have these different paths, so it’s kind of interesting to see how people become attorneys. And I want to jump right in. You posted recently the most important hires in your law firm aren’t the lawyers, they’re your staff.

Brian Glass:

Yeah.

Chris Dreyer:

Can you expound on that?

Brian Glass:

Yeah. So that one went kind of semi viral on LinkedIn and I picked up all these followers who were not lawyers, which is not really my target demographic. So what I learned from that is that message really resonates with all of the paralegals and assistants and marketing people in your firm because they all feel underappreciated the way that that got shared and reposted and liked by people that were not lawyers. So here’s my thesis, Chris is the lawyers and the legal work is important, but most of us are going to guide a case to just about the same result. So a competent injury lawyer is going to be within 10% of the result of any other competent injury lawyer, I think. And the client never knows the difference. I spend a lot of time with real estate guys and I analogize to realtors. They’re never going to know that had they hired a different lawyer or a different realtor to sell their house or settle their case, what the result would’ve been and how long it would’ve taken them.

But what they do know is how they felt about that experience. And they’re comparing their experience with your law firm not only to their experience with other law firms because they have almost none. Most people have one case, two cases, three cases through the course of their lifetime, but they’re comparing that with how they’re treated by every other business and industry with which they interact. And so the way that I approach hiring and staffing in my firm is that I want people to take care of my clients and I want to take care of my staff because I know that if they’re well taken care of and they feel respected and they have some ability to operate within a set of boundaries to get to the right result for our clients, then the clients are going to be well taken care of. And after onboarding and until the end of the case, 95% of the interaction is going to be with my staff, it’s not going to be with me.

And so that’s why it’s just so critically important to have staff that cares that doesn’t pick up the phone and go “Law offices.” There’s still law firms that are barking “Law offices” into the phone when you call them. And if that’s the client experience that you’re delivering for your clients, you’re not going to generate referrals and you’re not going to generate continued business. So that’s why I just think it’s so critically important to hire into those administrative assistant and paralegal and secretarial roles and do it well. And it’s as important, if not more important than it is to hire the next smart lawyer.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s a little bit of the divergent type thinking. I always hear something like clients come first, but you’re saying, you build your employees first, then they’re going to treat your clients well.

Brian Glass:

Yeah, I think that’s totally backwards. And we can get into this if you like, but I’m building a law firm that supports my life and not the other way around. And so yes, you hear clients come first, but I just think that’s wrong. So that Paul Hastings memo that went around about the client is always right and the client comes… If the client’s always right, what are you there for? So yeah, clients are important. We’re going to take good care of them. My staff comes before my clients. I have a rule if you are rude or mean to my staff one time you have a conversation with me and two times you’re not a client anymore. Because the client doesn’t come before my staff and before my happiness and my family’s wellbeing and mental health,

Chris Dreyer:

I’ve been on the same, looking kind of introspectively as when I’ve had a client and they didn’t treat my staff right and whenever I took action to respectfully part ways, I know my staff really appreciated that they felt like I cared about them. I got to think that it helps with the retention and it’s about protecting them too.

Brian Glass:

And we spend so much time and effort finding these people, number one, and then training them that if you lose them to somebody because they don’t feel respected by you or by your clientele, then you’ve got to go back and recreate the wheel and start all over again. And it’s so much easier to let go of that one unpleasant client than it is to let a handful of them build up and run your star paralegal out of the office.

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely. You said you’re designing the firm to fit your lifestyle and you’re creating it how you want it. Most people, they create a business that’s just solely about profit. They have their goals, but they don’t look at the lifestyle because you spend so much time in the business. It’s a job. It’s a job that they’re working instead of a lifestyle. So talk to me about that.

Brian Glass:

Yeah, so it’s a principle that many lawyers get wrong and many business owners get wrong is, you go out on your own from a firm because you want to make more money or because you want to have more time or whatever. And then we structure the firm around our skillset and our unique abilities, and then we end up doing everything.

And we’ve created for ourselves a high paying job, but not really a business because who could we sell it to or who could we transition the law firm to in the long run? And so the approach that my dad, Ben, and I have taken here is how can we position ourselves in a job, because to be sure it still is a job and we’re still doing the work, where we are putting the finishing touches on a very finely made product, but we don’t have to be involved in the day-to-day, every single conversation with the client, the preparation of the demand package?

