Patrick Williams is a skilled family law attorney with diverse trial experience, ranging from personal injury defense to complex alienation of affection cases. He is particularly passionate about domestic violence, equitable distribution, and spousal support cases. Known for his analytical approach and dedication to advocating for clients, Patrick’s focus on fighting for the “little guy” stems from both his upbringing and his affinity for numbers.
As a founding partner at Batch, Poore, & Williams, Patrick has built a practice that spans family law, divorce, domestic violence, criminal/traffic law, and civil litigation. In addition to his legal expertise, he is a certified parent coordinator, offering specialized insight into family dynamics.
Patrick earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University and worked as a System Administrator and Programmer before entering law school. His background in technology provides him with a unique, practical perspective when addressing complex legal problems.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-williams-55a0746/
Website: https://batchwilliams.com/
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Interview Transcript
Peter
Hey, welcome back to the Family Law Formula podcast. I’m your host today, Peter, and today we have a really special segment for you. It’s time for a spotlight on success, like somebody that is working in the family law field. We wanted to highlight somebody and just have a conversation today and shine the light on some of maybe their most successful and thriving law attorneys and really what separates them from the rest. And so today we have with us Patrick Williams, he’s one of the founding partners at Batch More in Williams in Raleigh, North Carolina. So it’s always sunny and always better weather than up north, right?
Patrick
I
Peter
Think it is.
Patrick
Yeah. It is always sunny, but these summers nowadays are hundred degrees or more so.
Peter
Well, I did see on your website that you are an avid mixologist and grill master, so you’re not letting the heat keep you down. You’re cooking, you’re
Patrick
Enjoying. Yeah, I’m out there regardless.
Peter
There you go. I could do a whole podcast probably with you on Grill Master and all that. I’ve got a ham on my smoker as we speak, but I learned a few things from you. You’ve been practicing law for 19 years now, almost 20, just had your anniversary there and you’ve built a reputation around some of your passions, domestic violence, equitable distribution, and spousal support cases. So excited to talk to you today, but before we kind of jump into some insights and experiences, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your journey in family law, why you love it, and some passions you have around it?
Patrick
Yeah, no problem. So I went to Campbell University Law School back when they were in Buies Creek before they moved to the fancy building in Raleigh. I started my law firm right out of law school. So it was me by myself at first. If you’ve ever seen Better Call Saul, that situation where he was in the nail salon working on the nail salon was pretty much me. For the first six months I was working. I had an office in my mom’s, my mother-in-Law’s Oak. She an OB GYN practice. So I had a little office in there. That’s how I started. And then once my wife graduated, she partnered with me and then a little bit later on we added a third partner and now we’ve got five attorneys, three paralegals. So decent small size firm, but still decent size
And initially did not plan to do family law, thought I wanted to do real estate and some other items, but there’s a big demand for family law. So we started doing it, kind of took over and kind of found the areas in family law that I really enjoyed doing. And what that really comes down to is assisting victims and people who are really not in a situation to help themselves and that manifest itself in domestic violence cases. Sometimes it manifests itself when you’re talking about a dependent spouse who just doesn’t have any resources in there and they’ve separated from their husband or wife and the husband or wife is just not sharing equally the marital assets. So part of that is helping people out who are in a tough financial situation, getting through a divorce, which can be tough for a multitude of reasons. And financial is one of the big reasons early on if you’re not the party who’s a working party.
Peter
Got you. Awesome. Okay, well it sounds like it’s something that was birthed in you and now it’s a passion of yours. And earlier before we started our conversation, we were talking a little bit about recently you tried your first case in front of the Supreme Court. Tell us a little bit about that and the success around it. What you see could be happening of that case.
Patrick
There’s this old antiquated law in North Carolina’s Alienation of Affection, which basically allows someone who was married and their spouse had an affair and allows you to sue the person that your spouse had an affair with for a judgment. So a lot of people think that that law probably doesn’t need to be on the books, but apparently some people still believe that it needs to be on the books. So I was defending a case against someone who was falsely accused of having an affair with someone just because they were a coworker with the plaintiff’s wife won that case at the trial court level and then it went on appeal and it was overturned on appeal. And the gist of the case was the plaintiff’s wife had an affair with a person who she identified as someone who she worked with, but they worked together at this large corporation.
