Law Firm Finances Demystified, with John Scott

Great lawyers don't always know

how to build great law firms.

Let's change that.

Join Ben Gideon as he shares hard won

lessons from building his own financially

successful law firm and practical

insights from top law firm entrepreneurs,

business consultants, and more.

This is a podcast for lawyers

by lawyers. Welcome to Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

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Welcome to Elawvate: Build and

Grow Your Law Firm. I'm Ben Gideon.

Jeff Wright is off today.

Very excited today to have

John Scott on the pod.

John is a CPA working at

the Anders firm out of St.

Louis and specializes in helping

lawyers with tax, accounting,

financial planning, and other

related matters. So welcome, John.

Thank you, Ben. Great to be here.

So just tell us a little bit about your

background and how'd you get into this

consulting and advising law firm's niche?

Well, I started at Anders in the

'90s and we, like many firms,

got most of our referrals from attorneys.

And we loved those referrals because

when you get a referral from attorney,

those folks are used to paying good fees,

and so they're kind of a qualified lead.

And I was very fortunate early in my

career to meet a very entrepreneurially

attorney who grew his niche

practice from just the St.

Louis area to 44 states and the UK.

And I spent 17 years working with this

attorney on his finance committee,

watching him build his practice

by paying attention to data.

So it became very apparent to me that you

need good, clean financial statements,

you need to pay attention to data and

make decisions based on that because when

you do that, if you make a mistake,

you can correct that quickly.

And that kind of folds into forecasting.

When people set budgets at the

beginning of the year and then they

put them in the drawer until October,

that's a useless exercise.

But when you do a dynamic forecast and

you look at it on a consistent basis,

it's kind of like using a

Waze app or a GPS for a trip.

You can see if you're off course and

you can course correct and you can pull

different levers. And that's what we

at Anders Virtual CFO services do.

We want current financial statements so

that we can pay attention to data and

course correct along the way

to help you achieve your goals.

Can you tell us a little bit more about

that entrepreneurial lawyer that ended

up in 44 states and international? What

kind of practice was that, first of all?

It was a family law practice and he

decided early on that he wanted to

work on his business and not in it.

And he got it down to a science.

Every time he moved to a new city,

he could be breakeven in six

months and profitable after that.

And he just had this formula. You go

to a city, you get temporary space,

you find a local managing attorney,

flood the airways with ads.

At the time it was

mostly radio ads and SEO,

and you would get enough business

to then hire that second attorney.

And at that point, you were

profitable. He made mistakes,

but because he was

paying attention to data,

he could minimize the impact of those

mistakes. Where so many of us just go,

"Okay, my gut tells me I should do this.

I'm not paying attention to the data."

And then 18 months later, I go, "Boy,

that was a mistake. I wasted a ton of

time not paying attention to the data.".

I'm curious, we don't have to stick

on this forever, but in that example,

this lawyer who built that business,

so in each different market,

he's acquiring or hiring

attorneys that manage the

business. And how does he keep,

and this may be outside of

the areas you're consulting,

but I'm interested in

this. If you have insight,

how does he keep the high standards

of practice and manage the egos and

compensation, which is always

a challenge with lawyers?

It is a challenge. The

standards of practice,

he came up with very specific guidelines

and oversight to ensure that people

were doing quality service for their

client and keeping them out of trouble.

With respect to how do you manage

the egos, he treated them very well.

They weren't owners,

but he treated them like owners and

gave them perks that they couldn't get

somewhere else.

And it was an impediment for them to

then leave and go somewhere else or

go across the street and set

up their own shingle. Plus,

the firm did everything for them.

All they did was practice law.

They didn't do marketing, they

didn't do accounting or finance,

none of the HR functions. So

it really was plug and play,

come in and practice your craft. And

if you wanted to go across the street,

you're going to have to do all those other

things that you weren't doing before.

And I noticed one of the articles you

have on your website had to do with equity

compensation or attorney

compensation model.

That's something we at one point

struggled with a little bit.

How do you create a compensation

model that incentivizes people for

performance-based behavior,

retains your best people so that

they're not going across the street and

competing with you and

hanging your own shingle,

but is also a intelligent

way to compensate,

doesn't overpay people

for what they're doing.

Have you figured out in the consulting

you've done what the sweet spot is for

how to think about attorney compensation?

Well, if you talk to

10 different law firms,

you'd have 10 different comp models.

