The Business Side Of Law: Sarah J Jacobs Of Jacobs Berger On 5 Things You Need To Create Or Lead A Successful Law Firm

An Interview With Eric Pines

Just Keep Swimming: Yes, I stole this from Nemo. It’s good advice! Running a business means making decisions. One after another, whether they were good or bad, and not running from them because hey are hard or scary. The key here, while you keep swimming, is to learn from each decision. You need to keep moving forward, keep executing, but it shouldn’t be in a haphazard way with no reflection on where you’ve been, what worked, and what didn’t.

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 Sarah J. Jacobs.

Sarah Jacobs is a Co-Founder of Jacobs Berger, a boutique divorce and family law firm in Morristown, New Jersey. She is certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney and Qualified as a Family Law Mediator and has been partnering with families for twenty years. In an effort to reform how divorce clients view the role of their attorneys, Sarah and her partner founded a firm that helps de-stress the divorce process by empowering divorcing families to transform chaos and circumstances into choices and change that work for them.

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.

When I was in my last year of law school, I was bit by the “trial” bug. I had the privilege of working at the Child Advocacy clinic, providing representation to abused and neglected children during their Child Protective Services hearings. Between that and participating in the Mock Trial team for two years, I knew I wanted to practice a part of law where I not only saw and interacted with people, but I was in the courtroom (literally and metaphorically) making a difference. I didn’t want to just push paper across my desk. Having been the product of parents who divorced while I was in law school, and having a front row seat to the process, I learned that family law was a natural fit.

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?

I had the good fortune to start my career at a family law firm in Bergen County, New Jersey where I spent eight years. My then-boss, and Chair of the Family Law department, was a bright, formidable, talented trial attorney. She taught me the rules of the road, from how to artfully craft a letter to client engagement to building a trial strategy from day one. Between her, the senior members of the department’s staff who always had a door open, and an ear to listen, I had a bevy of mentors who not only helped me grow but develop my own style. I am also fortunate that the Family Law Section of the New Jersey State Bar Association is full of similarly minded individuals, and even adversaries and judges have offered me a chance to refine skills, learn new things, and become an even better advocate for the families we all serve. But, I will always give the nod to my boss, who showed me what a good attorney can really do. She taught me to read the person, to ask about the goals, and to develop a plan for the family, and then to execute legal strategy based on the plan.

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?

When I left my first real family law job after eight years, I opened my own firm with a colleague. We thought we had it all figured out. We got a space. Letterhead. Opened trust accounts. Acquired billing software. And we had clients! We were experienced attorneys, who had watched what our predecessors had done, and we were ready! Off we went, and we were successful- for the most part. What we weren’t taught in law school, or even in our first years, was how to market. We didn’t really know how to focus on business development, to build a pipeline, or to cultivate relationships. So, a year plus into the venture, we took a hard look at the books, and gulped. How would we pay our rent? Our staff? Ourselves? There was a time where the coffers were slim, and we had to make choices about our path. Luckily, our mentors, and friends, were generous with their time and advice, and we began to not only see the practice as a law firm, but as a machine that needed greasing.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?

Is it wrong to say that I have an abundance of “life lesson quotes” from Schitt’s Creek?! Funny and witty, yes, but if we all take a step back, there are so many lessons in that show we could all stand to learn. One of my favorites, though: “Trust me, no one is thinking about you the way that you’re thinking about you.” — Alexis Rose Why? Simple. We spend a ton of time wondering how we are viewed in the world, and how people analyze our choices, and we make decisions based on our interpretation of others’ interpretations. When I left my first legal job, after eight years, I agonized about the decision to open my own firm. Would people think I was too young, too inexperienced, too green? Would people send me work because I was no longer associated with a bigger firm, or would I starve because I didn’t have a safety net and support staff? In the end, none of that mattered. Sure, they were contributing factors to where I am now, but I sure gave more thought to people giving thought to me than any of those people actually did!

Today, I think a lot of my divorce clients face the same predicament. They spend a lot of emotional capital worrying about what their family will think of them if they leave their spouse or what their friends will think of them if they accept this or that in a settlement. In the end, the clients who fare best are the ones that dig deep and focus on their own needs and goals and who focus on making things happen for their families rather than worrying about what people think of them.

This is not easy work. What is your primary motivation and drive behind the work that you do?

