Off the Clock: Understanding the Billable Hour From a Lawyer Who Abandoned It

John Reed: [00:00:10] In case you didn't know, I used to practice law. Litigation. Depending on who you ask, I was an okay lawyer. Maybe I could have been a great lawyer. Who knows?

The law firm where I worked was a typical firm in the sense that we billed hourly for all of the work we did for clients: research, writing, court appearances, meetings, prep for meetings, receipt and review of documents, phone calls. If I was doing anything related to an open matter, I recorded my time, by hand at first, on an actual time sheet in six-minute increments. 

My first year, I was required to bill 2,000 hours. Quick math would tell you that's eight hours a day, 40 hours per week. Home for dinner, time with the fam, and a good night's sleep, right? No. Logging 120,000 minutes a year takes much longer. It's a different kind of math. And the reward for reaching that goal? 2,200 hours in my second year.

There are correlations between billing demands, client service, career fulfillment, and mental health. Google it. Like any organization, compensation drives individual behaviors, good and bad. We'll dig deep on this with today's guest.

Christopher Anderson is an expert on the practice and business of law, as well as how law practices can become better businesses. He's a named partner with Anderson Dodson Law Firm and the entrepreneur and innovator behind New Leaf Family Law, accomplished author, podcast host, and the founding consultant of Sunnyside Services, a consultancy that teaches lawyers how to succeed on their own terms.

Hi, Christopher. Welcome to Sticky Lawyers.

Christopher Anderson: [00:01:52] Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the invitation and am looking forward to the show.

John Reed: [00:01:57] The billable hour is a central theme or maybe a common enemy, in your various endeavors. So, let's start with that. What is the history of attorneys billing hourly?

Christopher Anderson: [00:02:08] Interestingly, for me anyway, one of the most interesting things about it is that lawyers today, because it's been this way now for over 50 years, kind of have the sense that's always been the way and it's not at all. , And it was never meant to be.

It was never meant to be how lawyers in almost every practice area value their time or how we asked our clients to value our time. Pull up a bill from the late 19th century, and I would argue probably goes right into the 1960s, and you would see what we today would be referred to, more or less as block billing, where an attorney would, at the end of the week or a month or whatever the billing period was, would have a narrative of all the things that they did for the client during that time period. And then at the bottom it would say "for services rendered" and a dollar amount. And that would be that.

Because they did it that way, the lawyers were very attentive to describe it in a way that conveyed value. You look at most hourly bills today, they do not. Nobody really cares if you spent 0.3 researching issue in such and such, or 0.2 reviewing emails from opposing counsel or whatever. That doesn't convey any value whatsoever. But that's what we do. And that's not what it was meant to be. 

John Reed: [00:03:31] Where did this idea of narrative billing turn into this picayune, line by line, recording of my day?

Christopher Anderson: [00:03:41] Since it seems to be a popular thing to do today, we can blame insurance companies because that's where the blame lies. And they didn't do it to ruin legal practice. We did that to ourselves.

For a very small percentage of us who did work for insurance companies, the people who ran the insurance companies and tried to manage risk and understand cost, be the very effective bean counters that they are, asked the question, "How do we know if we're paying a fair amount for the counsel that we're getting?" And narrative block billing didn't give them the warm and fuzzies as to being able to tell their shareholders, tell their stakeholders, that the amounts that they were reserving for legal fees were fair and equitable.

So, they asked the lawyers to start tracking time. Factories work that way. Your workers' clock in, they clock out. We have a long history since the late 18th century of measuring workers' productivity that way. And so, “why not?” I think was the thinking with the insurance companies. And so, it came to be.

And then over time, they were then able to put standardized billing practices, much like medicine. So, they got codes, which we all know as LEDES, right? L-E-D-E-S. And made it easier and easier for machines to review and at least spit out when a bill seemed fair and when it didn't. Then the war started, right? Because now, lawyers are like, oh, they're using machines and algorithms to see if our bills are fair. Let's learn what they're looking for and comport our billing to match their review system so that our bills flow through. And then, then all corporations looked at that and said, "Hey." And general counsel, "How do we know? Lawyers, we'd like you to do that same thing." So then in law firms now, there's the corporate lawyers, and then there's the insurance defense lawyers, and the partners are going like, "Hey, you know, we're doing it that way here." And so, it was. And then finally clients started looking at it. And worst, in my opinion, bar associations when managing fee disputes, then also came in and said, "How do we know that the fee was fair? Insurance companies have figured it out." So, we all got burdened by this thing. And it was never meant to be.

