BIBI FELL:
You are worthy of being in this profession. You are worthy of representing that client. You are worthy of taking that high profile case.
SONYA PALMER:
Welcome to the season one finale of LawHER.
BIBI FELL:
Don't question that. Step in there and be yourself, your worthy self. You don't have to pretend to be somebody that you want to emulate. You don't have to pretend to be male in the courtroom. That authenticity is so much more persuasive than any tool you could learn from any seminar.
SONYA PALMER:
When we started the show, just 50 weeks ago, only 19% of managing partners in US law firms were female. While the number of women entering law school continues to rise, these numbers are not reflected at the partner level. To help bridge that gap, we continue to create spaces where we celebrate the trailblazing attorneys and entrepreneurs who are changing the game for women in the legal fields. I am Sonya Palmer, your host and VP of operations at Rankings, the digital agency of choice for personal injury lawyers. This is LawHER. As this season comes to a close, and we look back at some of the most impactful conversations, I would like to thank every attorney, legal professional, and all around bad asses who shared with us their hard-earned wisdoms, struggles, and dreams, whose stories serve as a constant reminder that we are all capable, worthy, and stronger together. And a very special shout out to my boss, Chris Dreyer, CEO at Rankings, for his unwavering support. Sara Williams found her authentic voice in trial advocacy, and it shows. She has recovered over 15 million for her clients, and though she has worked with some of the largest and most well-funded personal injury firms in the nation, she sees social media as the great equalizer for female attorneys.
SARA WILLIAMS:
It's an interesting concept, but I think, philosophically, that digital marketing and being able to market the way you can now is the great equalizer. I think it is the thing, and this is why I'm passionate about speaking about it to women and people of color. To me, it removed the barrier to entry. I don't need to be a member of your country club. I don't need to be a member of the boys club, right? I can go directly to the source, myself, for an inexpensive entry fee. Billboards are expensive. TV can be expensive, especially if you're in a market like ours where it's really competitive, but Facebook and Instagram, those ads? Even a new lawyer starting out can have some sort of budget set aside for that. And so yes, it definitely has changed my perspective because, if an Arab man with the last name Shunnarah, in the state of Alabama, can dominate marketing the way that he does, to me, if that's not a clear sign that doing these things removes the barriers to entry, I don't know what is.
SONYA PALMER:
You're absolutely right. I love what you said. It's an equalizer. It's an absolutely equalizer, and as things get more and more competitive, the pandemic has just driven everybody online. Legal was already extremely competitive, but I think you're right to promote yourself, because I do think that people, probably more than ever, are looking to connect with a person and not just a brand or a firm.
SARA WILLIAMS:
Here's how I know, in my heart, that it is the removal of the barrier to entry. All of the bar organizations across the country are trying to figure out, "Dow do we slow this down? How do we control the folks who are marketing digitally?" And that is because those organizations are primarily being run by the folks who either don't market, who have had to rely on their networks, who have relied on their family connections, and they are scared. There's only so much they can do, right? At the end of the day, change is going to come. You can fight it. You can try to change the rules to legislate around it, but it's going to happen. You cannot close us out of the marketplace. Lawyers are just any other business, and so I think that, to me, is the clearest sign that it's effective. When folks have to start changing the rules, that's a clear sign that it is effective and effective for people who were typically marginalized.
SONYA PALMER:
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be?
