Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. On this show, I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Let's get right to the show.

Hello everyone. This week on the podcast, I'm sharing my conversation with Tyler and April Roberts. Tyler, a former lawyer, and his wife April who has a background in marketing co-founded NOMOS Marketing, a marketing agency for lawyers. They share about how they navigated Tyler's exit from legal practice as a couple and their best advice for helping non-lawyer partners understand why you want to leave legal practice.

Before we get to the episode, I want to remind you that if you're listening to this episode the day it releases, there are only three more days to join The Former Lawyer Collaborative during its beta launch. The Former Lawyer Collaborative is my support community for high-achieving women in the law who are interested in exploring other career options and connecting with like-minded women.

We'll kick off on Thursday, April 2nd with a mastermind-style hot seat call followed by a workshop in mid-April with career coach Heather Yurovsky on revising your resume for non-legal jobs and an end-of-month workshop on my personal budgeting system that we use to pay off over $400,000 in debt. In the first week of May, Katie Aldrich, who you heard on Episode 24 of the podcast, will be running a workshop that will provide you with a framework for figuring out if you should leave your current job and how to figure out what's next if the answer is yes.

Of course, everything will be recorded for members so that you can watch replays when you can't attend live and you'll have daily access to our community forum to connect with me and other members. I'm so excited about this community and the incredible value that it will provide. I don't want you to miss out on locking in the founding member rate. You can join through this Wednesday, April 1st at formerlawyer.com/collab. Okay, let's go to my conversation with Tyler and April.

Hey, Tyler and April, welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

April Roberts: Hey, Sarah. So great to be here.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm super excited to hear your story and you are the first husband and wife duo that I've had on the podcast. Why don't you start by introducing yourselves to the listeners and telling them a little bit about why you're here?

Tyler Roberts: Sure. April and I are co-founders of a marketing agency called NOMOS Marketing. We serve lawyers all over the US. We do everything from websites to content marketing, social media, pay-per-click, all that good stuff with the digital side of marketing. But we also do what we call traditional marketing, which would be billboards, printed signs, newspaper ads, that sort of thing. We've been doing that for about two years now and it's been a lot of fun. We've seen a lot of growth and it's a lot of fun to do that as a husband and wife team.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. This is The Former Lawyer Podcast so tell me about which one of you is a former lawyer.

Tyler Roberts: Sure. That would be me. But April would say that she should have been on stage with me graduating from law school. I remember the day that I got the results from the bar exam, I was at work and she actually opened them and called me.

April Roberts: Okay, there's a story behind this. We had planned exactly how we were going to do it because back then, it sounds like it was so long ago, it really wasn't, but it came in the mail, I think now the results might just be online, I guess depending on the state, but we had said, “If it comes in the mail, I'll call Tyler. He'll come home. We'll open it together,” I just had an out-of-body experience I guess with all the stress of wondering, and literally just ripped it open and saw that he had passed.

I was like, “Oh, my God.” As soon as I did it I was like, “What am I going to do?” Then I called him, I was like, “I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me but I just opened this but you passed so you need to come home and we need to celebrate.”

Sarah Cottrell: That's amazing. Tell me at that point, where were you in your thought process about Tyler being a lawyer or you being a lawyer, Tyler, same question, what drew you to law school, how did you end up there, and when you graduated, did you think, “I'm a lawyer now and I'm going to be a lawyer forever”?

Tyler Roberts: I think going into law school, April and I both realized it wouldn't be something I did long-term as far as practicing law. We really viewed it as a personal challenge and a way to grow professionally, to learn a skill set that would be in demand, but then also create a framework for how we can go about entrepreneurship, building businesses, really exploring some of those other passions that we had.

Going into law school though, I think my mindset was slightly different in the sense that I really just wanted to be in a position to help people. Just to give you a little back story, I was injured in a car accident in college. I was hit by a drunk driver and I experienced the criminal justice system and the civil justice system as a victim. I had a lawyer who represented me through that.

