The Law Entrepreneur

David Burkus is a best-selling author, a sought-after keynote speaker, and an associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University. His newest book,  Friend of a Friend , offers leaders a new perspective on how to grow their networks and build key connections – based on the science of human behavior, not just rote networking advice.   This is a re-run of the c...

Today, my guest is Jonathan Merel. Jonathan owns a family law practice in the Chicago area that has experienced some pretty phenomenal growth as of late, now reaching 17 attorneys and support staff that are associated with those attorneys having started as a solo practitioner, and really grew as a law firm pretty quickly. One of the things we're going to spend a fair amount of time talking about i...

Today, my guest is Lauren Cohen. Lauren is an attorney originally from Canada, who now is located in South Florida, and licensed to practice law in two countries, which I think is pretty cool. She is the founder of a number of different businesses, all focusing around her primary mission - investing across borders. Her practice areas deal with all the different issues that people who are conductin...

Today, my guest is Demir Bentley, a productivity coach! Now, I am the poster child for someone who needs help in becoming more productive. I like to think of myself as productive, but my Achilles’ heel is planning. I am not a good planner. And that is where Demir really shines. This interview to me was personal and mind blowing. He has some really great ideas on how to take that giant leap, just o...

Today, my guest is Dara Rosenbaum. Dara is one of the founding partners of a firm out of New York called Rosenbaum and Taylor, and they represent individuals and businesses on a variety of legal issues, including contract negotiations and business disputes and all kinds of things having to do with business owners and entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. She counsels and advises them on transactional ma...

Today, my guest is Fred Joyal. Fred is a fascinating individual. His latest book Superbold: From Under Confident to Charismatic in 90 Days, teaches us a systemic way for anyone to radically increase their boldness and confidence to a remarkable level in a very short period of time. You're going to hear how he started out as a very shy person but pushed himself to become bolder. And, as a result, m...

Today, my guest is Jotham Stein. Jotham is a principal of the Law Offices of Jotham Stein, located in California, and he has more than a couple of decades of experience representing entrepreneurs and C-Suite executives in a whole bunch of different types of companies. He also represents board members and investment bankers as well as less senior employees of all different sized companies. He has w...

Today, my guest is Henry Gereis, and Henry is a criminal defense attorney near Bakersfield, CA who has an interesting journey, having transitioned from family law, ultimately into doing criminal defense work. It's an interesting story about how he attributes a lot of the success that he's had to the fact that he's a huge fan of Kobe Bryant's and learned a lot from Kobe and how Kobe approached his...

Today, my guest is Lori Mihalich-Levin. Laurie is an attorney who, as she likes to say, practices law as a side gig. She's a solo practitioner and also the founder of called Mindful Return. This is a really interesting business organization, course, book, and blog, all about the issues regarding the return to the workplace of parents after parental leave and that more transient dynamic that is ass...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.   Today my guest is Sean Greaney. Sean is in-house counsel for a company called HyperDraft, also the name of the product that they produce, which is a document preparation system for use by attorneys. What sets it apart fr...

On today’s episode, I interviewed Charles Vega. Charles is an attorney in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s a bit strange, but we have almost the exact same story. Both Charles and I were in business for multiple years and law is our 3rd or 4th career. We both went to school late in life, started a solo practice, and even right down to the fact that we are both practicing martial artists as well. I alm...

Today my guest is Wendy Meadows. And Wendy is, as I like to call her, a reformed family law litigator. That is to say, she practiced family law for quite some time at a medium sized law firm before going out on her own, and then decided that litigation was something that she needed to move away from. She's still doing family law, but focusing on the non-litigation aspects such as mediation, and he...

Today, my guest is Ryan Kimler. Ryan owns an accounting and finance firm, called Financial Clarity LLC, and they principally support attorneys. Ryan and I got together to discuss what are the important financial analysis functions that solo and small firm practitioners need to get into place in order to grow their law firms. If you’re like most people, you might have a bookkeeper that helps you ge...

Today, my guest is Kirk Simoneau. Kirk is an attorney up in New Hampshire, and is this fascinating story of how he went from law school to a fairly sizable firm and within a very short period of time, became the managing partner at a very young age for a venerable firm that had been around for a long time. And it's a really interesting story that then segues to the creation of his own solo practic...

Today, my guest is Eric Pines. Eric is an attorney who now operates a medium-sized law firm of about 30 employees and they're spread across multiple locations, as is often the standard these days. I wanted to have Eric on board because he could speak to the growth from a solo practice, that he started in his garage, hiring a few friends to help him run his business and has now moved on to have thi...

Today I have two guests - Lauren Lester and Jessica Bednarz. Lauren is an attorney operating outside of Denver, Colorado, and has a client based law firm focusing on Family Law principally. It's really interesting how she structured her law firm to be client centered and to take full advantage of the limited scope opportunities and productize the packaging of legal services to meet her client need...

Today, my guest is Sue West. Sue is a personal injury attorney outside of Houston, Texas, and we're going to talk about how she has gone from a law office, essentially in her spare bedroom, to a freestanding physical location in the suburbs and serving clients with a emphasis on client relations and coaching them through, and helping them through, the process of recovering from difficult times cat...

Today my guest is Steve Fretzin. Steve is one of the giants in the legal marketing and business development space. I wanted to have Steve on today for a couple of different reasons, principally because he's got a new book called Legal Business Development Isn't Rocket Science. And isn't that the truth? It summarizes some of the things written in the earlier books and adds some new material. It's v...

Every year this at this time of year, December, Stacey Brown Randall devotes the month to goal setting. And what you're going to hear on this episode is me admitting that I'm an utterly terrible person at setting goals. I'm the poster boy for why goal setting is important, and I have demonstrated ample ability to foil my own progress by not setting the goals in a way that they're achievable, or su...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.   Today, my guest is Laurie Gilbertson. Laurie has a very interesting career. She started off as a district attorney in the Queens County, New York office. From there she transitioned to being a fixture on Court TV along w...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.     In this episode, Neil and John discuss: Transferring the lessons from The Four Seasons and Disney to your business.  Focusing in on what most of your clients want.  Hiring for your firm before individual...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.   Today, my guest is Laura Frederick. Laura is a solo practitioner and entrepreneur. She comes out of big law and out of the commercial world, with most recently stopped at Tesla, of all great places to work. She started h...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.   In this episode, Neil and Jeremy discuss: Lessons for moving into your own solo firm from a big law firm. Digging deep into the tools that you have.  Challenges of opening a new, solo firm.  Implementing proces...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.     In this episode, Neil and Joe discuss: The power of education in marketing and advertising.  Building your preeminence in your field.  The difference between scale and growth.  Re-architecting for t...

Starting your own practice isn’t something they teach in law school. Join me as I sit down with legal professionals to hear firsthand accounts of just how they did it.  Today, my guest is Kelsey Johnson. Kelsey is a product marketing manager for AWeber, which is an email marketing platform that quite frankly, I use and have used for years and years. Aweber is a perfect platform and they have...