John Reed: [00:05:56] We are, as lawyers, in the trust business. We build trust with our client. We have a service, right?

Christopher Anderson: [00:06:01] Mm-hmm.

John Reed: [00:06:01] We don't build widgets. It sounds like the billable hour is a result of a breakdown of trust, that I, as the insurance company, if we're saying that it started there, don't trust you to have included in your narrative all that I need to know to be able to go back and say, yes, we got value. Do you attribute it to that or is it just more of administration and bookkeeping?

Christopher Anderson: [00:06:27] I agree with the first part of it that I think it's a breakdown in trust, but I don't think it was between the insurance companies and the lawyers. Because let's remember, some of the lawyers in the insurance companies are, and were, captive. They're actually owned by the insurance company. The trust was more between the shareholders and the administrators, and the administrators needed to have a way to say that they're auditing this in a more objective way that is provable. Insurance companies went public and as shareholders demanded more transparency and more profit, that's where it came in. I don't think it was a trust thing between the insurance companies and the law firms. I don't think the law firms had done anything writ broadly that would have engendered that.

John Reed: [00:07:10] If the billable hour is the cause, what are the effects? What are the consequences? What, what behaviors does it incentivize and reactions that it elicits?

Christopher Anderson:[00:07:22]  So it's horrible, right? It's absolutely horrible. My practice, in full transparency, is almost entirely focused on consumer facing law, right? Our clients, my clients have almost all been people. Early in my career I did some more business work, but you can look at it from the corporate side, from the consumer side, it's all the same.

You said lawyers are in the trust business. I think what lawyers really are, are in the problem-solving business. And in a real sense, as far as consumer law, in the life betterment business. And all of that is frustrated by the billable hour. Because what clients hire me for is to make their lives better. And you might say, they hire me to solve problems and hire my firm, hire the people that work in my firm to do those things. "Problem solved" has value. And one might even argue that, because we can't promise results, so I can't sell "problem solved," most of the time. So, what you're really selling is peace of mind that the best opportunity to solve the problem in a way that's favorable to the client will be achieved. That's the value, right? Moving the client from the place they are to where they want to be or to have the best chance at where they want to be. And in that distance between those two places lies value. And the billable hour says, no, no, no. How much time it takes the lawyer to do this is value. And that puts now the lawyers and the client measuring value in different ways.

I venture to say that there is not a client in the history of the world who has ever said, you know what, I really want 0.3 hours of an attorney's time. I just want to talk to an attorney or make an attorney do something for 0.5 hours. So, I'll pay for that because that's cool.

When you go to a restaurant, you don't go like, how long did the cook spend cooking my meal? When you get a surgery, you know, how long is the surgeon cutting me? These aren't questions we ask.

In consumer law, it's even worse because you're dealing with relatively unsophisticated consumers of legal services. And I don't mean that you're unsophisticated if there are some of our clients out there, not you're unsophisticated, you don't have a history of consuming legal services like general counsel of a corporation does, right? They are very sophisticated users because they've done it a lot.

In consumer facing law then, where you're being paid by the hour, the lawyer has an incentive. Everybody's going to get up in arms here. "We're ethical. This is a, this is a profession. We don't do this." And I'm not saying we do. But the fact that whether we do or not does not change the incentive. And there is an incentive to make the case more complicated, to introduce more drama, more friction, more conflict, because all those things add time to the case.

And while I believe 99.9% of lawyers are very ethical and really take their oath very seriously, they're also almost a hundred percent all human beings, and human beings respond to stimuli. And when the stimuluses make things more complicated, make things more dramatic, make things more conflictual, I mean, all you have to do is look at how cases are litigated to answer the question about whether that's what's happening, right? That’s not in the client's interest.

And then flip it. As a business owner, which if you own a law firm, you are, whether you like it or not, there is extreme disincentive to be efficient. I was just having a conversation this weekend with a lawyer who is trying to, and wants to, really adopt ChatGPT and large language models into their practice. They said, "I've asked it for a memo on a point of law, and I got it back in three minutes, and it was excellent. How do I bill for that?"