But I think one that aligns individual

attorney goals with the firm

goals is the one that

would best fit most places.

And you can tailor whatever system

they have to align the goals of the

individual with the firm. And I think if

you do that, everybody's going to win.

But you'll have firms that

are just sharing overhead

and there's no real growth

path there.

But if the firm wants to grow and the

attorneys want to do better and make more

and grow their practice within the firm,

then what you need to do

is have individual goal

meetings with those attorneys

and say, "Look, if you

work towards these goals,

then we're going to grow and you're going

to make more money." You can put some

parameters and guarantees around it,

but at some point you have to align the

goals of the individual with the goals

of the firm.

As you're growing, and the

example of this particular lawyer,

other clients that you work with,

how do you balance the

growth with cashflow and

not overextending yourself

or creating undue risk as you

grow that you're going to sort of grow

yourself into bankruptcy because you're

taking on more costs and staff

and attorneys than you can.

Handle?That's where we come in. We

practice profit-focused accounting,

which has four pillars. It's

cash, profitability, forecasting,

and pipeline of work. And so

cash being that first one,

what we do is we help

you set a cash target.

And the general rule of thumb is it's

between 10 and 30% of expected 12 months

revenue. So if you are a less risky firm,

hourly billing firm with great

clients that pay by return mail,

you can keep about 10% of that expected

annual revenue in cash reserves.

And that's operating cash. The

safety net is your line of credit,

but I really don't want you

to live on the line of credit,

but really what cash do I have

to retain to pay my rent, people,

and other overhead expenses

for the next couple of months?

And if I'm a more risky firm,

let's say I'm a PI firm with

large catastrophic cases,

then I'm going to skew more towards that

30%. So that's how we help you manage

that growth because if you are a growing

firm, even if you're a less risky firm,

but you want to keep growing

market share and hire new people,

you're going to have to build up those

cash reserves over the next few months or

a year so that you can fund that

growth without incurring debt.

I'm not a big fan of debt in a law firm.

I love having a line of

credit as a safety net,

but too many firms strip out all

the cash at the end of the year,

not leaving enough to operate,

and then they live on the line of credit

and they spend the first few months

paying down that line of credit.

I think that's the bad practice that

we need to kind of morph out of.

And if we can get disciplined

enough to leave some cash behind,

then I'm never going to be paying the

bank off with the next few months of.

Cashflow. Well,

I'm glad we've been following that

model and gradually increasing our cash

reserve and what we call a rainy day fund.

And the challenge on the plaintiff's side,

which is what we do is that all of

that is to be after tax dollars.

We're not able to deduct

any of those expenses.

So we're paying taxes on the money

we continue to keep in the firm.

Well,

and you have another challenge in that

you have to fund those cases with your

money.

And so you have this big investment

sitting in your balance sheet and prepaid

case costs. So you have a bigger hurdle.

Right. No, exactly.

We have enormous amounts out in case

costs in addition to our rainy day fund.

And all of that is after tax dollars,

which really creates a drag on the

cashflow of the business in certain

ways.

But have you found any work around to

that or is that just a reality of the tax

code as it applies to

plaintiff's practices?

Well,

there's no workaround with respect to

deducting those costs on a current basis,

but I do see some firms that are financing

those costs and then depending on

your state, are able to pass along

the interest cost to the client.

It can be done. We've just elected

not to do that for various reasons.

Understood.

So that rule of thumb, the 10

to 30%, it's 10 to 30% of what?

Of your expected revenue

for the next 12 month.

And I guess I'm wondering about,

would it be of expected

revenue when the question is,

do you have sufficient

cash to pay your costs?

Well, typically that's

just a shortcut to get to,

do I have two to three

months of overhead cost?

If you had two or three or six months

or whatever of overhead costs in a cash

reserve,

that would be another way to assess

whether you had sufficient cash on hand.

Right.

Got you.

Two to six months. Six months

would be more closer to the 30%.

So the riskier firm would

need six months of expenses.

I had seen some in reading

business books and things,

some have advocated even

up to a year of overhead.

I guess Bill Gates always had a year

of operating costs for Microsoft in the

bank, which must have been

a fair amount of money.

That's a little easier

for him to do, isn't it?

I would say so. Yeah.

So having that cash on hand is

one way if you're growing to hedge

against the risk of delayed

revenue that doesn't match your

expenses on a current basis, right?