So it was not possible to pinpoint who the person was. And then she later started dating an individual who she worked with and the plaintiff just assumed that because they used to work together, that was the person. There are some laws in place to not allow that type of assumption to get in front of a jury because you can imagine who are you going to pick from someone at a corporation when you’ve got that many people there. And the court of appeals found that a jury can decide that issue, which I thought was wrong. So we ended up appealing it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed with us and the trial court basically saying that, Hey, you got to have a little bit more evidence than just you got this hunch in order for you to sue someone and for that to go in front of a jury. So wanted at the Supreme Court, that was my first Supreme Court argument, thoroughly enjoyed it, and it’s kind of shifted our practice a bit towards doing more appellate work and more oral arguments and things like that. So it was a great experience.
Peter
Often when we think about growth of law firms or trajectory of how practice moves often it’s more surrounding the challenges. It’s exciting to hear that you guys are finding your way to potentially another growth area because of success, but let’s be honest, every case is not like that one. You’ve had cases that have been challenging. Maybe talk to us a little bit about what are some of the biggest challenges you faced within family law and how you guys made a decision to overcome some of those?
Patrick
One of the biggest challenge for us has primarily been just competing with some huge family law firms out there that have tons of lawyers who have been around much longer than we’ve been around. So establishing a foothold in the triangle, realizing that, hey, you may not have the resources of some of these other firms has been a challenge, but the way you overcome that challenge, and this is something, I don’t know if there’s expiring lawyers who are looking to start their own firms who are listening to this podcast, but one of the ways you get around that is just by doing good work and your reputation will procedure you, you’ll start getting referrals from former clients. We even get referrals from attorneys that we have cases against. Sometimes when they have a conflict or something like that, they’re like, Hey, I had this case with Patrick or this firm, they did an excellent job. So I think you’ll be in good hands with them. So it’s just important and you got to do all the marketing things that are important to build a business, but first and foremost, you got to dedicate yourself to doing a great job and good service for your clients, and also being respectful of people you have cases with because you never really know where those referral sources are going to come from.
Peter
Yeah, I love the thought process around setting a strong foundation of your story, of your brand, of who you are and being affirm it. People who maybe can’t always afford the services that you offer, but providing a trust building factor for them. How do you guys approach somebody who really needs your help but maybe doesn’t have the education or the resources or the means or the knowledge? What’s some of the things that you guys have done to outreach into the triangle and differentiate yourselves?
Patrick
So first and foremost, when you’re talking about meeting with a new client and meeting them on their terms, that you have to be able to show empathy. You have to understand, and over the years, you do enough cases that you’ve met. When you see a new client come in, you’re like, oh, this is similar to a previous client that I’ve had,
But you’ve got to be very sensitive about where they are and ascertaining what their needs are. But from a differentiation perspective, we have multiple attorneys. We have a team approach when we take cases here. So we have one partners assigned to your case. We have an associate attorney that’s assigned your case and a paralegal that’s assigned to your case. And it’s really important with new clients, especially that you’re available to them because they’re going to have questions in their case. So it is really important that they can call you and get ahold of you because as an attorney, you’re going to be in court a fair amount and they’re going to be days when you’re not able to reach out to a client. But when you have a team assigned to a case, they can call your firm and everyone’s pretty knowledgeable about what’s going on in your case at any given time.
So I think that’s really important. And then we also make sure that we offer finance options for clients with regards to fees. Having an attorney’s not expensive. I mean, it’s not cheap. So at the end of the day, if you’ve got an option there for them to finance fees to you, it’s very helpful. A lot of clients who need help and that you want to help, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to support your business and support your family. So flexible options as far as payment is concerned, it’s very important to us as well.
Peter
Yeah, I love that you and your firm have a grip and a grasp on who you are, you know who you are, who you’re trying to help, and I would guess that that’s attributed quite a bit to the growth of the firm. You mentioned there’s a lot of competitors, huge competitors in your market, but you found your sliver of being able to really grasp a market and a niche. And the thing I loved most about what you said is you know that all those marketing things are important, the social media posts, video search engine, all of that stuff, your website. But at the end of the day, the source seems to have been this need and desire to help people that you really, really want to. So if there’s a new attorney listening to this or someone who’s been practicing family law for a long time, but they’re in the grind, in the struggle, what advice would you give to that type of an attorney who maybe just needs that little bit of encouragement?
