The New Firm Begins

It's official. As of May 1, 2004, Homann Law and Mediation officially becomes "The Silver Lake Group." The biggest news is that another lawyer will be joining me as I officially leave the land of solo practice. My new partner, who is now winding up his present partnership (on good terms), will be formally announced here next week. There are over one hundred things on my "to-do" list, so my blogging may be a bit sporadic, but here are some highlights of our business plan that I'll flesh out in individual posts on this blog.

1. No client will be billed by the hour. I'll unveil our Service Pricing^sm plan in more detail next week.

2. We will guarantee each client's satisfaction with our service or refund their money.

3. We will hire a "client concierge" who will be responsible for one thing: keeping our clients happy. The client concierge will contact every client weekly, organize monthly seminars of interest to them, write topical newsletters, send birthday and holiday cards, solicit client feedback, and manage our firm's master client to-do list.

4. We will set up the "Silver Lake Small Business Foundation" and contribute ten percent of our profits to it. The money in the foundation will be used to teach entrepreneurship in local schools, donate books to public libraries, encourage people to start small businesses (with micro-loans), establish mentoring programs, and fund scholarships and work-study programs for local students.

5. We will share our methods, forms, letters, and experiences with others to encourage all of us in the legal profession to move away from the billable hour and toward a saner, customer-centered way of practicing law.

6. We will have a hell of a good time.

To say that I am excited is a massive understatement. I started this weblog to write about transfoming my practice, and I feel that I am almost there. Look for more details here over the next two weeks.

Comments

[Kevin O'Keefe]

Congrats on the launch of the "Silver Lake Group." Sounds very exciting. I expect you are going to do great stuff.

I really like the principals you have established. We established values we stood for at my firm and later with Prairielaw - doing the same with lexBlog.

The service guaranty will serve you well. We offered a guaranty at our firm that should any client be dissatisfied with our service, for any reason, they were entitled to the return of any fees paid over the last year - no questions asked. We only had one client ask for a small fee reduction based on the guaranty. In that case we learned something about improving our method of communicating with multiple beneficiaries of an estate.

Other less innovative firms will look at your name, your principals and your guaranty as gimmicks. They will not take part in similar innovation focused on better service to average Americans hiding behind the curtain that the law is noble profession that requires lawyers to act in archaic ways that turn people off.

If lawyers would read books on successful business practices (airports and bookstores are full of them) and look at what non-lawyers do to succeed in business we would have more lawyers like you and be on our way to improving the reputation of our profession. But I guess, one at a time ain't all bad - Good luck Matt.

[David Giacalone]

I wish you all the best with this venture, Matt. If anyone can make it work for client and lawyer -- good value, good ethics, good times -- it's you.

One caution about the "client concierge" -- you might want to have him/her ask each client how often they'd like to be called. Some of us/them would think weekly calls to be suffocating (by comparison, imagine hearing weekly from your insurnace agent).

[John W]

Congrats! Sounds like a lot of good ideas.

I thought is was going to be the "Silver Lake Law Group"; did you decide to drop "law" from the name?

Good luck!

[David Young]

What a tremendously exciting post to read! I know an accountant in Austin who does monthly Free Public Seminars and it has grown his practice tremendously. He starts off the seminar by showing the movie "The Accountant."
It won an Oscar for best short film. It's available at www.ginnymule.com It is a RIOT. Not what you'd expect from a real accountant.

Best wishes for a terrific practice!