TLH Ep.34 Building a Remote-First Law Firm with Margeaux Thomas
Hello, Legal Helm listeners! Today, we’re delighted to welcome Margeaux Thomas, founder and owner of Thomas Law, who is not only a distinguished attorney but also a sought-after speaker who has educated over 4,000 attorneys nationwide on business litigation issues. Her accolades include recognition as a Super Lawyer’s Rising Star, a Top Lawyer by Northern Virginia Magazine, and one of the 2023 Leaders in the Law by Virginia Lawyers Weekly.
Beyond managing her own thriving law firm, Margeaux has served in leadership roles within bar associations and on nonprofit boards, showcasing her dedication to the legal community. Today, she’ll share her journey of launching a successful legal practice and how she’s embraced a remote-first approach to build a resilient business. Join us as we dive into Margeaux’s inspiring story and the lessons she’s learned along the way!
Your Host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 20+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.
Our Guest
Margeaux Thomas is an accomplished attorney representing individuals and small businesses in complex commercial and real estate litigation across Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. She specializes in landlord/tenant, business partnership, and contract disputes. Margeaux serves on the Board of the Old Dominion Bar Association, is a George Mason Inn of Court member, and sits on the Alexandria Bar Association Judicial Screening Committee. Recognized by Super Lawyers (2013–2023) and Northern Virginia Magazine (2022), she also founded Vegetable Forward, LLC, promoting community gardening initiatives for nonprofits.
Transcript
Bim Dave: Hello Legal Helm listeners, today I am delighted to be speaking with Margeaux Thomas, founder and owner of Thomas Law. Margeaux is a highly experienced lawyer and speaker, having travelled throughout the United States as a faculty lecturer to educate over 4,000 attorneys on business litigation issues. In addition to this, she has been recognized as a Super Lawyer’s rising star, a top lawyer by Northern Virginia Magazine, and one of the 2023 leaders in the law by Virginia Lawyers Weekly, as well as managing her own law firm, Margeaux has held numerous bar associations positions and served on various nonprofit boards. On today’s podcast, I’ll be talking with Margeaux about her journey starting at legal practice and her experience in building a successful business in a remote first environment. Margeaux, hello and welcome to the show.
Margeaux Thomas: Hello,
Bim Dave: So Margeaux it would be great to, to learn a little bit about the journey that led you to founding and signing up your, your own law firm. So perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your journey.
Margeaux Thomas: and thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here today. so a little bit about the background. I worked in some bigger firms out of law school, and, you know, I felt like it was a great opportunity to learn from a lot of, you know, very accomplished and distinguished, other attorneys.
Um, and I did a lot of the same thing I do now, which is business litigation. We represented at that point a lot of, banking institutions and defended claims that were brought against them by consumers, um, for credit issues or debt issues or foreclosure issues and things like that. So I got a lot of court time very early on and I was lucky enough to go to a firm that was small enough where they kind of throw you in and you get your feet wet immediately.
So, you know, I, I really enjoyed that opportunity and worked in that. Environment for almost 10 years. And then, you know, I had a lot of personal things going on in my life. I got pregnant with twins and was on bed rest for a long time. My father passed away. We moved into another house and all of this happened within like six months timeframe.
You know, being on bed rest and dealing with these other tragic situations, I just had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do in the future, and I didn’t see myself continuing that path and that firm, even though I enjoyed it a lot. And I had always thought about starting my own thing and kind of doing it my own way and I was terrified of doing that given that I was being paid and could rely upon a paycheck and I wasn’t, I didn’t have a lot of clients.
I didn’t know how to generate business. so, it just, it was a spark at that time that it was something, you know, time is and we don’t have as much of it as we may think. So, you know, just kind of got my gears turning and a couple years after, I think about three years after, that thought process started with me being on bed rest.
Um, I opened the door to Thomas Law and now we’re in our eighth year, it’s been quite a journey, to say the least.
