Succession Planning for Law Firm Owners Series, Part 3 – How To Sell Your Law Practice with Tom Lenfestey (Ep. 22)

Owners of law firms often face unique challenges as they transition out of their practices.

Whether due to retirement, a career change, or other reasons, the decision to sell your firm requires careful consideration and guidance.

In part three of the Succession Planning for Law Firm Owners mini-series, Darren Wurz sits down with Tom Lenfestey, Founder of The Law Practice Exchange, LLC. Tom shares his journey from being a practicing attorney to founding The Law Practice Exchange, a company that provides services for selling or buying a law practice through an internal transition or in the marketplace.

Tom discusses:

How his company identifies good matches between buyers and sellers
The challenges in selling and buying a law firm
The importance of personal and operational readiness when considering growth through acquisition
The types of buyers interested in acquiring law firms
The trends in non-attorney ownership and private equity in the legal industry
And more!

Resources:

Connect with Darren Wurz:

Connect with Tom Lenfestey:

About our guest:

Tom Lenfestey is the Founder of The Law Practice Exchange, LLC as well as a practicing North Carolina attorney, licensed CPA and Accredited Business Intermediary. Tom founded The Law Practice Exchange in 2013 to fill a void in the legal profession by creating a platform and service model to help lawyers sell their law practices and create continuation and succession plans for when they were ready to exit.

Tom spends much of his time as a frequent speaker on law firm valuation, the buying and selling of law firms, law firm mergers and lawyer succession planning as a regular guest speaker at legal associations, CLEs, podcasts and others. Tom also is a frequent author for legal articles and publications and has authored the book Designing a Succession Plan for Your Law Practice with LPE team member Camille Stell. Tom was appointed and served on the Transitioning Lawyers Commission and Professional Vitality Committee with the North Carolina Bar Association and serves as advisor and contributor to legal insurers, law firm lending institutions and others in regards to the law firm buying/selling/succession marketplace.

Tom is a NC State Wolfpack fan and a past Michigander (who still believes in the Lions). However, his true passion in life is his family, including his wife and two young boys, coastal living and their travel adventures.

Transcript:

[00:00:03]:

We are on a mission to help lawyers and law firm owners maximize wealth and achieve financial independence. Welcome to the lawyer Millionaire with Darren Words from Words financial services. In this podcast, we will help you build wealth, minimize your taxes, and plan for retirement with money management strategies designed for the legal profession. Join in this journey where we help you manage your money so you can make the most of your future. Start feeling confident in knowing you are well prepared for retirement and on track to financial independence. Now onto the show.

Darren Wurz [00:00:41]:

You’ve probably heard of the stock exchange. It’s where you can buy and sell stocks, but have you heard of the Law Practice Exchange? I’m Darren Wurz. Thanks for joining us today, and welcome to part three of our series on succession planning for law firm owners. In our last episode, we talked about the design and implementation of succession plans for law firm owners. And today we have another special guest. We’re talking with attorney and CPA Tom Lenfisty, founder of the Law Practice Exchange. He’s also the author of the book designing a Succession Plan for Your Law Practice. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Lenfestey [00:01:24]:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Darren.

Darren Wurz [00:01:26]:

Yeah, I’m excited that you’re here. Want to learn more about your company? And let’s start there. As I understand that you spent some time in private practice as an attorney before founding your firm, your company. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what led you here and what inspired you to start the company?

Tom Lenfestey [00:01:48]:

