Amanda Koplos | How Legal Administrators Help Unlock Your Law Firm’s Potential

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here and I'm back with another episode of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. I'm delighted to welcome my guest today, Amanda Koplos. Amanda is the Chief Operating Officer of the Central Florida-based law firm of Shuffield, Lowman & Wilson. She's got 20 years of experience in various law firm leadership positions and she's currently serving as the president of the Association of Legal Administrators or ALA.

ALA is a premier professional association with 9,500 members that's been around for more than 50 years. The organization exists to connect, educate, and empower leaders and managers within the legal industry.

In her spare time—which I don't think she has very much of—Amanda is also the co-host of the Mostly Legal Podcast, which is dedicated to bringing awareness to the legal management profession and we're going to talk a lot about that today. Amanda, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Amanda Koplos: Thank you. I appreciate the invitation.

Elise Holtzman: I'm thrilled to have you here. I think it's pretty fair to say that many lawyers, unless they're already in law firm management, don't even realize that there is such a thing as a legal management profession.

They may never have heard of the ALA. They don't know that that organization even exists. What is the legal management profession? What's it all about? What do you wish people understood about it?

Amanda Koplos: Sure. Thanks. That's a great starting question. The legal management profession is really the business side of law firms. It's running the business side of law firms. People in my role will often manage many of the same things that any other company would have.

My title is chief operating officer, which aligns with what any other company you work within the world knows. We will often manage the human resources, the IT, the facilities, the marketing, and business development.

But we do that specifically for law firms. The reason there's a profession that exists specifically for law firms is that we are a different beast. We handle things differently. We have different types of clients. We make our money in different ways.

We spend our money in different ways. Really it takes somebody who has been in it and who knows it to manage it because it's completely different than other for-profit entities that are managed.

Elise Holtzman: You've been doing this a long time.

Amanda Koplos: A long time.

Elise Holtzman: You've been in a number of different roles and a number of different kinds of firms over the past 20 years. Would you share a little bit about your background in legal management, the kinds of firms you've worked with, and what changes you've seen over the years? How are some of these firms different? How are they the same? Has your role changed over the last 20 years? What does that look like for you?

Amanda Koplos: Thank you. I started in law firms 20 years ago as a small firm administrator. I came out of an air conditioning company that I worked for but I was doing very much the same things: HR, accounting, finance, payroll, etc. The firm I worked for, we had about 20 attorneys and they were looking for somebody who was very finance-heavy.

My background is I have an MBA. I also have a CPA. While I have a license to practice in accounting, sometimes my CPA stands for “Can't Pass Again”. So, don't ask me to audit anything. Don't ask me to write your tax returns. But it does give you a financial mindset.

The smaller firm I was working for was looking for somebody with a financial mindset. I had never heard of a trust account when I started, but our firm's trust account had never been reconciled. That should strike fear in your hearts if you're a lawyer or involved in legal at all.

I worked at that firm for a few years, then I went and worked for a larger national firm, Bowman and Brooke who has offices around the country. I think they have 350 attorneys and I managed multiple offices of their firm. Then I came here to the current firm where I'm the COO.

We have about 58 attorneys, give or take. All these rules are different. At a small firm, you're really wearing so many hats. I like to joke that I ran payroll from my hospital bed when I had my first baby because I was the only one. Nobody else knew how to run payroll and nobody wanted to learn it.

Maternity leave can't be that long. So I ran payroll with my epidural in before I had the baby. In the larger firm, I was really more involved in a lot of the strategy, but also in the HR and the associate development.

Then here, because I have the top role, I have a lot of managers that are underneath me and it's a very people management site. One of the things I like to joke about that I found so interesting is that my role has become more and more tech-heavy as we go on.

In my first role, I remember still sitting in the room when somebody talked about cloud and our documents were going to be in some weird place called the cloud and I freaked out and ended that meeting and was like, “That's never happening.”

