Today we share an Automation Panel from MaxLawCon 2019 featuring Tyson Mutrux, Kelsey Mutrux, Harlan Schillinger and Eric Coffman.
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Transcript: “Automation Panel” at MaxLawCon 2019
Speaker 1
welcome to the podcast edition of maximum growth live. The number one program for lawyers who want to grow their practices. Each week, our hosts Seth price and Jay Ruane tackled the fundamental questions about how to grow the profit and profitability of your law firm to watch the program live. Submit your questions and hear the latest episode tune in every Thursday at 3pm. Eastern on Facebook for our live show maximum growth live is a production of maximum lawyer media.
Jay Ruane
Hello, hello and welcome to another edition of maximum growth live. I am one of your hosts Jay Ruane, CEO of firm flex, a social media marketing company for lawyers as well as the managing partner overweight attorneys. In Shelton, Connecticut. We do civil rights we do criminal law. But more importantly, this guy right here Seth price, all things SEO, founder of blue shark digital and managing partner of Price Benowitz in DC in Maryland and Virginia in South Carolina, in Alaska and Hawaii in Peru. They’re everywhere. Seth are you doing this week?
Michael McCreedy
I’m doing great. I’m excited South Carolina is exploding. We’re up to three lawyers which is pretty pretty freakin cool.
Jay Ruane
That is a goodbye vacation house on the Isle of Palms. And you can you know, I can come down there and use it every summer. And you can deduct the whole thing and it’s a freebie to me, right?
Michael McCreedy
And I’m tickled because the oh, we would not have that. But for Dan Phillips joining us, thanks to Max Lacan. So, you know, the fact that this this world and what we’re doing here has helped build the firm is just awesome.
Jay Ruane
And for those who don’t know, Max law con is an annual seminar put on by maximum lawyer, maximum lawyers a podcast, we are syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast, as well as our own standalone podcast and we broadcast this show every week live in the Facebook group maximum lawyer, you can certainly join that group, you can subscribe to the maximum lawyer podcasts, you can subscribe to ours, or watch us on any one of our live platforms. So set, what we have this week is a visit with a friend of both yours and mine. I’ve gotten to know him through John Fisher’s mastermind, it’s funny, you keep hearing the same names come up, over and over again, you got fishers mastermind, which is phenomenal. If you want to tackle one hairy problem in your firm, everybody who’s out there should be participating in that at least once in their in their career. But once you get in, you want to go in again and again. Because it’s just it’s an awesome community. And then there’s the maximum lawyer community. And I’ve gotten to know Michael McCready, who’s our guest today through both of those. So why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about him? You know,
Michael McCreedy
look, this is a guy who’s built a pie shop in a very competitive market, Chicago when you have to see for yourself and you’ll see in a couple of minutes, Michael has done such a good job, not only with systems, but with software and KPIs. You know, he’s taken his pie shop with smart advocate. And he has done stuff that I think makes smart advocate proud. Like, I don’t think they realize how much you know, smart Africa was created by Jerry Parker, one of the legendary guys in New York, who’s just an amazing guy, we should gotta get him on the show. And, and Michael took this and is a force of nature. He’s, he’s, he’s tried TV’s work with us on digital, he has built just a juggernaut of a shop. And I would argue with tighter systems and culture than just about anybody. So I can’t let’s get let’s get him out here. So we don’t lose any time with him.
Jay Ruane
Yeah, you know, the culture that he’s built in his office is really sort of phenomenal. And it’s certainly something that I definitely want to talk to him a little about because of everything that we’ve gone on. We’re coming up to the holiday season, there’s going to be some some definitely some stuff that we should talk about with him. So let’s do this. We’re gonna take a few moments to hear from our sponsors, as we always do, we’re gonna bring him in. And when we come back, we’ll have Michael McCready, personal injury lawyer from Chicago with us. Hang tight, folks, we’ll be right back.
Speaker 4
The lawyers who will succeed in the next decade are the ones who are focusing on building their brands where people meet, and there is no place better to build your brand than on social media. With the firm flex DIY social media plan. Hundreds of lawyers like you are using social media to build their brand and become the one lawyer in their community that people know like and trust. By spending even just five minutes a day on social media marketing, you can engage with hundreds or 1000s of people in your local community who will need your services by cultivating a network of followers. You build a book of business that you can market to the next decade and beyond. If you are looking for a solution to help you jumpstart your social media marketing, look no further than the DIY plan at get firm flex.com. The DIY was created by a small firm lawyer for people just like you, helping you connect with local people online. and build your brand and engage people in the topics they want to talk about all for under $100 a month. To find out more visit, get firm flex.com.
