All About This Podcast

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Hey everyone. Scott Benton here. How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast, where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we make the practice of law fun.

Now today, we’re going to take a little bit of a quick, impromptu look at what we’re doing here, or what I like to call, a practice. All about this podcast.

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Today, in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, which is what we talk about on this podcast, in order to help you better understand the actual practice of law, the actual practice of law, which is a subject that is not taught in law school, we’re going to take an impromptu look at what we’re doing here, or what I like to call all about this podcast.

So it’s a little bit of a peek behind the scenes of why we’re putting together the Classroom 2 Courtroom. podcast.

We set up this podcast because we realized that there was a gap that existed between law school and new lawyers beginning their first job that we really thought we would fill. We saw what’s called a catch 22. It’s one of those things where people won’t hire you because you don’t have any experience, but you can’t get any [00:02:00] experience if they don’t hire you.

That’s an example of a catch 22. That’s not what we were seeing, but what we were seeing was that law schools would often. teach their law school students that the firms would teach you how to practice law. And a lot of law school students discover when they start their new jobs as an attorneys that they don’t know how to practice law and that the law firms don’t really want to teach them to practice law.

They expect you to already come in knowing how to do that. But since you don’t, they have to teach you. And it often takes a long time to get up to speed. So what if we could cut to the chase? What if we could. give you all of that information about practicing law in the first place so that when you showed up for your first day for your first job as an attorney that you would really already have a much better and clearer idea of what it takes to practice law instead of spending the next six months feeling around in the dark and trying to pick it up as you go along because that doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun and it sounds like you’re going to be spending a lot more time in the office and [00:03:00] a lot more time in a state of stress just trying to figure out what this whole business side of working in the law firm is all about, which is called practicing law or the practice of law.

So this website and this podcast is here to fill that gap. We’re here to give you all that information that law school doesn’t really teach you. We also know the bar exam doesn’t teach you how to practice law. That’s for sure. And I’m not knocking law school and I’m not knocking the bar exam. If you listen to this, podcast for any amount of time.

You’ll know that I often say that law schools have a function and their function is not to teach you how to practice law. That’s not in their wheelhouse. That’s why they don’t teach you how to practice lots, why they kick the can down the road and they expect the law firms to teach that to you and the law firms will teach that to you.

But it’s a little bit of a disservice to you because it’s going to take a long time. So we thought we would put this podcast together in order to give you all of that missing information.

There’s that void in between the end of law school and the beginning of your career, and we were going to fill that [00:04:00] void so that you had a much more easy way to go from one environment to another law school into your professional careers. We, as we say at the opening of this particular podcast and that way you can walk into an environment with a lot more confidence, you have a much better vocabulary developed for how to practice law and you can sit down and actually do the legal work, reach your minimum billable hourly requirements a lot quicker than probably just about anybody else.

And. Really get up to speed faster. You can click on those afterburners on your career and not have to wait six months, a year, whatever, until you’ve built up that vocabulary and have a much more keen insight on what it takes to actually practice law, because there’s two sides to affirm. There’s the legal side, which is performing legal services.

And then there’s the business side. So the business side is the part that oftentimes gets neglected. And that’s what this podcast is going to bolster. And it’s going to fill that gap, and it’s going to teach you that missing piece.

We really wanted to strengthen new [00:05:00] attorneys who are entering the legal field We felt the best way for us to do that was to produce a podcast So we came up with a classroom 2 courtroom idea And it’s a podcast that function as the glue between finishing law school and starting your career as an attorney and of course getting up to speed as quickly as possible, which You As you’ll see, it’s going to be very important.

You don’t want to go in and seem like you never went to law school. You really want to go in and hit the ground running. Because practicing law is difficult enough, and it’s really where your focus needs to be. Your focus needs to be on the active part of practicing law, of servicing your clients, of performing legal services.

You really don’t want the distraction on top of the already demanding process of practicing law and delivering legal services that you get from Having to learn the business side of what a law firm does in terms of practicing law. You don’t want that to be in the way, so we thought that this podcast would be a very necessary [00:06:00] antidote to that often very common situation that new attorneys find themselves in.

We wanted to remove that barrier, and we thought we could do that with information. You’re hired to provide legal services to the clients who hire the firm, and you need to be able to break down a case into its component parts in terms of what needs to be done in order to reach the legal goals of that case.

Now as I’ve mentioned, law firms expect that you’re going to show up on your first day already knowing how to practice law. And this is something that, in general, you haven’t been taught unless you belong to a firm. Maybe it was like your parents firm that you grew up with, or you had an uncle that you would work in that particular firm, and you picked up the practice of law.

