What if the way we bill clients is the very thing breaking the system? In this episode of The Founding Partner Podcast, I sit down with Christopher Anderson, founder of New Leaf Family Law, who’s replacing the billable hour with something few thought possible—a subscription model for family law. Could this be the future of how lawyers serve, earn, and build trust again?

And you could pull on the, draw the jerk opposing counsel that's just gonna litigate the crap outta the case. So,

Christopher Anderson: And we do all the time.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you talk about safety valves. So you know how, you don't have to tell us, you know, the secret sauce, but conceptually, how do you deal with that in a subscription model?

How do you protect yourself and protect a client, get them to the goal? How in that instance, for example.

Christopher Anderson: Two ways. One is sometimes we just take it on the chin. You know, we do draw those lawyers sometimes. And in this for the long haul. I'm trying to shine a light on a practice area that hasn't been working that well for clients and showing a better way, and I still see good in them.

Let's dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Hawkins. This is a podcast where I get to interview founding attorneys and other law firm leaders and hear about their journeys and some of the cool things that they're doing. And today's guest I've been really looking forward to this, this episode.

But, you know, and when I say subscription, I don't mean like some family law firms that do, I'll call it flat fee, sort of staged billing. Which I know a lot of people are skeptical of that. So really looking forward to diving in. Some of this today the guest is Christopher Anderson is, I think he may have more than one law firm, but his family law firm's called NewLeaf Family Law.

So, Christopher, welcome to the show. Happy you can be here and why don't you give a little bit of background. You've, I know you've done a lot of cool stuff. You do a lot of cool stuff. You've got your own podcast. Just give us an overview of, of you and, and your firm and what you do.

So, you know, I really do love the business of law. And so, you know, I, and, and kind of like I've been a fan of John Maxwell since beginning my career in, in business and have really strived to work my way up through his levels of leadership and consider it part of my mission today to expand that leadership beyond my own firms.

And that's why I sit on some boards. I serve as trusted advisor to many firms and help them solve a lot of the problems that I have faced. And and, and to get beyond them and to, to continue to manage their firms well, you know, the goal being really just to serve our clients better.

And I'd run a family law firm before, but I kind of did it just the old traditional way. We sat down and said the first thing, if we think we can do it better, we gotta really clearly define what's wrong. Because otherwise we, if we don't know what's wrong, we'll fall in the same traps. So we did and we found a newly family to be better.

It was really fun to be able to act, you know, after practicing law for 30 years, sit down and create a new law firm, clean sheet, right? Just completely clean sheet and say, what if we could start all over again? Because that's what we're doing. We do operate other law firms. We didn't leverage them.

Like, nobody would come in because they weren't looking for shawarma. Nobody knew what it was, and you had to introduce them to it. And once, once people knew what it was, then they, they'd go I feel like I'm ranting a little bit, but I'm, I'm just kind of giving the origin story, right? So we said, okay, people don't recognize this.

But so we said, all right, let's try phase two, which we call transitions. And this is what most people would recognize as a family law firm, right? We're now attracting people that know they want to change and are ready for that change. And we're gonna help them with that change. Whether that change be a divorce, a separation, change in custody even premarital agreement or, or pre prenup for most of the country.

You know, some sort of change. And, but we're gonna take that phase one thinking and make sure it's part of it. So, in other words, we went back and stayed true to our root cause analysis. Now I need to tell you what the root cause analysis showed us. The root cause analysis after we asked why, and asked why again, and asked why again, and asked why.

And most of them are excellent lawyers and most of 'em are excellent humans. Like this is not to disparage anybody. But they are humans. And when that very powerful incentive is there, along with some ethical guidelines that say, you know, be a zealous advocate for your client's interests it leads to outcomes that are not necessarily in the client's big picture interests, right?

We don't like to lose. We put it the other way. And when you've got a client coming to you with a divorce, I don't know what winning is, right? Sometimes it's easy, you know, the one spouse is abusive and has really put the, the, your client under their thumb, and you're really helping them escape a terrible situation.

Jonathan Hawkins: So.

Christopher Anderson: We are not gonna talk about what motions we're gonna file. We're not gonna talk about strategy. We're not gonna talk about all those things. We're gonna talk about where you're gonna live in two years. We're gonna talk about where your kids are gonna go to school. We're gonna talk about where you work, what's your relationship with your ex spouse, what's your relationship with his parents or her parents?

