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Joining us for Episode #51 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute is Sam Mollaei. In this episode, Sam covers how he automates his law firms and tells us about “My Legal Academy”.
In this episode we’ll also cover how Sam grows his law firms with automated virtual firms, lead generation, key employees needed, and breaking free from day to day tasks.
Read more about My Legal Academy here: https://mylegalacademy.com/
Watch My Legal Academy on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mylegalacademy
Join the My Legal Academy Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/legalfunnel/members/
See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.
Lindsey:
Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. As business owners, most of us have three goals in common, boost revenue, cut costs, and work less. But we are often so engrossed in the day-to-day operations of our firms that we don’t identify, much less implement, changes that would help us actually achieve our big picture goals. Joining us again today is Sam Mollaei, lawyer and founder of My Legal Academy, where he helps law firms work smarter to scale and automate their law firms. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sam:
Thank you so much, Lindsey. Super excited. This is round two, some of it, some updates.
Lindsey:
Yes. So glad to have you back. And last time we talked a little bit about virtual law firm secrets, and we talked about generating reviews and a lot of things that kind of go into the operations and some of the marketing of the law firms, but we want to dive more into what My Legal Academy is. So why don’t we just start off for the listeners who are hearing from you for the first time. So tell us a bit about your background and your law firms.
About Sam Mollaei and My Legal Academy
Sam:
Sure. So I became a law firm owner eight years ago, and at the time, I had no mentor, had no kind of sources to figure out how to generate clients, create my law firm, how to serve the clients, so I basically had to teach myself everything. I first got exposed to funnels, so I fell into this whole world of creating these systems for generating clients. Then once I get a lot of clients, then I had to learn how to automate things, so then I’m into the whole world of automation. Then I realized, wait, I need to build out a team. Well, I didn’t have a budget to be able to hire a bunch of people in-house so I started hiring people virtually, so I’ve gone to the hiring over 200 virtual assistants since then, and I’ve been through these phases of going in depth in very specific parts of running a law firm.
Fast forward, now I run six law firms that I’m either a complete owner of or that I’m partners in, and I’ve been able to streamline and automate all of these six law firms. And most of my time actually now goes… For the last three years I’ve been teaching and helping other lawyers create their own scalable and automated law firm, a law firm that kind of serves you and instead of consumes you.
Lindsey:
That’s great. You have a wealth of knowledge to be drawing from both in your trial and error of experience, but the partnerships and the connections that you’ve made along the way. And I want to dive into that experience and the knowledge that you’re sharing. You recently rebranded into My Legal Academy, what is that?
Sam:
Yeah, so we first started off the company as Legal Funnel, and I thought, in the beginning, when I started out, the focus was funnels and kind of client generation, but I realized that was just one part of the puzzle. Sure, okay, I could teach you all day long and share with you the best way to generate clients, but you also need to have a system to be able to take them on and you need to build out a team and you need to know the math behind the numbers, behind everything, and there’s a lot of other stuff. Also tapping into, also, your own potential and getting you focused and as productive as possible so that you can accomplish, basically, what your dream is. So we rebranded based on being more holistic approach, kind of working on you as the law firm owner, helping you… The slogan is ‘Work smarter, scale fast and enjoy life’. So a little bit more holistic approach, again, kind of focusing on the long firm owners themselves.
What Lawyers Do and What Lawyers Delegate
Lindsey:
So that way, you can not only get the clients, but once you have them, get out of your own way to let the operation operate itself with the right people in place and have the time that you are dedicating to your firm be focused on growing your firm and growing the business as opposed to getting sucked down into it.
Sam:
Totally. And I think the secret sauce really lies into really understanding yourself and knowing what the strengths are and what you enjoy doing, and then really tapping into that and tripling down on that, and everything else should be either delegated, automated or completely eliminated. And that’s where the programs starts, figuring out what those things are and then now the rest is, I’ll show you exactly how to automate everything else or delegate everything else, or let’s just completely cut out all the junks and stuff that you don’t need to do.
Lindsey:
Well, and the stuff that you don’t need to do, the stuff that you don’t want to do. If you are pouring yourself into 10 hour days of running a law firm, then you need to be making sure that you’re spending those 10 hours really doing the things that wake you up in the morning, that get you going so that you’re best serving your clients, but you’re also living a really full life in the process. So when you’re working with a lawyer who wants to grow their firm, wants to better themselves, where do you start with them?
