Q&A: Emma Maxwell – “I thought that if I’m starting from scratch and doing something that I haven't done before, I might as well rethink everything.”

In short:

• Anchored Family Law is a Victoria-based firm with a national clientele that provides fixed-fee, remote family law services.
• Director and principal Emma Maxwell uses technology to streamline the delivery of legal assistance to those who cannot access legal aid, in particular.
• A monthly subscription model is at the core of the firm’s service offering.

Can you tell us how you came to set up Anchored Family Law?

I didn’t intend to end up in family law. I finished my law degree and ultimately was offered a job in class actions at Maurice Blackburn. I spent seven years on large-scale litigation. At that time, it was kind of the very beginnings of class actions in Australia, so that was exciting, but it wasn't a great match for me. During that time, I had moved to a regional area and I was commuting back to Melbourne and I decided that I couldn't do the commute anymore, so I started to look at what was available regionally and that was family law. So, I started in family law by default in Ballarat, but it has been what suits me and what I love. I practised for another seven or eight years before going out on my own, just after COVID-19, and I’ve been running Anchored Family Law for almost four years now.

Taking such a leap of faith must have been confronting.

Yes, but I had a baby just before the pandemic hit and then I came back from maternity leave and went straight into working from home. I realised how much I preferred it and how many of my clients seemed happy being able to communicate with me remotely. I didn't want to go back into the office, quite frankly, and I realised that I could design a firm that worked for me and the types of clients that I wanted to work with. COVID gave us a jumping off point that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and it turned out to be the best thing possible for me and my family.

The sole-practitioner, remote model seems to be working for many women lawyers who have had a big-firm background and want to transition to practising by themselves and having more flexibility. Is that how you saw it at the time?

Yes, I did and I got to go through a process of rethinking everything. I thought that if I’m starting from scratch and doing something that I haven’t done before, I might as well rethink everything. That’s why the firm is so different to most other law firms.

What was the biggest test in setting up the firm?

Really it was around knowing that I could bring the work in myself. I always thought I could just go back to practising for another firm if I needed to, but being able to convince clients that I would see them remotely and that I was going to bill differently with a subscription model – that was a challenge. There was a six-month period at the beginning where I was waiting to see if it would work, and thankfully it did.

When you set up Anchored Family Law in 2022 offering assistance around divorce, property settlement, parenting and child custody arrangements, what gap were you trying to fill in a highly competitive market?

I wanted to be values-led, and I wanted to only work with particular types of clients after having previously worked with a broad spectrum of clients. In the early days I tested a lot of things. I was able to do so because I worked from home in a little office pod that my husband built in our backyard. I got to be more flexible. I offered weekend morning appointments for people that were working and that’s where the subscription model grew from, too, because I wanted to give clients predictability. By thinking about things from a different perspective, we naturally carved out our own niche from a very different place in the marketplace than most other law firms.

This monthly subscription model has been a key to your success, with clients paying a fixed monthly fee that covers not only advice and contact with their lawyer but also all written negotiations with the other party. Tell us more about how it works.

As I was in a regional area, there was a lot of legal aid work, which is a good thing for a practitioner in my view. It makes you very efficient as you balance the needs of fee-paying clients and legal aid clients. But I began to really notice that there is no predictability for the fee-paying clients once I was no longer doing legal aid work. There was a whole gap of people that just couldn’t afford to put down large sums of money to start legal work, and the idea of going into proceedings not knowing what it was going to cost them was unfathomable for people that were stuck in a position where they had no choice but to go forward with proceedings. So, thinking about the idea of predictability and how we could best meet that need while protecting the firm and making it profitable for the firm, we got the idea for a subscription model. We tried out several different iterations of it before we settled on the model we've had for a few years now, which is where clients pay a set monthly fee that covers all their contact with us. They contact us via Zoom and email and telephone and all of our written negotiations with the other side are covered. Then for anything else – any kind of landmark events such as court or settlement documents – it’s all fixed fee. There’s a lot of predictability and we publish on our website all our fees so clients can go ahead and work through and budget with that monthly payment.

