Lawyer Business Advantage

Lawyer Business Advantage


Law Firm Succession and Biz Dev with Roger Brothers

April 08, 2020

In this episode of Lawyer Business Advantage, we have a conversation with Roger Brothers, Principal at Brothers Smith. Roger discusses how he and his partner executed a textbook law firm succession with their senior partners. We discuss the strategy, the execution and how the transition was communicated to clients and to referral sources. Along the way, you’ll learn the one method every attorney can utilize to have business development success.
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:43] Well, everyone, I am super-delighted to have Roger Brothers with us here today. He’s a principal at Brothers Smith, one of the founders of the firm. Roger, thank you so much for being on Lawyer Business Advantage today. How are you?
Roger Brothers: [00:00:55] I’m doing well, thank you, and thanks for having me.
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:57] My pleasure. My pleasure. I’ve known Roger for a few years now, and I’ve always been very impressed with how he markets his firm, markets himself and does great work for his clients. And one of the reasons I wanted to have him on today and he was gracious enough to join us is Brothers Smith is a rare example of a law firm that has really executed a successful succession to the next generation of attorneys. And Roger was instrumental in that. Roger, I’d love to hear just a little bit about how you actually communicated that transition from when it was Buchman Provine Brothers Smith and then having Jack Provine and Robert Buchman transitioning to take a step back, how you communicated that to their clients and to their referral partners.
Roger Brothers: [00:01:45] I probably give you a little bit of history…might help explain some of that and how we how we got to that point.
Alay Yajnik: [00:01:50] That would be terrific.
Roger Brothers: [00:01:54] So let’s see…it was 2010. My partner Wes Smith was approached by a headhunter who was looking on behalf of a firm here in town which turned out to be, at that time, it was Shapiro Buchman Provine….was looking for a succession plan for their estate planning group, and my partner Wes Smith said, “Well, we’re not…I’m not really interested personally in leaving.” We were at that point at that time with the McNamara law firm, and we ran a separate unit, a separate apart from their insurance defense group, which was business, real estate, estate planning…were three principal areas. But Wes said, hey, but we might be interested in having a discussion with them about something a little bit more permanent and a little bit grander scale. So that’s kind of started the dialogue. We got an introduction to Bob Buchman and Jack Provine. Wes and I met with them for awhile and discussed a number of things. They had similar practice areas. And as we sort of – their intent was to have a succession plan for their firm and for their clients and for some of their attorneys.
Roger Brothers: [00:03:10] And so we negotiated on the front end that it would be a certain period of time where we would practice together. And at the end of that time, Wes and I would essentially have a call option on their partnership interests. And so that gave us a runway to integrate ourselves with their clients and vice versa and integrate our attorneys with theirs and then integrate our practices and everything else. And so that’s kind of what we did at the end of that period of time. We had a discussion with Bob and Jack. They were more than happy to say, “Hey, yeah.” In fact they came to us and said, hey, it’s that time you guys want to exercise your rights here? And we at that point, we negotiated a buyout of Bob’s interest and Jack’s interest and transitioned it from there. They both – Jack stuck around for probably a year or so after that and then retired. And then Bob, has just sort of scaled back since then, little by little,