By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach As an attorney, your time is important and there are a lot of people out there who want free legal advice. It is a common practice for many estate planning attorneys to offer a free consultation to prospective clients, so those who are insisting on charging a fee for initial consultations are creating a barrier to entry and eliminating potential new clients who otherwise seek attorneys not charging for their initial meeting. Over the years, I have heard a number of common mistakes made by estate planning attorneys with respect to how they handle…
Training Associate Attorneys & Staff
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Over the past couple of months, we covered the importance of properly hiring and incentivizing your associate attorneys and support staff in order to build and maintain a successful estate planning practice. Now, we will address training. As I’ve stressed in all other aspects of your practice, you must have processes, procedures, forms and systems for everything that happens in your law firm on a daily basis. This includes your marketing, client meetings, work production and work review, as…
64 Years of Combined Experience Running a Successful Estate Planning Practice
An Interview of Phil Kavesh’s Two Most Senior Employees Interview by Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach I had the most amazing experience to go on a trip with nationally renowned estate planning attorney and Ultimate Estate Planning Attorney, Phil Kavesh’s, Law Firm Office Manager (Arlyn V. or “AV”). We went out to Florida to visit with his Senior Estate Planning Paralegal (Elaine A. or “EYA”). Elaine just celebrated her 34th anniversary working for Phil and Arlyn will be celebrating 30 years this August. During our trip, not only did we get the opportunity to stop by a client’s office and…
What to Do When Everything is Urgent & Important?
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Too often for most people, there’s far too much to do and not enough time to do it. This requires a balancing act of figuring out how to prioritize your work. For most people, the work that gets set aside are the non-important, but also sadly, the non-urgent and important items. The things that you know you need to get to, but that don’t have a looming deadline to be met. Those tasks will constantly be backburnered into an oblivion, perhaps for eternity. We implement what is known as the “Urgent & Important” (or…
It’s You! Hi! You Might Be the Problem! It’s You!
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach I am not going to sugarcoat this article and it may rub some people the wrong way. This is a topic that has the power to be life-changing and transformative to your life and your practice, but it depends on what you do with this information. I recently had the pleasure of sharing the success story of estate planning attorney, Leigh Cowden, who finished up her first year of practice with close to $400,000 of revenue in her first year! While I was like a proud mama bear to share how much she had…
Do Client Maintenance Plans Really Work?
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Two of the major issues confronting estate planning attorneys are the commoditization of our “products” and increasing low price competition thanks to the do-it-yourself kits and internet trusts. One way to combat these issues is to emphasize and show your prospects how your “product” is superior to what your competitors have to offer, such as by differentiating the services available to the client after the sale. Think about it, when you purchase or lease a car, don’t you usually…
The Outstanding Success of an Estate Planning Attorney’s First Year in Practice
Interview of Attorney Leigh Cowden by Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach I had the opportunity to meet Leigh Cowden virtually through a Facebook group she formed called Lawyers Doing Seminars. I followed a lot of her success and she gave me the opportunity to share some of our own seminar marketing tips with the group on one of their monthly Zoom sessions. From there, she began to inquire with me about what we do and attended our Ultimate Level event in Dallas in May. I have followed her progress over the past few months and she then shared with the…
The Art of Confirming an Appointment
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Knowing the steps of how to properly confirm an appointment – – any kind of appointment, including a phone appointment, client meeting, lunch meeting, etc. – – is extremely valuable to any office looking to continue to operate efficiently and effectively. However, I have found that a lot of people don’t do this (or don’t do it properly) and this can result in a lot of disruption in the office. Whether or not you are the one responsible for confirming appointments, if you know that your office could benefit from a makeover in your…
Are You Fitting Jobs to People?
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Hiring, training, and managing employees have certainly not been easy things to learn when it comes to owning my own law practice. I say it time and time again, but these are the things that we never learned in law school, but yet seemingly take up a great deal of time (and expense) if not done well. One common mistake that I am guilty of making in the past, but that I’ve seen come up quite a bit lately…
The Top 35 Overlooked Best Practices for Executive Assistants
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach and Kirsten Allen, Executive Assistant Working for our boss, estate planning attorney Philip Kavesh, we combined have over 28 years of executive assistant experience. Throughout this time, we have been able to gain numerous best practices and good habits for providing administrative support to a busy executive. Also through our time in interfacing with many busy attorneys, we have interacted and even worked side-by-side with our fair share of assistants that either lacked the skills, experience, knowledge, training, or personality to be able to properly support their bosses. So we have seen what works…