256 | From Bankruptcy to Wealthy Woman Lawyer with Davina Frederick (Part 1)

From building a thriving firm, giving it up, and building an even more successful one to empowering women law firm owners to create wealth and fulfillment on their own terms, Davina Frederick is a force to be reckoned with.

The personal and professional challenges she’s faced along her journey have helped her hone in on exactly what’s important to her.

In this episode, Davina opens up about building her businesses, the personal crises that caused her to reassess the path she was on, and why she will never not manage her own money again. This is part one of a two-part conversation.

• • Davina’s decision to start her own firm straight out of law school
  • the personal challenges that caused her to walk away from her firm
  • building a new firm that fits her life
  • focusing on coaching over law
  • why women lawyers need to dream bigger
  • experiencing bankruptcy and rebuilding
  • how she handled an income disparity in her marriage
  • why she will never delegate her money management

Davina’s Instagram

Davina’s website

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey, friend. You are in for such a treat this week because I brought my dear friend Davina Frederick on.

Davina is a fellow attorney, business coach, and the host of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast, and I just love her views on money. She’s had some really unique personal experiences that have shaped the way that she thinks about money and the way she thinks about business.

Davina and I talked for almost an hour, so I’m going to share half of our conversation this week and the other half next week. So let me go ahead and read you Davina’s bio, and then we will jump right into the conversation.

Davina Frederick is a Florida-licensed attorney, two-time author, and founder of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a law firm growth strategy and business coaching company for women lawyers who want to grow their own multi-million dollar law firm businesses without grinding themselves into the ground in the process. She’s also the host of the popular Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast, and the author of two books on law firm marketing and management. When she’s not helping her clients build businesses that support their chosen lifestyle, she’s spending time hiking in the Colorado mountains with her hubby of 22 years, or playing with her English bulldog puppy.

Please enjoy my conversation with Davina Frederick.

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[Rho] Welcome to the podcast, Davina. So good to have you.

[Davina] Rho. It’s so good to be here on your podcast. You’ve been on mine. I’m happy to be here on yours. I’m excited about our conversation. We always have good conversations. So thanks for having me.

[Rho] We do indeed. Yes, thank you for being here. So would you take a minute? Of course, I’m gonna have your bio before we get started, but would you take a minute and just let people know a little about you and what you’re all about?

[Davina] Yes, so I am a Florida licensed attorney who foolishly or not, opened my own law practice right out of law school and grew it successfully. And then I had a little bit of a crisis because it didn’t turn out to be quite what I thought it was going to be.

I was making good money, but I was feeling very overworked, very overwhelmed. And I was 42 when I graduated law school and started my own law firm. And so I was starting going through perimenopause, I was packing on the pounds. I was getting there before everybody got there at the beginning of the day leaving after everybody left.

All I wanted to do when I get home at night was like drink wine and, you know, eat. So I was just not in a good place mentally. This wasn’t kind of what I thought this idea of freedom and wealth that I thought I was going to get from having my own business. I did make money, but it just wasn’t, I was like killing myself in the process.

And so I took a step back from that and I really invested probably tens of thousand dollars in coaching to really understand business and business strategy and how to grow a business effectively. And I started a second law firm a few years later and I grew that and it was a much different experience.

And then I had people asking me how I did it and that sort of led me to coaching myself. So I’ve been coaching professional service business owners for 12 years. I started out more generically and then over time I naturally gravitated or attracted other women lawyers who wanted to start and grow a law firm business.

So I rebranded in 2020 to Wealthy Woman Lawyer. I focused specifically on helping women law firm owners dream a little bit bigger and realize that you can have a wealth generating law firm without killing yourself in the process.

And so that’s what I do now. I have a podcast that I’ve had about six years of the same name. I’ve written two books and published two books on law firm marketing and management. And my focus is really on how to make more money than you ever thought you could make, so that you will have enough resources to not only buy back your time, but really build the wealth that you want in your life.

