For estate planning attorneys
If you have an estate planning practice, you already have a client care program.
You're just not charging for it.
On January 1st this year, roughly $600,000 was in our account before we unlocked the door. Craig explains how, in seven minutes.
Sound on. No sign-up needed to watch.Tap to watch. Sound on.
What you will be able to do
Four things you cannot do today
Know what your own client care program is worth, from your file count and your market, before you charge anybody anything.
Present it in the first meeting so it is part of the plan, not a fee you add on afterwards.
The letter, the timing and the phone script for turning years of closed files into members.
Several hundred renewal invoices in an afternoon, using the fields and formulas we use.
The part nobody bills for
Death by a thousand paper cuts
It never arrives as one big problem. It arrives four minutes at a time.
None of it is on a bill. All of it is on your calendar. And you cannot send a $200 invoice for six minutes of email without doing more damage to the relationship than the $200 is worth, so you eat it. Every week. For years.
Meanwhile the plan you drafted in 2019 is quietly going stale. The power of attorney statute changed. The brokerage account went back into joint name. And your client, who likes you, has been to eleven free dinners since he last spoke to you. At every one of them there was a financial advisor and an attorney.
We felt it too. For years. It is the single most expensive unbilled thing in a well-run estate planning practice.
You have thought about this
You already know the answer is a client care program
You have heard about them at conferences. You have had the conversation in a partner meeting. It comes up every January and then waits for a quarter when things are less busy.
Almost every attorney we raise this with wants one. We have met very few who thought it through and decided against it. What stops them is never the idea. It is three specific fears, and one practical problem underneath them: nobody will tell you what to charge, what to put in it, or how to launch it.
The three fears
And what actually happens
"It will cannibalize my practice."
This was Craig's objection, and he fought it. What changed his mind was arithmetic almost no firm has actually run: what share of your clients genuinely come back for a paid update, and how many years pass first. Ours was far lower than we had assumed. The program did not replace revenue we were reliably earning. It created a warm audience for work we were not getting at all. When Florida enacted community property trusts we sent one white paper to that list and hundreds of families engaged us.
"My clients will balk at paying every year."
About nine in ten of our new clients enroll. The real figure is probably closer to 95. That is not a talent for selling, it is a mechanic: give the first year free, take the card at enrollment, bill everyone on the same calendar date. Get those three right and the price stops being the argument.
"My clients will be annoyed. Or I will drown in calls."
In practice, utilization runs 25 to 30 percent. That is the share of enrolled clients who contact us at all in a year, for anything, including asking for a copy of a document. Craig has a client, herself a board certified attorney, who admitted she had not opened her annual packet in three years. She kept renewing. People are buying the assurance that somebody is watching. Low utilization is not a sign you are overcharging. It is the reason the arithmetic works.
Why us
We are not telling you to do something we read about
We launched ours in 2007 and we got a great deal of it wrong. We priced it too low and left it there far too long. We built the data structure badly and rebuilt it by hand years later. We learned most of it the expensive way, because there was nobody to ask.
The firms we have taught since do not repeat any of that. They start from something that already runs, which means they build in a couple of years what took us the better part of two decades. We are not going to put a number on your result, because we do not know your market or your fees. What we can tell you is which mistakes cost us the most, and how to skip them.
That is what this is. Not our history. Our mistakes, already made.
Our numbers, not a case study
What it looks like once it is running
Figures are Sheppard Law Firm's own. Your market is not our market, which is why Module 1 gives you a calculator and makes you run your own numbers before anything else.
How it works
Three steps, in this order, because the order is why it works
Almost every firm that tries this starts at step three, which is why almost every firm that tries this stops within a year.
Change the beliefs
Yours, your team's, your clients'
A maintenance program does not fail on marketing. It fails because nobody in the building believed in it, and clients can hear that. Module 1, before a word about price.
Set the price
On your numbers, not ours
Run the calculator on your own file count and your own market. Price it once you believe in it, and the number stops coming out apologetically low.
Build the machinery
The part nobody else shows you
The CRM fields, the spreadsheet with the formulas showing, the mail merge, the year end packet. Renewals at scale without your staff threatening mutiny.
The course
Five modules. The whole program, start to finish.
Plenty of people will tell you that you should have a client care program. Almost nobody opens the back stage and shows you the one that runs.
Shifting the Mindset
Three mindsets have to move: yours, your team's, your client's. Craig opens as the skeptic. Then the arithmetic, and a calculator you run on your own practice before going further.
Structure & Pricing
What goes in, what stays out, updates versus upgrades, one tier or two. Then pricing, including our complete fee history and every step we took to get there.