Patrick
So it’s really important to stay at it, be focused, and there are minefields out there as well. So one of the main things for new attorneys is they’re always wondering, how am I going to build this? How am I going to get business? Online presence is essential. When I started, it was in 2005. It was a completely different market than it was than it is now, but I kind of grasped on the fact that there were just not a lot of attorneys doing online marketing then. And my background is in tech. My undergraduate degree is computer engineering. So I really focus on, okay, this is how much money I have to market. And I decided that I was going to focus all of that online at the time, and I think we were one of the first firms to really spend a lot of money in that realm, marketing in that way.
And now everyone does it, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of third party vendors out there who want to do this for you. They want to market for you online. And I would challenge a lot of new attorneys, especially in this age where everybody grew up in a digital age, to try and build some of that online marketing and learn some of it yourself to start, that’s a good way to cut costs because these companies out here that want to do it for you, a lot of them are charging you two, $3,000 a month minimum and want you to sign up for a three year commitment. And that type of commitment early on in the lifecycle of a firm can sink it. There may be must that you don’t make two, $3,000 a month. I think that kind, learning how to do some of that stuff yourself in the early stages is very important. And then kind of branching out and finding third parties to do it later on, outsourcing some of that stuff when you can afford it, I think is the way to go. But keeping costs down doing good work, I think is a good way to start. And you can do it. I mean, you can start that way and you can grow it.
Peter
Yeah, yeah. Sounds like experiential advice that you’ve been through. You started now, you’ve been practicing for a long time of those digital marketing, when you made the decision to get into more of that third party vendor agency type of marketing, when was that? Was it a year? Was it a revenue mark? What for you was that differentiating factor?
Patrick
So I’m going to show my age, man. So in 2005, everyone, it was a push to use the Yellow Pages actually. It was like, Hey, you need a big full page and the yellow pages to be successful, and back then people would come by and try to actively sell you these ads. So being a young lawyer, part of me was like, okay, well everyone’s doing this. I feel like I have to do it. And we did Yellow Pages for a little while and realized, okay, this is a total waste. The people that you know who actually uses this to find things now, the answer was no one, everyone’s searching. So then it really came down to, from my perspective, okay, we’ll hire people, finding lawyers. What is the way that people find lawyers? And it was Google at the time. What it came down for us was I ended up learning how to use the Google Lab words myself, but I really look for vendors.
I don’t want to really call any names obviously, but there are some vendors out there who are going to try to sell you things. And it is basically, we’re going to get you results, but you have to commit to this for two or three years and then it puts you in a position where eight or nine months down the line, if you’re not getting results, what do you do? You can’t get out of this deal. So I think it’s really important. We learned this the hard way because we signed one of those two year deals and it didn’t work out, and we ended up losing a lot of money because of it, and it was tough. But the lesson learned from that, which is a lesson that I think a lot of people can employ going forward, is there are vendors out there who do these things on a month to month basis.
You can go on Upwork and find a vendor who will help you with SEO or help you with web design or help you with an AdWords campaign. They’ll charge you hourly and then that way you can say, Hey, this isn’t working out, or Hey, this is a tight month. I’m not going to pay you to do this this month. So it gives you the flexibility to not be committed if you do it that way. And that’s what I would encourage people to do when you do have the money to do that. But starting out, a lot of times with law firms, you aren’t able to market online. And that’s an opportunity. I mean, the real way to get around that is to really seek out contract work, core appointed lists, things like that I think can float in the early stages to get you to a point where you’re bringing in your own clients.
Peter
And I can imagine reputation, that trust factor that you talked about earlier was so at the core of all of those decisions that it seems to me like that was what the foundation you were standing on and then adding these vendors or agencies added more fuel to the flame, if you will. And that’s kind of where you find yourselves. It sounds like doing well, you added a third partner and things are continuing to grow in advance. What’s next for you guys over there at the firm and what are you looking to do to grow?
