James Magner

Kevin Daisey:
All right. We are recording. Welcome everyone to another live recording of The Managing Partners podcast. My name is Kevin Daisey, and I’m going to be your host. I’m also the founder of Array Digital, where we help law firms grow their pipeline using digital marketing. Today, I got a special guest out of Virginia, which is where I’m actually at, so nice to have another Virginia guest on the podcast. Jim Wagner, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Magner:
Good morning, it’s Jim Magner, with a M.

Kevin Daisey:
Oh, did I say, I said, Wagner, why did I say that?

Jim Magner:
It’s what everybody does.

Kevin Daisey:
Jim Magner, I apologize.

Jim Magner:
Not a problem.

Kevin Daisey:
So, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on to share your story, and some details about your firm, what you guys do. So, you’re just in Virginia, not too far from me in Leesburg area. So tell us really, what was the moment you decided to become attorney? What’s your journey? What’s your story?

Jim Magner:
Got you. Mine’s probably a little bit different than most people. I had no intention of being an attorney. That includes while I was in law school. I was actually working in Alexandria for a trade association doing government affairs work. And it dawned on me after a few years that those people who had the ESQ after their name made more money than those who didn’t. And so, George Mason University School of Law had a night program. They were about six blocks from where I was. And so I enrolled there purely with the idea that I would get the piece of paper, hang it on the wall, and demand more money. And it was probably about… So the night program, unlike most people go through in three years, it took four years for the night program.

Jim Magner:
So my third year, I took a class with a local judge who’s now retired, but he had me in a trial class, and had me working there and took me aside one day and said, “I know that you don’t have any interest in actually practicing law, but you ought to think about it, because you were actually kind of good at this stuff.” And he put me in a program that they had over at the Fairfax County Circuit Court for clerking for the Circuit Court judges there. And when I came out of that, that clerkship program, I still had a little bit of law school left to go because again, we had a four year program at night. So at that point I was keyed up and said, maybe he’s right. Maybe I should [inaudible 00:02:35] and become an attorney. So that’s the point that I had probably a little bit different than most people.

Jim Magner:
At the time I had actually really switched, I was then working for the US coast guard as a civilian and got put once I got my law degree, got put over as the clerk of the court for their court of appeals. So, I had my first job as a lawyer was before I was licensed. When you work for the federal government, they can call you a lawyer, if they want to call you a lawyer since you’re not actually representing any clients. So, I got to do a lot of appellate work and research work with the coast guard before starting over and jumping over to private practice, which was financially more beneficial for me. At that point, I had been out of college for a number of years. I had a wife, a couple of kids, and a mortgage. So, although the government had a lot of benefits at the time, working at that level on the GS scale in Northern Virginia just wasn’t going to cut it. So, I went out into private practice at that point.

Kevin Daisey:
Excellent. And a really cool story. So you had a mentor if you will, in the judge that said, “Hey, you’re good at this. You need to go pursue it.”

Jim Magner:
Yeah, that was really the turning point because I respected him quite a bit. And of course I was a little bit older than some of the other law students there. Not a whole lot, but a few years older, had been out in the world. Most of them at the time had gone straight through from high school, to college, to law school. And so I think that probably helped a little bit having a little bit of life experience in the law class. And I certainly recommend that to anybody who’s thinking about law school, get out, get some life experience first before you go diving into law school. It’ll absolutely help the whole studying process. Especially if you have kids, and it’s meaningful, right? You have that hanging over your head. “I got to pass this. I don’t have a choice. I’ve got to buy diapers and formula. I’ve got to get a job.” And that’s a huge motivator, I think.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Well I’m assume age too in the courtroom and being a little bit older versus super young might have some help too, but well, that’s really awesome. So, now I want give me a little more information on your firm, what you’re doing today, what your focus practice areas are, and I guess what you specialize in as a practice.

Jim Magner:
Sure. We are sort of the prototypical, I think small town law firm in a small town, that’s not really small anymore. As I started practicing the DC area, I was in Fairfax and I was working with the firm in Tyson’s Corner and they would send me out to Leesburg to do cases because nobody wanted to drive out this far. And I really loved it. And again, having a nice family and wanting to have a little bit more of a peaceful existence then in the heart of the DC area that this DC suburbs close in the traffic and the expense and everything. So when I came out to Leesburg, I just loved it and stayed and ended up joining a firm out here, and then eventually went out on my own. And the idea for this project was a law firm that had good business sense.