And that goes back to the old adage, the ship is stuck in the harbor, and the company that needs to move the cargo, they can't get the ship out of the harbor because the giant engine won't start. They finally call in this guy, and he walks in and looks at the engine, smells it, touches it, feels it, listens to it turn over and not start, and takes out his big hammer and whacks it in just this specific spot. And boom, the engine roars to life. And he says, you know, that'll be $25,000. And the captain, or the company or whatever looks at him and says, "$25,000? You were here for like six minutes." He's like, "Yes, six minutes and 30 years of knowing exactly where to hit the machine."

So, knowing exactly what to ask ChatGPT, knowing exactly what to ask the large language model, you know, in our measure of hours that would devastate the law firm and disincentivize that lifelong learning. Bringing efficiency to the practice is disincentivized. So, I mean, I think with those two examples, you see like what the billable hour is doing, right? It's misaligning us with the business. It's misaligning us with our clients, and that's why my podcast is called The Unbillable Hour.

John Reed: [00:12:46] That's true. I guess I'm also curious to get your thoughts about the impact of the billable hour on attorneys themselves. There was an ABA article in May, "More lawyers report billable hour pressures affect their mental health, survey says."

Christopher Anderson: [00:13:03] I have a couple of talks I do where I start with a number on the board and that number is 168. I just put it up there. I don't say anything about it. And sometimes I'll even go five minutes into the talk without even talking about it. Just have it hovering there. Because that is the reality. That is the only truth. That everything in our universe, everything around us is available to us in infinite quantity. Except that number, and for our listeners who haven't figured it out yet, that number is 24 times seven. It's 168. The amount of hours we have in a week to eat, poop, sleep, and bill for our law firms. That's it. Nobody gets more. Nobody can go to the bank and buy some more of these.

But in business, outside of law, we can, because we can use all the other things that exist in infinite quantity to buy time. When I started doing this talk, I would say by having maybe others or offshoring or automation do things to buy us back time. We'll spend money for other things to do things that otherwise would've taken me personally time. So, I get time back.

And now we've got artificial intelligence to add to the mix to give me back time to do what with? Well, to do things that cause me joy. That's one good thing. To do things that bring my clients more actual value. But boom, you run smack into the billable hour. I want to bring clients more value. but the way we think about things, that means I'm getting paid less to bring more value. And that's against all the laws of business, right? When you provide more value, you should be compensated more because it's worth more to the client.

So, think about this, right? There are these efficiencies. So now I'm actually probably trying to start churning out more work, more value for the firm, for my clients in that same billable hours, which means I'm getting paid the same. So now I'm not only running into working, working, working, you know, burning myself out that way, but now I've also got this cognitive dissonance going on where I'm doing more, doing more, doing more, seeing more value, more value, more value. And yet nothing's coming to me, and I just see it getting worse, exponentially fast, which leads to stress. This is not good. And then like the billable hours at the root of this.

John Reed: [00:15:38] It's become a measure of worth of attorneys. I'm as good as my hours and subsequently what those hours bring in, in dollars, of course. Hit that number and that's either going to move me towards partnership. Hit that number, and it's going to hopefully give me some more benefits in my life, financial or what have you.

I want to go back and talk about your artificial intelligence comments. Not only is it seemingly against or at odds with the billable hour, but there's so much written in the legal press against AI. We only hear the bad stuff.

Christopher Anderson: [00:16:13] Right,

John Reed: [00:16:14] We hear the hallucinated citations in the brief and, what have you. Yet we also see that Harvey, major player in this space, went from zero to $100 million in three years and owns a good chunk of the Am Law 100 and is going down market as we speak.

Is that going to be the disruptive thing or is it going to be more like people like you and the firms that you're running and advising and changing from within?

Christopher Anderson: [00:16:42] I won't speak about you, I'll just speak about me. But I've been here long enough that I have experienced all the waves of the things that were going to be revolutionary to the practice of law, that were going to change the way we do everything. And I'm not saying AI's not, but to me, it's a continuity of things that have changed us, have changed the practice over time 

It's not that long ago, 40 years ago, where when you had an interesting question that you had to solve for a client, you had to head to the library and the firm spent enormous resources, both in preparing them and then the lawyers reviewing these case notes all week, all month long as new things were decided, as new cases came down the pike. We'd just read, read, read. Of all this stuff we're reading, somebody's preparing it. And so, we're paying for that.