Patrick
We’re growing now. We’ve been doing appeals for years, but it’s one of those things where doing appeals is kind of unsung work because a lot of people aren’t reading these case decisions. But then once we had a couple of Appell had an appellate argument in front of the court of appeals and I had the Supreme Court appellate argument, and that started getting colleagues reaching out to me saying, oh, you did a great job. We’re going to start sending you these types of cases that has grown our appellate division a good amount. We obviously market for it as well. We’re in the process now bringing on, we have three partners, two associates. We’re in the process now bringing on at least one more attorney, probably two and a couple more paralegals. So just to accommodate the volume here, it’s been great. I mean, I can’t complain at all about the work, but it’s been working and obviously we’ve scaled our marketing in accordance with that to manage that.
Peter
It sounds to me like you guys had metrics that you were, if we do X, then we’ll do Y. Does that sound right? What are some of those success metrics? I’m a brand new family law attorney at the early part of my practice. I know I’ve got a sense of benchmarks. What are those from your perspective?
Patrick
So from our perspective, it is not like a bright line. They’re not bright line metrics. I mean, we had goals like, Hey, we want to by X year, we want to have this amount of revenue in this year. Those are definitely goals that we had, but even having revenue goals are not very helpful because what does that mean when you reach that revenue level? Does this mean, at least for us, it’s like when we reach this revenue goal, does this mean we automatically hire another attorney? Do we not hire another attorney? How is that going to impact health insurance? We offer health insurance for all our employees. It’s very expensive when you bring on somebody, you have to add that cost on. So we had those goals, but really for us, it’s more about, okay, are we able to provide a certain quality of service to our clients with our current staff size?
And that’s really what it comes down to. And once we see that starting to decline, that lets us know, okay, we need to bring on somebody for support staff. We need to bring on an additional attorney. And part of it is service to clients. The other part of it is also service to our employees, like our employees having mental health issues because they’re in trials four or five days a week. So we carefully monitor work that we’re doing for clients, but we also carefully monitor our employees to make sure, Hey, are you okay? Do you have time to take your PTO? Are you bringing this home super stressed out about the number of cases you have? And those are all kind of indicators for us to try and say, okay, we need to grow, we need to shrink, or whatever.
Peter
Yeah, you just keep on coming back to this core, and I want to make sure our listeners catch this. If you understand anything about storytelling or branding or anything, if you watch what Patrick’s done, go to his website@batchwilliams.com where clients come first. That’s your tagline. I want to commend you on this. Every decision is based on that, how you hire the goals and revenue that you’ve put in place, all with the purpose of how you guys have set up financial options for your clients. You really are embodying that. Where clients come first, where’d that come from?
Patrick
In any business, you’re really trying to satisfy your customer, satisfy your clients. But law more than any business is really about building a trust relationship with clients and making sure that clients trust you to listen to your advice. Because at the end of the day, you’re advising them. You’re telling them, Hey, this is what I think is best for your case. And if you don’t have a strong relationship with your clients, and if you don’t put them first, they’re not going to trust your advice. You’re going to tell ’em to do something, they’re not going to do it. Or they’re going to say, Hey, I think we should do this, or I don’t trust you in making this decision. For me. Once they realize that, Hey, Patrick has my best interest at heart, I believe that Patrick is going to do what’s best for me, then that makes the relationship a lot smoother between the client and the attorney.
And that’s very important. So that’s where it comes from. Just from experience knowing that your client has to trust you, you have to have a great relationship with your client in order to do your best work, and you have to build that, you have to cultivate that relationship. And a big way to do that is understanding your clients, understanding financially what a stressor paying you is on them. I mean, that’s a big deal. You’re getting paid a ton of money to represent them, them, so they expect a certain quality. And then kind of tagging back to what we said earlier, it also impacts hiring because you want to make sure you have enough staff available to be there for them. Because at the end of the day, one of the main reasons that people get upset with their attorneys is because their attorneys aren’t responsive.
And at the end of the day, there’s always a tug of war there before the attorney between I got cases to try, I got other cases that I’m not trying on that day that may have things that pop up. So that kind of leads back to the team approach. And these are all things where we’ve seen when I was by myself practicing, if I was in court all day and a client called me, I’d get back to ’em in two or three days and they haven’t heard anything. And then they’re like, I’ve been calling you for two days. I haven’t heard anything. And I’m like, Hey, I’m in trial. And then they’re like, well, is my case not as important to you as this other case? So that’s when you’re kind of like, okay, we got to do something about this. Whether it be I got to hire a legal assistant or I got to hire a paralegal who can at least get this client updates on their case.
