WHAT I DO: I help entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small business owners protect their brands and businesses, allowing them to protect their business, grow their customer base, and do what they do best. . . run their business. 

HOW I DO IT: I do this by advising my clients on legal structuring, and tax planning and helping my clients form business entities to protect their assets. 

WHY IT WORKS: When a business owner forms their legal entity and has lawyer-approved contracts with their employees, contractors, and vendors, the business can operate with confidence and purpose. In turn, this positions the business as a legitimate company ready to serve its customer base. Separation of personal and business provides authority and legitimacy. 

WHO I WORK WITH: I’ve worked with businesses of all sizes, new start-ups, companies with 5-50 employees, and Fortune 1000 Corporations. I provide clear, actionable ideas using my relatable approach to business formations and tax planning.

READY TO TALK? Reach out to me directly here on LinkedIn or visit my website www.joshualowenthal.com

 Areas of Practice: Business Formations / Tax Controversy / Tax Planning / Tax Structuring / Corporate Governance / Mergers & Acquisitions 

Social Links
•	Website: www.joshualowenthal.com
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Josh Lowenthal

One of the most hotly contested areas of a transaction is reps and warranties.

Unlike buying a house where you can see the defects, the loose shingles, the missing brick, the water damage, when buying a business you don't have the same flexibility.

Enter reps & warranties.

Reps and warranties are statements of fact, made by both parties, that form the foundation of a purchase agreement. The seller represents that the business is what they say it is: accurate financials, no undisclosed liabilities, no pending litigation, employees properly classified, taxes filed and current.

If a rep turns out to be wrong, the consequences survive closing.

Indemnification is the mechanism that gives teeth to reps and warranties — meaning the seller may owe the buyer back for losses tied to a breach.

Typically, we negotiate the survival period for reps and indemnification to run somewhere between 12 and 24 months past closing. Sometimes longer.

Most sellers assume closing is the finish line. Legally, it's not.

Understanding which reps are worth fighting for and which ones you can accept and move on from is critical to keeping a deal moving toward closing.

Lawyer ⚖️ | 💰Tax Planning | 🚀M&A | Helping you build your business empire by acquiring your next SMB.

Most buyers negotiate deal price.

Almost none negotiate deal structure.

That's backwards.

The structure of a transaction, equity vs. asset sale, has real tax implications and can be used as leverage throughout the negotiation.

Know the difference before you sign the LOI.

I am a retired lawyer and legal tech founder who is passionate about helping law firms become better businesses.

Just two years into my practice, the law firm I was working for imploded. A few years later, it happened again at a different firm. 

One Saturday, the lead partner called me and told me there had been a dispute over overhead, and the office was closing. Our first child was 6 months old, and I didn't have a job. So much for that Stanford Law degree!

Fortunately I landed at a firm that understood the business of law.

All the BS I had experienced in my other law firms disappeared on Day 1.

Our managing partner Ken helped me understand how to build a great practice.

I built a million-dollar practice and all the accolades that go with that: Best Lawyers in America, Chambers USA, Super Lawyers, Martindale Hubbell AV. 

I was inspired to help other lawyers experience the benefits of working for a great business.

From early on, I understood that clunky, disconnected software was holding law firms back. Later, I learned three secrets to lead any small to midsize law firm to become a better business:

      –Build on the shoulders of giants: Integrate tightly with market-leading platforms like QBO, MS365 and/or Google

       –Create a seamless & customized core financial workflow to make it easy to get paid and produce the insights you need to run your business

       –Tie in niche applications for all your specialized needs e.g. NetDocuments

This is how LeanLaw was born. Now hundreds of law firms have joined us on a mission to transform law from a 19th century cottage industry into a modern 21st century profession. What is holding your firm back?

Gary Allen

A 10-lawyer firm billing $300/hour should generate:

$4.5M+

Most collect closer to:

$2.6M.

That’s a 42% revenue gap. 

Where does it go?
• 15–25% lost to delayed time entry
• Write-downs reducing realization
• Payment friction killing collections
• Billing cycle delays

No new marketing needed.
No new hires.
Just plugging leaks.

The firms that win aren’t chasing more work.
They’re capturing the work they already did.

Where is your biggest leak — time capture, realization, or collections?

LegalTech Thought Leader | LeanLaw Founder | Sharing What Made My Law Firm and Practice Profitable

I’m looking forward to speaking at the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) Annual Meeting in April in National Harbor, Maryland.

Topic:
How to Achieve Best-in-Class Profitability in Your Law Firm

We’ll explore three pillars:

1️⃣ Efficient processes
2️⃣ Productive people
3️⃣ Aligned products and services

When these align, the economics of the firm change dramatically.

Best-in-class firms generate far higher profits on the same legal work.

Not because they work harder.
Because they run better systems.

Hope to see some of you there.

If invoicing takes 7 days each month…

Cash is delayed 7 days.
Multiply that by 12 months.
You’re financing your clients’ businesses.

