The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Ep. 197 – No BS Time Management for Lawyers: The ProVisors Talk
Ben Glass delivers a short but powerful keynote to a ProVisors group of professionals in Northern Virginia. It’s based on the principles from No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, a book he co-authored with Dan Kennedy. This rapid-fire talk is packed with hard-earned lessons from building a $7M+ practice without paid ads, and offers a clear roadmap for reclaiming control over your calendar—and your life.
Whether you're a lawyer, doctor, or high-performing entrepreneur, this episode will challenge your assumptions about time, productivity, delegation, and your true priorities.
💡 Highlights:
- The real value of your time (hint: it’s not your hourly rate)
- Why voicemail is a time-wasting trap
- What happens when you stop accepting unscheduled calls
- How Ben uses an overseas EA as his “second brain”
- The 6-step system for defending your time and scaling with intention
- Why delegation is a mindset, not a task
- A fierce callout to lawyers who say family comes first but don’t act like it
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
See, one of the things when we let time control us is we fix that by stealing from our families, right? So you've you've got a brief to do, but you get interrupted all day long. And then what? You're working late at night, you're going after dinner to write, you're going into the office on Saturday or Sunday, heaven forbid. Time is the only currency that matters. If I lose a dollar today, I can certainly go out and make five of the five more of those dollars tomorrow. However, if I let somebody steal my time, put their hand in my pocket and and you know steal time from me, that time can never be replaced. And I want to give you permission to be really ruthless about this. And ruthless simply means I'm paying attention. Because again, if you're good, if you are fulfilled, if you're happy, if you're rested, if you're energetic when it's time to be energetic, you're going to be better for your family.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business, and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach, and father of nine, this show is about more than just practicing law. For over 40 years, Ben has built a law firm that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money, do meaningful work, and still make it home for him. Each week, Ben brings you real conversations with guests who are challenging the tennis flow. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.
SPEAKER_01:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass, and welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. Um, as many of you know, I'm a member of Provisors, which is a national networking group for professionals who have been in business for 10 years or more. And recently my local group asked me to give a short presentation on time management, and I did based upon the NoBS Time Management Book for Entrepreneurs that Dan Kennedy and I. And so I'm gonna give you that presentation. Uh, and it's relatively short, but I hope you'll find a nugget. The talk arose because I was on another group call with a woman who did a 10-minute talk on networking. I picked up a great big nugget from that, from only 10 minutes. And I thought, well, this would be a good idea. Let's see if we can put something together on time management. Look, it's a lot easier to do a 90-minute talk than it is to do a 10-minute talk. Uh, but let's work. All right, so now we're going to uh get started. Here's the talk that I gave to the Provisors Group uh in November 2026 here in Northern Virginia. By the way, it's mixed breed, so there's lawyers and there's other uh business owners who are not lawyers in the group. Okay, everyone, well, we're gonna get started. Hey, thanks for letting me uh do this. Um, just by way of background for those of you who don't know me, uh my name is Ben Glass. I run a law firm here in Northern Virginia, and I run Great Legal Marketing, where we teach uh lawyer solo and small firm lawyers how to have great businesses that makes their families happy that they became lawyers. I'm also the father of nine. I've been a soccer referee for 51 years. In fact, my happy space is being in the middle of a high conflict game. I know that sounds weird, but it's one of the things that I really, really like to do. Um, and I'm the co-author on No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs. When I read the first edition many, many years ago, it actually really changed my life. I changed fundamentally some of the ways that I framed my day and my habits uh and really boosted uh my productivity. Um, Dan Kennedy, as you know, is one of my longtime mentors. In fact, he just spoke at our Great Legal Marketing Conference a couple of weeks ago. Uh, and when Dan was revising the book, he asked me, he said, Look, you're one of the busiest guys I know, one of the most productive guys I know. Would you write, would you help me rewrite the book? And so I said yes, and we did. And of course, I'm also the creator and the host of this podcast that you're listening to, the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. So, you know, the problem with most professionals is that people who are productive get asked to do more. And what happens is you fall into this trap where you're always in constant reaction mode. Um, email meetings, interruptions, they own your day. People waiting in the door, waiting in line outside your door with questions interrupt your day. You go through a whole day and you feel like, gosh, I'm really busy. I cut all this stuff done. But when you look back and reflect on the day, actually you didn't move the ball at all. Um, I sometimes back in the day would say to Sandy, hey, it's just felt like all I was doing was keeping the airplanes from crashing into each other all day. I didn't really get anything done. Um, and with so much, so much technology and so much social media and things like that, it's really, really hard these days, or it's really easy, let me say that. It's easy to confuse activity with achievement. So we can all be busy, like I fill up our whole day of being busy, mouse-click this and mouse-click that, and not get anything done. And so what the high-producing professionals are really good at is productivity. Um, and most of this comes because we have no system, right? We just react. We've not got not built in