So you take these two things, eliminating the billable hour and having basically what I call a coaching forward or future forward representation changes everything and it aligns us. It reduces withdrawal rates dramatically. It keeps clients in control of their future and the process. It leads to happier clients and better outcomes.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so before you go into that, I just wanna circle back on a couple things.

Real quick, if you haven't gotten a copy yet, please check out my book, the Law Firm Lifecycle. It's written for law firm owners and those who plan to be owners. In the book, I discuss various issues that come up as a law firm progresses through the stages of its growth from just before starting a firm to when it comes to an end.

The law firm lifecycle is available on Amazon. Now, back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: So first, you, you don't sound like a typical lawyer.

Christopher Anderson: Thank you.

Jonathan Hawkins: 2 ways. More than two. But the two I wanna point out is number one you approach this as an experiment with a hypothesis, which in most lawyers, they're not open to that.

And, and I'm curious if that, if you're just this way or if some of those other experiences helped you think differently than sort of a traditional lawyer. And you can go into some of the experiences if you want.

Christopher Anderson: absolutely. No, I mean, I think that's a great question and, and when I, by the way, when I said thank you, so you don't sound like a typical lawyer, I said thank you. I would say that it's not, that's not a ding on typical lawyers at all. It's a neurosis of mine. That I don't do. Typical. And, and like we, we, we have a little joke with our kids kids.

They're 22, 18 and 18 now. But from the time they were very little, if anybody said, you're weird, the response was always, thank you. And you know, 'cause I, I, I think the world's beauty is found in the weird in the, in the, in the different and progress is made by thinking outside the box. And it's never made by doing things the way they've always been done.

But to your other question. Yes. You know, I, I, out of law school, I worked to build legal software for mass tort businesses. I worked for New York City District Attorney's office. I then helped to get, build again, build other businesses. So I was constantly with one foot in business, one foot in the law and always looking again to change things.

And I was like, you did not, you are correct. That is my computer. Where'd you get it? I bought it. And like, this is like a Windows machine. Like these were expensive. Like it was three grand that used. I bought this thing used, and he is like, what are you doing with it? And I told him because, but you know, in the, in the office what we had this, these books, and if you wanted to write a motion, you'd pull down these books and you were like, all right I need a 22 and a five and a 18 and a 49.

And and then hand write whatever custom stuff you'd put in it, and you'd send it out to the typing pool and a day later you'd get it back and it would be wrong, and you'd make your edits, da da da. And so I'd telling him, I'm doing, you know, I'm putting all that stuff in to a program where I can do that myself much quicker and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's like I didn't, I, I was just a guy who didn't ask permission. I just did things. And sometimes I got in trouble. Sometimes it worked that way. But then really, so that was just my nature, right? But then really I got a chance a couple of chances. One of the software companies that I was working with got purchased by law.com which is a division of American lawyer media.

And so I got exposed to a much bigger world of business. Through that we got, that's my first exposure to Colorado. 'cause we got moved out to Colorado, joined up with a couple other businesses and, you know, I got my real first exposure to the business world and learned a lot from that. Later on down the road, I went back after that experience and.

And initially to help the law firm out. I took some outside work with LexisNexis. They were looking for, I was a, we used some of their software and I was a constructive critic with a loud mouth of that software. And, but some of my ideas apparently had gotten higher and higher in the organization.

I was invited to come talk to their product teams. Then I got invited to talk to their national sales teams and blah, blah, blah. I started working for Lexus on a, on a formal basis. And that's where I got exposed to notions of pragmatic marketing. Which was my, you said some of these first principles, ideas started to come in and the Toyota Way and, and that kind of stuff.

And I started to formulate this and it's formulate this and formulate this. And so went from that to actually first helping other law firms with it. And then. The pandemic and we've got this idea, let's do this. My wife, my partner, had already owned a, a law firm that did wage and hour work, and, but she's like, let's, let's do that.

I wanna do this with you. And so we decided to do this. So I think that's a really long answer to the question, but I think it's important, I think to kind of where, where did these crazy ideas come from? Well, they came from these places that were just eye-opening and revelatory. I didn't invent VA's ideas.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, I, I do want to, you know, as much as you're willing to share in terms of sort of the way that you charge the clients, the subscription model. I want to get into that. But the other thing that I think really impressed me and that really piqued my interest when we first talked was, you wanted to, this goes back to the experiment thing. You're like, I'm gonna move to a place and start this in a place where we've got no connections to really see if it works from a concept perspective, versus it's just people that know me and they refer me stuff or whatever , which was cool.