Right.

And then in addition to that,

having that line of credit there

in case you get in trouble.

Yeah, that's really your safety net. You

thought that case was going to settle,

but then they appealed the judgment.

So that's your safety net to

get you through that time.

So you talked about using

data. We're huge fans of that.

That's one of our core values is making

decisions based on science and data,

and we're really into that.

One of the challenges in using data is

figuring out what are the right metrics

to track that project the health

of your firm. Have you seen ...

And I think it would probably depend

on what kind of firm you have,

whether it's hourly rate, whether it's

contingent fee. And even within that,

different types of firms

probably have different.

But what are some different examples

of the key indicators that are most

important to track for data

purposes for financial planning?

You know, you're so right. It

depends on the type of law firm.

So an hourly firm, you're

going to look at standard rate,

but standard rate is

really, it's not material.

It really is what's the average bill rate.

So what's the rate that the client sees

when the biller has determined value?

You could say your standard

rate's a thousand bucks an hour,

but when you send the bill out, if

it's $600 an hour, that's the reality.

So paying attention to

that and then utilization.

We like hourly billing firms to set

targets for charge time of their

professionals and really monitoring

that because that's how we build the

forecast is how much could we do based

on the people we have and how many hours

they can charge or are expected to charge.

And then we monitor that at least on a

monthly basis to see how they're doing

with respect to those goals because

people have time off, vacations, holidays,

and we realize it's not

going to be a straight line,

but are they getting towards those goals?

And then in a PI firm,

it's what's your cost of acquisition?

Do I have enough cases coming in?

And then really monitoring

that process along the way.

Every type of case has a specific

timeline from intake to adjudication.

And sometimes you find firms that there

are bottlenecks internally that are

slowing down that timeline. If something

should take six to nine months,

but it's routinely taking 13 months,

we got to find where that bottleneck is

because we're really converting effort

into a dollar at some point. And

if it's taking us longer to do,

it's hurting our cash position.

Are there rules of thumb

regarding profitability

depending on the different type

of law firm model you have,

what your margins should be?

Yeah, certainly on the gross profit side,

we'd like to see gross

profit between 50 and 60%.

So that is my revenue minus my

production costs, the people cost,

including their overhead.

So if I'm paying someone 100,000

and overhead is let's say 28%,

I'm going to take revenue minus

$128,000 to determine gross profit,

and we want to see that

between 50 and 60%.

And then the rest of your cost

below gross profit are usually

about 25 to 30%. And so

depending on the firm,

you can have net income of 20 to 40%.

A sole practitioner could have 50% net

income, but they don't have the overhead,

they don't have the people

cost that a bigger firm is.

And generally the bigger a firm gets,

the lower that net income percentage is.

But remember, that percentage

is on a bigger number,

so it's okay to decline. And then

of course, if you're a flow through,

you have to almost look at this before

owner's compensation because really they

get whatever you're paying

them plus whatever's left over,

right? And then in a C Corp where I'm

stripping out all the income with a bonus

to all the shareholders, that net

income's going to be really compressed.

So again,

you add back at least the bonus

piece to get back to a 20% net

income of that C Corp law

firm. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. We've

noticed that as we've grown,

our net profit number has gone down,

but it's against a larger total revenue.

So the absolute profit number has gone up.

And it sounds like that would be typical

as you're taking on more overhead to

build out something bigger,

you're getting a slightly

smaller share of a larger pie.

Right. Especially as you

add, if you add partners.

I had a partner when I was a very young

professional here who said," I'm not

going to make less so you can make

more. We have to grow the pie.

"And the point stuck very quickly that,

" Hey, if I want to make more money,

it's not going to come from

my partners. It's going to be,

we're going to grow this

whole pie and I'll make more.

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I imagine a lot of times when

you're working with clients,

they'll ask you quite directly,"

Does it make sense for us to grow?

Does it make sense for us to add another

lawyer or move into another practice

area or another geographic area or

another city or town or something?

"And you're assisting them in analyzing

that and answering those questions for

them. How do you go about doing that?

In an hourly billing firm,

it's a very easy exercise. A,

do you have the work and what

are you going to pay this person?

Then we can calculate their cost,

including their overhead and say," Look,

they only need 500 charge hours to pay

for themselves. "Everything beyond that,

we can make some money on them. So if

you can get them to that very quickly,

yeah, go ahead and expand and do that.

