Like so many other lawyers, Ali Katz got into the profession because she wanted to help people. The problem is that once she began working in one of the nation’s top law firms, Ali found that this was very difficult to actually do in practice. Instead, she found herself spending long hours creating documents for an even longer roster of clients, rather than connecting and consulting with them, helping them to make better decisions.

Ali spent a lot of time figuring out what was broken in the industry and how it could be fixed. She then created a practice that puts relationships before transactions and creates an environment in which lawyers can lead with heart, while serving their clients, and creating a lucrative business and work-life balance, all at the same time.

Her method for doing this is included in her new book, The New Law Business Model Revealed. As you’ll see in this interview, while Ali’s book is geared toward lawyers, there’s a lot of practical information in here for business owners of all stripes who want to connect with clients, feel more fulfilled, and put their real skills to work.

Nikki Van Noy: I am joined today by Ali Katz, author of the new book, The New Law Business Model: Build a Lucrative Law Practice that You and Your Clients will Love. Hi, Ali.

Ali Katz: Hi Nikki, it’s great to be here.

Nikki Van Noy: It’s great to have you, thank you for joining me today. I would love to start off by letting listeners know a little bit about you and your background. Talk to me a little bit about your career in law and also what ultimately drew you to your own law practice?

Ali Katz: You know, I think what really drew me to becoming a lawyer and creating my own law practice was this idea about what success is.

Growing up, I think that I was drawn to become a lawyer for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that my dad actually was a con artist. He was involved with the legal system on the wrong side of the law. Having that experience, I remember reading his depositions. I must have been in fifth or sixth grade, this was when this was all happening in my life, and I remember reading his depositions and being fascinated by what I was reading.

At the same time, wanting to save my dad, right? At the same time, seeing how much he respected his lawyers. My dad didn’t have a lot of respect for people generally, but he had a lot of respect for his lawyers. Then also this idea that if my dad had been raised differently, he would have gone to law school and been a lawyer and not a con man.

I think all of that–and of course, wanting to create stability in my own life because my dad wasn’t able to give me that stability when I was growing up–created this trajectory for me to go to law school. When I went to law school, I went to law school thinking that I would maybe go on to be a divorce lawyer because I had kind of gone through my parent’s divorce with them, and they put me in the middle. I wanted to be able to help families in a way that would not have kids in the middle.

I didn’t ever imagine that I would come out of law school with the opportunities that I did. Given the life that I came from, through my childhood, I never imagined that I was going to become an estate planning attorney. I didn’t imagine that I was going to love my tax law classes. I didn’t imagine that I was going to graduate first in my class, and then have my choice of opportunities post-law school, but all of those things happened.

It turned out when I got to law school, for the first time in my life, I loved school. All of a sudden, I just found myself so engaged. I wasn’t bored, I was learning things that were opening my mind to new possibilities. Fortunately, I made the decision to go to the best law school that I got into, which was Georgetown Law. I didn’t know how important that decision was going to be, you know?

I grew up in a reality where going to a state college was all that was available to me. I wasn’t thinking about Harvard and Yale as possibilities for myself for college. When I was applying to law schools, Georgetown was the best law school that I applied to, and I got in.

Fortunately, I chose Georgetown, because graduating first from Georgetown law opened up a world of possibilities to me that had not been available to me before then.

A Need for Proper Incentive

Nikki Van Noy: I mean, that sounds like a book in and of itself. Everything that just got you to that point, that’s an incredible story.

Ali Katz: Yeah, I think that will be a book in and of itself at some point, but I needed to start with The New Law Business Model book as the first. It’s not my first book. I did write another book, and I’ve been featured in some books in the past. All of those were under actually the name I graduated law school under. Ali Katz is actually a chosen name.

The name I graduated law school with, Alexis Martin Neely, is the name I’m still licensed as a lawyer under. That’s a combination of the name I was born with, Alexis W. Martin, and then my married name, Neely. Alexis Martin Neely was the name that I wrote my first book under. It’s called Wear Clean Underwear!