He came to all the court proceedings, all the depositions, all the hearings. He was really there to support me through that process. I think I was 19 at the time. It's one of those challenging experiences that people shouldn't have to face. With that experience, it really motivated me to look at the law as a way to help others.

It's still something that's part of our ethos at NOMOS Marketing which is helping people find the legal help that they need if they are encountering those types of situations and feeling empowered to take control over their situation. But that was really the motivating factor behind going to law school.

In law school, I just found a passion for startups. I loved my internship with a company called the Royalty Exchange, which was a really cool platform that sold royalty streams as securities to accredited investors. That experience really opened my eyes to entrepreneurship and what could be done.

Then after law school, I got this corporate job and was working it and saw that there really wasn't a path forward to a position that would really be fulfilling. I looked at my boss, my boss's boss, and realized that isn't necessarily the trajectory that I wanted to be on. April and I had some conversations about that and made a shift to a more creative career.

Sarah Cottrell: That's really interesting because that is a very common theme in the interviews that I've done, which is that people start looking ahead at essentially the people they're supposed to want to aspire to be within their company or their firm and often have this realization of, “I actually don't want the life that person has,” or “I don't really want to do the type of work that person's doing.”

That's one of the things that sends people looking for different options or sometimes sends them into, “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do? Because I don't want to be the thing that I thought I was supposed to be.” At the point that you passed the bar, it sounds like you already both were thinking that Tyler is not going to be in the law forever. Or was it more I guess gradual than that?

April Roberts: No. I feel like we definitely knew before he even went to law school that he was going to use law school as a way to educate himself and do something really powerful and unique in the space. I don't think at the time we quite knew this is what we would do but we wanted to make a difference. I think both of us are very driven by making a difference in whatever community we're in.

I worked for a non-profit and traveled a ton while Tyler was in law school. We wanted to do something that married both of the things that we love. While I didn't go to law school, I think I still have a huge passion around making a difference and really access to justice. I think for us, it was really about finding a unique way to make a difference that's using a law degree in a different way.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm sure that a lot of people who are listening are thinking that this is super cool that you went to law school with a unique plan, but also, “But what about law school loans? What about the financial piece of that?” Can you guys talk to me a little bit about that and especially how that works in terms of your relationship and interacting about that kind of thing?

Because one of the things that I hear a lot from listeners to the podcast are things along the lines of having disagreements with their significant other or their significant other not completely understanding why they might want to invest in something like law school and then ultimately not be a lawyer.

April Roberts: Yeah. That's something that I think in any marriage, you have challenges with that. I feel like I really supported Tyler. We met when we were in college. I was 19 and he was 21. I really encouraged him to go to law school because I knew that he was going to do something really incredible with his life.

I think in any sort of higher education, it's an investment in yourself. It's whether you go to law school, I even think about something as simple as studying abroad in college. You're investing in yourself. We've always been really big on that. Tyler always says anytime we do a vacation just the two of us, it's an investment in our relationship and that's how we really viewed law school.

I think each month when we're making those payments, it’s always a little dagger to the heart but it really has made a huge difference. I think for us, we look at things and we're like, “Okay, well, we're finally getting comfortable here,” and now we're like, “Oh, Tyler's going to go to law school. We're finally getting comfortable financially,” and then we're like, “Oh, let's start a business.”

I think we keep reinvesting in ourselves and what we believe we can do. We're still fairly young and I think now's the time to be risky with everything and really make a difference in that way.

Tyler Roberts: Yeah, and I think speaking along the lines of risk, I think that a lot of people shy away from law school or even higher education because of student loans. I think if that is a primary concern, then maybe you should take a different path or look at different schools.

I think for us, we've changed the way that we think about student loan repayments. It's not necessarily paying down like a mortgage or a credit card, it's more of a tax for the ability to call yourself a lawyer, for the ability to say that you have a JD. I think for us it's opened us so many doors professionally and personally that wouldn't have been opened otherwise.

