How Jeff Hughes Scaled Sterling Lawyers with Fixed Fees, Offshoring, and Innovation (Ep. 120)
Are you a law firm owner looking to break free from the billable hour grind? Imagine scaling your practice with clarity, consistency, and true client trust—all while increasing profitability. That’s exactly what Jeff Hughes, founder of Sterling Lawyers, has accomplished by pioneering a 100% fixed fee model, embracing innovative technology, and reshaping how a law firm can scale.
At The Lawyer Millionaire, we’re always seeking the best financial and operational strategies for law firm owners. In this episode of the podcast, we sat down with Jeff to unpack his journey and uncover actionable insights you can apply to your own business.
Why Shift to a Fixed Fee Law Firm Model?
For years, the billable hour has been the norm in legal services, especially in family law. Jeff Hughes saw an opportunity to do things differently after being inspired by legal innovator Lee Rosen. By switching to a 100% fixed fee model in 2016—and going all in—Jeff aligned the interests of his clients, lawyers, and the firm itself.
Key Benefits of the Fixed Fee Approach
Client Clarity and Trust: Clients appreciate knowing exactly what they’ll pay up front, reducing financial anxiety.
Open Communication: With fixed fees, clients no longer hesitate to reach out, removing the friction that hourly billing creates.
Aligned Incentives: The fixed fee model motivates lawyers to resolve matters efficiently, benefitting clients and supporting firm growth.
“Anytime you can do something that the clients want and resonates with them, you have an advantage—getting their attention and their business. That’s what fixed fees offer.” — Jeff Hughes
Overcoming Challenges: Selling & Structuring Fixed Fees
Transitioning to fixed fees isn’t always easy. Early on, Jeff faced pushback from his team, concerned about moving away from familiar hourly billing practices. However, once the benefits became clear—for both lawyers and clients—the team couldn’t imagine returning to the old model.
One of the biggest challenges is client education. Jeff’s strategy involves visually walking clients through the stages of a family law case, explaining fees in relation to each phase:
Three-Stage Billing: Cases are broken into clear sections—settlement, litigation, and trial. Fees align with each step, making costs transparent and manageable.
Incentivizing Resolution: Because clients pay for each stage as it comes, there’s a mutual incentive to resolve cases efficiently.
Leveraging Technology and Offshoring to Scale
Sterling Lawyers has become a leader in operational efficiency by:
Building a Robust Offshore Team: Approximately 40 teammates in the Philippines handle back-office functions, allowing attorneys and paralegals to focus on high-value client work.
Adopting Automation & Apps: A proprietary client app is in the works to boost communication and reduce lawyer time spent on routine updates.
Flexible Communication: The team customizes its client communications by phone, email, text, or through the app based on client preference.
From Technician to Law Firm Owner: Building Processes that Scale
Many lawyers become business owners by accident and struggle to shift from technician to business leader. Jeff encourages law firm owners looking to grow to start by documenting their key processes—even in rough form—so new team members can deliver the same results.
Actionable Step:
Start documenting how you deliver your service today, so you can teach others and build a firm that works without you.
Leadership Lessons: Evolving as Your Firm Grows
Growth brings new leadership challenges. As Sterling Lawyers grew from a handful of attorneys to over 27, Jeff found he had to:
Develop Strong Leadership Skills: Inspire while building incentives that actually motivate your team.
Let Go of Control: Delegate responsibilities, hire managers, and invest in specialized roles to support scale.
Prioritize Team Wellbeing: Conscious energy and presence become more important than sheer hours worked.
Planning for Long-Term Success
Jeff is focused on ensuring Sterling Lawyers thrives well into the future by exploring:
Law Firm Acquisitions: Preparing the business to be an attractive, transactable asset down the road.
AI-Powered Services: Developing tools to address the large portion of the market currently unserved by traditional firms.
Takeaway for Law Firm Owners
Whether you’re a solo practitioner or running a growing team, consider how innovative fee structures, robust systems, and a clear leadership vision can create a firm that scales profitably—and delivers real value to clients.
Ready to scale your firm and achieve true financial freedom?
Start by process-mapping your practice, exploring new billing models, and leveraging technology to support your goals.
Resources:
Book: Smuggler by Roger Reaves
Connect with Darren Wurz:
Connect with Jeff Hughes:
Linkedin: Jeff Sterling Hughes
Website: J. Sterling Hughes
Website: Sterling Lawyers
About Jeff Hughes:
We operate Sterling Law daily with the conviction that we must empower clients enduring a family legal crisis, which are some of the most painful, bewildering moments of life.”