SARA WILLIAMS:
The thing that frustrates me the most about the legal industry is its inability to innovate quickly. I was just having this conversation with a professor at Cumberland. As fast as the world is moving, especially here in this state, but I feel like I get the sense that it's in a lot of other states too, the legal industry just doesn't seem to be moving at the same pace. The pandemic should have pushed us into innovation. We had to learn to adapt. We had to take depositions by Zoom. People are trying cases by Zoom, but it's weird. It's like, as soon as certain lockdowns were lifted, it's like people forget. You spend all this money on this equipment, and now you're demanding to be in person. Here we are back with a spike. Half of our office is out. I had a status conference the other day. Every single lawyer was either coming out of quarantine or was in quarantine, but you still have judges who refuse to have status conferences via Zoom, judges who refuse to have hearings via Zoom, lawyers who refuse to take depositions via Zoom, and law firms that don't allow parents to have flexibility in their work schedules. These kids are being sent home right and left, and daycares are being shut down. It's like, "We can survive." It's so bizarre to me. We literally spent a year, and we learned we could survive in doing this thing. Then, we come into this year, and we're like, "All right. Back to normal is," so that's the thing that frustrates me the most about the legal industry, because I think that is what hurts women, because we, right now, are the ones who are carrying the bulk of the load when it comes to dealing with this pandemic. I think it's a control issue. I think that it's a generational issue. I think it's a control issue. I'll tell you. I am very, very worried about every woman in my life, because I feel like we are all just hanging on a thread. We're one shot down away from just calling it, and I think that part of that for women lawyers is the law firms and the industry's refusal to just get with it
SONYA PALMER:
Despite the industry's desire to slow things down, up-and-coming female attorneys are full steam ahead. Reb Masel has over a million followers on TikTok. On the surface, it might seem like she only reads public depositions, but this account has provided a space for all legal professionals to come together, feel seen, and find a joy, even if it's in life's little absurdities,
REB MASEL:
Hundreds of thousands of comments, DMs, and views from so many attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants, law clerks, and staff that say, "Oh my God. Thank you." I have so many people emailing me submissions that are hilarious, but so many more non-attorneys and people who aren't in this field, who genuinely send me the most heartfelt, kindest messages about how these are hilarious and the hilarity is getting them through a bad day, or how they're like, "I only downloaded this app so that I could see these right when they're posted."I just am extremely fortunate to be able to have a vehicle, unintentionally, accidentally, to just make people laugh have a good time, and also understand that not everything in court is just a true crime, docuseries, podcast, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy. A lot of it is mundane, menial stuff. I'm preaching to the choir here, but so much goes on that, either some days it restores your faith in humanity, because some people are genuinely hilarious, and sometimes it breaks it down a little, but I like not knowing what day you're going to get.
SONYA PALMER:
Making the legal industry more inclusive. That's a thing that needs to happen, but also kind of what you're talking about, just breaking a mold of what people think an attorney, particularly a female attorney, is supposed to act and look like, a bob. Humor, I think, is often undervalued in professional positions. You're serious. You're a lawyer. And so when other people see like, "Oh. That person has a sense of humor, they're funny," you're talking about very tense situations, being able to make someone smile during something like that is totally undervalued.
REB MASEL:
Absolutely. I am a very, very loud proponent of being a person, and being an attorney, and attorneys who've practiced for a long time and who have achieved varying levels of success, I think, will echo that, will say that showing their clients that they are a person, that they are someone who can be empathetic, who can understand, who can listen, who can acknowledge the differences in their upbringing and their background from their clients, or understand and acknowledge that, even though they've done this for 20 years and they have 20 years of experience, they can absolutely learn from someone who is just now entering the field, who might have a bright, fresh new take on this area of law, on this burden shifting analysis, that they might not have thought of previously like, "I'm going to pave my way no matter what." You're going to be` fine. You meet, along the way, in law school, in practice, so many women who are like you, who are of varying ages, races, degrees, backgrounds, and experience levels, and so you think, "Oh. That's fine," but for people who are thinking about law school, for people who aren't yet decided, or for young girls, young teenagers who want to see someone other than just legally blonde in pop culture who they can look up to, I didn't realize until now how open of a space there was to be filled by women who are in this field, who have a voice, who are of varying personalities, education levels, practice levels, and practice areas. Because even if I'm just sitting on TikTok talking about something completely irrelevant to the law, just talking about my day, or telling jokes, whatever, I've had 100s, if not 1000s of DMs from women, teenagers, and girls that literally that make me sob, where they just say, "I'm just so happy that I can be a person. I'm so happy that you're still a lawyer. That's so cool. That blows my mind."
SONYA PALMER:
The Old Guard has paved the way for women in the legal field, serving as shining examples of how far women can go when we band together. Lisa Bloom has always been a community builder, rallying like-minded women and allies around the fight for justice.
LISA BLOOM:
I always knew that it was my job to contribute and to make a difference, although I was resistant to going to law school. When I was in college, I volunteered at a battered women's shelter. I worked with the abused children. I also volunteered in a homeless shelter, feeding homeless people, and I did that in law school as well. I really thought about becoming a therapist or a social worker, and helping people that way, but my mom convinced me to go to law school. Off I went, and the rest is history.