And then the philosophy should be,

if you find a good person and

you think you can fill them up,

you should hire them. Not when

you absolutely need somebody,

because you want to look at

your capacity all the time.

And when you get to 85% capacity,

so I don't have much left

and you find a good person,

you should hire them if you're a growing

firm because if you wait too long where

you have no capacity and

you're burning out your people,

you're at risk of losing

one of those folks.

That's probably one of the most important

things we've learned in our growth

journey is that when everybody's

coming to you and telling you they're

overwhelmed, it's already too late.

You're starting to run into problems and

you really want to head that off before

that happens so that people aren't getting

to that place where they're burnt out

and quality control suffers,

client service suffers.You're at risk

of committing malpractice because you

can't handle the volume of work that

you have appropriately and so forth.

You never want to get to that

point. That's great advice.

So what are some of the things when you

are first hired by firms and you start

to peel back the curtain

and look inside and are

starting to help them identify problems,

what are the kind of the common

sorts of problems you're seeing?

So we work on a subscription-based model.

And so we have three legs of the

stool of what we can or will do.

The first leg is the accounting function.

We'll do all the receipts and

disbursements in the accounting.

The second leg is advisory

where we meet with leadership,

go over the financial statements,

talk about capacity and anything else

that comes up. And the third leg is tax.

All three of these legs are independent.

So there's a menu of services,

you pick and choose what you

want to keep, what we do,

and then we set a price and we go forward.

When you engage with us

during the first eight weeks,

we have our onboarding process.

We go through a maturity model assessment

of your finance function and we

determine how you rate and it's

self-graded. So we grade it with you,

how you rate in five areas of finance,

and then you might be rocking it in one

or two of those areas and need help in

three. And so we set goals over the next

six to 12 months to get those better.

And during that eight-week period,

we analyze everything in your finance

function and we come up with a documented

plan of, okay, these are good. Here's

some suggestions for this area.

And so we really dig into the whole

function to figure out where the bones are

buried and then help you

improve upon those over time.

And going through that process,

are there some patterns you've

recognized where firms in general just

tend to fall short?

Yeah, especially in chargeable

firms where they hourly billing,

they haven't set charge-hour

expectations. They don't manage it.

So I had a firm that had a cashflow

crisis and it turns out that

nobody was hitting their charge

goals, including the two owners.

And the two owners were so consumed with

the cashflow crisis that they weren't

serving clients. And so we quickly

identified that. And in about 45 days,

we started seeing cash improve

because we started managing people,

getting them to work client files and

serve clients and then send out bills.

I had another firm that had a big

cash crunch when they hired us,

and they had one partner

who hadn't billed all year.

And billing hygiene is so important

because clients don't just pay you,

right? You do work for them,

you solve a problem that they had and

you send them a bill and they pay you.

That's how it works. So we identified

the fact that he hadn't billed all year.

And it took a few months because when

you send out a client six or eight months

after you do something, the pain

point's not there for the client.

So it's a little harder to

collect, but it did work out.

And now he's one of our best

billers. He bills every month,

cleans out all his whip, and

it's great. On the PI side,

the biggest thing I see is not utilizing

your case management system correctly

and missing those prepaid case costs.

If you don't get those in the file and

the settlement comes in and you don't pay

attention to capturing all those costs,

it's just as if you lost the Kate.

You have to write those off

and you get to expense it,

but you don't get your money

back. So in the PI world,

paying attention to those details,

having paralegals that really work

the case management system and

settlements,

having those handled correctly really

leads to keeping your cash positions

strong.

One more thing in the PI world,

and I'm seeing more and more of this

where a settlement will come out,

email goes out to a client that

says, "Hey, here's a settlement,

send us wiring instructions." There are

a lot of bad actors out there that are

spoofing emails and sending an email back.

I've had two firms that hired us

that right before they hired us,

they got that spoof email, wired

the settlement to the client,

which wasn't the client,

and that money's just lost.

So the key is when you

get that email back,

pick up the phone and call

a client and say, "Hey,

I want to confirm these

wiring instructions.".

That's great advice.

I have a colleague whose office wired

$10 million of settlement money to

a client and it turned out that

that was fraudulent. Oh my gosh.

So you really have to be careful.

