Gregory Singleton on Estate Planning and Customer Service

Thank you.

Yeah, well, let’s see. Currently right now I’m the owner and founder of Signature Law. I focus on estate planning, a little bit of probate trust administration, guardianship, conservatorship. During the law, really actually started, I worked as an actor for 10 years before I went to law school with moderate success. Unless you saw a bunch of weird off-Broadway in New York, you probably did not see me on stage. But my day job, during the time was actually most most actors work as like a bartender or a waiter and I’m a terrible bartender I’ve tried it but I worked with a contract negotiator negotiating multi-million and multi-billion dollar contracts so that was my day job and

then I’d go off Broadway in the evening so when I went to law school I wanted to do more transactional work but it was 2010 the economy kind of sucked and they said and everyone just told me just go into your strengths and everyone said acting is just gonna be just like trial work and you’ll love it and I learned it’s not. It’s very much not like trial work and I did not like it. don’t like, I like making a legal argument. I don’t like arguing and dickering and bickering about discovery disputes and all the stuff that goes along with litigation. So after bouncing around from a number of law firms, I eventually Through a lot of study, a lot of mentorship, hung up my own shingle and started Signature Law in 2019.

All we have a lot of money i think it would be some but i absolutely love what i do it gets me up in the morning and keep some happy all day

Yeah, I would say about 90 % of what I do is estate planning. I tend to keep it to families that have the states under $6 million. And that’s mainly because Minnesota’s state tax exemption for estate plan for estates is $3 million per individual, $6 million per couple. So I keep it under that. I’ve expanded beyond that, but I’ve learned you find your lane and you dig it deep and you stick to your wheelhouse and you make sure you do it well.

That said, I do some probate, some trust administration, and I’ve started branching into guardianships and conservatorships. Little horizontal expansion there, but primarily I focus on estate planning, cabin planning, small business formation, that sort of thing.

It’s going to things really for second of the first one is gonna be we take a really holistic approach to estate planning most estate planning attorneys will sit down and the final product on the last day they’ll hand you a notarized will and notarized health care director of notarized power of attorney wash their hands of it and walk out the door

And what we do is we put together a package and it comes in a binder. It’s all the core documents, all the ancillary documents. I put instructions on everything because I don’t expect anyone to remember a single thing I say after they walk out that door. It’s got a bunch of worksheets, you know, to organise their estate. We prepare bind packages for all the fiduciaries. We really try to make it as simple as possible. And when I say I do probate, I mainly do it for former clients because I know how their estate is set up and it just makes it really easy.

The second thing would be customer service, really. Just to be blunt, a lot of attorneys are really, really, really bad at customer service. They get into lawyer mode and robot mode, and instead of interacting with another individual as an adult, they interact with them as an attorney, which has its place, certainly.

But people don’t react well to it other attorneys react well to it clients don’t react so well to it so I working on the customer service aspect is huge for a firm.

Yeah, I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried print. I’ve tried Facebook advertising. I’ve tried specialty websites. I’ve tried lead generators. The things that have worked, most of those didn’t work, but the things that have worked is one is networking. That is something not networking with other attorneys. It’s networking with individuals. Some people do BMI or master networks. I don’t do that, but there’s other groups out there where you can just go out and get found.

I’ve met in the four or five years that I’ve been networking, I’ve met maybe two attorneys the entire time and very few attorneys network. It’s shocking. It is absolutely shocking. And I’ve tried to get attorneys to join me. We actually started a group called the NAAW. It was kind of set up like a BNI. It was going to be solo practitioners of small firms that really know their stuff are good with customer service and each has their own industry and we meet for drinks once a month. LNOS stands for the League of Non-Asshole Attorneys. We had a hard time recruiting, mainly because people don’t want to network. And we tried, but it’s shocking how few attorneys network.

