3 Ways to Grow a Community Law Firm

Interview Transcript

00:00:00:03 – 00:00:11:11
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Tom went from being laid off to building a hyper successful community law firm in South Carolina. His story is incredible.

00:00:11:13 – 00:00:39:19
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Welcome back to The Revenue Roadmap, the podcast designed for family law firms to learn, grow, and build their firm to new heights. My name is Tyler Dolph. I’m the CEO of Rocket Clicks, a hyper-focused digital marketing agency that works exclusively with family law firms around the country. We also own and operate our own family law firm called Sterling Lawyers, which has grown to over 30 attorneys across two states.

Today, we interview Tom Winslow of Winslow Law. Tom went from being laid off to building his community full-service law firm in South Carolina that now has over four locations and multiple attorneys, serving a lot of different areas of law for his community. He’s taken a unique approach and built a very successful firm. Make sure to check out the episode.

00:00:39:20 – 00:01:04:15
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Welcome back, everyone, to an awesome episode of Revenue Roadmap. Today we have Tom from Winslow Lawyers. Thomas is gracious enough to hang out with us today. Tom, really appreciate your time. Excited to have you here. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit about your firm?

00:01:04:16 – 00:01:22:10
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
Thank you, guys. I appreciate y’all allowing me to come on and allowing the firm to be, I guess, spotlighted a little bit on your program. I am Tom Winslow from the Winslow law firm. We are located down in South Carolina. We have practiced in actually 29 states, three countries, but primarily focused on South Carolina, with offices in Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Surfside Beach, and Pawleys Island.

00:01:22:11 – 00:01:47:29
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Incredible. And, Tom, how long have you been at your firm? When did you start it? Give us some background on the origin.

00:01:48:02 – 00:01:56:19
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
Absolutely. You know, a lot of times, as I’m sure you might have some of the same stories, you get thrust into things in life that you don’t necessarily plan on. Right? Your life is not necessarily how you planned it.

Coming out of law school, I was offered a position in a little town called Georgetown, South Carolina, which took me out of Columbia, which is the capital—it took me towards the beach. When I was presented with the opportunity, I went to my girlfriend at the time, now my fiancée, and I said, “Do you want to stay in Columbia, or do you want to move to the beach?” And obviously, because of her sway, we moved to the beach.

I was working with that firm. I actually got laid off from that firm. They did not necessarily agree with my political positions. And I went and partnered up with a guy roughly about 12 years ago, who had his own political persuasions. About three years ago, he decided to pursue politics full-time, turning the law firm into simply Winslow Law, which is where we were.

We were, at that time, roughly five attorneys in one location. Over the last three to four years, we’ve grown to eight attorneys in four locations. Sometimes you just follow the course that’s laid out for you, not necessarily what you planned.

00:01:56:20 – 00:02:15:12
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
That’s how it goes, right? I mean, I feel like we all have so many opportunities in this life, and the most successful among us are the ones that see those opportunities and run down that path to keep going.

00:02:15:12 – 00:02:37:11
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
You know, it’s funny because a lot of times—and there are books out there that say, you know, “Just say no,” and no is an important word. To me, people that say no close doors. I’m always a yes person; I always like walking through those doors. And I have the understanding that I might fail. I heard a while ago that if you’re not willing to lose a million, you’ll never make a million.

So I’m always willing to fail. I’m always willing to go bankrupt. It’s not mine—it’s God’s. So if He wants to give it to me, He’ll give it to me. If He wants to take it away, He’ll take it away.

00:02:37:18 – 00:02:47:00
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
I love it. That’s so great. It feels like since you took over the firm entirely, you guys have experienced some great growth—opening new offices, adding more attorneys.

Tell us about that. Did that moment spur an opportunity to take your firm to new heights, or was that always the plan?

00:02:47:00 – 00:03:06:25
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
You know, it’s amazing sometimes. As we were saying, you know this, running a law firm—it’s all about embracing that adversity. It’s almost like litigation, right? Every case you have is—you can’t run away from the facts that you have. You have to embrace them and try to turn them into the path you want to take.

When that situation occurred again, like three or four years ago, it was not something that was planned. It was not something that was ever on my agenda. As a matter of fact, owning a law firm was never on my agenda. That was sparked by being let go, right?