Now, when I find firms that are not Cloud forward, I look at them like, “What are you thinking? What do you mean you have your stuff on a server that's being protected in your room? I don't understand that.” So I think my role has become much more tech-heavy.

I spend probably 30% of my job or maybe even more on things that revolve around technology. A lot more these days I'm managing associate development and really helping our attorneys on their total path from being the first-year lawyer all the way into partnership.

My role is kind of to be that guide for them in everything but their work. I don't tell them how to write a brief or to conduct a deposition, but I can tell them how to talk to their partner about not having enough work or about wanting to be in more depositions or help them progress mentally into the role where they're going to be a first-year trial lawyer.

A lot of those changes have happened and some of it is just in career growth too. I would not have been prepared in my first year doing this to do associate development. Some of that has also progressed over time. That's a very long answer to the question.

Elise Holtzman: No, it's really interesting, and actually, one thing that strikes me is that what you mentioned just a moment ago about helping attorneys succeed I think often falls under the auspices of a chief talent officer or director of professional development. Are those folks typically members of the ALA as well? Is that considered part of legal operations?

Amanda Koplos: It sure is. We do have chief talent officers. We do have chief business development and chief professional development officers. Really, our association is dedicated to anybody who's working in the business of law, anybody who wants to help lawyers and do anything that's not practicing law. We have that. There are other organizations that they can rely on, but for those that are legal-specific, there are not many other places.

Elise Holtzman: Amanda, what do you think is coming next? I know you sit at the top of the ALA and you see the changes, you know the changes that have happened throughout your career. From where you sit, you can probably see what the trends are and what's coming next. What do you think is top of mind right now and will be over the next few years for people who are involved in law firm management?

Amanda Koplos: I'll say it's two things. I'm not going to say the two-letter AI. I'm going to go deeper and say technology. The reason I say technology is that 10 years ago, law firms did not have technology as a major investment.

We had a billing program, but now we have a practice management program. We have document management programs. We're not saving documents in a network drive anymore. We are going to continue these investments in technology and it's going to require a mind shift that technology is a cost of doing business. It also is a mind shift that we're not buying a program and that we're buying a CD and we're getting a product code and it sits on a shelf and we own it.

The concept of software as a service and continuing to pay year over year and for everything. I can think of 10 programs off the top of my head that I have to pay for every year and I will never own. It's becoming a larger and larger percentage.

Law firms, typically 70% to 80% of our costs go to salaries. Then we have 20% into facilities. After that, now technology is going to continue to get a higher and higher percentage of that.

The only way law firms then make this work, make these investments in technology work is we start changing our billing structure. I remember 1986 was the first time that people started talking about the death of the billable hour. But the only way the billable hour is actually going to die is investments in technology have to be recouped.

It's just like R&D. You think of a business that has R&D, the only way you can recoup R&D is if you charge for it. I think that's the first one. The second one is going to be with regards to talent management, specifically with regards to associates. Our staff is still we want to work remotely and we we go back and forth on that but attorneys want to work from everywhere, they also do not want to build $2,200 a year anymore.

I regularly see, when I'm interviewing attorneys, “Do you have a requirement of less than 1,900 hours?” Well, absolutely we do. We lowered our requirement for associates this year by 100 hours. It's a huge investment in our people. We did not lower their salaries accordingly.

I think it will continue to be that attorneys want this lifestyle. We've heard about how people came out of COVID, wanting a different work-life balance, reevaluating priorities, and trying to spend more time with family.

But there's going to be this shift where our older school attorneys are going to say, “Well, I work 2,000 hours. Why is he not working? Why is she not working 2,000 hours?” I think it will continue to be something I see and continue to be something that these chief talent and professional development officers will continue to work with.

I think it's a mind shift. And if you're changing your billable structure and you're changing to flat fee billing eventually, it's going to be an even better, work-life balance for these attorneys because now they don’t have to build four hours to collect the same amount of money, if that makes sense.