Bim Dave: That’s amazing. Well, congratulations on, on eight years. Where does that entrepreneurial spirit comes from? Because, I’m pretty sure it’s no easy conversation to have with yourself and your family to say, um, you know, walking away from, a paycheck that’s regular and, you know, is predictable, to actually taking a risk, um, on something like this to start up your own law firm.
So where, where does that, that entrepreneurial spirit come from?
Margeaux Thomas: You know, I think about that a lot. It’s a really good question because my brother also owns a company and he’s been doing that and has been very successful in his entrepreneurial endeavors so I’m like, now, where did that come from? Because both of my parents worked at jobs for 30 plus years, the same job.
Um, but my parents also invested in real estate so they were, you know, entrepreneurs outside of their nine to five jobs. I guess maybe that experience of observing the real estate properties, they own quite a few during my childhood, kind of sparked that let’s think outside of the box and, you know, what else is out there and maybe we can, um you know, push the limits of the public.
Bim Dave: Excellent. No, that’s that’s great. So tell us a little bit about the the kind of areas of law that you focus on, at Thomas Law.
Margeaux Thomas: So I say we’re business divorce lawyers, that’s what we do. We help businesses that are breaking up or that have conflict with their vendors or clients or business partners so, when I started the firm, I thought you know, I’ll just jump to the other side and represent consumers who are suing small businesses.
And I was in that realm and I was like, I know it well because I’ve been on the other side and I’ll be great at this. And then I got out there and I was like, I don’t, I don’t like this. This is not what I was, uh, thinking it would be, and I had always represented businesses and I had always talked to business owners, even if it was in house counsel at banks, you know, everything was a business decision.
How much was it going to cost? You know, what is the pros and cons of this? It was a lot less emotional or, you know, let’s talk about principle, it was more about what is in the best interest of the business, regardless of my emotional reaction, whatever is going on, and I just realized like, that’s how I solve problems.
I think about it from that perspective. So it was very hard for me to switch to working with consumers who are concerned about a lot of other things that do not have to do with, you know, the pros and cons of their business, a lot of them weren’t even business owners so it was very far outside of my thought process, so I was like, I got to get back into representing businesses.
And then I was like, we got to narrow the focus, that’s all we want to represent, people who are trying to grow and scale their business or reaching conflict, and a lot of them it’s not, you know, they’re not in conflict every day, they’re family businesses, but they have a big hurdle to overcome when you know, you and your brother started business and now you and your brother don’t get along, and you know, you’re working in this environment which is volatile, and, what do you do to get yourself out of this situation?
It’s even more difficult because you trust person, it’s usually a family member or a friend or someone you’ve known a very long time. So, you know, you kind of have to weigh, you know, what’s good for the business, but also you have these emotional, you know, ties to this, to this other person or the situation, which is all also in the background, you know, I like that dynamic and we have just kind of niched down to go to targeting people who are going through that exact situation and trying to help them through that problem.
Bim Dave: You know, it makes makes total sense. I see a lot of businesses these days thinking about their growth strategies, right? And sometimes that does involve partnering with, like you said, um, you know internal members, I guess, like a family, etcetera, to help grow, get additional investment to grow, um, and those kinds of things.
But also I’m seeing more and more these days external partnerships as well, right? Where there’s an agreement between two parties that may complement one another in terms of bringing different services to the market, do you see, are you seeing a lot of that? And is there, I guess, are there things that can be done from a preventative perspective to make sure that, you know, you don’t end up in those kind of heavy conversations and, um, issues after, you know, you have that breakup, that divorce that, that you kind of mentioned is the stuff that you can do in advance, uh, to make sure that you’re kind of protecting the relationship in a positive way from the outcome for, uh, as, as an outcome.
Absolutely, in fact there’s probably 25 things.
Margeaux Thomas:People could do, but I can tell you that the easiest ones are the most logical. Number one, get some good agreements that are going to govern that relationship, I would say a large majority of conflict disputes we have are because people used chat GPT or wrote on a napkin what they thought the agreement was going to be.