When someone utters the word “divorce,” specific images pop to mind. Expensive and never-ending bills, uncaring lawyers, and drawn out cases ending in heartache, to name just a few.
But why? Family law is supposed to be about serving people during some of the difficult moments of their life when they need a helping hand the most.
Jeff Hughes chose law as the platform to impact his community and the families in it. After working as a lawyer for many years, he saw that the status quo was broken, and radical changes had to be made.
As a co-founder of Sterling Law Offices, he turned his focus to obliterating the archaic family law “old school” system.
First, and this may strike you as crazy radical – Jeff does not want you as a client of the firm. He would much rather live in a world where families never broke apart. Sadly, that is not reality. The truth is that good, loving people find themselves in a family legal crisis.
Consequently, Jeff's core belief is simple: “When people in my community find themselves in a family legal crisis, we desperately want to serve them. They need us. So, we are obsessed with creating a modern firm that focuses on them and their families. I have this unshakable conviction, that if we build a client-centered firm, we will be wildly successful. If we empower clients, we will dominate.”
Second, according to Jeff, “the primary way family law is practiced today should be blown up.” It starts with “ridiculous hourly billing. It just kills me that lawyers ask clients to give them their credit card or a blank check with no assurance as to what their final bill will be. We have destroyed and buried hourly billing – R.I.P. If we can't tell the client what their fees will be up front, we don't accept their money.”
Third, Jeff has an incurable obsession with focusing every available firm resource on being amazing at one thing – family law. “Look, if my leg is broken, the last thing I am going to do is see a cardiologist or some general practice doc. I'm going straight to an orthopedic who specializes on legs. I just think clients need to be able to come to a firm and have confidence that their lawyer is focused 100% on family law, not dabbling in real estate one minute and criminal law the next.”
Fourth, Jeff feels the prevailing attitude of family lawyers is backward. “I have this unpopular belief in my profession. We all say that we put clients first. That is cliché and, for the most part, is absolute baloney. I think most lawyers actually put themselves first. They care far more about what other lawyers think of them than what clients think of them. That is asinine. This is why Sterling surveys every client multiple times during our representation. I know most lawyers are scared to know the truth–that is why so few lawyers actually ask their client for feedback.”
Finally, (Jeff insisted that we put this quote on the website): “There is a reason why we are transforming family law in just a few years. It is because we are maniacal about the client's needs, wants and desires. We are winning because we put clients first, and the market is voting us to the front of the pack. Every single person going through a family legal crisis deserves to know about Sterling Law.”
Outside of his career, Jeff and Winona get to love on their five boys and one girl. The Hughes family enjoys traveling to create as many special memories as possible. He is also a voracious reader, downhill skier, ping pong player, and loves, loves fishing on the Chippewa Flowage in Hayward, WI. Jeff grew up in Alton, IL.
Jeff got his B.A. degree in history from Bob Jones University in 1994. He went on to earn his law degree (J.D) from Southern Illinois University School of Law in 1997.
After law school, Jeff became a litigating attorney at a Wisconsin law firm, McLario, Helm & Bertling S.C. before founding Sterling Law Offices.
Transcript:
Darren Wurz [00:00:00]:
Switching to a fixed fee entirely was the best move for this family law firm. Welcome to the Lawyer Millionaire, where law firm owners learn to grow their firms and their wealth. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. Tired of the billable hour grind? Imagine a law firm that scales with clarity, consistency, and client trust. That's what today's guest has built. Jeff Hughes is the founder of Sterling lawyers and a 100% fixed fee family law firm and a pioneer in legal innovation and firm leadership. All right, we're here with Jeff Hughes. Thanks for being on the show today, Jeff.
Jeff Hughes [00:00:39]:
Happy to be here, Darren. Looking forward to our conversation.
Darren Wurz [00:00:42]:
Absolutely. So you've built Sterling Lawyers, as I understand, on a fixed fee model, is that correct?
Jeff Hughes [00:00:50]:
Yes, that is correct. We do 100% fixed fee. Just family law. That's it.
Darren Wurz [00:00:55]:
So, yeah, let's talk about that for a minute, for a second. And especially in the context of family law, that is kind of a new thing that we're seeing in law practice. Very different from the traditional billable hour. What inspired that shift for you and how has it worked so far?
Jeff Hughes [00:01:14]:
Well, I didn't think it was possible first off, and I met Lee Rosen down in, I think, Miami. We had to go down and pay for a day of his time. And he opened my eyes that it was possible and that it was beautiful. And the kicker was it aligned our interest with our clients interests and our lawyers interests. So get all three of those aligned. You can do amazing things. So that's when we got the idea for it and started moving moon on it. And it took us about four or five years to figure it out, but we did so, thankfully.