Elise Holtzman: What are you seeing as the response of lawyer leaders when they hear that sort of thing?

Amanda Koplos: It depends on what generation they are and how far into this they have been. I will tell you that there have been tears shed. I have shed tears over explaining investments in technology and how necessary they are. I have to continue doing that. I will be preaching that even just our investment in cybersecurity, since I've been here six years, has tripled what our investment is in that.

Continuing to explain that, our partners who are coming up, our newer partners get it. They get it when they see our associates coming in and they are asking, “What technology do you have? You're a three-year associate. I want to know, before I start, what technology do you have and what investment? Have you automated forms? Have you invested in the research products that have drafting based on AI?”

They're asking for that. Talent will drive those decisions. So I think that we'll see this shift and we'll see the acceptance of it. It's just going to continue to grow. It's not all the way there yet but it will continue to grow.

Elise Holtzman: Several years ago, I was present to hear a panel of general counsel from fairly large companies talk about how their legal departments were becoming the biggest competitors for law firms, largely because they were investing so much in technology and that the in-house legal departments were going to have all these technologies available to them, they were going to make themselves much more efficient at providing legal services to their internal clients, and that because law firms are slower to adopt these things, that law firms were going to suffer.

Amanda Koplos: It's true, yeah, law firms are usually very far behind the industry. I just wrote an article that will be coming out in Legal Management Magazine, which is produced by ALA. It was how succession planning is being led by technology.

One of the paragraphs, one of the things I wrote about is how law firms have to look outside of their legal tech toolbox. We have to look and see what programs other companies are using, like Trello, Asana, things like Notion, all these different knowledge management, project management type of software. We've got to look outside of the box.

So, yeah, these investments are going to continue to increase in it. If we want to keep up, we want to keep doing work for corporations and serving as outside counsel, we're going to have to make those investments.

Elise Holtzman: I think that goes to your point also about this idea of the death of the billable hour that law firms are still holding on for dear life to the billable hour. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a guy named Shaun Jardine.

He's in the UK and he's a former practicing lawyer for many, many years, and in his next career, he's really an evangelist for this idea of getting rid of the billable hour, and in fact, wrote a book called Ditch The Billable Hour! Implementing Value-Based Pricing in a Law Firm.

I think that there's so much resistance to it. It'll be interesting to see, and you'll have a front-row seat, obviously, to see how law firms make decisions about this sort of thing.

Amanda Koplos: Well, because you have to completely rewrite your business model. We compensate for how many hours you work. Lawyers only have their time to sell. That's all you have. You can only do so much. It's the whole like the myth of the entrepreneur, you only have so many hours of the day. You only have so much time.

It's like taking a law firm and just scratching your entire business model and existing firms who have been around 20, 40, 50, 100 years, that's really difficult. These firms starting up now are in a much better boat. They're in a better situation.

Elise Holtzman: If someone wants to get into this world, get into law firm management, where would they start? I mean, you said you came out of…

Amanda Koplos: I worked in an air conditioning company.

Elise Holtzman: That's what I thought you said. An air conditioning company. Certainly, there are people that come into legal management from those sorts of places that have absolutely nothing to do with legal.

But in today's world, someone wants to start, including lawyers, there. We know there's a subset of lawyers that decides to stop practicing law and get involved in another aspect of the legal profession. I'm certainly one of those. What advice would you give to someone who's not practicing law versus someone who is practicing law, let's say, now about how to get into legal management?

Amanda Koplos: First, I would say, welcome to the dark side. We're happy to have you. Come on over. It's great over here. Nobody tracks how many hours I bill a day, which is amazing. What's interesting about this profession is there are very few schools that can give you a bachelor's or master's in legal management.

