2461 - Creating Clarity and Growth in Law Firms Through EOS with Scaling Law's Brooke Lively

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Brooke Lively. Brooke, you are a speaker, CFO, strategic coach, EOS implementer. You are the president of Cathedral Capital, and you are the founder of Scaling Law. You've written many books, including Scaling Law, How Visionary Law Firm Owners Use EOS to Build Value, Step Back, or Exit. Brooke, it is great to have you. Thanks for having me, Josh. I'm excited to be here. It's great to have you. So before we get going, our friends who are listening to our conversation, it's possible if they listen very carefully, they might hear a little bit of activity going on in your background.

1:39And that has to do with usually I love to ask high-level leaders what they're doing for fun and you and I were talking and you happen to be at your family's vacation property right now and do you want to share a little bit about what you've been doing over the past few weeks yeah I am in Highlands North Carolina which is my happy place I my my parents have a house here and I am the child that is in charge of opening it for the summer and then closing it down in the winter So here I am opening the house, doing all the really sexy things like having the windows washed, meeting the bug guy, and the really fun one this week of replacing a TV and putting in a new hot water heater because no hot water.

2:29And it's really fun to tell your 80-some-odd-year-old mother, yeah, it might be a whole week of cold showers. Yeah, no, thank you. But our plumber is great and they got us in in 24 hours as opposed to a week. So they're putting that thing in right now. So if you hear a little noise. Yeah. Now, do you do you actually then Airbnb it? No, we don't. Oh, so the oh, so it's just the family all uses it. The various family members then come and use it. So and then for for someone who's not been to Highlands, North Carolina, just describe it, which is totally beautiful. I mean, if someone just goes and searches pictures, I believe we've been up there when the leaves are changing and it is just gorgeous.

3:16But it's up in Macon County, North Carolina. Tell me a little bit about the town. Okay. So have you ever watched a Hallmark movie? It's totally what it is. I swear they come and film here. It is just a storybook town there. It has a population of about a thousand people. obviously there are a lot of people that come in for the season, but it, there are no chains. Everything is independently owned, which is wonderful. You get to know all the people that own all the stores and you know, there's really not a lot of traffic and it's up in the mountains. It's about two hours outside of Atlanta. So it's easy to get here and it's just beautiful.

4:05We've got waterfalls. We're in the Colesagia National Park. And yeah. And interestingly, it's a rainforest here. Oh, my gosh. It is just lush and green and trees. And it's just beautiful. so for us Floridians that's where we go to uh you know it's like we get north Georgia you kind of get up to like Amicalola and Helen and in all those towns you keep on going and it just again it just gets more and more lush it's gorgeous so yeah well very cool Brooke thank you for giving us sharing with us a little bit of slice of heaven um that you'll find on your local Hallmark channel lots of rugged shop owners uh women from the city coming in and finding love uh There you go.

4:56I think I need to go spend more time walking up and down Main Street. Yes, right, right. Maybe find a date. So, well, share with us a bit about your work. And again, let's just start with scaling law, because, you know, obviously, you know, one thing they don't teach you in law school is what you teach. So it's either you're going to learn through the School of Hired Knocks, maybe you got yourself a mentor, Or, Brooke, you could take a serious study of this and actually learn what it takes. I assume that's a good enough as any premise to kind of tee you up. Yeah. So basically, with both of my companies, we help people grow and scale profitably.

5:45Whether, I don't care how you start your company. You start a company because of a passion or a particular skill. Very few people, unless you are my one crazy cousin, very few people start or buy a business because they love business. There's something about it that attracts them. You know, you love making something. You love practicing law. And the business part of it is something that comes along with it. And people are rarely prepared. So CathCap is a fractional CFO company that helps give that strategic advice to grow and scale profitably. And what we learned was that the companies that do really well are the ones that execute.

6:44And we dug in and we're like, okay, why are some of these companies executing so well and others can't seem to get out of their own way? And what we discovered was the ones that were executing really well were using EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Which didn't surprise us. We run EOS. And so that became our number one outgoing referral. And when we would send our law firms out to find an EOS implementer, they would come back and say, I can't find an implementer who's willing to work with a law firm, which dagger to my heart, bothers me from brothers and attorney. Why do you think that there was maybe that bias or that apprehension?