Empowering families. Divorce is a dirty word, you know? No one wants to wear the scarlet “D” on their chest. While it is rampant these days, it still carries a shroud of shame and people think it’s a disease that’s catching. Many clients arrive at our doorstep afraid, unsure of how to proceed, with decision fatigue, and without really understanding what’s ahead of them or how to navigate the process. My partner Jamie and I have really taken the time to figure out what works- and that’s forming a partnership. The attorneys and staff at JB get to know the people before us- what makes them tick, what they need, what their goals are, and where they are going. We lay out their options, the pros and cons of those choices, and we help them find resources to make those choices in a strategic, educated way. We help them see divorce is a season they have to experience, but that it’s not a definition of who they are or will be.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

In the past several years, I was blessed to help two amazing men get sole legal and primary physical custody of their daughter following two excruciating custody trials. I was also able to help another father, who was a victim of domestic violence and married to a woman with severe mental health problems, get custody of his three children and disentangle himself from a scary and toxic relationship. I just finished a two-year case where a woman who was a stay-at-home mom for fourteen years and moved across the country for her ex-husband’s job get the financial settlement that she and the parties’ three children deserved. My colleagues and I have hundreds of these stories- each so similar and yet uniquely different than the last- and despite an overburdened court system, whose entire process polarizes and destabilizes families even more than the divorce or separation itself, we can provide positive outcomes for people and their children.

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?

If you haven’t guessed by now, we are an exclusive boutique family law firm, focusing on divorce and all related matters. My area of concentration is mediation — I am a qualified Family Law Mediator- and high conflict custody and parenting time. I also work as a Parent Coordinator.

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?

1. Being Detail-Oriented: It’s cliché, but it’s true. Being an attorney requires attention to detail. You need to read carefully. You need to write carefully. You need to record data carefully. You need to listen carefully. You need to speak carefully. And so on, and so on. If you’ve done trial work, you know that being detail-oriented pays off when, in the middle of cross-examination, you’re able to produce the one line, in the seventy pages of discovery the adverse client produced, proving the exact opposite of the testimony they just gave. Perry Mason moment? Maybe. Or maybe you read carefully, took notes, made an outline, and were quickly able to find the document you needed because you had a carefully constructed evidence log readily accessible. Either way, the devil is in the details.

Business is no different. You need to make choices based on data (and a little bit of intuition) and you need to have done your research and paid attention to your advisors when you do that. But you need to be focused on the details. Vendor contracts, employment agreements, policies and procedures- it all requires detail, and it all requires paying attention.

2. Adaptability: Life isn’t static. Neither is the law, nor is a business. If you cannot be open to change and to modifying the way things were to the way they can be, your business will die. While I have been attorney for my whole adult working life, and I have practiced solely family law, family law itself has evolved. The way I learned to practice in my first year is not how I practice now. Back then we used chunky, red paper diaries to calendar appointments, deadlines, and appearances. Today it’s a click of a button on a device just larger than my hand, connected to all my team members, some of whom don’t live in this state or are international!

Just in the past two years, with pandemic life, the physical way we practice, go to court, do consultations, and view the traditional “firm” has changed. The court system, one of the most ancient and dogmatic institutions, had to catch up to the twenty-first century, and let’s face it, some of the judges went kicking and screaming! Just like the practice itself, the needs of our clients have morphed over time, and we have to be able to meet them where they are. It’s the basic premise of evolution: if you aren’t adaptable, you won’t survive.

3. Emotional Intelligence: With this, I am lucky, and I am very appreciative that I am able to read people, and situations, and I can understand how to navigate them both. As an attorney, and one who practices exclusively in family law, this has been a gift (and a little bit of a curse). It has allowed me to navigate the relationship between my client and their soon to be ex and see what patterns exist. It has helped me speak to the goals of a client and how best engage them to get out of their own way so we can bring the settlement to fruition. It has allowed me to navigate difficult adversaries and change the conversation so things can be productive instead of circular.

For business, it has helped us make hiring and firing choices and to keep improving all the time. It has opened my eyes to business coaching, and leadership training, because I do not (despite what I tell my husband) have all the answers. It has helped me form long-lasting professional relationships that provide referrals but also help our clients in key ways for their future success.

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?

Honestly, no. I don’t think where I went to school has any bearing on my personal success. I live and practice in a different state from where I went to school, my networking group and sources are entirely different, and the rules of practice for New Jersey, while similar, are not identical to New York. I think anyone who has the inclination and drive to go to law school, who has a good work ethic, who wants to be an attorney, and who can look at it as a business and not just a career, can be successful without a specific degree from a “prestigious” school.

Managing being a law practitioner and a business owner is a constant balancing act. How do you manage both roles?