Sales & Marketing
How to plant it in the first phone call so it is the last thing they see before signing, and why the attorney should not be the one selling it.
Launching to Existing Clients
The hard one. These people already know you do this for free. The occasion to hang it on, the letter, and how to hold the line afterward.
Fulfillment: the Back Stage
Ninety minutes of screen share. The CRM fields, the master spreadsheet with the formulas visible, the mail merges, and how to print a thousand reviews without opening a thousand files.
Every template
The enrollment agreement, the brochure, the launch letter, the cancellation letters, the master worksheet with formulas intact, and the estate plan review template.
What you download
The working files, not just the walkthrough
A screen share you cannot implement is entertainment.
Why this is a course and not an event
You should not have to fly somewhere to learn this
There are people who will teach you this in a hotel ballroom, or inside a mastermind you join for a year, or as a franchise you buy into and pay for forever. Those are real options and some of them are good. This is not one of them.
- Book a flight and two nights in a hotel
- Two days out of the office, plus the day either side
- Bring a staff member or go home unable to implement
- Notes, and whatever you still remember in March
- Ongoing fees, or a licence, or a mastermind year
- Three and a half hours, on your own schedule
- Watch it twice. Watch Module 5 four times
- Put it in front of your paralegal and your office manager
- Every letter, spreadsheet, script and field list included
- You buy it once. It is yours
We run a two day event and a year-long mastermind ourselves, and they are excellent. They are also not what most firms need in order to start. Most firms need the thing itself.
Who is teaching it
Two attorneys who ran this program in their own firm this morning
Fewer than three hundred attorneys in the entire state of Florida are board certified in Wills, Trusts and Estates. Three of them are partners at our firm. Most practice management coaching is sold by people who left the practice, or never had one.
We produce the IP we teach
Craig has written the books our clients receive, the white papers that drive engagements, and the brochures that sell the program. Blueprint member firms license them and put their own name on them. You will see all of it inside the course.
Founder and lead attorney of Sheppard Law Firm, and the visionary behind Freedom Practice. Board certified. Editorial advisory board of Trusts & Estates magazine. Author of Legal Matters When a Loved One Dies and Dear Entrepreneurs: Perpetual Wealth. He argued against this program when it was proposed, which makes him the more useful of the two voices on whether it works.
Partner and coach. Board certified. Runs technology, automation and fulfillment. When no practice management system tracked what the firm needed, he built one, and the firm still runs on it. He proposed the program in 2007 and he is the one who opens the spreadsheets in Module 5.
The specifics
What you will have decided by the end
Not topics covered. Decisions made, with our answer to each one.
Honest fit
This is not for every firm
Build this if
- You have an estate planning practice with a real client base behind you
- You have wanted a program for a while and have not started
- You have at least one person who can own fulfillment
- You want revenue that arrives whether or not anyone books an appointment
- You are willing to hold the line with clients who decline and then ask anyway
Skip this if
- You want something you can install on Monday without adapting it to your state
- You are not prepared to charge non-members for small requests, which is what makes membership mean anything
- You are looking for a marketing course. This is an operations course with a sales module in it
- You are unwilling to fulfill for a year before the first dollar arrives
Enrollment
The Client Care Master Class
Five modules. Three and a half hours. Self paced, immediate access, yours to keep. Every template above included.
Register for Practice Xcelerator and the course is included, so you arrive in Fort Myers already fluent.
Before you decide
Questions attorneys actually ask
I tried a maintenance program before and it fizzled.
The usual explanations are fulfillment and discipline, and both matter. But the real cause is almost always mindset, and there are three that have to move.
Yours. If you think of it as something you sell at the end, that is how it lands. Ours is built into every engagement from the first phone call. It is not an upsell, it is the last step of the process we described on day one.
Your staff's. They answer the phone and will either reinforce it or quietly undermine it. I had a client years ago, a doctor building a concierge practice before that was a thing. He had the model right. One person at his front desk never believed in it, and she is the reason it failed.
Your clients'. They arrive believing estate planning is one and done. Until you move them off that, an annual program sounds like a subscription to nothing.
That is why Module 1 is entirely about mindset and comes before a word about price.
I do not have the staff for this.
You do not wake up with a thousand families. We had fifty or sixty in year one and about a hundred in year two, absorbed into the staff we already had. We did not hire an associate attorney to help run it until around year four, by which point it was paying for her several times over. You do not need the team first. The program builds the team.
Is this Florida specific?
Our examples are, because our practice is. The trust code change we used as our launch occasion was Florida's. The structure travels. The examples need translating, and we say so in the course rather than pretending otherwise.
How long will it take me?