Absolutely. Well, I think what started it all was jealousy. I was a practicing transactional attorney, a state tax and corporate, and I had found myself in a niche, helping a lot of professional business owners with succession planning. But from the lawyer CPAC, right? So from that structure, working with a lot of CPAs, a lot of dentists, a lot of doctors, and I think the jealousy came about where it really seemed like their professional business segments and everything else had figured out a great way to build and then to exit for value, typically. And at that same time, my own law practice was growing. I was adding associates, adding team and so I started to think about what would happen for me as far as a succession plan, and then dove a little bit deeper on who is out there helping law firms and lawyers build succession plans. And most importantly, why isn’t there a marketplace for buying and selling law firms? Like there is for dental, for CPA, for insurance, for wealth management, for all of these other professions? And so that really started the journey, honestly, ten years ago, over ten years ago, to start to research, to see who was doing it, and then really getting into the marketplace, to start from an educational component to help build this market and really have lawyers look at it as this is an option I can consider. I can sell my practice through a succession internal strategy, or I can sell it in the marketplace. Or if I’m a younger attorney or a growing law firm, I can buy a practice of an attorney who’s built something good, built that goodwill value. And so since then, I’ve kind of transitioned out of that transactional world. And then the law practice exchange has become full force. And our goal since that date has really been to provide those options to attorneys, to do it under the right process, the right platform, to allow them to value their firm, to allow them to create and choose the right path for them. And we’ve been at it ten years now and working on doing so. Our work is not done, but we’re having fun continuing to see that marketplace grow.

Darren Wurz [00:04:07]:

Awesome. Very cool. So you saw a need out there in the marketplace and you went for it. I’m curious what’s the growth been like for this company? Obviously, you’ve seen a lot of demand for your services. Tell us about that.

Tom Lenfestey [00:04:23]:

Absolutely. So growth was slow to start. Some of those early conversations I would have if I was out talking about succession planning or buying or selling law firms with attorneys, someone would say, you can’t sell a law firm. It’s not allowed. And then we’d point to Aba Rule 1.17, how states have adopted that and how it’s done and everything else. And then others would really say, I’m a solo practitioner or a solo owner. I don’t really think my firm has value. And so we’d show them how the transition based sale can work to preserve and transfer that value to somebody else. And how they have value depends on the dollar amount of that. But once we got past those first obstacles, and really, I think the market has started to work on more talking about lawyer retirement is okay. More talking about you can not be an owner of your firm. You can keep practicing law. You don’t have to own a firm to practice law. And so I think as more lawyers start to open up to that option, the marketplace has really grown. And we actually saw a big bump with COVID as attorneys and law firms adjusted to remote management, remote client service where prior to COVID we had traditional law firms saying well, I don’t know how I would manage a firm or a location in another city even if that’s an hour and a half, 2 hours away. Where now that everybody hops on zoom or other aspects for not just client service but team meetings, reliance on more functional and everything else from a remote or virtual. We’ve seen a big growth where certain firms want to grow geographically. And so over the last two, three years, we’ve really seen the market kind of catch hold and start to grow in adoption first. And that’s a big part for attorneys. Attorneys want to know it and they want to know that A to Z kind of process or steps or what’s involved before they step into it. And I think that’s been the nice part is we’ve seen adoption, they’ve seen successes from others around them who have sold their firm or maybe bought a firm and that’s really fueled the market significantly over the last twelve to 36 months. And so we’re hoping to continue to increase it. We have a long way to go matching attorneys with I’m looking for this type of practice in this location you need scale. And so our real focus now is not just to have some but to have enough where it’s really scalability. So if any attorney wants to go out and sell, they’re going to have enough buyers for their practice area, for their location to hopefully find that match quicker. And that’s really right now what’s going on. It just takes us a little bit longer. You got to give yourself a longer timeline. But we’re hoping to shorten that timeline by building up those scale of interested buyers and sellers.

Darren Wurz [00:07:24]:

Yeah. Wow. So I have so many questions. Let’s start with this first one here. Okay. You mentioned the small law firm and you mentioned maybe a bigger firm. And I’m wondering what are some of the key differences there? Let’s start there between the individual solo practitioner and maybe a bigger law practice. What are you doing differently for those two kinds of customers?