Delicately. You have to make a conscious decision to spend time working ON the business instead of IN the business. You have to manage your calendar accordingly, blocking time to review reports and metrics, to network, to further educate yourself (workshops, coaching, etc.), to manage your team, etc. You have to know your numbers, and make sure that when you are in production, practicing law, you are doing both what you love but also what the highest and best use of your time is. It takes a long time to incorporate this business thinking into the mind of a trained legal practitioner, and I would venture to say that you don’t stop learning and synthesizing, even when it does make sense!

Can you help articulate the entrepreneurial skills a lawyer needs to run and lead a successful law firm?

As an entrepreneur, one of the most critical things you need to know is that you don’t know everything and you need to be open to assessing your skills, including strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to learn and grow as your business evolves. I think you need management and leadership skills, financial acumen, customer service skills, strategic thinking and planning skills, problem solving skills, listening and communication skills, tolerance for change, and the ability to make a decision and to keep making decisions. I think you also need to understand when the time comes to hire who have complimentary skills or who can help develop some of your less-than-optimal ones.

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?

A LOT of time. As mentioned before, you have to plan for it. If you don’t manage your calendar, the legal practice side can eclipse, easily, the business side. You also have to be mindful of making a transition plan. You have to consider all of the hats you wear (lawyer, billing clerk, bank manager, paralegal, marketing assistant, etc.) and decide when your business can sustain adding people to your team to better fill some of these roles, freeing up your time to focus on lawyering and running the business. You then have to make a decision as to whether you want to, someday, be solely practicing law only, with people running all of the managerial aspects of your business, or whether you want to be out of production completely, with lawyers on your team doing the legal services portion while you rain make and manage the business. Once you get clear on your goals, you can map out a long-term strategy.

Can you share some specific, non-intuitive insights from our personal experience about how a leader of a law firm should:

• Manage personnel: You have to make sure that the people you hire and manage are good culture fits. Anyone with a decent skill set can be trained to do a job, but if you have someone that doesn’t mesh with your staff, or your leadership style, that can be toxic to the business and ultimately, can cripple it. You also need, as a leader, to be consistent. A lot of business owners can run hot and cold with their messaging, their requests, their commitments, their personalities. The more communicative and consistent you are, the more likely your staff to be responsive and reflective of the mission and vision of the business.
• Hire and fire: The old adage- hire slow and fire fast. You need to make the right hire, for the right role, for the right metrics, and you need to fire quickly when you realize that either you have a toxic employee, or you have made a bad hiring choice. This is a hard one, especially if you have a real need or hole in the business and a great candidate presents themselves. Have you done your due diligence? Have you tested them for personality and culture fit? Have you tested them for skills? Have you checked references? Have you seen if they fit the role you’ve written out and created a template for? Or do you just like them and figure they will work out? On the flip side, there’s the employee you just seem to hang on to far beyond the time when the employee is profitable (financially or otherwise) for your firm. Whether it’s because you don’t want to do the work they do, or you really like them, or they have a backstory that pulls at your heart strings, you just can’t cut the cord.
• Generate leads: Know who you are fishing in the stream for, where in the flow of the stream you want to find them (putting their toe in the water, having made a decision and researching options or their pants are ON FIRE). Then you need to research how to find these leads, analyze what their pain points are, and how you can speak to the way that you can solve their problems. And then spend time and money developing different strategies for letting them know that. Until you figure out who you want to help, and what they need help with (specifically) and how you are uniquely suited to help them, your generation of leads is sporadic and not targeted. It may draw in numbers, but it may not be for cases that suit your optimal profit margin
• Advertise: Hire a specialist. Unless you are a gifted social media marketer, gifted PPC expert, or fantastic marketing guru, don’t assume you can figure this out, especially not when running a business and practicing law. This is the trifecta of disaster. That said: buyer beware. There are a LOT of specialists out there, with a lot of fancy lingo, and they create pretty reports which talk about impressions and clicks and all sorts of other jargon. Before you shop for specialists, find someone who will teach you how to interview them, what questions to ask, and what you really need them to do for you. And remember, there’s no magic pill. Marketing and advertising are about trial and error!
• Manage finances: KNOW. YOUR. NUMBERS. You need to be familiar with all the metrics in your business, and you have to know how they intertwine. If you don’t know your budget, and how your real income and expenses track with that budget, you can’t plan for investment or growth. If you can’t plan for investment and growth, you can’t generate more leads, recruit good team members, and if you don’t have leads and team members, your business will die. Financials are the root of all your planning tools.