When we've shifted the way that we've talked about our strategies for paying off student loans and also having a long-term view rather than this immediacy that you see when people are frantically trying to pay those types of debts down, it's really helped us to have a long-term vision and allowed us to make some really good judgments for us personally and professionally.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's a really important point because—and we've talked about this many times in the podcast—but I think often, lawyers fall into this black-and-white thinking about their loans in terms of “I just need to pay it all off as fast as humanly possible” or “I'm just not ever going to pay it off,” and despairing in that direction.

A big part of that dynamic is at the personal finance marketplace, the gurus of personal finance tend to very much go to the all debt is bad and if you have debt, it's a shameful thing and you need to get rid of it as fast as humanly possible. I just think that especially if you're a lawyer or someone else with a professional degree who has a large amount of student loans, that's just a very unhelpful and crushing message. It's just not a helpful way to think about your loans.

Certainly, you can prioritize paying them off. I know people who listen to podcasts know my story. For Ed and I, we basically spent 10 years and paid off all of our student loans, which was over $400,000 which is a lot of money, but that's not the only way to do it. I think sometimes, there's very black-and-white thinking about “This is the only way to do it and if you don't do it this way, you're doing it the wrong way.” I just don't think that's true.

Tyler Roberts: Right. I think what's really important for a lot of young lawyers especially is a cash flow analysis. How much money do you have coming in, how much money do you have going out every month? If you're focused solely on paying down that student loan as quick as possible, then your cash flow is going to not be as strong. You're not allowing yourself to take risks like starting your own law firm or stepping away from your Biglaw job to pursue something that you're really passionate about where the upside to doing that could be exponential.

I think if you tend to cower back and say, “Well, this is a steady job, I'm doing this solely for the money so I can pay this down as quickly as possible,” you're preventing future growth and personal growth. I think that's how we've been able to make some rationalized decisions about the path that we take rather than saying, “Well, we're stuck here and we're just going to have to suck it up and suffer through this for the next 10, 15 years.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that is a really helpful insight. Talk to me a little bit more about the thought process that you guys went through when you decided to start the business. I know you said that Tyler was working in a corporate job. Talk to me some about the timeline when you decided you were going to start the business and how long that process took. Just give the listeners some insight into how you came to that decision.

April Roberts: Yeah. It happened in a very organic way. We were living in Raleigh, North Carolina at the time and ended up moving to San Diego. Tyler was able to transfer with his job because his manager actually was living in San Diego. It was a natural move for us, we wanted to do something really fun for a few years before we really “settle down.”

Around that time, I ended up getting a job at a marketing agency for dentists called Wonderist Agency. That's where we met our now business partners. They were obviously my bosses there and we became really good friends with them, going out to dinner and stuff. Tyler was still working his corporate job and we really just started toying around with the idea of what could this look like.

Tyler was freelancing a lot, charging very little for what I consider excellent work that Tyler provides to people. We went to Laura and Michael and we said, “We're going to start an agency for lawyers,” build it the same way that they built their agency for dentists. I was like, “Let me know if you ever want to chat about it.” Within the next week, I think we were already in business meetings negotiating and all of that.

It happened really naturally. I think if you had asked us six months before if we would have been doing it, we would have said, “Oh, yeah, we'll do that. That'll be really cool,” but this really propelled us forward and allowed us a strong foundation in a way to start the business.

Sarah Cottrell: How long ago was it that you opened the business?

April Roberts: We're right at two years.

Tyler Roberts: Yeah, we're going into our third year. I will say I had a little intermediary period where I left my corporate job to work as an editor for three law-related magazines. That was the time that I was really freelancing to make extra money. I was riding on the side building websites, doing a little bit of branding work but really was like a one-man show sitting at the kitchen table at night doing this type of work.