But in general, that’s not really going to happen. Most new attorneys are coming to the field lacking this particular skill. Most people are showing up to their first attorney jobs, and it takes them quite a while to get up to speed to actually get good at the practice of law. So that putting a to do list together, performing legal services [00:07:00] and then billing for those services and getting paid, more importantly, so that you get paid in the firm gets paid. Those really need to be done. In the background is almost an afterthought that needs to be one of those autonomic kind of systems that’s running like your heartbeat or something. It needs to be done with out taking a lot of thought because you need room to be able to think.

You need room to be able to process the cases that you’re working on, to come up with case strategies, to come up with all kinds of, strategies for you to reach the goals that your clients have hired you to reach. And if you’re sitting there trying to figure out the best way to create a billing entry or, the best way to put together a to do list or something like that, it really becomes a distraction.

You want those things to just be running automatically. You want to do your to do list. You want to go to your to do list and pick the most important one. And you want to perform that service. And then you want to bill for it. You want to be succinct in how you do it. Create that billing entry and then you want to have that sent off.

That goes on to the monthly invoice or the biweekly invoice or whatever it is for [00:08:00] that particular client. But immediately what you want to do is go back to that to do list and you want to take the next most important item and you want to put that on your, Desktop and you want to work on it. You want to get that completed and bill for it and so on and so forth.

It’s a very easy process when you’re looking at it through the 30, 000 ft view. But the reality is that there’s so many complications, and there’s so many layers to just those three areas of practicing law that it merits it. A podcast like this one in order to explore all of those little details.

There are so many details that as you get into it, you’re going to see that you can’t just show up and, very superficially do these three stages of the success cycle and come out victorious. You’re not, if you’re just going to listen to one or two of the episodes on this particular podcast and you get into your first job, you’re probably going to be a little bit lost.

Cause you’re going to say to yourself okay, I know how to do a To do list. That’s simple here. I’m going to post it. I’ll put it on this post it. That’s what I’ll do for the day. I’ll perform the services. It doesn’t really matter what order I perform the services in and [00:09:00] okay, it took me a little longer than I thought, but I’ll do my billing entry.

That’s done. How do you do that? They have a particular system for this. Maybe they have my case or some other platform that they use for their billing and you have to go in and maybe your block billing at first. So you can’t do that. That’s where you take a number of tasks. And you just lump them together and you lump all that time together.

That’s going to be really bad for you and really bad for the firm and that could lead to fee arbitrations at the bar. And you want to really stay away from that because even if you win a fee arbitration at the bar, even if you prove that, no, this time is correct and this is what I spent on this case, and it gets ruled in your favor, That really, that took a day, that took a whole day for you away from the office, away from performing legal services, away from billing, and that ends up hurting you, it ends up hurting the firm, it ends up hurting, your the client that you were working with who’s upset about their billing because they couldn’t understand what you were writing and billing entries because you block billed them, that type of thing.

That just can’t go on. So all of this, yeah. background. All of [00:10:00] this practice of law stuff is contained here on this podcast. We talk about all these little nuances. It’s like a golf swing. I always liken something like the practice of law or even writing. If you’re if you write novels, if you do any kind of creative rights, the same thing.

There’s a lot of disciplines where and we’ll take law because that’s what we’re talking about here or the practice of law. But the practice of law, it’s like a golf swing. If you look at Tiger Woods, let’s say, and he’s on the fairway and he he’s gonna drive a ball. He takes out his driver and he puts the ball down and he lines it up and he swings and he smacks that thing.

250 yards down the fairway, whatever it is. And it’s straight and it’s high and it lands in the green. It avoids the bunkers that avoids the water. All that sort of stuff. It’s just like perfect swing. It looks like it’s one thing. It looks like that swing is one thing. But when you look at a golf swing, it’s not one thing.

There’s 20 different pieces to that golf swing, and you have to master each and every one of those pieces. parts of that golf swing in order for it to look like one thing and get that ball [00:11:00] down the fairway straight and true and high and onto the green. And that’s what you’re doing with practicing law.

There’s so many little microscopic pieces, but you got to know them all and you got to master them all. And when you put it all together, it looks like one thing. So when you start your job as an attorney and you get in there and you’re watching the other attorneys that have been there for five years or 10 years or whatever, and they’ve already learned all of this.

They’ve learned. They’ve learned. The practice of law, they’ve learned all of the nuances and all of the little pieces, and they’ve been able to just put that together. And it looks like, it looks like one thing, like a Tiger Woods golf swing, then you’re going to be a little disappointed when you sit down to do the exact same thing.

But the ball goes off, to the it slices or whatever it goes into the water. And you can’t figure it out. You can’t figure it out because you didn’t learn all of the nuances of the success cycle model that we have. The three pieces, the to do list, or what we call the G sheets, that stands for get it done, which equals G sheets.

