Douglas Wood: Crafting Purposeful Transitions and Empowering Experienced Attorneys

In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Douglas Wood discuss:

• Career transition planning for lawyers
• Effective planning and execution in law firms
• Challenges for senior lawyers in staying relevant
• Leveraging senior lawyers’ expertise in law firms

Key Takeaways:

• Lawyers should self-assess to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities early to make informed career decisions and avoid unwanted retirement.
• Law firms can create cohorts for senior lawyers to share knowledge and discuss transitioning their practices, similar to support provided for other groups like veterans or LGBTQ+ professionals.
• Solo practitioners and small firm owners benefit from planning the transfer of their client base well before retirement to ensure service continuity and maximize the value of client relationships.
• A robust book of business greatly impacts a lawyer’s career longevity and retirement options.

“Lawyers can get very lucky at times, but more often than not, if you’re planning it, you’re going to see the success that you need.” —  Douglas Wood

Read more from Steve at Above the Law: AboveTheLaw.com/tag/Steve-Fretzin/

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Episode References: 

The Power of Positive Thinking: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Positive-Thinking-Norman-Vincent/dp/0743234804

About Douglas Wood: Douglas Wood, author of From Dawn to Dusk: How to Build a Multimillion Dollar Law Practice and Then Give It Away, offers guidance on building a multimillion-dollar law practice and transitioning to retirement or other pursuits. With nearly fifty years of legal experience, including over twenty in Big Law, Doug retired to mentor young attorneys and those preparing to leave the profession. A novelist with ten books—seven fiction and three non-fiction—he is currently writing his eighth novel. Doug holds a BA from the University of Rhode Island, a JD from Franklin Pierce Law Center, an LLM from NYU, an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of New Hampshire, and has taught at UNH and University College Cork in Ireland.

Connect with Douglas Wood: 

Website: https://douglasjwood.com/

Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Douglas-J.-Wood/author/B00BCJRTV6

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/djwood1976

Connect with Steve Fretzin:

LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin

Twitter: @stevefretzin

Instagram: @fretzinsteve

Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.

Website: Fretzin.com

Email: Steve@Fretzin.com

Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!

YouTube: Steve Fretzin

Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody, before we get to the show, I just want to share that I’m now writing for Above the Law. If you enjoy this podcast, you might also enjoy my monthly columns. You can go to Above the Law and type my name into the magnifying glass in the top right corner to read my latest articles. Thanks and enjoy the show.

[00:00:20] Narrator: You’re listening to be that lawyer life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice Each episode your host author and lawyer coach steve fretzin Will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results Now here’s your host steve fretzin 

[00:00:41] Steve Fretzin: Well, hey everybody welcome back.

[00:00:44] Steve Fretzin: It’s steve fretzin with the be that lawyer with fretzin podcast happy that you’re with us today You Listen, we are rockin and rollin If you haven’t heard what fretzin does, let me just give you the Two Cent Tour. Doug, is that a thing? Two Cent Tour? 

[00:00:55] Douglas Wood: Yeah. 

[00:00:56] Steve Fretzin: All right. I’m gonna go with it. As you know, fretzin does coaching and training for highly motivated attorneys that want to grow their law practices.

[00:01:03] Steve Fretzin: We’re not talking about 10%. We’re talking double, triple books. Get to equity, you know, if you’re a solo, build it out, scale it out, whatever you want to do. And then of course, I’m running my Rainmaker Roundtable. So if you’re already crushing it at business development, you’re going to want to talk about being in a room with 10 other lawyers who are managing firms, equity partners that are doing a million to 10 million.

[00:01:22] Steve Fretzin: And collaborating with that group is, is priceless. Although there is a price tag associated with it, it is priceless. As I’ve been told. Anyway, Doug, how you doing, man? Good to see you again. I’m great. You getting some crazy weather there in the Carolinas? 

[00:01:35] Douglas Wood: Yeah, we are. It’s this, this Hurricane Debbie just doesn’t want to seem to go away.

[00:01:38] Douglas Wood: I’m sorry. A little storm, Debbie. We have to 

[00:01:40] Steve Fretzin: be careful. Okay. Yeah. We got it. Yeah. You don’t want to get, you don’t want to get it, you know, sued by Debbie. 

[00:01:44] Douglas Wood: That’s right. You never know. 

[00:01:46] Steve Fretzin: Debbie’s out there with the plan. I 

[00:01:47] Douglas Wood: can see, I can see, he’s all wet. 

[00:01:50] Steve Fretzin: There we go, all wet behind the ears. Well, listen, we’ve got a great show for you guys today, everybody.

