Q&A: James Stevens – "We get about 250 new clients coming on board every week"

In this Q&A, James Stevens, chief executive officer of Go To Court Lawyers, explains how embracing the digital world has allowed his firm to flourish; why millennials are an asset, not a burden; and the importance of being courageous and decisive.

Since being set up in 2009, Go To Court Lawyers has gone from strength to strength, especially in the past few years. How have you done it at a time when many firms are worried about the future?

“Probably the main reason for our growth is the investment that we’ve made in our website. Obviously, without clients you don’t have any growth and most of our clients have come from our website, or they are people who originally came to us through the website and then referred other people to us. We’ve put millions of dollars into the website over the past two or three years and it’s starting to pay dividends.”

A significant portion of that spending has been on Google AdWords to ensure that your site features prominently on potential clients’ search options, while you have also poured a lot of resources into content marketing by uploading articles on all aspects of the law. Tell us how you do it.

“Initially, AdWords was critical for us when we had little content. Now, organic searches are the key, and for this you need massive amounts of good-quality content. We have a whole team of lawyers who write for the site. Every article is written by lawyers and then vetted by lawyers. It’s extremely valuable information for the public and it’s all free. One of the big challenges has been deciding what information to put on the website and how to organise that content in a user-friendly way. We get a lot of great feedback from users of the website about how we have helped them.

“The amount of traffic we are getting is increasing almost exponentially every month, so that’s probably the main reason for our success, combined with our legal advice hotline. The hotline is staffed by practising lawyers from 7am to midnight seven days a week and we get calls from all over Australia. We get about 40,000 or so calls a year now and they are all genuine legal enquiries. Out of those 40,000 calls, and based on current figures, we book about 12,000 people as ongoing clients, with this increasing each month. As far as we know, ours is the only privately run legal advice hotline in the world – certainly in the English-speaking world.”

What sort of content is most popular on your website?

“People just want information to help them understand their situation. The government websites are limited and very hard to navigate. Immigration is a big topic at the moment, along with areas such as family law, de facto relationships, debt recovery, assaults, drink-driving and traffic matters. It’s across the board, but there’s very little information out there that’s written by lawyers that’s also free and easy to access. We want people to know that they can come to our website and pretty much get an answer, in plain English, to any legal question.”

Apart from a permanent team of about 120 people, most of them lawyers or legal clerks, you draw on a network of about 700 referral solicitors. It’s a big commitment to resources.

“Definitely. We’ve reinvested pretty much everything into the structure of the business and providing client service. We usually have about 12 hotline lawyers on the phone at any one time during business hours, and three or four after hours. We hire a lot of people who work from home to do the legal hotline work, including mothers who are very experienced in their office jobs. They have had children or for whatever reason they don’t want to go back to an office but still want to maintain a role practising in the law. We provide them with that opportunity. As for the network, that comes into play when we don’t have one of our own lawyers within driving distance of the client. With 700 lawyers in the network, we can literally get just about any person in Australia a face-to-face meeting with a lawyer within one hour, if needed. If distance is a problem, we do phone and video interviews to bridge the gap.”

What other aspects of your model have helped?

“We go out to see clients. So we have a fleet of Go To Court cars and they are available to our lawyers to drive out to see our clients at our serviced offices. Across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, we have 18 manned offices with lawyers, and we have another 70 or so serviced offices. That really works for us. Most law firms just can’t or won’t drive out to see clients, so it means that we get a large percentage of bookings that we wouldn’t otherwise get. Also, through a piece of custom software in which we’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, we’re able to calculate where most of our calls are coming from and, when we find a hotspot, we open a serviced office there. That process is working really well, too.

“Secretarial support staff are very costly and, in today’s modern workplace, often unnecessary. So we just don’t have any. With receptionists and admin people, we find that hiring older, very skilled and experienced people who work from home is the best strategy. They appreciate the opportunity to work from home, and there are no office distractions. Law clerks are perfectly capable of sitting at the front desk in the office to greet clients. If you visit one of our Go To Court offices you will find only lawyers or law clerks there – we don’t have a single legal secretary or receptionist working in any of them. This really has helped to bring costs down massively. If you can’t bill time, you shouldn’t be there!”

Rather than occupying expensive offices in the CBD, many of your lawyers can be found in areas that used to be predominantly industrial areas. Can you explain that strategy.

“It’s a whole lot cheaper, and you can choose areas that are strategically located and easy to get to and from. We have our biggest Queensland office in Salisbury in south Brisbane in an industrial area. It’s the place where most of our Brisbane lawyers are based. They all have cars and they can go out from there to our satellite offices so that clients don’t have to travel as far. It’s very easy to open a serviced office. If there isn’t an actual serviced office available, you can always just ring an accountant in any town or suburb and ask if you can rent one of their rooms. We’ve had a lot of success doing that and, accountants being accountants, they love the extra income.”

Earlier in your career, you worked at firms including Sparke Helmore and Clayton Utz. What impact did those experiences have on your career and your approach to business?

