How To Be an Exceptional Lawyer feat. Marco Brown

Marco Brown’s Background

I just tried to determine what was easiest in my head. So I became an attorney because being an attorney made sense in my brain. From a very early age, I was able to take arguments and kind of manipulate those arguments in my head and look.

At the permutations of the arguments and then follow them to their logical conclusions. Like this is just how my head worked. And I figured out after a while that's what lawyers needed to do. And then I've always been kind of combative and I've like, I like the fight. So I thought, okay, so I know I need to be a lawyer and I like the fight. So I know I need to be a litigator and I have to moderate myself, you know, in family life to moderate myself a lot so I don't mess up kids because I do like to fight a little too much.

“I became an attorney because being an attorney made sense in my brain,” shared Marco Brown in Episode 92 of You Are A Lawyer. 

It was that. That's how I identified that I needed to be an attorney. And then I got into family law, and then everything just kind of made sense in my head in family law. It just came really, really naturally. And I thought, okay, I'm going to go along with this and see where it goes. And then it just went, and I went with it.

What Can You Do With a Law Degree

Young lawyers need to understand this, that the most important people you will ever have in your legal practice are not the judges, they're not the partner who's over you. No, it's your paralegal. They're the people below you on the ladder, right? So you're paralegal. You take care of your paralegal before you take care of anybody else, because your paralegal makes your life 10 times easier or 10 times harder.

“You take care of your paralegal before you take care of anybody else,” explains Marco Brown in Episode 92 of You Are A Lawyer. 

And then the second set of people that you take care of are the court staff. Do anything and everything. I mean, don't bribe them, of course. We're not talking about that. But do anything and everything to make their life better because they will make your life, again, 10 times better and they will do you solids for your clients and make your clients experience 10 times better as well if you take care of them.

Lawyer Side Hustles

And then the vision starts, right? And then you just start putting the pieces together and it takes time to come to fruition, but you have to have that vision in your head a long time before you ever make it happen. So figure out what you want and what motivates you, especially, uh, people will tell you that you should be motivated by incredibly altruistic things. And maybe that's you, maybe that's you as a human being. That's not me. Like I'm not super motivated by altruistic stuff. I do a lot of altruistic things. I give a tremendous amount of money to charities; my family and I do, and we help a lot of people. But that's not what motivates me. What motivates me is this sort of thing, buying a villa in Italy, doing this and this and this. So we amass money and we amass a law firm that helps our clients exceptionally well because that's how you amass money, right? And then you can do all sorts of cool things with money. And those ancillary things are fantastic.

‍The Power of Being a Lawyer

And people will say, child alienation does not exist. I'm like, no, child alienation exists in literally every divorce because you are alienating the child from the other parent, one, by divorcing them, and then two, by your attitude toward that parent.

It just happens. It's the minimization of the alienation that's important. You wanna minimize that as much as humanly possible. So that's on the parent side. But there's only so much we can do as attorneys, but we can do a lot. So when we get into a case and decide, as a firm, we have this culture. We get into a case and we are going to go to mediation, we are gonna go to negotiation, we are gonna get these things done with a minimum amount of litigiousness possible.

The minimum amount of animosity and fighting as we can. Now if we have to, if we are forced to go to court and put boxing gloves on and punch people in the face, that is exactly what we will do because we are paid to do that thing and it is necessary in about 5%, maybe 10% of cases. But it is not in a vast majority of cases. So what we can do as attorneys is really lower that temperature, lower the animosity, not be litigious.

“[i]f we are forced to go to court and put boxing gloves on and punch people in the face, that is exactly what we will do because we are paid to do that thing,” shared Marco Brown in Episode 92 of You Are A Lawyer. 

Lawyers Getting Paid for Being Exceptional

Okay, get paid 100%. You would never allow your client to pick your pocket of 100 bucks. So don't allow your client to just not pay you $100. It's the exact same situation, but we somehow think it's different and it's not. Okay, don't let them steal from you. That is the basic contract that we have with our clients. And then the family law-specific suggestion I have for younger attorneys and law students is family law gets no love in law school. Very few things actually get love in law school. Amazingly, the only things that tend to get love in law school are the things that make the president of the law school look better. 

So it's like going, you know, putting people, clerkships, high level clerkships in the federal judiciary or, you know, the state Supreme Court or, you know, going to these high level large mega law firms and whatnot that make the law school look better, that make the president and on a personal level look better so the president can like go be the president of the law school higher off the chain. Okay, so that's what law schools do. Very, very few people are actually cut out to do that sort of work or find it rewarding. I've talked with hundreds and hundreds and almost none of them actually like it and they go do something else. So laws, family law doesn't there are not these large law firms that do family law. It's usually one, you know, one person or two people or maybe three, four, something like that. But I can tell you, it is incredibly rewarding as a profession, you know, inside the law as an area. And it's also can be very highly lucrative. Now, this is another thing that your law professors will say, oh, you can't make money in family law. And even a lot of other family law practitioners say, you can't make money in family law.

“They're projecting their inability to be good with money and to make money onto other people,” explains Marco Brown on the You Are A Lawyer podcast.

They're projecting themselves out there. They're projecting their inability to be good with money and to make money onto other people. I can tell you as somebody that does very well in family law by serving their clients exceptionally well, there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of satisfaction in helping people through the hardest time in their life. Now, the other portion of this is give it a chance. That's really what I'm saying.

But the other portion is you have to have the right attitude for it. You have to be able to disconnect yourself emotionally from your clients and their problems, okay? Not my circus, not my monkeys. We say it all the time here in the office. You have to be able to do that. If you cannot do that as a human being on a general level, then please do not go into family law because it will tear your soul up inside. You will never be able to go home and put it in the box.

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Contact Marco Brown

Marco Brown is licensed to practice law in Utah. Learn more about Marco Brown:  

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@divorceattorney

Website: https://www.brownfamilylaw.com/

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Kyla Denanyoh hosts the You Are A Lawyer podcast. 

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