When we ended up deciding to formalize the partnership and to really give it a go, I think we probably did about three months where we took on one big client and launched a site. Once we launched the site, that's when I came over full-time. I think we're going into our third year now and it's been a lot of fun since we started.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me more about the business, what exactly you guys are doing, how you're doing it, and just how the business has grown from the time that you originally started.

April Roberts: Yeah. As a full-service marketing agency that really builds our entire business around lawyers, we really do everything. We're a one-stop shop for any marketing needs. That includes branding, like a logo, tagline, building websites, the ongoing SEO work. We do Google ads. We do social media, social ads. We also do design work. We have a ton of clients where we do billboards and we can do newspaper, television, all the above really.

I think when a lot of people think about digital agencies, they forget that traditional marketing piece where people still do want print stuff. They still want promotional items so we do all of that. The business has really grown quite significantly in the last two years. It's grown enough that I ended up coming over in the fall full-time because I was still working full-time for our business partners and managing a team there.

Now I've been able to come over full time which is really cool because I think Tyler and I have very different strengths and I think any partnership but also anyone who's a husband and wife team who works together, typically, you have very different strengths.

I think we're able to provide the types of service that we really have always wanted to provide with me coming over and Tyler being able to do what he wants to do. He loves building websites. He loves content for clients and being able to write that while I manage really the business side of things and the clients.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me a little bit more about what it is like to work with your spouse because it's actually interesting. My husband and I two different times have worked in the same place not 100% intentionally, it just worked out that way. For us it always worked really well but generally speaking, people would react one of two ways when they found out, either they'd be like, “Oh, that's so cool,” or they'd be like, “I could never do that.” Talk to me about that experience for the two of you.

Tyler Roberts: Yeah. I think that every business partnership and relationship has its challenges. I think the one thing that has really been challenging for us and something that's really brought us closer together is the fact that if we have a good day, we share that good day, if we have a bad day, we share that bad day.

Finding ways to create boundaries around the business and our personal life has been extremely important to us and it's made us a stronger couple. Because of it, I think we're better communicators. We also understand each other's weaknesses a little bit better. I'm speaking personally. For me, I know that there are a lot of things that I can improve upon as a professional and there are a lot of things that April is just an absolute rock star at.

It's really fun to watch her thrive and watch her do really well with the aspects of the business that she handles. Then I really look up to her and it's really a great way for me to learn by example. I think that when we look at sharing those good days and sharing those bad days, we have to find those small moments to celebrate. Even if it's just going out to lunch or taking a walk with our dogs, maybe taking 30 minutes in the afternoon to go to a workout class together, those are the types of things that can really make the day fun. It can make the whole process really worth it.

Then I think at the end of the day, we always look back and we say, “Wow, I can't believe that we were able to accomplish that or do this.” I think anytime that you're in business ownership mode, it's very easy to get stuck looking at the day-to-day grind. The one thing we always say is you always wake up, you never wake up to a bunch of great emails, have emails, you're always solving problems for people and so being able to do that side by side is really exciting.

I think when we look back on our quarterly goals, we look back on our yearly goals and we see how far we've come, it's just so great to be able to share in that moment and to really understand what went into rather than having a couple of hours in the evening to talk about those things.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I understand what you're saying totally. Tyler, I'd love to hear from you and also from April some of the things that you feel like you bring from your legal training and practicing as a lawyer to both your work, in the business in the generic entrepreneurship sense, and then also specifically in this market of helping lawyers with their marketing.

Tyler Roberts: I think that going to law school, you develop this skill set of being skeptical. It really coerces you to evaluate risk in a very unique way. I think that there are a lot of decisions that have to be made that if you didn't go to law school and you don't understand contract law or just general corporate law, there are a lot of decisions that you can make pretty much blindly unless you have someone who's consulting you.

Going into ways that we write contracts, the way that we interact with clients, I think that it keeps you on your toes and you have a greater appreciation for some of the risks that you do take as an entrepreneur. I think for a lot of lawyers, that can sometimes hold them back. Going to law school gives you a greater appreciation of some of the risks that entrepreneurs take in the day-to-day operation of their business.