Sam:
Kind of where I mentioned, kind of figuring out, what are you doing right now? So based on, literally, the tasks that you’re doing right now, and then from there, kind of figuring out, then, what we need to delegate, eliminate, or automate. That’s the first thing. Second thing is kind of analytics of your past 12 months. Where are you getting your clients from? What’s your cost requisition? What’s your value per client? And making numerical based, data-driven decisions based on that. And an easy formula is to just triple down once you get clear on your numbers and just triple down on what’s working the best and then completely be very aggressive and completely eliminate anything that is not.
Delegation through Automation
Lindsey:
Sure. And I know you mentioned a lot of automation before in what is working well for a modern law firm, and clearly not everything can be automated, but how do you see the virtual presence and the virtual work shaping the new type of law firm and how you can hand off some of those responsibilities that you don’t necessarily want to take on yourself as a lawyer?
Sam:
So the mindset is most things can, and essentially, if you want, should be automated. And again, the whole point of automation is to get you to focus on what you’re strongest at, and you just do that and everything else is handed off or automated. So the way that I kind of look at it is pre-client, kind of like the sales side of your law firm, getting your clients signed up, and then second is serving clients, their service side of things. So when it comes to pre-client, sure, there’s a lot of automation that is required to be able to automatically collect your lead’s contact information, and then systematically be able to get in contact with them to get them scheduled on a call or to give them a call. There’s a lot of automation that goes in there. But the second thing that you need as part of the system is, you basically need a staff to be able to do that for you.
There’s a lot of automations plus people that can basically qualify your leads for you. They don’t need to necessarily provide legal advice, but kind of qualify and then get them closer to say, “Oh, well, congrats. You do qualify. This is exactly how we can solve your problem,” And basically getting them signed up. That essentially could be 80, 90% automated. Once they’re signed up as a client, that notifies, now, our second team and says, “Well, if this client just became a client, well, what do we need?” “Well, usually we need some documents and we need some information.” “Well, that could be automated too, as soon as they send the DocuSign,” “Okay, here’s a text or an email that’s sent to them, go ahead and fill this out and also go ahead and upload your documents here.” So once that’s collected, automatically, it will notify our second team to be able to start the drafting, which now, guess what?
ChatGPT could help up with a lot of that drafting based on the intake information that we collect upfront from the client. We’ll be basically using Zapier integration. We give ChatGPT a very specific prompt integrated with Zapier that says, “Hey, use this client’s answers to be able to go draft this particular thing.” This whole recipe, especially this part, we’ve been able to figure it out internally inside of our community. We have a couple of people that are kind of tech super AI geeks who’ve been able to put this together and now kind of seeing it literally being built in front of us and be able to, now, we’re sharing it with each other, is really eye-opening. But essentially, the mindset, again, is most things that you’re currently doing, the day-to-day operations, can and should be automated.
Lindsey:
Absolutely. Because doing the grunt work of writing your own drafts and figuring out the email chain to be sending back and forth is not a wheel that we need to be reinventing. And with the advent of technology and so many new programs that are out there at your disposal, there’s no excuse to be wasting so much time, that is valuable time, doing these mundane tasks. But I know a lot of our listeners are probably tuning in right now thinking, “Well, he kind of grazed over the first giant hurdle that I’m facing as a lawyer, which is generating leads and getting that phone to ring and kind of getting this process kick-started.” So how are you generating these leads that are being qualified?
How to Quickly Get More Legal Clients
Sam:
So there’s only two ways to generate clients. You either pay with it with your time or you pay with it with money. So the way that I think about the time, that’s kind of content, you’ll be able to provide value upfront for your clients, that way when people have questions or things, they’re then able to find you, and I’m sure that’s what you guys offer at Optimize law firm is kind of creating that value for your law firm clients to be able to come and basically be able to find you. That’s one way.
The second way is you pay with your money. That means you use money to be able to go to the biggest platforms, social media platforms in the world, like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube and Google to say, “Hey, I’m willing to spend money to come place myself in front of people,” And to interrupt them and say, “Hey, if you have this particular problem, or if you have these things that have been in your mind, let me show you a solution that’s helped hundreds of other clients that have been able to help in the past, and if you’d like to find out how, also, we can solve your problem, go ahead and click here so we can tell you how you can qualify for this particular benefit.” That is, essentially, paid ads.