Speaker 5
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a bigger impact. You have to have a digital blueprint that says typically, throughout the time that we’ve been working with blue shark digital, our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group grew over 14 100%
Jay Ruane
Seth and his team have years of experience in this area,
Speaker 6
blue shark is truly a part of the firm. So I don’t consider blue shark any different than the employees in my office.
Michael McCreedy
Michael, great to have you here. So excited to dive deep into what’s going on within your shop we’ve all been struggling with, you know, during COVID. And keeping systems in place that Jay talks a lot about, you’ve done a great job of not just system monetizing a firm, but it appears during COVID Coming up with interesting ways to try to keep those systems going talks a little bit about how in you know, in a very competitive market, you’ve been able to keep a ship running with as many people as you have.
Speaker 7
Yeah, thanks, sets. Thanks, Jay. Yeah, happy to happy to be here. So COVID has presented a lot of challenges. from an administrative standpoint, also from delivering the legal services. So when when we shut down, we’re in Chicago, and and we had a full shutdown in March, for about two and a half, three months, I had a firm wide meeting on Zoom. This is when zoom was still kind of new and interesting. I know everybody’s tired to zoom at this point. But we had a firm wide meeting and my message to the team was let’s take this opportunity, you know, we’re not going to struggle, we’re going to come out stronger. And what can we do to position ourselves to, to benefit and to come out stronger the end of this not knowing when the end was going to be of course. So we had a very rough month of April and May. And then we started opening up again, I want a personal injury practice 60% automobile cases, 30% premises cases. So when the economy is shut down, people just aren’t out. And there’s just not that many accidents. So we took the time of the complete shutdown to review a lot of our processes and procedures. We reviewed all of our forms. You know, when you’ve got a firm that has enough clients, you have to systemize it and you have to have forms, you can’t reinvent the wheel with every single meeting, if you have every single letter that you have, I think most most lawyers understand that and have their own set of forms, whether they’re automated templates or not. They’ve got a form. So we we went through and reviewed all of our forms, which ones are we using? Which ones are we not using? And which ones could we improve? And, and we spent a lot of time on that. Now, but the point is, we reviewed all of our systems from top to bottom with the expectation that things were going to change, and we need to change and adapt and how can we improve during this period of time?
Michael McCreedy
You know, part of it is keeping the your team motivated. And during the you know, non pandemic time you go around your pack somebody in the back, you say hello, you could actually tell by body language how somebody is doing, how have you adapted to keeping morale up and keeping people motivated in a time where you don’t have as many touches with them?
Speaker 7
Well, it’s certainly been a struggle. I can’t say that I have any magic answers. I think what helped our firm was what we had in place before COVID-19. And you can’t plan for that. Nobody expected a pandemic and a complete shutdown to the economy. But for years we have been working completely electronically. I’ve got four offices. We all work interdependent. Many of my staff don’t even see each other except in person at a Christmas party, but know each other very, very well just through the means of communication that we have. So when I sent everybody home, it was a Friday. I said everybody take their voice over IP phones home with them, plug them into the internet, made sure everybody had a computer everybody could log into our system and Monday morning. I mean we never missed a beat. So so so so logistically, it was okay for us but from a A culture standpoint, I think that a lot of the groundwork was was already built, which has allowed us to continue. If you don’t have a strong culture, if you don’t have people that love what they’re doing and believe in your vision and what you’re doing, sending him at sending to work at home is a nightmare. We do, we do have extensive metrics that we keep track of in terms of productivity, and so forth and so on. But frankly, we really haven’t needed to, to enforce very much of that, because everybody’s doing what they did when they were in the office.
Michael McCreedy
You have the multiple offices as is we do something that I’ve experimented with, with mixed results, I’m wondering how you’ve done is to keeping a video chat going to try to simulate some of the interpersonal that they might get in the office, even pre COVID, where we have multiple offices, and there might be an admin by themselves at a satellite location. Have you you know, have you had any, either positive or negative experience using sort of a video hangout that people can participate in when needed unmute and ask questions. So you get some of that serendipity rather than waiting for more formal meetings.
Speaker 7
We haven’t found that to be effective in our firm. Listen, Zoom meetings were cool and unusual in March. And then by the time April rolls around, everybody’s not another Zoom meeting.