Or, you know, they didn’t read the agreement and it doesn’t say exactly what they thought it said, so the agreements are going to govern that relationship. This isn’t an area of law that is usually based upon he said, she said type of thing, there’s usually going to be some agreement that they’ve written and that agreement and whatever ambiguities or misunderstandings or how do you phrase, you know, how do you phrase what you want in those agreements is really going to be pivotal to the outcome of that dispute. So, I mean, you would think that would become second nature, but there is a lot of people who just think, well, I’m going in the with my friend or my family member, so that isn’t top of mind because it’s somebody that they trust if they were going into a joint venture with a complete stranger, maybe they would think about that, maybe they would give more thought to that. But a lot of the people that we talk to aren’t strangers. They’ve been in the same, they’ve worked with each other, they’ve known each other through friends, or they, they have trust, you know, through somebody that’s, you know, a mutual acquaintance.
So, that’s not top of mind, I see a lot of people who their house for collateral or, you know, other assets that they have, and it’s not equal, and then they don’t properly memorialize that in an agreement, which creates a lot of conflict down the line when your house is tied to a business and the other person’s house isn’t and you haven’t, you know, memorialized what that’s going to look like if there’s a problem that, that creates a lot of issues.
But, you know, I think the fundamental thing is really has to do with, um, communication and the same things you would do when you go into a marriage to make sure that you’re fundamentally on the same page about very, you know, it’s the big things. You know, money, know, what’s your growth strategy is, you know, how we’re going to communicate what, what parts of the business are you going to run?
What parts am I going to run? How are we going to, we’re 50, 50 partners. How are we going to break a deadlock? You know, those kinds of things I mean, it’s the same thing when going into a marriage, like you want it to be all wonderful and easy, but we know there are going to be some difficult conversations.
So let’s get those out of the way first right, let’s focus on that difficult stuff and a lot of people want to focus on the, the let’s grow it and let’s build it and let’s go, you know, like that’s exciting that’s, that’s not the stuff people want to talk about.
Bim Dave: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s, it’s really good point actually and I think that transparency is, is key, right? At the start of the relationship as it, as it were to make sure that there is success, that makes total sense. Um, you, you touched on a really good point, um, just now around, another area, I guess, of, of AI technology influencing the legal field, which your example is something that’s probably less talked about, um, which is where chat GPT is, or solutions like that are being used, um, by a consumer in this case, um, rather than getting proper legal advice and, you know, we’re, we’re hearing more and more about solutions in the market that are helping law firms be more efficient in terms of how they deliver services to their consumer how, how are you seeing the, the kind of technology piece of the puzzle impact you as a firm, um, both from the kind of consumer impact slide that you just mentioned and, you know, in terms of how you deliver services?
Margeaux Thomas: You know, I love technology and I think that technology and AI and all of the tools that we have available to us make us efficient, and make the products that we can offer to our clients more cost effective, So I think it’s wonderful to use them, but I think that there has to be a disclaimer as to in what circumstances do you need to use them and have them reviewed?
You know, I think it’s kind of reckless to think that this program is going to create, you know, exactly what you need and that there doesn’t need to be any oversight into what product comes out of it, so maybe Chat GPT is great at creating an operating agreement, but then when you need to do an equity transfer Chat GPT is not looking at the prior agreements to make sure that there are no, um, ambiguities or conflicting phrases, uh, conflicting clauses between the documents.
So, you can have these, two documents that on their own would be great, but now you’ve introduced, uh, you know, an additional hurdle that, you know, isn’t being taken into account. And it is not uncommon for us to be in litigation with people who have lots of different agreements that cannot be read together.
It’s like, is it this clause or that clause or, you know, they’re, they don’t, um, make the prior agreement null and void so they’re supposed to be read together, but this one has, you know, different voting clauses, this one has different resolution, you know, like, how do we reconcile all of that? So, you know, I think that that may be a good starting point, but as in most things in life, I think it’s, it’s good to, you know, to take that information and hone it into what you need it to be.
Bim Dave: Yeah, no, make, make sense. Do, do you see the, um, as time goes on, do you think that the fact that you are kind of thinking technology from a lawyer’s perspective, you’re kind of embracing technology, whether it be AI or other solutions right, um, that can make your service to a consumer more efficient. Do you see that that becomes actually like a differentiator for you from a marketing perspective going forward?