So the to do list, performing the services, and then billing for the services, [00:12:00] inside of those three main categories, there’s infinite variety. infinite sort of shades and colors and things that you really need to know so that when you get into your first job, if you’ve listened to this podcast and you’ve put together all of those different pieces, then your golf swing, so to speak, your practice of the law is going to look like one fluid thing.

It’s going to look like it’s easy. It’s going to look like it’s just happening in the background. And for you, it should just happen in the background. Because again, you have to leave your mind free and available so that you can You Think on your cases that you’re working on. So when it comes to the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast, we really thought that we would take away all of that complication. We would reduce the practice of law into three areas, the success cycle, and then we would, because it’s a podcast, because of the nature of this format, we could take as much time as we wanted, we could use as many episodes as we wanted to describe one of these areas.

So let’s say you can, Just take the to do list. That could be infinite off the bat. You’re going to [00:13:00] say to yourself what’s the big deal about it to do list? I can just put together. So I can hand write a simple list. I can type it up. I can do it any number of ways. I can just even remember it.

If I have five or 10 things that I have to do. No, you can’t. Don’t do that. You’re gonna, you’re gonna blow yourself up. You’re going to slow yourself down. You’re not going to get your minimum billable hourly requirement met. You’re going to have a hard time. So a to do list is going to be very specific.

There are going to be to do list for each case. Then there’s going to be a to do list made for you for that day or for the next couple of days or whatever it is.

So you want to take the to do list, for instance, which, off the bat, you’re probably saying no big deal to do list. I can put that together. But a to do list can have many different sort of variations on it and components and gears and pieces and so on. And in fact, we could say, Spend an enormous amount of time, an enormous amount of Classroom 2 Courtroom, podcast episodes, just really talking about all those different factions and areas of the to do list.

And it can really be an infinite number of podcast episodes if we need it to be. If we need [00:14:00] to dedicate many episodes to the to do list. And we do talk about the to do list quite a bit. And we do dedicate a lot of space in this podcast to that particular component in the success cycle.

So we need to make sure that we’re supplying you with all of that information so you can get that kind of level of detail. I mean, It’s level after level after level. It does go down pretty far. If you go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, of the to do list, and you’re looking at every little component of that golf swing when it comes to the to do list, you’re going to see that goes pretty deep and pretty wide.

And so do the other two components as well, the performing of the services. That you select from your to do list and also just even billing how to do how to write out a proper billing entry and how to get paid. So there’s a lot of discussion as you can see that can go on here. That’s going to ultimately help you.

It’s going to ultimately teach you everything that you need to know, and it’s going to help you show up into the legal community. And we need you. We need you in this legal community, but we need you to show up already [00:15:00] knowing how to practice law. And so that’s another reason why you want to stick with this podcast and pick up as much as you can, especially while you’re a law school student, because this is the piece that they’re just not going to give you in law school, nor should they.

They’re busy just trying to get you to pass the bar. That’s what they want. They want you to graduate law school and they want you to pass the bar and they want you to become an attorney and you know what’s you want that as well. That’s exactly what you want, but you also need this other piece, the business side of practicing law.

So on this platform, the nice thing about podcasts is you can literally say everything that you need to say without any kind of limitation. And then if things change in the future All the better, because you can just use an infinite amount of episodes, as you see that you need, and you can talk about those changes, the model.

Let’s say to do lists, there’s some technology that comes along that really streamlines the to do list. Then, we can take as many episodes as we need to talk about those changes. So this is a [00:16:00] very good platform for us, for you, for us to communicate. We have a website set up. You can communicate with us if you want.

You can suggest if we’re missing some episodes that you think we need to cover, you can certainly get in touch with us that way. We also have an associate program here that if you’re interested in, you can contact us. You can come and work with us. We’re located in Southern California.

If you’re going to do Let’s say a summer associate program and you’re in school and you’re looking for a place to work during the summer. You can always get in touch with us and apply to the, that particular program. We also, let’s say you’ve graduated law school and you’ve taken the bar exam, you’re waiting for your bar results.

You can also come and work with us then as a law clerk. And even if you have some extra hours while you’re still in law school that you’d like to Continue to work. You can get in contact with us about that program as well. But we’re very interested in hearing from you. You can go to our website, which is classroom2courtroom.

com. And I hope this podcast is helpful for you. I hope we’re covering [00:17:00] everything that you need to learn in order to really get up to speed and learn how to practice law. But we also cover a lot of subjects one way or the other that are connected to this idea of the success cycle that we talk about over and over again.

The podcast is really set up and built around the success cycle, which teaches you how to practice law. A lot of times we’ll talk about subjects that are maybe loosely related to the success cycle, but partially everything we talk about is going to be related to the success cycle because ultimately, it’s going to underscore the business of law.

