Law Firm Owners: Stop $10/hr Work, Reclaim 100 Hours & $100k in Profit (Ep. 129)
As a law firm owner, there’s a good chance you’ve felt overwhelmed, stuck in the same revenue rut for years, or just plain burned out. The real culprit? Too much time spent on work someone else could do for a fraction of your billable rate. On this episode, I’ll show you how to identify and eliminate low-value tasks, free up your schedule, and boost your bottom line.
Why Law Firm Owners Run Out of Time (and Money)
Too many law firm owners believe the myth that being busy equals being productive. In reality, your time is your most valuable resource. I believe “you're not running out of time because you're too busy rather you're running out of time because you're doing the wrong things.”
Ask yourself:
How many hours last week did you spend on tasks someone else could do for $20 an hour?
The Buyback Principle: Take Back Your Time
The fastest way to build wealth and scale your law firm isn’t by working more hours; it's by buying back your time. That means hiring strategically not just to expand your team, but to delegate the tasks that keep you from focusing on high-value work.
What You Should Be Doing?
Building client relationships
Closing high-value cases
Designing your firm’s growth strategy
What You Should Stop Doing?
Scheduling appointments
Scanning documents
Answering routine emails
When you continue doing $10 or $20 per hour tasks, you pay a hidden price. For example, if your billable rate is $400 an hour and you spend even one hour a day on admin work, that’s $104,000 in lost earnings each year.
How to Audit and Reclaim Your Time
Step 1: Track Your Time
For one week, log every task you complete in 15 to 30 minute increments. If you are honest, you’ll likely discover that you spend more time on admin work than you realized.
Step 2: Categorize Tasks
Sort each activity into:
Low-value ($10/hour): Repetitive admin, scheduling, scanning, routine emails.
Mid-value ($100/hour): Delegable but necessary legal work.
High-value ($1,000/hour): Business development, high-level strategy, big client interactions.
Step 3: Color Code and Prioritize
Identify what only you can do, what you can delegate, and most importantly what you should delegate because it’s draining your focus or energy.
Overcoming Common Hiring Roadblocks
“It’s faster if I do it myself.”
Yes, you’ll be the quickest at first. But once you train your team, they’ll catch up and may even outpace you at the tasks you dislike.
“Only I can do it.”
You learned everything you do now so can someone else. Your real responsibility as a leader is to teach, develop, and invest in your team so the business can thrive without you.
When Is the Right Time to Hire?
Don’t wait for the breaking point. If you’re working nights, weekends, or turning away business, you’ve crossed the “pain line.” Hire before you start losing out on growth opportunities or burning out. Waiting until everything is perfect only keeps you stuck.
The Real Payoff: Profit and Peace of Mind
Law firm owners who delegate effectively do more than increase profit. They avoid burnout, build real business value, and make room for the work that drives growth. Instead of just working hard, they work on the right things.
Ready to Take Back Your Time?
Start with these simple steps:
Download a Time Audit Worksheet: (We provide a free template link is in the resources.)
Track your time for the next 7 days.
Identify five tasks to delegate or eliminate this month.
The most successful law firm owners are not the busiest—they’re the ones sailing their yacht or vacationing while their firms run without them. The journey starts by seeing your time as your most valuable currency.
Enter to win:
The Lawyer Millionaire Listener Challenge
Resources:
Connect with Darren Wurz:
Transcript:
Darren Wurz [00:00:00]:
You're not running out of time because you're too busy. You're running out of time because you're doing the wrong things. Welcome to the Lawyer Millionaire podcast, helping law firm owners build their businesses and their wealth. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. How many hours did you spend last week doing work someone else could have done for $20 an hour? For many law firm owners, the answer is too many. And it's costing you not just money but momentum. Hey there, lawyer Millionaires, I've got a fun challenge for you. Leave a review of this podcast and share your favorite episode with a friend or on social media.
