Transcript:

Hello, I’m Scott Berry, and we have a very special panel for immigration lawyers. Today. We’re going to be talking about how to grow your law firm. We’re going to be talking about how to scale it, and we’re going to talk about how to win more cases. I’m Scott Berry. Hi, I’m Paul Hunker. I worked as a federal immigration lawyer for the US government for 31 years. For the last 20 years, I was chief counsel of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas, and I entered private practice in February of this year. Hi, I’m Lucine. I am with LT Global Practice Management, specializing in scaling and optimizing law firms. Worked with a lot of immigration law firms, helping them scale every day, any day. Thank you. Thank you. Isabel is going to be asking us questions. These are frequently asked questions that we get about these three topics. And so we’ll turn it over to Isabel and jump right in. All right. So, Scott, you’ve been marketing and advertising for immigration law firms for about eight years now. What is one of the main reasons why smaller law firms stay small and never reach seven figures and beyond? So that is a great question because a lot of people get stuck and never do reach seven figures. It’s actually something kind of in the law firm world is— can I get to seven figures as a law firm? When we get to speak with people that have never reached that, I find that consistently they don’t advertise. And so I would say that’s one of the things holding law firms back that never reach seven figures. You can successfully advertise using social media. You can successfully advertise with Google or local service ads if there’s enough demand in your area. If you’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked, it’s usually because you don’t know what you’re doing and you need a professional. Because we know for a fact that we’ve been advertising for immigration law firms from the West Coast to the East Coast, and you can get a nice 6-9 times ROI with Google ads and local service ads. So why sit there only living off of referrals when you know, quality ads and campaigns can deliver us 6-9 ROI? So now Lucine, I’ll turn it over to you. What does it mean to have specialized practice areas? So law firms usually take on certain types of cases and they retain those types of cases. Oftentimes the law firm owners may choose to assign various tasks to the same individual to handle everything from the inception of the case till the end. So I choose to handle it slightly differently, and I prefer having individuals at the firm that specialized in certain case types and sometimes even handling certain areas of cases. So one individual could be better at drafting, the other could be better at consulting, the third could be better at researching. So one of the things that comes up often is when people are not specialized, the expectations are higher and failure keep getting increased as a result of that. So specialized staff and specialized cases is a must in scaling a law firm. In part. And a lot of lawyers can be afraid of federal court. And what would you say to them? I would say that I can help people with that fear and help them in federal court. A lot of people fear petitions for review and habeas because of the narrow standards of review. But in petitions for review, you have the ability to review legal claims, you have the ability to review constitutional claims, you have the ability to review mixed fact law claims. And in habeas, often that jurisdiction may be more limited. For example, on the border, the government has to follow its laws and regulations. And the Biden administration currently is restricting asylum and making it harder to apply for asylum. And if they’re not going to follow their rules, then that can be a good habeas case and alleged that the government is not following its laws and regulations. I think an exciting thing about federal practice these days is that Chevron is dead to them. Loper Bright reversed Chevron and no longer does the agency get sort of an advantage. No longer will courts defer to the interpretation of the agency. And they have to cite to the statute. They have to defend their position consistent with the statute. And often they can’t do that. Post Loper Bright we’re thinking about different ways to defend non-citizens more richly with that case. For example, one thing is the departure bar, like where in the law is there the departure bar. So I think there’s a lot of great arguments that can be made in petitions for review and also in habeas, and I want to help people do that. Paul, with what you just describe that goes along with what I was talking about earlier and comes to scaling law firm and becoming an expert in a particular area. So Paul is an expert in the area of filing habeases, mandamuses, and suing the government and we’re handling those federal cases. And that differentiates him from other lawyers in the specific practice area. So if anyone has any questions, needs and wants to succeed in those types of cases, please feel free to call him, ask him questions and pick his brain and take it from there. And over the years when I worked for ICE, we had a lot of different federal litigation. So I was representing ICE in that litigation. For example, the COVID Habeas Litigation. And I love federal court. I feel like I’m in church when I’m in federal court. I mean the judges are great. The U.S. attorneys are great. There’s a great deal of respect and care that’s taken by everyone in federal court. I think it’s a great place to practice. And I’m happy to help people with their claims. And I really understand— like it complicated immigration issues. I can really help people