The leading provider of practice management solutions to maximize opportunity and joy for Estate Planning attorneys
The leading provider of practice management solutions to maximize opportunity and joy for Estate Planning attorneys
Lawyers with Purpose Founder and CEO, David Zumpano, Esq. was a recent guest on the Profit with Law Podcast, hosted by Moshe Amsel. Together, they discuss the key aspects of growing a law firm, including tips from keeping a proper mindset to converting to value-based pricing.
One of the many benefits of being an LWP Member is the opportunity to interact with, and learn from, fellow Members in conjunction with the LWP team.
We created Member Power Hour to provide you with twice-weekly educational and mutual support events to help you grow your practice. It’s an open forum, a give and take, shaped by the following schedule:
What are your greatest challenges? Where have you found success? How did you do it? What, in short, is on your mind? Gain insight from your peers and the LWP team during Member Power Hour. Empowering success… together.
We can’t wait to see you every Tuesday and Thursday!
The LWP Team
A members–only section on your website can allow enrollees in your maintenance program to sign up for exclusive events, download videos of workshops they might have missed, and more. It also allows you to generate revenue through advertising (as does your newsletter). How? By offering companies that provide services of interest to your clients the opportunity to advertise on this portion of your site. House cleaners, estate sale firms, delivery services, caregivers… service providers like these and many more will pay handsomely for access to a targeted demographic. So, too, will financial advisors, accountants, attorneys who practice in areas outside of your own, and other professionals.
Of course, you must screen potential advertisers carefully to make sure they are good at what they do and worthy of your clients’ trust. Also, don’t run too many ads. Enrollees in your maintenance program will appreciate exclusive access to companies that provide services they need and can trust. However, you don’t want to leave the impression that generating advertising revenue is the only reason you offer a newsletter or a members-only section on your website.
Your maintenance program will help you forge solid bonds with your clients and members of your clients’ families. Consider the latter for a moment. Inviting family members to social events, encouraging them to attend review meetings and workshops, providing counsel to the family following a client’s incapacity or death… all of this allows you to bond with the adult children of your existing clients. Not only will your client’s adult children see the value of proper planning first-hand, they’ll know exactly who they want to design their plans—you.
Encouraging your clients to bring their advisors as well as their family members to social gatherings and plan reviews also allows you to form bonds with the advisors themselves, who can then become valuable referral sources for future new business. Many law firms struggle to develop profitable referral relationships. Your maintenance program can help you get your foot in the door.
Once you’ve established a maintenance program, there is another opportunity worth exploring… advertising. Well discuss that next time.
The TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program offers all of the services listed below. Remember: This information is intended to provide you with an idea of what a maintenance program can offer. Your program must reflect your clients’ needs and your firm’s capabilities.
The TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program EPLC includes:
As you can see, this is an extensive program. You might also have discerned that the components of the plan involve services that do not cost you a great deal of money or “attorney time.” For example, let’s say a client wants to make a simple change to a will or trust, like swapping out a daughter for a son. You already have the client’s documents in your system, so making a change like that is easy. Or consider the annual client group meeting, where all of the clients’ changes can be made at once. Your staff can handle the vast majority of such changes, as well as client calls, a newsletter, and the program’s various social events.
Your maintenance program provides enrollees with easy access to your firm and a sense of belonging to the “firm family.” It will also provide them with the peace of mind that comes from knowing the plan will work, and that the firm will be there to counsel family members in the event of the client’s incapacity and/or death. All of this sets your firm apart from competitors that do not offer a maintenance program. In addition, your program creates loyalty, a bond with your clients. We’ll talk about the benefits of that next time.
When it comes to maintenance programs, one size does not fit all. You should tailor your program to the needs of your client base and your firm’s capabilities. Also, as we mentioned last time, you have to limit the scope of your program. It’s supposed to be a source of steady revenue, not a loss leader. Accomplishing this requires offering services in your program that you are already providing free-of-charge, or services whose fees are insignificant. As one attorney with a successful maintenance program put it, “The administrative costs of billing for photocopies exceeds the income generated by it.”
You can also offer different types of maintenance programs. At EPLC, we have our main program, the TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program. We also offer a program for Medicaid clients, which basically provides enrollees with the annual certification they need. It is important to note, however, that our goal is to have clients who need nursing home care keep their TLC Program and add the Medicaid program to it as part of a package. We don’t want clients dropping the TLC Program when, say, one spouse enters a nursing home while the other continues to reside in the couple’s primary residence. Finally, we have a relatively inexpensive Will-based program for clients whose plans do not include trusts.
In our next email, we’ll detail the elements of our TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program.
Some attorneys dismiss maintenance programs out of hand because they don’t see why clients would participate in them. Don’t think like that. Maintenance programs are very appealing to clients, for two powerful reasons.
First, a maintenance program helps ensure that a client’s plan is always up-to-date and capable of accomplishing its goals when the client needs it. By explaining this benefit to your clients, many of them will quickly see the program’s value and the importance of enrolling in it.
Second, one of the main complaints people have about working with attorneys is the notion that attorneys bill for just about anything, whether it’s an email, a photocopy, or a one-minute phone call. Your clients will appreciate the fact that you will not “nickel and dime” them, and that there will be no unpleasant “surprise” invoices in their mail boxes.
By addressing these two issues, a maintenance program provides clients with peace of mind—the same long-term benefit that motivated many of them to want an estate plan in the first place.
So, what services should be included in your plan? You need to offer enough to make the program attractive to clients, but you must also be cognizant of not selling yourself short and offering too many services. We’ll discuss the particulars of an effective maintenance program next time.
Generating a consistent, reliable revenue stream is a challenge for many law firms. An annual maintenance program can provide a solution to this problem, and, in effect, function as a line of credit for your firm.
In the coming weeks, we’ll discuss the elements of a successful program, the benefits of such a program to your clients and to your firm, how your plan can generate additional income beyond what you charge for the program itself, and more.
At EPLC, we currently have approximately 600 clients enrolled in our various maintenance programs (we’ll talk about how our programs differ from one another in a future email). We charge $650 a year for what we call the TLC™ Estate Plan Maintenance & Fee Guarantee Program. If you do the math, you’ll quickly see that this income, which is both continuous and predictable, serves as a line of credit we can draw upon to cover any number of expenses over the course of a year.
At this point you may be saying, “Well bully for you EPLC, but frankly I don’t know why any client would even want a maintenance program, let alone pay for it.” We’ll talk about that next time.
The costs of healthcare & long-term care have dramatically increased in recent years. Yet, only a small minority of clients has adequate insurance and funding for this required assistance. At the same time, the spend-down of assets to qualify for government & elder benefits has changed over the years and become more complex. For most of the population, public benefits, including Medicaid & other government benefits, provide the principal funding of care. This has caused an unprecedented need for counsel fluent in asset planning & protection techniques to assist clients needing to qualify for government assistance. The faculty for this program features a national authority in the subject, who will cover tools for spend-down’s, exempt vs. non-exempt assets, differences between singles and married couples, the effect of future medical expenses on government benefits, and the landscape of Medicaid & medical expense planning. Lawyers With Purpose Founder co-presents “Mastering Medicaid Spend-downs, Government & Elder Benefits CLE” on March 11, 2020.
From mid-November through the beginning of January, Lawyers with Purpose members tend to see a decrease of initial contacts, initial meetings, and workshop attendance. The holidays are THE time for your prospects and clients to be thinking about AND discussing their future plans with family, however, not as many do. How can you remedy this? By kicking off your maintenance program!