Darren Wurz [00:00:37]:
Then head on over to lawyermillionaire.com/challenge to upload your proof. You could win $100 gift card, a signed copy of my book, or even a private strategy session with me. The link is in the show notes. Jump in and get your entry in today. Alright, friend. Well, welcome back to the show. I'm excited that you're here with me today. And today's very exciting because we're kicking off a three part series on the latest book that we've been reading in the Lawyer Millionaire Book Club.
Darren Wurz [00:01:06]:
Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martel. Well, the reason this relates to law firm owners is that the fastest way to grow your law firm isn't by working more hours, it's by buying back your time. You know, hiring is one of the biggest challenges that law firm owners face. And maybe you're facing a hiring decision right now yourself. You know, maybe you're a solo and you're thinking about hiring your first attorney. Or maybe you have a paralegal, you have an executive assistant and you know, you need to grow, you know, you need to bring somebody on to help you with the client delivery work. But it's just scary. It's a big jump, it's a big risk.
Darren Wurz [00:01:46]:
And are you ready to take that jump? Are you ready to take that risk? And how do you go about it and when do you know that you're ready? Well, in this series we're going to help you unravel all of those mysteries with the help of our friend Dan Martel and his great book that he's written, Buy Back youk Time. You know, I just love this book because this book was instrumental to me as I was first making my first hire. Actually, I read Dan's book before I made my first hire, which was my executive assistant. And let me tell you something, it changed my life. It changed the entire practice. And today I have a team of Five. And it's so incredible to see how that team is able to operate and execute and work together and figure things out without me. That's the funnest thing of all, when I can see my team getting things done without me and they can say, yeah, we got together and we worked on this problem and here's what we came up with.
Darren Wurz [00:02:45]:
I'm like, wow, Go team. That is one of the most awesome places to get to as a business owner, but it's not an easy journey. And so, as you may know, we have our book club, the Lawyer Millionaire Book Club, which if you're not a member yet, by the way, you need to be a member. Okay, we're reading. We read one book a quarter, and this quarter we're reading Dan Martell's book Buyback your Time. We just had a networking event with our book club members last week and I opened the floor. I said, you know, this is a great opportunity to share a challenge that you've been facing and get some collective wisdom from the group. Does anyone have a challenge that they'd like to share? And one of our book club members piped up and said, you know what? I know I need to hire, but I'm not really sure how to go about it and I don't know how to get started.
Darren Wurz [00:03:37]:
And. And it seems like a big risk. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is perfect. Read the book, buy back your time, because it gives you such a great roadmap for scaling and growing your team. And that's why we're reading it in the book club. Because you know what? Law firm owners are busy. And I bet you're busy too, right? And so the biggest thing you can do is to buy back your time. And so often we go about it the wrong way.
Darren Wurz [00:04:04]:
We grow our firm because we need help over here, we need help over there, or we think it's what we need to do. I hate the Inc. 5000's one of their ways of ranking companies is based on team size. I mean, team size is not all there is to it. You're not just growing a team for the sake of growing a team. You're growing a team to free up your time. That's the buyback principle. So what is the buyback principle? Well, the buyback principle says you don't hire to grow your firm.
Darren Wurz [00:04:33]:
You hire to get back your time so that you can focus on the high value work that only you can do. There's certain things only you can do. And as you continue to Buy back your time. The value of your time continues to elevate, and you're going to go higher and higher into higher levels of firm ownership and business leadership. The purpose of hiring isn't to make you busier. And I hear this a lot, too, from law firm owners. Maybe this is something that you're facing, right? I don't want to hire. I don't want to grow, because that just means more work.
Darren Wurz [00:05:05]:
I'm going to be busier, and I'm going to hate my life. I just want to stay small. And there's nothing wrong with staying small and staying a solo and staying right there and having a lifestyle type of business. There's nothing wrong with that. But the purpose of hiring is not supposed to be to make you busier. It's to free up your time. And my heart aches for law firm owners everywhere because I see so many law firm owners who stay stuck in the same exact place for years, maybe even decades, because they haven't figured out how to delegate and hire. They're still living in the world of only I can do it, and I can do it faster than anybody else.