[00:01:54] Steve Fretzin: We, you know, we have just a superstar rainmaker, superstar, a lawyer that’s going to just shower us with, with great ideas. But we’ll start off with our quote, and that is, a goal without a plan is just a wish. I write down my goals and then I take those goals, I put them in a drawer and that’s the end of it, right?

[00:02:10] Steve Fretzin: Is that how it works? 

[00:02:11] Douglas Wood: That’s usually about, how about 90 percent of it works for most people. 

[00:02:14] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Okay. Well Doug tell us, so why, why is that a quote that you want everyone to kind of understand? And obviously it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a negative thing and we want to look at, at, you know, the spin on that too.

[00:02:28] Douglas Wood: Yeah, no, I mean, the lawyers, we’re all goal oriented, and particularly lawyers are goal oriented. Whether it’s to get the contract done, to win the case, to come back and be partnered, it’s all filled with goals. Our lives are filled with goals, but they’re lacking a plan to get to those goals for the most part.

[00:02:42] Douglas Wood: We just kind of hope that as the, as the, as the days go on and our opportunities arise, we’ll see them, we’ll be smart enough to grab them, and we’ll somehow over time achieve our goals. If you go to any other business. Outside of law. And you would say that to the CEO, you’d be out on the street in about five minutes.

[00:03:01] Douglas Wood: Corporate America knows how to plan and planning is the key to their success. So any, any B school, whether it’s at Auburn or Oxford or Stanford, I don’t care where it is, that’s what they teach. They teach planning before they teach execution because without, without the plan, whatever your execution is going to be, is going to be haphazard and misguided and it may bullseye.

[00:03:22] Douglas Wood: You can get very lucky. Lawyers can get very lucky at times, but more often than not, if you’re planning it, you’re going to, you’re going to see the success as you need. So that’s what I, that’s why I like that quote, that a goal without a plan is a waste of time. 

[00:03:34] Steve Fretzin: And a plan inside of a drawer is also just a waste of time, right?

[00:03:39] Steve Fretzin: Not a plan then. It gets out of sight, 

[00:03:40] Douglas Wood: out 

[00:03:40] Steve Fretzin: of 

[00:03:40] Douglas Wood: mind. 

[00:03:41] Steve Fretzin: Out of sight, out of mind. So, 

[00:03:42] Douglas Wood: you know. A plan only works if you’ve got the, you’ve got to execute to it. What I try to tell folks more than anything else is that you’ve got your plan is not just goal. It’s very specific tactics that you’re going to execute to achieve each of those goals.

[00:03:57] Douglas Wood: And business schools will teach you that the more tactics you have, I do each of those goals, set over time and schedule the what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, how you’re going to do it, And who are you going to need to help you do it? The more you do that over the years, when you have a year long plan, the more likely it is you’re going to achieve that goal.

[00:04:16] Douglas Wood: So you can’t have tactics that are tucked in your drawer. You have to see the tactics, you have to schedule the tactics, whether it’s in your outlook, whether it’s in your assistance scheduling, or wherever it is. If you don’t have it in front of you, you’re not going to program your brain. I won’t get into the brain programming part of what I like to talk about, but, but you can program your brain to achieve these things by repetitive minding of the tactics you need to use to get there.

[00:04:42] Steve Fretzin: And again, I think execution is the beast. And, and so, you know, having a goal, great, having a plan, great. Having the plan in front of you even better and then of course having actionable tactical things that are written in the plan that you know you have to execute on every day and then the accountability to do it, whether that’s a mentor, advisor, coach, consultant, or like what I set up for a lot of my clients in addition to my coaching is accountability buddies, just having other lawyers.

[00:05:06] Steve Fretzin: That weekly get together and say what they’re gonna do they go do it and then they come back and say what they did and it’s thirty minutes a week could be an hour we could be thirty minutes a day it’s up to you but that type of of of execution is gonna make the difference between you having the year you want or you regretting that you didn’t have the year that you want it.

[00:05:25] Douglas Wood: You make a really excellent point this day because. Don’t do this alone. You know, a lot of lawyers tend to be egotistical maniacs who are, who, you know, want to control everything, you know, and are not good sharers of anything. That’s the typical you know, MO for a lawyer. I was one for almost 50 years.

[00:05:42] Douglas Wood: So I think we saw some wisdom on that and they don’t, they, they lose so much by not sharing and bringing other people within their circle who can help them. And you can help them vice versa to achieve the overall goals. I mean, we all want success. And it’s much easier to be successful in a group than it is all alone.

[00:05:59] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, there’s a a term for that just just having a mindset of abundance and realizing, I talked to a new lawyer coach today, they’re popping out of the woodwork everywhere you go, and all I could say, all I could say to her was, Let’s do it. You know, if I, if you have someone that you think might need me, if I need someone that might need you, how can I help you?