It is a bestselling book on legal planning for families because your mom always told you to wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident. But once you’re a parent, wearing clean underwear alone is no longer enough, there are important legal planning steps that you need to take. That book, Wear Clean Underwear was actually the first book.

This book, The New Law Business Model, what it does for the lawyers who implement it in their lives and in their law practices is critically important because the way that we have been taught to practice law as lawyers is really broken. What I discovered when I came out of law school and I did have all of these opportunities available to me, because I did graduate top of my class at Georgetown, I went to work at one of the best law firms in the country, Munger, Tolles, & Olson, started by Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett’s personal attorney. He doesn’t make a decision, from what I understand, without talking to Charlie Munger, his trusted advisor.

I thought I was going to be going into the practice of law that would look like that. That was very naïve, right? I was 25 years old and it was a naïve vision in some ways, but at the same time, it was what my heart really longed for. I think many lawyers go to law school with that same longing. We really want to help people, we really want to be able to be trusted advisors. Yet, as we go through the law school process, what happens is, first of all, we get incredibly focused on this competition, win/lose mindset that I think is really devastating to humanity. Not just to lawyers.

As lawyers, when we come out of law school with that mindset and then we go into the world of big law, or the world of this traditional transactional or litigation model as the only two ways to practice law, well, from that place, we either have a choice to be constantly escalating conflict, and that’s how we get paid, or focusing on transactional documents-focused practice, and that’s how we get paid.

In either situation, we’re not actually compensated, or incentivized, properly to support the people that we serve to create win/win outcomes that allow conflict to be resolved more quickly. Or if we are on what is formally known as the transactional side, that allows us to get paid by our clients as a true trusted advisor, helping them to make decisions for their families and for their businesses.

When I came out of law school and went to, again, one of the best law firms in the country and saw that the way that our billing models were structured, the way that we needed to work within these jobs that had been created for us, or if we were going to start our own practices, really did not align the lawyer’s interest properly with their client’s interest.

When I was at the big law firm, there were two types of matters that I was working on. One was these very high-profile corporate tax transactions, where the focus of the law firm was to save the corporations money on their taxes, or to structure a merger and acquisition in a way that would decrease the tax impacts.

That wasn’t really the work that I loved. The work that I loved was the work of working with the families of these big corporations to get their estate planning in place. This was very surprising to me, that I loved the estate-planning work, by the way. I never expected that because, again, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, although I did grow up in a wealthy community in South Miami. Also, because I hated math all the way through high school and college.

I took as few math classes as possible, so it was very surprising to me that I then loved tax classes and law school and I loved to do estate planning because it’s quite numbers oriented. But what I really loved about it was the idea that we could work with families and preemptively help them to keep the people that they loved out of court and conflict, as a result of the work that we were doing for them.

What I found is that that wasn’t actually what we were able to do, because of the way that the traditional transactional law practice model was structured. For example, when I was in law school, my father-in-law died. He had spent $3,000 on an estate plan, with a lawyer in Florida, to create legal documents that were meant to keep us out of the court process and from having to deal with his ex-wife.

He died and all of a sudden, we’re in the court process, and we are dealing with his ex-wife. I think to myself, well this lawyer that he worked with must have committed malpractice because this is what my father-in-law spent the money to do and here we are in court and conflict.

Fast forward to starting work at Munger, Tolles, & Olson, and doing the estate planning work in the estate planning department there, and seeing, wait a minute. This wasn’t malpractice at all. This is common practice. This is the exact same way that we’re doing things here at one of the best law firms in the country. Something isn’t right.

So, when I ended up going out on my own, to see if I could create something different, and I start talking to lawyers all across the country to see how they do things, what I found out is, again, not malpractice, but common practice.