SONYA PALMER:
To fight the way that you fight requires unbridled courage. Was courage a learned behavior for you?
LISA BLOOM:
It does take a lot of courage, and I tell my clients, who really are more courageous than I, because it's personal for them. I signed up for this. I always remember that they did not. Things happened to them, and then they decided, "I have to stand up, even though I'd really don't want to, even though I'd rather be a model, a secretary, or a security guard." I mean, these are the kinds of people I represent. That's what they wanted to do. They didn't want to be a civil rights activist. For courage, I think a lot of times you just have to fake it, and if you're faking it, and you're charging forward and doing what needs to be done, who cares whether you really feel courageous or not? You just got to take care of business, and you got to take care of yourself. I have people coming after me all the time, threatening me, suing me, threatening to sue me, and I just have to keep going, because I believe in what I do.
SONYA PALMER:
You've used your platform to outline the injustice that was done in the Zimmerman trial and the murder of Trayvon Martin in a book entitled Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It. You stated that the trial was unjust and racist, and were disturbed that so few non-black people read the book or even seemed to care about racism. How can attorneys fight against a racially biased system when it feels like they're on their own?
LISA BLOOM:
I think we have seen a little bit of improvement with the Black Lives Matter movement really becoming so giant in 2020 and millions of people in the streets, and we did see more white people, particularly, getting involved, and that was heartening to me. We're now seeing, I think, a backlash, and there's a lot of right-wing backlash to Black Lives Matter and trying to paint the whole movement like it was violent, and it's all about little microaggressions, and that's really not what it's about. It's about very fundamental problems in our system. How can attorneys do more? I mean, first of all, educate yourself about these issues. I think, as a white person, you may have certain assumptions, and don't assume that your life experience is the same as everybody else's. I mean, I've literally heard white people say like, "Well, I've never experienced racism."I'm like, "Okay." So there's a lot of great books to read. You can read mine, but there's a lot of wonderful other books to read, YouTube videos, documentaries, and really educate yourself, and then consider what you can do in your practice. Can you take on a pro bono case, for example? I just took on a case yesterday of an African American man called the N-word a couple of times in his workplace. We see a lot of that. This is a case that it's probably not a particularly high value case, but I think it's important, and we wanted to stand up for him and fight for him. If it ends up being a pro bono case, so be it. There's a lot of need out there, and I think once you educate yourself and you open yourself up to doing the work and helping people, you're going to be rewarded.
SONYA PALMER:
Suffering may be an immutable fact of life, but we certainly do not have to do it alone, and how we respond to that adversity is a choice all our own. Asking for help when we are at our most vulnerable can be one of the hardest things to do. But as Melissa Lamore found out, the pillars that prepped her up in her time of need were right in front of her all along.
MELISSA LAMORE:
Not only did going through cancer help me really connect with those who were helping, it solidified the community that I had within this industry. As an event planner, as somebody whose literal job is in hospitality and making sure that I'm predicting everybody's needs, my job has been in service, my profession has been in service, my business has been in service, really, my entire life. This was the first time that I was knocked down, and I couldn't be there for anybody. As a true extrovert, I really struggled with that, because what I did most was people, and so I kind of reached out to my community, and really the community within the industry really reached out to me. I mean, I'm not kidding. Daily, I had something showing up at my door: text messages, calls, FaceTimes emails. I mean, the amount of outreach that I received from the community within this industry was incredible, right?
SONYA PALMER:
That makes me really happy to hear.
MELISSA LAMORE:
So it really flipped the script for me, right? It really allowed me to see, for the first time really, how my relationship with our clients, with my colleagues, with my friends within the industry, that none of those things were dependent on what I can do for them, what I can produce for them, what I can create, or how I can galvanize people for them. It really was about an authentic relationship, and authenticity is my core value, and so when I got that outreach of love, compassion, understanding, and just love and support, it was overwhelming.
SONYA PALMER:
I loved to hear that you reached out, so that you recognized this was, like you said, it flipped the script for you. You were finding yourself in a place you hadn't been before, and you reached out. That first step, you took it, which can be very intimidating and very scary for people when they're feeling very vulnerable, but you did it. Then, you got it back 10-fold, 100-fold.