Darren Wurz [00:01:45]:
So when, yeah, when did you start implementing that model?
Jeff Hughes [00:01:50]:
We implemented on February 1, 2016 was day one. And we went all in. Did not. We burned the ships and we're like, we're going all in. This is what we're going to do. And we did it. We didn't look back.
Darren Wurz [00:02:05]:
I love that. Okay, so let's back up for a second. We're going to learn about all of your innovations. But first, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your firm.
Jeff Hughes [00:02:16]:
Yeah. We are a family law firm based in the Milwaukee area. We have offices throughout southeastern Wisconsin, Illinois. Today we've got around 27 lawyers and we are 100% fixed fee and very innovative when it comes to technology and building our infrastructure. About 40 of our teammates are offshore, so they're in the Philippines and they're amazing. And we have, we've built a really fun firm. We're really Proud of the fact that we just got top place to work. And so that's.
Jeff Hughes [00:02:50]:
That's been a big deal. We're celebrating right now, so. And we just announced our first partner trip to Mexico next year, so we're looking forward to that too. So those are, Those are what I'm thinking about.
Darren Wurz [00:03:01]:
Yeah. Very cool. That's. That's really awesome. And you're also on a mission to help other family law attorneys. Tell us a little bit about that real quickly.
Jeff Hughes [00:03:11]:
Yeah, kind of like my passion project is I have a podcast called the J. Sterling Hughes show and a website, jsterlinghughes.com where it's all about trying to pass on what we have learned and figured out and stumbled our toe on, screwed up on and passed that information to family lawyers to help them build their practice. So we kind of are trying to be a lab, so to speak, for how to do it or not do it, and then share the results of that with other family lawyers to help them build their practices, too.
Darren Wurz [00:03:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. That's really great. So, you know, the flat fee model, I love this because it's an innovation, and we've kind of adopted something similar in financial services. Most financial planners are compensated on a percentage of assets as a percentage of what you invest. We found that doesn't really work well for law firm owners who maybe have a variety of different kinds of investments beyond traditional stocks and bonds. So we adopted a flat fee model as well.
Darren Wurz [00:04:12]:
And so we can manage your portfolio or not. It's all included. It's just one flat fee. And we really love it because it just gives us a lot of simplicity and transparency, and it aligns the value with what the clients are getting. What was it like telling your, you know, bringing this idea to your, your team, were they ready for this or was there a lot of pushback?
Jeff Hughes [00:04:39]:
Oh, no, they were not ready in the slightest. In fact, Holly Mullen, our current managing partner, I remember going to her office and I was nervous, Darren, because she was a big deal in our firm and, and I, I had to go and sell her on this idea we're going to fix fee. And she went along with it very reluctantly, but she figured it out pretty quickly, and we kind of used her as our, you know, our, our bell cow, so to speak, of like, how do we do this? We'll follow you. We'll figure it out with you. So, no, they didn't love it at first. Now they just can't imagine going back. It just would be nonstop.
Darren Wurz [00:05:17]:
What do you think is the biggest, like, improvement that. That makes for your law firm.
Jeff Hughes [00:05:24]:
Yeah, I've got a couple. So one is that anytime you can do something that the clients want and that they res. That resonates with them, you have an advantage right there in just getting their attention and then getting their business. So whenever you tell them, look, I can pay you by the. You can pay me by the hour, and I don't know what it's going to be. And we're just going to send you a bill every month and. And we'll find out at the end of the case what it costs you. You contrast that experience with, like, okay, it's going to cost you this for us to handle your case all the way through.
Jeff Hughes [00:05:54]:
And they know that that gives them security. They know what's coming. That opens up the lines of communication because not afraid to call you and, like, you know, send you a text message, they're going to get whacked with a $50 bill or something. So it makes the whole relationship just work. It takes away a ton of the friction in the relationship. So it lines the interest with the clients, which they. They really appreciate. Now, that's the good stuff.
Jeff Hughes [00:06:17]:
That's all the great, great stuff. The challenge is selling it, because now instead of asking for, like, a $5,000 retainer, you might be asking for a $12,000 fee that's going to carry to a certain point in the future. Yeah, that's really difficult. That's a different conversation. You got to help the client understand the difference. This is apples and oranges. This is not apples to apples. So you can't compare our, quote, what we gave you as a fee to the.