Prior to going to law school, I tried to start a few businesses, a few side hustles but really didn't know what I was doing, and in some ways, that really helped me learn and really helped me to take those small little steps towards entrepreneurship. But after going to law school and prior to starting a business, you really have an appreciation for what that decision entails.

After going to law school and passing the bar, I worked for a lawyer/entrepreneur who had started the business I worked for after graduating and I really got to see how he used his legal background to start a business that served corporate entities in a very different capacity. Just a little background on that, we streamlined the contract negotiation process for clinical trial agreement.

He had a team of lawyers that were negotiating contracts but is in a very different type of environment. It wasn't your typical corporate law job. Seeing him take those risks, selling his business, and going through the process of raising capital and developing an internal technology product I think was really inspiring and opened my eye as to how you can use that legal background, not only to build a business and to be a successful entrepreneur but then also how do you take that legal background and leverage it to create a service or product that other people want and that's valuable to people.

With what we do, on our website it says “for Lawyers, by Lawyers,” why that's important is that when we're writing content or we are developing campaigns for lawyers, we really get to know their market, we get to know their demographics, their ideal client, what their goals are, but we're also able to just jump in and have a really good baseline understanding of what they do day to day, what their practice entails.

When we have conversations about their practice areas or their goals, we had this legal background where we're able to contribute in a really meaningful way as opposed to really having to rely solely on what they tell us that they're looking for. It allows us to have deeper conversations about the strategies that they want to employ with their law firm but then also allows us to create a really strong strategy around what we do to make sure that we are helping to accomplish those goals.

Sarah Cottrell: Hey there. It's me again all by myself in the middle of the podcast here to share a little more about The Former Lawyer Collaborative. I wanted to talk about a few more features of the Collaborative that I think are really important. Number one, it's private and confidential. To join, you must complete a short three-question application. The application is not intended to be daunting or stressful and is solely intended to make sure that this community is a fit for you and that you're committed to the confidentiality, needed to develop a thriving community.

Number two: it's affordable. I know there are plenty of women who need help with a long-term plan to leave the law with support that is flexible and available on their schedule without being a strain. Founding members who joined during its beta launch lock in the founding member rate of $19 a month or $190 annually.

Number three: as a founding member, you'll have the opportunity to shape exactly what the Collaborative offers. If you're ready to join you can go to formerlawyer.com/collab. Okay, back to the conversation.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that. I think it's interesting, the legal profession more so than many professions really has trouble innovating. There are a lot of reasons for that but I think one of the reasons for that is just the way that services are delivered, in particular, the model of just billing hours and having a billable hour be essentially the ultimate metric for success or achievement because almost by nature of having it set up that way, you disincentivize efficiency figuring out new better more streamlined ways of doing things. It is interesting.

I think it will be interesting to see how the profession evolves because things are starting to slowly shift. Like you mentioned, the person that you worked for, his company but there's still a lot of resistance. I think, like you said, part of it is that the training of lawyers is you're essentially trained to be even more risk-averse than you already were.

Tyler, tell me how you resisted that training.

Tyler Roberts: Yeah. I think that's something that is hard to do because you spend a lot of time going to law school, a lot of money going to law school, and you develop this skill set that is extremely valuable. It's a skill set that you can use to really do anything. When you are looking to set aside some of the hesitations that the lawyer in you would have when you're making decisions or moving forward on a project or an initiative for your business, that can sometimes be difficult.

I think there have been times absolutely where I've shied away from conflict in the sense of I don't want things to be blown out of proportion. Working with lawyers too, they have a really good understanding of how businesses should run. They also have a good understanding of contracts and so we're very wary of the fact that we're dealing with extremely sophisticated individuals.

