Steven Spurr runs Spurr Growth Partners, where he helps law firm owners with the business side of growth. His clients sit between $8 and $20 million in revenue, and he has spent about 15 years helping firms delegate, automate, and grow without breaking. He sat down with us to map the hardest jump in a lawyer’s career, from a busy, successful practice to a firm that runs when you’re not in the room:
Expect to lose some day-to-day visibility when your practice becomes a firm. Steven maps three stages: the successful solo, the practice (you plus an associate, a paralegal, maybe a VA), and the growing firm. The trouble lives on the line between the last two. Demand outruns your hours, decisions start happening without you, and you still have to sell and deliver. Adding people and tools won’t fix that on its own. You also need to organize the business that sits behind your practice of law.
Track five numbers and let them make the calls. Steven’s list: revenue, collections and cash flow, profitability, capacity, and pipeline. Measure revenue against a written plan for the firm, each practice area, or even your biggest clients. Most small firms don’t have a useful prior year to compare against, so the plan makes a better yardstick. The default QuickBooks P&L will get you started and then stall out.
Measure capacity by caseload as well as hours. Utilization tells you how busy someone is. Workload tells you whether your associates (and partners) can take on another complex matter. Start logging both, even rough versions, before you cross into growth mode. When you have to choose between referring work out and hiring, you’ll have the data. Profitability by practice area shows you where to invest next.
If you’re at capacity, raise your rates before you take on more work. Several attendees named capacity as their bottleneck: clients like how they lawyer and keep sending referrals. Steven’s answer starts with billing. Raise your rates to match what the market is telling you. Clients who can’t afford you can go to a referral partner or to an associate working under you. Then let matter volume decide between a full-time hire, a part-timer, or contract help.
Map your pipeline and you’ll see the dry spells coming. Dry spells often start weeks before you see them coming, when you take a vacation or move a kid into college and stop doing BD. Know exactly how you’re clients are finding you and you won’t let up the gas when it matters.
Expect hiring and operations to break first. Steven sorts the business of a firm into five functions: growth, people, operations, finance, and technology. Solos already wear all five hats. Stress shows up earliest in hiring, onboarding, and culture, then in workflows and vendors. Network for talent the way you network for clients, with its own block on your calendar. Big Law laterals who want interesting work and a saner culture make strong recruits.
Keep the highest-value work for yourself and push the rest down the pyramid. The top of Steven’s pyramid holds the work only you can do: client relationships and your firm’s reputation. Below that, hand work to people you already have, then hire (W-2, part-time, 1099, or vendor), then systematize the base with templates, automation, and AI. One attendee brought on a full-time paralegal with 25+ years of Big Law experience, nearly doubled what the practice could handle, and knew it was right within two days. Another, running a distributed firm, moved early W-2 hires to contract after a client folded and cut the downside risk. When you hire, watch how much time you spend redoing their work. If that number never drops, let them go fast.
☕ Want to meet a new HeyCounsel member every month?
Join #virtual-coffee-chats and our new Coffee Chat bot pairs you with another member for a 1:1 virtual coffee. Connect your calendar and the bot books the time for you. The next round of matches goes out Monday, October 12.
Meet up in person? Post a pic in the #virtual-coffee-chats channel and the drinks are on us.
What’s new this week inside HeyCounsel?
🤖 AI is sending our members new clients: a prospect told her their AI agent recommended her when they went looking for a lawyer. Your profile powers our SEO and AI-search work, so fill in every field and give the agents more to find. Thread →
👶 Welcome to the world, Baby Tyrone: Daniel Tyrone and his wife welcomed their third boy on September 28. Send a heart if you haven’t yet (45 of you already did). Thread →
⏱ Same-day contract turnarounds? Brian asked #subgroup-fractional_gc whether anyone accepts an 8-business-hour SLAs. After 39 replies the group stood split. Some offer it at a price. Others promise a response within a day, with a proposed deadline in place of a finished task, and one called the whole trend a race to the bottom. Thread →
📊 A member ran the BD numbers: Someone opened up their ROI numbers for marketing and ads, and lead-source table shows Justia turning $1,845 into $21,583 and Google turning $37K into $158K. LinkedIn, Nextdoor, and signage brought in nothing. He also shared notes from his first week of mostly flat-fee work: clients like the price certainty, and he still tracks hours to check his effective rate. Lead sources → Flat fees →
💛 HeyCounsel in real life: Tim Taylor, Taylor Bell, and Terressa DeHaven took over the ABS conference in Scottsdale (Taylor’s session on how Arizona opened up law firm ownership is on HeyCounsel Edu). Nick Robbins, Fernanda Hinojosa Cantu, and Teddy Ellison met for coffee in NYC, and Shahrzad Kojouri and Jennee DeVore split lobster rolls in Boston. Scottsdale → Recording → NYC → Boston →
🚀 Isaac Wall launched Parallax Formations: a guided Delaware formation platform he built himself with Codex. Founders answer one plain-English question at a time, the lawyer approves the exceptions, and the documents come out of firm templates. Isaac wants to partner with firms that would offer it to their clients under their own brand. Thread →
⚖ A pro bono win in Petaluma: A member represented the family council at a memory care facility that refused to cooperate Thread →
🌴 How do solos take a real vacation? A member who handles crisis work asked how you stay present on vacation when clients still write “I know you’re out, but can we talk this morning?” The thread ran to 13 replies. Thread →
👋 Warm welcomes: Chuck Kraus co-leads Corporate & Securities at Scale LLP and works deals between Alberta and Texas, after 10 years as GC of three public companies listed in both the US and Canada. Thread → Mason Gardner launched Momentum Advisors, a remote boutique for employee benefits and executive compensation. Thread → Cary Ullman leads the fintech practice at Scale, where she structures card and payments programs after seven years at JPMorganChase. Thread →
🤝 #04-ask-a-lawyer was busy: referral requests spanning pre-publication defamation strategy in Florida, Connecticut household counsel, Amazon import compliance, white-glove California CPAs, Riverside County probate, California unfair business practices, Dallas wills and trusts, Texas private investigators, founder CIIAs, Kentucky education discrimination, Arkansas M&A, an LA construction unwind, fashion print copyrights, fintech card programs, credit card surcharges in all 50 states, pricing video data sets for AI training, Maryland Comptroller disputes, and website ADA complaints.
💼 Referral Opportunities: 24 new opportunities posted over the past two weeks. Check them out on the dashboard.
📆 HeyCounsel’s Upcoming Events
Tue, Oct 13 → The Busy Lawyer’s Path to Publishing (and Profiting from) a Book — https://luma.com/heycou-lt8q
Tue, Oct 13 → Figuring Out Health Coverage for Solo Practitioners (presented by Solo Health) — https://luma.com/heycou-9cmg
Thu, Oct 15 → The Free AI Legal Research Tool Taking on Harvey/Legora: DingDuff — https://luma.com/heycou-zu75
Tue, Oct 27 → Taxes and Accounting Q&A — https://luma.com/heycou-2zf9
Wed, Oct 28 → HeyCounsel All-Hands — https://luma.com/heycou-fg05
Thu, Oct 29 → Community Chat with GC AI — https://luma.com/heycou-ou55
🧠 🧠 HeyCounsel Masterminds are back. 9 member-led groups kicked off this month: three working on operations and AI, six on business development.
Each group of 4-5 lawyers meets for an hour a month for six months, with a private Slack channel between sessions. It’s free for members.
Missed the October cohort? The next one starts in January, and applications close December 20.
Thanks for reading! See you next week 🤙
- Brian Scherer, Co-Founder & CEO