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This is maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Welcome back to another Saturday episode of Maxim Lawyer. And today I am responding to another text message I got, which I'll get into in a moment. We're going to be talking about premium offers that you can offer to your law firms. Going to give some examples. I'm going to leave the rest to your creativity, but I think it's going to be a good one to kind of get you thinking about premium offers you can make, why you can make them, things like that. I think it's going to be a really good one for you. Before we get into that, as I said, this is an episode that we got because or I'm doing because I got a text message from one of our listeners. They texted the the texting line which is 3145-0192-6031-4501-9260 that is also in the show notes so you don't have to memorize it. But I would save it if I were you because it'll just save you some time. In texting the show. You can also go to maximumlawyer.com ask and you can submit your questions, your comments. So it doesn't really matter if you're just starting out. If you've been doing this for a while and you just want to mention something, either comment on it or ask me something or you know, give me a topic you want me to cover. I'm happy to do it if we can fit it into the show. So that's where this one came from. So let's get into it. This week's Topic. It came from Fernanda Bueno, who heard our recent episode on revenue per employee rpe. You may have seen that on the thumbnail and wanted more information about premium offers that law firms can provide. And originally we had I was going to focus this on personal injury because I thought it'd be kind of interesting because personal injury is sort of a different beast. How however, I am going to tailor this to all law firms because I want to make sure that it's applicable to everyone. And I'll kind of squeeze in some ideas for personal injury attorney just because we don't get paid up front. So, you know, as most of you know, contingency firms, we don't get paid up front. But there are other types of contingency firms, not just injury firms. They're, you know, employment firms. I know that you all get paid on a contingency for the most part, I believe. I think there is a combination some employment firms that get paid hourly. But I'm going to try to give this a sort of a broader approach that people can take away from. So here we go. And let's talk about sort of some premium services or premium upsells and the reasons why you'd want to do this. First of all, it's going to give you higher value engagements. So you're going to be able to take higher level services. You're going to be able to charge higher fees for them. And this is going to allow you to, to really handle fewer cases. So you're able to up your level of service, provide service to less clients if you, if you want to. That way you're less busy and you're actually focusing more on the work. And this is going to allow you to, or if I guess it's also going to allow you to, if you are don't care about reducing the number of cases you're handling, this is just going to allow you to get a higher return on your existing cases. All right. That's another way of looking at, so we're, we're really talking about, you know, premium services or premium upsells. And that's a way of looking at it. Premium services is I think, the way I mentioned it in the RPE revenue per employee episode. But another we're looking at is really, you know, premium upsells. You can look at it that way as well. What this will also do because you're able to charge more is you're, it's going to boost your revenue per employee. And that's where this all sort of started. You Know, how do we boost revenue per employee? This is one of those options where you offer these premium services or these premium upsells. And this is going to allow you to deliver more revenue per case, which is going to directly impact each team member's contribution. Now what the thing is, is we talk about profit per employee, right? You want to make sure you're not doing this in a way where your profit per employee goes down. If you offer some sort of premium services, make sure that the cost of those services is not so great that it reduces your profit per employee. That is, that, that could be an issue. The third reason, and maybe the biggest reason to be honest with you, is this will differentiate your brand. This is something that I talked to Paul Yocobitis about. It's something that Alex Hormozi preaches, Paul had gone out to and he's, he's spent a lot of money on going out and meeting Alex Hormozi and doing all of his corporations courses and getting the, the consulting from Alex Hermosi. And that's one of the big things is even if it's not used, it's going to differentiate your brand. So you're going to offer this elevated, you know, white glove experience and that's really going to set you apart from other firms. That's a big part of this too, which in turn, because you're going to be, it's going to set you apart, it might actually increase the number of conversions that you have, which then would also affect your revenue per employee. So there's, there's multiple angles that this is going to apply here. All right, so let's get into. And this is probably the part you will care about the most is the. Some examples, some, some concrete examples that I'm going to, I'm going to try to give you all. The first