Denver does it. I think George Washington has a couple of programs. There aren't very many. But those are a good place to start. If you're coming out of college and you want to do this, getting one of those degrees is great. If you are already in the business world, sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right firms, because the rise of the law firm COO, so many people are entering our realm, our association, our profession, coming out of business management of other firms, because some of it is translatable.

HR is HR. IT can be IT, finance can be finance as long as you're okay doing a cash accounting system and you're not in love with your cruel system, which we don’t do. Some of that is very transferable so I recommend that. If you are going to go out of a law firm, and I'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute, I can, is that if you're going to come out of being a lawyer, it is a very big mind shift, because you are shifting your mindset from working on the business to working for the business to working on the business.

It's a very big mind shift because your clients are now internal. You still have the same responsibility to your clients who are now other attorneys. Your clients are the HR department. Your clients are those. You still have that different mind shift, but you now have to operate it as a profitable business, which is different.

I would lean into organizations like ALA. There are other ones, our competitors, but there's LMA, which is the Legal Marketing Association. There's ILTA, which is the International Legal Technology Association.

Finding people at those and leaning into their events and becoming members of that really can give you a very well-rounded education and prepare you for this. I also talked about there's an exam called the Certified Legal Manager exam, the CLM, it's produced by ALA.

But studying for and sitting and taking that test shows that you have a certification, you have a credential, you are tested on the ability to manage a midsize law firm and all of the aspects that that will include. So even just looking into the study guides for that test will tell you the wealth and depth of knowledge you need to have in order to start doing this role.

Elise Holtzman: I think some people think, “If I'm going to hire somebody to help me manage my law firm, I need to hire somebody who's already in the legal industry.” Some people say, “You know what, I'm going to shake things up a little bit. I'm going to hire somebody from outside the legal industry, perhaps from the accounting world where they tend to be a little bit better at this.”

Amanda Koplos: Some other professional services.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, some other kind of professional services. Do you have an opinion on that?

Amanda Koplos: I do, but because I came from outside of industry and figured it out. While I want to say, “You need to know legal to do legal,” I didn't know legal. Unless you start as a legal assistant or a receptionist paralegal, those things happen, you have to have outside education. You have to have outside experience. We all have to start somewhere.

I would say in ALA, probably half of our membership got promoted from within up into this role and the other half came from out. We've got people from banking, people from, again, professional services, architect's firms, those types of things. Then for a lot of our members, like director of HR, that's just a transfer from other industries where they were in HR positions as well.

The one thing I would say is that so many firms still think that you need to have a JD to do this job. I get very frustrated by that because there's nothing you learn in law school that I know or do.

I do not know how to write a brief. I do not know what a treatise is. I don't know any of those things but I’m still very successful in my job. I still get frustrated when I see these firms who are like, “Must have a JD.” Well, no, I have an MBA, I went to school for the same amount of time, and my CPA exam was as hard as the bar exam, if not harder, so I've done all the education, I don't need a JD to do this role.

Elise Holtzman: It's an interesting point. I think a lot of that comes from the idea that somehow, lawyers know everything there is to know. We're so smart.

Amanda Koplos: I love you all listening but no.

Elise Holtzman: I know right. We love us some lawyers but I think it's a shortsighted view, to your point. I think going back to this idea of what you can get from an association like ALA or the Legal Marketing Association or ILTA is that you can get involved and learn the language of law. You can understand how law firms run, you can understand what they talk about every day, the kinds of terminology they use, the kinds of things that they're concerned about, what keeps them up at night, which is what we need to be able to do for any client that we have regardless of what you're doing.

Tell me a little bit more about ALA specifically. I'm a member of the Legal Marketing Association. I'm on the board of the local New York Steering Committee, and I'm very involved in that organization so I'm constantly running into legal marketers.

When it comes to ALA, who joins typically? We started talking about this a little bit earlier, but why should people join? You get some education there, obviously, and there are some opportunities there for education. What are some of the other reasons to join ALA and the benefits?