MELISSA LAMORE:
It's so true. I work with cancer survivors now and those who are battling cancer now, and I work just sort of as a coach or as a mentor, as a guide of sorts through Stanford, actually. I tell them constantly, "I mean, as a true extrovert, that's what worked for me." I took my in-case-of-emergency group text, and I gave them my chemo schedule. I asked them to show up for me, to pick a date and show up for me, and I turned every chemo into a gathering, something I almost looked forward to, because the days prior to chemo is traumatic. There's no other way to put it, and so I created an environment that made me excited and that gave me energy. Truly, fundamentally gave me energy. I had a Shave Day party, and I'll tell you, out of the 12 people that came to Shave Day, 9 of them were in the industry.
SONYA PALMER:
So tell us more about The League.
MELISSA LAMORE:
So The League is, oh my gosh, The League is an incredible network and community of women in the industry. The League is us creating a platform of what sort of Carson and I had created just amongst ourselves, right? Carson and I, working in different parts of the industry, had this incredible network of women that she and I, together, were friends with that was just the most empowering, invigorating, energetic, and energizing group of women you could honestly ever imagine. She and I were talking one day, and she actually reached out to me and said, "You know, it would be great if there was a women's organization that was designed for all of us." I mean, there are so many women's organizations that are very particularly designed to support certain sectors of the industry, which are all incredibly essential and beneficial for those in that particular sector of the industry, right? But this is an organization that's designed for the whole woman, for their personal growth, for their professional growth, for their independent financial management skills, and for their why, right? It's designed for the whole woman, really solely, and then by supporting the whole woman, you support them in whatever role they play in the industry.
SONYA PALMER:
As more women enter the legal space, the ways in which we can collaborate shift and take new forms. Lauren Wood, founder of the annual Women in Trial Travel Summit, has created something entirely new by blending two historically male dominated industries, travel and law.
LAUREN WOOD:
I love being a trial lawyer, but I also just love travel, and I love the blog aspect of it too. And so it was really the thought process was to combine those two things. I actually did a small group trip to Bali in March of 2020, and because of just my professional connections and my friend base, a lot of them are women lawyers, and nearly all of the people who signed up for this small group trip, there were 10 plus me, so 11 total, were all women lawyers. From there, it sort of spiraled out of control. Then, we decided to get it certified for MCLE credit, and it actually wasn't until after the event that I got the word from the state bar that they had approved it, and so then I thought, "Well, if I can get MCLE approval for an 11-person group in Bali, I'm sure I could put together an actual conference and get it certified for MCLE, hopefully. Knock on wood," and then it, like everything else, it just sort of builds on itself. That was the impetus, is a much larger endeavor, obviously, but the thought of getting a group of women lawyers in a beautiful place like Mexico, where we can learn from one another and also just enjoy some time away from the office, that, to me, is such a wonderful thing.
SONYA PALMER:
Showing up unapologetically allows you to tap into the raw strength of your authentic self. As you pour your heart and soul into your career and clients, Genie Harrison explains what it takes to reach the top of your game and stay there.
GENIE HARRISON:
That consistency of reaching the top, and then saying at the top, is the function of my own internal drive to be the best that I can be on a daily basis. And so nobody puts those standards on me or has those expectations of me. I have them of myself, and my expectation is not to get X award or Y award. It's to give 110% on every single thing I do in every given day, every week, every month, and every year. My recommendation to everyone is have your own high standards, and strive to meet them on a daily basis.
SONYA PALMER:
It's easier to give your all, 110%, when you're taking it serious, so I love that. You are a very fierce advocate. The LA Times had this to say about your tenacity. "When you see her in a fight with a bear, worry about the bear." Have you always been a fighter?
GENIE HARRISON:
I do think that grit and the tenacity is something that becomes part of one's personality early on in life, and maybe there's some nature. The grit really comes from being exposed to adversity and overcoming it, having the courage. Everything's scary. A lot of things out there are scary. Standing up to an abusive parent is scary. Going into court and trying a case is scary. All of these things are scary, right? But what it takes is courage to overcome the fear. That's where you won't have courage unless you have fear. These things go hand in hand, so the question is, does one choose courage instead of backing down? That's something that you'll never exhibit unless you're exposed to adversity and things that scare you, and you nonetheless step into them.