Darren Wurz [00:05:48]:
But guess what? There's only one you. And so you're going to have to find a way to clone yourself. You're going to have to find a way to pass on things and delegate things. This is the case with one of my clients that I'm working with and this particular firm owner. I know what he needs to do. I know the steps that he needs to take. He's been working in his firm for a long, long time. He's getting closer to retirement.
Darren Wurz [00:06:18]:
He's probably five to 10 years away from retirement age. I mean, he's been doing this a long time. He's had a long career. But guess what? He's been stuck at the same revenue level for the past 20 years, and he just lost some team members. And now he's busier than ever, and he's shrinking. He's pulling back, and I can't get him to think bigger. It's a very difficult. It's a difficult shift in your mindset.
Darren Wurz [00:06:47]:
I acknowledge that, and I understand that. And maybe you're in that same place. And my heart yearns for you because I know that you can get unstuck from that place. I know that you can make a shift. I know that you can buy back your time. I know you can do it because I've done it. And I've seen other law firm owners who've done it also. The most successful law Firm owners are not the ones working 70, 80 hours a week, working on nights and weekends, never able to take a vacation, working on vacation.
Darren Wurz [00:07:20]:
I just had a call with somebody this morning who is. That's her dilemma. She is approaching RMD age, but she has not been able to delegate and free up time for herself. These are real people and there's a lot of you out there. Every minute that you spend on scheduling, scanning or answering low level emails is time that you're not closing high value cases, you're not building referral relationships, you're not steering your firm's growth strategy. Let me give you an example. If your billable rate is $400 an hour, and I just talked to somebody today, she's like, oh, you know, I only spend maybe 30 minutes a day on admin work. Okay, let's go with it.
Darren Wurz [00:08:08]:
Let's say it's an hour because we all lie, right? We all think we do less admin work than we actually do. Okay, let's be real. Let's say your bill will raise $400 an hour and you're spending one hour a day on admin work. That's five hours a week. That's $104,000 in lost earnings going to admin work. Okay, follow the math with me. Five hours a week on admin, 52 weeks in a year, that's costing you $2,000 a week or $104,000 a year now. Okay, well, I'd have to hire somebody to do those tasks.
Darren Wurz [00:08:47]:
Okay, granted. So let's say you hire somebody at $20 an hour to do that admin work, which you can definitely do. It could be someone here in the United States, could be someone in the Philippines or anywhere. Outsource it, right? Okay, so $20 an hour, your cost to hire that person is $5200 a year. So if you were able to get that off of your plate, free up your time, bill that extra one hour a day, your net gain would be $98,800 a year, almost $100,000 in lost revenue. But there's bigger relevance. The bigger relevance is burnout. So many law firm owners are facing burnout.
Darren Wurz [00:09:33]:
Are you struggling to keep going, to keep the energy going? I hear it in your voice. You say, I love what I do. I'm going to keep doing it until I die. But you're going home every night exhausted, you don't have any energy for your family, and you're just plunking down on your pillow and falling asleep. The bigger problem is what Dan Calls the pain line in his book. The pain line is the point at which business owners stop growing or even start to sabotage their own growth. Because growing anymore is painful. Ooh, when I read that, I just felt it.
Darren Wurz [00:10:15]:
Sometimes we sabotage our own businesses subconsciously. We don't even realize that we're doing it, but we're turning down clients, we're turning down opportunities. We're not completing things we need to because we are in pain and because adding more business is pain. And I see a lot of folks here who are turning away business. They're like, I'm so busy. I'm busier than I've ever been. And it's the attorneys that are mid career to late stage career. And maybe you're there, you're busier than ever, you're making more money than ever, but you're actually having to turn clients away, and you actually want to retire someday.
