Paul Seabrook

Kevin Daisey (00:31)
What’s up everyone. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Managing Partners Podcast. Thank you for tuning in as always. Thank you for listening to me and my guests and just appreciate everyone that tunes into this show. Today I have Paul Seabrook here out of San Jose, California. And Paul loves business. He owns a law firm. I’m excited to kind of talk to Paul, learn more about his business.

And of course, hope it helps some of you that are listening, that are either just in the middle of your business, starting your business, thinking about starting a business because we have a mixed bag of listeners on this show. So I’m excited to, learn more from Paul.

Paul Seabrook (01:05)
Yeah, I forward to helping anybody out there who can benefit from my story. That’s for sure.

Kevin Daisey (01:10)
Yeah, that’s what we’re all about. well, Paul, thank you. Please let us know more about you and introduce yourself and tell us about your firm and we’ll just kind of take it from there.

Paul Seabrook (01:18)
Yeah, Paul Seabrook. I graduated in 2010 and bounced between Seattle and the Bay Area. In 2016, I opened this law firm. Originally, I was working in bankruptcy law and decided in 2017, I needed to diversify and I added family law and found out I liked it so much that I just kind of…

decided to focus on it. And by 2020, things started to look good. And since 2021, I think I’ve grown my law firm about 1,000%.

Um, so it’s, it’s, it’s been a wild sort of journey for me, um, trying to experience this growth and manage all the things you have to manage while expanding the business. We’re, uh, sort of ready to make 2026 a real big year for us. You know, we had to learn some things, had to learn some lessons, but next year is going to be really good.

Kevin Daisey (02:00)
Yeah, it’s awesome.

I love it. I love the, you know, the positivity, optimism. That’s how I live my life if I can. And, you know, thinking about the good things and better your next year and how can we improve when we did? that’s great. It’s awesome to have that success. So it sounds like, you know, you’re going bankruptcy, you, you’re just a family law, you like that and you, you, went all in on that. And I know from looking at your website and things like that, you know, you really focused on like.

Paul Seabrook (02:43)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (02:48)
high asset, high net worth. Do you kind of niche specifically in that area? that where you found the most success?

Paul Seabrook (02:53)
Yeah, you know, mean, people, you know, they’ve got big problems, you know, when you’re dealing with high net worth divorce, you’re going to you’re absolutely going to need help, you know, identifying the assets and making sure you get a fair value in them. Also dealing with, you know, minor children and how to.

navigate the challenges that people face when dealing with a high asset, high conflict divorce. It’s very painful.

Kevin Daisey (03:18)
Yeah. So, mean, obviously, you know, focusing on that, um, you know, that as size and more goes into a divorce like that, then you’re, running the mill kind of divorces out there. So, um, and it’s kind it’s kind of interesting. I see divorce firms that either just take anything under the sun. They’re more like a volume kind of firm and, uh, separate from that, I see ones that they’re brand the way they carry themselves.

they’re very specific that they’re focused on a high net worth.

Paul Seabrook (03:48)
Yeah, it becomes difficult.

When you start thinking about who you’re going to serve and how you’re going to serve them, it’s really important to have all those things aligned. It becomes difficult if you go into McDonald’s and you want filet mignon. You’re going to have issues there. If you go into

you know, a good steakhouse and you just want the cheap food. Likewise, you’re just going to run into problems. And so as a business, you want to try to find out who you serve and serve them to the best of your ability.

Kevin Daisey (04:24)
Yeah, it’s hard to do all of it. It’s hard to do both of those things. And I know that in my business too. It’s, you know, you can, yeah.

Paul Seabrook (04:31)
Yeah, you wish you could help everybody, that

certainly increases the challenges the business faces.

Kevin Daisey (04:40)
Yeah. It’s almost like from a business perspective, you know, you’d almost have like two different brands or two different firms. Cause yeah, to your point, how everything’s structured and built and how, your staff and, and processes for a, you know, a, a small kind of run of the mill case versus like a real high complex divorce case. If you’re built for the high end high asset.