A lot of that stuff can be systemized both and with virtual assistance where we’re coming in and just putting the finishing touches on that. And Chris, for me it’s all about, one of the things that I did to get there is creating this list of heavy, medium, and light. So I spent a month where every time I was doing a task, I would come over to my whiteboard and sort it into heavy, medium and light. How did it feel when I was doing? It after that month was over how can I take the things that are in the heavy column that I don’t want to do that I feel resistance towards doing and transition them to somebody else? So for me, I don’t necessarily talking to clients in the middle of the case when the treatment is unclear because I don’t have answers most of the time. They expect me to have answers, but if your doctor doesn’t have an answer for you about where it’s going, I’m not going to either.

And so how can I transition that to somebody that’ll be empathetic and will make that client feel heard, won’t give them an answer because my staff won’t do that, but can help with that process and then take it off on my hands? And so that’s just a way to focus your time and energy on the things that you love doing that are really high value leverage for you and offload everything else to somebody who enjoys doing it. Because there’s somebody that likes doing that stuff, number one, and who’s better at it than we are, number two.

Chris Dreyer:

I love every bit about that and the energy, I think it was Dan Sullivan’s book Who Not How, where it talked about procrastination is a sign that maybe you shouldn’t be doing that thing.

Brian Glass:

Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art kind of is the same way. That’s where I get that idea of the resistance from. But a hundred percent, and everybody who’s listening who’s a lawyer has those cases where you should have done something four months ago and you haven’t done it. And that’s where we get legal malpractice complaints. That’s where we get ethics complaints. It’s the client who’s been in the back of your mind that you know should do the thing and you’re not doing it, just rip the Band-Aid.

Chris Dreyer:

So hyper aware of you and you get to use your time for the highest leveraged activities where you bring the most value and you have the most energy because ultimately it’s the energy. It’s like we only have so much energy to put into our day. Is that kind of where your podcast Time Freedom for Lawyers, is that where this idea came about? You had this awareness and you’re like, hey, I’m going to share this with other lawyers?

Brian Glass:

Yeah, a hundred percent. So that show started with me talking about investing and really it’s kind of circled back to designing your whole practice. So the idea of time freedom comes from financial freedom where, and once you’ve got a big enough pile of either money or passive cash flowing investments, then you can go and do whatever you want. But all of my friends that have gotten there that have the capability to do whatever they want, they’re still working. Why? Because they’ve created freedom to do the career or the vocation that they actually want to do.

And so freeing yourself up to work in that small quadrant of things that you’re the best at and that you really enjoy is very important to me. I’ve got three young boys, they’re 10, they’re eight and four. And so my wife and I are out every week night at practice fields and we’re at three games on Saturday. And it’s really important to me to be able to coach those teams where I can. And so now I’ve got a structural practice where I can get out of the office at four o’clock Monday through Friday to be on a sports field at 5:30, either kicking a ball around or throwing a baseball.

Chris Dreyer:

When you made that adjustment, did it actually create things that rose to the top that you said, “Now that I have this much time, maybe I need to delegate these items,” and it changed that whole high, medium, low impact. Did those types of things happen naturally?

Brian Glass:

Yeah. I think that’s really good. So when that first started happening for me was when I started taking a day a week and dedicating it to not being in the office. So I forget, I don’t know, Wednesdays I’m just not going to come to the office, I’m still working. I take my computer to a coffee shop. But what happens is, as we’re not disrupted by people coming into the office, as we’re not disrupted by phone calls, and the great thing about going to a coffee shop, you could shut off your internet and you don’t have any internet. So download the medical records and the discovery that you need onto your desktop and see how much faster you can execute on those things when you aren’t interrupted seven times. So I was doing eight hours of work in a two-hour time period, and then I was off for the rest of the day.

I’m like, okay, everything that I brought with me is now done. Now I can go for a run or I can go to the gym and I can work out or I could do nothing or I could figure out another skillset. And so that for me, I don’t know that the heavy, medium, light helped me get there, but that realization that so much of our time in the office is interrupted and is not spent in deep thought was a real unlock to, okay, if I could just spend two hours a day, what would I spend my time doing? And then how can I offload all of those other things to somebody else?

