Benefitting From What You Have Built: Buying or Selling Your Law Firm

Welcome to episode 127 of the Grow Your Law Firm podcast, hosted by Ken Hardison. In this episode Ken sits down with Tom Lenfestey and they talk about buying or selling a law firm.

Tom Lenfestey is the Founder of The Law Practice Exchange, LLC as well as a practicing North Carolina attorney, licensed CPA and Accredited Business Intermediary. Tom's years in private practice focused on transition and succession planning for other professions including creating, advising and implementing strategic business and estate plans for those clients. In doing so, he came to recognize the lack of knowledge, attention and options that were available in the legal profession to attorneys and their own practices, specifically in the realm of succession planning and other transition or exit opportunities. As a result, Tom founded The Law Practice Exchange in 2013 to provide education, options and brokerage and consulting services to the legal profession on selling, buying and overall law firm succession strategies.

Tom has served on the Transitioning Lawyers Commission and Professional Vitality Committee with the North Carolina Bar Association and provides numerous educational events to attorneys hosted by state and local bar associations, legal insurers and law related professional organizations on the topics of succession planning, selling your law practice, valuing a law practice and others related to lawyer transitions. In addition, Tom has been interviewed or published in a number of legal publications in regard to transition planning for lawyers and law firms.

Tom is an author of the book Designing a Succession Plan for Your Law Practice and numerous other articles and resources about selling, buying and valuation of law firms.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• Helping transact business deals for other professionals and seeing a need to help Lawyers complete deals
• The effects of COVID on the sales of law firms
• A remote world and its effects on what a buyer looks for when buying a law firm
• Structuring the sale of your law firm to minimize tax hits
• Not signing a deal until you know it is tax advantageous
• How to value your law firm
• Lawyers as risk-adverse buyers
• The ease at which deals are getting done because of the influx of funds in the space
• Non-attorney ownership as a wild card possibility in the future
• Private Equity's role in the market for law firms in the future
• The lowering age and demographic shift of those selling, and what it means
• The importance of knowing your potential options when ready to sell

Resources:

Website: https://thelawpracticeexchange.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-law-practice-exchange/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawpracticeexchange/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawPracticeExch

Additional Resources:

• PILMMA's Super Summit: https://www.pilmma.org/summit/
• The Mastermind Effect: https://www.pilmma.org/the-mastermind-effect/
• PILMMA's Free Resources: https://www.pilmma.org/resources/
• PILMMA Join Page: https://www.pilmma.org/mastermind/