Jeff Hughes [00:06:44]:
To the hourly fee retainer that you just heard down the road. So that becomes a real challenge. And the second challenge, and this is even bigger than the sales challenge. That is the practice of family law is much different when it's fixed fee versus hourly. When it's fixed fee, you have to be very proactive to move the case along, or else you got mad clients who. Cases are extending forever and they're getting a different. More. More cost involved.
Jeff Hughes [00:07:12]:
So that's. That's. That's contrary to how the family law bar operates. We're very reactionary to what the judge sets as a schedule or what the other client wants or what our client wants in terms of speed of the case and moving it along.
Darren Wurz [00:07:27]:
But I think clients love that. As someone who's been through that process and it took two years.
Jeff Hughes [00:07:36]:
Painful, right?
Darren Wurz [00:07:39]:
Speed is fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the sales. Like, how do you approach explaining this to clients? Is it. Is it a slide deck? Is it a chart? Is it.
Jeff Hughes [00:07:54]:
Oh, how do you question on that? We actually do have a chart that we show them, and it looks kind of like an oval racetrack, actually. And it's on my website. If you can go download it, we give it away for free. But it basically shows the client your case is going to have various stages to it. You know, you basically have the settlement stage, you have the litigation stage, you have the trial stage. That's kind of the best way to put it. About half the cases conclude in that first negotiation stage, like just exchanging information, reach a settlement. Done.
Jeff Hughes [00:08:27]:
Sometimes they're not right. You got to go and you got to litigate an aspect of your case, and then it gets you. Then 96% of cases are settled by the end of that. It's those small 4% that go into the trial stage that are very contentious and that sort of thing. So that really helps clients get a visual for what's coming. And we break it up and show, like, you know, this is whenever you have mediation, if you have children, and this is when you have a guardian appointed. If. If we need a guardian, and we kind of go through that.
Jeff Hughes [00:08:54]:
So that's. We. What we use as an aid to help clients get a visual and feel. Yeah. And understand the difference, though, how do.
Darren Wurz [00:09:01]:
You manage the fact that some cases might settle early, some may drag on and require going to court? Are they different fees? Are they all the same fee? How do you account for that?
Jeff Hughes [00:09:16]:
Yeah, well, it's taken us eight or so years to kind of figure out how to do that the most efficiently. But the best way to describe it is we break up a divorce into three stages, and we let the clients know where they're at in each stage. And for one, those that extend on, we've got like a sliding scale. If it goes beyond stage one, which is 50% of cases resolved there, and then what we'd ask for is, okay, they have to pay the second stage fee, but if it settles quicker, they get some of that back. It varies, but for sake of the audience, to give a visual, think of a divorce in three stages. We. We charge for the first stage up front. When we get to that second stage, if we need it, we charge for that and we get to the third stage and so forth.
Jeff Hughes [00:10:02]:
The key to getting that to work, though, is the client has to see activity and movement by the lawyer right away to get that case over with. If they feel and they sense that you're dragging your heels and you're not working hard for them, then they're going to complain. But if they know you're doing everything you can, you're communicating well, it's a much better experience. And then they're not so much. They get it. They don't like it. They don't like that second stage fee because it's. It's a big one.
Jeff Hughes [00:10:28]:
But they understand why that is the case.
Darren Wurz [00:10:32]:
Yeah, that's really cool. It also kind of incentivizes them to, you know, get it resolved.
Jeff Hughes [00:10:38]:
Yeah, probably.
Darren Wurz [00:10:39]:
Yeah. Yes.
Jeff Hughes [00:10:40]:
Yes. And because they're not charged for every bit of communication with us, the communication is. It's much better the. Than within an hourly model because I've been on both sides of it, so I can contrast both.
Darren Wurz [00:10:51]:
Yeah. How do you manage these cases? Do you have the lawyer doing the communication? Do you have somebody else on the team, kind of liaison, liaising with the client? How does that look like?
Jeff Hughes [00:11:03]:
That's the beauty of fixed fee is now we're not charging hours for lawyers and paralegals. So we have teammates that come in and handle many aspects of the case that can be done by people who aren't lawyers. And so they'll do a lot of the work, paperwork, behind the scenes, E filing, all that sort of stuff. A lot of most of the communication is done by the paralegal and the lawyer. And we have a lot of automated communication. We're just rolling out a client app right now. It's like, it's happening like as we speak. And that, that's all designed to over communicate with a client, which cuts down on their anxiety, first off, but it also cuts down on the lawyer time that's required.
Jeff Hughes [00:11:42]:
Communicate through the case with a client.
Darren Wurz [00:11:45]:
Okay, and how do you like to communicate? Is it through a software, through an app, or. Or through email?