The other things that help are I have a YouTube channel. Once every couple of weeks, I’ll do a short video on estate planning or probate.
We get into everything from celebrity estates to pet trusts. You name the weird stuff I do monthly presentations Which it’s just all free online zoom presentations. It’s nothing fancy. I don’t even advertise for it, but people seem to keep showing up it’s just on meetup and the big one the gold standard is the Google review

get good Google reviews get five-star Google reviews jack up your SEO as much. That’s the other reason for the YouTube channel is the best way to increase your SEO of your website is to put videos on it. Google loves that.

Easily, there was two really big challenges that I’ve had. Then the first one was huge. It’s that I had no roadmap for the firm. Most people that go hang up their own shingle. They’re like, I worked in personal injury for five, 10 years. I want to do my own thing. And they kind of copy what they did and took what worked and what didn’t work from their old firm. And they replicate that in their own way. I came at it. I never worked at an estate planning law firm. I had no idea about pricing, about structure, about client management, about client files.

About the whole process of intake, about the process of doing consultations. I had to make that all up from scratch. And that took a lot of work, a ridiculous amount of work and a lot of planning and thinking and talking to mentors and reading books and going to YouTube and going to videos and everything. But just getting the nuts and bolts of how to structure a practice has been interesting.

And I’m very, in a couple of weeks, there’s a CLE, it’s a day long CLE on how to have a successful estate planning law firm. And I’m gonna go to it. I’m very curious, because I have a feeling that what they’re gonna present is gonna be dramatically different than what I’ve put together. So I’m very curious about this one. I know it’ll be different having talked to other colleagues.

The other one, it just keeps coming back to it, the CRM program, the Client Relationship Management Program like you know the ones that people use are like practice panther cleo my case that sort of thing lawmatics i’ve bounced around between a couple most of them are built for litigators and they do not do well for an estate planning practice and i just need something that does the nuts and bolts basics of what i need and they don’t do it so i’ve switched twice i’m gonna switch again this year back to something i used to use and fingers crossed Because it’s pain.

Yeah, most people use absolutely 100%. Most people only use a small fraction of what their program can do. I won’t name names of the programs, but basically I need one that, for instance, I need to send out an intake form and then there’ll be reminders sent about those intake forms.

And I found some programs that do it, but they overcomplicate the process or they’re so non malleable that I can’t adjusted for what the client needs so they do a one-size-fits-all the here’s here’s a great example I’ll send out an invoice and there’ll be reminders every every program has reminders that go out for the invoice but sometimes clients will say hey you know what and I do a pay up front model and they’ll say hey look I’m gonna pay at the beginning of the month

And so got you there that’s in like a couple weeks I’ll say that’s fine but I can’t turn off the reminders that go out to the clients. So they’re still getting texts and emails saying, hey, please pay your bill. And I have to sell them, just ignore those, which is really unfortunate, I guess. It’s a problem. It’s a real problem.

We’re gonna give a customised approach to your needs. I’m not just one that just fills out a random template and calls it good. I didn’t just download a bunch of templates online. I’ve very much customised them and we take what the client needs and we find out what they need and develop a plan around that as opposed to try to cram what they have into our existing templates.

For example, One passion of mine is the healthcare directive. I’ve walked a number of people through the process of having a loved one die and what it means to be a healthcare agent. So, I hated all the healthcare directives that are out there. So I literally talked to doctors, social workers, palliative care providers, nurses, and said, what information do you need or does someone need to make those end of life decisions? And the healthcare directive that we’ve put together is like, it’s big.

It’s like, 15, 17 pages and I walk through the clients and getting answers on that. But it seems like a lot, but we’re, you know, I’ve only maybe once had a client say, is too much, I can’t do this. And then we just adjust to what they needed and what they could do. So whatever we do is going to be customised to what their needs are and to try to help them through the process as opposed to just plug and play with the template that I downloaded somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, that’d be absolutely right. That’d be absolutely right.

Thank you for the opportunity, for having me on. I appreciate it.