one is if you were to offer some sort of elevated white glove case management or concierge service. All right, this is one where maybe you have some sort of dedicated person to that case. And so you, you can call them, you know, a concierge, whatever you want to call them. So you have this specific person, someone that's coordinated everything. Could be a paralegal and this could be the client's single point of contact that can do everything when it comes to scheduling any sort of needed consultations. They need to go to a financial planner, a therapist, a mediator. They're going to handle all their paperwork for them. They're going to manage day to day communications. Really, this is where your creativity can come in. When it comes to personal injury, you know, maybe this is something where you have someone that they schedule the medical appointments for the clients, they figure out how to get them to the doctor, right? They, they schedule all of this, they coordinate all of that, which in when it comes to personal injury, that's also going to increase your average case value, which is, which is pretty good too. Another thing you can do is you can offer, you know, in office or a virtual concierge where these are. If they need some sort of extra support, they can come into the office, they can meet with that concierge, or they can have some sort of virtual meetings with them on a regular basis. Can help them when it comes to gathering sort of any records that they need and handle any urgent filings. And these are things that we're not talking about, you know, legal things. We're talking about things that are sort of outside of it. They're supplemental to the legal process that you're going to, you're going to help them or you can also, let's say you need to help them with connecting with other professionals for their case, or maybe it's not even for their case. We had a client the other day where she needed to, she has not filed her taxes and she needed to get to an accountant. So we made recommendations to a local accountant. That's not some sort of premium service that we offer to them. It was just sort of a one off. But what you can do as part of your premium package, offer things like that, you know, getting them to CPAs, getting them to appraisers, getting that to investigators, whatever it may be, but getting them to the professionals that they need another level of this. And so this is. Now we're kind of moving on to another idea. And you can take, you can package what you, what you should do is take, take what you like and leave the rest. And my wife likes to say that you take it. It's from, by the way, it's from a, someone that she likes to do yoga through. She's a YouTuber lady. I can't think of her name. But. So my, my wife did not coin that, but it's something that she, she likes to say based on that. So, so take what you want, leave the rest. And the next thing is, is that, you know, maybe offer some sort of VIP communication or access to you or to your attorneys in your firm. You could, I don't, I don't know if I could go this far, but you have some sort of 24, seven direct access to an attorney. An alternative to this is, you know, you just provide them access to. They have a cell phone that they can call at any point or text at any point, or you give them some sort of access to a team line. That's another option. Or where these premium clients, they can get an exclusive phone line, an email or some sort of chat channel for immediate responses or semi. Immediate responses during critical moments. Or this could be, if you handle business clients, you know, important urgent business deals, any sort of family law emergency that they can reach out to. Because having spoken to enough of you family law attorneys, I understand that it can be a really pain during the holidays. You're getting phone calls, text messages, all that. And just by simply one of the benefits is if you say we can offer this in our premium package, they will know. Some of the clients that don't pay for that premium package, they will know it's not okay to call you on Christmas day and expect some sort of result by the end of the day. But if they have the premium package, maybe they would. So this is a way that during the case, if they sort of start to violate some of the norms of your firm, you can say, listen, I understand you're worked up, but we can, we can help you. That's, that's part of our premium package that you, you refused before. Is that something you want us to upgrade you to? You'd want to work on the messaging on that. Obviously. You certainly don't want to probably bring it up in the middle of them being heated, because I understand that famal clients can get pretty heated at times, but it is something where you can upsell them at, at a certain point. So after they've calmed down a little bit, you know, hey, Mrs. Jones, I know you called last week and you're really wanting something right away, but as you, as you remember, that's more sort of our premium package. Is that. Do you think that's something maybe we could upgrade you to? So you wait until after they've cooled off a little bit and then. And try to go down that point another one. And I don't think a lot of people have thought about offering this as a premium option. I know a lot of people offer client portals. Something you could do is offer that only as a part of the premium package where other clients don't get the client portal. But the premium clients, the