Jeff Hughes [00:11:52]:
I think the clients drive that individually. So some of them are all text people. Some of them. I don't, I don't even have a. I don't know what a text is. Right. You got to communicate with them over the phone or in person. So it really is driven by the client.
Jeff Hughes [00:12:05]:
We try to match up.
Darren Wurz [00:12:07]:
Okay.
Jeff Hughes [00:12:07]:
Our communication responses and proactivity with what the client wants.
Darren Wurz [00:12:12]:
Makes sense. Very cool. Well, something that a lot of family law firm owners should definitely consider. And those are great statistics to know also. I mean, if most cases are resolving early, you do kind of mitigate some of that risk of things dragging on and becoming more expensive later, which is great. So let's transition and Talk about ownership and leading a law practice. Right. So so many law firm owners struggle making that leap from technician to true business owner.
Darren Wurz [00:12:51]:
When did that shift happen for you and what made it work?
Jeff Hughes [00:12:56]:
Well, there. And I. I don't have, like, a very relatable story here, so I will kind of put that caveat right up front.
Darren Wurz [00:13:03]:
Yeah. Okay.
Jeff Hughes [00:13:04]:
I practiced in a small firm with six lawyers, and I was one of the associates and became a partner right at the end, and I left. And then I came back into law about six years later.
Darren Wurz [00:13:14]:
Okay.
Jeff Hughes [00:13:14]:
So when I came back into law, I came back in right away as kind of the business on the business side. So I hired a lawyer and we just started practice. We wanted to scale it right away. We didn't. I had come from that satellite business that I had mentioned earlier that have started to fail. And so that's why I started the law firm. And I felt like I could scale it. So I.
Jeff Hughes [00:13:35]:
Since then, I've had very few clients that have been like my personal clients to have. I've done some cases in a court and all that stuff. But so I made that switch outside of law and came into law as I'm going to scale and build this firm with my partner, and away we went.
Darren Wurz [00:13:51]:
So nice.
Jeff Hughes [00:13:53]:
But I can share with you what I have seen. And I have seen that for most people, and I've seen a lot of family law firms. Okay. And. And really, most family lawyers greater than 50% just are not. They don't really want to do that. They don't want to scale it. They love practicing law.
Jeff Hughes [00:14:11]:
They want to be good lawyers. They want to stay technicians. So the reality is most of them never do that. They don't want to. They just simply don't want to. Those that do make that. That switch from being a technician working in the firm to working on the firm, that usually happens in growth. Somewhere around when they get about four or five lawyers on the team is when they start to really do that full time.
Jeff Hughes [00:14:35]:
But the mentality has to start before that where they got to be thinking billing process in order to bring lawyers in and introduce them to a process of how they do the law in their case. So that's what I've observed.
Darren Wurz [00:14:47]:
Yeah. Interesting. You came with a mindset already to be thinking as an owner. And you're right, not everybody wants to be an owner. Needs to be an owner, and that's okay. That's perfectly fine. So I think a lot of lawyers become owners accidentally. They think, I'm just gonna go practice law on my Own and then they find themselves running a business.
Jeff Hughes [00:15:13]:
Yeah, yeah.
Darren Wurz [00:15:15]:
Is that.
Jeff Hughes [00:15:16]:
They don't usually love that either, but that's by default. That's the best option for them. It's better for them to do that because they can run their own practice their way, and that's why I think they do that. But it is a day they don't think of it that way.
Darren Wurz [00:15:30]:
Let's say that's not what you love. Should you merge with another practice and just be a technician?
Jeff Hughes [00:15:40]:
I can't answer that. For individuals, I wouldn't say it's a blanket answer. They need to merge. But ideally, if you can find a group or a partner that is more business. Business inclined while you're more practice inclined, that way you both can play to your strengths. Yeah, lawyers have a hard time doing that over time, over a long period. You know, ego gets in the way and, you know, style gets in the way. And the business lawyer wants to grow it and the technician doesn't really want to grow it.
Jeff Hughes [00:16:09]:
They just want to practice law and they don't want the extra stress of having to train someone. Yeah, that was for. For us, that was our biggest constraint on growing it was getting a senior lawyer to train a junior lawyer, which is hard. It's incredibly hard to do that. Without question, that was our biggest challenge for 10 years, was that.
Darren Wurz [00:16:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. So let's say you are that solo law firm owner and you're doing everything yourself. What is the next. What's the most important step? Like, what's the next step you need to take if you do want to scale and grow, what's the first thing?