I was there when we went for the library, and then you could go to a Lexis terminal and look some stuff up, and then you got CDs. You could have the CDs and have it in your office. You didn't need to go to the terminal anymore. And then, the internet and so on and so on. And so, and all these efficiencies kept coming in, right? We were able to now wait until we actually have a question and then go look it up. We don't have to learn it all as it happens. We can look it up, which is great because the law is specializing and specializing and specializing and reading it all is really, gets harder and harder.

I mean, I still remember the debate about whether or not having faxes was maintaining client confidentiality. And I'm sure I wasn't around for, can we really talk about client matters on the telephone because there's operators listening. But I'm sure we debated that, right? We must have.

And here's ChatGPT. Here's large learning models. For anybody who's really interested in this stuff, they should pick up “The Singularity Is Near” and “The Singularity Is Nearer,” two fantastic books— Ray Kurtzweil is the author—that help us to understand that this technological treadmill that we're on has been going on for a very, very, very long time and will continue to. But that the pace of change is exponential, and actually the exponent of the pace of change is also exponential.

We're increasing by double exponent. And by that, yeah, Harvey's coming, but Harvey's going to look like... every innovation is being replaced faster and faster and faster. And Harvey's going to look like something old very fast. To me, the way we can see that is it's expanding our capability to provide value.

It's liberating us bit by bit, piece by piece, from all the drudge part of it, and allowing us to really exist in our creativity and in our brilliance, whatever that might be for you or for me or for everybody listening because theirs is all different. Which will, again, the more we focus and, and live in our brilliance, the more value we're creating.

But we've got to... like the billable hour's out there fighting against all of this. And you might say, “Well, Harvey, and you said it's in Big Law.” Well, probably Big Law is going to be the first ones that are seeing it going like, wow, there's a lot of associates I don't have to pay if I use Harvey. And that will bring efficiency to some extent, but at great cost, and maybe not greater value to the clients as opposed to adopting it and saying what we are is problem-solving and we're not machines that produce billable hours. And, and that's, it's got to happen

John Reed: [00:20:17] I want to switch gears. Your path to and through the law is unusual. What did you study in college and when did the law enter the picture? When did law school start to make sense for you?

Christopher Anderson: [00:20:29] Yeah. The answer is astrophysics was where I started in college.

John Reed: [00:20:33] So, it does take rocket science.

Christopher Anderson: [00:20:35] Well, except I stopped. But you know, that's not the usual entry point. I might have continued if I hadn't tried to tackle third year differential calculus in my freshman year. If I just waited, I might have persevered. But I faltered enough to look around and what I really, really liked was solving problems. Yeah, sometime during it, I switched and started studying government, and the natural path from there was to law school because it was the place where you could solve problems. I could've gone to business school, I guess, but I decided law school because that's where the more interesting problems seemed to be.

I mean, I was an entrepreneur from the time I cleaned swimming pools at 15 years old. Cleared snow from people's driveways with my parents snowblower. So, entrepreneurship and all that comes with it was also a big part of me. So, when I graduated law school, my first job, I went into the software business, helping in the insurance defense business, to build software that helped to analyze mass tort events. But I quickly went back to the legal practice because I liked solving multiple people's problems and not getting stuck on one problem.

But there's like been, an interweaving constantly of business and law and business and law and computers and law, and information technology and law throughout my life, whatever I've done. So that's, I think how I ended up here because I'm just utterly fascinated by the increasing power to solve more problems more quickly for more people that technology has always brought to the practice.

John Reed: [00:22:07] How would you describe your evolution? What lessons did you take from each arena and apply to the other?

Christopher Anderson: [00:22:14] It's always been a back and forth. I think the biggest one though, the real biggest one I have to credit is my time at LexisNexis. LexisNexis hired me 'cause I was a loudmouth. I honor them and I love the people I worked with and the time I spent there, but the main criteria, it seemed, for me getting the job of being a product manager for a new software product was that I was highly critical of their old software products in a very constructive way. And I described the problems that they caused and the solutions that I proposed, I guess, in some way that caught somebody's attention.