Tom Lenfestey [00:07:53]:

So we really define we work mostly with small ownership groups down to solos. So we help build succession programs for larger partnerships, other firms that are looking at how to bring in the next level of associates or non equity partners. But in the marketplace when we’re dealing with that, it’s usually the small partnerships or the solo owners. The very small firm typically has built most of their firm around themselves as the attorney. They are the brand. They’ve gone and networked. They’ve gone and built out this community of referral sources otherwise that know them. Once you get to a little bit larger scale firm, maybe additional partners or even just larger based on revenue, they focus typically a little bit more on the firm brand and the firm marketing and other things that kind of drive the firm brand versus the personal brand. And that’s really what we try to pull together for any deal. We need the personal brand, we need that personal goodwill, those referral sources, everybody that that selling attorney knows. And we also need the firm brand, the website, the client database, any marketing programs, events that the firm does. And to pair those together, if you’re a very small firm solo practitioner, maybe you have one or two paralegals no associate, you really typically have a longer transition period as part of your sale. Right. Because it takes just a little bit longer to introduce a buyer to those referral sources to get them a little bit more comfortable with making sure that the revenue continues. If you have a little bit larger firm that’s focused more on firm brand, firm marketing, firm value, I’ll call it. If you have a website that drives all of your leads through Pay per click or through other different campaigns and you really sit back as the owner and have a $5 million firm, but 4 million of that comes from digital marketing or otherwise, that’s a lot easier to transition and transfer over to another buyer. So your transition plan is probably a little bit shorter. So as we talk to everybody, we say total transferable value, the value of a law firm in someone else’s hands is made up of that personal goodwill, that personal brand. You have that value tied to you as an individual. Plus the transition plan that’s needed post sale to kind of help hand that off. It’s a baton pass, not a throw of the keys. And then it’s plus that firm brand and that firm value, the clients, the database, the team, the technology, everything that comes with the firm. Put those all together and you will maximize your transferred value right to another buyer and also to you to monetize it for purchase price or exit price or anything else. So usually those smaller ones just need a little bit more transition. They may need a little bit more time in the market to find the right buyer as well. But it’s definitely there. And if you’re open to, again, a little bit longer baton pass than maybe somebody who’s just running this big personal injury firm that gets all of their new clients through Billboards, Radio and Web and marketing, then overall you can find it. It just may take you a little bit more time and a little bit more focus on that transition plan.

Darren Wurz [00:11:27]:

Okay, very cool. You at the Law Practice Exchange, are helping these buyers and sellers find each other. And you mentioned scale. That’s obviously really important because that’s the big challenge, right? How do you find the successor, find the right match. So is this like a bulletin board where people can kind of post their firm for sale? How does it work and what are some of the other services that you are providing to these buyers and sellers?

Tom Lenfestey [00:11:57]:

Yeah, absolutely. So we do help buyers and sellers from that standpoint of if you’re looking to sell, you can go to thelwpracticeexchange.com we have an add your listing directly to the marketplace. So if you just want to put your listing out there all confidential, we’ll coach you on that. But to have that out there in the market seeking a potential buyer, a successor, otherwise you can do. So we actually also help do full brokerage and search. So to come in and do valuation of the firm, build out market prep, build out market terms on pricing, structure, everything else. And then really on the sell side, then we are actively searching for buyers. And so we are going to be working through our database, of course, but promoting everything in that confidential listing realm, but trying to find that ideal buyer in an active service. If you’re a buyer on the flip side, come to thelawpracticeexchange.com see the listings we have. If we don’t have something that you’re interested in, which happens right now because we don’t have 100 listings on our site. And if you’re a buyer that says, hey, I’m in Toledo, Ohio, and I am looking for an estate planning practice, I can tell you that right now we don’t have one. But tomorrow we may or you may say, I’m ready to buy today, and we can act as your search arm. And so we provide that to buyers to really help find those matches. Our goal is to make this marketplace move, is to help you, if you are a seller, find that right successor, find that right buyer. So we’re navigating and opening up different corridors to do so. And the same thing on the buy side. We would hate for a good ready buyer to wait on the sidelines for just the right seller to come along when we can be out there searching on your behalf and say, hey, attorney in Toledo, Ohio, who’s maybe 60, some years old, doesn’t have a succession plan. We have somebody interested in being your succession plan. And usually that opens up conversation. It makes it easier. And then we can offer process service and kind of our resources to help get those deals done. And that to us is great because it’s creating this awareness and it’s creating this market build of helping attorneys who are looking for an exit, looking for succession match. And so as we were talking about kind of earlier, that’s the scale is kind of bringing those interested parties together and really helping them complete deals. And our goal is to make sure that the deal works for everybody. And so it’s really not this advocate side. It’s really looking at the financials, the structure, how to transition what’s been built over to the next piece or to the next generation, and to really help the parties through the process, which is very similar to a buying selling process, but unique to lawyers and law firms.