Those ads that you see on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, that’s what I focus on myself, that’s what I got good at, understanding exactly what these platforms want and need and be able to give them that, to be able to optimize, how can I, again, get myself in front of my potential prospects and lead them down a funnel with the goal of getting them automatically signed up? This has proved pretty fruitful. Once you set this up, it’s completely automated and, literally, 24/7, you’re having leads and clients coming in and actually also being self-served. Like my funnels, at this point… Basically, we have the DocuSign getting signed without us literally doing anything. We’re able to qualify them. Again, this requires a little bit more explanation, but the idea is, we generate them, we qualify them, if they qualify, then we get them signed up.
Lindsey:
That’s fantastic. And what a dream come true for most of the lawyers who are listening right now, to be able to just automatically generate 24/7 leads, have them vetted, have them go through the funnel, and ultimately just end up with a document on your desk, you have a careful eye look at it so that you can actually represent the client in a serviceable way that is really meaningful and life changing for them, but having a lot of the basic, everyday routine stuff being knocked out so that you can really focus your energy on the lawyering that you actually want to do.
Which Roles Can’t Be Automated?
Lindsey: And while 80% of this, 90% of this can be automated, you still need to have the right people in place that can help run the firm that are not necessarily the virtual employees and that are not you. So what roles do you still need in order to be able to step back and focus on the parts of the law firm that you want to focus on?
Sam:
Totally. So across these six law firms, there’s one thing that’s always required and that’s either a COO or a director or implementer or whatever you want to call it. That somebody who kind of oversees the big picture of everything when it comes to getting the client signups, to onboarding them, serving the clients, to the marketing, and to managing the team. So that is a must. That has to be kind of in-house, somebody that you’ll be able to meet in person who kind of oversees the big picture, that plus the attorney. The attorney, ideally, you don’t want to hire virtually or as a freelancer for that because it’s kind of risky to do that. So for that, obviously a full-time attorney who can use a lot of the virtual staff to do day-to-day, collecting the documents, collecting the information, even starting some filings, and then the attorney kind of oversees it to make sure that it’s done correctly and process based, pretty much. But those two roles are kind of the ones that are required to be in-house and the rest is kind of day-to-day for that, very easily could be either supplemented or completely replaced with the completely virtual teams.
Lindsey:
That is a great vision that I think a lot of lawyers would love to be able to implement. But many of our listeners today are probably still so overwhelmed with their cycle that they’ve created, which is a standard traditional law firm where they are still having to go in and do a lot of the day-to-day work and don’t have time to get things automated and time to set things up.
How Can Lawyers Start Streamlining Today?
Lindsey: So what can a lawyer do today to break their day-to-day cycle and focus on growing their firm into one that is more streamlined and automated?
Sam:
It’s to get out of your head by getting into a community that is really focusing on personal development and focusing on, not only bettering yourself, but also your systems and things like that. What I did in the past three years, kind of created an ecosystem that kind of empowers each other to be able to grow. A lot of times, I’ve found that when people are law firm owners and they’re doing their own thing, they think that they get stuck into this road and there’s no other way, they just see it as it is, but once you step out of it and you look at and hear other people talk about, “Hey, here’s how I did mine, here’s a more efficient way that I did that,” It kind of opens up your horizons, what’s possible, that’s when you kind of tap into your potential of, “Hey, maybe there is a more efficient and better way to do this.” So at least join a committee or get a mentor who can expose you to these concepts.
Lindsey:
That’s great. And how can our listeners get in touch with you if they want to explore their own personal potential and start bettering themselves in their firms?
Sam:
So I kind of do more marketing through a lot of content, not only paid ads, but also a lot of content because I realize there’s some time for people to get used to these ideas. People don’t usually go from listening to say, “I understand now,” So the best way is to just go on YouTube, search for ‘My Legal Academy’, or just search for my name, Sam Mollaei, M O L L A E I. You’ll probably find a couple of my YouTube videos, you’ll probably watch a couple of them and then you’ll get hooked and then you’re like, “Wait a minute, there’s some stuff to this.” And over time, then you’ll kind of get more and more ideas and you’ll probably implement a couple of those things and you’ll see that it works, and then from that, then you go look me up. So yeah, YouTube is primary, also, we have a Facebook group called My Legal Academy, or if you just go on Google and search for ‘My Legal Academy’, you’ll be able to find us.
Lindsey:
Great. Well, thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate you joining us today.
Sam:
Thank you so much, Lindsey.