SONYA PALMER:
Bibi Fell has carved out a name for herself as a dogged trial attorney, while tapping into kindness and compassion. As the number of women entering the legal field continues to grow, the percentages of women at the top remain staggeringly low.
BIBI FELL:
There is a huge gap, and we do need to close it. That gap gets even wider when you look at women who are more like five to seven years of practice. I think what we need to do is we need to have more women mentoring women. When I was a young lawyer, I didn't have anybody to look up to and say, "Okay. This is what my life can be like. This is what my career can be like," because I was looking at men who were in very different circumstances than me. The other thing we can do, as women, is support each other through the hard times. I mean, there are so many women who think that, in order to compete in this male dominated profession, we need to be perfect. We need to have perfect lives. We need to have lives that just give us a clear path to doing our job and only our job, and that's just not reality. When I look at the women who have really made it to the top of the field, the ones who have been practicing and are up there in the highest organizations, getting the biggest verdicts, they're women who went through struggle, but they're women who kept getting up. I think that needs to be the message to young women. Whatever you're facing, whether it's issues with kids, divorce, infidelity, illness, there is a path through if you want to keep going in this profession,
SONYA PALMER:
I do feel like women often take the burden on themselves. "I can do it myself. I don't need help," and so they don't look for help from other women, and it's not then as instinctual to then reach out to other people, so I do think that relying on others, other women can impact that. Is there another role that you think that community can play?
BIBI FELL:
I think our community tends to have this impression that it's not happening. There are so many people who have made it, who I respect, and because it doesn't impact them in their circle, they don't see it. I think, as a community, we really need to open our eyes to the fact that, "Yes, it still exists." Why aren't we hearing about it? Because women aren't complaining about it. Why aren't women complaining about it? Because women get punished for complaining about it. It's our job, especially those of us, male and female who have made it to the tops of our profession, to open our eyes, to recognize it's happening, to call people out, and to hold opportunities out to both sexes on an equal basis, not just that group of friends that you go to the bar with all the time, that happens to be the same gender as you. But to actually say, "Okay. Stepping outside of my small circle, which is so biased, because I like the people who are like me, who deserves an opportunity? Who really is the best person for this case."
SONYA PALMER:
Yes. A lot of the reason we started this podcast was because women were not getting the same amount of attention, opportunity, recognition that their male counterparts were. But then when I started booking guests and started looking around, there was no shortage of very successful, powerful, prominent women who are just at the absolute top of their field. They're not being as paid attention to. I think that first thing that you said, just about paying attention, and looking around and seeing the people who are already doing it, so yes. What lessons do you wish all female lawyers knew right now, or young lawyers entering into the field?
BIBI FELL:
Yeah. I think the number one lesson I wish I could teach everyone is be yourself. I mean, you are worthy of being in this profession. You are worthy of representing that client. You are worthy of taking that high profile case. Don't question that. Step in there and be yourself, your worthy self. You don't have to pretend to be somebody that you want to emulate. You don't have to pretend to be male in the courtroom. That authenticity is so much more persuasive than any tool you could learn from any seminar.
SONYA PALMER:
Women are leaving big law and established fields, left and right, to start their own practice. While there may never be a perfect time, every now and then, the circumstances feel just right. Candice Klein explains how she seized an opportunity to open her firm and live out the work life integration she truly desired.
CANDICE KLEIN:
The pandemic came at a time where I have a son, he's nine years old, and I was struggling with wanting to be home and wanting to be a stay-at-home mom, but loving my career and really wanting to try cases. COVID kind of came at a crazy time for me, that it was so nice to have the opportunity to be home with my son. Then, it just felt like the natural progression to start our own creative firm, and to do all the things that we wanted to do, have the time to work with the clients, to focus on cases that we could just give our all to, and to have clients that we could understand their story, learn about them, and be creative with them. It just was timing.
SONYA PALMER:
You mentioned that you never want to choose between being a lawyer and a mother. You successfully do both. For those considering motherhood or those who are already moms, is the work-life balance a myth?