Darren Wurz [00:14:59]:

Yeah. Okay, so now how then do you know if it is a good match? How are you identifying these successors? What are some things you look for? And is geography an important part of that? Yes.

Tom Lenfestey [00:15:15]:

Our two biggest typical match, like what buyers are looking for is what’s the practice area and what’s the geographic location? Over the last actually, 1218 months, a lot of our buyers have shifted from being individuals to law firms. And so now we have law firms really looking for geographic or practice area expansion, but they’re looking at certain practice areas and certain potential locations, different states, different cities, otherwise. So those are the two biggest matches. Those are the easy kind of qualifications of, hey, you’re looking for Toledo, Ohio, estate planner? We don’t have it. We’ve got estate planners in North Carolina. We’ve got one in California. We’ve got one here, but we don’t have one in Toledo. Okay? So we don’t have a match. The other is maybe we do have that in Toledo, Ohio, and it’s an estate planner. But we’re also asking our sellers as part of that onboarding process and our buyers to go through what we call a fit assessment. And that fit assessment is asking some questions about their goals and what they’re looking for as part of that deal. And so for a buyer, they may come in and say, look, I’m really looking for somebody to be a mentor, to be there to train for the next two years, everything else. And if our seller is having health issues or otherwise and needs to be out in six months or less, that may not be a good match, right? So that buyer may be interested and that practice area location works, but they’re going to need a little bit more than what the seller is able to offer. On the seller side, we have practices that, again, have built great businesses, great brands, and they’re looking for a specific exit price upon specific terms. And our buyer may be, hey, I want to pay on a performance piece. I don’t want to go get a loan. I want to do this. Well, there’s just not a financial fit at that point, right? The terms are too far apart or otherwise on that. And so our goal is to try to filter those earlier in the process so we can kind of know. And the other things we do as part of this is we actually connect the parties pretty early in interest stage so that they can kind of see if that fit is there as well. Because as much as it’s like, yes, checks the boxes, right? Toledo, Ohio estate planning, this size practice, great. When you get the parties together and we say this is like a first date, so they should be well behaved and everybody should be on best behavior. But also it allows kind of to see a little bit more on how the firm operates, how the parties, because they will need to work together after closing for some period of time, how they could work together or could they work together. And so those are things that we really try to look at to make sure it’s the right fit. And ten years of doing this in the marketplace also is one of those that we basically can guide buyers or sellers to say, we know you think it might be the right fit, but here’s some things of why we don’t think or there’s some obstacles or challenges we need to answer before this is really the right opportunity. And so that’s kind of the guide and advisory side of what we do yeah, very cool.

Darren Wurz [00:18:31]:

So you have ten years of doing this. You’ve had a lot of experience at this. Now I’m curious, as you’ve grown the business, as you’ve worked with law firms, what are some things, some big things you’ve learned along the way that maybe you didn’t know when you were first starting out or what are some big secrets that you’ve discovered to this whole process?

Tom Lenfestey [00:18:54]:

So when I started the law practice exchange, I think the goal was to help everybody, anybody that was a lawyer that had a law firm sell their practice. And what I’ve come to learn over time is not every practice truly is sellable. And that’s a heartache from that standpoint. But it’s usually not sellable because the seller hasn’t given themselves enough timeline. They’ve started to wind down their practice before really looking for that next buyer otherwise or they just can’t break emotionally or financially from that practice. And so one of the common frustrations we get from some of our buyer prospects that have contacted us is they’ve said, I’ve been trying, I’ve been having these conversations with different owners of firms and their price and terms are way out of control. We have great conversations about moving things forward, but things never move forward. And so it is one of those that lawyers do have emotional blocks of selling their firm. And that’s one of the things that we as part of our overall fit assessment, are they good clients for us or how we help our sellers and guide them through it is an emotional process. It can be. Not all are firms tied to owning their firm, but for a lot of them, they’ve owned their firm for 2030, some of them 40 years, and kind of giving up that ownership. What they see as control can either be a block or it’s just an obstacle that with education on the process and the plan and the right successor, they can overcome. But I think that’s the big thing. Not every practice is sellable. Not everyone that contacts us or that a buyer may talk to is truly interested in selling, even though they would say that. And on the buy side, I think it’s some of the same aspect is a lot of attorneys and we’ve seen this and Darren, you and I were talking about it pre recording is the aspect of we’ve seen just this huge surge in buyer interest in those that say I want to buy a law firm. And five years ago if somebody contacted us and said I want to buy a law firm, we would be clicking our heels, excited to do that. We would show them everything. Now it’s really guiding them through and going through a little bit. Are you ready to buy? And so if you are interested, I think it’s really important to develop your buy strategy and plan. It’s really hard for us when we see a buyer prospect come through that has clicked every one of our listings that they’re interested in. And that really tells us that they probably don’t have a buy strategy. This sounds like a great idea. And when you talk about buy strategy, you’re talking about are you financial ready? Like, do you have the financial power and ability to do this right? Are you going to borrow for it? Do you have your own capital, right? These different things? And what is your budget for this? If you go and talk to a lender, the lender may say, hey, if it’s the right practice, I’ll lend you up to $5 million. Or the lender may say, for the right practice, I’ll lend you $500,000. And you need to know kind of what that is, even if you choose not to use those lenders. But kind of there’s a reason why they’re giving you that advice, right? Why their levels are set there and everything else. It’s because of your abilities to do so. And the others on the side of the buyer is, are you ready operationally and personally to take on whatever this growth through acquisition stage would be? Is it a fit for you, for your firm, for your life, everything that comes with it? And that’s a little bit more personal goal setting or firm goal setting if you’re already running a firm that you’re looking to acquire. But to anybody that says, hey, I’m doing a million dollars in revenue on my firm, I would love to acquire another million dollars in revenue and three to additional profit. That sounds great, but it also means you’re doubling the size of your firm and so does your firm, operationally and otherwise. Can it handle that growth? Are you ready for that? Are just some kind of personal decisions that we would encourage. And that on the flip side of saying not all firms are sellable. Not all buyers that are really interested are truly buyers. Yet we’re working on hopefully, if you’re interested and everything else of hopefully guiding to get you there when the time is right or when you’ve checked some of those boxes.

Darren Wurz [00:23:35]:

Yeah. Now I’m curious, who are these buyers? You mentioned that there’s been a lot of interest more in the buy side. You have a lot of buyers coming in that want to buy practices. Are these fresh out of law school attorneys looking to jumpstart their practice? Are these existing attorneys who have already built a growing practice? What are you seeing? Are the majority of these buyers?

Tom Lenfestey [00:24:00]:

