#169 Legals By Design® - I am thrilled to share this with you
This week's podcast episode is one I’ve been planning to record for a while, and it's finally time to share it with you. I've been working for some time on how to articulate in a really succinct and clear way how it is I do what I do when working with my clients, and how it is I create legal documents that work for small business owners.
Now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I don’t often talk about myself. Today, however, I want to share with you my unique approach to working with my clients, the vision for my business and the ‘why’ behind it all.
Introducing Legals by Design
Legals by Design is my signature approach, developed over my more than 20-year career in the legal field. While it has evolved over the last five years since launching my business, I have spent the past 12 months refining and articulating it for you. This approach is a blend of my extensive knowledge and expertise, combined with the insights and practical implementations I deliver when collaborating with my clients. It's unique to me and captures the essence of what I deliver when developing legal documents that work.
The Four Elements of Legals by Design
In this episode, I’ll take you through the fundamentals of my signature framework so you have a clear understanding of who I am and what I do:
1. Client-Centric Approach: My focus is empathetic and centred around you, the client. Recognising that every business has different needs and challenges, I meet you where you're at with fluidity and flexibility. I offer fixed-fee value-based pricing to ensure you only pay for what your business truly needs.
2. Better Communication: With feedback from clients, I've honed an accessible and down-to-earth communication style. I specialise in making complex legal issues simple and understandable, empowering business owners with clarity and confidence.
3. Richer Outcomes: My tailored legal documents are designed to be relevant, current and compliant with your business's legal obligations. They ensure confidence and pride whenever you issue them, whether to a client, a team member or any business partner.
4. Comprehensive Implementation: Bringing all elements together, I spend time ensuring that the legal documents truly work for your business. From setup to practical application, I guide you through every step, sharing my extensive experience to avoid potential pitfalls.
While these elements may sound simple, they’re not always a reality in traditional legal practice. I believe this framework sets me apart from the rest, and is also what sets my soul on fire.
I hope this episode helps to explain the nuances to my approach and what underlies my thinking behind developing legal documents that truly work for business owners.
Happy listening!
Full Transcript:
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[00:00:00]
Tracey: Welcome everyone to what is going to be a very exciting podcast episode this week. This is an episode that I have been wanting to record for you since, well, since the middle of last year. I've been working for some time on articulating in a really succinct and clear way, how it is I do what I do when I work with my clients and how it is that I create legal documents that work for small business owners.
Around the middle of last year, I finalized the work around refining and finessing how I articulate this and how I frame this for you. [00:01:00] And I'm now ready and able to share it with you. So today I'm going to share with you what Legals by Design is and how it's my signature approach for working with clients.
Legals by Design is something I have developed throughout the course of my more than 20 year career. I haven't been actively developing this the entire time, of course, but it has evolved over the last five years since launching this business. And for the past 12 months, I've been working on articulating my signature approach and really diving in to explain it in a way that's meaningful. I can now share with you that Legals by Design is a blend of my knowledge and expertise, coupled with the insight I share and the implementation I deliver when collaborating with my clients. Legals by Design is something that's unique to me. It wholeheartedly captures the [00:02:00] essence of what I do and the depth of what it is that I deliver for clients when I'm developing legals that work.
You know, by now, if you've been listening to me for a while, that I have such a passion when it comes to documentation, contracts, agreements, all things that many people find typically either boring and dull or overwhelming and complex.
It's a passion of mine. It's an area that I love, and I have used my experience and knowledge gained throughout my career to launch this business on a platform of educating and empowering business owners to set themselves up properly so they don't need to call a lawyer like me later when things go wrong.
So let me dive in and share with you the four elements that comprise Legals by Design and I'm going to explain to you what they are and how this approach makes my approach unique. So the first element of Legals by [00:03:00] Design is my client centric approach. My focus is empathetic, and it's centered around the client, not me. Let's be honest, no one cares about my education and what I do and what drives me and all the things. Clients come along because they want to know what I'm going to be able to do for them.
So my approach is client centric. It's fluid, it's flexible, and I meet the client where they're at. And this is where the magic happens. Every business has different needs. Every business is at a different stage. Every business has different challenges. That needs to be recognized. I respect this completely, and I have an ability to be able to meet clients where they're at, explain to them what it is that they need and deliver accordingly.
It's taken me a while to realize that that really is a unique client centric approach because the time that it takes to do that is different for every client. My billing in my firm, so [00:04:00] my fees are all fixed fee pricing. It's all value based. So I'm not the lawyer that says, I don't know what I'm going to charge you in the end, because I don't know how much time it's going to take to work on this with you.
This is what's unique. So rather than giving a range or rather than charging extra, if you need extra time or extra sessions, or you've got more questions, I don't. I don't do that. It's fixed fee because it's value based and I'm committed to ensuring that what I deliver works for every business owner that I work with, not just the ones that only need me for a little bit of time.
To design legals that work, I take the time to get to know the client. I get to know their business, how the business operates. I need to know what's important to them. And I can only do that through giving them the time. And I need to know what their experiences have been, what their pain points have been, where they're coming from.
When I know all of that, [00:05:00] I can meet them there and share with them what it is that we need to put in place to meet their legal requirements, to meet their needs with their clients and to make sure that their legals work for them in the way they operate their business.
The next element that comprises my Legals by Design is better communication.
I know from the feedback I've gotten from my clients, that I am accessible. I'm easy to understand. I'm down to earth and I only share with clients what it is that they need to know, based on their circumstances and their business. You probably won't be surprised to learn that my superpower really is making the complex simple. So I have a real passion for this area of law, as you know, and I have an ability to dive in, digest it, understand it, and then explain it in a way that the clients can understand and in a way that helps business owners feel empowered. There is nothing worse than somebody sharing a whole ton of information [00:06:00] with us. It's overwhelming. We don't quite get it. We don't want to ask the questions and we walk away either with more questions than we started with or scratching our head, not quite sure what's going on.