Chris Dreyer:

This makes me think, and I haven’t read this book, it’s on the shelf to read, I’ve read a lot of Dan Kennedy’s stuff, the No B.S., People and Profit. I’ve read a lot of his books because he’s got the time management one, and I’ve heard him say something along the lines of an open door policy is a terrible policy because you’re just going to be interrupted. And it makes me also think that it’s tie into the Pomodoro Technique where you got these focus blocks of like 25 minutes. What are some other things that you’ve heard that have been effective for maybe some of your guests on the show?

Brian Glass:

So one thing that I like doing is checking my email only twice a day because I’m back and forth on this. I’ll have times where I’m bad at this, where I’ve got my Outlook open, I’ve got my personal Gmail open, I’ve got our lead generation or lead management software. Everything is pinging and there’s all these windows are open at the same time because everything feels important.

But when I’m more intentional about it, and I could say, “Listen, I’ve got somebody whose job it is to manage the intake and she knows how to get ahold of me If there’s something truly pressing.” If that surgical case with the drunk FedEx driver that ran somebody over in a crosswalk calls, they know how to find me. But for everything else, it can go through our system. And so for me, if I can get to a point where I’m looking at email twice a day, and if I can get to a point where I’m not looking until maybe 11 o’clock, I’ll look and I’ll respond to everything, have lunch, and then come back at the end of the day and triage the email, think that’s really helpful.

And then the other thing that I’ve been doing recently is with my key staff, the people who report directly to me, we have weekly one-on-ones. And it really cuts down on the number of things coming through either a Slack channel or email or the case management software.

Now when it gets bad, you have four conversations going on in four different channels and that just mentally making all those mental shifts is really hard. But if you can structure it where you are going to have my undivided attention for 30 minutes in this one-on-one, and so please aggregate all your questions that aren’t pressing and bring them Tuesday at 10:30. Those are two really good ones.

The other one that I stole from Eos is that delegate and elevate chart, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, where you put everything into a quadrant, I’m good at this and I like doing it. And then the opposite quadrant is, I’m not good at this and I don’t like doing it. And we got to stop doing everything that’s in that quadrant immediately and figure out how to outsource the things that we like doing, but we’re not good at. And the things that we’re good at, but we don’t like doing.

Chris Dreyer:

The company you keep shapes the person you become, surround yourself with motivated individuals who embody the life you want. To reach new heights, equip yourself with innovative concepts, fresh perspectives, and inspiring role models. When you’re in the right environment, progress is inevitable. Brian got there by joining a community that challenged him to grow, expanded his worldview and empowered him to realize his best self.

Brian Glass:

The problem that most people have is that their perception of normal sucks. Most people’s normal is really mediocre. And so the greatest thing that’s happened to me in the last couple of years has been hanging out with really high level entrepreneurs, both lawyers and non-lawyers, and just realigning what’s possible and what’s normal in these groups.

So yeah, it’s been several years since I ran Umstead 100 mile race down in Raleigh, North Carolina. I finished in a little bit under 24 hours, I almost immediately passed out because your brain, as you’re working towards this target is like, okay, get me to the target. My brother was walking with me on the last mile or two of the race and I was hallucinating. I was seeing things on the side of the trail. It was like four in the morning, the second day of the race. Anyway, so I immediately passed out on that.

I finished also a 70-mile trail run in Pennsylvania, and more recently with three kids. I just have less training time. So I’ve been doing Spartan races. My friends and I are going to run the Spartan World Championship in Sparta, Greece this November. So that’s kind of a bucket list trip. My wife’s coming over, a bunch of guys are bringing their wives over to hang out in Greece, tour Sparta, hang out with Joe De Sena who’s the founder of Spartan Race, and then run a pretty epic race in a pretty epic location. But all of that comes from hanging out with people that want to do that stuff and for whom that’s normal.

Chris Dreyer:

And you’re exactly right with the people you hang around with. My president is really into adventure racing and he went and signed us up for a Tough Mudder and I’m like a bigger dude, right? I’m like 280. I was like, “Okay, we’re going to do it.” And I remember going through that first mud puddle where my shoes are just swamped, and I’m like, “There’s no way in hell I’m going to finish.” But somehow you’re there in the mindset, you shut off the David Goggins, that inner voice. That is so awesome. Did you always have a passion for running and competing at this level or was it brought to you with the people around you?