Jeff Hughes [00:16:48]:
I think you need to process out your own practice because that's what you want to duplicate. And so make building process, writing down at least some of the steps on how you do it to train someone else how to do it. And it's a leadership issue too. You can't lead others unless you can lead yourself. And that means discipline in those areas of building process, I believe, and how you go about practicing, you want someone else to do it that way too. So I think that's the first, very first square one step that you need to take.
Darren Wurz [00:17:20]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did you kind of have those processes set out from the beginning? Is that where you started when you wanted to scale?
Jeff Hughes [00:17:30]:
We had no processes from the beginning. We just started and let's. Our first lawyer was Dan Exner, and we just let him start practicing. And I was really concerned about the business side of it and getting clients in the door and building sales Process. And that's how I was thinking about it. We didn't come about that. I gave you that answer. But that answer took me quite a few years to really learn and be able to say with credibility and confidence.
Jeff Hughes [00:17:54]:
So hopefully people will take that and like, oh, I'm going to do that because I'll save years. And that's what you should do. So I didn't start that.
Darren Wurz [00:18:04]:
It doesn't have to be daunting. You know, I think, I think some law firm owners hearing this might think, oh my gosh, I've got to sit down and create these SOPs. It doesn't have to be like super involved.
Jeff Hughes [00:18:18]:
No, because absolutely not.
Darren Wurz [00:18:19]:
It'll be a work in progress. Right?
Jeff Hughes [00:18:21]:
Yeah. If you're a business minded lawyer, you're not going to want to do it anyway. I hate that stuff. I hate it. I totally hate it. But you at least need to have a rough sketch and you can find people that'll do it for you. Go on online. You can find people that'll do it.
Darren Wurz [00:18:33]:
That's true.
Jeff Hughes [00:18:33]:
Pretty cheap. Cheap. That'll write up those operating procedures you're talking about.
Darren Wurz [00:18:38]:
Definitely, definitely. So you have 27 attorneys now. How is running a firm of that size different from running a firm with, let's say, four or five attorneys?
Jeff Hughes [00:18:52]:
Well, for one, it's easier. I will point out that if you're a lawyer running that size of a firm, your hair's on fire most of the time. It's hard, it's hard to make that turn. And so, I mean, today we've got a lot of structure. You know, I've got a president who actually runs the firm day to day. I, I hate my own direct report. We have two outstanding managing partners who train and support all the lawyers. They don't practice, but maybe one or two cases every few cases.
Jeff Hughes [00:19:21]:
So. But it's taken us 11 years to build that structure and get there. Yeah. And I, you know, I want to give a lot of props and respect to those lawyers that are practicing at the same time they're trying to train four or five other lawyers to learn how to practice appropriately.
Darren Wurz [00:19:42]:
In that growth process. How have you had to evolve as a business leader? What are some of the key skills that you've had to acquire?
Jeff Hughes [00:19:52]:
Yeah, boy. When we started, I fancied myself as a really good leader and I thought the people side of the law firm would be, would be the easiest for me. And it turned out I was the opposite. It was, I was, I struggled to get the, the motivations and the Incentives lined up appropriately. I'm great and I've always been really good in like inspiring and connecting with my team. And I can go in a room and I could, you know, get everyone excited and connect with them and hear them and be, be present. But when it came to building the right incentives that lined up with what they wanted, I was consistently and mistakenly seeing their world from my point of view. And the things that motivate me aren't the things that motivate them.
Jeff Hughes [00:20:42]:
And I was trying to fit them into my mold and it just did not work. So understanding over time where I was really stubborn, my hitting my face against the wall was my biggest learning and growth was growing through that. And I still, I mean, I'm still bent the other direction. I still struggle with that. But I've got really great teammates around me that are great in those areas that do them well and can pick up where I'm weaker.
Darren Wurz [00:21:11]:
Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think one of the areas that we have to sort of change our thinking. You know, so many of us in professional services who own businesses, we're used to working hard. And when we're not working 60, 70 hour weeks, we feel, we feel a certain type of way. Feel guilty. Yeah. Or lazy. Right.
Darren Wurz [00:21:40]:
But I think this is a theory, work in progress theory. But I think at that level, you have to prioritize your health and your energy because it's your energy that's going to drive the team. I mean, you can't be down in the dumps. You've got to get it together and get to that team meeting and rah, rah, rah, and rally the troops.
Jeff Hughes [00:22:05]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, the higher you go up, the bigger your firm gets, the fewer privileges you have. You don't have the luxury of coming in and being dour and grumpy and yelling at your team and being not present. You just don't have that. You lost that privilege when you accepted leadership responsibilities. And you've got to think others first, not yourself first. The agenda's got to be for the team and not for individual. So it's contrarian thinking for you to succeed in a people business like we are in.