[Rho] I love all of that. So I’ve got so many things that I want to dive into, starting with that initial experience of going out on your own, building this successful firm, but realizing that you’re kind of grinding, you’re not enjoying the process.

The part that I love about that or the reason that I love that is, I think there are so many lawyers who are in that position, whether they are firm owners or whether they are employed. So often we get caught up in the grinding and the making money and we forget about what we want for our lives and how we want to define success for ourselves.

And you talked about when you made the switch to your second firm, how you were able to build it with that experience in mind and the freedom that you wanted and all of that.

So can you dive a little bit deeper into the importance of thinking about what you actually want when you are going out in your legal career?

[Davina] Absolutely. I think it’s so. I went to law school, I had a previous career. I was a professional services marketer for 15 years before I went to law school. I got married and that provided an opportunity for me to go to law school. And I went to law school with the purpose of starting my own law firm when I graduated because I married an entrepreneur and part of what I loved about that was kind of the freedom of his lifestyle.

And so I did that intentionally. And sometimes I think we don’t know until we experience, right? So I look back on that experience and I wouldn’t change a thing because it was an absolutely amazing experience.

I brought in a partner and we’re still friends to this day. We did a lot of things right, but it kind of created…I was going through a life change as well. When you start going through perimenopause and then going through menopause and all that, you change, your body changes and what your body needs changes.

And I was very sedentary and as a result, I started having all these health problems, you know, the typical kinds of things, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, you weigh too much, you know, all this kind of thing.

And for me, I was like my, my number one, and fortunately, I’m married to somebody who also sort of subscribes to this philosophy. Our number one priority is health. And I was, I was looking at going, my lifestyle is not set up in a way that allows me time to do the things I need to do now that I’m older. And, you know, it’s not as easy to lose weight as it was when I was 20. When I was 20, I could leave off condiments and go run a mile and I would lose weight.

And then I’m leaving off whole food groups and it’s still not working. And it wasn’t for aesthetic purposes so much as it was for these sort of like, oh my god, I’m starting to get diagnosed with these sort of chronic problems.

And then I was having some other things going on in my personal life that were all just too much for me. And I said, I need to take step back. And I think that is very scary for a lot of people because I went to law school and I invested all this money and all this time took out loans. And fortunately for me, I didn’t have to take out quite as much as some other people, but I still had loans.

And I’m like, what in the world is going on? But I was really having an emotional sort of crisis about all of this and thinking about my life and going, I’m not happy. This is not working for me. And no amount of money is worth it. Right?

That’s the part that I got to and I look back on it and first, hind sight is 20/20. I think to myself, well, I wish I had just hired coaches to help me figure it out and not walked away from it because I loved my partner. I loved what we were doing, but that just wasn’t how it wasn’t in the cads for me that way because I didn’t really think of coaching.

No coaching was available. You didn’t have nearly the proliferation of coaching programs back then that you do now. So and the ones that were available seem to be for like big firms, not for small firms.

So it took me sort of like stepping back and I actually got invited. I didn’t work for a year as a lawyer. I worked in my husband’s business. We owned a high performance fitness training gym and I worked, and I got certified and I worked in that business with him.

And I really just gave some thought. I just kind of put everything on pause. And I was fortunate to be able to do that because I was married at the time, so I didn’t have to worry about the mortgage being paid and that kind of thing.

But we had invested a lot in me going to law school and so I really had to put my thinking cap on and come up with a new plan and so that I started my second law firm.

And the first thing that I did is I started a virtual firm. And that was not in 2011 that was not something that people did. This is way pre-COVID. I had a lot of naysayers.

I had a guy tell me, one of my mentors tell me that, oh, your clients are not gonna like that. They’re not gonna like, they don’t have an office to come to. But as it turned out, I was doing estate planning, which was another thing as I sort of scaled down from all the different practice areas I was doing and I focused on estate planning and business contracts.

And my clients actually loved it because I dealt with a lot of elderly people in Florida who didn’t want to drive any place and I was able to work with them. And that’s how I started that business.