But then they gave me a fantastic reward for doing that because they hired a lot of brilliant people, some of whom brought some innovative business practices to LexisNexis at the time. And the one that really just caught my attention was Lean Agile, and all the thinking around Agile and Agile Scrum. The work of lean innovation and learning about how to think about business in a way. And this was all developed by— Lean was developed by Toyota, the Toyota Way. The Lean Startup, how to think about business startups in a lean way. Putting all of that learning in front of me and letting me consume that as part of my job was I think the biggest turning point because then I was able to, once I was, you know, time to go back into law from LexisNexis, I was able to bring all of that to law. Bringing those innovations and that way of thinking really is a value-based thinking. And again, that, to me, is the business we're actually in, right? Is providing solutions to problems, a.k.a. value, to our clients.

John Reed: [00:23:56] If I can draw a pattern here, in your astrophysics studies, the scientific method. Then we move to law school, one could argue, Socratic method, but the idea of a structured form of analysis, problem solving. Then there's Lean. Then there's Agile, whatever. This is the channel that you move in. Just finding these different applications of structures and frameworks and analyses to solve problems.

Is that fair? 

Christopher Anderson: [00:24:22] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Um, yeah. Ever improving structures. You started with scientific method, and that's always been important to me. There was another school of thought that I learned, called pragmatic marketing. Somewhere around here I've still got the coffee cup, but then the coffee cup, it says on the side facing me, "Your opinion while interesting is not relevant." The whole point of that being that marketers know nothing. Product developers know nothing. All we know is method, That's all we've really got. So, if they don't know anything, who does? The answer is the market. Our clients. They know, and they will tell us. But you can't ask them. They don't know how to answer the question. They'll just show you, and by their behavior, that's how we learn. And, and so yes, the scientific method, you know, has become a big part of that, right? Every marketing effort, every campaign, everything that you do is actually an experiment in the scientific method. Anybody that works with me already knows. I force them to commit.

Whenever you commit marketing, the first thing you got to do is say, I believe that if I do this, the result will be X. Because if you don't take that step, then how do you know what you're going to get? It's all about method and a framework for that method. The billable hour doesn't like that. The billable hour likes chaos. The billable hour likes trial and error, rather than method.

John Reed: [00:25:42] Tell us about your law firms. There's New Leaf Family. There's Anderson Dodson. 

Christopher Anderson: [00:25:49] New Leaf Legacy. New Leaf Defense. 

John Reed: [00:25:51] Tell me about that. And I'm going to bring up something you mentioned to me in a prior conversation—the law firm as a crucible—because I think it kind of informs all these law firm ventures that you have.

Christopher Anderson: [00:26:05] Well, I mean, my, our law firms are the crucible through which I feel I earn some credibility to work on Sunnyside. Sunnyside Legal Services is the branch, the division in which I help other law firms achieve their goals. We come up with innovative new ideas. How are we going to use AI? How are we going to, how are we going to generate the marketing? How can we... like at New Leaf Family, we invented four years ago a completely new no-billable-hours way of building our clients.

I had no idea whether that was going to work. I used my 30 plus years of practice to inform that answer. But until I tried it, I had no idea. And, you know, the common knowledge was that particularly in family law, that flat fees will bite you in the butt because you can't control the complexity of the case. You can't control the chattiness of your clients. Before I would bring any of that out to my clients, I try it on myself and see if it works. I only bring the successful stuff back to the clients. Nobody knows about all the failures because we bury those nice and quietly and never try them again. Or never try them exactly the same way again. But we may try an iteration. But so yeah. So that the law firm very much is that crucible where we try all our crazy ideas first and then build on the ones that work.

John Reed: [00:27:26] I don't want you to give away secrets or tell the recipe of the secret sauce, but what did you learn in your experimentation, in your own crucible, that got you to the point of having this system that you could rely on and embed into New Leaf Family?

Christopher Anderson: [00:27:44] We're just at the beginning, quite honestly, of that learning. But the hypothesis was that the billable hour is not in client's best interest. And if they're exposed to something different, they'll like it. And they do.

It serves, it scratches so many itches for me. I'm also a big believer in access to justice. The bar requirements that lawyers try to do 50 hours of pro bono work are just never going to solve the problem. There's not enough of us. There's just not enough of us. 50 hours, which, if we were talking about bill hour requirements, in larger firms that number can be north of 2,400. In smaller firms, it can be 2,000-ish. Fifty represents, what is that? 2000, 10 percent is 200, two-and-a-half percent of... 

