Attorneys need a third party to make the difference.
In what situation does having a middleman make all the difference? As FastCompany explains, Middlemen “are more prevalent–and more important–than ever. Agents, brokers, dealers, and resellers get a bad rap, but they play a crucial role in almost every platform today— As a result, being an effective middleman has become an even more valuable skill than it was in the past.”
Middlemen are particularly useful for attorneys and retainer financing. As our last few blogs have pointed out, a lawyer’s psychology and mindset when entering into their pitch with a client are extremely important. Your belief system enters into any meeting before you do and, when playing a game of retainer-payment-chess with your client, it becomes an immovable force. While you need to focus on (or stubbornly cling to) all of your mental chess pieces, your middleman steps in to get the important work done.
Think of your belief system as a ladder with five rungs. The bottom rung is your identity, which shapes your beliefs. The next rung is belief, which shapes the next rung, capability. That rung influences behavior and those behaviors shape your environment. This ladder is powerful and cannot easily be dismantled. You carry this ladder into all of your pitches and meetings with clients. It can be very hard to negotiate and work from a place of compromise when you’re hauling around a heavy ladder of belief.
- Environment
- Behavior
- Capability
- Belief
- Identity
There’s something about having a middleman, someone who is NOT carrying your ladder around, someone who can be the responsible third party, that is essential to making the attorney/client relationship work. While you’re stuck in your mindset, the middleman is free to negotiate. There are very few attorneys who are getting their mindset right, are getting paid fully by their clients, and who aren’t suffering from this issue. Everyone knows it exists and that it sucks but no one wants to talk about the depth of the problem because we’re raised to win trophies. We, especially as attorneys, often believe we can do it (and win it) all ourselves.
You may think you don’t need a middleman, but chances are you’re already using one. Attorneys push this stuff off on office managers and employees to get rid of that pain. But the one dealing with the pain didn’t create the cost, they’re just collecting. Betty’s job at the front office is not to collect your money! Betty’s job is to do 8 hours of work for your practice….not chase money around. You don’t have the time either. Betty is not the middleman. You cannot be your own middleman.
Fortify, powered by iQualify Lending, is ready to be your middleman. Start using the Fortify software and you’ll have an easy, modern way to get new clients signed up when they come to you, As the attorney, you get paid upfront with both cash and financing options and get paid over a period of time with an in-house payment option. iQualify attorneys get paid their full retainer on most of their cases without ever having to chase their clients for money or call them for payments.
Contact us today and let’s get started making Fortify your middleman, protecting your practice and letting your belief system do what it does best: win cases for your clients.
Want to find out more about the most famous American middlemen? Esquire has a fun article on seven key middlemen in U.S. history.