[00:06:19] Steve Fretzin: How can I support you? What do you need? And we talked it out. And you know, I’m not, there, there were times where I would, I would have shied away from that. And I just don’t think that’s, I said to her. I go, our comp, our competitor isn’t each other. Our competitor is lawyer apathy. It’s lawyers that aren’t willing to invest in themselves to hire a coach, to work on their BD, to get the book built.

[00:06:42] Steve Fretzin: So they have the control and freedom. And she obviously could agree, agreed with me wholeheartedly because it makes sense. 

[00:06:50] Douglas Wood: Well, you know, an entrepreneur should be looking at this market. When they realize that they look at the legal market, they, they analyze what percentage of the lawyers practicing are responsible for 80 percent of the business.

[00:07:01] Douglas Wood: There is a huge market for those who are not contributing as much as they could if they simply had a plan, and they were organized, and they knew how to do it. They don’t. They generally just, 90 percent of the lawyers I know are not entrepreneurs, much as I think they are. Instead, they’re very reactionary.

[00:07:17] Douglas Wood: They’re not, they’re not proactive, they’re reactive. They bring in their facts, they get the facts, they figure something out, and then they move. It, it, it, that’s the mindset you need as a lawyer to represent your client and to make sure you cover all your bases. But that’s not an entrepreneurialist attitude, and when you find those lawyers who are really just Lawyers, you know, entrepreneurs hidden as a lawyer, you know, they were irritating a lawyer.

[00:07:39] Douglas Wood: That’s the ones who I think really the ones that succeed 

[00:07:43] Steve Fretzin: and you guys are you guys are going to find yourselves again Showered with wisdom today. We’ve got douglas who’s the principal law offices of douglas j. Wood big firm lawyer writer And by the way, we immediately connected on because it happens once every 10 years, someone else that was in some form of a, of a, of a plane or helicopter crash that is still living.

[00:08:04] Steve Fretzin: And I right away when, when you brought that up to me, I was like, you got to tell me the story, just like everyone says to me, Steve, what’s your story? You got to hear that, but if you wouldn’t mind giving the kind of the shortest version of that. So, so people know what you’ve been through. And, and I just think it’s just so interesting and how it helps define us as people too.

[00:08:21] Douglas Wood: Yeah, I was, I was privileged to represent the gentleman who owned Belvedere and Chopin Vodka and are produced in Olin, and we were in the middle of all sorts of wars and all sorts of battles over it and everything else. So at one point we had to go to Poland, this was shortly after the Soviet Union had broken up and, you know, Poland had just gotten to NATO, it was very backwards, there was a lot of stuff going on.

[00:08:41] Douglas Wood: And we had to rent a helicopter to go someplace in Poland, and we got one of these giant old Russian ones like you saw in Rambo. I mean, I think it was very frightening looking. The gun was removed, but it was a gigantic error. Yeah. So we fly out to where we were going to go, and we’re coming back, it starts to snow.

[00:08:59] Douglas Wood: And this, this helicopter starts acting funny. So they landed in the back of somebody’s yard. Next thing you know, police are there, they’re yelling. I don’t understand a single thing they’re saying. They’re screaming at us. And the pilot says, we have to get back in the helicopter, and we have to fly over there because we’re not allowed to be in somebody’s yard.

[00:09:13] Douglas Wood: Like, it’s like a bunch of idiots. Like, Brian and I get back into the helicopter, we get about a half a mile in the air, not up in the air, but forward, about maybe 200 feet in the air, and it just stops. It just stops. Goes smashing down into the money bot. We had to crawl out. Everybody was fine. Luckily, no one’s.

[00:09:33] Douglas Wood: That’s amazing. The mud sucked our shoes off. It was just one of those same moments where you sit there as a lawyer. You go, I don’t think I went to law school for this part of the job. 

[00:09:42] Steve Fretzin: Well, that’s another thing. They don’t teach at law school, right? How to survive that kind of junk. Oh, my God. Well, I 

[00:09:48] Douglas Wood: think you need.

[00:09:49] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, I guess as they say that that doesn’t kill us, right? So you’ve had, but, but since then you in, in before and since that you have had such an incredible journey in your law career. And I would love to just have you give again a short version of what you’ve happened because what’s happened to you and what’s transpired because ultimately I want to get into, you know, giving some really good actionable advice to the lawyers that are listening to you on how, you know, they can be their best versions and, and actually, you know, You know, whether it’s retire or, or a, some kind of transition plan, but we’re going to be getting into the weeds on that.

[00:10:25] Steve Fretzin: So, so give us, give us the legal, the legal side of the background. 