litigate those in federal courts. Very few immigration attorneys have access to a former chief counsel. In order to bounce ideas off and strategize, and that would be a cool thing if you’re open to talking to people and help them with their cases. Definitely. And especially post Loper Bright, which overturned Chevron, the agency doesn’t get a leg up anymore. And so we have a lot of great arguments we can make and we’re on equal footing with the agency. And Paul, a quick question. How often lawyers, practitioners reach out to you asking you questions about this specific types of cases? And what is the next step if an attorney reaches out to you with this type of a question, “Hey, I have a matter to take on, but I don’t necessarily know what the steps are”, what would you say? Oh, I would say, I’m happy to help. My firm has a lot of litigation experience as well in federal courts. And the doctrine, the immigration doctrine is is something I’m really I love and I’m comfortable with. And I can really help make those arguments. I helped out in the Membreno-Rodriguez case, where the Fifth Circuit made a very bad decision. Basically finding that if a non-citizen was inadmissible, he was not eligible for adjustment, which is hugely different than how we’ve understood adjustment. So I joined up and helped out with the attorneys and we crafted a petition for rehearing en banc and that eventually led DOJ to agree with us. And so that case was dismissed. So that was a huge victory for noncitizens because that Fifth Circuit decision would have been really bad. It would have been really bad for keeping families together, parole in place as well. So I think that’s an example of how you can kind of step in. And I love parole. I’m a total parole geek. I understand that doctrine really well. So I was able to help and a couple of excellent attorneys I worked with, but I brought that parole expertise that that that really helped us convince DOJ that this was a bad decision. And we worked together to get that vacated. So if someone wanted to just ask you a couple of questions, you’d try to make yourself available. But if they wanted to engage you because this one’s going to be close and really ask you to formally get involved, could you do that? Yeah, I’d be happy to do that. And Scott, going back to advertising your pro when it comes to growing law firms, and you mentioned earlier that too many law firms don’t grow because we’re not advertising. So what is the second most reason that firms fail to grow? Yeah, so this is really good timing for this question because I had two of these instances earlier today. So it seems like immigration lawyers have a really strong idea of what they’d like to do, how much they want to grow. So they’re like, “Hey, I did half a million this year. I want to do 1.5.” So that piece I think they have in the back of their mind, but what they don’t have is what they need, which is the financials, to help them decide how much advertising and how much work they need to do in order to hit that number. So without that good financial analysis, then you’re forced to guess. So you might go to your agency and go here, I’m going to give you two or three more thousand dollars just so I can get more leads because I want to hit a big number. Well you can do the math and that’s not going to get it done. And no one ever does that. So you put some more in marketing and then you’re sad at the end of the year when you don’t hit your numbers. And so we created a calculator that’s loaded with formulas that most people we meet. They asked, Would you send it to me so I can manipulate it? And so they’ll go in at the top and I recommend that anyone looking to grow do this. They’ll put the number that they’re looking to grow at the top and then the formula start working for them. And then in a previous section they’ll say, “Hey, if I had 100 leads, I’d get this many booked… consultations booked. This many will actually show up. This many are going to be a fit. And out of those that are fit, I know I can win this many.” Well, once you know how effective your team is at turning a 100 leads into 20 cases or 10, then you can calculate exactly how many leads you need for your personal team to hit that number. And when an immigration attorney sees that in writing and can manipulate those numbers, their confidence level increases tremendously. And then knowing what their gross profit is, you can set limits like I want a 4 or 5 times return on my advertising. Okay, well then you can’t spend more than this. And I mean, just the plan gets developed financially right before their eyes. And I’m telling you, almost no one is doing that. So if you’re going to try to advertise and you’re going to invest and grow in your business, that’s a step that you have to start doing. And Lucine you talked earlier about specialized areas, and you are also a pro at scaling a law firm. So why don’t you talk a little bit about how to scale a law firm and what tips you have? Yeah, absolutely. I always say a lot of people, entrepreneurs have ideas. So what ideas needs to be— we need to see to the execution and you need to be very flexible at the same time with your ideas. There will come a time when you’ve envisioned something, and then through the process you’ll find out that there are things, tweaks that you need to make. And although you need to be stubborn about your ideas and scaling and growing, but you also need to be very flexible. So you need to define your vision and your goals. You need to make sure that your processes are streamlined. You need to absolutely make sure that you’re hiring the right personnel and you’re developing the specialized practices. And you’re leveraging