I'm happy to be able to bring in that legal background so that way, we are on even footing. But at the same time, I have to take a step back and say I'm not going to lawyer this situation. There's someone out there who does this on a daily basis that we can consult and they can provide an expert recommendation.

That's been one of the most challenging things to do but also one of the most freeing things to do is to say, “We're not going to be the one who writes this contract, we're not going to be the one who incorporates our business. We're going to hire that out to someone who knows what they're doing and does this on a day-to-day basis.”

From that sense, that was a hard decision. I love to do things on my own. I love to learn. I'm really curious and I love the law. I love going to law school but I think, like you're saying, it's difficult to take that step back and operate solely as a business owner, an entrepreneur rather than a lawyer as well and being a lawyer for the business.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. It's really interesting because this is not even in the business context but we've had many people over the years ask us for advice about getting their wills done for example and we're like, “Yeah, we hired a lawyer. We hired a lawyer for that.” We did not do that ourselves because I think it's good to know, even though the lawyer tendency is to be like, “I can do everything,” it's good to know where your strengths are and let someone else handle the other stuff.

April, I'd love to hear from you a little bit about I hear a lot from people, and even in my own life from friends who are lawyers and they're married to non-lawyers and they're trying to convey why they might not want to continue working as a lawyer and it's sometimes difficult to communicate to someone who doesn't have that same experience of being trained to be super paranoid and risk-averse and then going into the kinds of work environments that many lawyers go into. Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for the listeners who might be in that position speaking as a non-lawyer?

April Roberts: Yeah. I think it's really about listening to your partner and really supporting them in whatever they do. Tyler, before we started working together when I was working for a non-profit, I was working for my sorority's national headquarters and traveling and opening up all of our brand new chapters around the country, which was a really cool job.

We had completely different paths but I think for us, we both were stressed but in different ways and I think it's really about listening to your partner and making sure that you're really putting yourself in their shoes. I think I'm very lucky that I have a husband that's always supported me and I hope vice versa to make sure that we can really live a good life and be happy.

I have always said if I'm doing something that's not bringing me joy, I don't want to do it. I was telling Tyler yesterday that I follow all these accounts on social media. I'm all about women entrepreneurship, women's empowerment but there's also this thing of the grind, just keep grinding, work super late, do all this. I have done that and I am really at a place now in my life where I really want to find balance and I really want to find boundaries.

I think that that's important to do as well and people don't give that as much credit as what it deserves. That allows you to make better decisions I believe. I think that that's been really important. The fact that Tyler's encouraged me to take that time but also vice versa, like yesterday I think it was just a long day, I was like, “Let's stop working. Let's have dinner let's play with our dogs. Let's do this.” I think in no matter what you do, you have to encourage your partner to really take that time.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's so right, especially the point that you made about listening, listening to understand and not just listening to respond, which I know people talk about that all the time. I'm certainly not the first person to come up with that idea because I think that often, we import our own experience, we think, “Oh, well, how would I be responding in that situation?” I don't want to say that doesn't matter but it kind of doesn't matter because ultimately, the question is how that other person is experiencing that situation.

For the people who are listening, why don't you talk a little bit about maybe one of your recent projects just so they have a little bit more specific of an idea of what exactly your day-to-day looks like?

Tyler Roberts: Yeah. I absolutely love this one project, we're at the tail end of it, we're still working with this client. He was a Biglaw lawyer working for Troutman Sanders, did a lot of securities work, just a really impressive individual. I think he's probably late 30s, just in the middle of his legal career.

I would say about a year ago, he bought a motorcycle and started to bike a lot and really had this sense of freedom doing that. It really opened his mind to what else was possible for his life. So he decided to leave his Biglaw job and take on one or two corporate clients as what he calls a fractional general counsel; providing general counsel services but they're unbundled. He's not working there full-time. He's just going into the business and helping them bring legal decision-making into their day-to-day decision-making process.