[00:10:29] Douglas Wood: Well, very quickly, I, I started out with nothing in the back. I know now it sounds very, you know, so cliche ish, but I literally did. I didn’t have any business. I didn’t have anything. I, I didn’t have a law degree from a fancy law school or whatever.

[00:10:41] Douglas Wood: I got into a law firm, realized that I wasn’t going to get any help. in building business. So I started to look at business books, something I didn’t look at in law school, wasn’t taught there. And I got the, I drank the coolie of it and started to do the classic business planning, the SWOT analysis, the strategic goals, the tactics that go with it.

[00:10:58] Douglas Wood: And I kept doing that consistently year after year. And ultimately it grew into a very sizable eight figure book of business that I eventually found myself in the middle of big law in, in New York with a global law firm. Got into the management, climbed up the ranks, made a lot of money. And then one day I realized that our partnership agreement said we are de equitized at the age of seven.

[00:11:21] Douglas Wood: I was 68 at the time. It sort of hit me like a truck. I go, well, wow. I mean, I, I never looked at that when I joined the firm. It’s not, not as if I could have negotiated it. It was just, that’s the part of your agreement. That’s what you get. 

[00:11:31] Steve Fretzin: Sorry. But I, but I want to stop you. I love the fact that lawyers aren’t reading the agreement.

[00:11:39] Steve Fretzin: I always get a kick out of that. We 

[00:11:40] Douglas Wood: bother to do for us what we do for our clients. Yeah, right. 

[00:11:43] Steve Fretzin: The cobbler’s kids have no 

[00:11:44] Douglas Wood: shoes. Exactly. Precisely. So, it hit me that I had to figure this out on my own. And how would I approach this? So, because I was a student of myself in terms of how I built my business, I said, I’m going to take the same approach on getting on, on leaving and then, and, and transitioning out.

[00:12:02] Douglas Wood: Because ultimately, while I could have stayed, I would have been a senior counselor or whatever they would have called me. After I was 71 it was, it was, the message is clear. And I think it’s, it’s a, it’s a fair mess because ultimately the institution of a law school, a law firm needs to have, have consistency and longevity and institutionalized, institutionalized clients, it all makes sense.

[00:12:22] Douglas Wood: And eventually you have to let the older ones out and the younger ones up. I understand. Law firms have no plans for that, that I paid for, including the one I was with. So I did the same analysis. I looked at my strengths, my weaknesses, opportunities, threats, made a very, you know, very introspective analysis of myself.

[00:12:40] Douglas Wood: It was somewhat painful, but it was honest. And then from there, I set the goals and the tactics, met with the firm. We worked out the deal. I think that is very much the exception rather than the rule. Because most firms I found when I spoke to people, We’re more inclined to just sort of watch. I’d have the difficult conversation.

[00:13:01] Douglas Wood: We maybe were a little nudging here, a little nudging there that the senior lawyer would incorporate others into their, into their business so that they could pass it on before they fell dead at the desk, but there was never any real definitive program to do it. And worse, the thing that I thought was really silly in this profession is that not only is there no plan to sort of talk about this, but because of that, there’s really no definitive plan.

[00:13:26] Douglas Wood: to utilize the asset of these senior lawyers in some kind of capacity within law firms and again in servicing clients that could keep them feeling relevant, keep the older lawyer feeling relevant, and at the same time return a real value to the firm. That’s like, that won’t cost the firm, firms a lot of money because what they’re, what the lawyers at that stage of their lives are probably looking for is a little more free time, a little more balance.

[00:13:50] Douglas Wood: They talk about that part, they never put any executed, executed tactics to it or any real strategy to it. So, a lot of lawyers are just sort of floundering. All of a sudden, one day, they find that they’ve lost a big client because the client aged out of them. You know, I mean, we boomers are aging out.

[00:14:08] Douglas Wood: There’s a boatload of boomers with a boatload of business who are all aging out. And these younger kids, so if I call them, they’re not kids, but these younger executives and younger lawyers are raising into the community, into the profession, and they want to be with their peers. They, they want decisions made in conjunction with their peers, not some old gray hair guy who they don’t even know, probably never even met anymore because of the way it’s practices today.

[00:14:32] Douglas Wood: And so you got to face that reality. And this conversation is just one that. People are very uncomfortable adding. I had it with my firm and it worked out fine for me and what I’m trying to do is get the message out that don’t let, don’t let fate decide what this is going to be. You can control this. You can at least try to control this.

[00:14:51] Douglas Wood: If you don’t do it, someone’s going to just change. Do it to me. 

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[00:16:16] Steve Fretzin: Man, I thought I was a good marketer, but maybe not. Lawyers have been approaching me asking, what’s the Rainmakers Roundtable? Well, I tell them this is a special place created exclusively for rainmaking lawyers to continue their journey of prosperity. Our program is unique as every member has a significant book of business and is motivated to grow it year after year.