So I really was thinking about like a lifestyle business for me and then we developed from there. But, that for me, a lot went into that and there was a lot of kind of identity crisis about what my life, what I really wanted in my life.

And I struggled with, do I even want to be a lawyer? And what will that look like? And, you know, I had a friend tell me, you, you know, you’re being a lawyer is your identity, regardless. You’ve earned that, regardless of whether you’re practicing law day in and out.

Anyway, if you’re a lawyer, you’re a lawyer, you pass the bar, you’ve got a license, you can practice law, you can do it part time, you can work for a firm, you can, it can look any way that you want it to.

And I think that was really liberating for me to have that kind of support, somebody who says, you know, you don’t give up that identity just because you make a change in how you show up in other parts of your life. And I think that’s really where a lot of lawyers struggle because we work so hard for that identity and then to go, well, yeah, but I’m not happy in the way that this picture looks feeling like we can’t change it.

We see a lot of that with people with practice areas.

Well, I’m not happy in this practice area, but I’m making so much money, I can’t change practice areas.

And you have other lawyers who are practicing in the practice area they want to go to saying, you can’t just come into my practice area because you’re not, you have no experience, you’re not qualified. And it’s like, well, at one point, guess what, they weren’t either. And they went into that practice area and they took CLE’s and they got mentors and they got, so if they can, you can too.

And I think that rigid thinking that we get into and that over analysis is really what holds us back from making those changes in our lives to make it more satisfactory to us.

[Rho] I think that’s exactly right. And I’m curious, the friend who encouraged you that you’re still a lawyer even if you change things, does she happen to not be a lawyer?

[Davina] No, she is a lawyer. She is a lawyer.

[Rho] She is a lawyer? Interesting.

[Davina] She is a lawyer. Matter of fact, she was my business partner. She was my business partner and this was after I had left and we were friends at law school and I started the business. She was working for her firm and I invited her after some period of time on my own, I invited her to join me in the business.

And we remain good friends to this day. But I thought that was a really great little piece of wisdom. And my husband also told me when I went to start my own firm. I said, what if it doesn’t work out? And he says, well, you’ll just be like every other lawyer out there.

He had worked with lawyers for 25 years in a computer business, and he said, lawyers change things all the time. Some people work as an associate that they become a partner or they go out on their own, that they go back to being an associate, then they start a business with somebody else.

He goes, you have so many different options in a, in a lifelong career. So thinking to yourself, oh my God, the world’s gonna end if this one thing doesn’t work out. I think that’s the pressure that we put on ourselves, you know.

[Rho] I 100% agree. And that’s why I was curious if your friend happened to not be a lawyer because I think sometimes we get very focused like, this is how it must be. And I can 100% relate to what you were talking about with having an identity crisis around wanting to make a change because I went through the exact same thing when I decided to leave the practice of law to go full time in this business.

And I think we do get so attached to our identities as lawyers and to, I am this specific type of lawyer, this is what I do, that we can’t sometimes see the other opportunities that are available to us because it’s like, no, this is how it has to be, right?

[Davina] Right? And you know, looking at it where I am now, I really see it’s an evolution, right? It’s an evolution of me as a person, right? I’ve evolved from that person I was then to this person that I am now eighteen years later.

You know like I’ve evolved and I’ve allowed that, I’ve allowed that to happen and I’ve opened myself up because I’ve been coaching now for 12 years and that, that was a huge part of the coaching experience for me.

I remember I was running my second practice and my coaching parallel simultaneously, and I was at a fork in the road where I had to make a choice because I knew that to be successful, I really needed to focus.

And this is something I tell my clients who are entrepreneurs. We’ve got all kinds of ideas about different businesses and one of the things I say is focus until that thing becomes successful and able to operate and run itself and then you can add something else.

But doing two things at once, you’re probably not going to do either of them very well. And so I chose the coaching over the law firm business because they were both about equal financially at that time, but I just enjoyed the coaching more.