The way that we were taught to do estate planning, the way that we were taught to create wills and trusts for families, in this transactional way, is really all focused just on the documents. It’s not really teaching the lawyers to create any sort of a model where we’re able to look at the family dynamics, and we’re able to look at the assets, and we’re able to structure a plan and a process that will actually keep the family out of court and out of conflict.

The families are not finding out until it’s too late because somebody has now become incapacitated or died. This was just crazy to me, Nikki. There was definitely something that didn’t make sense. So, I had to spend a lot of years really trying to figure this out and that’s what led me to create The New Law Business Model because I needed to figure out a way that would allow the lawyers to be able to provide a service that would make sense for their clients, actually keep their client’s families and ultimately their businesses out of court and out of conflict, while at the same time properly incentivizing the lawyers, through the compensation structure of the lawyers, and be able to do that.

The New Law Business Model is an alternative to the traditional litigation model and the traditional transaction model and introduces what I call a relational model. A relational model where lawyers have a way to serve their clients that really truly makes a difference in their lives keeps their families and businesses out of court and out of conflict, and pays the lawyers properly to do that so that the lawyers can also have a great life, and be role models and leaders in their communities.

Right now, the way that we apply the New Law Business Model is just for estate planning and business practice lawyers. But my hope is, Nikki, that other lawyers in divorce, and bankruptcy, and immigration, and criminal and personal injury, will read this book and be able to take what I have created in the field of estate planning and business planning and apply it to their practice areas as well so that we can really transform the industry as a whole.

An Alternative to the Traditional Model

Nikki Van Noy: You know, Ali, I’m curious. What you’re saying makes so much sense and it sounds like a net win for clients, for lawyers, for everybody involved. Why isn’t this standard practice? Do you think it’s a matter of that this is just how things have been done for so long, even if it’s backward? Or is there something that makes establishing this sort of practice difficult to do in practice? What are your thoughts about that?

Ali Katz: It just wasn’t time yet. If you think about the reality of our technology systems, let’s just look at estate planning as an example. We could look at business planning too because I think it’s really the same issues. I graduated law school 20 years ago, and when I graduated law school, technology–this is so weird to think about–was still at a place where we could not really automate the drafting of legal documents.

We were just at the very beginning of Word and Windows, and so if you think about the amount of effort that needed to go into the creation of legal documents, there wasn’t the creative bandwidth available to the lawyers at that time to really do anything other than focus on, how do we get these documents drafted, right?

If you think back just even a little bit before that, lawyers were using typewriters. Every document had to be created in triplicate and if you made a mistake on one, it was a big deal because you had to go back and recreate the whole document set. Lawyers, our energy and attention were really focused on creating the documents. Of course, we evolved into a model where we’re getting paid for the documents because that was the valuable output that we were creating. That took up all the time, energy, and attention we had, creating that valuable output.

Now, fast forward to technological innovation and especially where we are now. Today, it’s easy to create documents. Documents are not the value of what the lawyers are creating. In fact, people can create their own documents online themselves, and that’s going to get even better as we go along. Lawyers, more than anybody, are facing technological unemployment and they should be because we no longer really need to spend that much energy on creating the documents, but the model hasn’t really caught up yet.

The New Law Business Model is the catching up of the way that we are compensated, and the things we do for our clients, catching up with the technological innovations because the one thing that will never be able to be replaced by technology is humanity. Now we have this opportunity that lawyer’s time, energy, and attention is freed up from having to figure out how to create documents. Now, we get to support the lawyers to actually start to give their time, energy, and attention to cultivating their humanity.

What a huge opportunity. What a huge opportunity for lawyers, what a huge opportunity for their communities, because when lawyers get to focus on cultivating their humanity, and restructure their income models to be in alignment with why they actually went to law school in the first place–I believe that most lawyers went to law school in the first place because they want to help. The law is a helping profession.

Lawyers have the most opportunity to contribute to the shift of our culture when they’re not focused on the billable hour, and they’re not just focused on creating documents, but are instead focused on how to bring their gifts, the gifts of their humanity, to their communities.