As or may not know, every law firm, like every business is a business. Put together in order to generate a profit. And that’s exactly what a law firm is doing. They’re there to generate a profit, and they are in business to generate a profit. So this is a very important side of what a law firm is doing that you really need to know.

You need to know to practice law, which is to essentially run a business. Now you’re not running the business, you’re, You are providing legal services, but in [00:18:00] providing legal services, that is the, that is what the firm is doing in terms of the product that they sell, the business that they have is supplying legal services.

You are there to supply those legal services, but you need to know the other part. Now, celebrating wins as one example doesn’t necessarily fit into any of the sections of the success cycle. I mean, It does. You can say it’s a component of all of the different sections, the three sections, the to do list, performing the services and billing because you can celebrate wins from any of those categories.

And celebrating wins is something you overlay on top of the entire success cycle because you want to find a way to make yourself positive. You want to find a way to make yourself excited about the practice of law. You want to find a way to look at all of those valuable services that you’re providing to your clients and that you’re helping them to improve their lives.

You’re literally making the world a better place. And we say that at the end of every single episode that we do, we say that we hope you’ll [00:19:00] join us for making the world a better place. And we sincerely believe that the work that we’re doing and our is helping clients, which in turn over time is literally making the world a better place.

So wherever you go, whatever firm you work in, that’s what you’re going to be doing. You’re here to make the world a better place. That’s probably why you chose law. You wanted to get engaged in these fights and battles or just these injustices that you’ve seen, or you want to help people set up maybe, in our case We’re helping people transfer their wealth from one generation to another.

We’re a probate law firm, probate and trust administration and litigation law firm. That’s what we do. And so we see that we’re helping families. We see that we’re helping individuals. We see that we’re helping, people to live a better life with our help and our services than they otherwise could live.

So we’re improving the lives of people. And if you do that just over and over again, and you do it year after year, [00:20:00] eventually there’s a pretty significant chunk of goodwill that you’ve created. And that ultimately is going to make you feel pretty good, but it’s not going to make you feel good if you don’t remember it, if you don’t celebrate it.

And remember, those are all wins. That’s all wins can be big. They can be small, whatever it is, but. Celebrating them is what’s important because it’s going to keep you in a positive mindset. It’s going to keep you wanting to come back every day. Monday morning is going to roll around and you’re going to want to jump up out of bed because of how good you feel based on all of the success that you’ve had with your clients, which starts with learning how to practice law and delivering those legal services and following the path of the success cycle of making your to do list.

You get into work on Monday morning. You look at your to do list. You prepared it Friday night before you left. You you reprioritize your to do list if you need to. And then you pick the most important one and you perform that service. You deliver that service. You bill for that service. You go back to your to do list over and over again.

That’s the art. Of practicing law.

Now lastly, We’re interested in building community and bringing [00:21:00] law school students together to share this information with one another and to really build community. Help each other show up to their legal career after they’ve passed the bar in the best possible light so that they can impress the firms in the first few weeks.

And that’s so important to do that they show up and they start working and they hit the ground running right off the bat. They’re delivering. legal services and they’re not getting caught up in learning how to practice law. They’re just able to get in there and and really hit that golf ball with that golf swing.

That looks like one thing when it’s really 20. So with this information and by listening to this podcast, we sincerely believe that you’re just going to be better prepared to start your legal career than other attorneys who’ve just not really listened to or learned this information on their own.

And it’s why we encourage you to share these episodes. We believe in helping others. We help our clients all day long in our law firm. We help them long term, we help them short term, whatever it is. But underlying all of that is our need to help other people. And [00:22:00] we believe that when others are helped, that gratitude is returned, even if it’s just in the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped someone else in a small way.

We’re a law firm. We believe in helping others and that when others are helped that gratitude gets returned to you, even if it’s just in the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve helped someone in some small way. So we hope that this builds community, that you can share these episodes with each other, that attorneys can create their own community through them in just In terms of learning how to practice law, we hope that the practice of law will become a lot more streamlined.

It won’t take so long to learn it. It’ll be something that you inherently know once you begin your first job, and that in building this community, you’ll have plenty of people that you can go to, plenty of resources that you can contact if you have a question about a particular area of law that you’re just not sure about, or Some question about your career and how to grow your career and the arc and the trajectory of that career All that sort of stuff that begins with community and we’re hoping [00:23:00] that this podcast Helps in some small way to foster that community if only through sharing these episodes.

I’m Scott Benton I’m the host of the classroom 2 courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for joining us And we hope the work that we’re putting together here is helping you and others learn all about what you need to know in order to practice law.

If you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website at classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two, courtroom. com, where you can send us a message to keep in touch with us. You can even inquire about our seasonal associate programs that we have available for law students.

You can come and work with us. And as always, don’t forget to share, and subscribe to stay on top of all of our newest episodes. And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place one client at a time.

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