So you moved to Colorado, you say, we're gonna start this thing. And so, I'll hand it back to you. I mean, there's really two questions and you can work it in however you want. Number one, you had to come up with sort of, the billing model and there's a whole host of things that go into that, I'm sure iterations and whatnot.

Christopher Anderson: So the market's easy. It makes sense. It's how they buy everything else these days, right? So it makes total sense. It's how they're paid, that's what they can budget, what they can't budget as a retainer and an unknown replenishment at an in an unknown time. And. I won't name any other firms, but you know, the firms that are out there with these phase based or flat based fees are really in much the way that my BMWI don't have A BMW, I used to have A BMW, this is why I don't have A BMW, why I now drive a used car.

But you know, the, when I would go to the dealer, they had a flat fee. When I would come in with a radiator problem, you know, radiator problem is $550. And I asked about it. I mean, I was curious like, how did you do that? How did you know? Like, well, truth is they have a book in the back says, well, all the things that go into this are this many hours.

But when you peel that back, that's just the billable hour again. It's all the same problems, right? Because more drama, more conflict, more problems, more issues, more money. Exactly the way the hour, the billable hour works because it truly is the billable hour. It's just the billable hour chunked up into, into discernible pieces rather than, we don't call them ours, we call them.

And so the subscription helps us. When the case gets more complex, it tends to last longer, and so it tends to even out. There are a lot of nuances to this. We built in things to protect the client. We, we move almost all the risk to ourselves. So let's say for instance, one problem with a subscription might be that there's delay, right?

And so now you're taking money month after month after month, and there's not much going on. We have a way to protect the client when that happens. We've developed a way to protect us if we get the complexity all the way wrong. And, and other things. So, you know, the, the, and some of these things we've had to iterate and, and we've learned a lot of it we came up with from the very beginning.

What would've happened with this case? What would've happened with this case? What would've happened with this case? We just gamed it and gamed it and gamed it and gamed it and came up with an idea and then I'll tell you what, I got it. So very, very wrong. The first iteration I was losing money handover fast, and we had to learn.

And like I said, we move all the risks to ourselves. So. If there's a big delay or whatever, we have safety valves for the client to make sure they're protected. I think I lost track of what question I'm answering, so I,

Jonathan Hawkins: well, I've got another one. So, So in terms of the factors, so I hear the lawyers in the audience saying, well, what about this? What about that? So here's one for you. So, you know, it's cool that you move to a new jurisdiction where you didn't know anybody, but you don't know anybody.

And you could pull on the, draw the jerk opposing counsel that's just gonna litigate the crap outta the case. So,

Christopher Anderson: And we do all the time.

How do you protect yourself and protect a client, get them to the goal? How in that instance, for example.

Christopher Anderson: Two ways. One is sometimes we just take it on the chin. You know, we do draw those lawyers sometimes. And in this for the long haul. I'm trying to shine a light on a practice area that hasn't been working that well for clients and showing a better way, and I still see good in them. And I can turn them from the dark side and, and, and bring them, you know, bring them into the Jedi order.

I, I do, I I just think that if, if you treat everybody the way you want them to treat you I think it was, oh, was it Bob Berg? I'm gonna mess this up, but No, it was Jay Berg. Jay Berg, a legal author that was really instrumental in my early days of practicing law. Great guy. I read early on, read two, read his books and came away with two key concepts that have served me all these years.

Like, this is a different way to think about the business of law. So when you think about it this way, you have your different levels of complexity. And so let's say they range from one to five. so each case carries a number, one to five. then you say, well, a lawyer can carry, and this comes, you know, this is a bastardization, but it comes from some of the agile scrum thinking about how to organize teams.

They, they don't know how to deal with it. Subscription probably blows their mind. They don't know what, what to deal with. But

Christopher Anderson: And opposing counsels too,

Jonathan Hawkins: them two and then you've got the bar regulators. And so, because you were on, you were on, you know, the bleeding edge here of, of this concept for law. You know, you're, you're gonna be pushing up against all these sort of external forces.

And I'm curious let's focus on the bar regulator piece. You know, what sort of pushback or, you know, what sort of issues, if any, have you encountered on, on that front?

They'll never say, yeah, you can do that. But, you know, it's not fair to say that, you know, they'll, they're only there to catch you when you do it wrong. That's not true either. They're, they're helpful, but they're not in the business of, of being our outside counsel. Right. We had, we hire our own outside counsel.