Darren Wurz [00:10:56]:
And maybe your clients have told you, no, you can't go anywhere. You're not allowed to retire. If this is hitting home for you, stick around because I'm going to be giving away my free law firm time audit worksheet at the end. So you can put this in action today. Let's talk specifics. What can you do? So what I want you to do and what you can do to really help yourself get started on this process, you really need to figure out how much time you're wasting. It's the same thing with money. It's the same exact thing with money.
Darren Wurz [00:11:26]:
And this is what's so amazing to me, is I see the same concepts in financial planning as I see in business planning. And that's why we do both of these things, because the concepts are there. I ask people, how much. What are your average monthly expenses? And they lie. They always lie. They don't lie knowingly, but they have no idea or they vastly underestimate what their actual spending is. We underestimate our spending. Oh, you know, I have the mortgage and then this and that.
Darren Wurz [00:11:56]:
I was talking to somebody this morning and I was asking her, you know, what's, how much you spend on average each month? And she was like, well, see, there's the mortgage and then there's this and there's that. That's about $5,000 a month. And I'm like, are you sure? And then she was like, oh, wait, I forgot food. Well, yeah, you got to eat. Okay. So there are so many things that we spend money on that we forget about that we don't know about. And so that's why one of the most foundational, fundamental things that we do with law firm owners is help them track their spending. You don't have to have a budget.
Darren Wurz [00:12:27]:
We can help you with budgeting, help you put together a budget and follow a budget. But the bigger and more important thing is to know what you're spending. And just like money, we need to know how we're spending our time. So you're going to do a time audit. Step one is the one week time audit. You're going to track every task that you do for five to seven days in 15 to 30 minute increments. Tag each task as $10 an hour, low value or repetitive work. Okay? The next is your mid tier.
Darren Wurz [00:13:02]:
That's like $100 an hour work, which is necessary work, but stuff that could be delegated to somebody who's knowledgeable and trainable. And the last is the thousand dollar an hour work. That's the high tier stuff. That's the stuff that only you can do. Dealing with high end client relationships, driving the growth. Right? Three tiers. Now the dollar amounts don't really matter, but low, medium, high. Step two, color code these things, color code them.
Darren Wurz [00:13:33]:
Mark the things that only you can do. Owner only. So you have three things. One color for owner only. Another color for things you could delegate. Doesn't require your skill set. And then the third are things that you should delegate. Oh, what does that mean? Let's back up a minute.
Darren Wurz [00:13:52]:
Because you don't enjoy every task that you're doing right now. I'll say that again, you don't really enjoy every task that you're doing right now. So the should delegate. Color is for the things that you should delegate because they hurt your focus or they zap your energy. Those are the things you've got to get off your plate. And you've got to get them off your plate now. Okay? And then you're going to review, you're going to review, you're going to scan through that, you're going to look and you're going to find things that you can delegate, you can give to somebody else. I did this, by the way, probably three, four years ago.
Darren Wurz [00:14:31]:
I did this before I hired my executive assistant. I did this in my business. I did the time audit because I didn't think, I don't really need an executive assistant. Why do I need an executive assistant for? And I did it and I realized, wow, there's so much, so much time being wasted on non productive, non revenue generating tasks. So that's what you're going to do. And in the show notes, we have a link to that resource. You can create your own or you can use ours. We put together a template for you.
Darren Wurz [00:15:07]:
Let's go a little bit deeper. Let's talk about the pain line versus the capacity line. When do you need to hire? You know, I see so many, I hear so many rules about when you should hire, right? You need to have six months of your employees wages saved up or even a year's worth of employee wages saved up. Okay. I mean, there are some financial metrics that might be helpful, but you're never going to hire if you wait to have a year's worth of employee wages saved up or it'll be too late. The bigger question is the pain line versus the capacity line. Higher before you hit the breaking point, before you start turning away work or working nights and weekends just to keep up. Higher before that point.