CANDICE KLEIN:
I will quote my mother who always says, "You can have balance. You just may not have balance at all times." It is definitely, I don't want to use the word difficult, because life can be difficult, so I don't want to say it's difficult to be a mom and a lawyer. I think that you have to create kind of boundaries in your own life, and then try to work within those boundaries. If there are certain things that are extremely important, that I know that I want to be a part of with my son's life, I will make sure that I am part of those things. For instance, making lunches or making breakfast. I don't care where I'm at, if I'm in trial, if I'm not, I enjoy making my son's lunch for school. I will wake up early or do whatever it is, because I like that creative part of making lunches, the color, and the way that I organize it, and putting in notes. That's just something that's important to me, so I could wake up at three in the morning, prepare for trial, and then make sure that I always get his lunch done, because that's something that is important to me. I think it is hard. It's hard, especially being a trial lawyer, because it consumes so much time. It's not only being in trial during trial hours, but then it's also preparing for trial. Obviously, that takes away from family time, but I'm lucky that I have a supportive husband who, when I'm not there, he's there for my son. We've never had a nanny. People think we're crazy. I hear all the time, "Why don't you have a nanny?" or "Why don't you do this?" and we just make it work, because that's what was important to us. We had my son older, and so it was very important to me to be a hands-on mom, so we just make it work.
SONYA PALMER:
Opening a firm is hard, scary, and can be incredibly stressful, particularly if you are subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that says you have to be the hardest working in the room to be successful. To be in your A game, Allison Williams learned the hard way that you need to put yourself first, and that despite the challenges, opening a practice is well worth the reward.
ALLISON WILLIAMS:
So there's so many benefits to going out on your own, right? It's not for everyone, so I will say that, but there's a certain fire that a lot of lawyers have inside of them that they're not even aware of until they become a business owner. When you have the ability to, not just have the freedom from a boss, because to be clear, I worked at three great law firms, and at least the managing attorney, the one who hired me, the one that I work most closely with, I still have great relationships with all of them. I loved working for them. It was never a matter of me wanting to escape a job, and I always was highly productive. I got a lot of freedom. But when you are in your own business, the freedom then becomes something that you can really visualize as how you want your life to be so that you can create a business that supports your life. That might mean you want, at a certain stage, time to be able to cut out in the middle of the day to go to things at your children's school, or you might want to entertain artistic passions that you have. So you want to be able to take certain weeks off to be able to go paint, go write, or go be in a commune, right? There are certain elements of the business that you have a lot more say over, so you get to start directing who you help. Who are the people that you most enjoy working with? What is it that you want to create with your law firm? Do you want to just practice law as a way of making money, or is there something bigger to that? By the way, there's no judgment if there isn't something bigger. There are some people that, practicing law is a job, and they want that job to be highly financially successful so that they can do something else. But if you don't own a business that is effective at producing revenue without you, just as you can't when you are working a job, you have to produce the labor in order to justify your compensation, you're not going to be able to get to that something else. I think that something else is really critically important. It's really become even more important during the pandemic, as people have really had to stop, pause, and think about, "How much time do I want to be spending at my home with my family in my interests? How much time do I want to give over to a career that may or may not serve me?"And as we tap into that more, creating your own business really allows you to have space to create that for yourself. Now, a lot of people don't actually create that for themselves, because they see having a law firm is just a job with my name on it. That's how they run it, right? So they now hold themselves accountable to billing a lot of hours instead of being held accountable by someone else, but if you really conceptualize it the right way, a business is a gateway to creating a dream life, and it really does make people better citizens. It makes them better for their families, better for their friends, better for themselves, and I'm very much committed to helping my clients achieve that.
SONYA PALMER:
Once the courageous leap is taken to open a firm, asking for help and guidance is crucial for success. Learn from those who've come before you, be willing to delegate, and let go so that your firm can grow. Jennifer Gore is at the helm of one of the fastest growing firms in the nation, with no plans of slowing down.
JENNIFER GORE:
The average law firm in the United States is growing at less than 10% annually. I don't know whether I'm really a star or we're just measuring against a very slow moving industry, because a lot of what we've done to grow has been out of absolute necessity. For example, I'll just give you an example. We have an intake team. We have wonderful, lovely people that work on our intake team. When we were smaller, we only had one intake person. Can you imagine how many hours they had to work to cover all the shifts of a 24-hour, 7-day a week business, where you get calls all throughout the day? So I kept telling everyone, "We are not going to be able to keep intake people if we only have one intake person," and we were seeing that. People would get burned out, so I was like, "What would it take for us to support three or four intake people?" And a lot of why we've wanted to grow is just because we can create better jobs for people, and we can create more sustainability in the law firm when the number of the person in that department is not one. You see so many law firms where they have one person doing one thing, and one person doing another thing, and then they lose that person and the law firm implodes.