You’re just not going be officially, you’re going to lose money probably on those other cases,

Paul Seabrook (05:09)
Yeah, smaller, simpler cases become more difficult to manage because, you know, they’ve, and it’s really difficult because those people are in trouble. You know, I mean, I, you know, the, the passion I get is from helping people who are in a toxic marriage reclaim their freedom. And it’s, it’s, it’s real tough because there’s a lot of people in bad situations that you want to be able to help. But again, if you start trying to, you know,

hand out a McDonald’s cheeseburger for $50 that clients don’t like. That doesn’t get for a happy client.

Kevin Daisey (05:40)
It’s not going to work. ⁓

So do you have, I mean, I guess the best thing to do is to have good referral sources to say, Hey, not a fit for us. I got so and so, or that would be a great fit for you and help you out that way you’re taking care of them. Hopefully they’re getting into the work with the service they need. And you can continue to focus on, you know, what’s your best at. So.

Paul Seabrook (05:55)
Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Kevin Daisey (06:07)
Yeah, that’s great. I tell me a little bit more, I guess, uh, the structure of your firm. Um, you’ve had obviously great growth and success. Um, especially recently, what are some of the, you know, I guess what’s the makeup of your firm, attorneys, things like that. Um, and, uh, just interested to get into more like, what, what were the kind of those moments of success or what things can you recall that you felt contributed to that?

Array Digital (06:37)
Thank you for tuning into the show today. I have taken things to the next level and I’ve started the Managing Partners Mastermind. We’re a peer group of owners looking for connection, clarity, and growth strategies. So if you’re looking to grow your law firm and not do it alone, please consider joining the group. Spots are limited, so I ask for anyone to reach out to me directly through LinkedIn and we can set up a one-on-one call to make sure it’s a fit.

Now back to the show.

Paul Seabrook (07:07)
Yeah, think the biggest thing is, you know, so I’ve got five attorneys underneath me. My whole team is 20. And as we, I mean, it’s tough because it’s not ever any one thing. You know, I have had to learn hard lessons.

in every aspect of the business. Marketing, intake, sales, we’ve, you know, the lawyers and the lawyers, the work that we do has always been good. But, you know, when you start to see this kind of growth that I’ve experienced, really trying to manage it becomes challenging.

and trying to figure out how to make sure that we manage the cases so that every client feels heard and can, that we can make sure that they’re progressing. That’s probably been the biggest because when I kind of got that under control, that’s when we started to have the happy clients who were getting what I wanted them to get.

Kevin Daisey (07:58)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. It’s as you scale, like every client wants time. They want to be updated. What is their case? What can they do to help with the case? you know, so it takes a lot. so, yeah, it’s one good legal work is.

Paul Seabrook (08:06)
Yeah, and if you get it all wrong,

like if you don’t manage it effectively, then you’re going to have unhappy clients who leave bad reviews and then it’s going to be, you know, it makes marketing your law form more challenging. so, yeah, there’s a lot to consider, you know, and then, you know, like the staff, do you have the right staff?

And when you get to be my size, I mean, you probably experienced this. All of a sudden, California employment law comes into play as far as how we’ve got to manage it. It was a lot simpler when it was me and a couple of people. as you get more complex, it certainly adds to the learning opportunities I’ve had.

Kevin Daisey (08:43)
You

absolutely. mean, yeah, to, you know, doing great legal work. think a lot of lawyers, they all want and believe and they do good legal work. And that’s, that gets you to some, you know, a certain amount of leeway, but to run a law firm and to scale it and grow it, just doing good legal work is not enough. You have to have the systems, the processes. Yeah.

Paul Seabrook (09:05)
Yeah,

that’s where, you know, it’s so important. The systems and the procedures, you know, the policies, it’s got to be written down. get to, last night I decided I was going to schedule a meeting with my team. That’s sort of an impromptu meeting this afternoon just to cover something that people, you know, I noticed that.