We got to work with him from the very beginning creating his branding, going all the way to his website, and now we're doing a lot of collateral with him, we're doing his social media. The process was just an absolute blast with him. Fortunately, he was a local client so he would come into the office and we'd do our kickoff call with him. We'd have our team come in and we'd get to know him and his practice a little bit better.

We went through several rounds of branding and we landed on this really strong brand that's very distinctive and leans heavily into his passion for biking. After we finished with that, we did I think what was a four-hour photoshoot in the office. He came in and had a couple of different outfit changes but we went all around San Diego, we went and we had a few beers with him and took pictures of that. We got some pictures of him on his bike and really created this very high-quality collateral.

Once we had those assets, we created his website, and hit's a one-page website but it's honestly one of my favorite ones that we've ever built, I think it's so distinctive, it's really unique and it really embodies everything that he stands for as an attorney but then also as an individual talking about freedom, being on his own, and then serving other entrepreneurs who are taking similar risks and living a similar lifestyle.

Now he's an ongoing client. We actually had a meeting with him this afternoon. We're creating pins for him, t-shirts, we're helping him set up a happy hour to launch his law firm, let other people know what he's up to. We're scouting out locations for him there. We're really trying to be a partner with him in his business and it's been so exciting to see that project come together. Now we can start to focus on growth. We can start to focus on strategies to help him achieve his future goals.

Sarah Cottrell: That's really awesome. How do you find and connect with the clients that you work with?

April Roberts: I think that's a great question. As going into our third year, we're still figuring it out to be honest. In the beginning, we were getting a lot of clients and not really sure where they all aligned on things. But I think that we've really looked at the industry and figured out what works and what doesn't and also who we want to work with.

We are a part of Atlanta Legal Tech which is a really cool group that is obviously bringing technology to lawyers and doing really cool innovative things. We talk about the legal industry being a little bit behind some other industries on things and I think that Atlanta Legal Tech, Clio, all of those awesome platforms are really pushing everything forward.

Tyler and I have found a lot of success in working with clients who really believe in that. From a personal standpoint, it makes it where we enjoy doing the job. We're really narrowing in on our ideal clients and the impact that they're making in their communities. That's really brought us a ton of joy and those are the types of clients that we want to continue to work with.

It's fun to build a website and we love doing all of that but we really love working with our clients and helping them feel good about what they're doing and really enhancing that with our expertise.

Tyler Roberts: Yeah. I think April is spot on with this and it's something that we have both had so many conversations about which is who are the clients that we find the most success with, not personally but clients that we can serve really well. We talk a lot about lawyers who are serving their communities in very powerful ways.

When we started out, we're like, “Well, we don't necessarily know who we want to serve and what that market looks like.” As April said, we started getting involved in ClioCon, we're going to ABA TECHSHOW, the Atlanta Legal Tech group, we're starting to discover, there's this group of attorneys that really love innovation but they love innovation for the sake of serving their communities. That's something that we really try to bring into what we do for our clients but it's also something we're trying to replicate in our own business.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's so cool. Okay, for people who are listening and they're like, “I'm working as a lawyer, I kind of hate it. I think I want to leave or maybe I want to leave. I don't really know, I need to figure it out,” what advice would you have for them?

Tyler Roberts: April's looking at me right now. Look at the things that you love. This is a new philosophy that I've been developing over the last six months so this is always evolving but I really believe that you can find passion in pretty much anything that you do. I like to think of what the world wants from me rather than what I want from the world.

Looking at your skill sets and what you're naturally drawn to, how can you leverage that experience going to law school, how can you leverage your experience as a lawyer to find those things that you're passionate about, to serve the people that you want to serve, and to really give your talents to the world?

I think for us, that's what we discovered was what are we good at, what can we do to serve other lawyers, to serve their communities. I'll look at the skill set that April brings to our partnership and there are things that she does that she thinks were simple, I couldn't do them to save my life. The process that she creates, the attention to detail, the way that we surprise and delight clients are all things that she learned over the course of her time with the nonprofit where she worked at and also with our business partner’s agency.