[00:16:36] Steve Fretzin: Where else does this exist? If you’re a managing partner who’s looking to get off your lonely island and talk shop business,

[00:16:49] Steve Fretzin: And I have a sidebar question for you that I’m hoping you can answer, but if not, you know, I may be able to chime in a little bit, but In the old days, if you will, the younger lawyers would court the older lawyers to get their book of business and take it over and they would get origination, like the origination credit would transition.

[00:17:07] Steve Fretzin: I don’t know that that’s the case anymore, right? I think most, most of it’s then being absorbed by the firm and they might still get the hours or they might get management credits. But the origination sort of not going along with those clients. Is that accurate? You, do you have a feeling about that or information?

[00:17:22] Douglas Wood: You know, that now I think it’s a very astute observation because in the end of the day, getting credits is really the, the, the, the stamp that you want to have. Yeah. Well, the stamp 

[00:17:31] Steve Fretzin: it’s called, it’s called a dollar sign stamp. Yeah, 

[00:17:34] Douglas Wood: exactly. So it. I think at the end of the day, when firms try to say there’s no leading lawyer on that client, it’s got 10 heads that are running it or whatever it is.

[00:17:45] Douglas Wood: That they actually do a disservice to themselves and to the client, to the, the lawyers, because that’s why the lawyers leave. They think they can, they can figure out they got a little piece of this one or that piece and then they leave. So we’ve seen a huge increase in lawyer migration from firm to firm in the last 10 years that we ever had in the first 30 years of my career.

[00:18:04] Douglas Wood: A 

[00:18:04] Steve Fretzin: lot, a lot of lateral groups too. I mean, the recruiters are having a field day with these lateral groups because they’re getting paid insane money to bring a group over from this firm to that, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20. Lawyers leaving a firm and going to another and it’s insane. And three 

[00:18:18] Douglas Wood: years later you see that same group leave that firm and go someplace else.

[00:18:21] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, or maybe they just go out on their own and do their own thing because this was not a 

[00:18:25] Douglas Wood: This was The big money eventually dries up. 

[00:18:29] Steve Fretzin: Well, they know that that if they have the 10, 20 million book of business at the firm and they take it and split it between 10 or 20 people, you know, and without all the high overhead and all that, you know, I’m, there’s just a lot of ways, a lot of ways that that can play out.

[00:18:43] Steve Fretzin: But I want to get, I want to get into the, into the weeds a bit with you, Doug on how lawyers that are maybe, you know, my age that are in their fifties and maybe in their early sixties should be thinking about. The transition thinking about whether it’s retirement, whether it’s going out on their own, whether it’s like, what are the options and how to best play that with the firm that they’re with?

[00:19:05] Douglas Wood: Yeah, it’s the lemma there. Steve is trying to figure out where’s that tipping point. Now, where is it that you hear on the one side of the tipping point, your, your goal is to build, build, build, right? You know, whether it’s business reputation, position, whatever it is within your environment, within your law firm.

[00:19:22] Douglas Wood: Yeah. And eventually you hit a point where you’re getting close to a use by date, like on a milk garden. And you’ve got to decide that now it’s time to be looking on the other side, but protecting this side at the same time. That’s, I think that, you know, to me, in my case that happened when I was 68. If I could, if I could have, Reinvented this.

[00:19:43] Douglas Wood: I would have probably been thinking more serious about that when I was 62, 63, and a little over into my sixties. Yeah. At that point, any of my clients would have been matured, so to speak. They’re all, you know, they’re, they’re still very peer oriented and making decisions and things like that. They’re not out of management, but I would, I would be able to see they’re about to go.

[00:20:01] Douglas Wood: I mean, I had clients who had mandatory retirements and some clients at 65. And there are companies that have those kinds of real rules. So you have to reflect. What you’re going to do based upon your client mix as well. What are they going to make change? So you need to sort of focus and figure out where you’re tipping point is.

[00:20:18] Douglas Wood: I don’t think it’s, I think, you know, up to 60, you’re probably still need to be focused, you know, primarily on building, building, building. At some place, some point between 60 and 80. In my case, 68 I think is when that focus, the tipping point starts. Settle it. And the longer runway you have to figure that out, the more strategic you’re going to be in the decisions you make, and the more successful you’re going to be.

[00:20:41] Douglas Wood: I started at 68. I was de equitized at the end of 70, so I had two years to put that plan into place and to work it out. It worked out because my firm cooperated with me, but I could imagine there are other instances where it would be a shocking conversation for you to have with your firm. And you wouldn’t get the level of cooperation I got.