And, but that's been very helpful because, you know, you, again, you, if you try to do things the right way and you pay attention to things like fairness and reasonableness and transparency and candor, like you back to the court, you know, to court fee, fee what, what'd you call it? The court fee.

Jonathan Hawkins: A fee petition or.

Christopher Anderson: Fee petitioner fee award.

This is, this is what it would've looked like. And we always keep track. And it's a pain, right? It's because you have to keep this whole team, all the lawyers, all the paralegals keeping their time when they, they don't bill it. And and, but it's just, it's just a rule, right? So we, we keep that stuff, but that's how we do it.

Jonathan Hawkins: So,

Christopher Anderson: Except it's still you, you're still always afraid.

Jonathan Hawkins: yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Anderson: But, but you know, we, we were, what's, what's the word my grandfather used to use? We're, we're living right? We're trying to live. Right.

Jonathan Hawkins: So another aspect of this, so you've got you know, you, the leader, the innovator came up with this you've, you've explained it to the market. They loving it. You, you've figured out a way to explain it to the courts and the bar regulators, et cetera, et cetera. Let's talk about recruiting attorneys and staff and training and retention.

Christopher Anderson: so again, I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm a pretty predictable guy, right? So it's the same way, like I don't invent different ways to do the same, the different things. Candor, transparency, fairness. Um. Everybody we hire, we review this system with them in the hiring process. And some people don't like it, then they don't come work here.

And that's okay. A lot of people who come work here look at this and say, I don't want to figure this out. Like, so they weren't looking for a job solo. Like one of, one of the greatest sources of new team members here has been solos or small firms who look at what we're doing and say, wow, I'd love to work in that environment. I don't want to invent it.

And so they just come work with us and we give, we liberate them and help them to do that. But, you know, to answer your question, like, so we're, we're very transparent about the system. Whether and whether it's that solo that's coming over or we're recruiting and actually hiring a lateral. Or we, we also take, you know, we, we, we raise new lawyers too.

So we take law clerks and raise new lawyers through the firm. And if it doesn't float their boat, they don't come. Right? There's no, there's no bait and switch. There's no trick. It's just a different way. And, and there, as you can imagine with me, there's a lot of things that are a different way.

I just started over with, with a clean sheet. Now the, you know, the firm that my wife and partner had started, it still operates. It's doing its own thing over there. But they don't interact. And, and so we really did have a clean sheet. We said we we're just gonna do things the way we want to do them, the way we think is right, and we don't have to fix or carry the baggage of the way that didn't work.

So, and that goes with everybody that joins us. Like this is different. Like if you want different, this is different. And for our team, they love it.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, another question that personally I'm curious. So any firm or any business that's on sort of a subscription style mo model, you mentioned compensation you know, traditional firms, you know, you hit this amount of hours, you're gonna get this sort of incentive comp. If you originate this, you get this, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, the traditional elements that law firms sort of base incentive comp on.

Christopher Anderson: it's, I mean, so there origination's still a real thing, so we still do that. Right? And then it's around client happiness, so we have a way of scoring that and it's around caseload. So, you know, I said, you know, I, I threw out that kind of bogus number. But, you know, going back to that concept, right, saying a typical lawyer can carry 45.

And so we just say, listen, if you carry, if the, if the number's 45, which is not if you carry above 40 for every, every number above 40, there's incentive. And by carry it's, you know, that they, that they stay current on their subscription and that you work the case. And if you go above 50, we turn it on, we turn the gas up high, and you on your, you your variable Comcast cost higher.

And and I don't wanna do much more than that, and they can do that too. So we, you know, we have this incredibly flexible comp plan. So we've got lawyers making a lot, a lot of money because they really want to maximize income. And we've got some lawyers that really wanna maximize lifestyle, and that's okay.

The only, the only challenge, and again, we learn as we go, the only challenge with that is that we've had to restrict the number of times you can change your mind in a year. So, you know, once a year you can change your mind as to how, how you want your comp to work. But you know, so we replace hours again because that's not what we do with.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. So you mentioned earlier, and, and we talked about it, you, you also coach and maybe consult with the law firms and lawyers. So I wanna talk a little bit about that, but also tying into the subscription, do you coach firms on maybe how to design these things to fit.

Different practice areas if they want.

