The Elder Law Coach

Ep 57 Learn The Essentials To Build, Price, And Market A Sustainable Elder Law Practice

• Todd Whatley

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We share a step‑by‑step path to launch and grow an elder law practice, from education and mentorship to marketing that actually reaches seniors and their families. Along the way, we explain flat fees, specialization, and why calm counseling wins more trust than courtroom swagger.

• choosing elder law for meaningful, non‑adversarial work
• compressing years of learning with coaching and mentorship
• building forms, processes and clear timelines
• marketing to seniors with talks and Q&A sessions
• creating a referral network across cpAs, advisors and care teams
• using digital content to reach adult children online
• structuring flat fees and framing value against care costs
• practicing as a specialist and educating the public
• designing a balanced schedule with limited court time

Please subscribe, please share, and visit www.theelderlawcoach.com to schedule a call with Todd


Check out our new website www.TheElderLawCoach.com.

SPEAKER_00:

You're tuning in to the Elder Law Coach Podcast, the definitive resource for attorneys delving into the world of elder law. With your host, Todd Watley, a certified Elder Law attorney, past president of the National Elder Law Foundation, and renowned coach with a quarter century of specialized experience. Whether you're an established attorney looking to refine your expertise, or an emerging lawyer seeking a successful foray into elder law, this is your masterclass. Now, let's get started with the luminary in the field. Here's Todd Watley.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi there, I'm Todd Watley, Certified Elder Law Attorney and the Elder Law Coach. Today I want to go way back to the very beginning and let's talk about how to start an elder law practice. Today, I want to give you some marketing strategies, some pointers on how to get started, but basically just the essentials of building a successful elder law practice and provide guidance for you to get this thing up and going. Hopefully, you are thinking about this and someone has recommended this podcast to you. I appreciate that. If this is your first visit here, please subscribe, please leave comments, share this with people because I do this for free to help people be able to do what I think is absolutely the best job in the world. So Elder Law, it's what I think people would consider a niche practice. And it is, but it's it's huge, okay? And it's not just a niche practice, it's a mission. Once you get into this and once you start meeting these people, and these people become lifelong clients of yours, you'll learn this is not just a job. It's it is something that you can absolutely enjoy. It is something that you will learn that your clients actually like you. I know that that is strange in the practice of law. You will also like your clients because typically you're not being adverse. You are coming together as a team and solving problems. It's not your typical attorney practice where you're teaming up, you know, you're against each other. It's very adversarial. You're on one side, they're on the other side, you're trying to prove points. Now, you will fight a little bit with the state because generally they're they're going to do things that are stupid, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do this, or they're interpreting something way different than you are. And so there are times to fight. If you love to fight, you you can fight some, but almost always it is a very collaborative, hey, let's come together, let's let's solve this problem. And I truly think it is the best job in the world, and the need for this is skyrocketing. The um the population is aging, the population is needing more care, their health is generally declining, and the need for elder law attorneys is huge, and baby boomers are the reason for that. Let me talk about very briefly how I got started. Okay, my first career was physical therapy. I was a physical therapist, young, young 22-year-old guy who really wanted to do sports therapy, but there isn't a huge market for that back in my hometown of Benton, Arkansas. I did get to work with the high school team, and it was just a nightmare because you know, you're a a volunteer, you're not a doctor, and so people don't take your advice very well, and particularly parents who think all of their kids are going to play college and then NFL ball. And when you tell the quarterback's dad, hey, I think he needs to sit out the next game so I can get his shoulder feeling better, they're like, Nah, we're not listening to you. And the family practice doctor says, Well, you know, I I think he can play. And you're like, Okay, fine. And it was just you're beating your head against the wall. And the job that I had was with the hospital and not voluntarily, but I got thrown into working with old people. I liked old people, but I didn't know that I would like to work with them as much as I was. And so I worked with older people and fell in love with it. I worked in nursing homes and I was helping people in nursing homes get better, go back home, and it was a really nice job. But I got bored, okay? And when I got bored, I thought, I think I'll go to law school. So I went to law school, graduated, did general practice for a year, and hated it, hated the adversarial action, hated the did not like most of my clients. Most of my clients at the end of it, it's like, well, you didn't get everything that I wanted. It's like, well, we couldn't get everything you wanted because you're being unreasonable. And it was just a very adversarial, and I just hated my life. And then finally discovered there's this thing called Elder Law. And this is back in 2000, okay? And Elder Law was fairly new at that point. And so I was like, I love old people, and now I can be a lawyer for old people. This is really cool. So I jumped into it. To my surprise, there was really no competition, which was bad because there was no one to call, no one to ask, no one to run things