We had an email that came

in after a settlement that

purported to be from a lien

holder seeking recovery of a lien,

must have infiltrated some emails or

something to know that this was something

we were in the process of

negotiating. And fortunately,

our internal financial manager

noticed that the email address had one

digit difference from the real email

for the person we had been communicating

with. That was a $500,000 lien repayment.

So we're very happy we picked up on

that before sending the money out of the

office.

But this is what's rampant and something

people really have to try to be on top

of.

Is there other things in terms

of just financial checks or

controls on the money flow side of it?

Obviously avoiding

being a victim of fraud

is always a good idea,

but there's also scenarios I've heard of

where employees themselves internal to

the business are embezzling money and

you have to be concerned about that.

Are there certain types of financial

controls that you advise putting in place

to protect yourself?

One of the other pillars of profit-focused

accounting is your financials and

having good current financials

with separation of duties is key

too many firms, and not just law firms,

but too many businesses have

their neighbors, uncles,

brother do the accounting on the

side. They've got a full-time day job,

they do this at night and they're

three months behind in reconciling the

accounts. And you know in a law firm,

your trust account is super important to

have always reconciled and be high and

tight. And when you are three

months behind, it's just historical.

There's no benefit to that. And so if

you have someone preparing the checks,

someone else reviewing and signing the

checks and yet a third person or outside

vendor reconciling those accounts

and doing it on a current basis,

then it's going to lead to two things,

the good data with which to make

decisions and you're going to avoid those

fraud or bad actors in your operations

because you're going to have

that separation of duties,

you're going to have that oversight

and you're going to have good current

financial information.

Do you recommend that firms occasionally

have outside audits done just as a

check? And if so, how

frequently would you do that?

I don't know that you need

an audit unless you ...

If you suspected something or if your

trust accounts were just way behind,

you could have agreed upon procedures

or someone in a forensic and litigation

with a forensic or litigation

background come through and audit that.

But unless your bank requires

an audit of your firm,

I don't think you need that.

You could get agreed upon procedures

to look at certain things,

especially in the IOLTA accounts. But

I think if you have an outside vendor,

CPA or firm like ours,

reconcile those accounts and

don't have your office manager

have the authority to sign those checks,

have the bank statements go to the

owner's address so that they have some

oversight in that,

and also your CPA so that someone else

is looking at those statements to look

for transactions.

We're coming into an AI world that is

good and bad. I think it's going to be

great for efficiency on these

repeatable transactions.

And when we get in the accounting world,

I think it can help us minimize the time

on doing the actual accounting so that

we can spend more time

analyzing what happened.

And you're going to see AI tools

that'll go, "Hey, this is a new vendor.

Somebody should look at

this and think about this.

" And so I think AI is going

to really help us in that area,

but it's also going to help the

boogeyman who's spoofing those emails.

He's going to get tools to

come in and do bad things too.

So right now, in terms

of if me as an owner,

if I wanted to have a

second check on things,

would I essentially take

the books and throw it into

an AI and say,

"Can you flag any patterns or

issues or is that a viable way to

do it? ".

I know people that are

doing that right now.

What it's doing is it's

looking at variances month

over month, year over year,

and just highlighting things

that maybe you should look at.

I think the other thing you should do

is pay attention to those statements,

review those statements,

look for anomalies,

and then have an outside person or

someone else in your organization do the

reconciliation as opposed to the

office manager who's creating

the checks. And there's

several opportunities for

you to review things, right?

You can review the bank statement,

you can review the disbursements

when you sign the checks,

or better yet in a automated area,

if you go to a bill.com

for your disbursements,

you're going to get your vendors

to email the bills to you.

You'll get an email allowing you a chance

to review and approve the bill or ask

questions and not approve, and then

you can hit the button and say, "Okay,

okay to pay." But just the owner has

to be involved and have some oversight,

and then there has to be an independent

third party person reconciling those

accounts so that you can minimize

the chance of an error or

collusion for fraud.

Let me ask you about tax.

What are the big issues that come

up for attorneys regarding tax and

tax planning?

They don't want to pay taxes just like

every other American, but I think if you,

especially at year end, look

at bonuses for your people,

but maximizing profit

sharing contributions,

accelerating some expenses at

year end, really in a PI firm,

you have the ability to manage income

a little bit. You can delay a judgment,

push something off until

January, but really going out,

if you were going to make an

investment in new technology,

accelerating that into the current

year so that we can take depreciation,

or if you needed new computer

equipment, the same thing,

just making sure that it's placed in

service in the current year as opposed to

the next year. But don't do things

like the car salesman will say, "Oh,

Mr. Owner,

you should buy a 6,000 pound gross vehicle

weighed vehicle and you can ride it

all off." Well, if you

didn't need that vehicle,

you shouldn't buy it. But if you were

going to buy it in March or April,

go ahead and accelerate that and

you can get the deduction sooner.