This is the first time in our reality that we actually have the ability to do this as lawyers. Because technology has caught up. If we look at this moment in time, we can see that lawyers who use technology to its greatest ability, to be able to serve their communities start to see, I don’t get paid to create documents. I get paid to help people make good decisions. I get paid to be a trusted advisor.

That is a massive mindset shift for both the lawyers and for the people that are hiring the lawyers because we really indoctrinated people to believe, I think, that what they’re paying for is documents. That’s actually not the case, in fact, people who are buying documents from lawyers or even buying their own documents online, without a clear decision-making process for what goes into those documents, are leaving their families at risk, are leaving their businesses at risk.

Much in the same way that my father-in-law did when he died. You know, he bought a set of documents that did not work for us after he died. We are at this very unique moment in time, due to technological advancements as well as a willingness and a desire for lawyers to really step into and utilize their humanity, to have a shift in the practice models, in the business models, and in the way that lawyers are serving their clients.

A Transformed Experience

Nikki Van Noy: What you’re describing here really sounds like a sea change and I’m just curious with putting this model in place, how your experience as a lawyer has changed?

Ali Katz: I mean, Nikki, there was a time when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to be a lawyer anymore. I actually walked away from everything that I had created as a lawyer, including a million-dollar law practice, and including another million-dollar-plus business training lawyers. I moved to a farm and lived on that farm for a year saying, who would I be if number one, I wasn’t making my decisions based on any sort of need for money? And number two, if I considered the possibility that maybe I cannot be a lawyer and live in alignment with my values?

What I discovered during that year is that I love being a lawyer. I just can’t be a lawyer from that old paradigm perspective, because it was not nourishing to me. I didn’t actually feel as if I was really helping people, and in order to be able to be a lawyer in a way that truly aligned with who I am, and how I wanted to serve, I would have to completely shift where I was coming from.

Once I did that, once I spent that year recognizing that I could be a lawyer, and I could serve lawyers from a totally new place, then I was able to move off of the farm and come back out into the world, and see that actually part of my privilege and my responsibility is to help lawyers to make this transition for themselves.

Because if lawyers don’t see a different possibility for themselves, we will lose the best and the brightest to other opportunities. Many of the lawyers who come to us at New Law Business Model do come to us at this moment in their own life, where they are saying, “Maybe I need to go do something else because I cannot find fulfillment being a lawyer.”

Today I can say that I am just so thrilled that I went to law school. I am so thrilled that I became a lawyer because I have found a way to be able to lawyer that fulfills my desire to truly make a difference in people’s lives, be able to make a great living, and to not kill myself in the process while I am doing it.

Watching other lawyers be able to step into that is one of the most fulfilling parts of my life. So, I can’t recall exactly what the question was that got me onto that topic, but I am so glad to be giving lawyers a new lease on life, I guess I would say, so that they can use their law degrees, and see that their law degree can be their most, their highest value asset. Not just from a financial perspective, but from the perspective of true fulfillment because that isn’t always presented to us as an option when we are coming out of law school.

Nikki Van Noy: Yeah, you know Ali, I am asking you to speculate a little bit here to the extent that it is possible, but hearing you talk about your year on the farm made me think a lot about the situation that we are in right now. I know in my own life–and I have seen this happen with a lot of my friends also–it’s like we have this break and this silence that we are just not used to. Even if you are still working, you are working from home and it is a different scenario than usual.

It seems to me like with this for a lot of people is coming a value shift and reprioritization. The feeling of it sounds a lot like what was happening at the farm. So, I am curious if you have talked to other lawyers in the midst of this, or if you foresee what is happening right now, shifting in the profession in the direction that you’re talking about in a more large-scale way.