Firms that moved from:
“Manual billing week”
to
“Structured 1-day billing workflow”
accelerated collections dramatically. 

Faster invoices → Faster payments → Stronger cash flow → Confident partner draws.

The firms that feel “financial stress” often just have slow systems.

How long does billing take at your firm — honestly?

Most partners obsess over rates.
Few obsess over realization and overhead.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
A firm can raise rates 5%
…and lose 10% through write-downs, slow collections, and excess admin.

Revenue – Overhead = Profit. 

If overhead creeps past 30% of revenue, margins compress fast. 

And when realization drops into the mid-80s?
You’re discounting without admitting it.

Great firms monitor:
• Worked-to-billed ratios
• Write-down percentages
• AR aging
• Admin-to-attorney ratios
• Month-end close speed

Average firms monitor revenue.

Best-in-class firms monitor the machine that produces it.

Hard truth from National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF):

You cannot scale dysfunction.

On Saturday, Jon Naseath and I shared a simple framework:
✅  Fix broken processes
✅  Align people + compensation
✅  Redesign products & services
✅ Rules
✅ Tools

Most firms jump straight to tools.

But if billing takes a week…
 If trust accounting is manual…
 If compensation feels subjective…

Tools won’t save you unless you've done the work on the other pillars.

Best-in-class performance isn’t about software.
It’s about discipline.

Which pillar needs the most attention in your firm right now —
 Processes, People, Product, Rules or Tools?

Thank you to everyone who joined Jon Naseath and me at National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF).

One theme kept coming up in the discussion:

Firms want to improve profitability —
but they don’t know where to start.

That’s why we built the Law Firm Profitability Matrix.

It measures proficiency across key capabilities that drive financial performance.

Most firms fall somewhere in this spectrum:

Basic → Rationalized → Systematized → Dynamic

The difference between the extremes?

Systematized firms can generate 30–50% more profit on the same work.

Not by raising rates.
By running a better business.

If you want to see where your firm sits on the spectrum:

Open article: Free Law Firm Assessment — Propel Legal by propellegal.co

Free Law Firm Assessment — Propel Legal

Realization isn’t math.

It’s behavior.

Write-downs happen because:
• Scope wasn’t clear
• Time wasn’t entered daily
• Rates weren’t defended
• Work wasn’t supervised

Collection problems happen because:
• Bills are confusing
• Payments aren’t frictionless
• Follow-up is inconsistent

When realization is 85% and collections are 85%, the compounded loss is brutal.

Fixing it requires:
• Same-day time capture
• Clean draft editing
• Professional invoice presentation
• Embedded payment links

That’s an operating model — not a software feature list 

If your realization is below 95%, that’s not “normal.”

It’s a warning light to fix your operating model.

Yesterday at National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF), we took a simple poll:
It amounted to "how is your firm performing financially?"

Most leaders paused.
Not because they didn’t care.
Because they didn’t know.

If it takes you 10+ days to close the month…
If you can’t see realization by matter…
If you don’t know utilization trends…

You’re flying blind.

Financial visibility isn’t about spreadsheets.
It’s about leadership clarity.

Best-in-class firms build dashboards by role:
• Partners see profit
• Billing sees workflow
• Attorneys see performance 

If you had to answer on the spot —
What grade would your firm get?

The National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) conference this week reminded me of something important.

Most firms don’t have a revenue problem.
They have a leakage problem.

Jon Naseath and I walked through what actually separates average firms from best-in-class firms:

Revenue – Overhead = Profit
Simple formula.
Harder to execute.

The biggest gaps we see:
• Slow, error-filled billing
• Collection lag
• Overhead creep
• No visibility into realization

Best-in-class firms don’t work harder.
They tighten systems.

And the upside?
$200K more profit per lawyer per year.
Over a 40-year career? That’s an $8M wake-up call. 

If you were at National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) — what operational capability are you most concerned about right now?

Two firms.
 Same lawyers.
 Same clients.
 Same work.

One earns 30–50% more profit.

What’s the difference?
Proficiency.

At National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) on February 28, Jon Naseath and I are breaking down the Law Firm Profitability Matrix — a framework that measures how well your firm performs in 10 competencies that drive revenue.

There are four levels:
• Basic
• Rationalized
• Systematized
• Dynamic

Dynamic firms don’t work harder.
They execute better.

And that gap?
 It compounds year after year.

If you’re coming to the NAMWOLF conference, join us.

If you’re not — message me and I’ll send you the questionnaire.

Here’s how firms start using the Law Firm Profitability Matrix:
They answer a questionnaire.

That’s it.

But here’s what happens next:
They see:
 • Where revenue leaks
 • Where process breaks
 • Where compensation creates drag
 • Where reporting is too slow to matter

Most leaders feel something is off.
The Matrix quantifies it.

And once you see your level of proficiency, the next steps become obvious:
 Process upgrades.
 Automation.
 Role clarity.
 Better metrics.

At National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF), Jon Naseath and I will show how firms use the Matrix to move up one level at a time — and why that’s where the profit jump happens.
Incremental improvement.