Jeff Hughes [00:22:37]:
Right. Because you're scaling with people and that's the hardest way to scale. You've got to be all about them. And the more you go up, the more you have to give up to go up. That's just the way it works.
Darren Wurz [00:22:48]:
Yeah. Have you ever had a moment where I know you're running a fabulously successful firm? Right. But have you Ever had a moment where it was just things were not working and you felt kind of discouraged, but you had to come in and lead the team and kind of just like put on a smile and fake it.
Jeff Hughes [00:23:11]:
Yeah, that. The moments that stick out to me, as you asked that question were when a few of our lawyers left. Not all at once, but over time. So the first big loss was this lawyer was. She was like our third lawyer we hired and she left. And that was like a gut punch. It took me weeks to recover from that. And she went to a competitor to help them grow their, their fixed fee business.
Jeff Hughes [00:23:35]:
And, and that was super, super, super hard to work through that because I took it so personally, you know, and she, and she didn't mean it personally. She saw it as an opportunity for herself and she was a little discouraged by some of the previous business decisions I had made where I had put her in a leadership role and pulled her out of it. A self, self inflicted. I did it and so I can see why she felt that way. And it was just. It, it was hard for me to work through that, quite honestly. That sticks. Sticks out.
Darren Wurz [00:24:03]:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. What are, what was maybe one of the other really big challenges in, in getting the firm to this stage? What's been one of the biggest hurdles that you've had to overcome?
Jeff Hughes [00:24:22]:
Covid was tough working through those first couple months of COVID that, that really sticks out to me.
Darren Wurz [00:24:27]:
Okay.
Jeff Hughes [00:24:28]:
Yeah. The other ones have come when we, we had to build systems and processes to, to bring up the junior lawyers. So we had to figure out a way to motivate financially and professionally our lead, our top lawyers to train and work with our younger, our younger lawyers. And so we were, we were. And I think it's like two years ago, two and a half years ago, we were struggling financially because we were spending so much to grow and we didn't have the bottom line to support that. And I was feeling like, oh man, we're going to go into a season, we're going to lose a lot of money. It was a Q4 of the year is always really tough. Coming into Q1 is kind of tough.
Jeff Hughes [00:25:08]:
And we were coming into that and I was freaking out, scared about it. And I knew we had to make a change to our comp plan because a comp plan was old. It had been built on a certain type of assumption where we didn't have a lot of support and we had built up a ton of support, a ton of expense, but we didn't change the top line comp plan for Our lawyer. So we're still paying them as if they had very little to no support where we had added all this expense. Okay. And I just ran through a comp plan, like we got to do it. So we got a month and a half to do it. We're just going to do it.
Jeff Hughes [00:25:42]:
That's, you know, for the most. The majority of our lawyers understood it. They, they saw that they didn't love it. Okay. No one loves a cut financially at all, but they knew that we majority of knew we had to, but some of them didn't. We lost one or two as a result of that.
Darren Wurz [00:25:59]:
Yeah.
Jeff Hughes [00:25:59]:
And you know, two years go by and our team does a, like a year's worth of work and they change the comp plan again. They did it the right way, slowly took everyone's input and it was, went off a million times better. So that, that moment where I just said, okay, this isn't popular, I don't really have a lot of support from anyone. But we're doing it because financially we have to. I think it was the right call. Even today, I'm not one. I wonder, could we have done it better? Yes. But we're coming in the year.
Jeff Hughes [00:26:30]:
You know, all those things are going on in my mind. So that, that sticks out to me as a moment where that was tough. Tough for everyone. Tough for the team, you know?
Darren Wurz [00:26:37]:
Right, right.
Jeff Hughes [00:26:38]:
Everyone.
Darren Wurz [00:26:39]:
That's incredible. Yeah. You know, sometimes as the leader, you, you do have to follow your gut instinct. And the, the team, the people around you might think you're crazy, but you just gotta, you gotta, you gotta listen to that lizard brain sometimes.
Jeff Hughes [00:26:57]:
Yeah. The other one was when we went from doing a bunch of different, different types of law to doing all family law and only fixed fee. And because we lost half our league, we had eight lawyers. We grew from zero to eight lawyers in 18 months, in our first 18 months. And we let four of our lawyers go, our half support team goes, all those 40% of our clients go and had a refund. All those clients. And so, you know, that was like an overnight kind of pivot that we had that we felt like we had to do. And so that, that was another one of those moments that we're just going to do it.
Darren Wurz [00:27:29]:
Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So now you know where you're at now. How are you thinking about and planning for the long term future of your law practice as an entity to continue on, you know, beyond you? What are your thoughts there?