Brian Glass:

No, my story is I was in law school. My first year at law school I was at Michigan State and I transferred to William Mary and I graduated from William Mary, but I was trying to get in shape and trying to find something to do in Michigan where literally, it’s grey. From early October through late April. The first bit of running that I was doing was on this indoor track. It was 11 loops to a mile, and it was a bunch of guys from our law school section.

And then my sister, who’s younger than me started running marathons and I was like, okay, that’s cool. I could maybe do that. And I tried and I was way slower than she was. And I got faster gradually over the next couple of years. But then I stopped getting any faster. And so I said, “Well, I’m never going to beat her in a marathon, so maybe if I just run longer than she does.”

And so I had read Born to Run by Chris McDougall who talks about, I think he talks about the Barclay marathons, but also about these a hundred-mile races in Mexico. And I just said “That’s cool.” So I signed up for a, I think a 24-hour race was my first race. I did 50 miles there. And then slowly but surely figured out nutrition and okay, you got to go a little bit slower, you got to walk. And we got to make sure that we’re eating at all these aid stations. All the while again, calibrating to that guy’s doing a hundred-mile race, that guy just signed up for a 200-mile race, just expanding what’s possible and then saying “Can I do that?”

Chris Dreyer:

Tell me about some of these masterminds and these communities that you’re involved in that surround yourself with these people that are really trying to elevate and have these very fulfilling lives. What are some of these masterminds and communities that you’re involved in?

Brian Glass:

So I’m in two, I’m in Great Legal Marketing, my dad and I run. It’s lawyers. It started as a marketing company 15 years ago or so, really teaching solo and small law firms, Dan Kennedy style, direct mail marketing. It has evolved away from being predominantly marketing to being, how to build a great practice and how to have a great life. So my dad’s obviously my role model and he was one of the first people that’s like, you can have nine kids and have a thriving law practice and still get home for dinner. So I owe a lot of the calibration of what’s normal to him.

And in that group we get together quarterly, the high level group, and then we have monthly calls. We have a Q&A call that the heads of the group run, and then we have an accountability call where everybody’s on it and we kind of go through a hot seat style, what are you working on, what do you have? What’s a resource that’s been helpful to you? And what can we give you help with?

And then the other group that I’m in is called GoBundance. It’s an all male high net worth entrepreneurial group. And we focus on how do you make money from real estate? How do you have a great family life and relationship with your wife? How do you do epic adventurous stuff and how do you remain fit so that when we get to the point where we’re living to 120 and 130, you’re really maximizing the amount of that time that is spent in a healthy lifespan.

And I’ll tell you, Chris, just on the last note, the interesting thing about both of those groups is that what attracts people to those groups is the idea that you can make more money. Almost uniformly people come to the law group and they come to GoBundance to try to make more money and they stay.

And we end up talking 50% of the time about how do you have a better life outside of your business? How do you be a better spouse? How do you be a better parent? Especially in the entrepreneurial group. The law group, there is a lot more tactical stuff, but that’s why people stay. This sense of community and the sense of vulnerability, especially with lawyers, is something that you don’t get anywhere.

You can’t go to the courthouse and ask somebody who’s competing in your space for marketing tips or for how to manage my staff tips. We just aren’t vulnerable like that. And so it’s easier to join kind of a national group where you give yourself permission to say, “Hey, these are the things that I’m not good at yet, and these are the things that I want to get better at.” And your problem is not unique, so somebody will come and help you with those things.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s incredible. And I imagine the safe space allows you to be more vulnerable. And not only that too, and I’m in a few masterminds, what I’ve noticed as well is, oh, I know Jacques Spitzer from Raindrop puts out these epic videos. He’s doing these videos for Dr. Squash, what’s he have to say about viral marketing, and you get to learn individual strengths. It’s just about great legal marketing. Do you guys do in-person as well? So I imagine the monthly and quarters are probably Zoom, do you do in-person too?

Brian Glass:

So the monthly is Zoom. The quarterly meetings are in our office. So as we were looking for new office space for the law firm, one of the things that we said is we would also like to stop paying hotels to rent meeting space once a quarter. And so we have a training center in the law firm that fits 50 people, 40 comfortably, but 50 people. And we’re right near Dallas Airport. So that was another major attraction.