Margeaux Thomas: Absolutely, I mean, the more efficient that we can be in providing the services that we provide, you know the more clients we can serve um, the better the product we can produce, yes, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve touched on this, but, you know we have a remote team, so we have people in South Africa, people in the Philippines, people in North Carolina, people in Maryland, and you know in order for us to all be able to collaborate and provide this service to the client and the quality that we want it to be at, you know, we have to rely upon technology.
And the better we’re able to do that, the better we’re able to service our clients and differentiate ourselves in the market.
Bim Dave: Yeah and, and that’s a great segue, um, to really how, how you went from you know, that initial idea and thought of, you know, I’m starting a law firm and you’re a one person band at that point to having such a distributed team and what kind of like, what was your first thought process in terms of getting to a point where like do I hire locally, um, do I have people office based versus do I look at the talent pool in a wider respect, and actually, like, it’s really interesting that you mentioned, uh, South Africa and Philippines, like what was driving some of those decisions that kind of look outside of country as well.
Margeaux Thomas: Well, I can say that I was never a fan of commuting, when I used to drive to work, and I worked at a firm, I always thought you know, I could be so much more efficient if I did not have to sit in my car and drive to this office to do the same thing that I could do from home, and there were so many people who were like, this office environment is just, you know, we need this dynamic and I was never a huge believer of that, I always thought there’s nothing that I to do here that I can’t do at home. And I’m very introverted, I like working from home, I’m very productive at home, so I always just felt like it was a waste of time, and I used to commute, like in Northern Virginia, we have some of the worst traffic in the country, so I used to sit in traffic every single day, and then by the time I got to work my mindset was just so like frustrated because I’ve been sitting in this horrific traffic for so long to get to this place to do something on a computer that I brought from my house to do, right? So when I started my firm, I was already thinking, how do we do this remotely? How do I do this from my kitchen table? And I hire people who are really good at what they do and wherever they are to collaborate to get this done, so I was not printing out, you know legal binders, I was trying to figure out a way to do this paperless because that’s the only way that makes this really efficient.
So I think that for me, it was very helpful that that was how we started, it wasn’t so much of a transition. A lot of people when COVID happened, they were like, you know, we got to like figure out how we can do this differently, but for me I think, we were ahead of the game because we were already doing it that way so we didn’t have to shift. know, the big shift that happened for me was we have a physical office in Fairfax, which is right near the courthouse, Fairfax is the largest county in Virginia and, you know, I just thought it’s good to have an address, occasionally we meet with people, occasionally people ask us to meet with them, so I thought, you know, let’s keep the office, it’s not a huge expense, right? And then I think this year, it was like, even if people ask for an initial consult for us to come to the office to meet them, taking that option away. though we have a space, we could go, we’re in the area you know, enough of us are in the area we could go there, but it became so inefficient to do that when we could do it via Zoom. So I could have three consults in the time it would take me to go to the office to meet you in person, and because of the tight schedule of work that we do it’s very document intensive, and it’s not so much based upon your credibility or things that you say in that meeting, it’s more based upon what documents did you find to get here and how are those documents likely to be interpreted, which makes our face to face communication even less important. You know, I think Zoom is great, but you know, a lot of people, I guess the negative thing they say about Zoom is you can’t feel the environment you know, get the vibe of people. But in my, um, profession, that’s very little important. to be able to pivot to totally remote, even though we could potentially meet with people and we were some point in an environment where the courts were also remote, which was also very helpful because we can have all of our hearings remotely.
They have pivoted back to being in person, which is unfortunate, but, um you know, I said, I think that we were already thinking about that, and I never thought we need to have somebody down the street, you know, if there is a great legal assistant in South Africa, let’s hire them, if there’s someone, you know, in Texas, what’s the barrier? So, you know, I’ve always posted the ads more broadly, and whoever was able to fill that position, um, that would be a cultural fit for our firm, we hired them, we never saw that as a barrier.