premium package, whatever you call it, they get access to it so you can give them that secure portal where it gives them those live updates, you know, upcoming deadlines. Case milestones, any other access to digital documents that they need access to. Another thing you can think of is let's say that you, you say, listen, part of the premium package is frequent check ins. Like you get like a weekly check in. And that's not something you offer to everybody, that's just something you offer to the premium package clients where they get some sort of scheduled regular video call or phone call with proactive updates so there's no waiting for them to call you or waiting for you to call them. They have this scheduled time every single week where someone calls and gives them an update. Just an idea. All right, let's move on to the next one where you've got priority case representation or priority case handling. This is one where you really need to do everything within the ethics rules of your state. But sort of an idea is they get expedited case handling or filings, they kind of get bumped to the front of the line. You're not going to do anything that's going to harm your other clients. But maybe where you can ethically do something like this and where that's practically feasible, you can place these premium clients at the top of whatever the workflow is and you can handle their cases first. So if you're handling business contracts, maybe you deal with the negotiations on that before you deal with a non premium client's negotiations and all deadlines, at least deadlines that cannot, I'm not talking about things like statutes limitations, but other sorts of deadlines. The premium clients will, theirs will push all the others down just a little bit so they would get handled quicker in the queue than other cases. Again, make sure you're doing everything within the ethics guidelines. Something else, and this is, this idea came from. There is, and this is just only loosely related to the idea but to what this other firm does. There's a defense firm, they do, they handle DWIs in St. Louis. They're not nearly as good as, you know, the best in the state. Scott Rose got Rose. I give a shout out to him. He's a Guild member. He's awesome. He handles criminal defense and DWIs. He does just amazing work. So to see the growth that he's had over the last few years. But there is this other firm that I do know where you can buy, you can sort of get add ons for their DWI packages where you know, in Missouri you, you've got this administrative hearing that's also part of the, you've got the criminal case that's separate from the administrative side of it, so the administrative side's more for the, the driver's license. And then you got the criminal side, the DWIs. Well, they will add, you know, these add ons, you know, well, if you lose it, the administrative hearing for X number of dollars more, we will appeal it, yada, yada yada. So they create these packages that really defines the representation more, which I find kind of interesting with this. So, you know, loosely related to that, what you could do, and this could be, you know, injury firms as well, you could do this and you offer some sort of mock trial or focus group that could be an add on to it. And so this, this could really apply to anyone that does litigation. You could offer this as a part of a premium package that's sort of a add on. And I guess this is a decent time to talk about pricing too, a little bit. Where if you're doing contingency fee, a couple of different ways you could do this, you could increase the fee percentage, you could off, you could charge some sort of upfront fee. I think that that would somewhat defeat the whole idea of, you know, doing it on a contingency. Another way of doing it is you actually charge a fee, but it then comes out at the end for the settlement. So let's say that I'll just make up numbers. Let's say your fee is, traditionally most firms are a third, and then it increases to 40% if they file suit. But then if you offer them the premium package, let's say it's $2,000, you would get your fee. So let's say, you know, you end up having file suit, you charge 40% plus $2,000 at the end. So that's, that's a way you could do it. Maybe the easiest way is just charging a percent or more for the case for your fee. And that could probably lead to more money, to be honest with you, because it's something that the client, they're not thinking about, oh, it's gonna be 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 percentage point. Could be a substantial amount of money depending on the value of the case. So that's an idea for you. And then there's also, depending on the case type, you could do some sort of, you know, custom briefing or some, some sort of custom research where you, you provide in depth sort of specialized reports for them. And you know, this is, I don't think this would really work for every case, but you could do it for a lot of different kinds of litigation, patent disputes, trademark disputes, all of that. This you could do it for a lot of different things when it comes to the different, different practice areas. Another easy one in this is one where like Paul Yocobite is his firm. They do estate planning but they've. I believe that Paul's got this, a financial component. It's either a separate company or he, he is licensed in it himself. Where you can offer some sort of financial or some sort of strategic planning assistance. So