How can we be near a hub where people can fly in, stay for a couple of days and then we can work out of our own training center? And we put on an annual event called the Great Legal Marketing Summit every October, I think it’s the week after Columbus Day this year, if you go to glmsummit.com, you’ll find all the information about that. And if you use discount code, ‘Brian’ you’ll get special pricing

Chris Dreyer:

Working with both your father and your wife and just family, how is that dynamic? How do you think about work-life balance? Because you don’t have the separation, you’re kind of working on the same thing. So how do you think about that dynamic?

Brian Glass:

I wish I had tactics for you. I’ve just been really fortunate. So I joined my dad’s firm four years ago after 10 years of practising on my own. And it was really important for me to make my own friends and my own way of doing things and my own way of developing clients and referral relationships before I came to join him. And the relationship I know would not have been as successful if I had joined him straight out of law school.

And I’ve been really fortunate that he is good at things that I am not and that I’m good at things that he is not, and that we don’t get in each other’s way when the other one would be better at whatever the thing is. And honestly, the same thing is true of my wife who came to do our HR and a lot of our office administration last year.

So she was at an IT company, helped grow them from 16 employees to 80. They got acquired by an eight hundred person company and her life just became a nightmare. Like she was up at five in the morning answering emails, then would work with the kids, with me and then would sit down and do regular work and then we would have kid time at night and she would get back on email at seven o’clock. And I’m like, okay, you have an important job, but I own a company and I’m not working as hard as you are. And so how can we exit you out of that job?

I think the important thing is having a structure where different domains are actually the domain of that person. So, I don’t tinker with any of our HR stuff. She’s the professional, whatever she says goes. I just don’t have an opinion on it. And again, hard for lawyers because lawyers tend to have big egos and we tend to think that we know everything, but if you can stop tinkering in somebody else’s space, I think that makes for the family relationship being a lot better.

Chris Dreyer:

Fantastic. Defer to them as the expert in their domain. I think it’s such a great piece of advice. Brian, this has been a lot of fun and I appreciate you sharing everything that we’ve talked about and also about the community and the masterminds. One final question, where can people go to get in touch with you or to learn more about your mastermind?

Brian Glass:

Yeah, so let me give you a couple of spaces. So I’m most active content-wise on LinkedIn. So if you connect with me on LinkedIn, I try to post there just about every day. My podcast is called Time Freedom for Lawyers. I got two episodes that come out a week, one interview and then one solo me ranting about something that happened to me that week. And then the mastermind is great legal marketing, greatlegalmarketing.com. You can find us there.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Brian for sharing his wisdom today. Let’s hit the takeaways. Time for the pinpoints.

A big check is not enough. Your clients need to know they’re heard, understood, and safe. Demonstrate true compassion and attentiveness. Let them feel genuine care. They have endured serious trauma. To earn their trust and referral, provide extra support and maintain open communication every step of the way, when your staff makes that human connection, it makes all the difference.

Brian Glass:

They’re never going to know that had they hired a different lawyer or a different realtor to sell their house or settle their case, what the result would’ve been and how long it would’ve taken. But what they do know is how they felt about that experience.

Chris Dreyer:

Invest in the dream team. Who do your clients spend the most time with? If it’s your staff, then you need to be investing in talented individuals who share your values. Care for your staff, and they will go above and beyond for your clients. But remember that client experience should never come at the expense of staff or self.

Brian Glass:

I’m building a law firm that supports my life and not the other way around. And so yes, you hear clients come first. I just think that’s wrong. So like the client doesn’t come before my staff and before my happiness and my family’s wellbeing and mental health.

Chris Dreyer:

If you want to transition from employee to owner, start delegating. Handoff tasks you don’t enjoy the team members who have strengths in those areas. This frees you up to focus on those high value work that you can do best and gives you the space to lead the firm as an owner. Thoughtful delegation empowers your whole staff and gives you the space to lead the firm as an owner. Take time to assess needs, match talents and tasks, and elevate your practice.

Brian Glass:

I spent a month where every time I was doing a task, I would come over to my whiteboard and sort it into heavy, medium, and light. After that month was over, how can I take the things that are in the heavy column that I don’t want to do that I feel resistance towards doing and transition them to somebody else? Focus your time and energy on the things that you love doing, that are really high value leverage for you and offload everything else to somebody who enjoys doing it. Because there’s somebody that likes doing that stuff, number one, and who’s better at it than we are, number two.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about Brian, check out the show notes. While you’re there please hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.