We just rolled with the path we have, and I was blessed to find a multitude of good team members and good attorneys who helped facilitate the direction of the firm. The firm’s a little bit different. At least in my mind, it is.

There are so many law firms nowadays that are niche law firms—they focus on one task, they do one thing, right, family law. They do one thing, and they pass out the other cases or refer out the other cases. What I learned from my experience in my community is that a lot of people here are really embracing and really wanting that community law firm, right?

With us, we always put it in our brand, and we never market. We always brand, because to me, marketing is trying to get clients; branding is trying to tell people who you are, and they get to choose how they want to work with you. As attorneys, we build relationships, right? Even in the family law department, many of my cases are three to five years long. I’ve had cases that are 12 years long. You’ve got to have a pretty good relationship with somebody that lasts 12 years; that’s longer than some marriages.

So we want to build a community law firm where people could come to us, because as we always say, we’re attorneys and counselors. Honestly, it’s more important for us to be the counselor than the attorney. They come to us, and each one of our attorneys has a department, so we always work in collaboration with each other, not in competition with each other. So I have one attorney doing family law, I have one attorney doing estate planning, one attorney doing civil and criminal real estate, right?

When an issue comes up for a client or community member, they have one law firm to come to, but they have people in each niche who know what they’re doing. So it’s a niche attorney in a community law firm.

00:03:06:27 – 00:03:21:02
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
I love that approach, and it is definitely different than a number of the firms that we speak with—and obviously different than the firm that we own and operate. Sterling has made its calling in being exclusively family, and even niche down in family: we only do divorce and mediation.

For us, it’s like building a factory, right? Being able to be really great at a single thing. But the ideology around having a community-based firm that can serve the community in whatever it needs from all the different facets of law is really cool.

Was that planned? Did you want to create that, or did it just happen based on the lawyers that you hired and their specialty?

00:03:21:02 – 00:03:40:05
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
I’m going to go with both. I’m very—at least personally, I believe I’m very community-oriented. I get yelled at because all I do is help. And obviously, as attorneys, sometimes all we do is help free, and we all get paid for it.

We want to be—well, we’re very involved in the community. We try to make it so that no matter what happens around us, we’re gonna be a part of that. If someone’s house burns down, we’re there to offer them a meal, right? If someone has a need. So we’re known in our community as a member of the community, not just as a business in the community. It has really garnered a lot of, I believe, mutual respect between us and our community members.

That’s really fed into who I believe I am as a person, but I can’t do it alone. We currently have 25 members of the firm on this team, and without someone that has that family law expertise, without someone that has that real estate expertise, I couldn’t facilitate that because I can’t possibly know everything. We found the right people that know those niches, can really step in and help the members of this community—both from a counselor standpoint and from that advocacy standpoint as well. You gotta be good at your job.

00:03:40:07 – 00:04:07:00
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
100%. Yeah, you can’t just offer everything and not be very good. Right? So I think that’s a great distinction.

Tom, I’d like to take us back to the beginning a little bit. As I mentioned before we started, our listeners are young lawyers, they’re law students — they’re thinking about what’s next. Give us some perspective. When you had moved to the beach and decided to—you got laid off—was your mindset, “Well, now I’m going to start this firm,” or was it, “I’m going to go get a job somewhere and create some security?”

Give us some perspective there. I feel like a lot of younger lawyers learn the law, they get passionate about the law, they get excited to be a lawyer, and then they are thrown into this entrepreneurship journey, realizing that they have to do so many other things other than just practice law. And it takes a while, right? There’s a lot of key learnings during that period. Give us some perspective in your circumstance.

00:04:07:00 – 00:04:49:22
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
You’ve hit on so many things that I just love, so feel free to jump in. I love the word “perspective.” That’s my favorite word in the English language because it’s impossible for you to appreciate what you have and understand what you have unless you get perspective from both around you and above you and below you.

I literally got back—I had a client that made me go to India, and I just returned a week ago. To be able to have the perspective of India compared to the United States, doing law work with people in India compared to the United States, is mind-jarring. So your perspective is so important, and it’s so important for young people to have, because it’s really, honestly, hard for them to have it. You gotta have experiences to be able to have perspective.

For me, going general to the specific, generally with young folks—and you might be the same way, or maybe not—I was this way: I wanted to go to that school out of Loyola Law School, be the best in my class, and do everything. I’ve completely changed my perspective. If you ever go to law school, I don’t care what school you go to, go to the community you want to practice in. Get to know the people. Get to know the judges. Get to know how they do the law there. Because I promise you, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina versus Charleston, South Carolina versus Columbia, South Carolina versus Costa Rica or India, it’s different everywhere how you practice law.

