Lawyer Business Advantage

Lawyer Business Advantage


Leveraging Relationships with Mika Domingo

January 20, 2021

In this episode, Alay Yajnik and Mika Domingo, owner of M.S. Domingo Law Group, discuss how Mika built relationships that she was ultimately able to leverage to build her book of business:

* Serve your clients incredibly well. It’s the best advertising.
* Reach out to your connections…both business and personal. Talk with them. Become a master listener, and listen to what their concerns are. Then, try to help them or connect them with someone who can.
* Leverage activities you’re already involved with, such as a social club or activity club.
* Become a thought leader by speaking about technical aspects of the law that interest you.
* Get involved with a bar association and build relationships by collaborating with your colleagues.
* A good business coach will help you leverage your relationships, choose the best organizations, and put together an approach for how to leverage both.

Alay Yajnik: Welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage. This podcast is dedicated to helping attorneys earn more money, get better clients and spend more time with family. I’m your host, Alay Yajnik, founder of Law Firm Success Group. Smart Business guidance for small law firms begins in 3…2…1….
Alay Yajnik: And I’d like to welcome to the show Mika Domingo, the founding attorney with the M.S. Domingo Law Group. Mika, welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage.
Mika Domingo: Thank you, Alay. I’m very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Alay Yajnik: Delighted that you’re here. And tell us a little bit about your firm and the areas in which you practice.
Mika Domingo: M.S. Domingo Law Group helps individuals protect their assets and loved ones in the event of incapacity, disability or death. We prepare wills, trusts, advance health care directives and powers of attorney. We also represent individuals in probate and trust, administration and litigation matters. So these include will contests and will defenses, breaches of fiduciary duties, breaches of misconduct, probate litigation, improper execution, undue influence, elder abuse, fraud, removal of trustees, removal of executors and creditors, claims against the estate. M.S. Domingo Law Group is located in Walnut Creek, California, and we represent clients in both Northern and Southern California.
Alay Yajnik: Awesome. And so I understand you do a lot of trust and estates type of litigation. Are there other practice areas that you that you do as well in your law group?
Mika Domingo: Yes. About two years ago, we started taking cases, auto collision cases. So we do have that as well.
Alay Yajnik: So how does auto collision fit in with trust and estates litigation?
Mika Domingo: Totally unrelated to trust and estate litigation! And the reason why I started doing some of these cases is because I have some colleagues or referred cases to me who were really seeking me out for the civil litigation experience that I’ve had. And so I was very limited in what I wanted to take initially those cases that that were strict liability cases. And that’s worked out well. Whenever I get any cases that have to do with med, mal and complex cases, I’m sure to refer those cases to my colleagues who focus primarily on personal injury cases.
Alay Yajnik: I think it’s terrific that you are such a highly thought of litigator that people are willing to bring you those kinds of cases, cases which are outside the trust and estates realm. But I really want to hear about some of the reasons why you started your own firm, because it didn’t have to be that way.
Mika Domingo: Right. So I started out as a litigator. I served as a deputy attorney general for the attorney general’s office in Sacramento. This was during the time our vice president elect, Kamala Harris, was the attorney general for the state of California.