Sollertis is the Law Firm and Legal Team business owners have been crying out for, with a Quarterback as Chief Counsel calling the plays across business and personal fronts for your clients, it offers the most holistic legal strategy for elite and executive individuals. This legal quarterback is your personal direct contact and oversees the moves by the many advisors in your life.
WHO IS SOLLERTIS?
The “Main Street” Type of Lawyers Who Get to Know You
Everyone loves a leisurely stroll down Main Street. The shops, the cafes, the restaurants, all lining a pedestrian friendly street adorned with impeccable building facades. Family, children, and friendly strangers and shopkeepers. You have nowhere to be, and no particular place to go. You are just enjoying the moment. Main Street USA is such an incredible pastime that Walt Disney built the entrance to Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, in this very fashion.
Clients love Main Street. Clients want a close and personal relationship with their attorney. Clients want to come into the law office and be met by someone they know who is ready to engage in a conversation about the weather, arts and entertainment, sports, news, family, work, travel and numerous other topics. They want attorneys who know their interests, the names of their kids and where they went on vacation. They want to have coffee with their attorney, dine over lunch at a favorite restaurant, golf, attend concerts and be made to feel they are special. They want an attorney who is also a friend.
Any why shouldn’t you? You’re special!
Each and every client has his or her own unique story of getting to where they are. This is the part about the initial consultation that I enjoy most.
So, where did you grow up? Where did you go to college? How did you happen to choose your line of work? Where did you meet your spouse? How have you enjoyed being a parent?
I love asking these basic questions and listening while they share the details of their life story.
This typically leads to even more interesting questions.
What was it like being in the military? How did you get the capital to start your business? How did life change when your youngest kid left for college?
It’s through these questions that you develop trust and rapport with your clients and without trust and rapport, it’s nearly impossible for any lawyer to effectively represent you the “Quarterback” type of way.
Plus, the better we get to know a client, the better we will know the risk tolerances, what makes a client comfortable and what makes them uneasy, and the better we at Sollertis are able to help a client use our services to meet their objectives.
The “Wall Street” Type of Lawyers Who Already Know Your Industry
But Main Street doesn’t always work for attorneys. As much as they would love to provide this level of service for their clients, it’s just not conducive to the operation of a hustling bustling law practice.
For starters, good attorneys have many clients and are very busy keeping up with their casework. They have packed calendars with nearly every minute accounted for. They schedule phone calls on their driving commutes, they bring laptop work on their airplane trips, and they can easily be spotted in the courthouse reading briefs and other legal documents while waiting for their case to be called.
With such packed schedules, they are only going to have a pre-scheduled amount of time to meet or speak with their clients so they need to minimize small talk to ensure the agenda is covered.
Aside from the fact that attorneys are just too darn busy to deliver Main Street to their clients, it just does not make sense economically. With so many attorneys and so much competition for clients, it costs a lot of money for marketing, advertising and business development to obtain new clients. And the support staff to help you serve those clients is not cheap. Associate attorneys and paralegals are highly educated and well compensated. Malpractice insurance is expensive and so are professional office leases and all of that technology needed to operate a law practice.
With so much overhead involved in operating a law practice, it’s just not affordable for the attorney to sacrifice fee producing casework time for Main Street relationship time. In fact, many attorney communications with clients are by email only, or are channeled through a secretary, paralegal or associate attorney.
So, how do we solve this problem? How do we let the attorneys operate the Wall Street law office but also give the client the Main Street law experience?
THE SOLLERTIS QUARTERBACK
At Sollertis, our Chief Counsel will serve as your primary point of contact, quarterbacking a select team of experienced attorneys, who handle all of the underlying legal work. Let’s explain how it works.
We work in teams of three, comprised of a Chief Counsel (this is your quarterback), a Private Practice Attorney (we call them each a “PPA”), and a Paralegal.
Our Chief Counsel is responsible for delivering Main Street to clients, developing trust and rapport with our clients, getting to know them, helping them to identify their objectives and to develop a strategy for meeting those objectives. Then, they turn the project over to the PPA assigned to the team who performs the majority of the legal services necessary to meet the objectives. Typically, the Chief Counsel will perform about 15% of the attorney work and the PPA will perform about 85% of the attorney work. The Paralegal assigned to the team assists both the Chief Counsel and the PPA in the performance of their casework.
So, while the PPA and Paralegal are busy working in the Wall Street office, the Chief Counsel’s time is freed up to supervise the project and ensure the team and the client are on the same page while working towards the client’s objectives.
Most importantly, the Chief Counsel, without having to be involved in the day-to-day details of the project, is available to communicate with clients by text/phone or in person meetings to ensure the client is getting the Main Street experience!
But delivering the Main Street experience is just the beginning. Once we implemented our quarterbacking model years ago, we learned many other ways our Quarterbacks are able to benefit our clients.
Getting the Attorneys on the Same Page
Many times clients have multiple attorneys. An estate planning attorney to help with their wills, trusts and probate. An attorney to help with their business. An attorney to help with their real estate. An attorney to help with their tax audit. An attorney to represent them in a lawsuit or dispute matter.