Most of our buyers are at least five years out of law school, probably more in today’s world. Most of them own their own law firm, at least a small law firm. Or we have larger buyers too, that may be larger, 15, 20 million. And plus law firms looking to grow and expand. We have regional Amla 200s that are looking for acquisitions, but typically it’s at least that five years. And we were actually just working on a project with University of Richmond School of Law and Josh Kabicki, who Darren, I don’t know if you know Josh, but he’s a great advisor in that world. But overall, that goal was to say, can we build a platform for that new grad, that new law grad to come out and buy a law firm? Because the exciting part to us is we haven’t seen a lot of success on that one. New law grads are getting out. There’s less of these, less of the labs, less of the clinics for lawyers to really, while in law school, learn how to truly practice law. But that’s changing. I think law schools are adding more practical learning, helping community learning how to do an elder law clinic right or these different things that you can learn while in law school like other professions do. The other part is law grads are getting out typically with a good amount of debt. And from that standpoint, they haven’t started really paying off their law school debt and they haven’t maybe bought a house yet, bought a car, got married, all these other things. And so typically it’s to get them settled in, to not just life overall, but then also practicing law to learn a practice area. And then that’s when we see them. They may have been in a firm for five years doing something great in a certain practice area and they just are ready. They’re entrepreneurs and owners and they’re ready to take that step. The other is they’re lawyers who have built great firms and they’re doing great things, but they’re in Raleigh, North Carolina or they’re in this jurisdiction, Charleston, South Carolina. And they want to grow to a suburb. They want to grow to another major metro and acquisition allows them to do so. Typically, it’s about taking their platform of what they built like a better way, hopefully of practicing law, leveraging technology. Otherwise and they’re going to take over a more traditional practice and kind of roll clients, revenue team onto their model to hopefully continue to do more in different markets and have that growth and kind of carry that forward. So a good example of that is a few years ago we had a residential real estate firm which was owned by a husband and wife. And we had another firm that was our buyer in a different city who was going to come over and part of market expansion take on this firm. Well, actually, our sellers were the ones that were very concerned that our buyer wouldn’t be able to carry the workload right, even though that he had a firm, he had all this staff. They just said, it takes the two of us so much time to do this. We don’t know how he’s going to manage these two locations. And it was really interesting because it wasn’t a concern over the deal, financials or anything else. They just didn’t want that buyer to be overwhelmed and to get into a situation where they felt there was just too much to do. Well, a month after closing, we caught up with our sellers. How is everything going? Everything. And they said it’s amazing. It really is amazing how much the buy side, how they have this technology and they’re able to do this and they’re able to do this and really this we wish we would have done this to our own practice ten years ago, right? If we could have gone back, it would have created a better platform operation and openly more money for us. But they law it, but they saw it after this deal and everything else that comes through. So that’s our goal is kind of as we do generational shifts, is just to hopefully move on to the next platform of how to run a law firm. Everything else, there’s lots of knowledge from the seller side that can be transferred. There’s a ton of value, but there’s also new concepts and new proven platforms and process from the buy side. If we can kind of merge those together, then I think it’s good for the profession and it’s good for our deals to kind of preserve the best of both worlds.

Darren Wurz [00:28:34]:

Yeah, you get that fresh set of eyes maybe on an existing practice and maybe you have some new ideas on how things can be improved, processes can be run more efficiently, and technology, as you mentioned. So that’s very interesting, a very interesting take on how maybe a buyer can more easily take on practice like that. We’re quickly coming to the end of our time here, unfortunately. But I definitely want to ask you this last question about the future of law firm sales and law firm succession planning. We were talking before we got started about the idea of non attorney ownership and private equity. Tell us about some of the trends that you’re seeing and maybe what you think the future might hold for law firm sales.

Tom Lenfestey [00:29:22]:

Well, it’s been very interesting. For those that don’t know, Arizona and Utah passed a couple of years ago. Now their versions, each a little bit different, of allowing non attorney ownership structures. And Utah has what they call a sandbox, which kind of allows them in for testing and kind of review. Arizona has what they call their ABS, their alternative business structure, which I think they call it that because it sounds better than non attorney ownership. But that’s really what they allow. And the purpose, of course, of doing this is to allow change. There is this gap in legal services, right, this underserved or nonserved community. And so that’s really where those states have moved to allow this. It is not a move that the attorneys were clamoring for, it’s a move to services, those that are not getting served by the profession. And so will it change things? And has it already changed things in Arizona and Utah? Absolutely. From that standpoint. Darren, if you look at Arizona and Utah, some of those alternative structures now are wealth management companies coupled with estate planning, coupled with a CPA firm, right? It’s bringing that family office structure together because the belief is that’s a better way to serve clients, right? And there is a financial incentive, of course, to do so. But also you can be a holistic planning firm if you bring those different services and realms together. And you don’t have to be an attorney that also goes out and gets your securities and financial planning and also a CPA to really try to spread yourself too thin. But there’s also been non attorney platforms that are very digital. They’re focused on serving the underserved or those that can’t afford the price of legal services. And then you’ve got kind of this other marketplace that I think is building, especially in Arizona, which is there’s a lot of opportunity to improve law and to improve the business model of law. And I think private equity especially is looking at certain areas like personal injury, for example, and seeing great profit margins, great opportunities to do more based on technology growth, professional business management to do that. And so that’s what’s getting a lot of interest in Arizona. And then attorneys that are outside of Arizona but are also in these certain practice areas like personal injury, are keeping a pretty close eye because if it happens in Arizona then will it happen elsewhere or what does that mean from a competition standpoint or otherwise? As these firms kind of grow bigger in Arizona and then carry forward from there? And so we’re keeping close eye on that in Europe. In other jurisdictions, of course, there is already non attorney ownership. It’s interesting, that was such a big change 2030 years ago when that happened. And still, I think fully private owners, law firms in European markets is still like 25 or 30%. So it hasn’t been that every law firm now is owned by a private equity group. Same thing in the CPA world. CPAs firms can be owned by non CPAs and you still have seen movement, right? But it’s not like everyone has changed. And I think the good news of that for the marketplace is it’s bringing in professional buyers, which is a good thing for kind of increasing, allowing exit strategies. They also have their own funds, so it’s not asking for a lawyer to go out and borrow funds or use their own capital or anything else from that side. And so we’re seeing really the market watch and start to build and kind of see how this is going to integrate. And so who knows how long the other states will take to change. But I do see kind of the prep and the movement on that. And I think it will be a good thing for our marketplace overall to allow other buyers in certain practice areas, hopefully to improve, hopefully to offer different alternative services that lawyers right now because of pricing capital needs otherwise can’t do. But I’m sure there’ll be some negatives as well with it. But good lessons to learn would be looking at some of those other professions. Right. You can look at dental. There’s a lot of private equity in dental. There’s a lot elsewhere. It’s coming. It’s just a matter of when it’s going to come and to which states and locations.