About three and a half hours of video, cut into short lessons, self paced. The templates are where you will spend real time and you can adapt them one at a time. You do not have to finish the course to start.
Do I need a particular CRM?
No. Everything in Module 5 comes down to custom fields, a saved view and an export. Practically any practice management system does that. Mike walks through what the fields need to be, not which vendor to buy.
How is this different from your live events?
This is the client care piece in far more depth than a live event allows. Practice Xcelerator covers the whole practice: client experience, front and back stage, marketing, team, estate settlement, technology. Register for PX and this course comes with it.
From other firms
What attorneys who have seen this material say
These are attorneys who have been through our programs and seen this material. Published with their names and firms at 4freedompractice.com.
What I really like about The Freedom Practice is, as somebody who is a little bit older, this doesn't tie the client to me personally or individually. What it does is that it marries the client to our firm. We're also developing marketing processes that attach the client to our law firm, so they'll be with our firm for the rest of their lives. For me, as a Senior Partner, this tells me that my younger associates can be successful over the long haul.
Freedom Practice provided a lot of really specific samples of the tools they use in Client Care (letters, agreements, print screens of software, etc.) that, combined with the ability to hear from several other firms that have successfully run their own programs, made this one of the most helpful sessions ever.
Craig has put together a system, processes and support tools that I've been working on developing myself for nearly 15 years. He is delivering tens of thousands of dollars in value that will make a difference in my practice.
I came looking for solutions, which I got, but I left with the realization that I need to change my mindset and my team's mindset about who we serve, how we serve them, and how to serve them better if I am serious about transforming my practice.
The best thing was the information shared about the Estate Settlement Program and the Client Care Program. I've been involved with other programs and this one blows those others out of the water. The quality of the brochures, books and materials is phenomenal.
The best thing about today is the realization that I can change my firm in phases that aren't overwhelming or burdensome. Having the courage to adapt is tough, but being encouraged by the folks here makes it seem completely logical.
One last thing
Our first year we collected fifteen thousand dollars and our bookkeeper asked why we were bothering. The program was not finished. The pricing was wrong. The data fields were incomplete. None of it mattered, because we were in the black the following year and clients were enrolled and paying while we fixed everything else.
We are lawyers. We do not send a document out until every cross reference is right, and we bring that instinct to launching a program, which is why so many of us keep designing one and never start.
Pick one thing. Just one. Start there.
For estate planning attorneys
If you have an estate planning practice, you already have a client care program.
You're just not charging for it.
On January 1st this year, roughly $600,000 was in our account before we unlocked the door. Craig explains how, in seven minutes.
Sound on. No sign-up needed to watch.Tap to watch. Sound on.
What you will be able to do
Four things you cannot do today
Know what your own client care program is worth, from your file count and your market, before you charge anybody anything.
Present it in the first meeting so it is part of the plan, not a fee you add on afterwards.
The letter, the timing and the phone script for turning years of closed files into members.
Several hundred renewal invoices in an afternoon, using the fields and formulas we use.
The part nobody bills for
Death by a thousand paper cuts
It never arrives as one big problem. It arrives four minutes at a time.
None of it is on a bill. All of it is on your calendar. And you cannot send a $200 invoice for six minutes of email without doing more damage to the relationship than the $200 is worth, so you eat it. Every week. For years.
Meanwhile the plan you drafted in 2019 is quietly going stale. The power of attorney statute changed. The brokerage account went back into joint name. And your client, who likes you, has been to eleven free dinners since he last spoke to you. At every one of them there was a financial advisor and an attorney.
We felt it too. For years. It is the single most expensive unbilled thing in a well-run estate planning practice.
You have thought about this
You already know the answer is a client care program
You have heard about them at conferences. You have had the conversation in a partner meeting. It comes up every January and then waits for a quarter when things are less busy.
Almost every attorney we raise this with wants one. We have met very few who thought it through and decided against it. What stops them is never the idea. It is three specific fears, and one practical problem underneath them: nobody will tell you what to charge, what to put in it, or how to launch it.
The three fears
And what actually happens
"It will cannibalize my practice."
This was Craig's objection, and he fought it. What changed his mind was arithmetic almost no firm has actually run: what share of your clients genuinely come back for a paid update, and how many years pass first. Ours was far lower than we had assumed. The program did not replace revenue we were reliably earning. It created a warm audience for work we were not getting at all. When Florida enacted community property trusts we sent one white paper to that list and hundreds of families engaged us.
"My clients will balk at paying every year."
About nine in ten of our new clients enroll. The real figure is probably closer to 95. That is not a talent for selling, it is a mechanic: give the first year free, take the card at enrollment, bill everyone on the same calendar date. Get those three right and the price stops being the argument.