for business clients maybe you could bundle legal services with business consulting. For estate, estate planning clients you can offer additional guidance on asset protection or some sort of financial advice or you can coordinate with a financial advisor. That's another thing you could do where you give them this more long term wealth management offer. I mean you gotta get creative here. But you can do a lot of different things in offering these packages to these clients. And then you know, with family law clients something you could do is you could provide post divorce financial counseling budget budgeting assistance or give them some sort of connections to child custody specialists and therapists that really help with that transition. That's another option. I think that that would be a really easy one to get a sale on potentially is providing that, that post divorce therapy option. That could be a pretty easy upsell. I think another option is you know, lifestyle or personal support services where for family law, immigration relocation assistance where you assist them in moving to wherever their new place is. Especially if they're just getting a divorce. They need to move to either a new city, a new house. You can assist them with that. We already talked a little bit about counseling or therapy. That's something you can especially if you were licensed. But I know, I know that Nicole Christie, pretty sure she hired someone in house that is an actual licensed therapist that you know you're not going to provide that. In my opinion. I don't think you're going to provide that to all clients. You're going to provide that to only premium clients. I'm not sure how Nicole does it but I think if it were me I would only offer that to premium clients. That's, that's just me though. And then obviously we talked about business coaching a little bit too where you know, maybe there's some sort of major legal event, maybe there's a big acquisition or reorganization or they've got some sort of settlement where they were sued. Something you can do after that. You can offer coaching sessions on restructuring things and what they should do next. I'll get to a few other ideas. I have a lot of listed ideas that I think I may run out of time. With, but I'll get to as many as I can. The last couple I want to talk about is giving them exclusive education or coaching of some sort where you take and you can create 10 steps to finalizing your estate plan. That might be one way of doing it. I don't know if I do that. Maybe if you have a business client and you've got another niche in the firm or another, another partner that offers estate planning maybe can use that as a, to kind of upsell them to an estate plan or you name it, you know what to expect in a complex civil lawsuit where you can give them these either live or recorded sessions, where you just give them an elevated education on the process. That may be a tough sell for a lot of, a lot of clients just because they might say, well you shouldn't you just be offering this to me anyways. So this is something you're at to get creative on as well. But if there is something that might work for you and this could maybe work for trademark clients where you know, after the fact they've gotten the trademark through you and here's how you protect your trademark. And that's sort of an added charge. I think that that's something I might be willing to pay for. I know we've gotten trademarks for maximum lawyer and by the way, shout out to Joey Vitale, he's fantastic, he's our attorney when it does, when it comes to trademarks. But that's something that, you know, I might be interested in paying for that when it comes to protecting our trademarks. Another thing is client resource library. You can give them premium password protected access to webinars, FAQs, checklists, white papers, things like that. And then you could also offer personalized Q and A sessions. That's something you could do every single month where you only offer those to premium clients. All right. And then, you know, I think they'll maybe the last thing what I'll do is I'll talk about is customize logistics or court appearance management, whatever you want to call it. I mentioned this kind of already, but the like travel coordination. If your clients have issues getting to places, whether it's the doctor, whether it's court, that's something you could help coordinate. That is, you know, customized logistics for them. You help them with travel coordination. That is something they could, could actually go quite a ways. And in helping your clients court day concierge, where they get, you provide, you know, one of your assistants, you know, they get this sort of a personal assistant for hearing days that walks around with them at the courthouse, maybe they even pick them up and then they take them to court. They provide them all the things they need when it comes to appearing in court that day, which could be note taking, could be, you know, tissues, emotional support, whatever it may be. But this person that you provide to them that sort of walks around with them and gives them all the things that they need, that can be a really easy one, you know, what about lunch? You know, ordering lunch for them? What do you need for lunch? What are your dietary concerns? All that. That's something that you could really, really help them out with. Okay, that is all I'm going to cover when it comes to ideas because like I said, I could be here