technology. You need to make sure that you are checking all the boxes when you are scaling a practice. So definitely in Paul, I’m going to turn it over to you as you’re now in a private practice. But earlier we were talking about all those years of experience that you have as an ICE attorney. What tips would you give out now that you’re in a private practice? I think interacting really well with OPLA, with the ICE attorneys. The judges, their job is to apply the law to the facts. And you might have a generous judge for asylum. You might have a tough judge, but they’re basically going to follow the law. A lot of times the result you want is your case dismissed so your client can apply for adjustment. And that involves working well with the OPLA attorneys. I was the chief counsel for OPLA for 20 years. I wrote our office’s prosecutorial discretion guidance. So I think in those areas I can be particularly helpful to help attorneys navigate what’s the best way to make a requests for prosecutorial discretion. Some things the OPLA, the attorneys, the chief counsel is probably not going to agree on. But if you change it and you revise it, you may be able to do that. Also. I’m very excited about the new immigration court regulations that give the private bar a lot more flexibility to dismiss cases, to ask the cases be. It gives the private bar a lot more flexibility to move to dismiss cases. It gives the private bar flexibility to move to administratively closed cases. And there’s a lot of arguments that one can make in those contexts with those new regulations. I don’t think the private party generally appreciates that enough. I think that was probably my most clicked on or responded to LinkedIn post was when I posted the new regulations and very few people seemed to have known about those. And so I think I could really help private help attorneys in making those requests, because that can be such a huge thing for your client if you can get the case. It’s just a lot of times it can take a long time to get a case dismissed. The OPLA attorneys are so busy with their own cases that it’s hard for them to get an OPLA attorney to agree to dismiss or close the case. I think I am in a good position to sort of help make that happen. And just to wrap this up, people are coming to this webinar for tips. So Scott, just talk a little bit about for those immigration lawyers that are frustrated that they’re not able to grow and build their law firm of their dreams, what words would you have for them? Yeah, Excellent. So this will be a kind of a different answer, but it’s come from the learnings that I’ve had over the last 10 or 20 years working in business. I would say if you are having a difficult time achieving something, doing something you’ve never done before, such as we’re doing $500,000 a year and we want to do $1.5 and we’ve never done that. You need to approach that from a business standpoint, from an analytical standpoint, unlike anything you’ve ever done. So if you think about in the U.S. and really anywhere in the country how people solve really impossible problems, you bring in people that know like agile, problem solving, lean six sigma guys. And what they do is they break the challenge down in a proper way, using cross-functional teams to look at the most, brainstorm the possibilities that you could use to fix the problem or reach those goals and then prioritize which ones are more likely to have an impact. So that’s what you should do. And I want to ask you to do that. That means you have to schedule a meeting offsite. You need to spend three or 4 hours. You might need a little facilitator that knows how to solve problems, not just brainstorm solutions. Because here’s what most immigration law firms are doing. They’ll say, “Guys, we did a million and we need to do one and a half million. Does anybody have any ideas?” And so people just start throwing things against the wall, trying to come up with the best ideas and somehow they end up trying to do them all. Like, those are great ideas, guys was a really great ideas and they never go through the motions to think about which ones out of these great ideas should we do because we’re not doing them all. Let’s prioritize them. The ones that we think will have the biggest impact that are easy to do. And then here’s the vital next step. What are the financial implications if we do this? Nobody solves problems that way in immigration law. And because what it really looks like is we need to make more money or we need to grow. And they’ll say, “Okay, well, we’ve been doing free consultations and now we’re going to start charging for them. That’s our best idea.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s different. Now you’re going to market completely differently. So let me see the spreadsheet, the financials of how much business you think you’ll lose because of that, and then how much business you think you’re going to win because of that. And what are the financials going to look like at the end of the year?” Zero out of ten times you have that. But the team is saying, let’s do it. So I would ask you in close with, if you’re going to try to grow, which is what I’m here to talk about, is use some professional business sense to try to come up with the most likely best ideas and then put financials around them and have everybody buy in to the financials before you pull the trigger. Then you know, whether or not if you implement it, it will even work. So you heard it here first on Immigration Nation. But the secret is to use that financial calculator and evolve over time. I’m sure that you’ve created a list of some tips and tricks. So what would you advise people to do in order to thrive in their