People, know, give them an inch, they take a mile, that kind of thing. And we get to have a meeting today to get people back in line on what, you know, how we need to do things and why we need to do it the way we’re doing it.

Kevin Daisey (09:40)
Yeah.

So something in that process is getting skipped or missed and you need to dial it back in. Yeah. It’s going to happen. It’s going to, it’s going to continue to happen. Right. And as you grow, you know, you got your communication can become charter. There’s something like, it’s like the project manager, certification, my business partners, the project manager, whatever, but it’s in there. Like as you add another person.

Paul Seabrook (09:44)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (10:00)
two people, then three people, then four people. Like the communication gets so much more difficult. And as you have 20 people or 50 people, it just makes things way more complex. so companies can get really out of whack and very complex very quickly.

Paul Seabrook (10:06)
Friend. Friend.

That’s what, know, like I think for a law firm, I noticed that I got complex. So I had, was, was pouring a lot into growth and I had three lawyers working for me. And I noticed that when I tried to expand past that, I needed to bring on administrative support to help me with marketing, help me with HR, help me with business operations.

And when I did that, the business got complex. And all of a sudden, the marketing needed to work and the sales needed to work. The overhead goes up and then the way the attorneys and the paralegals are delivering the service needed to work. And that’s where…

Kevin Daisey (10:47)
Well, your overhead went up.

Paul Seabrook (10:55)
I’ve learned a lot these last couple of years, you know, as I’ve tried to understand where the holes are in the business and what needs to be fixed. It’s been a tremendous opportunity to learn, that’s for sure. Any of it in law school, by the way, none of this came out.

Kevin Daisey (11:07)
It sounds like so have you

You

only learn this stuff on the Managing Partners podcast right here. So it sounds like, so have you, have you fallen in love with the business side of law?

Paul Seabrook (11:20)
Yes, I have. Yeah. I think I’m probably in line for a vacation here coming up. I could take a break, that’s for sure. But yeah, no, it’s, it’s fascinating to be able to think about how you get people to, you know, buy in to what you need them to buy into and, you know, holding standards and there’s just so much.

Kevin Daisey (11:39)
There is so much. It’s just so many things. People always say, what’s the secret? And it’s like, well, there’s no secret. There’s no silver bullet. It’s a lot of things that you have to work on.

Paul Seabrook (11:47)
Yeah, there’s

no, mean, if you got one thing wrong, it can, it can, it’s not, you you got to fix it. I feel like, you know, somebody, I get asked a lot, like, what’s the one thing that you wish you knew? And there’s, you know, I can’t answer that question because

Kevin Daisey (11:58)
You

Paul Seabrook (12:04)
I had to experience it. had to go through some tumultuous times, you know, in looking at what I had created and looking at what I wanted and what’s the gap there, you know, as far as I’m sure. I know now that if I knew how hard it was going to be, I would never have started. You know, that’s the truth of the matter.

Kevin Daisey (12:27)
But it takes that hardship and lessons to be able to be good and to be able to address those things, right? And learn it really deeply enough to go, okay, I know what to do to fix this. But you can’t just read a book one time and go, okay, I can do all this. It takes that experience.

Paul Seabrook (12:39)
Yeah.

No, it’s trial and error.

Yeah, it’s experience, it’s making mistakes and you know, just keep going one foot in front of the other. That’s how I’ve done it.

Kevin Daisey (12:51)
Well, it sounds like you’ve done a great job. I, I use this analogy sometimes. I’m what I was having kids. I got two kids. and all, all my friends that had already had kids, they want to tell you everything. I’m going to tell you everything and you’re just going to listen to me and, and then you’ll have it all figured out. Of course you ignore everything they say. And then when you have your second kid or your friends have kids, you’re like, here’s a book. You read this, do this.

And they probably don’t listen to any of it because they have to go into it themselves and then they come out. Second kid, they understand what to do.

