The Business Side Of Law: Dave Zumpano Of Lawyers With Purpose On 5 Things You Need To Create Or Lead A Successful Law Firm
An Interview With Eric Pines
Have financial literacy. Understand the relationship between marketing, sales, operations, and finance.
Law school primarily prepares lawyers for the practice of law. But leading or starting a law firm requires so much more than that. It requires the entrepreneurial skills that any CEO would need to run a business; How to manage personnel, how to hire and fire, how to generate leads, how to advertise, how to manage finances, etc. On the business side of law, what does an attorney need to know to create a successful and thriving law practice? To address these questions, we are talking to successful law firm principals who can share stories and insights from their experience about the “5 Things You Need To Create Or Lead A Successful Law Firm”.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing David J. Zumpano.
David J. Zumpano is the owner and founder of The Estate Planning Law Center which currently serves as a “model law firm” to hundreds of law firms across the country. Dave’s practice remains focused on estate planning, asset protection, and elder law. In addition to his law firm, Dave is Founder of Lawyers With Purpose, LLC and Co-founder of Guidr.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are? Specifically we’d love to hear the story of how you began to lead your practice.
I was a young lawyer doing work for an insurance defense firm. I was hired to handle their wills and after two years, I had created a very robust will and trust addition to the practice. The partners were unfamiliar with this area of the law and were not sure if I was doing the work correctly. However, they saw how happy their clients were, so they “fired” me to reduce any potential liability they might have and asked me to stay of counsel. They then referred all their will and trust clients to me. I guess you could say I was thrown into it. After that my practice doubled every three to five years. When I was growing at that rate, I didn’t have a lot of people I could turn to for guidance. I found a national legal organization that focused on guiding attorneys with the management of their practice. These 1,500 lawyers met quarterly and had a listserv where I could post questions. Within a year of joining, I was identified as a standout lawyer. They asked me to become an instructor and I began teaching others. Soon after, I realized there was a real need to help lawyers with practice management and I started Lawyers With Purpose.
I’m a huge fan of mentorship throughout one’s career. None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Who has been your biggest mentor? What was the most valuable lesson you learned from them?
My greatest mentor has been my coach whose teachings are based on Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach program. The greatest thing I’ve learned from having a coach is the power of planning. Once a quarter, I put myself in a room with other like-minded professionals and we focus on planning for the future. It all starts with a thought, but most thoughts never become real. My mentor taught me that thoughts are just thoughts until they are shared, verbally or in writing. Once they are shared, they are an idea and then one must decipher what is important and what is urgent. I’ve learned to focus on what is important and urgent first and to table the non-important ideas. I have four different coaches now, so I never stop learning.
From completing your degree to opening a practice and becoming a business owner, your path was most likely challenging. Can you share a story about one of your greatest struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
One of my greatest struggles was the recession of 2008–2009. My company was growing, and we’d met revenue goals for 39 months in a row. I had a team of five lawyers and 20 staff members. We had money in the bonus pool and our higher-level staff were getting $10,000-$20,000 in annual bonuses. In one month, our sales dropped about 40% and the next month it dropped another 20%. We went from 20 employees and five lawyers to 11 employees and two lawyers. That was the most daunting time of my career and I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. I was trying to keep everything together and losing relationships in the process. Some of the attorneys we laid off went out on their own and then were ultimately competing against me. However, we overcame the effects of the recession by maintaining healthy, professional relationships with our former employees. I started to become more aware of reporting and tracking and paid more attention to leading indicators versus lagging indicators. When the next major event happened, which was COVID, we were more prepared. We were already in the process of becoming a virtual law firm and were able to adapt much more easily this time than during the recession.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
I have two quotes that I live by. One of my notable quotes is, “Do what your heart tells you, up until the point where your head says enough.” In business there are a lot of decisions you must make. As the owner of a law firm, you need to pay attention to the decisions you are making and be aware of your head and your heart. This is important when you are leading employees. In a three- or four-year period around 2015–2018, I was watching from a distance while my executive management team was leading my entire company and things weren’t going well. I was following my heart and I showed up at a company-wide event. I had six employees approach me and tell me they were looking for another job. I knew there were some problems, but I didn’t realize how it was affecting my staff members. So, when my head said it was enough, I ended up terminating my entire executive management team and took over the reins of the company to rebuild it again.
The second quote I live by stems from growing up in the family business. One day I went to the warehouse and my dad was sweeping the floor. He said, “Dave, don’t be afraid to sweep the floor. You must understand what it takes to sweep the floor or the people sweeping the floor will have you believing it’s a lot harder than it really is.” The message was that I should know every area that I am supervising. The more floors you sweep, the more valuable you are to the company.
This is not easy work. What is your primary motivation and drive behind the work that you do?
My primary motivation is people and value creation. By this I mean, I have never gone into an endeavor to make money, but instead to make a difference. You have to find a lacking in the marketplace and give people solutions they wouldn’t otherwise have.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
The most exciting project I am working on right now is Guidr®. Technology is advancing and digital is taking over most industries. The legal field is lagging in adopting new technology. The financial services industry has been doing it over 20 years and the legal industry is just starting to dip their toe in. A few years ago, I was sharing this concept with an entrepreneur at lunch, and we ended up collaborating and built the first digital platform for lawyers to digitize the practice of law. We never got into it for money, but rather how we could help lawyers and people. We built this entire company during COVID, all while working virtually.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to discussing the business of law. Can you tell us a bit about the nature of your practice and what you focus on?
