In this episode, we sit down with Emery Wager, founder of Confido, to discuss his journey from the Marine Corps to helping law firms optimize their collections process. Emery shares valuable insights on how firms can boost profitability by implementing a "collect early" billing model and tackling points of friction in their business. Join us as we explore leadership lessons from the military and how they can be applied to enhance law firm performance.

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MPS: Hey, Law Firm Owner. Welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast. We're your hosts. I'm MPS. 


And so we're going to From Emory and his journey as a founder and his entrepreneurial journey. So hopefully we can share some insight there, but now he's worked with countless small law firms to understand how to improve their overall collections process to ensure that they get paid. And this is such an important topic when dealing with the concept of running and managing a law firm. 


So Emory, thank you for being on the call today. A pleasure having you here. 


Emery Wager: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. 


MPS: Well, Law Firm Owners, if we didn't say it enough open the ears. This is about getting paid. So this is a good episode to listen to. Emery, we like to kick things off by just learning something about you. So what's maybe something not everybody knows about you? I know. 


And now I'm working on a musical about self discovery and leadership in the military. So we'll see how that turns out, but that's something that doesn't come up too often in sales calls with law firms. 


Richard James: Hey MPS, I didn't realize this, but we may very well be talking to the next Jack Carr. Are you kidding me? 


MPS: So I mean, this, this is the starting point. it's public now if it wasn't already. No I'm, excited. First off, appreciate your service. Thank you for that, and secondly, if you're open to sharing, is this like a novel, like you published, or is this just a project you worked on? 


MPS: I'm writing the title now. 


Richard James: Well, I put it in my phone. I'm already ahead of you. I'm buying it. I'm buying it as we speak. 


Emery Wager: All right. 


MPS: Well, I appreciate you sharing that. That's really cool. That, find the military background and the stories coming out of the military are so fascinating to me and I think there's endless lessons that come out of those stories. So I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you for giving an outlet to everybody to grab a copy for those who are interested. So talk to us a little bit about that then. So you were in the military and now we're here at Confido. Talk a little bit about the high points of the journey. 


So he basically said, I need me one of these. So he was networking in the veteran community to try to find a, you know, an XO, which happened to be the last role that I added. And so we got connected, hit it off. And you know, I ended up working for his company for, 10 years. And, that's you know, about six years into that role, I started managing kind of on the side, all of our outside, you know, outside counsel, you know, the relationships we had with all the different law firms that we worked with. 


And so got really interested in the business of law and dug in and learned about. All these crazy things like a trust account, you know, what an iota account was and how money needed to be handled and why law firms can't In many cases, use a lot of the best in class tools out there. So what I didn't know because I was coming at it from the client side was how that impacted that experience impacted the actual financials of a law firm. 


So that money just drops to the bottom line. So, it seemed like a major, major problem that we could help solve not fully but, we can make a big impact by kind of bringing best in class, integrated e commerce experience too. to the legal world in a way that complied with the rules of professional conduct. 


Emery Wager: I didn't have any say in the matter. 


Richard James: Okay. So did they, so did they Make you into this person or did you already have the skillset and you think they do a good job of recognizing that? 


Richard James: Well, you know, so for the law firm owners that are listening and by the way we're in this boat, we're growing rapidly. 


I'm older, not younger, and I'm looking for a replacement in my world and operations and understanding that XO. Position is actually going to be helpful for me. It was a writer downer for me. But for you law firm owners that are listening, if you're looking for this operations person in the EOS world, entrepreneurial operating system world, they call it the integrator, right? 


MPS: to collect as much as they can during the initial consultation. And so it starts there and what I find is that, and I'm curious to hear Emery's thoughts on this, but what I find is that many firms think in many cases it ends there too. 


Emery Wager: Yeah, totally agree. You know, there's relying on, like you said, they're going to send out an invoice after the work has been, done. And I think that's the first [00:11:00] mistake. The best firms that we work with are implementing what we've called kind of a collect early billing model. So you're either doing flat fee work where you can take that payment up front and drop it right in your operating account, you know, or you're running kind of an evergreen retainer model where you're always work working against money that you already have in the trust account. 


We had one firm that it was a bigger firm that transitioned to that model and all of a sudden, I mean, it's a big firm, but they all of a sudden just found a million dollars in the bank, 


MPS: crazy how that 


Emery Wager: um, By making sure they had a key performance indicator that was. What percentage of our revenue this month came from the trust account? 


And they were trying to maximize, you know, they're trying to get that as close to a hundred percent as possible. And then you know, another method is, just putting a payment method on file, basically. It's, kind of the evergreen model without having to deal with all the trust account stuff. 