by. Medicaid, particularly in Arkansas, was a very new field and had not been tested very much. And the few attorneys who tried to do it did not last very long. And one of the attorneys from the state, he he started just about the time I did. And after about four or five years, he said, We were on a pre-fair hearing phone call, and he said, You're not leaving, are you? I said, No, I'm not leaving. He said, Well, we can usually run most people off. I said, Well, I like what I do, I see a lot of benefit in what I do, and I'm not leaving. He's like, Okay, well, that's that's good to know. And so a lot of attorneys get into it, but they just don't stay. And even today, with a lot more resources, I see people get into it and they just don't stay because of a lot of reasons. Okay, but let's get into that. And so I did start, learned all of this by myself. And I will tell you, it was at least five years. Five years before I could sit down with the client and basically know what to do and know that what I was going to do for them was not malpractice, okay, to be honest. Because I had no mentor, I had no one to learn this. I would go to the nail of conferences, but they were here's one topic here, and one here's one topic here to make all of those flow together and meet a client's needs. It just wasn't there. And it took five years to figure this out. And I don't want it to take you five years and skip ahead 20 plus years. I've now figured out this coaching thing so that generally my saying is if you'll give me a year, I can make you a really good elder law attorney. And with coaching, you don't have to turn away clients. You can bring in a client that you have absolutely no idea what to do with, get on the phone with me, I'll tell you what to do, walk you through it, and you'll learn by doing, but you'll also learn from videos, from from lots of educational events, webinars, mastermind classes, and the one-on-one phone calls each month. Okay. So that's how I got there. That's how I did it. And it was expensive. I messed up a lot. I had to write families a fair amount of money numerous times because we messed up. You learn those mistakes. When you write out a$20,000 check when you didn't have$20,000, that message sticks in your head loud and clear to say, I'm not making that mistake again. Now you can use my five years, 10 years of mess ups to make sure that you don't mess up. So to start this, you really do need education and training. And there are some resources out there. There's books. You can go to Nayla, like I said, but they're going to cover one very specific topic, and you need to go to Nayla a lot and read the Nayla magazine a lot to start getting a grasp of this. Okay. I've put all of that into the Oder Law Coach. I have the videos that you can watch all of the videos if you really buckle down to it. I want to say there's twenty twenty and twenty-five hours worth of videos. You can sit down, plow through those in a weekend, and have a really good understanding of how this works. But then people get abandoned there. They're like, okay, I've watched this, but how do I apply that to a client situation? That's where the phone calls come in. And you can read this, but you still don't feel like you can do anything. So you're like, I don't know if I should take this client or not. No, take them, bring them in, let's get to work. Okay. So education and training, forms and processes, okay? That took a while to figure out what forms we need, what processes. And I'm still 26 years into practice and I'm still kind of refining some of my processes to make sure that they work correctly. And I've seen a trend lately in my coaching calls. So many people ask, particularly the new ones, they're like, what's the timeline? What's first, what's second, what's third? And I never thought about that because I just do it. I just go out and I just do what needs to be done. And I don't think about the time frame or the timeline to do this. And so many of my coaching clients now, brand new, this is their first application. They're like, what's the timeline? And I get it. It's difficult. You don't know what comes first. And so we have figured that out for you. I can walk you through this from the very beginning step, step, step, step, all the way to the very end. So forms and processes are huge, and to figure that out yourself is difficult. And you're like, well, there's plenty of elder law attorneys around me. I'm sure they will teach me. I have found most elder law attorneys are giving to a point. Okay. And think, do you really want to train your competition? And so a lot of your local elder law attorneys will be helpful, but they're not going to get on the phone with you for an hour and explain in great detail how to do this and give you their forms and their processes. Okay. With me, I will give you the forms and processes that I work with that I have developed over the last 26 years. And then just basically the one year of mentorship. Okay. So a very important part of this is mentorship. And you're going to be hard pressed to get that from someone within your state because they don't want to train their competition. I've done it. Okay. So that's one of the things I do for people is I am with you by your side from the beginning to the end. Okay. So having all this knowledge, having the forms, having the processes, having the mentor is great, but how do you get clients to call your number? That's a challenge with this group. I will tell you. Marketing to seniors is difficult. Okay. Marketing to younger people is pretty easy. Instagram, TikTok, Google searches, things like that, you can get to those people. These people, a lot of them don't own a computer. They don't have a smartphone. They're still flipping open their phone and dialing the number. They are difficult to market to. And so a few things that I tell my coaching people that I have worked out over the years is leverage your existing network. And particularly if you've been an attorney for 10, 15, 20 years, you've worked with a lot of attorneys out there. And probably none of those attorneys are elder law attorneys. And