Yeah. Well, I can relate to

wanting to pay less taxes. I mean,

I feel like because of the quirk

of the plaintiff's practice where

all case costs are not deductible

until the case resolves,

you're essentially providing tax-free

after tax loans of that money

that can go on for years and that is a

real drag. But other than financing them,

as you've alluded to,

there's really no other workaround

on that we've identified.

Yeah. Now in the plaintiff's world,

there are programs where if you

write it into the settlement,

and I really see this in the

mass tort area where you have 20,

40 million million settlements

and you can say, "Hey,

I want to defer my fee." It has to be

written into the settlement and the fee

then, let's say you have a $20

million fee coming and you say, "Okay,

I'll take two and I want to defer 18."

That money really goes into a deferral

account, which you can control and

invest with whoever your broker is,

and then you can take

that money out over time.

It's still going to be ordinary income,

including the growth on that account,

but then you can smooth out

your income over the next 10,

20 years.

Right, right, right.

You can structure your fees or you can

put them in a qualified settlement fund

like you're describing.

And various elements of that have

different levels of IRS blessing or

confidence, and some of them are subject

to challenge even that's going on now.

So you have to be careful about it,

but there are different

vehicles that you can use there.

So just finally to wrap up,

can you just tell us a little

bit about what you guys offer?

If there's lawyers listening who feel

like they would benefit from more

structure or robust accounting

and financial planning in

their practices, what do you guys

offer and how does that work?

The value proposition of what Anders

Virtual CFO Services provides to a firm

is that we bring an entire team of

finance professionals to you on a

subscription basis. You

get a VCFO, an accountant,

and a technology person all on

a fixed fee subscription basis.

And it's usually about 75 to 80% of what

it would cost you to hire those people

internally, and you don't have a long-term

commitment. If you hire a great CFO,

then great,

but it might be 18 months before you

figure out if you made the right hire.

With us, we ask for a month's

notice, but you can pick and choose.

Additionally,

you get to keep whatever you want to

keep internally and we take the rest.

So it's a menu of items

that you say yes or no to,

and depending on what you

say yes to, that's the price.

If we get two months down the road and

you now want us to take over your payroll

administration, we just

flip the switch to yes,

issue a new statement of work and move

forward. So it's really a riskless way

of performing your finance function. You

can have a great internal bookkeeper,

which we really need a good

working relationship with.

That's going to lessen what

we do, lessen the price.

We're going to make their life better,

offer them some suggestions

for best practices,

and really work together well with them

to give you the visibility into your

financial statements to improve your

cash position and help you achieve your

goals.

We look at this as a journey where you're

taking a trip to get to your goals and

we're going to help you stay focused

on those so that if we get off track,

we can pull different levers to course

correct to get you to where you want to

be.

What level of revenue do

clients typically come to you at

a level of size and maturity of

practice to obtain your services?

It's really between two and 50 billers.

And I have firms that are a million and

a half dollars all the way up to $30

million in fees. And so it really

depends. And we scale our pricing.

We can do our pricing in a 30-minute

conversation and give you a firm price,

but we scale our pricing based on

revenue and number of employees.

That's what really drives the price.

It was interesting when you were talking

about a couple of firms you worked with

that they had a cash crunch and they

came to you because you'd think sometimes

when people have a cash crunch,

they don't go out and spend extra

money on consultants or CPAs or finance

people,

but probably that's the time you need to

do that so that you can get your house

in order and get yourself

back on track, right?

Right. It doesn't feel right,

but that's what they actually

need to do to get back on track.

It's kind of like the stock market,

right? If you invest correctly,

you're supposed to buy low, sell

high, but when you invest emotionally,

you sell low and buy high.

Right.

That tends to be my strategy and probably

why I should stay out of the market.

Well, John,

it's been really great to talk to

you and appreciate your time today.

And thank you for doing what you do

and helping lawyers be able to have the

financial freedom to build good law

practices and to continue to grow and

thrive. So thanks for doing that.

Thank you, Ben. I enjoyed it.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate:

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