strategies-init

So the first thing I’ll tell you about the cost structure of our firm is we bill on an hourly basis. We don’t flat fee matters and our time is our time. Our staffs billing rates are set based on their level of experience and who they are, so at the bottom level we have our paralegals that bill at $150 an hour and at the top level we have me that bills at $525 an hour and then everybody else falls somewhere in between. So the way that we try and mitigate costs for our clients is by spreading work between the different levels. We try and generally have the lowest person who’s competent to do the work do the work in order to save cost. We’re not going to send a paralegal in on a criminal matter or we’re not going to send an attorney to go do $150 hour level work but we try and work within the structure that we have to be as efficient for the client as possible. I’m a small business owner myself and I believe in driving value. I believe in the work that we do providing value to our clients because we’re in tax and, because California and the IRS aren’t going away anytime soon, trust me when I tell you we’re not running out of work. So our team is not really incentivized to bill you any more or any less than what we have to. We bill you as much as

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So at Brotman Law we have a couple of different tiers of people and the tiers are not driven by the value of the people. They’re just driven by the cost structure for how much those people bill, so as a lower tier we have paralegals and we have administrative support staff. Most of our paralegals bill anywhere between $150 and $225 an hour based on their level of experience. Above that, we have a category for mid-level associate attorneys that can range anywhere from $250 an hour all the way up to $400 an hour. Then we have a senior attorney class that kind of overlaps with that and ranges anywhere from $350 to $525 and I’m at the very high end of that range in terms of our billing. So there’s nobody who has a billing rate that’s higher than mine in the firm and the way that we divvy up work and who’s gonna work on matters is largely a factor of who is the lowest cost person that can most competently do the task and we look at competency not only from a “can they do the tasks” but also “who’s most efficient to do the tasks.” So for example, there are tasks that our senior paralegal can do because she’s so good, but there are times that I will allocate something to our senior attorney because he can do it a lot faster or in cases of our junior attorneys and our senior attorneys, occasionally our senior attorneys will step in to senior projects because they can do them a lot quicker than the junior people. We try and maximize efficiency around here because it makes clients happier and we try and have a spread of people working on matters because a lot of tax matters are collaborative efforts so depending on your particular situation, you may work with more junior people, you may work with more senior people, but I can promise you that no matter who you’re working with, there’s always vision, there’s always transparency and there’s very active communication on all of our matters to make sure that they’re running smoothly for our clients.

So we have two methods of communication at the firm: we have email and we have phone calls. We don’t have text messages and the reason we don’t have text messages is because text messages are very hard to track internally and we like for all of our calls and all of our emails to come in and be documented so that they go into your file. If for some reason I’m out of the office one day, our senior attorney can pick up the file, can read through the notes and the history of communications, and be in lockstep with me and the decisions that I would make on the course of your matter. So the best way to handle communications from our firm is by segregating what the best type of communication is for longer explanatory things and things that are better reduced to writing, we prefer email. It helps get thoughts in order and we can more easily move emails under the file, although emails take a lot of time to compose sometimes so we tend to shy away from those.

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So I point to a couple of different things when I differentiate our firm from other firms. The first thing I would differentiate is that our firm is really built for businesses, for business owners and for corporate officers, and the reason for that is is I’m a small business myself. I love being a small business and I love all the challenges and the excitement and the risk that comes with running your own business. When I set up my tax firm, I wanted to build a business that catered to the need of businesses and to help those businesses help their clients and be the best platform that they could be so I designed a firm around not only fixing people’s tax problems but working with small businesses to make them the best versions of themselves that they can possibly become. A lot of that is accomplished through tax and the thing that we’re doing but it’s a gateway for something much much larger. Number two I would point to our experience in separating ourselves from other firms that are out there. We have a lot of experience particularly in dealing with

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