Darren Wurz [00:15:48]:
Okay. Higher before you've maxed out your capacity. Well, maybe, you know, once you're reaching capacity, but before you've hit the pain line. But so many people struggle with this. Let's talk about why they struggle. There's a couple of traps. There's a couple of traps, right? The first trap is it's faster if I do it myself. Yes, yes, it is.
Darren Wurz [00:16:18]:
You will always be the fastest at doing the things that you are good at. Always. I've seen this in my business. I can fly through tasks super fast. When I first started handing things off, I was like, gosh, something that's taking only take me 10 minutes, take one of my employees an hour. But that's because they need to be trained and they need experience. Once they gain experience and they practice, they will get faster. But when they start out, be prepared, be prepared.
Darren Wurz [00:16:48]:
They're going to be slow at doing things. They're not going to be able to do things at your pace. And that's okay. They maybe never will. Okay. But as you grow your business further, let me tell you a little secret. As you grow your business further, you will start to find people that are actually faster at doing things than you are. The things you hate to do, someone's faster at doing that than you.
Darren Wurz [00:17:13]:
They can do it faster and for less money. Billing, emailing, communicating, I don't know, whatever it is, the thing that you hate doing in your business, the thing that you're always procrastinating about, it's at the bottom of your to do list. Or maybe it's at the top of your to do list and you're like, get to it. It's the email in your inbox that you've let it stay there because you're like, I'm going to get to that eventually. The things that you hate doing, someone else is faster at doing those things. Okay? But you are going to be faster at doing a lot of things. When you first hire people, they're going to be a lot slower, but over time, you're going to find that the people you hire are smarter than you and they're faster than you. I found that in my business, my team members, I'm still pretty smart.
Darren Wurz [00:18:05]:
Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty darn smart. But there are things that my team members are smarter at and better at than I am in huge ways. Huge ways. And especially the things that I don't love doing. My mother always told me something, and maybe your mother told you the same thing, I don't know. But what she said. One of my mother isms was, if you want it done right, do it yourself. Usually this was said when she was not happy with the way I had done something right.
Darren Wurz [00:18:40]:
And many of us, I don't know, maybe you heard this in childhood and you started believing it, that if you want it done right, you got to do it yourself. It's wrong, by the way. It's wrong. You know, we're so blinded by our own perceptions. We think that we're the best and the fastest at doing the things that we do, and we think that no one else can do them as good or can do them as fast as we do. Until you actually get out there and start hiring quality people. And there are. I will never, ever accept this lie if you tell me this lie if you tell me there's just nobody good out there, there's no good lawyers to hire.
Darren Wurz [00:19:17]:
Bullshit. Bullshit. There are fantastic, hard working, incredible people out there waiting to be a part of your team. You just have to go hire them. Stop telling yourself and stop telling me or anybody else that there just aren't good employees these days, that these millennials or these whatever, just. They're just lazy. Oh, shut up. I have a millennial on my team.
Darren Wurz [00:19:49]:
Well, actually, I am millennial, but I have someone younger than me on my team. What is that, Gen Z? Yeah. And let me tell you something, she is faster at doing everything she does than I could ever be. Her name's Stacy, by the way. Shout out to Stacy. You're awesome. Another trap that we fall into is the only I can do it trap. Only I can do it.
Darren Wurz [00:20:15]:
It's a lie. You have a unique way of Doing things. Yes. You have a skill set that you acquired, but you didn't always know how to do what you did. Someone taught you or you learned. And so it's not a disconnect. It's not innate. You were not born knowing how to litigate or how to do X, Y and Z.
Darren Wurz [00:20:37]:
You didn't come out of the womb knowing how to do this, my friend. You learned. Someone taught you. So teach someone else. You've got to summon your inner teacher. Summon your inner. What's the word? There's a better word. Sensei.
Darren Wurz [00:20:51]:
Yes. Become the sensei. When you hire, you become a leader. And your employees. Your job is to lead them and guide them. Your job is not to reprimand them. They're not machines that just are supposed to perform tasks for you. You are responsible for their growth and development.