Jim Magner:
And the reality of it is that lawyers, and I know because I have clients that are doctors, dentists and other professionals, because you’re really good at one thing doesn’t mean you’re really good at business. And unfortunately, a lot of the law firms I worked at, including the one where I was a partner, there was a lot of sort of financial turmoil constantly, and you would go out and you’d get a big fee on a case and you’d think, “Great. Hey, we’re all going to go out for a steak and champagne tonight,” and he’d watch us, the money just went down the hole into the debts that the firm had accumulated and the attitude was always, “Well, we can always make more money. We’re lawyers, we’re law firms.” So, frustratingly badly managed. So when I went out on my own, I thought I’m going to have a firm that is a good, solid business. In addition to being good lawyers and having a good law practice, we’re going to be a well run business.

Jim Magner:
And that was kind of my focus. And so, my focus personally has always been on helping small businesses, whether it’s setting up small businesses, business to business litigation, developing contracts for them, developing employment profiles, and all of the things that they need to do for running their business. And then off of that shot estate planning, and assisting them and that started with company founders, company owners saying, “Gee, I want to leave this to my kids. I need to do my estate planning.” So that grew into an estate planning practice.

Jim Magner:
I brought on an attorney that I had worked with years ago, that I had a great experience working with, a guy by the name of Jeff Seredar, and he came over, and he runs our family law and personal injury section. We added a criminal defense attorney, just one, Megan [inaudible 00:07:40], who was an award-winning criminal defense attorney, particularly working with children and kids, which is great because as it turns out that business owners often come to me with, “Hey, my kid did something stupid and got in trouble. Can you help him out?” And so, it all sort of works together symbiotically. We recently had-

Kevin Daisey:
That’s awesome.

Jim Magner:
Pardon?

Kevin Daisey:
I said, that’s awesome. It’s a good I guess progression I think that makes a lot of sense with what I see with business law estate plan. It makes sense usually right after that, and I’ve heard of a lot of other attorneys come to that same conclusion as I’ve got to interview quite a bit of them. So, that’s really cool.

Jim Magner:
Yeah. And the idea is to add the pieces of the legal work that our clients need, and not try to be everything to everyone. We do take a pretty wide variety of cases, but we try to make it all fit into a coherence with the business plan and model for our clients, where we’re serving a certain type of people, we’re providing legal services that they need. And so, they come back to us. They don’t just come to us for the business contracts, they come back to us for the other things that they need as well.

Kevin Daisey:
All right. I think that’s great. I think, we have a business attorneys that we use quite often for our company, and there’s things we just, we can’t do without them. We have to have them, and their expertise and reality is if they offered estate planning, which they don’t, and those other things, why would I go searching for someone else when I have a trusted relationship with them, they do good work, they take care of us. So that makes sense to me. So I know for me, I would do the same place. So, that makes sense. Well, thanks for sharing that. And then Leesburg, anyone watching, if you’re not from Virginia area, Leesburg is beautiful. We like to go up there and stay up there sometimes. And it’s just a beautiful area, a lot of wineries and cool spots. So, that’s like the… It’s like California, but it’s on the East Coast.

Jim Magner:
Yeah. It’s changing though. It is in sort of a shift because there’s been so many people moving out here, so much development. When I first got out here and started practicing out here, I think the most serious crime they had to deal with was someone cheating at Polo. And of course now with all the growth and development, we have real problems as well, but it’s still a very pretty place to be. There’s a lot of horse country, a lot of wineries, as you say, and I think a little bit more civilized than the inner suburbs.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are trying to move out and move out to the suburbs or where the country’s at. So, we’ll see that shift for a little while I think. But yeah, hopefully those areas you can maintain some of those farms and spa and lands will stay in place. So, but all right. Well so let’s switch over to, so your practices, I love kind of how you’re set up, business focus attorneys don’t come out of school knowing how to run a business. So I think that you’ve kind of caught on, so that’s important. And running your practice like a business, especially when you’re helping other business owners, you need to yourself know how to run a business. So I think, that makes all more of the sense to use someone like yourself, that you’re taking care of your business, which means you can really help and give the right advice, I think, to another a business owner, that’s something I would look for in an attorney for sure.

