Your Profitable Law Firm

Why Clients Choose You Before They Ever Call | Andrew Colsky Andrew Colsky is an attorney, licensed professional counselor, author, and entrepreneur who studies why clients hire the professionals they hire ... and why they don't hire everyone else. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, credibility, and AI search, and he has spent years figuring out what actually causes a potential c...

A Submarine Fire, $80K in Cash, and the Client Who Quoted California Ethics Rules at Me | Mike Kimball Mike Kimball has been a licensed California attorney since 1995. He worked on Yahoo's legal team during the dot-com era, served as chief legal counsel at a company Salesforce acquired, and has run his own practice since 2007 advising tech startups and large companies on deals. Before any of t...

The Checks Were Right There. Nobody Was Looking. | Stolen From Within Expense fraud hides in plain sight inside law firms… disguised as routine payments, fake vendors, and manipulated general ledger entries that disappear from the reports you rely on. In this final episode of the Stolen From Within series, Kelley Brubaker breaks down how expense fraud works, how to spot fake vendor schemes, why yo...

They All Had Access to the Trust Account. That Was the Problem. | Stolen From Within This is episode three of four in the October series, Stolen From Within. All four episodes this month are solo — no guests, just the numbers and the stories law firm owners need to hear before they happen to you. Today's episode is about your trust account — the IOLTA account that holds client money, not firm...

He Signed the Partner's Name 806 Times. | Stolen From Within This is episode two of four in the October series, Stolen From Within. All four episodes this month are solo — no guests, just the numbers and the stories law firm owners need to hear before they happen to you. Today's case: Jairo Tomas Santos, the office manager at a San Francisco law firm who worked there for 22 years before fe...

She Worked There for Six Years. She Stole $839,000. Nobody Noticed. | Stolen From Within Welcome to Stolen From Within — a four-episode October series on Your Profitable Law Firm dedicated to real cases of financial fraud inside law firms. This series was inspired by a conversation with Delisi Friday (linkedin.com/in/delisifriday), whose work in the legal operations space pushed Kelley from thinki...

Why Most Small Business Owners Never Understand Their Numbers (And What to Do About It) | Danielle Hayden Danielle Hayden is a CPA, former corporate CFO, and the CEO of Kickstart Accounting Inc., where her team of nearly 50 serves thousands of small business owners through bookkeeping, CFO services, and tax preparation. She also hosts the CEO Numbers Network podcast. In this episode, Danielle join...

Why Law Firms Are Flying Blind on KPIs and What to Do About It | Sachin Bakhai Sachin Bakhai is the CEO and founder of LawKPIs, a platform that integrates with Clio and MyCase to deliver AI-powered KPI dashboards built specifically for law firms. In this episode, Sachin joins Kelley Brubaker to talk about why most law firm owners are making critical business decisions without reliable data, which...

How Law Firm Owners Can Scale Without Becoming the Bottleneck | Matt Symes Matt Symes is a transformation strategist, AI-first architect, and founder of Levership, where he has worked with more than 500 organizations and contributed to over $1 billion in profitable growth. In this episode, Matt joins Kelley Brubaker to talk about the constraint that stops most founder-led law firms from scaling: t...

The Hidden Friction Tax: How Operational Inefficiencies Are Costing Your Law Firm Money | Tricia Warren Tricia Warren is the CEO and founder of TLW Integrated Solutions and the Operations Friction Fixer. She works with law firms and professional service businesses as a fractional COO to eliminate the operational drag that quietly costs money, burns out staff, and frustrates clients. In this episod...

How Attorneys Can Build a Book of Business Without Feeling Like a Salesperson | Dena Lefkowitz Dena Lefkowitz is an attorney turned executive coach who works with lawyers to build books of business on their own terms. In this episode, Dena joins Kelley Brubaker to talk about why most attorneys hate the idea of rainmaking, why that resistance is costing them more than they realize, and what a susta...

A CFO Reviews a Real Law Firm P&L… Here Is What She Found NOTE FOR SPOTIFY LISTENERS: This episode includes a live screen share walkthrough of a real law firm profit and loss statement. To follow along with the visuals, watch the full video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/_RaUprFhhTA Kelley Brubaker, CPA and fractional CFO for law firms, walks through a real anonymized profit and loss statem...

Why Law Firms Lose Revenue Before a Single Ad Is Placed | Scott Berry Scott Berry is the founder and president of MarketCrest, a law firm growth company specializing in immigration and family law. He joins Kelley Brubaker to make the case that most law firms don't have a lead problem, they have a client acquisition problem. In this episode, Scott breaks down the five revenue leaks killing law...

