She's Not a Lawyer — But She Built One of California's Most Innovative Law Firms

Collin McKee

Welcome back. I'm Collin McKee, and today we're covering a topic I genuinely haven't seen before in the legal world. My guest runs a subscription-based law firm — not hourly retainers, not flat fees per case, a subscription like Netflix, but for your legal life. And here's the twist: she's not an attorney. She's a serial entrepreneur who looked at the legal industry from the outside, saw a broken business model, and rebuilt it from scratch. She runs four businesses, is done with work by 2pm every day, and just booked a trip to Barcelona, Mykonos, and Rome — so she's doing something right. Grace Gooray, welcome to the show.

Grace Gooray

Hi, thank you.

Collin McKee

I want to start at the beginning. You have three degrees, you run four businesses, and you built a law firm that's surprised me with how successful it is — and you're not even an attorney. So where does The Right Litigation Group actually come from?

Grace Gooray

I always wanted to be in law. My initial plan when I was younger was to become an attorney — I loved Matlock growing up, I was eight watching Matlock thinking, "I want to do criminal defense." But somewhere along the way I fell in love with business. My parents owned businesses; I was surrounded by it. I had a job at firms that were so new and small that I had to do both — the law side and the business side, growing their revenue and figuring it out along the way. Then I started doing that for multiple people, multiple law firms, and eventually thought, "I could do this myself."

Collin McKee

You said something in our pre-call that stuck with me — that most lawyers are lawyers first and business owners last, even if they own the firm. When that's the case, what does it really cost a managing partner?

Grace Gooray

When you go to law school, you're taught the law — you're not actually prepared for real-world law. Law school teaches you how to think like a lawyer; that's all it is. So when you come out and start your own firm, you have to learn the business side, and most people don't know how to switch that part of their brain. Law school only teaches one path of thinking — not as a business owner, because they don't want you to be a business owner; they want you to be another cog in the machine. So if you don't think of a law firm like a business, you never will. Law firms are businesses, but because lawyers run them, they don't think, "I need to check my numbers — what's my revenue, my CAC, my expenses?" Most don't even pay themselves; they use the old system of paying out of profits once a year. If you're not paying yourself and don't know where you're going, how do you know you need to grow? That's why a lot of attorneys who start a firm stay small or stay solos.

Collin McKee

Right — or they stay siloed inside a larger firm. The education system is built to make you a cog. So walk me through how a Netflix price-increase email inspires a subscription-based law firm, because that's a genuinely weird origin story.

Grace Gooray

Every time Netflix or Apple raises a subscription, they email you. I specifically remember a Netflix email saying prices were increasing in a month or two, and I just laughed — like, "Okay, so am I going to stop using you?" And I thought, that's probably how most people feel. They're already using it; they're not going to quit over a dollar or two. As inconvenient as it is, do we really think we're going to stop watching TV? It's an escape. Getting a lawyer is even more essential. So I thought, people will curse them in their head but won't actually cancel — I can work with that. I started it within the law firm, then across all my businesses. People don't think about recurring revenue enough — how can you get recurring revenue without lifting an existing finger? It transformed my firm. Suddenly I had predictable, consistent revenue every month while still getting new clients. That's a game changer — you're not stressing, especially when you're first starting out.

Collin McKee

Congratulations — brilliant idea. Let's talk about the business case, because it's striking. You told me the average firm gets around $7,500 per client lifetime. Contrast that with your subscription model.

Grace Gooray

Hourly retainers versus subscription — I'm probably up to about $20–25k per client lifecycle, on a consistent basis, because we take people from start to finish. It took some trial and error to find the right numbers, but if you build it right for your firm, it works very well: clients stay longer, fewer people leave in the middle of a case or because they can no longer afford it. The lifecycle of each client is about $20–25k. Compare that to hourly retainers, which run anywhere from $3,500 to $15–20k if you go to Northern California. We operate across the entire state, not just certain counties. If you tell someone to pay $15–20k at once, a lot of people can't bucket that — and when they see how fast it goes through on hourly billing, they're done. They don't want you calling in a month to re-up another $20,000.

Collin McKee

So you've got subscriptions at different tiers, flat fees, and classes. How do you figure out which lane a client goes into?

Grace Gooray

We pre-screen our consults, sometimes twice. The initial intake form is already a screen and sets up a normal case evaluation. If something gets flagged — certain words or the way it's written — they get screened again to determine whether they're looking for legal advice or something else. Based on that, the receptionist offers a class, a paid consultation, or another avenue. We do a lot of filtering up front. Then in the actual consultation we whittle it down to two options based on their price and what they want, and customize from there. The case evaluators, the intakes, and the code words that trigger a second intake are how we make sure people get to the right place.