John Reed: [00:28:33] Hey, hey, hey. No math, okay?

Christopher Anderson: [00:28:35] Two and a half percent, right? Our goal, our aspiration, which the bar associations will clearly admit we don't hit, is to do two-and-a-half percent more for underserved populations when the actual market of underserved population is more than a hundred percent of what we already do. But if we get more efficient and if we build by value and find ways to efficiency, now we find ways to serve. And one of the things we've found is just by getting away from the billable hour, we're actually serving deeper into the underserved market than we ever thought possible. Just starting to innovate this way, I think, is beginning to solve that problem. And we're looking to solve it more. 

John Reed: [00:29:15] You didn't talk about it, but I would think that with that business model that you just described, you have people in your firm who are more fulfilled because they are solving problems for clients, but they're also getting personal satisfaction and fulfillment by being able to maybe do that pro bono work, providing access to justice, having a life outside the law. So, this alternative approach you have—not the billable hour—is also a recruiting tool?

Christopher Anderson: [00:29:49] Yeah, because we take on a client and we give the client a billing system that's not focused on the hour. And then we come up upon something that would normally be cost prohibitive for that client, in the amount of hours it would take and the amount that we'd have to bill for it. But our lawyers can just go ahead and solve that problem and the client will go ahead and pay what exactly what they'd committed to pay at the very beginning of the case. It empties out that frustration for both the client and for the lawyer. And just the knowledge, I think that we're helping more people that are otherwise unserved in the marketplace is really powerful for our team.

Do a lot of our lawyers work really, really hard and really long hours? They do. But they're doing it from a different place, not because we've hung a huge billable hour requirement over their heads. We still track hours, just a full disclosure, because not every client is always completely happy and the bar still wants to be able to evaluate whether under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, whether our billing is fair, and the best measure that they have still is the hour. So, we still track it, and for business reasons, we track it as well, right? There's no other incentive to it, and billing more is not incentivized in any way whatsoever.

John Reed: [00:31:17] You started to mention the additional "New Leaves," if you will. New Leaf Family—you and I have had the chance to talk about that—and that is family law. New Leaf Legacy is?

Christopher Anderson: [00:31:27] Estate planning and trust and probate. New Leaf Defense: criminal defense work. Those are the currently active brands, and New Leaf Bankruptcy is in the offing. And as we branch out to other states, the new leaf part of it may not be the brand going forward, but the concept of having a consumer set of brands is very much so. And, and solving problems in an efficient way is what we're all about.

John Reed: [00:31:50] Does the New Leaf Family model structure work for New Leaf Legacy and New Leaf Defense, or are you tweaking and adjusting for those different types of practices? 

Christopher Anderson: [00:32:03] Yes and yes. Right? Yes, it works. And yes, we're tweaking and adjusting. Because in some part, estate planning, the more accepted model is actually a flat fee model. It's simpatico with and we're still adjusting it and helping clients maintain the estate plan in ways that that would fit more in the New Leaf model. Criminal defense is also traditionally a flat fee model.

So, these have been easier to expand into because they already have at least some thought, and so in estate planning, efficiency's been rewarded for a long, long time. And there are wonderful organizations out there who provide estate planning lawyers with updated-constantly, made current, and adapted to new laws model estate plans so that the lawyers are confident without having to spend half their week researching and learning. They're confident that the products that they're delivering to their clients are up to date and up to speed, and because they don't have to put as much time into them, they can again, hit that market where it needs to be as they solve these problems.

So, it's easier. Quite honestly. Family law has been the hardest one to tackle, which is why we went after it first, because that's my nature. We're just doing it in such a tremendously different way that it's a great model for other practices as well.

John Reed: [00:33:20] Speaking of your nature, one can easily glean that you are a lifelong learner. You said that. That you are also a teacher. When did Sunnyside Services... when did the idea of now consulting to other law firms, one might say the competition, when did it occur to you to take your learnings, your wisdom to other law firms?

Christopher Anderson: [00:33:42] I always have. I think it occurred to me because I'm a bad student, I find it very difficult to find motivation to learn from me. I love learning for other people. And so having clients, having other law firms, having other people's problems that require new and interesting and innovative thinking, does more to motivate me to keep that lifelong learning going than doing it just for myself or my own business. So yeah, I have to inflict all this on all my clients at Sunnyside, because I won't do it for myself.