Christopher Anderson: yes, absolutely. The uh, you know, I, I've worked with a couple dozen law firms across the country. I think we're up anyway in various aspects of their businesses. So not just how to build this, but how to market it, but not, and again, my, my, my consulting work and I tend to do more consulting than coaching.

That's not the most of my clients. I gotta tell you, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm with all your listeners. This is not for the faint of heart building a subscription model. You 'cause the way I do it here, I've learned a lot. And there's, you know, if I had to do it all over again, I would do things very differently.

And so I always tell people, you know, don't, don't say, how did you get there? Could, then you'll follow those tracks. Don't do that. You know, let's, let's, let's show you a way where you don't fall down that shaft as you walk through the fields. And it, it's just not for the faint of heart. And if you don't have the data, right, I had a lot of data, but I don't have a lot of data for Montana.

Can I, can I help first of all? And how hard is it gonna be to help you? And, and then we, we, we start to work from that perspective. I only tend to work, so my criteria for clients I work with are clients that want to grow relatively fast. And that they're starting from a place where they can afford to work with someone like myself and that they want to grow fast.

'cause that's what I do. I don't do. Static management. There's a lot of people who do, and it's not, and it's not poo-pooing it. A lot of firms who are happy with where they are in their general market and their general revenue level and their general size, but wish they were more profitable or wish that they weren't as tied to the business or wish that they had better management with their employees and less turnover.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I, as I think about subscriptions we'll tie it back to that. Is it a family law or a litigation practice is probably the most difficult. You may disagree with me, but in my mind, it seems like that's the most challenging type of practice to implement a subscription into. If you can do that, you can probably do it anywhere.

The co, the,

Christopher Anderson: and not to interrupt you, but that's the two I have. I've done, I've done subscriptions with business representations as well. I did that before the family law one, and that was, that was lots of fun.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so for your consulting firm, the firms you consult with and you maybe help this implement subscription or the other services you, you provide, it's, it, it, it's not just family law firms? Correct. It's any type of firm or so any firm that just wants to grow.

I, you know, I couldn't jump into court and prosecute a medical malpractice case. Criminal defense has some of the other ones but that's not important. Like I understand your business model and I understand how the inside of the firm works. That's where I help. You know, I'm not there to help you be a better lawyer.

Most of my clients, I presume, are just fine in that regard.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so we're coming up almost on our time here. I have one more question and then we'll, we'll wrap up. And,

Christopher Anderson: You bet.

Jonathan Hawkins: For law firm owners out there that are, you know, anywhere in their journey, we can, you can pick a place, but any low hanging fruit or any advice that you would give them if they want to grow?

Well, let's just say they want to grow, they don't wanna maintain what's, you know, top 1, 2, 3 pieces of advice you'd give them?

I'll work with the personal lifestyle ones.

So in order to move on from that, we've gotta have a powerful reason. So, you know, I'm not getting all Simon Seneca on us, but we gotta get to the why you want to grow first and that, so that's, that's the big, big one. And everything falls from there. You know, then I think it's also important to know what you're not willing to do. You know, oh, I'm not willing to work 50 hours a week. I wanna work only 30. I'm not willing to. Try a new practice area. I'm not willing to open another office. I'm not willing to hire new people.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, if you write the book, let me know. 'cause I, I definitely, I'll be the first one to buy a copy. So Christopher, thanks for coming on. I wanna plug your, your podcast again. Unbillable hour. You know, I remember that, you know, I've been into podcast forever, but this one's been around. I I looked it up.

I mean, at least 15 years, I think. I mean that's,

Christopher Anderson: It's, yeah. Could. Yeah. Yeah, I

Jonathan Hawkins: it's, that's impressive. You know, and when you started it, it was a lot harder to do a podcast back then than it is today. Way easier. Still, still, I mean. Still takes work, but so 15 years, that is impressive consistency. So kudos to that. Everybody out there, if you haven't checked it out, you go check out unbillable hour.

Christopher Anderson: you bet. If you, if, if you'd like to have a discovery call with me just to consider working with me or just, just. A pioneer future. You can reach christopher@sunnysidelaw.com and or you can check out sunnyside law.com. It's a very rudimentary website 'cause we honestly just don't do much with it.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, Christopher, again, thank you for coming on. I, I'm really, really intrigued about what you are doing and what you've done. I think that's just really, really cool stuff. So, thanks for coming on and, and sharing it with me and sharing it with everybody else.

Christopher Anderson: Thanks. My absolute pleasure. It's been, it's been a delight and thank you for having me on the show.