How to Run a Client-Centered Law Firm

Interview Transcript

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Angela has dedicated her life to helping kids in difficult situations, especially when it comes to divorce. Make sure to check out her amazing story.

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Welcome back to The Revenue Roadmap, the podcast designed to help

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family law firm owners continue to level up and build their practice.

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My name is Tyler Dolph, and I am the host here at the Revenue Roadmap. I’m also the CEO of our digital marketing agency, Rocket Clicks, which is hyper focused and works exclusively with family law firms around the country.

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Today we are continuing our interview series with Angela Brown of Angela Faye Brown and Associates. Angela has an awesome story as she started her firm right out of Texas Law School and has built an awesome firm fully focused on helping kids out in sticky family situations.

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She has a great story and a passion, like no one else I’ve interviewed. I really hope you enjoy it.

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Angela, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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I appreciate the invite.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Tell us a little bit about yourself, about your firm. We want to dig into life before your firm. Why you decided to start it and, go from there.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Yeah. So I came straight out of Texas law and opened up my own practice. And so I actually graduated, like, a semester early to February bar, and just, like, was off to the races at that point. And, like, wow. Yeah. And so in law school, I did the Children’s Rights Art clinic or whatever, which got me kind of in the family law a little bit.

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And then it just kind of snowballed from there. And I just decided that was what I wanted to commit to.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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That’s amazing. Angela, so many of our listeners, when they graduated law school, they would go to a big law practice, right? And they would go through the ranks and understand what that’s like and then eventually peel off and start their own firm. Help us understand why you decided out of the gate that you wanted to start your own firm right away.

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Was there an opportunity to join a different firm, or like, what were the reasons behind that?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Yeah, I received offers to go to, like, prosecutor’s offices and to kind of go that route. I didn’t want to do criminal. I wasn’t really interested in that. And I had not really worked very hard at trying to get into a family law firm I already had in the back of my brain. That was something I was interested in doing while I was in law school.

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One of my colleagues actually started a group called Like Solopreneurs. And so I had already kind of had that on my radar and luckily had the opportunity to talk to other attorneys who are out there on the streets already. And so I had a general idea about how I could pull it off. And so I decided it was worth a shot.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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That’s amazing. Congratulations. American dream there. Talk to us. Talk us through the, maybe slap of reality. When you realized you were starting your own business, you needed to get an office. You had to find clients. You had to do marketing. Walk us through some of those early days and lessons you learned.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Oh my gosh. I, I will tell you, it. I’ve heard people say, when you give birth to a kiddo, that part of your brain just shuts down. You don’t remember the pain or anything. I feel like that’s a lot about what happened then. I know what happened, but I. I don’t feel like I fully appreciate all the pain that it was, but the the only way I can describe it, it was just kind of like, literally flying by the seat of my pants, right?

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Like you’re bringing it every day, bringing in clients, paying bills, like the money is literally coming in and out within hours of each other. For quite a while, it took a while to get to a place where, oh, I can sleep in on Saturday again. So it was a lot of hustle for sure up front. And figuring out office space, a lot of, connecting to colleagues, and trying to just find a place that had a desk and a door.

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And that’s really all I needed, to kind of call role. Right. And so I, I had offices in pretty shady places for a while. Until I, you know, got everything pulled together.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Lot of, When did you realize that maybe you couldn’t do it on your own, or you needed to make a first hire. Was there, like, an inflection point of, like, we have too many leads, or I want to continue to stay small and do it on my own. Like, what was your mindset or what is your mindset around growth and scale?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Yeah, I mean, I think generally I look around, see what I’m doing that I don’t want to be doing, and then find someone else to do that or whatever that is. When I first started out, that first thing was, I can’t answer my phones and keep up with this. Like, there’s just no way for me to actually answer the calls from my clients or potential leads in an effective way.

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Like, I was definitely someone who did a lot of research online about marketing and how sales should work. And I was like, there’s no way I can call these people back in the amount of time they think I’m supposed to. And so once I got to a place where, I had the capacity to bring on anybody, I did.

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And so I will say have to start out with, having an answering service for a little while, and then I realized I had enough work to fill the gaps between the phone calls. You know, fill out this piece of paper, do these things. And so I found someone, and I’ll tell you, she started by working at my dining room table in my house for probably the first two months before we actually go to office.

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So I hired before I had a space to work because it was, yeah, it just make sense.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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So wow. And how many employees you have today?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Right now we have two locations. We have no location in downtown Austin and one downtown Houston.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Okay.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Yeah.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Is there a specialty to your firm? You know, the people listen this and, like, what you’re saying, and they find themselves in a situation. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your firm, your uniqueness and why, why your business?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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Yeah, I mean, I, I will say I decided to go to law school because, I was working in kind of the social work realm desk, where I was working like a teen homeless shelter. And by the time a teen gets there, I mean, the family lost system has broken in so many places for them to be, you know, 15 and not have any adults that can care for them.

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And so it was motivating because it’s like, how does this happen? I come from this huge family. My dad is the youngest of ten. My mom’s the oldest of eight, and I knew all of my aunts and uncles and saw them regularly, right. Those huge families. So the idea that this person ends up at the shelter and doesn’t have anyone, it’s kind of just maddening to me.

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And so I went to law school and decided that was something I was passionate about, was kids and trying to make sure they had, the support they needed, to kind of, you know, walk their way into adulthood. And so my practice has focused on kid cases, mostly like mostly, custody cases, divorce cases that are geared toward children, where the parents are mostly concerned about that, not about the property.

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I often struggle when I’m in a case and people are arguing about their villa in Maine or something, and I’m like, sell it and split it in half. You can’t do that with a kid, right? A kid is different and so the nature of negotiating around kids, nature of making parents are getting parents to be better parents. It’s just it’s just different work.