[00:20:58] Douglas Wood: So you know, you maybe need that conversation a little earlier. 

[00:21:01] Steve Fretzin: Well, not only that, but you know, obviously I’m in this business of, of coaching and business development. My goal is when I work with a client, a lawyer is to set them up and internalize ways of doing business development. So they have those skills and have that book built.

[00:21:15] Steve Fretzin: Every year is their best year. And so when I run my rainmaker round tables and everybody’s talking about their growth for the year, everyone’s having their best year every year, and I just beam with pride. My concern is that that’s 10 percent of the legal population. There’s 90 percent that are working in their fifties and sixties at firms, crushed with work, billable hours, 1500 to 2000.

[00:21:36] Steve Fretzin: Like they’re, they’re making money. They’re doing that’s there, but they don’t have the book. So what’s the difference between the book and no book in that transition? 

[00:21:45] Douglas Wood: And you’re making a point that I think is very important that law firms tend to, and this is going to sound really cruel, but I think it’s the reality.

[00:21:53] Steve Fretzin: Okay. 

[00:21:53] Douglas Wood: Law firms tend to look at their lawyers as the important ones of the rainmakers, the others are fungible assets. You know, they’re just workers. 

[00:22:00] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. 

[00:22:01] Douglas Wood: They really don’t think, they compensate them to the point that they have to to keep them. If they lose them, they just be their, you know, their commodity.

[00:22:08] Douglas Wood: That’s the, that’s a horrible mistake. Yeah. There’s a, there’s a group of lawyers within a firm. You know, that you’ve got 70 years, let’s say 70 plus and it’s going to be a relatively small population within your law firm group as a collective wisdom and experience that isn’t just the ones who brought in the money.

[00:22:28] Douglas Wood: It’s the ones who argued the cases, the ones who negotiated the. Negotiate the contracts. I’m going to put in all the hours of work because when I was bringing in eight figures, I got to tell you, I didn’t have a lot of billable out. I didn’t need to. I was going to get rewarded because I was bringing all that business.

[00:22:42] Douglas Wood: So I didn’t do a lot of the work. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t necessarily a good lawyer or couldn’t do the work, but there’s a whole group around me that had the wisdom. So law firms need to change their attitude about what they do with senior lawyers. It’s not about whether they were rainmakers.

[00:22:58] Douglas Wood: It’s about taking this asset of wisdom that has accumulated over 30, 40 years in their individual practices and harnessing it in a way that, that they can do benefit for the firm, benefit for the younger attorneys, benefit for their clients, and without a huge investment. And, but I don’t see law firms thinking that way instead, and, you know, it’s, it’s, this is easy for me to say because I was the bene beneficiary of it.

[00:23:25] Douglas Wood: I had a lot of book, I had leverage. I couldn’t negotiate a deal. But if you don’t, it’s much more 

[00:23:32] Steve Fretzin: challenging to, to, to get the deal. 

[00:23:35] Douglas Wood: So you need a better, you need a, the law firms need to have a, a, a more, a more intelligent plan themselves as to, you know, how are you going to utilize this asset? 

[00:23:46] Steve Fretzin: So that’s what, what are, but then Doug, what are a couple of, I’m sorry to interrupt what, but like what, then what would be a couple of techniques or, or things lawyers can do to transition in a way that’s going to be beneficial to the firm and also beneficial to them?

[00:24:00] Steve Fretzin: So they’re not just, Like walking into it blind. You’re giving them a couple of things to think about. 

[00:24:06] Douglas Wood: Well, one would be I, I admire law firms and all the efforts they’ve made to protect different cohorts within the legal profession. Whether it’s LBJBQ, whether it’s a veterans, whether it’s the sale, they do wonderful jobs of doing that, putting together cohorts and letting them talk about their problems and resolve.

[00:24:22] Douglas Wood: They don’t do that with the older lawyer. So the first thing I think a law firm could do would be to have a cohort of senior lawyers, let’s say 70 plus or whatever the number you want to use. They finance them a little bit to have some, some opportunities to get together and just talk and to talk to the manager and have the conversation and to share it like your, like your rainmakers round table, there’s nothing more valuable.

[00:24:43] Douglas Wood: Then the little nuggets of wisdom you’ll get, you might sit there for a half an hour and only walk away with one or two nuggets, but they’re invaluable. Yeah. You could get the same kind of return if you would just regard that cohort as just as important as all the other important cohorts in law firms.

[00:25:00] Douglas Wood: And the other actual point, again, I mean, it’s kind of the same spin on it, is to recognize the problem and for senior management in law firms to have the conversation. When was the last time you met lawyers who were senior lawyers who can say, oh yeah, I meet regularly with my senior management about what I’m going to do when I transition my career?