How Law Firms Can Use AI for Intake, Client Communication, and Operations | Alejo Pijuan Alejo Pijuan is a fractional AI officer who works with law firms on AI strategy and implementation through his company AmplifyVoice. In this episode, Alejo joins Kelley Brubaker to talk about why most law firms are losing clients to voicemail, how AI voice agents can handle intake without making callers feel l...

Tax Planning, Business Structure, and Wealth Strategy for Law Firm Owners | Mike Milligan CFP Mike Milligan is a Certified Financial Planner, founder of 1.oak Financial, and author of The One of a Kind Financial Plan. In this episode, Mike joins Kelley Brubaker for a conversation that jumps straight into the deep end on taxes, financial planning, and the real difference between tax prep and tax pl...

How Law Firms Can Use AI to Fix Intake, Compress the Sales Cycle, and Stop Losing Clients | Len Ward Len Ward is the founder and CEO of Commexis, an AI consulting and product development firm that began on Wall Street and evolved through digital marketing into AI-powered systems. In this episode, Len joins Kelley Brubaker to talk about what law firms are getting wrong about AI, why potential clien...

How Law Firms Can Use Press Releases to Build Credibility and Get Media Coverage | Mickie Kennedy Mickie Kennedy founded eReleases 28 years ago to help small businesses and professional service firms get real media coverage through press release distribution. In this episode, Kelley Brubaker talks with Mickie about how law firm owners can use press releases to build credibility, get picked up in n...

Succession Planning, Selling Your Firm, and Private Equity in Law | Ed Alexander Business attorney Ed Alexander joins Kelley Brubaker to talk through one of the most avoided topics in law firm ownership: what happens when you're ready to step away. Ed has worked on succession plans, mergers, and law firm sales well into the hundreds, and he breaks down why waiting until you're ready to ret...

How Law Firms Can Use AI to 2X to 10X Their Productivity | Joe Popper Joe Popper, founder of Popper Tech Team and returning guest, joins Kelley Brubaker for their third conversation to break down how law firm owners can use AI to dramatically improve productivity. Joe walks through the four levels of AI adoption, from basic prompting tools like ChatGPT and Copilot up through AI agents doing autono...

Why Your Law Firm Needs CFO-Level Thinking (Not Just a Bookkeeper) | Natalia Zacharin Most law firm owners assume that having a bookkeeper and a tax person means their finances are covered. Fractional CFO and bookkeeping expert Natalia Zacharin of Zacharin Consulting joins Kelley Brubaker to explain why that assumption leaves dangerous gaps. In this conversation, Natalia breaks down why bookkeepin...

Is Your Law Firm IT Actually Good or Just Fine? | Joe Popper Most law firm owners say the same thing when asked about their IT: "It's fine. I have a guy." But is fine actually good? IT expert Joe Popper joins Kelley Brubaker to break down the real business cost of reactive IT, why law firms are measuring IT success the wrong way, and what proactive IT support actually looks like. Joe...

AI for Law Firms: Custom AI Agents, Flat-Fee Disruption & Secure Workflows with Aaron Shechet On the Your Profitable Law Firm podcast, host Kelley Brubaker interviews attorney and AI builder Aaron Shechet, who shares how a rare cancer diagnosis in 2023 pushed him to explore AI to keep his busy litigation practice moving, including work on a California Supreme Court case.  After building intern...

How Law Firm Owners Can Build a Referral System (Without Asking) | Stacey Brown Randall Kelley Brubaker interviews referral expert Stacey Brown Randall about how law firm owners can generate consistent, high-quality referrals without asking, paying, or relying on constant networking. Stacey explains why great work alone doesn’t create predictable referrals and outlines a system-based approach that...

Most law firm owners think the solution to growth is simple… spend more on marketing. But what if that’s not the real problem? In this episode, I sit down with Eric Ritter, founder of Digital Neighbor and self-proclaimed “SEO sommelier,” to unpack what’s really happening behind the scenes in law firm marketing. We talk about why more leads don’t always mean more clients, how firms are wasting thou...

Most law firm owners believe they are overwhelmed because they are doing too much work… But what if the real problem is that you are carrying too much responsibility? In this episode, I sit down with Jason Henneberry, creator of Dependency Design and author of Why Your Business Won’t Let You Go , to talk about why growth often increases pressure instead of reducing it… and what is actually happeni...