if they've been in practice as long as you have, some of their clients are getting older. And they may be getting phone calls from some of their clients saying, hey, Fred just went into the nursing home. Do you have any idea how I can protect my assets? They don't. They don't have any idea. But if they know that you're now doing this and that they have screened this client for you and made sure they're a good client, most bar association ethical rules allow you to share that fee, to split a fee that is pro to the amount of work that is done. And typically, if I can get a client screened and I know their assets and I know, yes, this is a great client, in my mind, and most attorneys' mind, that's about 20% of the work. And when you start doing these cases, particularly the Crossis Medicaid cases, you're going to charge somewhere between 10, 20, maybe$25,000 per case. And so 20% of that becomes some very substantial money for the person to take a phone call and say, hey, call Todd. And they will send you clients because they don't want to learn this and they don't know what to do. And probably they're going to mess up the case if they did try to do something like, oh, well, let's just give away the house because Medicaid can't take it if you give it away. Yeah, that's true, but you've just caused a whole world of issues. So I have found that CPAs, financial advisors, estate planning attorneys really don't want to do crisis Medicaid or the end-of-life things. Let them know that you're now doing elder law and that you can work with people who are needing long-term care or are concerned about losing their assets and they still have five years. Let them know what you're doing. Okay? Speak locally. My marketing person, the standard answer to can Todd come speak for us is yes. I do a lot of public speaking. I go out, I face the people, I let them know that I'm here. This is what I do. Let them see my personality, see what I do, and know that I am very approachable and that I have the knowledge to help them out. So speak locally every time you're invited. Set up some things. And I will tell you, for my coaching clients, one of the most important things that they do is a thing we call coffee with the pro. It is not slides, it is not handouts, it's nothing other than showing up to a group of people and answering questions. And typically senior adult centers, places like that are very willing for you to come in if you're not selling anything. Okay. And you're typically not selling anything. You are showing up, you are answering questions. But simply by being able to answer their questions, and particularly things I will teach you about what to say regarding their current documents and should I have this reviewed? The way that I have crafted this over the last probably 15 years works very effectively. And that's what keeps my phone ringing. Okay. But I still speak to churches, civic groups, basically anybody that will let me come in, I will go in and I will speak for 10 minutes to two hours. Okay. Build a referral network, okay? Get with people and say, hey, let's work on sending clients back and forth, okay? Home care agencies, long-term care facilities, discharge planners at the hospital. They love being able to give out stuff to people that makes them look good. It's like, yes, you're going to the nursing home, and their question is, what about all my stuff? It's$10,000 a month. Yeah, it is, but go call this guy. He can help you save it, okay? Get out there, go have lunch, go have coffee with people, sit down with them and say, How can I help you? I do elder law, I do Medicaid, I do VA, I do end-of-life estate planning. What can I do to make your life easier? And then today we are a digital world. And even though our clients may not have computers, their kids and their grandkids do, and we need to be very internet savvy. Blog, podcast, okay, short videos, anything that you can do to get more information out there that shows up on people's feeds when they're when the people who are on the computer, when they look it up and are searching for, oh no, dad's going in to the nursing home, your information pops up and teaches them. Some some things about how you practice, okay. I will say that Elder Law is not for the aggressive go get them, you know, hell and brimstone type attorney. It is more of a laid-back, compassion, empathy type practice. Okay. Having the ability to sit down with a family member who has now put their loved one into a nursing home and simply listening, schedule an hour, have some tissues on the table because almost always there's going to be some tears. And being able to sit down with a family and listen to them and say, I've I've been there numerous times with other clients. I know exactly what you're talking about, I know what you're going through, and the solution is very interesting, and we're going to be able to protect a very large portion of your estate. And being able to do that calmly and professionally, and then being able to quote a fee that they see as make sense, that's how you do this. Okay. Pricing. Almost always all elder law attorneys that I know do flat fees. Okay. It's based on a lot of different things, but the client knows this is how much this is going to cost. Here's the fee for doing this. We don't talk about money again. We just get to work and let's get this done. And I think like I mentioned before, with a crisis Medicaid case when you're saving$300,$400, a million dollars, a fee of$15,000 or$20,000 does not seem egg exorbitant, particularly when a a nursing home costs$10,000 a month. It's like, look, for two months worth of nursing home, which you're going to pay next month and the month after that, and then still keep paying$10,000 until you're basically out of money. If you'll give me two of those, I can get you onto Medicaid the first of next month. You don't have to pay that$10,000 for that next month. You don't have to pay the month after that or the month after that. And once you say$10,000 fifty times in the meeting, and I'm only charging you$20,000, so like, yeah, that makes total sense. Okay, so clear flat