 Massive cumulative impact.

Basic firms survive.

Dynamic firms scale.

What’s the cost of staying Basic?
• Manual billing
• Slow reporting
• Compensation debates
• Trust accounting anxiety
• Revenue that “should” be higher

Individually, none of those kills you.

Together, they quietly suppress profit by 30–50%.

That’s what the Law Firm Profitability Matrix exposes.
Jon Naseath and I will be unpacking real examples at National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) on February 28:

✅ How firms moved from reactive to disciplined.
✅ From personality-driven to process-driven.
✅ From busy… to profitable.

If your firm feels busy but underwhelmingly profitable, this conversation is for you.

Let’s diagnose something quietly painful.

You’re billing hourly.

Realization sits at 85%.
Collection sits at 85%.

85% × 85% = 72%.
You’re keeping barely 70 cents of every earned dollar.

On $4M in production…
That’s over $1M disappearing.

Improve realization to 93%.
Improve collection to 92%.
Now you’re at 86%.

Same lawyers.
Same clients.
Wildly different partner distributions. 

The question isn’t “Are we busy?”
It’s “Are we efficient?”

What’s your firm’s realization rate right now?

The dirty secret of hourly billing:

The problem isn’t so much the hourly model.
The problem is how most firms run it.

Across the revenue lifecycle, firms lose money at four predictable points:

1️⃣ Time capture
2️⃣ Billing workflow
3️⃣ Realization
4️⃣ Collections

Industry averages suggest that firms collect only about 60% of the revenue they could actually generate from the work already performed.

That’s not a pricing problem.
It’s an operating model problem.

Fix the process → recover hundreds of thousands in revenue.

A conversation at National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) stuck with me.

A managing partner said:

“We’re busy all the time… but the profits don’t reflect it.”

That sentence describes half the firms I meet.

The reason?

Revenue leakage across the lifecycle of legal work:

• Time not captured
• Bills delayed
• Write-downs during billing
• Collections friction

When those issues compound, firms can lose 40%+ of attainable revenue from work already performed.

The good news:

You don’t fix this by working harder.
You fix it by modernizing the operating model of the firm.

If you're curious where your firm might be leaking revenue, the assessment we used at NAMWOLF is here:

Clients don’t hate lawyers.

They hate uncertainty.
That’s why fixed fees are exploding.

But many firms struggle when they try them.

Why?

Because they try to run fixed-fee work using hourly-billing systems.
That’s when problems start:

• Margin becomes invisible
• Effort across attorneys isn’t tracked clearly
• Compensation disputes creep in

Flat fees don’t fail on pricing.
They fail when the firm can’t see the economics of delivery.

The firms that get this right build highly scalable services.

Here’s a hard truth about hourly firms:

Most revenue loss isn’t pricing.
It’s leakage.

Industry data shows firms lose money at every stage:
• 15–25% of time never captured
• Realization drops to ~85%
• Collections hover around ~85%
• Billing cycles delay cash

For a 10-attorney firm billing $300/hr?

That can mean over $1M in revenue already worked — but never collected.

Not because lawyers aren’t working.

Because the operating model is broken.

Capture → Bill → Collect → Report.

When that lifecycle tightens, profit rises without adding a single new client.

That’s the power of an Hourly Operating Model built on LeanLaw and QuickBooks Online.

You don’t need more marketing.
You need less leakage.

If billing takes a week every month…

You don’t have a billing process.
You have a billing struggle.

I’ve seen firms where:
• Attorneys reconstruct time
• Admins chase missing entries
• Drafts go back and forth
• Clients wait
• Cash languishes

And everyone feels the stress.

The best-run hourly firms?

Billing happens in a structured pipeline:
Ready → Draft → Review → Approve → Sent.
Invoices go out in a day.
Cash moves faster.
AR drops.
Partner draws stabilize.

It’s not about pushing people harder.

It’s about designing the workflow correctly 

Revenue discipline beats revenue hope.

The National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) Spring Meeting last week left me with one big takeaway:

Most law firms don’t have a profitability problem.
They have a visibility problem.

At our session on the Law Firm Profitability Matrix, we asked participants to complete a short assessment.

What we saw over and over:

• Firms operating at different maturity levels across key financial competencies
• Strong lawyering… but inconsistent financial systems
• Revenue leaking quietly through process gaps

The interesting part?
When firms see the gaps clearly, the fixes are usually straightforward.

If you want to try out the assessment for yourself, here it is:

Imagine finding $400K of revenue in your firm…

Without raising rates.
Without adding lawyers.

That’s exactly what happens when firms tighten their hourly operating model.

Where the money hides:

• Delayed time entry
• End-of-month billing bottlenecks
• Write-downs during pre-bill review
• Payment friction

These small leaks compound.

In a typical 10-lawyer firm, fixing them can recover $1M+ in annual revenue that was already earned but never collected.

The work was already done.

The firm just didn’t capture the value.

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