Bim Dave: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s awesome. And so is there uh, are there any challenges that you face in terms of onboarding? Cause I think one of the things that um has been, I guess when you look at the way that a traditional firm would operate in a, not like a very, you know, office kind of driven environment a few years ago, you would typically, like, hire a bunch of, you know, junior associates to then on board and kind of, you know, just live and breathe within that world, same way that I’m sure you, you know, learn, you know, how to practice law, um, through that experience of like seeing some of those, um, senior lawyers doing their thing, watching and learning as, you know, you are in an office environment. How does that get replaced in this world? So if you’re, if you’ve got a distributed team, and your business kind of with people maybe outside of country as well as the dealing with time zones and all the rest of it, how do you grow talent? Like, how do you make sure that you can grow and maintain talent so that then, you know, in, in five years time, 10 years time, you can get to a point where you’ve got, still got that dependable team that’s delivering for you but you’ve been able to kind of work people up the ranks as well or is it kind of a different mindset for, for this type of, approach?
Margeaux Thomas: I don’t think so because when I was watching and learning it was basically me being in a physical room with another individual who’s like, I read this brief and these are the key points that I think that we need to refine or think about or, you know, edit in some degree. That’s the same zoom call we have now, you know, and now we have the tools where you can be in the document, you know, marking it up and I can be in the document seeing you do that or you putting in comments and we can be talking about it together at the same time. So I think it’s probably even more advanced you use the tools correctly in order to collaborate on things, I mean there was no way to do that when I started, there wasn’t you know, multiple user, we could edit documents at the same time um, I don’t think that functionality was there when I started almost 20 years ago, so the fact that we have that and you can see in real time, you know, what I’m thinking about as far as edits to these documents, you know, people they have some jurisdictions they still have Zoom hearings, like in DC so we can have junior associates like watch hearings um, you know, to the extent things are, in this area, um, we have some that are local and they can go to the courthouse, but I think the watching and learning and growing talent. It’s the same, it’s just how much time you want to dedicate to the people, I don’t think that time needs to be in person.
Bim Dave: Yeah, it makes sense and it’s, it’s interesting because just, I recently had an example of this where we were out at a client, like a face to face client meeting after a long time, right, because like, like you say, a lot of the meetings we do are either via zoom or teams, and it was funny because we’ve become so used to having the AI transcription service on a meeting that when we were in the meeting, we left and I looked around to my team and I said, who took notes? And everyone had literally forgotten to take notes because they were so used to just clicking a button and it doing it for you, I was like, we didn’t have, you know, teams in the room with us, uh, unfortunately. But yeah, you’re absolutely right, like I think, it’s one of those things where we can leverage some of this technology to actually make us a lot more efficient right, and I think, you know, you make a great point about being able to achieve much more in a shorter timeframe, so serving more customers, um, by leveraging some of the tools and technology around it, and I think you kind of touched on this a little bit, but in terms of the relationship side of things, particularly with new business, like when you’re going off to new business, does this impact you in any way in terms of having to deal with clients remotely, like, we deal with some customers that will only meet in person, right? So they’re just of the mindset that I have to meet you in person before I signed a contract with you to, to work with you, right, because they just want to establish a relationship. Do you get that kind of thing happening? And how do you get around that from, from the relationship building side of things, especially with new clients?
Margeaux Thomas: We lose those clients. I mean, and that, that was the line we had to draw, you know, how many of those clients are there versus the clients who will, work within the parameters of how we set this up to be efficient for us, right? And there’s always going to be some outliers who are like, I want to see you in person, I want to shake your hand, I want to come to your office, I want you to show me around what it looks like, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but this isn’t the best fit for that client, because we’re not the best fit for clients who have a box of documents that are, you know, in disarray that, you know, they want to go through the documents together, like, are the firm where we need to scan all that stuff in so that we can organize it and, you know, we can pull the pertinent information from those documents, occasionally we’ll have somebody drop off something and we’ll scan it for you but like, we are putting ourselves in a position to service a particular type of client and we understand that we will lose other clients in that process but if we do this, this segment of society well, it won’t matter.