all day because I have a long, I have a long list of other ideas. I don't want to belabor it too much. You all can be creative. I know that. I have faith in people that listen to maximum lawyer. We have. It's a very unique breed. And so I know that you all will get creative with the ideas I've already given you. But let's go on to the steps of making this happen. I was really kind of thinking like, okay, how do you actually do this, right? How do you create these premium services? A way of doing it is you really think about your entire case process. So think about the entire case process, start to finish, right? Think about the whole thing and go through and figure out where the pain points exist for clients currently or extras that they might, your ideal client, what they might value the most. And then, you know, this could be whether you're a business owner or you, your clients are business owners or they are family law clients or injury clients. A lot of our clients are individuals in crisis, right? And if you think about those major crisis points, those might be able to help you identify those pain points that you're looking for. So we'll look at it from start to finish and then figure out where those ideal clients that you have, where they experience the most pain. So start with that and then you, you craft a workflow that's number two. You're going to map out each of these premium offers and you're in detail, how it's delivered, who's responsible for it, how it's priced, all these things, right? You have to get really, really into the details, come up with as many use things like Chad, GPT or Grok or whatever to really dig deep on where you might be. Might have some gaps in this because you may not, especially if it's a premium offer that you're just starting off with. You may be missing some things. You might, might have some gaps. So use some AI to help you fill in some of those gaps. Then the next key part, in my opinion is, is that you pick a. You pilot it, right, and you roll this out to a small group of your existing clients and just pick a few, you know, three to five. You roll it out for them, maybe you even offer it to them for free, just to test it out. And then you gather feedback on it, and then you refine. Okay? And gather feedback, Refine, gather feedback, refine, keep going until it's ready to go. Then you train your team on it. All right, so you, this is number four, four step. There's four steps to this. You want to make sure that everyone on the team understands the benefits of it, the process. You can even go through common objections, how to overcome those objections. And the key here, though, is making sure that you are delivering a consistent, high quality, truly high, high quality experience. Because if someone does take you up on the premium offer, one, it's going to set you apart, even if they don't take it. Right? So that's the, the, you're already benefiting from it, but when they do, they're going to expect an elevated experience and you better provide it to them, because if you don't, you are going to really, really hurt your brand. And you don't want to do that. We want to make sure that you are, if you do this right, I think if you do do this right, we want to make sure you're doing this right so that you're getting the ideal clients that you want, that you're getting those reviews. People are giving you raving reviews because you had this elevated service. And so you want to make sure you're doing this right so that you can upgrade your firm. Right? That's what you're wanting, but that's life, Fernanda. Hopefully this is something that you and everyone else is listening. It helps you out when it comes to offering these premium offers or these premium upsells. Hopefully these are things that most firms can apply, you know, to whatever your practice area is. So hopefully, you know, whether you're doing family law, estate planning, business, criminal defense, personal injury, I was really hoping to provide enough value that you can use these ideas to build your own packages and then pricing those accordingly. So. And by the way, something we didn't talk about a whole lot, but create tiered packages. So sort of a standard gold, platinum tiers. I wouldn't just add one extra layer one premium service. You can, it's something you can just have this premium upsell, but give them sort of a menu of three. I wouldn't go, do not go over three. So either have two or three. Create these tiers to let them pick from. And that is, it's, it's going to go a long way to increasing the offers and the revenue and the revenue per employee, which is why we started this, that revenue per employee, it's really, really key. But I can't stress this part enough. Do not do this if it's going to sacrifice your profit per employee. So if it's going to decrease profits because it's going to cost you a bunch of extra money to hire new people or, or whatever it may be, you're not going to want to do it. You're going to want to make sure you're doing this for the right reasons and you're going to want to make sure that you're not only increasing revenue per employee, but also your profit per employee. All right, just a reminder, if you have a topic you want me to cover, make sure you just shoot me a text. 314-501-9260. You can go to maximlaw.com ask I always love hearing from everybody. So shoot me a text, even if it's just to say hello. Remember, consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, everyone.