Behind the Scenes: The pillars that hold my business together

The first pillar, which will be no surprise to longtime listeners, is around my love language, which is processes and systems.

My processes and systems and our client agreements are without doubt the first pillar that supports my business.

Our client agreements need to do a range of things.

First, we need to comply with our Law Society requirements.

The Law Society, because we're regulated heavily, there's a ton of things that we need to include by legislation in our client agreements, so ours do that.

Ours aren't templates.

As you can imagine, the Law Society do have templates that lawyers can use.

We don't use that.

My client agreement goes so much further because to me, relationships are at the core of what I do.

Relationships are the backbone of my business.

So that is reflected from a very early touch point that new clients have with me when they receive our client agreement.

So it sets out in there who we are, what we do.

It sets out the scope of work, what it is the client has engaged me to do.

It deals with scope creep and what we're going to do if you need out-of-scope work from time to time.

It sets out the fees.

All of my work is fixed fee, so that it's really transparent and clients know from the very beginning exactly what they're getting from me and exactly what they're being asked to pay.

That's a non-negotiable for me because that is one of the elements that I pride myself on, is being really transparent about the work, what's included, and what it's going to cost the client.

Back in my litigation days, so before I set up this business, I've been running this business for seven years now, but way before that, the law firms that I worked for were all very much time costing.

We bill the client in six-minute increments.

We can't possibly know what work's going to be involved, and that is true because the majority of what I did was litigation work, and you can never know with certainty what's going to be involved.

But what I saw back then was clients who were really overwhelmed, fearful, uncertain, because they just didn't know what they were in for in terms of the legal support that they needed, that they were getting, and what it was going to cost.

So it just fills my heart with so much joy to be working now in this business, running it the way that's aligned with me personally and my personal values, to support business owners with what matters to them, and transparency around pricing and fees matters to business owners, and I get that, so that's what I do.

So this is all forming part of the first pillar in how I run this business, and it's set out in my client agreements.

The client agreements then go on to talk about a whole range of things, intellectual property, who owns it, payment of the fees, use of AI.

I use it for note-taking and summaries and, and workflow efficiency, but I ask clients not to put my advice or my documents through AI, and I explain the risks attached with that in terms of waiving legal professional privilege and confidentiality.