Kevin Daisey:
But what’s some of the ways you’re getting in front of your clients, what are you doing to market yourself, and pick up new clients along the way?

Jim Magner:
Well, this has been sort of the ongoing problem, particularly small law firms. Obviously we don’t have the budget for the TV ads, the late at night, have you been injured in an accident type of ads. We can’t advertise on the Washington capitals, hockey games, kind of thing. So, as I explain to my small business clients, sales is really the hardest job in business. And there’s a reason that most of the fortune 500 companies CEOs come out of the sales department. It’s because it doesn’t matter how good you are at the job, whether it’s trying cases, or writing contracts, or whether it’s hanging drywall, or doing plumbing, if you can’t get out, communicate to people, and get people to hand you money to do your job, then you’re not going to last very long, no matter how good you are.

Jim Magner:
And so we’re yeah. So if we’re always in that, what do we do with the budget that we have? What do we do with the tools that we have? Well, one of the tools that we have is ourselves. Lawyers who do litigation are naturally outgoing people. We have lots of hobbies, we like to do things. One of the things about being a lawyer is it doesn’t afford you the opportunity to be active outside of the law firm. Doesn’t always give you the time, but it gives you the money [crosstalk 00:12:44], right? But so we’ve developed a program. I like to call it the room method of marketing. And the idea is that there are two facts that are true. One is that people will hire you if A, they like you, and B, you happen to be standing in the room when they need you.

Jim Magner:
And so the key then is to stand in a lot of rooms. And that means getting ourselves out there in the various aspects of the community, where we want to be with the people that we want to be with. So, we try to turn those things that we do as attorneys, as hobbies, into community activism. Being out, so for example, I like to fly airplanes. I have a pilots license, and so I’m very active at the airport. I’m very active with pilots associations and groups out here.

Kevin Daisey:
Excellent.

Jim Magner:
One of our attorneys, Jeff Seredar is very big into men’s sports, so he’s involved in soccer and other programs. And then we take part in a lot of charitable events, we always have a donation and a table at the Local Habitat for Humanity Annual Gala. We have tents at the local horse races. We have a box at the polo grounds, and we do these things, none of these things, I don’t think anybody’s ever called us up and said, “Hey, I saw your sign up at the horse races and I want to hire you.” But what it does is it gets us out where people see us. Gets us out visible-

Kevin Daisey:
You get to talk to them?

Jim Magner:
Yeah. And then while we’re out there, we’re not constantly shoving our business cards at people saying, “Here, Start Today. We’re lawyers, let me do your will. Let me do your will.” Instead, what we’re doing is we’re participating. And if Jeff is out playing on the men’s soccer team, he is out playing on the men’s soccer team. If we’re participating on something online, or I’m going to a pilot’s the organization meeting, we’re just out there being part of the group and participating so that people actually like us. And they’re not afraid when we come around that, “Oh, if I go talk to him, he’s going to shove a business card at me. He’s going to constantly talk about business.” And it takes a long time. It’s taken us, we’ve been in practice here, we started this firm about five years ago, six years ago now, and God, I guess, it’s six years now going on seven. And it takes a while to build that. You have to really work at being out there and being involved in stuff for a long period of time.

Jim Magner:
But if you do that, you find that more and more, you start not only getting the calls from the people in those groups, but you start getting the calls and the emails and the messages from people saying, “Hey, Bob, in your group said to give you a call. He said, you know, I’ve got a legal problem. He said you could help me.” And once you get those kinds of calls, you realize that your network is really your marketing channels are really open and working the

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. I love it. I mean, that’s really how I started out too. And I still rely on it heavily. So, I think that’s a great way to do and within what you do. Yeah, you can’t just go force yourself down to people’s throats. And the other thing you said too about sales, how important that is, and yeah, if you can’t close the deal, you can’t sell anybody, then there’s no work to do. There’s no one to help. So I think that’s a really good point right there. No. So I think what you doing there, as far as a marketing standpoint, online social media, is there anything like that you guys are putting some energy into?