And that's what The Unbillable Hour is about too, right? That's why I have this podcast. It's because I won't go to a conference and just talk to people unless I'm trying to solve a problem, and usually the problem for someone else. Law is really a good practice for me because in my business, I've got hundreds of people coming to us every month with new problems. So, yay! I get to learn how to solve them.

John Reed: [00:34:42] To be the lifelong learner, but also be the lifelong teacher means that you're not just regurgitating the same things over and over again to your clients. As you're learning from the problem solving you have with them, it's enhancing your knowledge and expertise that you can then take to new situations, new clients, and adapt accordingly.

Christopher Anderson: [00:35:03] That's very true. And it's like, it's a neurosis, right? But part of the problem, I think there's also a problem with it, which is why my clientele over the years has changed. Because once I've taught the solution I learned 20 years ago, for a while I get bored of that one. And I'm looking for bigger, more interesting problems to solve. And so, my clientele has changed to one that has been evolving into ones that have bigger, more interesting problems to solve.

John Reed: [00:35:29] When approaching a new client, there's the assumption you know nothing because you have to learn from them. Is there a framework you bring to that relationship to help you develop the knowledge or at least get the data so then you can work with them through steps to get where they want to go?

Christopher Anderson: [00:35:46] Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, in Sunnyside in particular, the first thing I do with a client is I have to go live in their firm. So, one of the first things we'll do is I will go sit in their firm with them and observe and see how people are behaving and acting and what the problems are that are visible while I also tear through their books, their standard operating procedures, their employment manuals, their physical space.

I'm not shy to share this framework. Every engagement I do, whether it's helping a law firm or helping a family law client or helping an estate planning client, or probably helping someone who's stuck on the side of the road. It always starts the same way with me, and it comes from exactly what you talked about, is I come in presuming I know nothing. And the biggest thing is that I know nothing about what you're trying to do.

You see someone stuck on the side of the road, you might start pushing their car. Well, what if that's not what they want? What if there's a baby squirrel under the tire? Right? That's not what they're trying to do. So, like in family law, we do this too. And what we find is that the vast majority of the time when someone comes to you with a problem, they actually haven't clearly defined where they want to go, what they're trying to achieve.

They know where they are most of the time. They know they don't like it most of the time, and that's it. And whether it's coaching law firms or working with a family law client—I find too many people like, here are those two things. They're just like, okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make things better and never ask that question, which is, what is better to look like to you? And they march their clients down a path that's well-trodden for them and that they've been successful with. And it's not wrong. It's just not the way that I believe we can help more people more deeply.

You've got to get clear and the way I teach it to my team is we're getting it clear for us. Because that way when we're doing a representation with every action we take, we can ask the question, is this helping move the client closer to their goals? Which is huge. But we're also doing it for them because they haven't always thought it all the way through. And so, we just start with this question. This is the secret sauce. 

John Reed: [00:38:08] One of the things that I do in my business development coaching is try to teach lawyers not to pounce. That you meet somebody, whether it's in a business setting or wherever else, and they begin to tell you that they have a problem. Great, I can help with that. But as you say, let's figure this out. Maybe if it's an employment issue, well, I'm going to retire anyway. I could care less. If it's a contractual issue, we didn't want to work with that supplier anyway. Or it's absolutely existential. What's the implication for not solving this problem and what does success look like? And you look stupid if you pounce on a non-existent problem, if you try to inflict pain on something that doesn't hurt, and then say you can solve it. 

Christopher Anderson: [00:38:51] Yeah, but respectfully, it's actually worse than that. Because we sit here in this position of knowledge, I've often described as we are priests. We're priests of the law. Priests of the law of the government and of our society. And we know things because we went to school, and we've had a lot of experience in them. And so, when lawyers pounce and start to say what we're going to do, even worse than looking stupid, is clients go, “okay, let's do that.”

And you march, march, march because they presume that you have an end in mind and that it is their end. It gets far down the relationship and one day they look around and go like, this isn't what I wanted.

John Reed: [00:39:38] And it's even worse in the consumer law space.