Amanda Koplos: Yeah, I think that's great. Our members mostly work in law firms. I'd say 80% of our members work in law firms. We also are open to you can work in a corporate legal department. You can work for a government legal department. We had somebody from the city of San Jose and he was in their facilities section on their legal side.

So we have that sort of thing. That's our members. Really you have to have an interest in the management of law to be a member, you cannot work for a business partner so you cannot work for an entity that sells business, sells into law firms, but you could be a consultant and have multiple client members.

We have a lot of people who are consultants that are members of ALA because in order to work in law firms, they need to continue to develop their education and develop and know the knowledge base.

I would say the reason you become a member is that when you are in this role, you don't have any peers at your law firm. When I walk out the store behind me, everybody either works for me or I work for them.

There is nobody I can go and sit with and complain about my boss when I walk out the store. When I go to lunch, I'm on a different level. I cannot complain about my job or complain about things that are happening.

So ALA gives you peers. Above and beyond, more than anything, if I need to know how to deal with a partner who is exiting, I had a partner have a heart attack, and now we had to figure out what to do with these cases, nobody out here, my firm is going to know that, but I have friends on speed dial who do the same job I do, who can call and I can ask, “How do I do that?”

But it's also good for managing partners. We have a lot of managing partner members, especially if they don't have a strong manager and they need to know what is the industry doing.

I mean, just being able to send a message to 9,000 people that says, perfect example, “Who are you using for legal research?” Well, you're going to get a lot of responses and you're going to find out why.

We're evaluating practice management software and we've gotten demos from 10 companies. How do we choose? What are you using? The different firms are going to tell you their pros and their cons and what they're using. So it's just that networking is really important.

I mean we have our white papers. We have our webinars, our conferences. All those things are great. But building your network is, in my opinion, far and away the best. I like to joke that, I mean, I technically met my husband through ALA because we met while I was planning this conference and he was at the hotel bar at the same hotel. We met that way.

When we got married, we had a very small wedding. I had 50 people total, each of us were allowed to invite 25 people. Of my 25 people, four of them were people I met through ALA and their spouses, so eight of my 25 came out of this association. If you lean into it, those are the type of relationships you can build.

Elise Holtzman: Let's say I am a law firm that has finally come to the conclusion that hiring professional legal managers is a good idea. What am I looking for in terms of skill set? Do I have to hire somebody as a COO who can do everything?

Amanda Koplos: No.

Elise Holtzman: Should I be hiring more than one person with different skill sets? What do you think that small to mid-sized firms in particular, because we know that the large firms have already bought into this, that they have many fantastic professionals on their roster of employees, what about the small and mid-sized firms who may not have the same resources, where do you think they should be starting out?

Amanda Koplos: It does depend on firm size because that depends on ability to spend, how many staff, and then how many staff you need. If you're less than 20 attorneys, you can probably find a really good single person who could manage some staff.

Like 20 attorneys or 20 timekeepers might be even better because if you're a personal injury firm, you might not have 20 attorneys but you might have 20 timekeepers, so at 20 timekeepers, you can probably have one person do the job, and manage a billing manager, managing receptionist, manage maybe an HR generalist, and a marketing coordinator. One person at a firm could do that.

Once you get to 30 or 40 attorneys or our size is 50 attorneys, we have departments. My role is to manage an HR manager, manage a controller, manage an IT manager. I have a facilities manager and I have a marketing person. What you're looking for is somebody who can make decisions, who is not afraid to make a decision, and can support and defend their decision.

Because lawyers, I love you all, you're trained to question the information given to you. You're trained to question the facts. When I need to get something done, I know I am going into something that I must have made a decision on and that I must be able to defend.

So I think that skill set is extremely important and that you don't need to know law to know those two things, to be a leader, and feel comfortable in your ability to lead, and other skills that I would look for is somebody who can take very technical information and dumb it down, for lack of a better term, or the other way, being able to read and understand people, knowing motivations, understanding that, those are all skills you can learn outside of law.