7:33Well, okay. I'm going to blame Shakespeare. Let's just start there. First thing, let's kill all the lawyers. You know, you've been battling that for 500 years. I think lawyers get a bad rap. And are there some that probably aren't the most fabulous people in the world? Sure. But a few rotten apples shouldn't spoil the whole barrel. The attorneys we work with are incredible people who love their clients and really care about them. And so. The second thing we would hear is I found an implementer who's willing to work with attorneys. I'm like, yay, my people. I love attorneys. And that's why I date so many of them.

8:24And so, but our clients would say, but they don't understand the legal industry. And that's really where the idea of scaling law came from. So CathCap is an amazing company. Our COO really runs it. It doesn't need me any longer. And so I became an EOS implementer. I'm the only one that works exclusively with law firms. I wrote Scaling Law and EOS published it. It's about what it's like to implement EOS in a law firm. And now I'm creating a community of law firms that are running on EOS so that law firms have other people to talk to that are solving problems using the same tools. Give us an illustration of what a non, very typical, non-EOS law firm might look like and what can change.

9:30So a very typical non-EOS law firm has the owner sitting at the center. And they spend a lot of time ensuring that standards are being met, that everything is being done properly, that clients are being taken care of really well. that problems are being solved, that the decisions that are being made are being made the way they want them to be made. I call this heroic lawyering because what it comes down to is it's that lawyer, it's that owner who ultimately is making all of those decisions, who is drafting all of those documents because when they delegate something out, it comes back and it's not exactly the way they would want it.

10:33So they just redo it themselves. And what it teaches their team is there's no reason for the team to do it because they know the owner's just going to redo it. So why put in the effort? You're teaching them what I call learned helplessness. so they learn to just come to the owner for every decision in my book I talk about a guy who he said I have to know everything I have to know every detail down to the nitty-gritty including you know his team would come to him about what kind of coffee to buy and what kind of copy or paper and he spent an entire day researching energy star ratings for refrigerators because they needed a new refrigerator this guy sat on his like had a leadership position in the state bar association and he's researching energy star efficiency ratings so not a good use of his time they tend to be the bottleneck in the firm oh yeah they are the thing that is slowing growth and God bless them.

11:47They're working their tail off. They're doing everything they can. They are the hero lawyer. They're keeping up standards and they're killing themselves. Wow. Wow. I, you know, I, if we had more time, I'd love to get into the psychology of what's going on there. And, you know, I know they may have very high expectations for themselves, you know, how they run their company. And, but I mean, Brooke, I mean, I mean, you know, and I know, and I think almost everyone with, you know, some degree of awareness knows where that's going to lead. And that's just burnout. You're going to start hating your job.

12:25You can, you know, your likelihood to become an alcoholic or something like, you know, something like some sort of, you know, addiction. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a, that's a very challenging, That's a very challenging life situation. It is. And the legal industry has a really high rate of alcohol and drug abuse. Why? Well, you know, law school teaches you that the law is the ultimate individual sport. Right? This practicing law is not a team sport. You have to have the answers. You have to know what to do. you solve the problem. Unfortunately, when you own a business, it's about a team. It's about creating process.

13:14It's about allowing other people to make decisions. But for them to be able to do that, you have to share your vision and they have to buy into it. You have to have the right people sitting in the right seats. Otherwise, there's no way that you'll trust them. You have to have data so that when they make a decision, you know that they're making a decision based on something other than their gut instinct. Because if it's gut instinct, dude, you're totally going to double, you know, you're going to second guess that. And you're going to second guess it during dinner with your family, in the middle of the night, or when you're talking to a client the next day.

13:59Or all three. All right. So, Brooke, your website is scalinglaw.com. Our friend can, they can absolutely snag the book. It's available both in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. And again, what else might they do? And you have, obviously you're an EOS implementer and you do that through scaling law. So to our friend that's listening, what are next steps for them? You know, you can contact me through the scaling law website. You can contact me through the EOS worldwide website. Scaling law it might be easier. But, you know, I just, I love helping law firms run better. And if you go on the Scaling Law website, at the end of the summer, you're going to see that community popping up.

14:59You don't have to work with an implementer to run on EOS. You can self-implement. And that was how I first started with EOS was self-implementing and we self-implemented for years and it revolutionized our firm. And the scaling law community will allow you to have other people that are doing the same thing that are self-implementing or working with an implementer to talk to. It'll also have resources on how to implement better. Brooke Lively, again, your speaker, CFO, Strategic Coach, EOS Implementer. You are found on the web at both cathcap.com, where your company provides fractional CFO services, and then, of course, scalinglaw.com, where folks can get your new book.

15:59Brooke, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh. I really appreciate it.

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