What's great is I was able to come in with this legal background and also this knowledge of building websites and design. We're able to combine those things to create a service that people wanted. If you're thinking about leaving the law, I would recommend looking at that experience.

You don't necessarily have to stay in the legal field but maybe there's something that you loved about a client that you worked with or there's a matter that you had handled that you got exposure to a certain profession or certain career path that you are really interested in taking, and really looking back on that experience and understanding why you liked it, what you could personally bring to the table if you were to pursue that.

Then of course, if it's a new skill, looking at going to law school and becoming a lawyer and passing the bar exam, it took you three years to get to that point where you could call yourself a lawyer. That's an extremely difficult and challenging thing to do and not very many people are able to do that.

Looking at whatever you want to do in the future, whatever you want to do with your life, and relying on that experience that essentially helped you build that character and afford it to really push past some very difficult moments and challenging moments and succeed, I think that you can take those lessons and you can apply that to literally anything that you want to do with your life.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's really helpful insight and definitely something that people should think about. I also think, to your point about figuring out what you love, one of the things that we've talked about on the podcast and I want to talk about more as time goes along is the idea that you can figure out things that you love and then you can figure out whether you actually want those things to be your career or whether you want to find a career that supports you in doing those things that you love even as hobbies.

Because I think sometimes, there's this push lately, and there are like a bajillion articles that have been written about this recently to turn everything that you love into your full-time job or your career. Sometimes that's a really great idea and sometimes you just need to find a job that lets you do what you love outside of your job. Figuring out which is the best for you is I think a really individual thing and something that people will definitely be served by spending some time thinking about.

As we get to the end of our conversation, April and Tyler, do you have anything else that you'd like to share that we haven't talked about already?

Tyler Roberts: Yeah, I think one thing that we talk a lot about, and especially understanding the purpose of this platform that you have, really the guidance that you provide, and the value that you provide, one thing that we think is really important and something that we've talked a lot about is not looking back with any regret or bitterness about decisions that you've made and really looking at those as learning opportunities, as ways to build character, and then even to discover things that you don't necessarily like.

When you are trying to make decisions about your future, let's say you do want to start a business or you want to go into another field or another industry, I don't think that it ever hurts to say that you went to law school. I think that there are times when you may be overqualified for a position but I don't think that there's any time that you're going to necessarily be underqualified.

As long as you can make your case, no pun intended, there are always opportunities out there to make those transitions and to really use your law degree, your law license, your previous legal experience to benefit your new employer, to benefit your clients, to benefit your community even if you are to do pro bono representation on the side. I think there's always a way that you can use that in a positive way that's going to bring you joy and it's going to bring you fulfillment.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's really well said and I think that is great advice for people to think about. If people want to connect with you guys online, see more of what you're doing, maybe if they need your services, what is the best way for them to find you?

April Roberts: Yeah. Our company is NOMOS Marketing. Our email address is you can email me, it's [email protected]. Our website is nomosmarketing.com. Follow us on social media. We do a ton of really cool showcases of some work that we're doing with clients. We are also obsessed with our dogs, Lilly and Piper so we showcase them quite a bit. I think it’s one of the highlights of the business personally.

But yeah, we love talking to people. We had someone reach out earlier today asking if we can give her some tips and tricks and all of that. We really love to educate and I think that it's really fun to work with people and help their business. If anyone's interested, we would love to chat with them and brainstorm some cool ideas.

Sarah Cottrell: That's awesome. I will put all of those links in the show notes. If anyone wants to go find them easily, they'll all be right there. Thank you so much for joining me, April and Tyler, I really appreciate y'all coming on and sharing your story.

April Roberts: Thanks for having us.

Tyler Roberts: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening today. I absolutely love getting to share these stories with you. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the show, and come on over to formerlawyer.com and join our community to get even more support and resources in your journey out of the law. Until next time. Have a great week.