Paul Seabrook (13:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Second kid, yeah, I’ve got two kids as well. the second one, the first one, know, it was everything you see is the first time you’re seeing it. And that’s a lot like running a law firm is, you know, all of a sudden, you know, you have an employee do something that you never, you never even thought you’d have to come across. And all of a sudden, here we are. And I get to learn this now too. And

Kevin Daisey (13:38)
You

Paul Seabrook (13:42)
It’s an interesting, never-ending learning experience, that’s for sure.

Kevin Daisey (13:46)
Yeah. And it’s easy, think for, no, it never is. I mean, every week it’s something. but, that’s good. You have to fall in love with that part or have fun with it, or you’re, you’re not going to be in good place. I think if you just, you’re up for the challenge, like you’re excited about next year and 2026 and where you’re at now, that’s the mindset you have to have, or you’re just not, you’re not going to be in a good place.

Paul Seabrook (14:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

it’s, it’s, I think it’s important because you’ve got to be able to, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna grow a business, you gotta learn all the parts of it. You gotta learn how to make, how to improve upon it. You know, you get to be my, my size. And I think it really, like, if I had any advice for people out there trying to, like for law firms.

If you’re trying to go from small to big, for me, it was three attorneys. then crossing over into more than that is when it became so complex that I needed to bring in people who knew what they were doing in order to help me. I mean, there’s people who work for me that know a lot more than me.

You know, that’s, you know, I, initially I hired some folks who were learning on the job and that cost me a lot.

Kevin Daisey (14:54)
Yep. That that’s a very important lesson right there. I’ve done this too, is you try to bring people out of school or college or someone that, just has a little bit of experience and you plug them in and, they, they can’t help you get to that next step. They might actually cause more problems. so I think, yeah, it’s, it’s hard to do because you’re like, okay, I got to hire a bunch of people that don’t bring in any revenue. They don’t bring in any money.

Paul Seabrook (15:14)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (15:16)
And you’re not sure if it’s the right decision or if they’re the right fit or the right people or there’s just so many complexities there. Like are they the right culture?

Paul Seabrook (15:22)
Yeah, and

I’ll tell you, you know, like one of the fascinating things about that part of it is if you’re bringing in somebody to do a job that I don’t know how to do, how do you hold them accountable to that job? That was something, you know, like the first time or two I tried to do this, like I didn’t even know.

what I wanted from them. All I knew is that I needed help in operations and trying to find somebody you trust and you trust has that knowledge and experience and is gonna help you out was a challenge for sure.

Kevin Daisey (15:53)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a risk. And it’s again, once you get to that size, I have a lot of business owners that I know person that tell me I made more money and I was happier when I was just by myself. It’s like, and you know, and so, yeah, you, you cross the line at some point where it’s like, okay, this is not about me. Obviously I got team. got, have family. It just gets so much bigger. And, and then it’s easier to fail as you’ve scaled up in some cases.

Paul Seabrook (16:03)
Hmm.

Kevin Daisey (16:18)
Because there’s a lot more risk, a lot more overhead. If leads aren’t coming in and sales aren’t closing, you have a lot more there to be responsible for. So he’s saying you just.

Paul Seabrook (16:20)
Wim parts, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

That marketing side

of things is really difficult to get right. I tell you, it’s a never ending process. What do you do to attract enough leads, enough high quality leads?

Kevin Daisey (16:43)
Yeah. And then you got new

platforms. You got AI search, you got Google, you can change your stuff all the time.

Paul Seabrook (16:51)
Yeah, always got to be on top of it. And you got to have somebody who knows. I mean, that was, you you go through a thousand percent growth. That was so fascinating for me because, you know, obviously when I, when I started on that journey of growth, I had marketing that was working. And then I noticed as the growth kind of continued.

The marketing had to change and it didn’t. It has now. I, you know, like it’s so fascinating as you go through this journey on business as far as, you know, who do you want to attract and how do you attract them?