own practice? There’s a number of things I would advise one thing— who has the burden in the case? Typically, we as the private attorneys have the burden, but sometimes the government has the burden. If you’re trying to remove a lawful permanent resident, the government has the burden. If the government’s trying to take away your LPR status, the government has the burden. The government’s not used to having the burden. So often the government messes up. So you may get an adjustment denial and you may think, Oh, there’s some problems with this adjustment denial, but you know we have the burden ultimately. But if you get a rescission letter that says we’re taking away or LPR status and there’s problems with that letter, that is super important because the government has a very high burden to do that. I think that’s one point to keep in mind. I think a second point is just to realize that there’s no better time to make legal arguments right now, especially in federal court with Loper Bright having overturned Chevron. There’s all sorts of arguments we can make. There’s a case out there called Briones that says that if even if you’re adjustment eligible under 245 I. You can’t adjust if you’re inadmissible under to 212(a)(9)(C). I was actually the government attorney on that case and all these circuit courts deferred to that under Chevron. Well, Chevron is dead. There’s still going to be a sort of presumption that interpretation is correct under sort of statutory stare decisis, But that can be overcome. That would be a huge that would be a huge thing for noncitizens if they could adjust, even if they were technically subject to 212(a)(9)(C). I think we have a lot of arguments that they aren’t. If a non-citizen is paroled, I then we have a good argument that the non-citizen is not subject to inadmissibility under 212(a)(9)(C). Because the parole sort of takes away the being present without admission. So I think it’s a great time to be in private practice. I think I timed it really well entering private practice right after Chevron was reversed. And so it’s an exciting time. There’s a lot of great arguments we can make. I think that’s one of the things that makes the practice exciting that we’re taking on interesting novel cases and making a lot of arguments. And federal court is the place to make those arguments because generally the Board of Immigration Appeals, the immigration courts, they’re going to follow their regulations. But what statutory basis is there for the departure bar? There is no statutory basis. So you may have to end up going up to the Board of Immigration Appeals, losing there and then filing your petition for review and telling the circuit court the emperor has no clothes. There’s no statutory basis for the departure bar. Yeah, I think those are great tips. And I want to turn it over to Lucine, one last time. So how does client satisfaction in strategic partnerships affect the success of a firm? Absolutely. So we’ve been talking about specialization from the beginning of this and I wanted to use Paul as an example, and he’s bringing up very specific examples and matters that he specializes in. And I encourage the practitioners to continue creating those strategic alliances with individuals and practitioners and advisors in a specific area to enhance their client base and to generate more business through those types of relationships that they have, because not a single person practitioner or business person knows it all. Ability to nurture those strategic alliances and strategic partnerships such as Paul would be essential and law practice, specifically in immigration practice. And that goes along with the other area of scaling that we’ve been talking about earlier. Having strategic partnerships and making sure that the client’s satisfaction is up to par is very, very important. Now, how do you necessarily make sure that your client satisfaction is at the highest level, is by having the right people involved in case, such as Paul, in those specific cases to improve the client experience. So I strongly recommend reaching out to Paul for specific matters and making sure that you’re scaling your law firm correctly. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. There could be people that would be helping. And it’s not only practitioners, it’s also marketing specialists, accountants, financial advisors, consultants, so on and so forth. Just continue establishing those relationships and scaling your law firm every day. So I hope you enjoyed this special panel. If you own an immigration law firm, it’s constantly on your mind. How can I grow? Now that I’m growing, I need to scale, I’m going to need more people and more systems. And now that I’ve got more consultations and more cases, I still have to win. And that’s why we pulled this special team together. You’ve probably seen us before on podcast on the Immigration Nation podcast, we do webinars. Our work has been seen in the Associated Press, Yahoo! Finance, a lot of places where our work has been published. So I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to talk a little bit more about growing about advertising leads, making the phone ring, that part of the equation, you can reach me on LinkedIn at M. Scott Berry, or you can find our contact information where the podcast is, immigrationnationpodcast.com. And then lastly, you could find us find me on our agency website, marketcrest.com. And I can be reached at paul.hunker@dmcausa.com and my phone number is (972) 694-3024. And I can be reached at 833-NEED LTG, very easy to remember my email is la@asklucine.com. Call me, email, reach out, ask questions. Let’s get this solved. Hey, thank you guys for being here.