Those are the things I would look for. You need the hard skills. You need somebody who has done some HR. You need somebody who has done, again, I would look for a certified legal manager. I would look for somebody who's done this role in another firms. They have some of that. You need some of those skills if you're less than 100 attorneys because I still have to write a separation agreement.

I don’t write, but I still have to take one and review one and fill one out and help our HR person do something like that. I still need those types of skills. Does that kind of answer your question? You've got 20 attorneys, you could probably find a well-rounded person to do this. But once you have 40 to 50, you can have somebody who's a better people manager and doesn't need to know everything. I don't know how to program a server but I know how to manage somebody who does that.

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned this idea of legal managers having to kind of have the guts almost to go up against the attorneys, because, to your point, attorneys are trained to be skeptical. Sometimes lawyers are looked at, certainly in in-house legal departments, sometimes they're looked at as the department of no.

That's not great either. I remember years ago doing a program for a bunch of chief marketing officers on how to influence lawyer leaders, explaining to them what their background is like and why lawyers think the way they do, how we self-selected into law school with a certain mindset and then they trained us a certain way. Then you get to a law firm and you get trained even more so in that regard.

From your perspective, as someone with so much experience and at the head of this organization, how can lawyers and lawyer leaders make a professional legal manager's job easier, not just because they're human beings and we want to make their jobs easier, but also because it's better for the future of the firm if you do?

Amanda Koplos: Right. Well, I would say, first of all, respect that they know what they're talking about. Because when we come to you, we have already fully researched, vetted, and thought through this. We've sought outside help. We've talked to business partners.

We know what we're doing. Some of it is just because we don't have a JD—I know I'm kind of beating this—doesn't mean we don't know anything. I know this podcast is not on video but I hang my diplomas and my certifications on my wall because that matters a lot to attorneys.

But you don't even have to have a college degree. I said a lot of things today skill set-wise that don't require you to go to college to learn. But if I'm a legal manager and I don't have a degree, you cannot look down on me because remember I said a little bit ago, there aren't that many colleges that give you degrees in doing this.

So don't think that I don't have the knowledge and information because I didn't go to college. It doesn't make me less intelligent. My undergraduate degree is in mass communications. I thought I was going to do radio, television, and film. That doesn't help this role.

So some of it is that. Some of it is I fight a lot for not just a seat at a table, but a voice at a table. If you are at a partner meeting, and you're at a firm large enough, and you don't have your legal manager, your legal administrator, your firm administrator, you don't have them at the table and listening to them, you are not going to be better off.

There's a concept of groupthink. You have talked about, do you self-select into firms? You all are raised to think the same way. You need someone in the room that thinks differently, and having somebody who is thinking about how to make the business more profitable is very, very important. That's what I spend my day doing. If you're a lawyer, you might spend five percent of your day as a managing partner.

My managing partner likes to say if he spends less than five percent on his business, he is doing a great service to this company. My managing partner has an LLM in tax and does corporate work and owns outside businesses and is brilliant to that. But what he does for our firm better is let it be run by business managers and he practices law.

So giving them a seat at a table, giving them a voice at the table, using them as a trusted advisor, and then I also talk about investing in their professional development. In sending them to an ALA conference, it's not cheap, it is the best investment you will make as a firm. They shouldn't have to fight for that. We should not have to beg and fight for $3,000 to go to conference. It's incredibly important. I wrote it into my offer letter.

Elise Holtzman: I love that. Make it happen right up front. Yeah, I think these are really important points. It sounds Like to me, it comes down to a mindset shift for the whole legal profession, but certainly for individual lawyers who are in management of their firms.

You talk about this next generation being more open-minded to doing things differently, I suspect, and I certainly hope that the newest generation of leaders is going to look at their professional legal managers in a different way and be willing to listen and be willing to learn from them. That's the other thing too.