But even expanding on that, just without regards to clients, we genuinely care about people who are going through divorce. And one of the things that we discussed offline was our website has a ton of information, and we have clients all the time who call us and say, I found X on your website. Is this true? Or, I really felt like that you were helping me because the information on your website was so helpful and that’s why I’m calling you. And our approach with that has always been, Hey, we want to give you information that is actionable on our website versus just information that gets you to call us. And then, hey, if you try to do it on your own and you’re not able to do it, then call us. We’re here. But at the end of the day, for example, a divorce, which is a very common thing, there are so many resources to do the actual divorce without an attorney. We try to lead you to those sources versus saying, Hey, call us. We can do this for you. You can’t do it without us.
Peter
Yeah. Well, man, I’ve been totally impressed with just you guys as approach to growing a firm, managing a firm, how you approach really growth cycles and even challenges. I can imagine that family law massively demanding for one of my last questions, how do you manage that work-life balance and maintain your wellbeing and all of that? Because there’s a lot of cases involved in this, right? So how do you approach that
Patrick
Hobbies, man,
You have to focus on, for me, if I go home and I don’t do anything, you’re going to think about, oh, this case went this way. I could have done this differently. This client can’t be in a good space based on what happened here. It’s just really important as an attorney, when you’re done with your cases, obviously you’ve done your good work when you’re done to find something to take your mind off that day-to-day emotional fight that you’re involved in with family law cases. So I got a ton of hobbies, man. Way too many. Sometimes I got to cut back on my hobbies, but it’s just basically the way when I go home, that’s how I’m like, all right, I’m done with this sort of day. We’re going to work on something that I enjoy doing.
Peter
Yeah, it probably affects your clients on the backside too. You’re more rested. Yeah, I’m happier, more balanced. You’re happier, you’re going to work harder on their case of the, all those things are implications to how you approach family law. So man, if you’re listening today, some of the takeaways that I’ve heard are build that strong foundation with your core values, scale appropriately around those. Be smart with how you launch your firm and how you approach family law. Find some good hobbies. Patrick, in the last couple of moments, floor is yours, man. What advice and last minute thoughts or anything around when it comes to being a family law attorney that you want to just give our listeners before we end today?
Patrick
No problem. So it is a stressful profession. Just be prepared and that means that they are able to deal with stress and able to relate to people who are dealing with stress. So that’s very important. It’s not for someone who wants to avoid emotional clients, who wants to avoid emotional situations and cases, but if you want something that’s rewarding, meaning that always tell people family law, a lot of people go through it, whether it be they saw their parents get divorced and they have opinions on it and they’re like, Hey, I don’t believe that my mom was treated right in the divorce from my dad, but it is extremely rewarding. I can’t think of anything I’ve ever done that’s been as rewarding from when you’re representing somebody who you know is being done wrong and you get the right result. Whether it be getting a restraining order to protect them from somebody who’s been abusive, whether it be getting a spousal support or some type of support award to allow somebody to keep their house after they get divorced.
Those are the situations where when that happens, not only do you have extremely grateful clients, I’ve gotten some of the greatest gift baskets and things like that from clients who are happy from services with us. But it’s extremely rewarding to help somebody like that who goes into it thinking, this guy has been taking advantage of me, or This woman has been taking advantage of me her entire life during our entire marriage. And I know that the court is not going to listen to me because he didn’t listen to me. It is very rewarding to win a case like that, and those are the battles that we fight for all the time.
Peter
Well, Patrick, man, it’s been a joy to talk to you today and hear about your story and your firm, and I can’t shake that where clients come first. So thankful for you being in the triangle area and helping so many people. It’s been a joy, man, and I look forward to maybe continue this conversation at another time. But thanks for taking some time today.
Patrick
No problem. Take care. I appreciate you.
Peter
Alright, y’all have a great afternoon. We’ll see you on the next podcast.
Patrick
Sounds good. Take care.
