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Growing your firm ‘will never be easy’
For boutiques or sole practitioners looking to grow, this lawyer said that hard work, trust and taking it one step at a time are key.
Lauren Croft
Mike Chastaine is an attorney based in California, where he is admitted to the bar. Speaking recently on The Boutique Lawyer Show, he discussed growth strategy and succession planning for smaller firms and how firm owners can grow their law firm into an asset to sell.
While selling a law firm comprises a number of different things, succession planning was a priority for Mr Chastaine, as well as getting himself into a business-owner mindset and stepping away from thinking of himself as a lawyer.
“The things that didn’t work for me all revolved around the reluctance to let go, that I kept having to be the decision-maker; everything had to run through me. And so, I became the cork in the bottle. Once I realised the importance of one, hiring good people, [and] two, trusting them too within parameters, you give them guidelines as to decisions that they make and then trust them, but verify. You check up on it,” he explained.
“You don’t just let everything run amok, but you gotta let go of some of this stuff. Nobody can do it all effectively, in my view. My focus is to be the best lawyer that I can be, to be the top at my craft. If I do that and let other people do the things that I hire them for, things work out. And I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t work out for anybody who’s willing to become as good as they can be in their craft.”
Therefore, to get from A to B to be able to sell his firm, Mr Chastaine said there were a number of challenges along the way — and that it was “hard work”, to say the least.
“A lot of people are looking for the greatest app or some website or magic pill to make all of this easy. This is not easy; this will never be easy. And you just have to understand that there’s a certain amount of work that’s going to go into it. It doesn’t have to be miserable, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not hard. So, I think you just have to recognise that there’s going to be some hard work here, but it doesn’t have to be miserable,” he added.
“You just take it a step at a time. You take one project, you go, ‘OK, I’m going to start doing data collection on our intake funnel,’ for example. Well, get it set up, make it work, and then move on to the next project. Don’t try to do everything at once. I think another mistake is you get all this great information; you try to do 50 things at a time and it doesn’t work. It’s much easier to break it up, do one at a time, get it done, and then move on.”
In terms of getting on this road in the face of a global economic downturn, firm owners shouldn’t be too worried, as long as they’re aware of what’s happening in the market, according to Mr Chastaine.
“I think some of it’s going to depend on your practice area. So, during the pandemic, everyone thought bankruptcy was going to go crazy in the United States, and it almost shut down. Immigration became a big issue during the Trump era, and it’s still a big issue, and that’s not going to change. My practice was criminal defence. That’s not going to change,” he noted.
“So, I think it’s a good idea to be aware of what’s going on, but I never changed anything in my practice because of some news report. Recessions come; recessions go. I practised during the housing recession in ’08, ’09. It did impact our practice, but back then, I wasn’t keeping data, and I didn’t have a lot of the knowledge that I have now. If that happened today, it would not impact our practice nearly as much. So, I think you need to be aware of what’s going on around you, but figure out what your goal is and then be flexible about the route of getting there.”
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Mike Chastaine, click below:
Lauren Croft
Lauren is a journalist at Lawyers Weekly and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from Macleay College. Prior to joining Lawyers Weekly, she worked as a trade journalist for media and travel industry publications and Travel Weekly. Originally born in England, Lauren enjoys trying new bars and restaurants, attending music festivals and travelling. She is also a keen snowboarder and pre-pandemic, spent a season living in a French ski resort.