I really, I got real with myself about who I am and what I really enjoy doing. And I enjoyed business strategy. I enjoyed helping people create and grow a business that they loved.

And also I mentioned this earlier about dreaming a little bit bigger. One of the things that I often see with women law firm owners that I have worked with men to, by the way, if there any men listening to this, is that there’s this sort of settling of, I’m making enough and staying solo for years because they’re afraid of hiring other lawyers. They don’t think they can afford it. They don’t want other lawyers to see their mess.

And so they just kind of like, I’m happy if I just make 250, or I’m happy if I just make 500, or I’m happy whatever. Right?

And so to me, what the work I’m doing is to say, why not you, why not you? If two bros can come out of law school and start their own business and then 20 years later it’s a national law firm, why not you as a woman?

Why can’t you and somebody you went to law school with start your own business, or you go start your own business and hire other lawyers and grow the business as big as you want it, whatever your vision is and it impact as many people as you want with your law firm.

And I think there’s a self capping that happens with a lot of lawyers who go start their own law firm. They say, I’m a solo and it’s like, but why? Why do you need to be a solo? I mean, you can be if you want, but you also can have a whole lot more than that.

You can have a business that you can actually go on vacation and not have to worry about how you’re going to do client consults, you know, do them before your vacation, do them after your vacate during, during your vacation. You don’t have to take your laptop with you.

I’m not interested in taking my laptop to the beach. You get sand in it. You get suntan lotion in it. I’m on the beach, I want to be on the beach, right?

And so that’s really what I’m putting out for people is like, why not you? Why, why can’t you be a millionaire, a multi millionaire? Why can’t you take home in your pocket what your revenue used to be?

[Rho] Yeah, oh, I love that. And a couple of things in what you said come to mind. So going back to when you were taking the break and deciding what you want it to do next, you talked about, you know, having or being fortunate that you had a spouse so you didn’t have to worry about the bills.

But something that I see in that is that you and your spouse were managing your finances in such a way that you were able to take that pause, to take that step back to think about what it was that you wanted to do because there are a lot of two income households that still would not be able to do something like that. So I want to highlight that, you know, the fact that you managed your finances in that way allowed you to then take a step back, regroup and create something that fit your lifestyle a lot better.

[Davina] Mm hmm. Yeah. I want to be, I want to be open here because I don’t want people to think, oh, well, rosey life, right? Because we really were, we really struggled.

Like it was not a time that there was a whole lot, he was making a whole lot of money and then the 2008 crash, his business crashed along with it.

He made the mistake of putting all of his eggs in one client basket and the client kept having more demands and instead of him ramping up his business, he focused more on that one client. And then when their business was affected by 2008, he was affected as a vendor.

And so we literally went from being flush to being bankrupt overnight as a result of that. So I want to be very clear that it wasn’t because I think a lot of people think, oh, must be nice, right? You had a spouse, but, but we were struggling, we were struggling in our marriage. We were struggling financially. Well, he was making a lot of money. He’s a very generous person. He never questioned how much money I was spending or what I was doing, but I am not the kind of person who expects other people to support me. I never had. I always supported myself.

And so for the brief period I was in law school, it was a little uncomfortable to be somebody else was paying the bills while I was going to law school.

But, and then we started another business. That’s how we sort of got through. And our gym business did not make a lot of money, but it was enough for us to, you know, live on and do what we needed to do and build back our life.

And that’s another thing too, I would say to people is that, you know, sometimes things happen and you have to rebuild.

And it could have been a point where we were like, oh my God, life is over, you know, life is over because all this, all these things have happened. But, we instead, we just kind of said, well, we rebuild from here.

And, you know, I, it’s so funny to me because I remember, you know, getting divorced and you’d have, I was married to my first husband, and I got divorced years before I met my second husband.

And I remember just all the things that we had, the house that we had, and the furniture we had and all the things we had. And when I got divorced, I had nothing. I got very little. I took a lot of debt relative to what I was making at that time. And I just was like, I can have all that stuff again if I want all that stuff.

