Mining gold from other professions

Law Biz Con is a niche conference on best practice for practice principals of all disciplines across various aspects of running a law firm, such as social media, staffing, and technology. It was put on by Caralee Fontenele, who is the principal of Collective Family Law as well as Scalable Law (a platform, community, and coaching service for fast-growing, progressive law firms).

I often look to the legal profession, a self-regulated and longstanding pillar of society, as something the financial advice profession can aspire to and learn from. So, in the spirit of that, here are my key learnings from Law Biz Con.

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Ethical efficiency

Great lawyers don’t compromise their process and ethics in the pursuit of efficiency. Advice should be the same. By this, I mean while lawyers are constantly looking for better and more effective ways to deliver outcomes to their clients, they always treat each case as a blank page and build their solution live using their knowledge.

They find efficiency in narrowing their fields of practice and client types (specialisation), focusing on the right person doing their right job and equipping their practitioners to deliver without being burdened by tasks a support team member can complete.

As advisers, we are time poor, weighed down by both real and perceived compliance burdens and have huge overheads. These are greater constraints than is placed on other professions. It is natural then for us to seek out ways to deliver advice better.

The contrast to the legal profession in this instance sometimes feels like we focus on the wrong things. Instead of specialising, resourcing existing practitioners, and individually understanding our legal obligations, we look to stack tech that allows 80-page advice docs to persist, while narrowing our Approved Product Lists or even worse, only vertically integrating products to disguise revenue plays as efficiency. This can create a range of ethical dilemmas for advisers, be that in which products they recommend and their best interests duty or whether they even offer the advice because “we would have to do an SOA”.

In the same guise on the tech front, I have been known to explore technology and its options for greater efficiency and, ironically, run a tech product – but GPT and AI is not the panacea to save your advice practice. All the AI in the world can’t save your business if your team lack the mental capacity to be their best. A business that considers both their staff mental health while augmenting the process with technology, will outperform the business that automates everything while removing any creativity by advisers. Unless, of course, your aim is to have no staff and you want to go toe-to-toe against institutional scaled robo-advice?

Speaking of staff, law firms are challenged by the same conflict of hiring and training junior lawyers as advisers are in bringing on PYs. There was a constantly familiar conversation around the tension between a feeling of obligation to bring on and train the next generation of lawyers and the challenge of finding the right fit for your business, especially for smaller and medium-sized practices. A key takeaway for me was just because a hire isn’t right for you doesn’t mean they aren’t the best person for another business.

Building a brand

On the marketing front, Fontenele managed to organise Camille Vasquez to attend for a keynote. For those who aren’t law or Hollywood nerds, Vasquez was Johnny Depp’s lawyer during his infamous trial. Her keynote was absolutely sensational, but she really brought home the power of your personal brand, that it is both instrumental for success but also that “a narrative or brand that isn’t shaped by you, is forged by others”. A special mention on Vasquez, the excitement held by every attendee at the appearance of a “celebrity” lawyer was actually wholesome and infectious. I can’t think of who in the advice space would inspire a similar feeling.

Continuing down the branding and marketing front, there a was a great panel discussion where Lucy Percy reminded us that positive marketing lifts all boats, but marketing without a plan is just ranting. As a profession, we need to focus on raising awareness of the benefit advice brings to all Australians and avoid being territorial or combative in any of our communications. There are more than enough Australians that need advice, and we know how few of us there are now.

That energy I spoke of was not limited to just Vasquez’s session. The community Fontenele was able to build and the calibre of the attendees meant every session had people applying themselves, listening, learning, and connecting. While it helps there was no mention of additional legislative requirements for lawyers bringing the conversation down, I actually credit this to both the mindset of the attendees and the environment Fontenele was able to put together.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and will attend next year. I encourage anyone to stretch outside of your comfort zone, attend some adviser conferences to start and think of what other external industry events you could go to, both to grow your network and bring back value to the advice community as a whole.

Nathan Fradley is a specialist financial adviser at Nathan Fradley Advice.