So go where you want to practice law. I don’t care what you do in your undergrad. If you want to be a dance major, you’ll be the best dance attorney in the world, right? It doesn’t matter. Focus on what you love, what your passion is, and go where you want to practice. I don’t care where you go. I’d rather hire someone, honestly, from the Columbia, South Carolina area than Harvard or Yale. That’s me. I’d rather have someone who’s in my community and knows how my community is than someone who comes in not knowing and thinking they know better than everybody else. That’s just very general, guys, very general for me.

In terms of the firm for me: I was fired on December 23rd. I was actually looking up directions to my firm Christmas party and I had a voicemail. Every night, and it doesn’t matter what day it is, every night I make sure all my emails are checked, all my text messages are checked, all my voicemails are checked, and I call them back. Every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday, right? It’s part of that being part of the community—you make sure the people that you are working for know that you appreciate them.

I checked my voicemail. It was December 23rd, 2011 or 12, and it was basically my boss saying, “Don’t bother coming to the Christmas party.” I know, right? A voicemail, come on. My wife was four months pregnant with our first child. Obviously, we had a home, a mortgage. I was relatively innocent. By January 1st, I partnered up with this other gentleman, and we had started the firm within seven days. I had a choice to make, right? The choice was either I wallow in my pity and get food stamps, or I start a firm and I make something out of it.

So I called this guy up on literally December 24th, right after I got laid off December 23rd, called him up December 24th, said, “Hey, it’s Christmas, I know it is. Y’all think about it over the weekend, and let’s talk next week.” We made it happen. It was the two of us as attorneys and one paralegal, and we pushed forward 70 cases. When I walked in, we had 70 cases. By the end of that first year, we had over 170 cases in that first year. Obviously, it’s catapulted up to this point now.

At this point, we have roughly 1,300 open cases in the firm, and we’re averaging—give or take—about 15 what we call PACs (potential cases) a day, getting about 15 potential cases coming in a day. We’ve got over 1,000 open cases currently, and that’s what’s manifested just in the last 12 years. Because we keep putting ourselves out there and keep being available for people.

00:04:49:24 – 00:05:07:10
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Tom, that is incredible. It’s so inspiring to hear that the only option was to keep attacking.

00:05:07:11 – 00:05:56:19
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
If you fall down—look, we all fail. Honestly, I plan on failing. I want to fail every day, because if I’m not failing, I’m not pushing myself hard enough, right? I’m going to fail, I know it. It’s how do I respond when that happens? That’s what we have to remember: you always keep moving forward, and sometimes you take a step back to move forward, and sometimes you move forward half a step, and that’s okay, as long as you keep going.

00:05:56:20 – 00:06:13:07
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
We have this saying in our office—and I have this mug—

00:06:13:07 – 00:06:17:04
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
You didn’t send me a mug. I don’t have a mug. I have a water bottle. You should send me a mug so I can have it.

00:06:17:06 – 00:06:53:28
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Yes, we have a saying in our firm, and it’s “Be the buffalo.” The reason is spoken about in so many different places. In a storm, the cow runs away from the storm, and the buffalo runs through the storm, because it knows instinctually that’s the fastest way to actually get through.

So, that’s it. And I think that’s so inspiring, Tom, to hear how you were able to overcome that adversity and build the firm that you have today.

Talk to us about the future. Where’s your firm going? What do you hope to continue to achieve? Is it more communities, more…?

00:06:54:00 – 00:07:29:13
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
You know, it’s amazing. It’s almost the converse of where we started. When you first start off a law firm, or start off as an attorney—let’s say we have a lot of young listeners maybe in law school—you’re trying to embrace as many opportunities as you can. You’re trying to grab audience because you’re like, “What can I do?” You might not have things presented to you because of your age, right? We both know this, running a law firm or practicing law and being a law student and learning the law are completely different things.

Truly different things. Learning the law is a precipice for modifying your mind and your brain, but it has nothing to do with actually practicing the law at all. Until you get into a courtroom and get yelled at by a judge or a client yells at you for a fee dispute or something like that, you don’t even understand what the law is. That’s just, again, perspective. That just takes time to get those experiences.