Force or Choice

Ali Katz: Yeah, you know one of the best parts of what I am seeing right now is that, in the past, when I was seeking to educate lawyers, I had to lead with a conversation about money. Meaning that if I wanted to attract lawyers to learn from me, I had to focus on, “We’re going to teach you to make lots of money with your law degree.”

What I am starting to see now, and really over the past couple of years, not just now as a result of everyone needing to stay home, I will share more about that in a moment–but what I have been seeing in the last couple of years is that I no longer need to lead with the money. I get to lead with the heart.

That is new in the legal profession, and even if you see the cover of my book, you will see a heart on the cover of my book. Six, seven years ago, I didn’t feel that that would have gone over very well in the legal field, but that has changed significantly.

The lawyers that we are seeing come into our programs now, they are leading with their hearts and it is so beautiful for me to see that. That is definitely different.

Now, with respect to everything that is happening as a result of the pandemic and people needing to stay home, what I’m really seeing is that lawyers who have wanted to go virtual, and deliver their services remotely for years, are actually doing it. At New Law Business Model, we have been providing services remotely and virtually forever really.

I remember back in 2005 and ’06 in my own law practice using Skype to deliver my services to people who were in, let’s say, Northern California. My office was in Southern California. They wanted to work with me because I had written the bestselling book on legal planning for families, and I did have my kid’s protection plan process that no other lawyers had at that time. So, they wanted to work with me, and we did it on Skype. That was 2005-2006.

So, we’ve had many lawyers who have wanted to create virtual practices, but they couldn’t get out of their own way. There wasn’t enough motivation to get out of their own way, to actually do the work that was necessary to create that virtual practice. Well, what has been amazing to see of course is that in the last three months, the number of lawyers in our New Law Business Model trainings who have gone virtual, and started delivering their services remotely, has been extraordinary.

Now, all of a sudden there is the requirement, there is the necessity. Now going virtual and serving clients remotely, yet still having a strong connection with our clients, without any sort of a decrease in the value of the service that’s being provided, in fact, I would say an increase in the value of the service that is being provided. Again, this is nothing new to us, but what this time has really forced for many lawyers is that now they have to do it.

Now they start to see there are no excuses. Now they are able to get out of their own way. Really, Nikki, I find that this is really what life does for us in some ways. You know in my own life I have recognized this idea of force or choice. Force or choice. So, I do believe that life is always looking out for us, as humanity, that we are in this evolutionary process to learn how to live on the planet in harmony with the planet, with each other, and of course with ourselves.

Life is directing us through force or choice. So, we will either be forced into seeing what is hard to see, and through that being guided towards more harmony with the planet, with each other, and with ourselves, or we will choose that. When I moved to the farm for a year in many ways I was forced. It felt as if I was being forced. In some ways, I could see how I was choosing it at the time, but it did feel as if I was being forced.

Really, it was my choices that were being made from a place of blindness, in a way darkness, that was forcing me there. But what I see is happening now is that lawyers, and especially with this book, with The New Law Business Model Revealed book, are being given a choice that I could not see. If I couldn’t see it, and I am a seer in many ways, then really how could any other lawyers see it, right?

But now with this book, with New Law Business Model Revealed, I do believe that I am introducing a choice for lawyers to step into a new reality for themselves that is in full alignment with why they went to law school in the first place–to be able to help people, to be able to make a great living, to be able to have control over their lives and their schedules in a way that feels fulfilling. To be able to show up as role models in their communities and truly be able to shift culture. Now, this choice is available to us as lawyers because there is a business model that supports it.

It is very hard for people to be able to make a change in any industry when the financial realities just don’t support it. So New Law Business Model is a choice to align your financial realities with that of your clients and that of your community so that you are helping people do good, while still making a great living, being able to pay off your student loans, being able to be generous in our communities, and really come back to the reason that I believe we went to law school in the first place.

Nikki Van Noy: You know hearing you talk about the lawyer’s experience, I feel like this experience can be applied to a lot of different industries. Is this book specifically and only for lawyers or is there some crossover to other industries as well?

