Winning Strategies to Grow A Family Law Firm

Interview Transcript

Tyler Dolph 00:47

Today, I am interviewing Billie Tarascio, who has an amazing family firm in Arizona. She has an awesome story about how she leveraged experimentation, the idea that, hey, I’m going to try this and if it doesn’t work, that’s okay, until she got to a point where she was scaling at a rapid rate and had to learn to be a great leader and manage people. It’s an awesome episode, and I really hope you enjoy it. Billie is so excited and thankful to have you on. Really appreciate your time. Would love to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself and your firm, and we’ll get into it.

Billie Tarascio 01:21

Thank you so much for having me, Tyler. So my name is Billie Tarascio. I am an owner here in Arizona. I’m a family law attorney and I own the firm Modern Law and some spin-off companies as well. Modern law is 15 years old. This year is gonna be our quinceañera. I think we’re gonna have like a big quinceañera theme. Oh, you have to.

Tyler Dolph 01:42

I know, right? Because who doesn’t want to have one?

Billie Tarascio 01:45

One of those. So yeah, I love, love, love business. I love the business of law. I’m excited to talk to you guys today.

Tyler Dolph 01:52

Awesome. Tell us a little bit more about your firm. How many attorneys? Is it family law exclusive? Has that always been the case?

Billie Tarascio 01:59

Is it family law exclusive? Yes-ish. If it touches things like probate or estate planning, we have lawyers that do that, but we don’t advertise ourselves as in the state planning or probate firm. We’re a family law firm, but we have enough lawyers who know enough things that we can dabble and help our clients out in other areas as well. How many lawyers? I think we’re 18 today. You know how it is. Well, due to a certain number, it kind of fluctuates. Three physical locations for major presences, because we’ve got a major presence in Tucson, but we don’t have our own physical location yet. That’s part of a co-working type space at this point. Got it. Love it. That’s awesome.

Tyler Dolph 02:37

I want to go back to the very beginning and learn a little bit about your journey to opening and owning your own firm. Did you have aspirations of doing that in law school? Did you join a big firm first and then realize you want to do your own thing? Give us some perspective there.

Billie Tarascio 02:53

I’ve always been super entrepreneurial and always very, very interested in the business aspects of law. And not really interested in signing up to do the big law model, it seemed very unappetizing from early on. So coming out of law school, I started out as a contract attorney working for a bunch of different firms so that I could really understand how these various firms worked. Solos, bigger firms, and it didn’t take long to kind of get the information that I needed to be competent to practice family law. And then I opened a firm. So I got out of law school in 2005. And that was right when things were just really crashing, really crashing. So nobody had any money. There’s always been an access to justice issue, but it was glaring to me as a new attorney. And most new attorneys come out and they’re like, Oh my gosh, there’s all these people who want to pay lawyers. I don’t need to charge $300 an hour. I can make great money less than that, right? So that was my initial concept is like, why do lawyers have to charge so much? Why can’t we just all do it, why can’t we do flat fee, pay as you go, limited scope, make it simple. So that was the first model that I tried here in Arizona. It was not limited to family law, a bunch of lawyers, because there was all these unemployed lawyers. By the time I got to Arizona, it was 2009. Okay. Unemployed lawyers everywhere, broke people in foreclosures everywhere. That was just what was happening. So I tried that model first, 99 bucks an hour, pay as you go, kind of like a clinic for lawyers. It was a very different model and it didn’t work. And so if you’re entrepreneurial and if you’re experimental, like a lot of things are not going to work and that’s gotta be okay. Like you’ve gotta go into your experiments with curiosity and not conviction.

Tyler Dolph 04:44

That’s a great, great lesson as it relates to lessons. And when you were starting the firm, were there some like light ball moments, like, holy shit, this is not what I thought being a lawyer was going to be? Or did you have enough of a business background to realize that you have to buy insurance and make payroll? And we get a lot of attorney owners on this podcast talking about some of those early days and how it was like a shock to the system. There’s so much more to running and owning a firm than just being a great lawyer.

Billie Tarascio 05:18

Yeah, I think about them as two different skill sets like they’re not even in the same world. Okay. So don’t go open a business unless you’re ready to learn how to run a business because it’s a completely different skill set. And you can do both. But they’re, you know, to me, they’re just very different.

Tyler Dolph 05:35

Did you have any early mentors or guidance in helping you overcome some of those business challenges or was it all trial and error?

Billie Tarascio 05:42

trial and error. The only advantage of that is that I didn’t have a bunch of old lawyers with their old ways telling me you have to do things certain ways. There was a lot of freedom that came in that stupid arrogance, right? Stupid, stupid arrogance to be like,

Billie Tarascio 06:00

and we’re gonna do it really different. It’s gonna be great.

Billie Tarascio 06:03

But the advantages of that are we weren’t confined by the rules of the culture around us.

Tyler Dolph 06:10

It’s interesting how some people will become great and create great firms by leveraging lots of mentors, lots of this is how we did it, so you should do it this way. And the same proportion did what you did. And like, no, I’m gonna figure it out. I’m gonna make it on my own. I’m gonna adopt what I’ve learned in the marketplace that’s working today, not worked 100 years ago. Have you is that just your personality? Is that kind of how you’ve always run?

Billie Tarascio 06:39

I mean, I can’t say I recommend it, right? I don’t know that it was smart. But I had just moved to Arizona because my then husband got a job here. And so we moved from Oregon to Arizona and I didn’t know anybody. And I was already in the midst of setting up my own firm with this new concept and, you know, taking out an SBA loan. So I didn’t want to change directions. But I didn’t know anybody here. So it was just like, Here we go.