That is not me. That's not how I do things. That's not my style.
My belief is that in order to collaborate effectively with a client, crystal clear communication is a key and that has to flow both ways. So clients need to be comfortable to ask the questions, to reach out, to have their team reach out so that everyone's on the same page. Clients need to be comfortable to know that they're digesting what I'm sharing, that they're understanding what I'm sharing and that they've been told everything they need to know, that they're across it, that nothing's been missed, and that they've got this. And I do that by using better communication. It's that simple. The third element is richer outcomes and richer outcomes to me means tailored legals that are [00:07:00] branded and work for a business. They are not one size fits all. No one wants or needs legal documents that look like a lawyer has taken them from a textbook, has printed them off and changed the names. You probably won't be surprised though when I tell you that not only are there lawyers that still do this, but there's actually lawyers who build businesses doing this.
That's not creating legals by design. That is not taking the time to understand and respect a business. It's not delivering quality outcomes and it's not empowering a business owner or setting a business up for long term success. It's just not.
Legals by Design delivers legals that are relevant, that are current, that comply with a particular business's legal obligations, and they contain practical terms that a business owner can understand and that a business owner knows how to apply. This process in itself [00:08:00] ensures that a business owner is not only confident when they issue their legals, but that they're proud of them every single time.
Sending them out to a client, a team member, whatever the case may be, the business owner is confident and proud. The legals work for the business. They look like the business. They're a continuation of touch points that a client has had with a business. The clients I work with stand firm in their professionalism and the documents that we produce reflect this. And the fourth element that I want to share with you that comprises Legals by Design is implementation. Bringing it all together is key. So it's one thing to get to know a business owner, to work with a business owner and draft the legals that will work, but it's another thing to spend the time on implementation to make sure that they do work. Without this really important last step, which I see as [00:09:00] missing far too often, it's likely that the documents won't end up doing the What it is that the business owner wants and needs them to do that the documents won't protect the business at the pointy end when a business owner needs to rely on them, which begs the question, what's the point of developing them if we don't spend time on implementation?
What I see is that this step is missed by a lot of lawyers either because they don't want to spend the time with the client that's not profitable, or they don't understand.
And again, everything that I do in this business encompasses all the years of experience that I have, including the first 12 years of my career, that I spent in litigation and dispute resolution. So I've seen it go wrong. I know what can go wrong. I've seen it all. So when I spend time on implementation, it's because I know what to look for to avoid things going wrong.
It's because I know what to [00:10:00] do and how to set documents up to make sure that they work, to make sure that they withstand challenge. And this is a really important piece. You can see just from hearing me explain the process is why this last part is so important
When I work with a client on implementation, what that means is not only just giving you some tips and explaining it to you, here you go, this is how you do it, but I am here to have a look at how it is you've set it up. What wording have you used when you're issuing your client service agreement and your proposal?
Or what wording have you used in your emails when you're sending these things out? How have you set this up on your website? Show me. This is the unique implementation phase of the work that I do with clients when I am creating legals that work because having them done is one thing. Making sure they work is another.
What I've come to learn over the last five years is [00:11:00] that this part of the framework requires a willingness to spend time with clients to make sure things work.
I've come to learn that many practitioners perceive this as an administrative matter. And let's be honest, ego tends to come hand in hand with the legal profession. And I've come to learn that many practitioners will say no to spending time on the implementation because they see it as administrative and that's not a legal question.
So it's not a matter for me. That's a sad reality of the traditional legal practice. And it's not something that I think serves the client. So it's not client centric, the first element of the Legals by Design framework. It's just not. By taking the time to spend with clients on implementation is what makes this signature approach so unique.
It's so valuable to business owners, and I know from experience just how valuable [00:12:00] this time can be. At the end of the day, a business owner needs legals in place that work. And my signature approach, Legals by Design, ensures that they get just that. Legals that work. And it's holistic as you can see. So it's taken some time for me to be ready to share this with you because you know, from listening to my podcast that I don't sit and talk about myself a great deal.
I share with you knowledge. I share with you real life client examples. I share with you my guidance and give you insights, but I don't often sit and share with you the inner workings of why it is that I'm doing this or why it is that I do that or what it is that actually drives my approach.
And that's what this episode is designed to do, because it is unique and we've been working on it for quite a while. So I know that it's time to share it because it's important for business owners to [00:13:00] understand the intricacies and what goes on behind the scenes in developing legals for your small business that work.
The reason I wanted to share this today is because we're talking more and more about legals on the podcast, and we're getting into the detail on some really nuanced aspects of the work that I do with coaches, creatives and consultants and things that need to be included and things that shouldn't be included in documentation.
But this framework is what sets me apart from the rest. And this framework is what sets my soul on fire. When I do this work with clients, because it is so soul led by me, it does fill me with joy to no end to work with clients, to develop these types of documents that work. And I know that by sharing with you my approach and what underlies my thinking and my reasoning in developing documents the way that I do is really important context for business owners to understand. So to recap, Legals by Design is a blend [00:14:00] of my knowledge and expertise coupled with the insight that I share and the implementation I deliver when collaborating with a client. And the four elements that I work through in this unique signature approach is a client centric approach, better communication, richer outcomes and implementation. Thank you so much for joining me for this very special episode. It's near and dear to my heart as you can tell. And I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed recording it for you. If you have business friends that you think would benefit from this insight that I've shared here, please feel free to share the podcast.
It would mean the world to me if you do, because that's how we get the podcast into the ears of even more business owners. Thanks for joining me. I'll catch you next time.
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