Ali Katz: Well, any smart business owner will read this book and be able to find the application from the legal field into their own industry. In fact, that, in many ways, is how The New Law Business Model was born. Many years ago, when I saw that the current, the traditional practice model for lawyers wasn’t working, and I looked around at the most successful lawyers in the field, and I saw what success looked like as a lawyer, I said, “Wait a minute, I don’t want that.”

They were working all the time. Sure, maybe they’re making good money, but they don’t have any time to enjoy it and they don’t actually seem that happy with their lives.

I needed to leave the legal field to learn from other business owners in service-based practices, like chiropractors and dentists and carpet cleaners, even a magician, who were service providers in their own industries and innovating in their industries in ways that I could see was allowing them to make a great living, and have a great life. That was the definition of success I wanted. So, I needed to go out and learn from them and then take what I learned and apply it to my law practice. That is actually where the roots of The New Law Business Model came from.

Anybody who wants to have a practice or a business–and I do see those as really two separate kinds of ways of bringing your work into the world on a spectrum. If you have a one-to-one service that you are offering in the world, you start with the practice, and then you can build that into a business. Eventually, you may build it into a company.

So, anybody who has a service that they want to offer in the world, in a way that is sustainable for them, that does allow them to align their own financial interest with that of their clients, in a way that makes sense for their time, and the value of the outcome that they are providing to their clients will be able to read The New Law Business Model book and learn a tremendous amount for themselves that they can then apply in their own practice as they grow that into a business and perhaps even decide to change an industry as a result.

Eventually, I will have a book that is not lawyer specific. There are two more books on the horizon. I hope I will be able to get them written more quickly than this one. This one actually took me two years to write, even though I had a lot of help. So, I am hoping that the next two, which will be non-industry specific to lawyers, will come much more quickly but anybody who wants to get a preview of what they can create in their own business, even if they are not lawyers really can and should read this book and apply it to their own work.

No Need to Reinvent the Wheel

Nikki Van Noy: Well, as far as the two years go, books are such a labor of love and they take so many resources on all different levels, which is why I really love doing this podcast. I always know that on the other end of the line is someone who is truly passionate about whatever it is they’re writing about because otherwise there is no incentive to write a book.

Ali Katz: It’s really true. I mean the book writing process is something that I am compelled to do. I am really grateful at this point that anybody who does read The New Law Business Model book and who wants to implement the model in their own life and law practice, without having to reinvent the wheel, and who does want to serve families and business owners as we teach, can now work with us at New Law Business Model.

That really allows the book to be rewarding to me at another level, but I have an even greater hope honestly with the book, which is that lawyers in other practice areas will read the book and start to come up with ideas about how they can transform, for example, the world of divorce. Which in some ways, is where I wanted to start, but I never ended up starting in that practice because I saw what the divorce process did to my parents.

I saw what the divorce process tried to do to me and my kid’s dad. On occasion, I do handle divorce matters for friends as a mediator, because our divorce process is so broken that it is tearing families apart. So, one of my greatest hopes with this book is that some divorce lawyer out there who has a better way, and that really has the business model dialed in, in respects, will learn something from this book and see how we can make it even better. So that we can help lawyers who are serving people going through a divorce or maybe who are facing bankruptcy as I did.

To have an experience with lawyers that will actually help their family and help their businesses. I really look forward to that happening as well as lawyers taking the concepts that I am sharing here and applying it to other business areas to serve at a greater level.

Nikki Van Noy: Divorce lawyers, listen up.

Ali Katz: Yes, that’s right. I’m here, I’m ready to support and serve that market when there is a lawyer who reads this and says, “Okay, I’ve got what’s needed to actually build the business systems.” Because, I want to be clear about that, for lawyers who want to step into this new practice model, it does require the business systems to support the practice model. With technology today, there is so much opportunity to be able to streamline the process of how we communicate with our clients and how we educate our communities, as a starting place.