fee pricing is the way to go. I never fully understood. I always thought the term counselor at law was an interesting title that some attorney that they say is available to use. I always thought, you know, we're not counseling. People just hire us and we go fight for them. That's an attorney at law or Esquire, whatever, but a counselor at law, and you will find in the practice of elder law, you are doing a lot of counseling. You are sitting down with families who are having a really bad day, and you are educating them on here's the Medicaid rules, here they here's how they work in your situation, and I can make this work so we can protect a very large portion of your estate. Okay. So you do a lot of counseling, you do a lot of educating. And particularly when I do speeches out in the public, that that general public is still of the mindset that a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer. All lawyers are the same. Can't imagine that their family law or their business lawyer doesn't understand what I'm doing because I'm a lawyer. Their lawyer's a lawyer, so therefore we know the same things. And you really have to educate them and then say, look, what I'm teaching you, very few people in this area know if you're in an area with very few elder law attorneys, which I can almost guarantee that you are, and let them know, hey, this is what I know, this is how this works. And I would, and if you take this information to your lawyer and they don't tell you this, you really do need to come see me because we are specialists. And I spend a lot of time talking about specialization. They understand it with their doctors. They go to their doctor, general practice doctor, and it's like, hey, your your blood work's a little weird. You need to go see a kidney doctor, you you need to go see an orthopedist, you need to go see your heart doctor, you need to go see the spine doctor. They understand in medicine there are specialties. There are people to do specific things. And I spend a lot of my time educating clients to say the field of law is getting to be very specialized. There are attorneys who focus on very specific things. I am that type of specialist. I don't do divorces. I you don't want me representing you on a traffic ticket or a criminal conviction because I don't know that stuff and I don't want to know that stuff. Here's what I do. One of my my favorite sayings is I don't do a lot, but what I do, I do extremely well. Okay. And people understand that. They understand their doctor doesn't do a lot. They they know this organ very well, and that's who you want to go see. And so that's one way I get people to not go back to their family law attorney when they're trying to do Medicaid. It's like this is what I do. All right. So again, let's go back to how I started this. I had no mentor, I had to read the rules. There were very few books out there that actually explain this. I figure this out by doing it. You can do the same thing. You can just say, I do elder law, and you can start doing it. And I will tell you, it's going to take some time, and you're probably going to commit malpractice in the process of doing this. And I am telling you, let me help you. I would love to work with you. I would love to help you get your practice up and going. If you do elder law and you're still struggling, let's work this out. I've done it, I've been where you are. Let's get this thing up and going. And if you're thinking about changing fields of law, elder law is a fantastic field. It's very human. It's it's very soothing. You control your schedule. Okay. I rarely go to court. Rarely go to court. And so therefore, I set my schedule. I practice two days a week. Two days a week, I see clients. The other two days a week, Monday and Wednesday, I do coaching. And I'm off Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of each week. I love my life. I love how I do this. And I think me still practicing law is what separates me from a lot of the other coaching courses out there is they are being taught by attorneys who don't practice law. And many of them, it's been decades since they have practiced law. And so I'm still doing it. I'm still in the trenches with you. I'm still figuring this thing out. And so I would love to be your coach. And I would love for you to do Elder Law because it's a very fun job. You love your clients, your clients love you. It's just a great way to make a living. So please visit the website, theelderlawcoach.com, and there's a lot of information there. And there is also a link there that you can schedule a phone call with me. Okay. It's not one of my staff members, it is me. Let's get on the phone. Let's talk. And if you truly want to take that one year of training that is typical in coaching, if you want to bring that down to a weekend, call the office or during our phone call, ask me about the transformation weekend. I will probably bring it up to you. I am now taking what took me five years, and then I put it into one year, and now I'm putting it into a weekend. It's an intense weekend. It is an absolute transformational weekend where you will come in knowing very little and you will leave here knowing a lot. You will be able to start seeing clients the first of the next week and you'll start making money. Okay, so if you're interested in getting five years crunched into one weekend, let's talk. Okay, because I want to help you transform your practice and be with you for the next six months after that to get you up and going and doing what is the absolute best job in the world. All right. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe, please share, and I will see you next time. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for joining this episode of the Elder Law Coach Podcast. For those eager to take their elder law practice to new heights and are interested in Todd's acclaimed coaching program, visit www.theelderlawcoach.com. With Todd Watley by your side, the journey to becoming an elder law authority has never been more achievable. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and stay passionate about elder law.