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And so most of our practice has been geared around supporting families going through that sort of, you know, life change, I guess.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Yeah, yeah, it’s such important work. You know, at our firm, we totally believe the same thing. And being able to help these families through that difficult time. How are you getting business today? What are you doing to help, get your name out in the community? And, you know, is a lot of your business through referral?

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Are you doing anything unique on the marketing side?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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So right now, I guess we have multiple different things happening. So one, I tend to keep my name in, like legal directory. So like avo, find mom, like, try to just have the listing up. So I try to keep that up updated, get reviews on it, that sort of thing. We’re pretty good at keeping our review listing on Google.

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Keep our numbers up as far as our number reviews. So that’s one of the things we do focus on. We do we use Google Local service at right now. And so that’s one of the ways we bring in cases. I have a pretty I do a lot of back end, decent amount of back end marketing. So I send out newsletters once a month, we call past clients and kind of try to stay top of mind.

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And so most of our referrals, I would say, come from past clients. The, in addition to that, we’re also doing we sometimes will do a little PPC, if not a big fan. It just kind of depends on what’s going on, whether or not I’m going to drop, cash in that. And then we just recently play with Facebook.

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Don’t think I mastered that, but I’m trying it again, this month, because I have finished an e-book and I’m trying to kind of promote the e-book and, work that through the system as far as getting in front of people. So I think we’re going to do a workshop in a couple of weeks on zoom that we’ll publicize on Facebook and just kind of create buzz that way and see what happens.

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So I like playing with different new and different ideas when it comes to marketing. So I’m always kind of at some of it.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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Yeah. That’s great. And to talk to us about the future of your firm, where do you see the industry going? What are you thinking about? As as you know, we’re in 2025 now. And, you do you do have a planning period. Do you think about the next couple of years?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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So I tend do planning in June. So it’s been a while since I touched that. I will say, but, you know, summertime family in summertime is just kind of weird, as far as work goes. And so it’s always a good time for me to take a little time off. But, but as far as what I kind of see happening is like, I’m big fan of what’s coming with AI.

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And I am curious to see how that’s going to impact customer service and support within the legal profession, considering that’s like the number one reason you’re going to get a grievance is because you didn’t call people enough, even though they have to pay per phone call, you still didn’t call them enough. And so the, so I, I’m curious to kind of see how that plays out.

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I’m not because it’s family law. I’m not that concerned about drafting and all that kind of stuff. Like I use AI for drafting, but I don’t use it for research. So, you know, the things you see in the news of craziness happening now and have to deal with that. And then also, I think finding ways to help people solve their own problems more efficiently, is I think a big is a big deal.

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Like one of the things we do with the firm is, will essentially help, you know, pro se folks mediate their divorce and then help someone paper form like, kind of help them walk through that process. Tell them, say, the cost and the drama of having to go to court if they can avoid it. One of the things I’m trying to do with my firm is trying to do.

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I’m trying to shift to what I call like, high impact, high impact family law, which is essentially like the cases that I know if you do this up front, the rest of this won’t break. Right? So we’re doing like premarital agreements. Texas gives parents does their parental rights in the context of dealing with child support. The the state.

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And so you go to court for child support Haitian everything. If you have an attorney there, you probably won’t have to go back to deal with anything later. And so just trying to catch people earlier to help stave off some of the issues that, you know, cause some people hundreds of thousands of dollars later. So that’s kind of where my mind is as far as, helping folks right now.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

00:12:01:00 – 00:12:25:27  

Love it. That’s awesome. And so we really appreciate your time today. We love your story. It’s it’s always fun to hear the different like, panelists and reasons why, law firm owners started their firm and what they’re doing on a day to day basis. I mentioned earlier that we have, a younger audience of, of young attorneys who are looking to take the next step.

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And I’d love to end with, do you have a few points of advice for for these attorneys thinking about either starting their own firm or joining a large firm or what’s next? What can you offer our listeners some advice?

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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I think I think what I would probably offer is that there’s tons of work. You just got to be willing to do the work, and you’ve got to be willing to do the hustle to find the people who need that help. And that it is it is worthwhile for you to take the steps necessary to understand how to run a business and understand the spreadsheets and to pay attention and to talk to your bookkeeper and like to figure those things out, but never to be overwhelmed by it.

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There’s tons of attorneys who are willing to take that phone call and talk you through anything. Be it marketing or otherwise, on the business side, you know, and get get help. Like there’s people who coach, you know, get a coach, anything that’ll help you get through it. I had I’ve had multiple coaches, and that’s one of the reasons I’m as successful as I am now.

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Is that just kind of adds gasoline to your fire when you have someone, helping you with the business side. Law school does not teach you how to run a law firm. They barely teach you how to practice law. They definitely don’t teach how to run a law firm. So that’s what I.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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I will doing. I don’t know. We’ve done maybe a hundred of these, and that is the one most consistent like comment is that you don’t learn how to run a business at law school.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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You do not.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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And there’s one class I believe, right. It’s called like law firm management or something.

Speaker 2: Angela Faye Brown

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I’m sorry. It depends on the law school. You went to my law school there to, you know, cloud and embracer and clouds or something. And I mean, it was all theoretical, so, but like, just we didn’t do that. And so, yeah, getting help and understand, knowing you need it and accepting that you probably need it at least a little bit is worthwhile.

Speaker 1: Tyler Dolph

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100%. Angela, thank you so much again for your time. Listeners, thank you for your time. I hope everyone has a wonderful day and we’ll see you next time on revenue roadmap.

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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out the other Family Law Firm interviews we have on the podcast. We have a lot of great content here. Learning and growing from other family law firm owners in our space.

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I really hope you enjoy it.