Darren Wurz [00:21:16]:
Maybe I have this understanding because I came from the world of education. I taught 8th and 9th grade science for five years before I started my own business. Be a teacher. Take on the teacher role in your business. Invest in the development and growth of your people because your people are one of the most valuable aspects of your business. We've talked on this show before when we talked about how to value a law firm. We talked about intangible capital, which, by the way, is 85% of your firm's value. Okay.
Darren Wurz [00:21:51]:
And that's not just saleable value, but the value value in terms of your firm's ability to continue to produce revenue. And there are four key pieces of intangible revenue. Intangible capital. My bad. And one of those is human capital. The more you invest in and develop your team members, the more loyalty they have to your business and to your brand. The greater their institutional knowledge and skills and talent becomes, the more value they'll have to you and to your business. Only I can do it.
Darren Wurz [00:22:26]:
Nonsense. Because as Dan says in his book Buy back youk time, 80% done by somebody else is 100%. Awesome. You can still be involved in the process. You do the initial 10%, someone else handles the bulk of it. The 80%, you come in at the end and put on your finishing touches. The last 10%. But, you know, many of us are used to working.
Darren Wurz [00:22:49]:
We're used to being busy. And so being busy is what feels right and feels normal. There's a lot of psychology to this. And when we're not feeling busy, we feel ineffectual. We feel like losers. Oh, my gosh, there's nothing for me to do. So we find things for ourselves to do. But being Busy has nothing to do with being productive and it hides inefficiency.
Darren Wurz [00:23:14]:
And friends, this is the ladder to real wealth. If you want to grow real wealth in your business and outside of your business, you've got to start replacing those $10 tasks with thousand dollar an hour work that only you can can do that will effectively, that will skyrocket your effective hourly rate and accelerate your wealth building. So here's what to do right now. Go download the Law Firm Time Audit worksheet. Commit to tracking everything for the next seven days. Circle your top five should delegate tasks and pick one. Pick one thing that you're going to delegate or eliminate this month by the end of August. Okay, let's do it.
Darren Wurz [00:23:57]:
Let's delegate The Most Successful Law Firm Owners Remember this. The most successful law firm owners aren't the ones who work the hardest. They're the ones who work on the right things. As I said, the most successful law firm owners, the wealthiest law firm owners I know are not the ones working 80 hours a week in their business. They're sailing their yacht in the Mediterranean while their law firm runs itself. And how you get there is by buying back your time. If you want to scale your firm, protect your time and build your wealth. Because that's what it's really all about, right? You have to start seeing your time as your most valuable currency.
Darren Wurz [00:24:35]:
This is exactly what we help clients do, both in your firm and in your financial life. We can help you get a lot of that financial planning stuff off of your plate and help you start thinking about how to scale and grow so you can get unstuck and start building real wealth. If you enjoyed today's episode, you will love our book club. I'm just telling you, you will love it even more. Join and we have a live discussion coming up which you can join in on. So join in. The live discussion on Buy Back youk Time is happening live on Zoom on Friday, September 19th at 3pm Eastern. You are all invited.
Darren Wurz [00:25:17]:
All you have to do is join the community@community.lawyermillionaire.com and you'll get an invite and you don't want to miss it. You're going to meet great, fantastic law firm owners from all across the country. Have an opportunity to interact, share ideas, get ideas and it'll be a blast. Plus you'll be in the community, which would be just phenomenal. And don't forget to join the Lawyer Millionaire Listener challenge@lawyermillionaire.com challenge for a chance to win prizes and even coaching time with me. Help us out. If you love this show, share it. Get it out there.
Darren Wurz [00:25:55]:
Get the news out there, get the word out there, help us spread the word and get this show to more law firm owners who need to hear this valuable message. Now, I've just got one last question for you, friend. Who is the lawyer millionaire? That's right. It's you, my friend. Own it and live it. I'm your host, Darren Wirtz. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you next time.