um, you know, a moat around our time. We've not built in systems that help our team get better. Um, and we've not built built in, we don't have any rules for how to engage with us or when you can engage with us. So, in part, this book that Dan and I wrote addresses those issues. So I'm going to give you six tips for mastering your time. The first is to really know the value of your time, and that is not my salary divided by 40 hours a week, divided by whatever that math is, because most of us are only productively working, even on our best days, two or three hours a week. So you really need to take like what it is you want to earn and use the two or three hours a day as your mathematical model to find out what your time is really worth. And then you have to decide like, I am not going to do things that somebody else could do for me, uh, and I pay them a lot less than my time is worth. One of the things I've gotten really good at in the last couple of years is mastering the skill of delegation. As many of you know, I have an executive assistant based out of the Philippines, and we worked together for about a year and a half now, and we both have gotten really good working together. Her name is Claire, about mastering the skill of me being able to delegate to her clearly, like what is done look like, and Claire being able to get things done on my behalf so much that she becomes my second brain. There's a lot of books and other podcasts on the delegation skill. For lawyers, the thing that stops us is our ego. So we think nobody could do things as good as we could, or you know, we don't want other people to know, quote unquote, our secrets. That's all BS. Like you're never gonna be a top producer unless you learn to delegate. The next step is, you know, one of the first things I did when I read the first edition of No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs is I decided we're not gonna play take any unplanned, unscheduled, inbound phone calls. My team said that wouldn't work. I said, let's try it. I have not looked back. It's been at least 20 years since I've instituted that in my practice. Everybody who talks to me talks to me by appointment. Um I am prepared, they're prepared. They have to tell us, like my team, like what the subject is and what the questions are. Um if they don't do that, then they don't get through to the call, right? So nothing is worse than playing phone tag, leaving voicemail messages. I don't even have voicemail, right? It just, I don't need it because everything is scheduled. And if you won't schedule, then you can't talk to me. Um, number four step, big idea for mastering your time is time block everything. So, in other words, rather than make a to-do list, like we'll write down on a very temporary basis, these are things I need to get done. But then immediately, like by the end of that day, you got to find a place for those on the calendar, right? You got to block them in. And it's much easier to do today because you're working on electronic calendars, most of us are. And if you can't fit it in uh, you know, in the calmness of an evening, you can't fit into your calendar, there's no way it's gonna fit in in real life. So you got too much to do. So now then you have to get good at knowing the value of your time and mastering the skill of delegation. But start to block your time. You will fail at the beginning. Um, all activities have a start and an end time, you will fail, but you will teach your brain this is a real deadline, and I need to get this done. You'll also teach your brain, hey, it takes X number of minutes or hours to do this particular task that I have to do. So let's just get better at now blocking that time, put it on the calendar, and nobody else can bother you. And I swear you will get more productive. Step number five, want to fend off the time vampires. Those are the people that are waiting outside your door with all sorts of questions. Um, look, your team needs you, but again, you can schedule this. Hey, my door's gonna be open from four o'clock to five o'clock on Thursday afternoon. Bring your problems, but don't just bring your problems, bring your three proposed solutions. What this does is it teaches your team to think, very valuable. But also when you say, hey, look, that's a great solution, go and do it, it gives them the confidence to know that they are empowered by you, they do not need your approval, and they're actually really good at making decisions. And this is how you're gonna scale your law firm. Like you're never gonna be for so many of us, like like we are the bottleneck. We really are. Our egos are wanting to have our hands and everything, is the bottleneck. If you want to scale your business, grow your business, and deliver a better product to clients, which I think is what everybody who's listening to this podcast wants to do, you need to learn how to both fend off and teach your team, right? Fend off the time vampires, but teach them, which brings me to tip number six is you need to have an audience for your client calls. So whenever I do a client consult or in that rare time when I'm talking to a client who maybe is mad at us for some, you know, for some reason, I have an audience. I it's on the speakerphone. Uh, I joke that I sell tickets for it, but my team or parts of my team are in the room listening. They want and they are learning by listening to me. What does Ben say? And then we'll do a debrief. Why do I say it? And now you are teaching them when you have an audience for your client calls, you are teaching them that yes, they can do this. Yes, they can give better uh answers to clients. Now, my team isn't doing legal advice, but so much of what we do is not legal advice. It is process advice. It is what's next step advice, it is strategy advice, it's not legal advice. So get into the habit of having an audience of your team in for your client calls. They will get better. You will end up with less client calls of stuff that really isn't all that important, and you will be the better for that. We have a whole section in the book on making better decisions. Um, and one of the best things you could do is kind of just chart out your next three to four or five work days and see where you're really spending your time. You are going to have to separate the essential from the optional, what truly moves your business and life forward, and commit to doing that. Look, I believe that you were born with no idea how many days on