“At Sparke Helmore, my boss was Richard Anicich, an extremely experienced commercial litigator who taught me that there is no substitute for expertise. And when I went to Clayton Utz, my boss was Mark Waller, an expert in commercial and insurance litigation who also stressed the importance of learning from experts. I’m really happy that I had that experience at those two firms. It made me realise how important it is to be an expert in your field and that philosophy has shaped the structure of Go To Court. We hire accredited specialists wherever possible. Those specialists mentor the junior lawyers and review all their work. They speak to the junior lawyers before the junior lawyer ever sees a client, which means they go into a client meeting well informed. It’s not practical to send an accredited specialist to every interview, but you can send a junior solicitor there who has an accredited specialist to back them up. We’ve found that this is an incredibly efficient way to do things.”

You took on the role of CEO a few months ago to focus on business development rather than practising law. Why did you make the switch?

“I identified two years ago that the marketing and business development side of it is where I have the most interest. I’ve been a solicitor for 17 years and I’m finding this new side of the business very interesting – the technology, the internet, the possibilities for marketing and bridging the gap between clients and solicitors. I enjoy the psychology of it as well; finding out what interests people and the way they search for lawyers on the web and being ahead of everyone else. It’s very exciting.”

What is your advice to other firms about technology?

“A lot of lawyers still don’t understand the importance of technology and the internet. But the way that people search for lawyers now has changed and all lawyers need to understand that the days are gone when people used the Yellow Pages or asked their family connections which lawyers to use. There are other parameters that people use now and if you haven’t got an excellent, informative website, as well as a significant digital presence and a solid reputation online in terms of reviews, then you’re just not going to survive. I can see why it’s very difficult for small suburban firms to achieve that, but if they wanted my advice I would say find your niche and market yourself to that niche. If you’re a solicitor in a suburb, know what it is that you’re good at and market those things to the people in your suburb and you’ll always rank well online for that. But if you try to rank for everything you just can’t do that without an investment of millions of dollars and a whole team behind you.”

As a CEO, what is your approach to staff management?

“We give people every chance to succeed and they earn opportunities to manage and lead. I try to identify what staff members are good at. Some people are obviously demonstrably good at managing people and we put those people in positions of authority as quickly as possible. A lot of our office managers are very young and in other firms I don’t think they would get ahead as quickly. I think millennials expect this kind of fast progression if they’ve earned it, and they won’t hang around long if they don’t get it.

“We give every solicitor an iPad they use constantly, for accessing emails, our practice management software and for video interviews with clients. Most of our lawyers also have a Go To Court vehicle they can use, as well as a laptop with every available technology and support so they can be a mobile law firm unto themselves, without the need for administrative support staff.  And we promote them online, personally, by encouraging them to get good Google reviews for their work and then marketing those reviews. Whenever they have a success story they get a client to post a review about them and that helps their own online reputation. On top of all that, we also have a salary and performance review every three months for every staff member, which I think is pretty much unheard of in the legal sector.”

Many firms are battling with how they handle millennials and other younger workers. What’s your experience?

“We’ve found that the younger staff members understand the digital world and the way it works. We have had some experiences hiring older lawyers and it hasn’t always worked out because they just couldn’t deal with our business model. In some cases, they were just too set in their ways. Having said that, we do have a number of older lawyers who do embrace our business model, so it’s definitely not a rule that we only hire millennials! In all seriousness, younger people really understand our model, and they back it. They look at the traditional ways as ‘old school’ and outdated, and I think they’re right. As long as they are well supervised by experienced and skilled experts, they really can flourish – and this is especially so given their ability to use the latest technology effectively.”

Where does your firm go from here?

“By our calculation we are only scratching the surface. We get about 250 new clients coming on board every week and we are looking at doubling that within two years. Of course, there are limits to how many people actually need a lawyer each week, but we are taking a lot of clients off the firms that haven’t embraced the new way of doing things, so we still have a long way to go. Unless these firms  wake up to what’s happening, we’re going to just keep taking those clients off them, and that doesn’t really break my heart!”

Do you have any other messages for your peers?

“I often read stories in magazines and online where CEOs of companies talk about what they regard as the key things business leaders should concentrate on. One of those that resonates with me is to ‘be decisive’. It sounds so obvious, but a lot of lawyers are actually very hesitant to make decisions – it’s just a trait that lawyers have to be careful and considered. While that’s good when you are giving clients advice, when you’re making business decisions that can be fatal. Sometimes it’s better to make the wrong decision than to make no decision. Another is to ‘be innovative’ and always look for better ways of doing things. We are constantly updating our software and website. Don’t rest on your laurels, or someone might just take them from you.

“We should also ‘be courageous’. Back yourself. Do it intelligently and carefully, but don’t be afraid to be courageous – if that makes sense. The other important thing is to know where you want to go and have a plan to get there. If you don’t have that direction and you’re just riding a wave without any idea of where it’s going to go, that’s dangerous. And above all, remember that if your clients are happy, then you’re on the right track.”