Richard James: here's the thing. The smaller firms don't usually recognize the impact. This has on them. I mean, they do, you know, when you have a larger firm that's moving five, 10, 20 million, whatever it is a year, and they start to recognize doing business like this vice versa, doing the business the way they did before. Like you said, they all of a sudden wake up and find a million dollars in their bank, right? And 


I understand now after working with lawyers for 15 years why this is, but it is still a little crazy. That idea of having a credit card on file for an evergreen situation. You know, so my mentor, Dan Kennedy told me many years ago, he said, Richard, cause we were talking about invoicing in the way we should do things. And I was talking about when I was launching my consulting business, I'm like, so should I, you know, invoice them, you know, after the first month or whatever he said, and he looked at me, he goes, Richard, wealthy people. Are paid in advance for the work that they do and I'm like really I go you could do that He goes not only could you do that? You should do that. It's just good for everybody, right? and so this is what we try to get through to the law firm owners that we work with now If you're a law firm [00:14:00] owner and you struggle with this idea, I get that. There's a lot of the things you've been through law school, ethics training, your peers, whatever that have told you, maybe it shouldn't be this way. But if you own a law firm, you own a business. And if you own a business, your number one job for that business is to be profitable. Yes. You have a mission to help your clients. I get that, but we have to help all three C's. We have to help the clients. We have to help the company and we have to help the crew or the staff of the company. 


They're getting paid for their hours. And so they don't take the time to pay attention to these other things. What advice, if any, have you given them to get them away from their thinking of being a technician and moving them towards running their business like a business? 


Emery Wager: Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of these things aren't necessarily any, any harder. And. If you know, if you are successful, if you're feeling successful, it's so easy to have this. initial conversation basically saying, Hey, we're going to put your payment method on file, or we expect to always have money in the retainer account. 


Collect early billing models. Yeah. 


MPS: I think it comes down to just the root of it, is just the perspective of them viewing their law firm like a business, right? Because if you view your law firm like a business, you're going to make sure that it gets paid and you're going to make sure that you're profitable. But when you view your law firm as solely just the practice of law, It's easy for some of those things to go on the back burner and their focus is on the practice of law and not on the business. 


Emery Wager: Yeah. There's this concept of, always kind of going to the point of friction. So, you could be, you know, commanding a battalion. You know, and that's, you know, trying to take a fortified hill and you, there might be one moment where you know, there's going to be a breach in the, defenses and everything hinges on that. 


And if the point of friction happens to be, you know, we're only collecting, you know, 80, 80 percent of what we're billing. Then you need to go there and fix that. And then take a step back, survey all the troops and then find, you know, where's the next point of friction that I, as the, you know, the leader need to be at. 


So, you know, I think there's a misconception that if you're a leader, you're never. in the trenches or you're never, you know, diving into the details, but you really, you know, you need to identify where that point of friction is. And it really is your job to be at that point of friction and unblocking whoever's around, you know, whoever's in that situation and kind of taking lead on the front line there. 


Emery Wager: Yes. Yep, exactly. 


And if you marry that with what Michael said of that, if owners of law firms would start to recognize that they're business owners. So we get them to recognize that they're a business owner, and then we get them to recognize that their primary job is to identify the friction point. And then. Get involved in the friction point at some level so that they can figure out what's going on, whether they're doing it on their own because their firm is smaller, or they've got to figure out how to teach their team, how to figure it out for them, but they have to be involved in order to get it going on. 


Why don't you just fix this? Like some point we just have to get involved. I mean, Michael, you see that all the time, not as much in our company today. But certainly in companies that we're leading, would you agree? 


It's not until we actually go in and do it that we recognize, ah, that's missing, or ah, we need to change that, or we need to add that. And so just being willing to do that will allow you to certainly move the needle forward. So Emery, I think that was an amazing point that you just drove from the military and I think you got right to the root of where the biggest opportunity lies in most law firms. 


So I appreciate you sharing that. I'm curious. what's got you fired up? What's got you excited? 


And so we, actually just launched a, a pilot of our a disbursements engine to help. Those plaintiff firms who are operating on contingency better manage and digitize the process of paying settlements and awards out to clients. So I'm, super excited you know, to work in those practice areas and with those firms, it's been great kind of building the concept of the product with them. 


And it's Yeah, definitely getting me excited for the future. 


Richard James: I mean, you know, based firms. Are certainly one of the fastest growing niches in law has been for a while. And so if you've developed a product that is going to, for a service that is going to make their life easier and give a system to provide systematic processes to it, I can imagine there's going to be a rapid appetite for this. 


So I'm excited for you. Congratulations. 


Emery Wager: Thank you. Thank you. 


Emery Wager: Yep. Confidolegal. com is a great place. There's a bunch of avenues to get in touch with us. And I love nerding out on this stuff. So even if you have no uh, you know, you don't have any need for our product. We love to, you know, throw around ideas and whatnot. And we also have a one page downloadable called the Collections Optimizer. 


You can just search for it on our site. And it talks about some of the kind of best practices that we've seen firms implement to you know, to get to frankly a near perfect collection rate. So, 


Emery Wager: thank you so much. It's 


Richard James: it. so much. It's great to be here. I'm in man. That's a great name. Killer name. I love it. I hope everybody goes and downloads it. That's what this is all about getting incremental improvements for law firms each and every day. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. 


Thank you as always for your service to our country and for bringing what you learned from that service time in our, when you're serving our country to the company that you now found it. And we're excited to watch where you go from here. Appreciate you being a part of partners club family and supporting our members as well. Thank you so much. You're appreciated. 


Emery Wager: Thank you. 


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