We get to educate on this broad level, and then how we stay in communication with our clients. You know one of the biggest complaints against lawyers is that a client hires a lawyer, and then they never hear from them again. It is like they fall into this black hole. Well, that’s because lawyers get so overwhelmed with all the clients that they have to take on in order to make a living, and then they don’t have the processes and systems in place to communicate with their clients on an ongoing basis, and frankly, I think lawyers just get overwhelmed and they collapse under their lack of systems.

Today, one of the things that we get to do is use technology to automate the way that we communicate with our clients, so we keep them informed every step of the way. I am really looking forward to a divorce lawyer who has that ability to really understand the divorce process but then has that ability to really build the systems for that ongoing communication with the clients–so that clients never again have to complain to the bar that they hired their attorney and then never heard anything again, or that the attorney was not able to advise them well about how to resolve a conflict that should be easily resolvable.

Nikki Van Noy: Yeah, you know from a client end, all of this really lands with me. Every lawyer I have ever had cause to work with has been absolutely wonderful, and it has been such a human process, and yet they have this reputation. So, I love that idea, just from my personal experience, of allowing lawyers to do what so many of them seem to do so well and then can’t for various reasons. I think people from other industries can relate to that.

You know the feeling of just too many clients and wanting to perform their job one way and being forced into doing another.

Ali Katz: Yeah, I mean what that really speaks to Nikki–and, again, this will be a topic of another book–is that our financial models for how we serve clients across industries is broken. That is a bigger conversation in how the legal industry is broken, but it really does affect every industry, where people want to provide a great service, but we have not been taught actually how to price and package and deliver our services in a way that allows us to not get bogged down by this idea of being out of right relationship with time, money, and how we get paid.

I have actually created a whole body of work around this concept of ‘enough’. I’ve got a series of teachings called The Money Map. This all happens through Eyes Wide Open, which is the brand that I’ve created for this, to help people be able to make eyes wide open decisions around the use of their time, energy, attention, and money. So, that we can construct our income models in a way that allows us to provide a great service, get paid what we need to provide that great service, and have our clients happy with the outcomes.

Because far too often, the way that we have been taught to make our decisions around how we provide our services, how we price and package our services, simply puts us into a situation of workaholism–not really being able to provide a great service. Not really being able to be the people that we want to be in our families. Constantly feeling the stress of not enough, scrambling to catch up. We are at a time in our reality where we can shift this because of technology when we use it in the right way.

For the first time in our history and, really, in our ancestral history–truly we live in a world where there is actually enough. We just have to change the way we are making our decisions so that we are no longer making them based on a scarcity mentality, that our parents and our grandparents and so on before them needed to have. They needed to have that, they actually needed to structure things the way that they were structured, but we don’t need to do that anymore.

We are at this moment in time where we get to change everything, and we get to create the way that we offer our services from a place of thriving. From a place of abundance, a word that I don’t typically actually like. I think we need to change our relationship from this survival scarcity based mentality that has informed us up until now. This is our opportunity, as creators of the next economy.

We are in this next economy moment. It is being created now as a result of the decisions that we make and we have a far greater ability to influence the next economy than most of us think. That’s really what I look forward to going forward, is helping us all to step into our role as creators of the economy. Recognizing that we each have that ability, especially those of us that are professionals, especially those of us that have invested so much in becoming well-trained in our skills and our services.

As a result of how we offer those services, we can create the next economy that is truly the one that we want to live in, and we want to be a part of, and I am really excited about that.

Nikki Van Noy: Beautiful, Ali, and very inspiring too. The book again is The New Law Business. Outside of the book, where else can listeners find you?

Ali Katz: I am available, of course, at newlawbusinessmodel.com. If you are a lawyer that is definitely the place for you to go, newlawbusinessmodel.com. Then eyeswideopenlife.com is where I am sharing my work around our role as creators in the economy.