Jeff Hughes [00:27:48]:
Well, we see, we see a big challenge is to crack the acquisition code, not A lot of law firms are transacted. Right. And we have the scale now and we could do that. So we are thinking about that a lot, planning for that. Financially, that's something that we're going to take our, take a run at. There's a lot of headwind on that, but we feel like we, we're going to give it a shot. So that's one thing. Another thing that we're doing is we're building an AI assist kind of a tool for our lawyers so they can serve more clients at A.
Jeff Hughes [00:28:24]:
About 65% of the market's unrepresented. And there's a fair amount of those that have the resources to hire a lawyer but choose not to. Or at least they can. They need some legal support, but they're choosing not to. We feel like we can target those with a, with a good product. So we're working on that. And that should launch in June. In June.
Jeff Hughes [00:28:43]:
Again, we're kind of reconstituting it. So that's, that's what I'm thinking a lot about. Yeah, so that's how I love that. Yeah. So going in the future, that's what, that's what we're doing.
Darren Wurz [00:28:53]:
And my next question was going to be how are you using AI? So that's perfect.
Jeff Hughes [00:28:58]:
Yeah, yeah. So we use it a lot in our practice. We, we have a, every other week we have an all team meeting. Everyone gets together and one of the segments we have in there is what's going on in AI. What's what, how. How we're using it within the firm. And so a lot of it's just one off stuff right now, But a good 70% of our lawyers are using it for a lot of their work.
Darren Wurz [00:29:20]:
Very cool. Well, I'm excited to hear how these new innovations go for you in growing your practice even further and to see what lies ahead. Jeff, I've got one last question for you before we go here. And we have a book club, the Lawyer Millionaire Book Club, which is free and open to any law firm owners who want to join. We read one book a quarter. Right now we're reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
Jeff Hughes [00:29:47]:
Oh, yeah, I've read that. Great book.
Darren Wurz [00:29:48]:
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic read. So, you know, I know law firm owners are mo. You know, most law firm owners are voracious readers. I'm curious, what are you reading right now?
Jeff Hughes [00:29:59]:
Oh, I. There's this podcast called the Soft White Underbelly, and it's these really crazy stories for in society where a lot of folks are really kind of on the in tough situations. They had a guest on there, this guy named Roger Reeves who was a drug smuggler back in the 70s 80s and had a wild life. And so he wrote a book and it's not, it's got these crazy stories in there. So I'm like loving going through the book and it's like a. Just a bunch of stories after one after another. It's not written great but the stories are so good you overlook some of that. So it's called Smuggler.
Jeff Hughes [00:30:36]:
So I'm reading that right now and that's not my normal read and I'm usually reading stuff like what? Like Shoe dog sort of book. So that's. This is kind of like an anomaly to what I normally read.
Darren Wurz [00:30:48]:
Yeah, but that's great. You know, you need other stuff to read. You can't just be. You need to take time out and let your brain take a break from thinking about business and growth and strategy all day long. So that's great. Love the recommendation and we'll certainly check it out. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Hughes [00:31:08]:
Oh, thank you Darren.
Darren Wurz [00:31:10]:
So before we wrap up, just share with us with our audience how listeners can learn more about you. Where should they go?
Jeff Hughes [00:31:19]:
They can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Jeff Hughes, go there and search Lawyer Wisconsin. I guess you might find me that way. You can go to my website jstirlinghughes.com and that's all for family lawyers. It's, it's kind of like a resource hub to help family lawyers. That would be another way. You can also email me directly at JHughes@sterlinglawyers.com, which is our website. Our firm website.
Darren Wurz [00:31:41]:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Jeff.
Jeff Hughes [00:31:44]:
Thank you Darren. It's great. It's been fun being a guest.
Darren Wurz [00:31:47]:
Well, a big thank you to Jeff Hughes for sharing his journey and insights with us. Be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn, visit his website or email him directly. Check the show notes for all the info. So here's my challenge to you. If you want to scale start documenting how you work so you can teach others to do it too. You know, building a business that works without you is the true path to wealth and freedom. At the Lawyer Millionaire, we help law firm owners like you grow profitable practices, create exit ready firms and align business success with personal financial freedom. Learn more about us@lawyermillionaire.com where you can download the first chapter of my book, the Lawyer Millionaire.
Darren Wurz [00:32:31]:
And if you haven't yet, join our free Lawyer Millionaire book club today. It's at lawyermillionaire.com. just click on community at the top. Who is the lawyer millionaire? It's you, my friend. Own it and live it. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. Thank you for joining me. See you next time.