Jim Magner:
We are. This has been been, you know, social media has been in existence now for nearly 20 years and, Facebook, Twitter marketing. Before that there was MySpace and there were AOL chat rooms. And there’s, it seems like since the internet has started, there have been group meeting places on the internet, on the worldwide web, and yet even 22 years later, 20 years later into it, we still, I think as businesses, have difficulty figuring out how to do that. Because people are online because they hate ads, right? That’s why you stop watching the TVs, because you’re tired of the ads. You get a subscription that’s it’s free of the ads and you participate in that. And so, I think what we’ve decided is to take the same approach that we take in real life, we take online. And so, we’ll be involved in the same types of organizations we’re involved, showing up in person we’re involved in online.

Jim Magner:
And then with the same emphasis of trying to be a good participant in that group, a good group member, and use that as sort of an online version of our regular marketing channel. And that’s been very effective. Some of the online groups that we participate in, feed us a lot of client work, a lot of inquiries, a lot of new client development through those channels. Because let’s face it, right now, a lot of people have windows open with social media and they may be watching us and listening to us. They’re also clicking through their Facebook to see what their friend did over the weekend.

Kevin Daisey:
No, I think that’s excellent, and I think it’s a great way of, of putting it and thinking about it. And we do social media as a service as one of our services that we do, because we do digital marketing for law firms, but we call it… We don’t call it social media, if you’re like to work with us, it’s we call it community engagement because that’s what we feel it is. And it’s not just advertising on there or trying to post every second about your firm, and how they can hire you. But community engagement is what it should be. You’re helping, you’re engaging, you’re responding to things that people have questions or in your case, there’s tons of online groups, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups for like the chamber or other organizations in your community that you just participate.

Kevin Daisey:
And when someone’s got a question that you feel you can answer just that alone and say, “Hey, that guy’s always around and seems to participate and he’s always got an answer for stuff,” and that’s going to work just as well. So I assume with COVID too, are most of your groups back up meeting in person and stuff like that?

Jim Magner:
They’re coming back, they’re coming back. One of the things that I will say is that with law, and I’m sure the same as true doctors will tell you the same thing, real estate agents will tell you the same thing. People won’t go ask a lawyer for advice first. They won’t go ask a doctor for advice first. They’ll go ask their friend, right?

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah.

Jim Magner:
You know, my kid got in a car accident and they asked that to their buddies and their buddies say, “Oh yeah, you should Sue, you’ll get lots of money and you should do this.” And so we found it’s helpful if we’re their friends. They come to us as a friend for the advice and oh, by the way, unlike your other friends, I actually know something about this. And because that’s just the reality of it. I mean, a lot of the work that we do, the first sort of part of the client process is dispelling all of the stuff they’ve been told by their friends, and family, and coworkers, and TV, and movies, that they’ll know that’s not really true. It’s not how it works. Here’s the reality.

Kevin Daisey:
That’s awesome. No, it’s funny. Like for me, I get a lot of friends that reach out to me, like asking about websites or how I can help them set up advertising campaigns or whatever, and just because they know what I do. And I think one of the things that’s important too, like just that people know what you do do and that’s okay. More like your, your power base, if you will. “Hey, by the way, I didn’t know if you knew, but I now run my own law practice.” How many people that you know, high school back all the way, that probably have no clue what you do. So sometimes it’s a good practice for a new attorney anyway, to let everyone know. Friends, family, work your way through and just give them a call. You’re not asking them for their business, just, “Hey, just want to let you know that this is what I’m doing.” So, that’s it. And they might go, “Oh, actually I have a friend that is starting a new business right now.”

Jim Magner:
The other piece of it that I think is really, really critical that a lot of people don’t get and understand. And that’s that if you want to get those network channels flowing with case work coming in, you have to be a good referral partner as well. You’ve got to be given out the numbers and contact information for the CPAs who are referring you work for the financial planners, the real estate agents, and the other professionals that are calling you up and giving you clients for, you’ve got to be as responsive. And because if that flow is only going in one direction, it’s going to dry up pretty quickly. And so that’s part of being a good business partner, but good community member is helping other people connect as well. And that comes back tenfold. For every referral that I give out, I probably get five or six referrals back.