If they're willing to learn and be open to the idea that there's somebody else out there who actually knows more than they do, as you mentioned, I think it runs to everybody's benefit.

Amanda Koplos: Right. We'll go back to a little bit something you asked me earlier about there are also fractional COOs, there are people who do this and might have six firms that they do it for, so don't think that somebody at this talent or this caliber is not available to you because you can't afford it.

I would still encourage you to do that. If you have somebody who's the receptionist and they're also doing your billing, it is valuable to go and look for somebody else to help you with those processes.

Elise Holtzman: I'm glad you raised that point. Yeah, because I know that there are firms that say, “Well, yes, this sounds like a great idea, but we can't afford that.”

Maybe not having to think about a full-time commitment to somebody who is an employee, on staff, getting all of those benefits, all of those sorts of things will make it easier for people to at least start figuring out how to use people who can help them and then see where goes from there.

Amanda Koplos: Right, and it's not consultancy prices. A fractional COO can do a really great job for a small firm and provide just as much value as you would need from a full-time person.

Elise Holtzman: Amanda, as we start to wrap up our time here together today, there's a question I want to ask you that I ask all of my guests. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

When it comes to law firm management, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem super obvious to you, but is important for people to hear, especially lawyer leaders?

Amanda Koplos: Based on the curse of knowledge, I would say that law firms are businesses. We exist to make money for the owners of the business and for its employees and staff. When you make a decision that affects your firm, you have to look at it with a business mindset.

Am I investing in technology because it will make my business better? Am I hiring somebody who will make my business better? So looking at the firm through that lens, and we want to run it with our hearts, we want to do great for clients, all that is great. But if you can't take profitable work, you're not running a business, you're running a charity.

They hate to ask for trust deposits or advanced deposits when the deposits have been depleted. Well, you're doing work for free. You're working for free. Your guy that cut your trees down will not cut your trees in your yard. He will not cut your grass without being paid so why are you continuing to work for clients that don't pay you?

So I'm constantly, when I look at an AR, for example, I'll go write to the attorney, “Why don't we have money in our trust account to cover the work you've just done?” “Well, I didn't want to ask him for it.” “Fine, I volunteer as tribute. Give me the phone. I'll call him and tell him we need money to put into our trust account.” You want to do a great job as a lawyer. I work for fantastic lawyers, but you also are running a business. It really is a curse to deal with that on a daily basis.

Elise Holtzman: It goes back to what we were talking about before about a mindset shift because I think the legal profession was always a legal profession and it was like, “Oh, lawyers are these highly educated professionals and we behave a certain way. Talking about money is unseemly and we're providing this amazing service,” almost like a country club mentality of being higher level than everybody else and not stooping so low as to be talking about money on a regular basis.

You can correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I think that's where a lot of the discomfort for lawyers comes from in terms of, “Well, talking about money is somehow tarnishing this professional high-level relationship that we have.” The mindset shift that needs to happen is that we're really talking about a legal marketplace now and it's not like the old days anymore. I mean of course we want to be professional and of course, we want to do a great job of serving clients but, to your point, it's a business.

While we know that, I think many lawyers know that intellectually, it's sometimes hard to get from the intellectual to the feeling it in your bones and getting that on a daily basis and making your decisions based on that knowledge, so great advice for us to all remember, Amanda. Thank you.

Amanda Koplos: I will end with this comment. Lawyers, you are salespeople. If you think you picked a job where you are not a salesperson, you are sadly and sorely mistaken. You are a salesperson, you are also a bill collector. Those are hard things to take and to think about. But yeah, I love what I do and I love helping law firms. When I took this job, I decided this is where I would end my career. I'm 20 years in, I got 20 more years to go.

Elise Holtzman: Oh, love it. All right, well, glad to hear you're so happy, and thank you so much for all the information you shared with us today. I think it's going to be very, very valuable for a lot of people so thanks for being here, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in.

If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.