SONYA PALMER:
Yes. What other sort of systems and processes did you put in place to help kind of scale and keep up with the growth?
JENNIFER GORE:
Well, at one point, we only had one pod, and then you would get a client, and if they're unhappy, not everyone's a fit for everyone. So I'm like, "I can't own a wall firm that has one option. We need multiple different options for our clients. And so we have intake software. We have case management software. We have ways to text our clients. We have ways to have them sign digital documents. We use a lot of technology, because that's the way the world is going.
SONYA PALMER:
I think that probably does play a role in being able to grow so rapidly, is the adoption of technology, where I do think that sort of traditional law firms might be hesitant to do that and kind of change things up.
JENNIFER GORE:
I mean, our clients are not just comparing us to other law firms. They are comparing us to their consumer experiences across a broad range of services. If they can get a pizza by pressing a button in five minutes, and then you want them to come in and sign a document with their blood, sweat, and tears, 25 miles away, you're losing people.
SONYA PALMER:
Taking all that she has learned over the years, Jennifer wants to help others do the same. She explains how she got started as a business coach for women.
JENNIFER GORE:
What started happening was a lot of people started asking me to help them here and there, and I'm so passionate about business, having more women owning companies, and growing multi-million dollar companies. There was a statistic from the 2018 American Express report, which basically said that the number of women owned businesses in the United States that had revenue of $100,000 or less, guess the percentage?
SONYA PALMER:
I'm afraid to.
JENNIFER GORE:
$100,000 or less is the category. What do you think the percentage is? 80%.
SONYA PALMER:
80%?
JENNIFER GORE:
$100K or less.
SONYA PALMER:
$100K or less.
JENNIFER GORE:
Okay, and then there was another statistic that said the percent of businesses that are owned by women, this is in 2018, that do $1 million or more.
SONYA PALMER:
Yes. That's where the low, 11.
JENNIFER GORE:
It's 1.7%.
SONYA PALMER:
Oh. So 1% of women own businesses that are doing more than $1 million.
JENNIFER GORE:
Correct.
SONYA PALMER:
Wow.
JENNIFER GORE:
And that includes lawyers. That includes all business. That's every type of business, but I really found that number so hard to wrap my mind around, because I own a law firm that's a multi-million dollar law firm, so then I'm like, "Okay. I'm in a 1%." Actually, I'm probably in that half percent, because they're just saying minimum of $1 million. Then, I'm thinking to myself, "How many employees can you employ with $1 million of revenue?" It's not a lot. I mean, what can you do with $100K? These are really just kind of side hustles.
SONYA PALMER:
Yeah.
JENNIFER GORE:
And they're not sustainable, meaning you can't go off grid and have a three-month maternity leave like I did, because there's no one there to run the law firm when you're gone. I started thinking about what kind of experience are these women giving themselves in owning a "business." If you don't own a business that has employees, and they said the average number of employees that these women's businesses had was half of an employee, that experience, the experience of doing everything all on your own, and having no support and no leadership, that is a very draining experience. As a business owner, as a lawyer, you do that for a period of time until you can get the leverage to start hiring people, but that level is unsustainable to do for years and years and years.
SONYA PALMER:
I come across a ton of statistics, but that one is jarring to me. Like you said, that's a side hustle. That's not necessarily a business, and yes, that it is not sustainable.
JENNIFER GORE:
Yeah, so what would our country look like? What would a lot of things look like if there were more women that owned multi-million dollar companies, let alone multi-million dollar law firms?
SONYA PALMER:
To all of the women who have tuned in and continue to make their corner of the world a little brighter, thank you, and I would love to hear from you as we plan our next season. Please reach out to our Instagram. You have been listening to LawHER with me, Sonya Palmer. Please share this episode with the trailblazer in your life, so we may continue to watch our community grow. I will see you next time on LawHER, where we will shed light on how another of the brightest and boldest woman in the legal industry climbed to the top of her field.