Now, on the opposite side of it—because we’ve been going for about 12 years—we’re not trying to grasp opportunities, they are coming to us, which is a real true blessing. It’s something I truly believe in: you’ll be able to handle anything that’s given to you as long as you’re willing to embrace it and allow God to give it to you.

So the problem I have now is we have so many opportunities of locations or attorneys. Every week, we’re getting an attorney or a paralegal sending us a resume asking if we have any jobs available. So do I hire more people? We have three different locations that want us to come to their communities because there are people down there that want us to work there. But do I have the right people in place? Do I have enough cases to facilitate another location?

The truth is, right now we’re trying to manage our opportunities so we can move forward with our future, but not bankrupt our present. We want to make sure we take care of our present and our team. I love this team. We really facilitate and gel together. I love our community that we’re in. So do we grow within our community? Do we grow outside our community? Do we bring more people in? It’s that managing of presented opportunities now, and how do we use those to behoove our community, to bless our community or other communities?

But truthfully, I don’t know the answer to that. We’re working on that as we speak right now. Over the next month, we’ve got some big decisions to make.

00:07:29:15 – 00:07:50:15
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
I love it, and you’re in such an advantageous position where you can have the confidence to make that decision, knowing that today is going to be okay as you build for tomorrow.

00:07:50:16 – 00:08:15:09
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
We’re blessed, you know, and that’s one of the things you’ll learn. I always try to tell my kids—I’ve got an eight- and an eleven-year-old—I say, “Look, I can’t spend everything I have on one trip or one shirt or one pair of shoes. I gotta save that moving forward.” We’ve been able to build up our war chest, build up our reserves. It allows us to facilitate these opportunities.

And the bigger cases, as you know, can easily spend—I do a lot of medical malpractice and complex litigation. Real estate might cost you four or five hundred thousand dollars, but if you’re going to do a med mal, it might cost you $100,000. If you don’t have the assets and funds in reserve to handle that, it puts you in a real detrimental position versus an insurance company who has unlimited resources. So you can’t go and spend it all in one place.

We’ve been able to build that up over the last 10 to 12 years. So now we have the funds, we can do that, and hopefully the economy will allow us to do that. We’ll find out.

00:08:15:10 – 00:08:28:03
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
We’ll see. Tom, this is incredible. I really appreciate your story. You have an awesome firm. What a great community story. I’d love to end our interview how we normally end, which is: talk to our audience, give them two or three pieces of advice they should be thinking about as they’re starting their own firm, going out on their own, or thinking about joining another firm. What would you want to leave them with?

00:08:28:05 – 00:09:09:21
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
Yeah. You know, if I’m looking for—or I’m looking at—a younger attorney, right, law students, someone who’s going to start as an entrepreneur, the key is allow your fear to be your driving force. Right? You’re going to be—I’m still scared. I still have fears every day. And I’ve been doing this now—I was forced into this— for 10 to 12 years.

So don’t allow that fear to paralyze you, where you make no decision. That’s the worst decision you can make. Make a decision, choose a path, and it might be the wrong one, and then veer when you learn that decision, or fail and try again. But if you don’t make a decision and you don’t keep attacking, then you fail.

What I’ve always told my team is, don’t focus on the problems, focus on the solutions. Always find a way to move forward. If you focus on the problems, that’s all you’ll ever see—problems. And it creates a negative attitude, it creates a cancer within a culture. Always focus on a solution, always drive forward, and always attack, and never be afraid to move forward. Ever.

00:09:09:25 – 00:09:16:19
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
That’s so good. Be the buffalo, right?

00:09:16:20 – 00:09:21:02
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
The buffalo.

00:09:21:02 – 00:09:40:06
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
Tom, thanks again for your time today. I really appreciate it. I hope you have an incredible rest of your day. And thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Revenue Roadmap.

00:09:40:07 – 00:09:42:05
Speaker 2 (Thomas Winslow):
Thank you all for your time.

00:09:42:10 – 00:10:04:27
Speaker 1 (Tyler Dolph):
I hope you’re enjoying our interview series here on Revenue Roadmap. We have lots of great interviews to share with you of family law firm owners who are building their practice through lots of different means and mechanisms. There’s no one way to do this; there are many ways, and we’re hoping to showcase that for you here. Make sure to check out our next episode right here.