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”?

I feel like this is anticlimactic after we’ve gone into such detail above, because some of these naturally flow from the answers I’ve given before. But, in summary fashion, with a little bit of spunk, the five things are:

1. Name What Matters: Ok, this is a piece of advice from Kendra Adachi, who wrote the book The Lazy Genius. (Side note: if you haven’t read it, YOU SHOULD. If you haven’t listened to her podcast, YOU SHOULD. Your world will be reorganized, and you will be immensely grateful). What matters to you? What do you want this business to provide for you? Do you have a reason for starting it, running it and continuing to work at it? When you think you’ve hit on the first answer, ask yourself why. Then ask yourself why again. Think about how this business helps you professionally. What freedoms it could give you personally. How it can help your family. Think about whether it will help bring you financial stability. Then, write it all down. Without knowing the motivations behind doing what you do, you can’t understand how the practice will help you achieve what you’re striving for.
2. What Do You Stand For: What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to help, and how do you want to help them? For us at JB, we know that we want to change how divorce clients view the role of their attorney. We want to help divorcing families, and we want to take them from distressed to de-stressed in the divorce process. We do that through our mission and our value system, and we try to have our internal business workings reflect the same values we offer to our clients. Without a purpose though, and without knowing who you want to help and how, you have nothing to build your business around. You’re missing the spark which ignites your staff and what draws people to you. You can build a budget around how many people you want to help in any give year, and build a marketing strategy around helping those people, and you can build a team and a culture that resonates with your mission and wants to do the work necessary to support it.
3. Know Your Numbers: Without key performance indicators, or your financial metrics, you are like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Your best hope is for a volleyball buddy named Wilson to keep you company and hope you hit an island with food and shelter. Any good business owner needs to know their income, expenses, the cost of providing this legal service by that member of their team, their collection rate, and whole bunch of other important financial data. Create a dashboard that works for your firm. Figure out what you need to know, in the most precise way to condense the key information and monitor it regularly. Decide what you need to review daily, weekly, monthly, etc. And do it. Don’t skip a week, or two, or ten, because it’s a lot of work to gather the data, and you have a brief do. The numbers are your life raft and will help you keep afloat in rocky seas.
4. There’s No “Good” Time for…..: Change: Growth. Hiring. Firing. Moving. Niching your practice. Spending more. Restructuring your budget. You name it, and there’s no good time for it. As a business owner, you can’t base choices and options you have on whether it is a “good time” to take action. Learning, at the outset, that the ground will be more stable at some points and less stable at others, and downright unstable at others is key. If you put off things you need to do for the seasons to change, or for things to “even out” it’s time you’re missing in your business that you could have effectuated or manifested something that would make life easier or more enjoyable.
5. Just Keep Swimming: Yes, I stole this from Nemo. It’s good advice! Running a business means making decisions. One after another, whether they were good or bad, and not running from them because hey are hard or scary. The key here, while you keep swimming, is to learn from each decision. You need to keep moving forward, keep executing, but it shouldn’t be in a haphazard way with no reflection on where you’ve been, what worked, and what didn’t.

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. :-)

I am not sure it’s unique- for those of us who do divorce work, and who are frustrated by the court’s myriad of roadblocks, I anticipate we’ve all felt this way from time to time. But, my vision is for attorneys to be able to offer a holistic approach to their clients (therapy, fitness, financial planning, career training, real estate services, trust and estate work, etc.) in a one-stop-shop format. Not that you would punch a deli counter number-style serving system, but where a business could serve all parts of a family, at one time, under the same roof, without having to navigate the bureaucratic red tape that the Rules of Professional Conduct for us and all professionals impose. At the bare minimum, it would be amazing for lawyers in this particular field to be able to employ on their staff therapeutic individuals, both to help the client through such a difficult season, but also to help the attorneys and staff navigate the clients’ changing needs and mindsets, so we could provide even better service.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Wait for my tell-all expose! No, seriously, our firm, has a robust online presence, on all social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) and our website has pretty extensive resources, including the Ultimate Guide to Divorce which you can download, and you can join our firm’s quarterly newsletter. I frequently have articles published- a few were on Talking Parents where I give tips for co-parenting after divorce and Divorce Magazine, where I talked about protecting your child’s emotional health in divorce. We also have a pretty extensive video library on YouTube, and if you join some of our email campaigns, we have some pretty hilarious videos on the aspects of family law you might not see coming. My partner and I are in the process of working on an exciting project though- so stay tuned!

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.