Darren Wurz [00:34:02]:

Yeah. Interesting stuff to watch and see how that all progresses. Now, lastly, in 30 seconds or less, our final question. What does the future look like for you, Tom? Are you going to be sitting on a beach sipping martinis someday or traveling the world? What is your idea of the ideal retirement?

Tom Lenfestey [00:34:21]:

Yeah, the ideal retirement to me is I think I’ll always be a business owner, even in retirement. Right. And I know a lot of lawyers are like, yeah amen right. Never give up that ownership. I’m a believer in bringing in partners to do that at a certain aspect. But I also know that working with lawyers, working with other entrepreneurs, they don’t always go from 100 to zero. Well, and so for me, I think my retirement would be more of a slowdown than overall, a full exit and transition out. Even if somebody came and said, here’s your check today, I would probably use that for the next idea. Right. And so to kind of move that through. But my family is my focus. They are the priority. And so having more time to be with them and everything else, that would be great. I just still, of course, may have some side entrepreneurship opportunities working throughout that. Hopefully they don’t bother me on the beach or when I’m my second martini or anything else.

Darren Wurz [00:35:21]:

Right.

Tom Lenfestey [00:35:22]:

But early morning coffee meetings, that’s fine.

Darren Wurz [00:35:25]:

That’s cool. Yeah. If you love what you do and you’re entrepreneurial like you are, that makes a lot of sense. Now, Tom, if people want to get a hold of you, should they just go to thelawpracticeechchange.com yes, absolutely.

Tom Lenfestey [00:35:38]:

Thelawpracticeexchange.com and you can again go there. Look at our active listings, look at our buyer seller services. I’m on there as well. Feel free to contact we’re on the social medias via LinkedIn, Facebook, anything else that you want to do, we’re happy to be a resource, so feel free to check us out. And if we can help you with succession planning or your interest in buying and selling, we’d be delighted to do so.

Darren Wurz [00:36:03]:

Great. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. Tom and I want to thank all our listeners. Thank you for joining us today for this episode of The Lawyers Millionaire. Don’t miss our next episode, part four. In our continuing succession planning series, we have another exciting guest for you. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please like share, subscribe and give us a five star review on Apple or Spotify. Also, I encourage you to visit thelawyernillionaire.com where you can access free resources and webinars for law firm owners. Schedule a consultation with me or get your own copy of my book, The Lawyers Millionaire. Now take what you learn today and go make your dreams a reality. I’m your host, Darren Wurz, and I’ll see you next time.

Succession Planning for Law Firm Owners Series, Part 3 – How To Sell Your Law Practice with Tom Lenfestey (Ep. 22)

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