And that’s what we had to figure out. You know, yes, there’s gonna be somebody calls and says, look, you’re not gonna meet me in person, I don’t want you to be my lawyer, and I have to be okay with saying, well, you know, that’s, that’s it, you know, and it took me a long time to get there because was like, am I just lazy? Because I couldn’t go meet this person, you know, the office is not that far I actually do have an office, it’s not like, this is like, not real, it would be very easy for me to do that but when I think about the big picture of, you know, the efficiency piece, which is very key, how many other people can we service by doing this this way, which we believe is more efficient and if this person is not willing to bend to the way that we have to set up, they’re likely not going to be our ideal.
Bim Dave: I think that’s, that’s right like you kind of have to draw the line and just say this is my approach to market and, and doing what you need to do to kind of grow in that way so, yeah, I think that’s a great take on it actually. So for those businesses that are trying to adapt to remote working and remote operations, are there any legal considerations that they need to consider from, you know, protecting their business perspective and their employees with this kind of setup.
Margeaux Thomas: So we see a lot more of that now in our business partnership disputes, technology issues, because people are remote and I can say the number one thing, which I never would have guessed would be the number one issue is like two factor authentication. see that as a problem in a lot of cases, because you know, somebody has the two factor tied to their personal cell phone, right?
And then they leave and then, it’s very difficult to get a lot of service providers to overstep that, to give access to people who are still in the business, because that authentication piece is huge, especially with online companies, if you are unable to authenticate, if they can’t send them the code, this telephone number or this email address, you know, and you’re like, well, I don’t have that phone anymore, that’s not my number, that person left, it creates so many level of ripple effect of problem for the business owner who’s still in the business and I don’t think people think twice about what number that can be tied to and it’s very easy for people to tie that to the cell phone, not a business phone, not a, you know, bondage number, but like their personal cell phone where they’re getting those text messages, people don’t even think about it and it creates I mean, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in court like, requiring this person to change the two factor authentication to a number that is associated with the business so that they can continue on in the business and how debilitating that can be for a business because, you know, people’s domain is tied to that, their Google is tied to that, their phone number might be tied to that.
I mean, they have so many things in their business that require some type of authentication and people just tie that to their personal devices routinely and that creates a big issue and when I was younger attorney, that wasn’t an issue that I saw coming up, I don’t remember any circumstance where I was at my computer at my job 20 years ago and they were like, you know, give us your personal cell phone number so we can send you a code that you can authenticate mean, that’s a relatively new concept has created a lot of issues.
Bim Dave: Yeah, that’s, that’s a very good point, actually, because especially with the, the kind of drive towards cloud, um, computing and cloud solutions, it’s even more exacerbated because ultimately you no longer own the hardware that the software sits on, right. It’s sitting up in the cloud and someone else has the keys to that, that engine so yeah, that makes, makes total sense. That’s also a great segue into, into some of the technology side of things. Are you 100 percent kind of cloud solution based? In terms of the, the solutions that you use and what, what would you say are the kind key drivers to, um, success when it comes to some of the solutions that you’ve selected as part to kind of run your practice on?
Margeaux Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think that when you have a remote team, you’ve got to have solutions to technology issues that everybody is easily able to access and use and navigate and we’ve done a lot of research on the front end into what those solutions are because, you know, our practice is constantly changing and people are coming in and it’s growing and that requires us to, you know, at new solutions for problems that we didn’t have before so like the most recent issue was project management, like we have a case management system that was doing great, but when you bring in more people and then we have marketing projects and admin projects, legal projects, it, it wasn’t lending itself to all of the rest of the stuff that also needed to be managed. So we needed to move to a project management software, which could all kind of collaborate together and It took, I don’t know, three, four, five months to just research, there’s just a laundry list of different options and figuring out what would be the easiest for us to implement and to onboard people and what their training was [00:29:00] like, and what kind of assistance they would give us and whether we would need to build out certain portions of it um, there was just a lot of questions about that and I think that. You know, putting a lot of thought into that solution on the front end and making sure that it’s adaptable to whatever environment you have built is huge and, we really rely upon that technology so much that it’s got to be functional. So, you know, we have practice management, we use Microsoft for, you know, all of our, um, email and document storage.