earth you have. It's a one-way journey. It's meant to be lived. Your life is meant to be lived for your joy and your happiness first, because when you are good spiritually, physically, emotionally, financially, mentally, all those things, then the world is going to be better around you, particularly for your clients, particularly for your team, and most of all for our families. See, one of the things when we let time control us is we fix that by stealing from our families, right? So you've you've got a brief to do, but you get interrupted all day long. And then what? You're working late at night, you're going after dinner to write, you're going into the office on Saturday or Sunday, heaven forbid. At Ben Glass Law, the lights are out at 5.01 each day. There's nobody there on the weekends. We never have any fires to put out because we run a really well-organized firm that has thriving, like your life is lived to be a thriving life as its primary purpose, not the winning of cases, not the gathering of money. Our primary purpose is to build a place where people will thrive. Look, it didn't get there overnight, but we are definitely there. And next, you got to block time for what matters. Like you got to go through your schedule and carve out that time for your family time, for your vacations. Oh, I haven't, I don't have time to have a vacation. Well, you don't make time. Like, even if like we're recording this in late 2025, like, I don't care what your calendar looks like. There's space in 2027 for a three-week vacation. Like stick it on the damn calendar and have figure out all the things that need to happen between now and like a year and a half from now to make that happen. So time blocking is absolutely critical. And next is you got to develop systems. You know, when we don't have systems, this really drains the life out of lawyers. I mean, I have lawyers say, well, I don't, you know, I'm I'm delivering individual, individualized, personalized care. BS. And most of what we do is a system. And what we want to get to as lawyers are are things that allow us to do our art. So the faster we can wrap our arms around the facts of a case and what the problem or opportunity to be solved for, the quicker we can do our art, which is our strategy, which is taking our experience. And the only way to get there is to have systems that can be executed by others so that you only get involved at the highest level, whatever the thing is that you love doing. It may be trying cases, it may be strategizing just about the firm, it may be strategizing about cases. That's where you want to spend your most time. So I would encourage you to call a timeout. Think about this deeply. Like, what do you really like doing? Okay, let's design great legal marketing is all about. Let's design a firm that allows you to work in your zone of happiness, right? Your zone of expertise. I'd spend the most amount of time there. If you listen to this and you're listening to me for the first time, you think, well, that's impossible, Ben. I'll tell you it is not impossible. 20 years of running great legal marketing, thousands of lawyers' lives affected. I have got email after email. I've got written note after written note, I've got thank you package after thank you package for people, from people whose lives we have changed with just this philosophy. Finally, commit to being home for dinner. It was a subtitle of my very first book, How to Get More Cases, Make More Money, and Still Get Home in Time for Dinner. For me, this is always been a primary lawyers. You'll hear them say, Oh, I value my family. Like family comes first. And I call BS on that. If I followed you around for a week and I watched your actions, would I be convinced that you actually put family first? So if you do these things and if you'll read the book and carry out some of the exercises and change some of your habits, you can be home for dinner. I'm just telling you that thousands and thousands of lawyers have this life. And if you don't have this life, it's on you really to change it. And we're here to help you fix that. Finally, you know, time is the only currency that matters. If I lose a dollar today, I can certainly go out and make five of the five more of those dollars tomorrow. However, if I let somebody steal my time, put their hand in my pocket and you know, steal time from me, that time can never be replaced. And I want to give you permission to be really ruthless about this. And ruthless simply means I'm paying attention. Because again, if you're good, if you are fulfilled, if you're happy, if you're rested, if you're energetic, when it's time to be energetic, you're gonna be better for your family, you're gonna be better for your team, and you're gonna be better for your clients. So here's my challenge to you. Um, you know, this is your one precious life. It's meant to be lived for your happiness. Like, what can you do in the next week? I suggest like just logging your time and be in giving yourself a true analysis of how you were spending your time over the course of a work week and certainly you know, your after dinner time, if indeed it is devoted to work um life when it really shouldn't be. And now let's figure out how do we start to grab that for ourselves? How do we get more control over it? Again, I'm Ben Glass. I would say listen to these episodes of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. Um, if you're not a member of Great Local Marketing, frankly, like you should join. Uh Brian and I are having a great analog marketing bootcamp in February. Um, you can find that information at gillmbootcamp.com. Like, you gotta start because otherwise, if you're not happy with your life today, six months, sixty months from now, nothing is going to have changed. And I think you will have wasted your precious opportunities, the opportunities of which, again, we don't know exactly how many days we have. All right, that's it for today. It was a really quick um uh exercise that I had for the uh for the provisors group. I hope you enjoy this. If you're a member of Provisors and you'd like me to give this talk to your group, uh reach out and we can arrange to do that. All right, until next time.
SPEAKER_00:That's it for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger. Want more tools, strategies, and stories from the trenches? Visit GreatLegalMarketing.com or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn. Keep building boldly. We'll see you next time.