Kevin Daisey (17:26)
Yeah. It doesn’t stay static, right? It’s as you grow and have different things, you know, different clientele, you know, you’re in a different position, your brand grows, authority grows, and you can also pull off other types of marketing that a startup firm or small firm can’t. So you get some advantages, you know, um, it’s, think there’s, you know, obviously we do marketing, there’s like when you’re, when you’re starting out,

Paul Seabrook (17:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Daisey (17:52)
You got to pump up ton of money and a bigger percentage of your budget into awareness and lead gen and all that stuff. But as you, know, as firms get bigger, like a Morgan and Morgan are like some of these big law firms out there. Like they put all their money into brand because they’re, so recognized now. It’s just keeping that brand going, but they don’t have to pay pay-per-click and they don’t have to do these other things. So it’s kind of like this life cycle, if you will.

Paul Seabrook (18:06)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (18:14)
And I think that a lot of firms try to like skip or go into channels and areas that they’re just not prepared for, or they can’t afford, or they just don’t have the long, you know, they don’t have the brand there long enough to be successful in some.

Paul Seabrook (18:26)
Yeah, I can totally

tell. You know, like, like, like, you know, like we’re embarking, we’re going to have to embark on some more brand marketing, you know, as we continue to grow, you know, we’re, we’re growing. There’s a couple of law firms in the Bay Area that are bigger than me still. you know, I’m trying to chase them down.

Kevin Daisey (18:44)
coming for them. Paul is coming for you. Watch out.

Paul Seabrook (18:47)
Yep,

yep, I’m here, that’s for sure.

Kevin Daisey (18:50)
I love it, man. That’s awesome. I love everything you’re doing. What is the best way for folks to, I guess, find your firm, check it out? What’s the best way to connect with you personally, if I got other lawyers that are like, Hey, I love your story. Like love to talk with you and learn more. What’s the best way to find you?

Paul Seabrook (19:03)
Yeah, the

website, you know, the Google My Name. you know, I show up there. Email is just paul@seabrooklawoffices.com And happy to talk with people, you know. I’m part of a network of a lot of attorneys who are growing. I’m always happy to, you know, talk ideas and give tips, you know, help people out.

Kevin Daisey (19:09)
You

I love it.

That right there, you know, having a network or a mastermind or a group of other attorneys, someone else to talk to, especially other owners is so important. ⁓ it’s pretty lonely. otherwise, yeah. Unless all your friends and family are entrepreneurs.

Paul Seabrook (19:33)
Critical, yeah.

Yeah, man, yeah.

Entrepreneur there, no that doesn’t happen.

Kevin Daisey (19:43)
Yeah.

So it’s, it’s hard to take that home or talk to your normal friends. And if they don’t run a business, it’s,

Paul Seabrook (19:49)
Yeah,

they don’t get it. They don’t understand it.

Kevin Daisey (19:51)
They just say, hey, you’re lucky.

Paul Seabrook (19:53)
If they only knew if they only knew

Kevin Daisey (19:55)
Everyone listening is so lucky and it was came easy, right?

Paul Seabrook (19:59)
Blood, sweat, and tears, that’s for sure.

Kevin Daisey (20:01)
I I love it. All right. Well, um, I appreciate you, Paul, uh, coming on to share. what you’re doing. Excited to see you grow excited to see your success. Um, hopefully it’s motivational to everyone listening here. Um, especially the divorce attorneys that are tuning in and, you can get it done. You can have the growth thousand percent. mean, that’s awesome. Congratulations.

Paul Seabrook (20:07)
Thanks, John.

Yeah, that

was, it’s, it’s, you know, be careful out there guys. a lot that can happen. But thanks for the time Kevin. I appreciate it. was great chatting.

Kevin Daisey (20:25)
That’s right.

You as well. stick on with me for just a sec and everyone else. Thank you again for tuning in and we’ll see you on the next episode.