Kevin Daisey:
Oh, that’s great.

Jim Magner:
And attorneys we have to be a little bit careful because we have to make sure that we advise the clients that we’re not endorsing a particular professional, whether it be a CPA, or a real estate agent, or something, we have to be a little bit careful how we do that, but we can still make those connections, and referrals for people and help people get those other services, our clients. So we’re helping our clients and we’re also establishing and maintaining those referral networks what we’re relying on.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. And I think, it’s another great practice is to, I call like a power, it’s like almost like a power group. Like I used to be in BNI long time ago, like a networking group. And you’d always see these little groups that always got together and always refer each other. And that was like the real estate agent, and the mortgage person, and the title person. Like they all obviously work together well. And so, you could do that with your own… With like a law firm. Like, if you mentioned your CPA, these are different types of professionals that have a good ability to refer you, go find them go established relationship. And then for me, I keep a spreadsheet that all my employees have access to for things that we don’t do.

Kevin Daisey:
I have my attorneys in there, I have CPAs in there, photographers, videographers. So we do marketing, but sometimes we don’t cover some of those things. So if a client asks one of my employees, “Hey, do you guys know anyone that does this?” “Oh, I have a sheet right here. Here’s our trusted referral sources that I can refer you to.” And try to make a point to try to refer when we can to help them out. So, but yeah, good point. If you give a referral, they’re going to try to go out their way to give you one back.

Jim Magner:
Yeah, and pretty soon you find that those other professionals you’re actually working as a team on some of your bigger matters. If we have complex business litigation, I know I’m going to need to bring in the CPA or the other professionals. If we’re working on a construction case, we might need other construction experts to come in. So it’s nice to be able to have those people that were referring back and forth to be able to bring those guys in as part of a team and really help the client out when the time comes to do that.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah well, that’s yeah, a good point that we just experienced that ourselves. We were doing a restructure of our company and we had our idea, of course, as the business owners, which you’re always, the entrepreneur is always going to have their own, because they’re trying to figure out everything. And then you go to the attorneys and then they go, “Okay, well not necessarily.” So they came up with the way, but then we brought in our CPAs and we brought in our financial planning company that does all our business, financial planning, our 401ks, all that stuff. And they each three had their own proposal for what we should do. One was for most protection, the attorneys, the other one was for taxes, and whatever from the CPA, and then the financial planner was, that was all looking at other types of returns, and if we sold, or whatever. And then we had to decide, but we paid all three of those people, lots of money to discuss it. And we got the options we needed, and we pulled the trigger on what we thought was best. So yeah.

Jim Magner:
And you bring up a point there for business attorneys. If you’re going to be representing business clients, if you’re because as the attorney, you’re always worried about what’s going to go wrong and what’s going to happen, how are they going to get to sued? But if your answer to every question they give you is no, all the time, “No, don’t do that, no, you can’t do that,” they’re going to start going someplace else. And they may start getting advice from non lawyers and other people that may get them in trouble. The good business attorneys find a way to say yes. Now it may be, “Yes, you can do that, but let’s do it this way so that your protector, we can minimize the risk if you do that.” It’s very easy as the attorney to get scared and say, “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” But saying no all the time, it’s like when you were a kid, if your mom told you, “No, you couldn’t have a cookie,” you stopped asking, you just got the cookie.

Kevin Daisey:
[inaudible 00:26:04] anyway.

Jim Magner:
You’d get in trouble later. Same thing happens with your business clients.

Kevin Daisey:
That’s a good point. Yeah, I think for, yeah. Any business attorneys listening. Yeah. It’s as an entrepreneur like a business owner, we’re going to figure that out somehow, whether it’s done right or not maybe, but you’re going to try to figure out other ways, and no is not a good answer to a business owner. You got to have some options out there. So, I think-

Jim Magner:
[crosstalk 00:26:32] answer really is no, really is no. Try to find a way-

Kevin Daisey:
The answer really is no. [crosstalk 00:26:39] Ponzi scheme. No, that’s not a good idea.

Jim Magner:
Yes. You have to pay your taxes. You can’t get out of this. Sorry you got to do that.