[00:25:21] Douglas Wood: They don’t. They just don’t have that conversation. Now, granted, they’ve got lots of busy things they’re doing, but it’s not like it’s a huge population. It’s not as though I’m asking a law firm to have a conversation with every associate they have, law firm manager. I’m not. These are a relatively small population, and so it’s not a huge effort.

[00:25:36] Douglas Wood: Instead, law firms, many law firms, they have these extravagant retreats, they’ll bring all the, you know, associates to some place, all their partners to some place. But all these kind of meetings, everything else, and the ones excluded from that, other than if they’re just having to be invited along in terms of any focus, are the senior lawyers.

[00:25:54] Steve Fretzin: But from a senior, not the firm’s perspective, but the senior lawyer’s perspective, what does that individual need to do when they’re hitting in their early sixties and they realize, Hey, you know, I don’t have a book. I have a little bit of a book, whatever. And I, they’re asking me at 65 or 72. You know, to go, to go find something else to do.

[00:26:14] Steve Fretzin: And they’ve got young people coming up. How do they, how do they handle it? Do they go off and join another firm? Do they, you know, take it out and take their show on the, the few clients they have and take them on the road on their own and wrap up that way? I mean, what’s the playbook say? 

[00:26:28] Douglas Wood: I would say the first thing they do is, is a very introspective self assessment.

[00:26:33] Steve Fretzin: Okay. 

[00:26:34] Douglas Wood: So you go through, you understand who you are, where you’re situated, what the realities are. And look at what your opportunities are, look at what your threats are, look at what your challenges are, your weaknesses, whatever it is, and figure it out early enough that you’re going to either make a decision, well, this firm I’m with seems to be as good a place as I’m going to get, the grass isn’t going to be greener at another place, and so I’m going to just put my nose to the grindstone, I’m going to do whatever I got to do, I’m going to partner with people, whatever.

[00:27:00] Douglas Wood: Or you may conclude that I have opportunities elsewhere, or I have an opportunity to, I’ve seen plenty of lawyers in their 60s go from private practice to in house, to go from private practice to non profit work. I mean, there’s, there’s other options, but you’ve got to. Evaluate yourself first, honestly, and then you have to look at what the opportunities might be out there.

[00:27:21] Douglas Wood: Get counseling with, with folks who, who do talk about options in careers and that kind of thing. But there’s no, there’s no one who is a senior lawyer in a firm, even if they don’t have any business, who would not benefit by doing an introspective analysis and determining what it is in the marketplace.

[00:27:39] Douglas Wood: That they might find enjoyable. And maybe the cruel result might very well mean that, look, where you are, you’re not going to get anything better, gut it out. Which is sad, but I suspect that lawyer is one who never did any planning for the first 30 years of their career. 

[00:27:56] Steve Fretzin: And for the solo and small firm owners that are listening right now, I’ll bring up my father, the late, great Larry Fredson.

[00:28:04] Steve Fretzin: And he built an amazing practice, a solo practice over 40 years, but when he was ready to retire at 65 to the day, six months before that, he found a couple of knuckleheads that he, you know, found on the curb or something and brought them in and they were going to transition his stuff over and, and basically they just drove it into the ground and it was done.

[00:28:23] Steve Fretzin: And I just wish I had been in a position to help him back in the day to avoid that because he could have brought that into a firm, a small firm and gotten paid out on it. He could have done a little more vetting and found some people that really would have cared for his clients. He could have transitioned them.

[00:28:39] Steve Fretzin: Over like that that transfer of trust which needs to happen which didn’t in this case so i think look he retired with a few million bucks he did great but he could have done much better if he had thought ahead and planned and that again i’m just putting that out there for the solos out there that that think is just gonna you know shut off that just you know shut shut it all down there is value in your clients in your book you just need to find a good place to put it.

[00:29:03] Douglas Wood: When you think about it lawyers are just we’re all about relationship issues with our clients with our colleagues. And the better our relationships, the longer our relationships, the deeper, the more longevity we have. Yeah. So, so if you, if you sort of take that Kool Aid, pretty early in your career, you want to be in, in, in a group that shares, that has respect for one another, that is bigger than just the one individual.

[00:29:26] Douglas Wood: I always used to say to mentees. If there’s two parties, and I talk about this in my book, where you look at two partners, and one is one that shares, and one is one that doesn’t, they have identical books of business. Who’s the one you want to work for? Who’s the one you want to learn from? If you’re the loner, take them off your list.

[00:29:44] Douglas Wood: Do everything you can to be with that person you share. Because that’s ultimately going to build your business. And it’s going to make them more likely to want to share their business. But instead of it, what do you start with the, the loner superstar, you know, gets all these, you know, fantastic cases and doesn’t share anything versus someone who might not have such as, you know, literary practice, but brings in just as much money.