Bim Dave: I think it’s underestimated as to how much is involved, right, in just managing the technology stack and I think, in the older days, when you, when you had those softwares running within your environments, you had like complete control over it, there was other headaches you had to deal with, um, in terms of managing the data centers and managing the servers and hardware but you ultimately had full control over the software delivery process and you were kind of in control. I think one of the challenges that we see a lot and firms, uh, struggling with more these days is when you are 100 percent cloud and you have different solutions in the cloud, the challenge becomes, I think you touched on a great point is that, you’ve got to do your selection process, right? So you have to understand what is actually going to work for you. And it’s not enough to sit through a demo, you kind of need to get into trials and kind of make sure that, you know, the software is doing what it says on the tin. But I think also then the other piece of the puzzle is then how do they talk to each other, right? And making sure that from an integration perspective, there’s, there’s a thought about how, not only how do you get it connected, but then how do you make sure it stays connected, right? Um, because that seems to be another big challenge that, um, firms are facing with this kind of not just cloud, but hybrid, you know, on prem and cloud mix.
Margeaux Thomas: And then how do you get people to use it? That’s the next hurdle.
Bim Dave: Yes. yeah.
And that, that’s a great point, right? Like, training and education on all of the different systems and as they evolve so quickly as well is definitely another, another part of it and actually, it kind of leads me to, to a question around culture of a business that is kind of remote like yours. Are there any tips or tricks that you can share with the audience in terms of how do you keep people engaged? How do you make sure that, you know, from a company culture perspective, that your team is feeling connected? Um, you know, when they’re not necessarily physically sitting next to you.
Margeaux Thomas: You know, I struggle with that. I think that is a real challenge with remote teams and probably the biggest challenge that I’ve faced as we’ve grown because you know, I find my, I’m more of an introverted person that doesn’t need a lot of, like, interaction with other people in order to feel like I’m part of this, right? But I know that other people do need more of that interaction than I do, so ways to do that and, you know, we started with doing virtual lunches where we would all just get together and talk, and then we decided to bring in some speakers to talk about certain things and that has been really helpful because, you know, they’ve talked about different topics that bring up, you know, talking points that we never would have, you know, that make us learn more about each other. We have in person dinners twice a year and flying people in to come to those has become important so, a lot of at our last one, which was a few weeks ago, there are people that I’ve never seen in person who came.
It was very interesting to have that interaction. that was fun, you know, I think it’s like a constant analysis of what more can we do to build that element, because I think that when you’re in an office and there’s a water cooler and people are just like in the environment to talk about things going on outside of work and what’s frustrating them, that kind of has to be fabricated to an extent in the remote world because you’re not together, right? So, you can be in front of your computer and not talk to anybody all day and nobody would you know, raise a finger, you know, like if you’re in your office environment, you’d have to walk past people, you’d have to go get your lunch, you’d have to say hi to Bob, you know what I mean? Like, you’d have to do those types of things, so I am constantly looking for new ways to do that, I’d like to host a virtual retreat for everybody to take off the day and bring in some people and have some team exercises and things like that, talk about goals and strategies and trying to figure out a way to coordinate that so that we can have some more culture and spend some more time with each other and we’ll see how that goes but that’s my next goal is to so try to get that off the ground.