"My clients will be annoyed. Or I will drown in calls."
In practice, utilization runs 25 to 30 percent. That is the share of enrolled clients who contact us at all in a year, for anything, including asking for a copy of a document. Craig has a client, herself a board certified attorney, who admitted she had not opened her annual packet in three years. She kept renewing. People are buying the assurance that somebody is watching. Low utilization is not a sign you are overcharging. It is the reason the arithmetic works.
Why us
We are not telling you to do something we read about
We launched ours in 2007 and we got a great deal of it wrong. We priced it too low and left it there far too long. We built the data structure badly and rebuilt it by hand years later. We learned most of it the expensive way, because there was nobody to ask.
The firms we have taught since do not repeat any of that. They start from something that already runs, which means they build in a couple of years what took us the better part of two decades. We are not going to put a number on your result, because we do not know your market or your fees. What we can tell you is which mistakes cost us the most, and how to skip them.
That is what this is. Not our history. Our mistakes, already made.
Our numbers, not a case study
What it looks like once it is running
Figures are Sheppard Law Firm's own. Your market is not our market, which is why Module 1 gives you a calculator and makes you run your own numbers before anything else.
How it works
Three steps, in this order, because the order is why it works
Almost every firm that tries this starts at step three, which is why almost every firm that tries this stops within a year.
Change the beliefs
Yours, your team's, your clients'
A maintenance program does not fail on marketing. It fails because nobody in the building believed in it, and clients can hear that. Module 1, before a word about price.
Set the price
On your numbers, not ours
Run the calculator on your own file count and your own market. Price it once you believe in it, and the number stops coming out apologetically low.
Build the machinery
The part nobody else shows you
The CRM fields, the spreadsheet with the formulas showing, the mail merge, the year end packet. Renewals at scale without your staff threatening mutiny.
The course
Five modules. The whole program, start to finish.
Plenty of people will tell you that you should have a client care program. Almost nobody opens the back stage and shows you the one that runs.
Shifting the Mindset
Three mindsets have to move: yours, your team's, your client's. Craig opens as the skeptic. Then the arithmetic, and a calculator you run on your own practice before going further.
Structure & Pricing
What goes in, what stays out, updates versus upgrades, one tier or two. Then pricing, including our complete fee history and every step we took to get there.
Sales & Marketing
How to plant it in the first phone call so it is the last thing they see before signing, and why the attorney should not be the one selling it.
Launching to Existing Clients
The hard one. These people already know you do this for free. The occasion to hang it on, the letter, and how to hold the line afterward.
Fulfillment: the Back Stage
Ninety minutes of screen share. The CRM fields, the master spreadsheet with the formulas visible, the mail merges, and how to print a thousand reviews without opening a thousand files.
Every template
The enrollment agreement, the brochure, the launch letter, the cancellation letters, the master worksheet with formulas intact, and the estate plan review template.
What you download
The working files, not just the walkthrough
A screen share you cannot implement is entertainment.
Why this is a course and not an event
You should not have to fly somewhere to learn this
There are people who will teach you this in a hotel ballroom, or inside a mastermind you join for a year, or as a franchise you buy into and pay for forever. Those are real options and some of them are good. This is not one of them.
- Book a flight and two nights in a hotel
- Two days out of the office, plus the day either side
- Bring a staff member or go home unable to implement
- Notes, and whatever you still remember in March
- Ongoing fees, or a licence, or a mastermind year
- Three and a half hours, on your own schedule
- Watch it twice. Watch Module 5 four times
- Put it in front of your paralegal and your office manager
- Every letter, spreadsheet, script and field list included
- You buy it once. It is yours
We run a two day event and a year-long mastermind ourselves, and they are excellent. They are also not what most firms need in order to start. Most firms need the thing itself.
Who is teaching it
Two attorneys who ran this program in their own firm this morning
Fewer than three hundred attorneys in the entire state of Florida are board certified in Wills, Trusts and Estates. Three of them are partners at our firm. Most practice management coaching is sold by people who left the practice, or never had one.
We produce the IP we teach
Craig has written the books our clients receive, the white papers that drive engagements, and the brochures that sell the program. Blueprint member firms license them and put their own name on them. You will see all of it inside the course.
Founder and lead attorney of Sheppard Law Firm, and the visionary behind Freedom Practice. Board certified. Editorial advisory board of Trusts & Estates magazine. Author of Legal Matters When a Loved One Dies and Dear Entrepreneurs: Perpetual Wealth. He argued against this program when it was proposed, which makes him the more useful of the two voices on whether it works.