Tyler Dolph 07:05

Wow, that’s awesome. I appreciate that insight. I want to now transition a little bit. Given the size of your firm and the number of attorneys that you have, I’m assuming that developing yourself into a great leader has been something that you’ve had to work on and work through. Could you talk to us a little bit about some of the early hires, early attorneys you had on your team that maybe worked or didn’t work and why they did or didn’t and how you’ve had to evolve as a leader as your team has continued to grow?

Billie Tarascio 07:36

That’s been the biggest thing, right? Being a poor leader, being a poor manager, being somebody who was not offering enough structure and predictability and training. Like if you are somebody like me, like if you’re hearing that and you’re like, I love to break things too. You have to understand that the people who work for you who will be successful working for you are nothing like that at all and you need them, right? We want, we need lawyers that want to work for us, that want to just execute and they want predictability, they want stability, they want to know that they have enough clients coming in the door, they want to know what they need to do to be successful within your firm. And so if you’re super experimental and like, I don’t know what I need to be successful today, it’s different than it was yesterday, let’s try something new, that is a terrible thing.

Tyler Dolph 08:29

We adopted the EOS and the entrepreneurial operating system and it talks about the visionary mindset, right, which a lot of us are and we love new shiny things and we love to pivot and change our mind, but our team isn’t used to that. They don’t love change. They don’t want to change processes every single day and learning that lesson of being able to slow down, embrace the consistency is so important, but also so difficult for the personality types that I can tell we share.

Billie Tarascio 09:05

Yeah, I love EOS and love traction. I think it’s so great for any business. And I’m sure you’ve already told all of your listeners to read it and adopt it. It’s really, really good. But yeah, I had to learn how to behave with discipline. And that was not something that I had. With freedom and with experimenting and with curiosity and creativity, and I needed to be a good leader, be a lot more disciplined about here are the plans. This is what we’re executing. This is who we are. This is what we stand for. This is our policies and procedures that we’re going to follow and hold people to.

Tyler Dolph 09:40

Tell us about your firm today, how has the culture changed, what are you hoping to achieve over the next three to five years as your firm continues to grow and thrive?

Billie Tarascio 09:47

So today we’re I think a total of about 50 people and mostly remote So one of the things that I’m really grappling with right now is what does the future model look like? I think it’s hybrid it for my firm. I don’t think it’s entirely remote Like we have a legal clinic where we hire law students to provide legal services through a legal clinic and and that to me is a great way to get a pipeline of lawyers because I want to hire lawyers because the hardest part of growing is not getting clients. It’s getting lawyers I think that’s gonna be a really great way to raise lawyers and find great lawyers But there has to be an in-office component and figuring out that piece is something that I’m really grappling with I think will impact what the law firm looks like over the next three to five years

Tyler Dolph 10:34

I totally agree. And we see it all the time, both in our own firm and with the clients that we work on on the marketing side, you know, if marketing is working, and you’re driving lots of leads, well, other things are going to break, and you’re going to need to continue to grow and build a pipeline of great attorneys. Now, there’s two ways to do that, right? You can grow them, which takes a long time, but you can do it within your culture, your process. So as they become more experienced, they’re actually a really great asset, or you can hire for them. But when that comes baggage and old experience, and this is how we did it over here and all that, that is continually something that we see as an issue and opportunity for everyone that we interact with in this community. The idea of the law school or law student, can we expand on that a little bit? I’m intrigued.

Billie Tarascio 11:23

So Arizona is pretty deregulated when compared to other all I think of the other states and their bar organization. So I think everywhere if you’re a law student and you go work for a nonprofit or like the DA’s office you’re allowed to give legal advice under the supervision of a lawyer. Well Arizona expanded that to allow private firms to do that. The legal clinic allows me to hire law students who want to practice family law and then provide a service to the community because access to justice has I was telling you about like that’s where it started and it’s still a passion of mine. Some of the spin-off businesses are all geared towards access to justice and so I can market this clinic. I can be a leader in the community that offers this access to justice and this accessibility to legal services and also see who are the best team and bring them into this culture.

Tyler Dolph 12:24

It’s almost like you have like a minor league team that you can then call up to the majors when they’re ready. Billy, this is this is so great. I appreciate your time and learning more about your firm. As we finish up, I always ask our guests to give our listeners some advice. So put yourself back in the shoes of being in law school, you’re about to graduate, you’re thinking about what’s next. What pieces of advice would you give the younger you or today’s law firm students that you now have a bit more experience with now that I’ve learned?

Billie Tarascio 12:56

The advantage that you have as a young lawyer is the same advantage that I had as a young lawyer. By the time you get to be big like I am now, we have to act with discipline. We can’t break things. We can’t be as nimble. And so if you’re a new lawyer and you’re going out, you have new things that you can try. New pricing models, new business models. How can you use AI differently? How can you in that place and that’s something you want to do? Play with it because these big firms can’t.

Tyler Dolph 13:30

100%. I love that. That’s so good. Billy, is there anything else you’d want our listeners to know?

Billie Tarascio 13:36

Oh, there was one other thing I thought we should mention, but now I can’t remember what it is. But it’s been a great time. I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Tyler Dolph 13:44

Absolutely. If anyone’s listening and wants to learn more about your firm or learn more about you, how can they contact you?

Billie Tarascio 13:49

I am all over social media, Modern Law or My Modern Law. If you Google Billy Tarascio, you’ll find me. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of.

Tyler Dolph 13:57

That is amazing. Billy, thanks again for your time today. Thank you everyone for listening, and we will see you next time on The Revenue Roadmap.