Kevin Daisey:
Man. Oh, well. Also you had a better answer for me than that but. Well, Jim, so last question before we wrap up and also everyone tuning in, please check out his website, go check out his firm up, learn more about Jim. The website addresses here at the bottom magnerlaw.com. So check that out. We’ll also post that link up once we get the episode live. So Jim, what’s really the plan, so you’ve been in about six years and for this firm, what’s your goals, plans, for the next couple years?

Jim Magner:
We’re slowly expanding, and we’re expanding I think with the rate of the expansion of the county that we’re in. It’s nice being in a growth community because it means that our business is growing, and so our clients’ business is growing. We want to add some attorneys slowly as we start to build. And eventually, at some point, I’d like to have my partners able to sort of take over the case work from me and me to focus on the development of the client’s, client development, selling the firm, managing the firm. Right now, it’s sort of, you always have three hats to wear as a business owner, doing the work, selling the business, and then managing all the stuff, doing all the nitty gritty stuff of going through the books and the billing and everything else.

Jim Magner:
The problem is you only have time to wear two hats. And one of those is always being neglected. And for most people, the one that’s being neglected is the management stuff, right? There’s always an inbox full of things you got to go through, and stuff from the state bar, you got to fill out forms for and the insurance, and those are things nobody likes to deal with. But eventually what I’d like to do is get to the point where I can truly be a managing attorney and not do the case work. The problem is I really enjoy the case work. And I really, that’s the part that I… It’s why you become a lawyer. You want to stand in court, pound your fist, and make Shakespearian speeches at juries, that’s why we do it. We don’t do it so that we can go through billing invoices, and pester attorneys about getting their time in. That’s not why became lawyers, but it has to be done.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Well, enjoy that for a little while and eventually can be happy that you’ve gotten to a point where you don’t have to do that because you’re managing a managing partner at that point. So, no, I think everything you had to share makes sense. It looks like you’re on a great track. You have a good structure in place. You’re not trying to overdo it and scale too fast. You’re focused on running a good business. So I think those are all good things where I think you would make someone a very good business attorney. So, anyone in Leesburg area, actually, so you actually serve some Northern Virginia and parts of Southern Maryland?

Jim Magner:
Some parts of Southern Maryland. We have a, one of our attorneys is licensed in DC, we tend to avoid DC like the plague. We will take a case there occasionally, but mostly our bulk of our practices, [inaudible 00:29:53] and Fairfax, Arlington Alexandria, Prince William, Northern Virginia communities.

Kevin Daisey:
Excellent. Okay. My brother lives in Prince William county. So I’ll be up there soon, I guess, the visits. But excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, and more about your firm. I think some of the things you’re doing are unique, and different kind of approach. So I think it’s important. I think especially for business attorneys on that side of things where you got like personal injury, that’s a little bit more, more advertisements usually done in those areas where you got to stand out or be there. But I think for business attorneys, you got to build those relationships up, and build this refill sources are super important, and going from there. So, but anyway, thanks for sharing. Anything else you’d like to share before we roll?

Jim Magner:
No, thank you very much for having me. This is A, easy and B, fun. So I like things that are both easy and fun to do.

Kevin Daisey:
Well. Yeah. We try to make it easy and we try to make it fun in light and just have a conversation. So, but anyway, hopefully I think folks are going to learn a lot from what you had to share. Especially dudes looking to start, and get their own firm going. You’re five, six years in kind of give them an idea where they can be and kind of the ground… The foundational work you’ve done, I think is important. And what you’ve kind of set up in the community to build your practice. So, I appreciate you sharing that. Everyone turning in, if you want to see this episode, it’ll be up on our podcast of course, soon it’ll also be on our website, Raylaw.com/podcast, and also look for it on lots of other platforms, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Kevin Daisey:
So we’ll get those out soon. And if you need any help, websites, SEO, advertising your firm, please let us know, reach out at raylaw.com. You can also reach out to me. Got any questions, just happy to give advice. If you don’t know what you need to do, or if you’re just starting out, and you need a more affordable option, happy to share anything like that with you. So any questions reach out to me, [email protected] or go to the website and fill out a form. We’ll give you a call. Jim. Thanks so much again, you can hang on me for just a second. We’ll stop recording, everyone else, thank you so much for tuning in and we’ll talk to you soon.