Your website has a very clear list of fees, which is not always the case with some firms. From what you’re saying, it seems to work for you and your clients, right?

It feels like it's the right thing to do. It feels like I'm giving the clients what they need in a very uncertain time, but it's also good for us too in that we have real predictability and really smooth cashflow.

What else has been a challenge in running the firm?

Recruiting has been our biggest issue. I realised really early on that, working remotely, I couldn't have a junior with me because I really think junior lawyers need to sit next to senior lawyers and learn from them by being exposed to their day-to-day work. I couldn't do that. Zoom is not conducive to teaching a junior lawyer. They need hands-on experience, which led me to trying to hire senior practitioners. But the problem with senior practitioners is they can be really set in their ways and, working in a model like mine, it goes against the way most lawyers are trained. You have to be very, very efficient and careful with how you use your time at Anchored. Also, there's a change in mindset for our lawyers. With a subscription model, clients need to trust that we will respond really quickly and that they can rely on us. A new client that is onboarding often has a high level of needs and that can be difficult for lawyers who aren't used to working on a fixed-fee basis. So, at the moment, I'm stuck in the position of not being a great fit for senior lawyers and not being a great fit for junior lawyers.

What does success look like for your firm?

It's a combination of things. I feel like I've achieved a way to make an unfair system a little bit fairer. This is not a system people want to be in, and it's a terrible experience for them almost 100% of the time. In addition, I have young children and a lot of my goal was to be as flexible and have as much time for them as I could, and I've achieved that.

How do you make the family law system less ‘terrible’ for your clients, outside of giving them fee certainty?

Through communication – we’ve been really working on communicating in a way that is not traditional within the law. For example, with our initial consultation, clients get our Navigation Guidebook, a graphic guide that sets out the family law process. If people are overwhelmed, they can't process a five- or six-page letter from their lawyer. We also give clients free access to my calendar so they can book whenever they need to, while being conscious that it’s not going to cost them any extra. It means we can be really proactive in getting in front of an issue before it becomes an issue. I know before that when people were fee-paying they would put off contacting me because they didn't want to pay for it, and then issues would get bigger and harder to solve.

You practise online exclusively. Can you tell us why you went down that path and how it is working for you?

After COVID, having only online appointments seemed natural for my core market, which is millennials, and it’s quite natural now for a lot of people. We also have a lot of diverse clients and people with disabilities and that means that they don't have to leave their house. They can speak to me from the comfort of their own home and that makes it easier for them.

Do you need any tech support in the background or any other sort of software programs that have made it easier in that sense?

I pretty much use any tech that I can find and which will make life easier. I trial things quickly when they come on to the marketplace. So, we've moved away from Zoom and we’ve got VXT now. I’m looking forward to them bringing in their video system. It’s a telephone integration system, and it automatically captures transcripts of conversations, which is really great because then I can have a conversation with a client and I'm not focused on my phone and I can have the conversation knowing that it’s been captured and then it goes back into my practice management software, Smokeball, straight away. Removing a lot of the heavy admin makes our processes more straightforward and it makes our model more efficient.

What about AI – are you using it?

I have ChatGPT open and next to me all the time. I think that as long as you don't use it as an alternative to your own brain, it makes life much easier. I never trust it, I know it hallucinates, but I can say to it, ‘How can I make this more straightforward? How can I put this into simpler language?’ Because there is a tendency to overcomplicate things for lawyers and making things clearer is always better – and AI is strong in that way.

As you look to the future, where do you think Anchored Family Law will be in five years?

Originally, I wanted to grow. I liked the idea of offering other lawyer mums, in particular, this type of flexibility that I have at the moment. But I'm stuck with a recruiting issue. So, I can see this model going on for the rest of my career, or it might be that we grow. I am really not sure at the moment.

Are there any other messages you would like to get across to fellow law firm leaders?

We fall into a lot of traditions with law. The more we can think about why are we doing things the way we do them and see if there is a different way to do that, it makes our lives easier and our lives happier.

This is an edited version of a podcast interview with Emma Maxwell. For the full podcast, click here to listen on Spotify.

www.anchoredfamilylaw.com.au