And I think about how many times my husband John and I have gone through different crises and how we’ve, we just rebuilt, like how many different couches we’ve had, how many different, you know, rugs we’ve had, how many different things we’ve had. Because things change, and you can stuff, you can you can always get back your, you can always get back your stuff if you have the physical ability and the mental ability to work and go out and earn money.

So I just want to throw that in because I think a lot of people are listening think, okay, she’s just here making money and she has the luxury of stepping back. No, that was a financial crisis in our life.

I was going through this kind of mental emotional crisis. He was going through something. We had trouble in our marriage as a result of it. So there was a lot of hardship in those years. And in that, I was, both of us were looking for what makes us happy. What is this about?

It wasn’t our relationship with each other, it was ourselves. We were both kind of going through midlife crisis, if you will. And are we happy? Like we have this money and then it all blew up and then are we happy? What is that will make us happy? And that’s been the journey since then.

[Rho] Thank you so much for sharing all of that, Davina. Like thank you for being willing to be vulnerable and to be open about that. Because I think, to your point, a lot of times we might just see that situation like I did it, right? I’m like, oh, she was able to take a step back because of how they were managing their finances. And you’re really like, actually, no.. So I appreciate you being so vulnerable. And that actually brings up another question for me.

Having lived through that experience, having experienced the recession like so closely, how has that changed how you view the importance of making your own money? How you view the way that you manage your money?

[Davina] Oh yeah. So some of the things that happened were, is when I married my husband, we’ve been about to celebrate our 22nd anniversary and when we got married, he made a lot of money and I never had. I never made a lot of money.

And I worked, you know, for years for I had a degree in journalism, I worked at marketing, I was a copywriter. I was making 30,000, 40,000, 50 at one point.

One point I took a pay cut, went down to 20,000 to work for an agency I wanted to work for. So I was literally not making a lot of money.

And part of what I really loved about him when I met it was this kind of he’s like, making money is easy. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been making money since I was seventeen and he made a lot of money. And I was just kind of like, wow, you know, that’s, I’m amazed by that. I love that. Right?

And when I married him, he was, he was sort of managing all the money because he was making it and I wasn’t making as much. So I just, you know kind of rocked with that.

Even though I’m like this really die hard intersectional feminist, you know like I’m like okay, let’s try this for a while.

But when we had all this sort of financial crisis, one of the things that came out of, out of it for me is like, I will never, ever not manage my own money again.

I will never not have some safety nets built in for me.

And so we changed how we were managing money because we were both spenders and this really brought me to, okay, I want to understand money and wealth, and how to actually turn money into wealth.

And I sort of took over the management of money at that point. And, we do it together, right, but I lead it in terms of, here’s what I think we should do to invest, here’s what I think we should do for emergency fund, here’s what I think we should do for this and that debt and all that kind of stuff.

And so we really switch roles a little bit, because that is something that I just became very, very interested in, and I began to educate myself on it.

[Rho] I love that, and I think so often it’s easy, especially for those of us socialized as women to defer to someone else, like defer to the spouse, defer to even financial advisors or other professionals like these people must know more than me, so I’m just gonna let them handle it.

And I love that you came back. You’re like, I’m gonna take charge. I’m gonna educate myself and now I want to be involved in this. I’m going to manage this. And I like that you two are doing it together, but that you are taking more of an active role in it and not just sitting back in, you know, all right, let him handle it and we’ll just see what happens.

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All right, we are going to pause there for today. Are you enjoying this conversation so far? If so, be sure to show Davina some love. She is on Instagram at wealthy woman lawyer, and she also has a podcast called Wealthy Woman Lawyer, as well.

Make sure you come back next week, because we are going to dive into more of Davina’s thoughts on actually managing your money, the things that you want to have driving your decisions about money, including an issue she has with women lawyers who make a lot of money. So you don’t want to miss that.

Please take a second, leave a review for the episode. That helps the episode and the show at large be exposed to more people so more lawyers can get their hands on this information. As always, I appreciate your support.

As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life, and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.