Partner and coach. Board certified. Runs technology, automation and fulfillment. When no practice management system tracked what the firm needed, he built one, and the firm still runs on it. He proposed the program in 2007 and he is the one who opens the spreadsheets in Module 5.
The specifics
What you will have decided by the end
Not topics covered. Decisions made, with our answer to each one.
Honest fit
This is not for every firm
Build this if
- You have an estate planning practice with a real client base behind you
- You have wanted a program for a while and have not started
- You have at least one person who can own fulfillment
- You want revenue that arrives whether or not anyone books an appointment
- You are willing to hold the line with clients who decline and then ask anyway
Skip this if
- You want something you can install on Monday without adapting it to your state
- You are not prepared to charge non-members for small requests, which is what makes membership mean anything
- You are looking for a marketing course. This is an operations course with a sales module in it
- You are unwilling to fulfill for a year before the first dollar arrives
Enrollment
The Client Care Master Class
Five modules. Three and a half hours. Self paced, immediate access, yours to keep. Every template above included.
Register for Practice Xcelerator and the course is included, so you arrive in Fort Myers already fluent.
Before you decide
Questions attorneys actually ask
I tried a maintenance program before and it fizzled.
The usual explanations are fulfillment and discipline, and both matter. But the real cause is almost always mindset, and there are three that have to move.
Yours. If you think of it as something you sell at the end, that is how it lands. Ours is built into every engagement from the first phone call. It is not an upsell, it is the last step of the process we described on day one.
Your staff's. They answer the phone and will either reinforce it or quietly undermine it. I had a client years ago, a doctor building a concierge practice before that was a thing. He had the model right. One person at his front desk never believed in it, and she is the reason it failed.
Your clients'. They arrive believing estate planning is one and done. Until you move them off that, an annual program sounds like a subscription to nothing.
That is why Module 1 is entirely about mindset and comes before a word about price.
I do not have the staff for this.
You do not wake up with a thousand families. We had fifty or sixty in year one and about a hundred in year two, absorbed into the staff we already had. We did not hire an associate attorney to help run it until around year four, by which point it was paying for her several times over. You do not need the team first. The program builds the team.
Is this Florida specific?
Our examples are, because our practice is. The trust code change we used as our launch occasion was Florida's. The structure travels. The examples need translating, and we say so in the course rather than pretending otherwise.
How long will it take me?
About three and a half hours of video, cut into short lessons, self paced. The templates are where you will spend real time and you can adapt them one at a time. You do not have to finish the course to start.
Do I need a particular CRM?
No. Everything in Module 5 comes down to custom fields, a saved view and an export. Practically any practice management system does that. Mike walks through what the fields need to be, not which vendor to buy.
How is this different from your live events?
This is the client care piece in far more depth than a live event allows. Practice Xcelerator covers the whole practice: client experience, front and back stage, marketing, team, estate settlement, technology. Register for PX and this course comes with it.
From other firms
What attorneys who have seen this material say
These are attorneys who have been through our programs and seen this material. Published with their names and firms at 4freedompractice.com.
What I really like about The Freedom Practice is, as somebody who is a little bit older, this doesn't tie the client to me personally or individually. What it does is that it marries the client to our firm. We're also developing marketing processes that attach the client to our law firm, so they'll be with our firm for the rest of their lives. For me, as a Senior Partner, this tells me that my younger associates can be successful over the long haul.
Freedom Practice provided a lot of really specific samples of the tools they use in Client Care (letters, agreements, print screens of software, etc.) that, combined with the ability to hear from several other firms that have successfully run their own programs, made this one of the most helpful sessions ever.
Craig has put together a system, processes and support tools that I've been working on developing myself for nearly 15 years. He is delivering tens of thousands of dollars in value that will make a difference in my practice.
I came looking for solutions, which I got, but I left with the realization that I need to change my mindset and my team's mindset about who we serve, how we serve them, and how to serve them better if I am serious about transforming my practice.
The best thing was the information shared about the Estate Settlement Program and the Client Care Program. I've been involved with other programs and this one blows those others out of the water. The quality of the brochures, books and materials is phenomenal.
The best thing about today is the realization that I can change my firm in phases that aren't overwhelming or burdensome. Having the courage to adapt is tough, but being encouraged by the folks here makes it seem completely logical.
One last thing
Our first year we collected fifteen thousand dollars and our bookkeeper asked why we were bothering. The program was not finished. The pricing was wrong. The data fields were incomplete. None of it mattered, because we were in the black the following year and clients were enrolled and paying while we fixed everything else.
We are lawyers. We do not send a document out until every cross reference is right, and we bring that instinct to launching a program, which is why so many of us keep designing one and never start.
Pick one thing. Just one. Start there.