[00:30:08] Douglas Wood: Go with that person because that’s going to be your future. Yeah. The stars, shooting stars, they come and they go. 

[00:30:14] Steve Fretzin: Well that’s a great, a great place for us to kind of wrap things up, Doug. The game changing book that you, that you’re recommending is The Power of Positive Thinking. I’m a little, feeling a bit negative about that choice.

[00:30:24] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, 

[00:30:26] Douglas Wood: I, I, you know, I try to think a lot, a lot of what I read is outside the legal profession because I, I don’t want to read, you know, what other lawyers have to say, even though I write books about that. Yeah. But Norman Vincent Peale was a, put him aside the religious part of that book, because Basically, his teachings are that, that you’re going to get a lot further in life if you think positively than negatively, and, and there’s lots of books that do that.

[00:30:46] Douglas Wood: I particularly like that one. It’s an easy one to, to read but there’s plenty out there. I just, you know, you get, just got to be positive. 

[00:30:52] Steve Fretzin: And you’ve got a couple of books that you’ve written. Do you want to just share, you know, 30 seconds on those? 

[00:30:57] Douglas Wood: Yeah, the two that are, that are, I’ve written 11 novels mostly, you know, fiction, but the two that do, I get to kill people and they’re terrorists.

[00:31:06] Douglas Wood: But the ones that I’ve written about my law profession, my law career, one is, the early one’s called Asshole Attorney. Which is about the first 40 years of my career. Cause I had a very colorful, crazy career, including the helicopter crash. Yeah. The newest one is when I just got out, you know, with from, from dawn to dusk, how to build a multimillion dollar law practice and then give it away, which is my sort of way of paying it forward and saying to the community, here’s how I did it.

[00:31:33] Douglas Wood: Maybe it’ll work for you. Maybe you’ll get a nugget out of this, but I’ll help you through either building a business or transitioning on it. So that’s kind of where I am. 

[00:31:41] Steve Fretzin: Absolutely. Beautiful. Absolutely. Beautiful. The got to take a moment to thank our sponsors. Of course, PymCon coming up for the personal injury folks that want to see all the top players on stage and, and have just a first class experience.

[00:31:52] Steve Fretzin: If you use the, be that lawyer discount code, I think you get a discount and then of course get staffed up a way to delegate your way to freedom and, you know, hire away all the, all the tasks that you shouldn’t be doing as a successful lawyer. So. Doug, if people want to get in touch with you they want to, you know, talk to you about, I know you’re doing some coaching, they want to hear your story, they want to just connect with you, what’s the best way to reach you?

[00:32:14] Douglas Wood: Well, probably by email. My email is a simple one that I remember. Douglas. wood at wood. com. Okay. Or they, or they can go to my website, DouglasJWood. com, and I have this contact information there, or they can just find me on LinkedIn. Okay. All my contact information on LinkedIn is public, so they can easily get to me.

[00:32:32] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, we’re going to put that in the show notes for everybody too. So man, this is, you know, I’m, I’m no joke. Like I want to keep in touch with you. I want to, I want to, you know, share the journey for the next, whatever, five, 10 years that you’re going to have, and I’m going to have, I just, the collaboration.

[00:32:46] Steve Fretzin: And I think attorneys have such a great need for, you know, that, that last chapter or whatever they want to call it, of how they’re going to be, do that successfully. Yeah. And even how to build it, right? How to get there, what I’m doing and what you’re doing, I think is right in line with that. So just thanks so much.

[00:33:02] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We do 

[00:33:03] Douglas Wood: hand in hand. 

[00:33:04] Steve Fretzin: We do. Hand in hand. 

[00:33:05] Douglas Wood: It’s all hand in hand. Yep. 

[00:33:06] Steve Fretzin: Yep. I’m a left, you’re a right. Something like that. All right, 

[00:33:10] Douglas Wood: everybody. 

[00:33:10] Steve Fretzin: Thanks, Doug. I appreciate you, man. 

[00:33:12] Douglas Wood: Thank you. 

[00:33:13] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for spending some time with Doug and I with the Be That Lawyer with fretzin podcast.

[00:33:18] Steve Fretzin: God, just so many takeaways, especially for the folks that are really, you know, I think it’s important to think about, think about that last chapter. Think about the you know, how you want to, how you want to wrap up your career and getting ahead of it is, is a smart idea. So Be That Lawyer, everybody confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker.

[00:33:35] Steve Fretzin: Take care, be safe, be well. We’ll talk again soon.

[00:33:41] Narrator: Thanks for listening to Be That Lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fretzin. com, for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.