Christopher Anderson: [00:39:40] Yeah,

John Reed: [00:39:40] Because we go back to this idea of "unsophisticated," not regular consumers of legal services. You're the expert, lawyer, so I'm going to trust in you that this is where we're marching and that you're the one who's going to take me there, and you are the one to do it.

Christopher Anderson: [00:39:56] To me, that's worse than looking stupid.

John Reed: [00:39:58] You debuted the first episode of The Unbillable Hour Podcast in October of 2009, at or near the end of the Great Recession, and you've also survived a global pandemic. How has it changed over the last 16 years? I think I know your emphasis, but talk about that a little bit, but then also how has it morphed over that time?

Christopher Anderson: [00:40:19] When it started out, The Unbillable Hour was more focused on discrete technology: this case management software, this document management software, this document automation software. We talked to people. And I think we've evolved into talking more. We still do discreet things. We'll talk about a marketing methodology. We'll talk about AI. That's been the popular one lately. But we do it one from this growth mindset perspective. And I think that's been a big evolution for me, is that I try to work that into almost every conversation. Because again, it's just back to if you're not growing, you're dying, right?

What are these tools for? I think we've moved away from like the idea that with technology more is better—let's just get some of that document management and sprinkle that onto the firm, that'll be good— and more into a more holistic and ‘is this going to help you get to where you want to go’ conversation. In the past couple years we've added the community table, which is an ‘ask me anything’ format, which has been really fun because, you know, again, love learning for others, right? So, on the show, we get new people coming every month to just bring us unique problems, ask me anything, just bring their questions there. It's live. It's every third Thursday at three o'clock live on Legal Talk Network.

So, I think those have been key evolutions in the show. But yeah, it's been a long run with that show. It started while I was at LexisNexis. And yeah, here we are still doing it. Still plugging away.

John Reed: [00:42:00] What's on the horizon for you? What's Christopher Anderson's next venture or focus?

Christopher Anderson: [00:42:06] Well, I talked to you earlier about everything to me is an experiment. Everything is scientific method. I've been practicing family law since 2004, I think that's right. and law since 1996. We started New Leaf Family as a completely new experiment. Clean sheet. We started a law firm. So, what were the criteria I needed in order to prove that this model was successful? One, I needed to do it somewhere where I had no clients, no referral sources, no colleagues, no anything. So we went to a completely new state, to us, one we actually want to live in.

So, we're really excited and proud to have made the move to Colorado, but I knew nobody. Nobody. And we'd launched this brand and launched this type of firm and this business into a place where we had zero advantages that might have colored, if I just transformed my firm, that would've been taught different lessons.

With what we've been able to achieve, like we believe that most of our hypotheses have been confirmed. And so, what's next is we're taking this on the road, right? We're going to be bringing this both to new firms that we launched, but also existing firms that want to do business our way. which is why I said you may not recognize as the New Leaf brand. There'll probably be something else that'll kind of connote to you that it's mine, and that it's this method. And so I'll say watch this space, but that's what's next. I believe our main mission is to empower families across the United States to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, and in the bigger consumer law area, but to solve legal problems efficiently and with less drama. We think we know how, and I think we've got the evidence now to take it on the road. That's what's next.

John Reed: [00:43:55] Finally, one last question. How did I do, coach? I mean, do I show any promise as a podcast host?

Christopher Anderson: [00:44:01] I mean, to me a great podcast is a great conversation, and one in which the listener is not a listener, but a participant. And so, I'd say, top marks, because I think that you've led a conversation here that is interesting, was interesting to me. And I'm easily bored. Let's just be honest. And I've enjoyed it, and so I hope our listeners, I hope your listeners, feel a part of this conversation and feel that it's the beginning of a conversation that we can continue.

John Reed: [00:44:35] And hopefully they'll forgive my shameless pandering. 

Christopher Anderson: [00:44:37] There you go.

John Reed: [00:44:39] You and I have a few things in common advising law firms on the outside, non-traditional career paths, and understanding how the business of law firms works and can be better. Thank you for sharing your time and insights with me. This has been, it's been a pleasure for me. It has been a conversation as opposed to a speech, so thank you.

Christopher Anderson: [00:44:57] Thank you. No, I've enjoyed being on, and yes, you are a very, you're a very good host, so thank you very much.

John Reed: [00:45:02] Thank you.

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Until next time, I'm John Reed and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.