Collin McKee

That's huge. A lot of firms don't put enough emphasis on screening — it's about using your resources well, and it's a service to the client too.

Grace Gooray

And I'm not going to waste my time. I clear a few spots in the morning to personally take some consults, and I always told my team: my time is the most expensive, so if I'm taking someone, make sure it's someone I want to speak to; if not, put it on someone else's calendar. We have another filter we don't really tell people about — you can tell from how someone wrote their intake whether it's an emotional story or something more analytical. I have a team member full of empathy who loves those cases, so I send them there. I like the analytical, sterner person — "this is what I want" — because I can communicate with that type. We also match by language and background: some staff like to talk to people in their native language. It's a personality match, which sounds like it would take more time, but with a well-flowing system it doesn't — and it's worth it, because the client gets an experience they never expected. They feel like they're talking to someone who truly understands their problem. Half the time, that's the conversion.

Collin McKee

Another selling point of the subscription model — and I don't think everyone realizes this — is that hourly billing's incentive structure works against the client. Break that down for the audience.

Grace Gooray

Fun fact: firm bonuses are built on billable hours — collectible billables, specifically, because they have to be able to collect it. Attorneys, paralegals, and legal assistants all have an hourly rate based on experience: attorneys roughly $350–750, paralegals about $175–275, a legal secretary $75–150. Every time you call your firm, you talk to two or three people — receptionist, legal assistant, paralegal — before you ever get booked. Everyone bills in six-minute increments, so every six minutes is a 0.1; six minutes and one second is a 0.2. When you talk to your attorney for an hour, that's almost $600. Then every time they go to court, travel, park, or review your case, they're billing you, because they have to account for their hours. Reasonable firms target about six billable hours a day; bigger ones push seven or eight, and an eight-hour billable day is very hard to actually fill — that's where over-billing comes from. Employees are incentivized to tack things on, because even if they want to help a client, if the firm isn't happy with their collectible billables, they're losing money.

Collin McKee

It's almost a racket. We're all in it to make money, and people are incentivized, but in family law especially, clients just want a solution — not to be tracking down billable hours.

Grace Gooray

Exactly. I had one person tell me she didn't feel comfortable working with a firm that doesn't offer an hourly billable rate. I said, "If you want to go pay $750 an hour for someone to tell you how to do your case, by all means, go — I can even give you recommendations." I didn't beg her. She called back about a month and a half later. She'd spent all that money on a retainer first when she could've just started with us — now we're fixing someone else's work. But that's the thing: they all come back at some point. My assistant laughs because people come back from a consult months later saying the only thing they remembered was me — they didn't know how to find me, they just remembered what I said. I don't lie to them; I don't do fluff. It's straight what you see. I'm not everybody's cup of tea, but the ones who are want to actually learn something and commit, because they want their divorce to go smoothly. And we're highly tech-driven — I built this to merge business with tech and convenience, because across my businesses I realized my time is money: the more time people spend with me, the less I can do elsewhere.

Collin McKee

You told me that every time you start a business, you tell your husband, "Give me a year — I'll make the business a priority, then buy back your time." Is that still your model?

Grace Gooray

Always. I just launched another business in January and told him the same thing — "Give me a year to put you on the back burner." He knows what that means now: it's not that I ignore him for a year, but he knows my priorities. He knows I'll work randomly in the middle of the night, and that if there's an email or someone needs me, I'll prioritize it — even on our trips, where we're gone at least two weeks at a time, most months. But on date nights I don't take anything; I spend my time with him. The business is my new baby. We have little code words — if we're watching TV and I'm on my phone and he asks what I'm doing, if I say "work" or name the person who runs most of my business, he knows where my attention is. My husband was a firefighter with Cal Fire, and at some point we decided he'd stop working, because if I needed to give him attention when he wanted it, we needed a better system. So now we have the convenience of time to spend it in ways we didn't think we would.

Collin McKee

Sounds like a great partnership. Grace, this has been exactly what I'd hoped — you built something genuinely different, not just in law but in how you think about building businesses, buying back your time, and creating systems that don't depend on you showing up every day. For anyone listening who's dealing with a legal situation and wants to know more about The Right Litigation Group, where should they go?

Grace Gooray

Our website, rightlitigationgroup.com, and our social media under the same name. We do everything for California — family law, business, criminal — and, again, subscriptions.

Collin McKee

And for any business owner or attorney who's heard what Grace has built and thought, "I need that for my business" — that's exactly what we do at Endeavors AI. Head to endeavorsai.com to learn more. Hit subscribe, and I'll see you on the next one.