I am focused exclusively on estate planning, elder law, and asset protection.
You are a successful attorney. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? What unique qualities do you have that others may not? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Determination. Being determined to achieve a particular outcome is really critical to your success. Guidr is an example of determination. I had a vision several years ago to create a way for lawyers to more effectively share information with their clients or with clients of allied professionals. I tried to build a model to do that, and it failed. I was determined because I thought it was a great concept that lawyers needed and wanted. I tried several ways and then took a different approach. It was much more sophisticated than the first, and it failed again. It didn’t fail because it wasn’t the right concept, but it failed because it didn’t do it simply. I was contemplating giving up and I ran into Guy Remond at an international coaching lunch. Since Guy had such a sophisticated technology background, I shared my idea with him. Guy immediately had a solution on how to simplify the platform and together we built what is now known as Guidr. If it was not for my determination and my persistence to continue exploring possibilities, lawyers would not be able to benefit from the Guidr platform today.
Commitment. What are you committing to and are you keeping those commitments? What are you asking others to do and are they keeping those commitments? Nothing can destroy you quicker in business than not keeping your commitment. Always do what you commit to do and when you don’t, acknowledge it, clean it up, and recommit. I think we can all relate to a time we didn’t keep our word and we can relate to the pain or frustration it caused.
Generosity. If all of your focus is on, “What’s in it for me?” it is very difficult to create value for others. In my experience, if I focus on creating value for others, I win. It provides me with money and notoriety, and it provides me with the right network of people. It all starts with helping people solve the needs they have in their life. My life is an example of generosity. I have been blessed with money, employees, and allied companies. I have had the life I have wanted, and I love helping others to create that same life.
Do you think where you went to school has any bearing on your success? How important is it for a lawyer to go to a top-tier school?
I believe the education is more important than the name of the school, with the following caveat. Most powerful names have great educations. One of the things I think that is important is focusing on the non-technical parts of being a lawyer. The school’s name usually helps get you your first job. The school can become part of your personal brand if that is what you want from it. I think if you are determined, you keep your commitments, and you are generous, you will achieve all the things you want, regardless of where you went to school.
Managing being a law practitioner and a business owner is a constant balancing act. How do you manage both roles?
Being a lawyer is a role. I am only a lawyer when I am in a room with a client, or I am doing the work I committed to do for my client. Being a business owner is a very different set of skills. I think the hardest thing for a lawyer is understanding the difference in those two very different skillsets. There is a presumption that because lawyers are really smart, they must already know how to run a business. Facts would substantiate that law school doesn’t teach us how to run a business. The E Myth by Michael Gerber explains that the entrepreneurial myth is the assumption that because you are a good lawyer, you must be good at running a law firm. The hard part is understanding the difference and making sure you spend enough time in each role to be successful as a lawyer and a business owner.
Can you help articulate the entrepreneurial skills a lawyer needs to run and lead a successful law firm?
There are two: people management and financial management. The most important entrepreneurial skill is financial discipline. Understanding revenue and expenses and how those create a net profit. The second is people skills. If you are an ogre, you may succeed, but the process will be miserable for everyone. We have to be able to collaborate with people of different backgrounds and perspectives.
As a business owner you spend most of your time working IN your practice, seeing clients. When and how do you shift to working ON your practice? (Marketing, upgrading systems, growing your practice, etc.) How much time do you spend on the business elements?
The business I created is focused on teaching lawyers this exact question. Lawyers With Purpose has trained hundreds of lawyers to run very profitable legal practices. What we have identified is that committing to a minimum of eight hours a week on the business and up to 32 hours a week on the legal side, creates a very lucrative law practice.
Can you share some specific, non intuitive insights from our personal experience about how a leader of a law firm should:
- Manage personnel: Treat others as you would want to be treated.
- Hire and fire: Utilize social sciences and assessments.
- Generate leads: This is a skill set unique to people that have it. And, if you don’t have it, you will know it.
- Advertise: A way to create an awareness of the value you can create in the world.
- Manage finances: It’s the heart of every business. If it is not controlled properly nothing works in the business, including the brain. If your finances aren’t in order, everything shuts down.
Ok, thank you. Here is the main question of our interview about the business side of law. What are your “5 Things An Attorney Needs To Know In Order To Create A Successful And Thriving Law Practice”?
- Figure out what you do best.
- Figure out what part of the practice you dread.
- Figure out how to get other people to do the part you don’t like to do?
- Have financial literacy. Understand the relationship between marketing, sales, operations, and finance.
- What is the prize? Why are you running the business? Is it for the money? Providing a good life for your family? What do you want from your practice? Once you understand that, use the first four to get what you want out of the business.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Always be willing to discover the greatness in yourself and play into bigger possibilities.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
LinkedIn or by visiting: lawyerswithpurpose.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
Mr. Pines has also served as a mediator for numerous federal agencies including serving a year as the Library of Congress’ in-house EEO Mediator. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court for federal employee matters. He has also worked as an EEO technical writer drafting hundreds of Final Agency Decisions for the federal sector.
Mr. Pines’ firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia. His first passion is his wife and five children. He plays classical and rock guitar and enjoys playing ice hockey, running, and biking. Please visit his websites at www.pinesfederal.com and www.toughinjurylawyers.com. He can also be reached at eric@pinesfederal.com.