The issues that one attorney addresses often overlap with the issues that the second and third attorneys are handling. But identifying what issues overlap and with what particular attorney can be challenging and time consuming, especially because each attorney does not know what each other attorney is doing, and may not even know the other attorneys or the issues they are helping with even exist.
This is where your Sollertis Quarterback, your Chief Counsel, can be of help.
Since we need to know about all of your assets in order to help you protect them, we will be uniquely positioned to help you coordinate the efforts of all of your attorneys. In some cases this involves counseling you and/or providing you with a to do list, but in other cases our clients have asked us to communicate directly with the attorneys to ensure the coordination of all efforts. In fact, for some clients who desire to minimize their time speaking with attorneys so they can spend their time on other matters that are of more importance to them, we handle all communications with all attorneys and our clients only speak with us.
After all, who better to quarterback all of the attorneys than another attorney who speaks the same language and understands all of the legal issues?!
Getting the Professionals on the Same Page
It does not stop with attorneys. Once we started quarterbacking all of the legal counsel, it was just a matter of time before our clients asked us to quarterback their other professionals such as:
- CPAs
- Financial Advisors
- Insurance Brokers
- Real Estate Brokers
After all, while our clients typically work with one of each of these professionals, we work with many of them on a daily basis. One of the challenges these professionals all face is getting in touch with their client. So, the professional advisors also benefit from our clients engaging Sollertis to quarterback as it gets them quicker information, documentation and decisions they need to better serve you.
When we are quarterbacking these professionals, especially with respect to a transaction or deal that you are doing, it allows you to spend your time on other matters that are important to you, such as operating your business, while we get the deal closed for you.
Quarterback as Ambassador
Think of our Quarterback as your ambassador to our firm. From the very beginning, your Sollertis Quarterback will help you use our firm to serve your needs. Here are some of the benefits to you:
- Fee Agreement. We all know the attorney’s fee agreement is a legal document, a contract between you and your attorney. Like any contract, it is typically long and contains a lot of terms that you may not understand. At Sollertis, your Quarterback is going to help you understand how we do business so you can make an intelligent decision as to whether we are the right fit for you. We know we are not the right fit for everyone, so if we are not the right fit for you that is okay. But, by helping you understand how we do business up front, you can decide if we are the right fit for you before you enter into a fee agreement with us. This is much better for you and us as we would not want you to find out later, after you have already hired us and we have provided services, that we are not the right fit for you.
- Status Report. One of the biggest complaints from legal clients is that they do not know what is going on with their case, that their attorney is not keeping them in the loop. Of course, to what extent a client wants to be kept informed is different for everyone. At Sollertis, your Quarterback is going to discuss your preferences with you. We typically report to our clients once each month by delivering to them a written Status Report which sets forth all pending projects and the status of each. But some clients want a more frequent report, perhaps twice a month, and other clients want a less frequent report, perhaps once a quarter. Your Quarterback, again, acting as your ambassador to help you use Sollertis to suit your needs, is going to help you decide the frequency of reporting which sometimes may include more frequent reporting on some projects and less frequent reporting for other projects. We can also involve you in more or less emails depending upon your preferences.
- Project Lists. To ensure that all projects get completed in their entirety, with nothing falling through the cracks, and to ensure that each project is completed efficiently (translation: with minimal fees), we use a detailed project list for each project we are asked to handle. Our project list is a comprehensive list, in sequence, of each task that we must complete in order to complete the project. Before we start working on any project, your Quarterback will review and approve the project list to ensure that your objectives are being met. In some instances, we will send the project list to you for review, and sometimes to your CPA or other advisors, before we start working on the project to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Invoices. Your Quarterback will review all of your invoices to ensure that the work being performed is consistent with your instructions and with the project lists, that the right person, i.e., the PPA or the Paralegal, is completing each task so that the work is being done efficiently. For certain projects, your Quarterback will help you establish a budget and will thereafter work with the PPA and Paralegal to ensure that the legal fees remain within your budget.
These are just some of the ways that your Sollertis Quarterback will act as your ambassador to help you get the most out of Sollertis.
And it doesn’t end there.
Your Quarterback will also help you to get the most out of your other professional relationships, such as those with your other attorneys, CPA, financial advisor, insurance broker, and real estate broker, often by helping you understand what services you need, and what services you don’t need, and then negotiating with them on your behalf to ensure that you are only paying for what you need and that you are receiving competitive pricing.
You’re busy operating and growing your businesses and simply don’t have the bandwidth to properly address each of your advisors individually, so put a quarterback at the helm.
Explore your Sollertis Quarterback options today, at Sollertis.com.
This material has been prepared by Sollertis for informational purposes only and nothing herein is intended as legal advice for any particular or individual situation. You should not rely upon any information herein as a source of legal advice, and receipt of any such information does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and Sollertis. Viewers and readers should not act upon this information without seeking professional legal counsel. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