Bim Dave: I think that’s a great take on it. And I think the, the idea about speakers is, is actually really good because I know that we, we all, I think a lot of people can relate to the fact that there was a bit of, um, you know, zoom fatigue through the number of webinars that were launched over the COVID period right but actually, the benefit now is that if you, if you’re bringing somebody in that is speaking on a topic, um, and there’s a little interaction involved, I think there’s a lot of value for the individual, right? Because it’s basically like enhancing their knowledge so it’s, it’s something that’s exciting for them to be part of. And it’s almost like you’re giving back, right? You’re giving back to the employees, to enhance their profile, um, a little bit and give them skills that maybe they didn’t have before so I love that, I think that’s a good incentive to for people to come together as well as the fun stuff, you know, there’s also the self development stuff I think makes a big difference, so really, really glad to hear your investing in that area and be very interested to see how your event, uh, goes in terms of the retreat. I like the sound of that. It’s, it’s, it’s good. So I do want to, not leave without talking about flying cars and flying houses, I had a very fun read of your website and this was, this was actually really cool, The Negotiator comic, tell our audience about how, how that came about because if anyone hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend going to check it out because it’s something that I’ve never seen before on a law firm’s website and it’s actually pretty cool.
Margeaux Thomas: It’s funny you bring that up. So my son is super into comic books and art. I mean, our house is covered with art books and paper and drawing just everywhere, he was like, you know, all in when it comes to art, and he wanted to make a comic book, and he wanted to make it about, um, so he has a twin brother, and he wanted his brother to be in it, and I have a daughter as well, and he wanted her to be in it, and, you know, we just started talking about the plot and I’m in the process of writing a negotiation book, um, about becoming a better negotiator for my clients and educating other lawyers and somehow that negotiation concept merged with his cartoon and it’s a really fun project, you know, we actually, um, hired an illustrator, um, from Upwork, the virtual platform and he was involved in like looking at all of the illustrators work and he had done his own sketches and then they kind of his sketches and, you know, added more to them and just going through the process with him of talking with people online who could make his vision come to life and, you know, the editing of the story and everything, it was, it was a really cool process and, you know, then we were like, might as well get it copyrighted so he ended up getting it copyrighted and he was really excited about that, then started selling books at school and it became a whole thing and now he’s working on the second series so, um, it was cool but the fact that it could be about lawyers and negotiation, I was really honored to have him want to write about that. It’s cool.
Bim Dave: Yeah, no, it’s really, really fun take on it. So you have a very, very talented son there. So really nice to see that. So Margeaux, um, I just have a couple of wrap up questions I ask all of the guests that come on my show. The first of which is if you could borrow Doctor Who’s time machine and go back to Margeaux at 18 years old, what advice would you give her?
Margeaux Thomas: Maybe I would have started sooner. I think that a lot of my adulthood was kind of a catastrophizing what could happen if I bet on myself and if I, um, pursued a road less traveled and I love what I do and I wouldn’t give it up for, for anything and I wish I had reached that point of clarity, you know, sooner in life, I just think fear can be paralyzing and I would just tell my younger self that, you know, you got to bet on yourself.
Bim Dave: Amazing. That’s great. Great advice. Um, and second question is what’s your favorite travel destination?
Margeaux Thomas: Oh, that’s a great one I love to travel, um, I really, really like Dubai, um, probably up there, I really like Carousel, probably like my one and two.
Bim Dave: Very nice, very nice. Well, as, as I ask these, these questions to the guests, they get added to my bucket list, right? The ones that sound interesting, so thank you for that. Any closing thoughts or advice that you think would benefit the legal professionals in our audience today?
Margeaux Thomas: I’m a huge promoter of entrepreneurship, I understand that, you know, it’s not the path for everyone but you If there are people who are listening to this who are considering the path of entrepreneurship, and I’ve listened to a lot of your prior episodes and there’s some with lawyers who are like, you know, I want to create this product that will make the legal field better, and, you know, I, I think that goes back to my betting on yourself like, you know, entrepreneurship is definitely a rollercoaster, but it has so many thrills and opportunities associated with it you know, if you’re an entrepreneur or potential entrepreneur, I would just say, you know, to follow and lean into it, I think it is totally worth it. I think it’s worth every risk, every fail, every pickup, every scrape, like I think it’s all worth it and, and if you don’t try, you’ll never know.
Bim Dave: Fantastic. Margeaux is been a pleasure having you on today, thank you for taking some time out to speak with me, really appreciate it.
Margeaux Thomas: Thank you, I appreciate it.