Michael McCreedy
What I was talking about, like a, just an ongoing, Jane, I’ve talked about this, the ongoing video hangout so that it’s basically I’m trying to figure out ways to keep people not being isolated. They’re doing their work. And in theory, they know what they’re doing. They’ve pivoted into that. But if you’re working in your own world, our intake team, for example, normally can shout around the room. Hey, I got a client asked me about this. Anybody have any experience? And you you lose that? Is there any sort of chat and or video chat that you’ve been able to use to sort of help simulate what you did have at least for the people that were together before?
Speaker 7
No, we really haven’t. We communicate primarily electronically between the offices, we use teams, just like a Slack, just we’re bouncing things between everybody all the time. I think it’s a good point, it may work. Also, I’ve got a lot of different personalities in the firm. We all respect each other. We all work together. But we’re not necessarily buddies. You know, as my firm has grown, when it was me and three, four or five people, it was just one of the teams. You know, we go out for a beer after work on Friday. anymore, is it? Yeah, but but now I’m the boss. I feel Yeah, I need to separate myself. And then same thing we’ve got, we’ve got millennials that are interested in going out and doing their own thing. I’d have people that have been with me for 15 years that have got kids that are in college. So we have a lot of different interests that socially, I don’t know, necessarily, it just wouldn’t work with my firm.
Michael McCreedy
You know, you’re talking about some ideas. You know, we’re all trying to figure out holiday parties coming up. Marilyn just reduced the percentage of people 20 People max at an event, restaurants 25% capacity, you had some creative ideas of what you’re thinking about holiday party wise.
Speaker 7
Yeah, so the holiday party is a really big deal at my firm. Because it’s for me, I mean, I really look forward to it. Last year, what we vary from year to year, so one year we will do staff and spouses. And then another year, we’ll have a big party where we invite our referring attorneys and doctors that we work with. So one year we rented out the House of Blues for a big party last year, and we went to a really nice steak restaurant in downtown Chicago with just spouses and last year. The thing about the holiday party is it’s not about me, right? It’s not about my ego. I don’t need anybody to say oh my god, you know, it’s for everybody else to get together and their spouses to get together and people. When we have the various offices, it’s one time a year they are in the same room together. And last year, we had dinner we did everything we normally do the rest of the bar closed at 930. And I’m not kidding, no one left. Okay, no one from the Christmas party. You know, listen to bar closes, everybody leaves, right? It gets to be 1030. In the end, the restaurant kicks us out. But to me, I just sat around and watched and was so proud of everybody that was there at the firm and their interactions, you know, and even responses, you know, oh, I can’t believe you work with you work with reading was wonderful. So that’s the history of our holiday parties. I looked into having holiday party in person and It’s just not happening. You know, it’s no matter how much I want to do it, it’s not a fan. Now Chicago was shut down again. So it’s just not feasible. So we’re we’re investigating a virtual holiday party. And I didn’t even want to do it, because I was afraid a virtual holiday party would sell. But we have, we have gotten some creative ideas. And we are in the process of implementing some of those. So here’s what we’re working on. And I’d love if anybody else who’s listening to the podcast has any other ideas to share them. Because to make a virtual to make any virtual holiday party is a challenge. So the first thing we’re doing is we’re hiring a comedian to do the Z. The holiday party has set a very, very strict schedule. It cannot be freeform, it cannot be 30 people on Zoom and everybody talking, Hey, how are you? How are you? There’s gotta be a structure. So the comedian is going to act as the emcee. He’s going to send out a questionnaire to the firm, with some questions that we’ll be able to use material a couple other things we’re doing in his website called cameo comm or you can get a personalized video. So we’re here in Illinois and our former governor went to jail. He’s now on cambio. They have a very happy holiday. And say we want we’re also going to use pre recorded videos. Referring attorneys that doctors that we work with really quick, everybody at mccredie Law, shout out. I’m Dr. Doe. And so wishing you Happy holiday, I love working with you guys. And intersperse those around the evening. It’s a holiday party, what happens? I’ll drink for some people, Hey, we’ve got some that don’t drink that others that? Well, that’s reason they go to the out of the park Corporation, kind of a drinking game and have a flashcard come up like every 10 minutes or so
Michael McCreedy
I can see when the Cle is when they put the number up, you have to you have to write down.
Speaker 7
Right? So if you have a dog, take a drink. And okay. And even people that aren’t drinking alcohol, I mean, if they have water or pop or something like that. So just something that will encourage people to drink. There was one card that said have the number of drinks as the number of countries that you visited. And a lot of I’ve been in 31 countries. But so we’re trying to do that. Yeah, well, I mean, that’s what else we do. We do a white elephant, which is like a gag gift every year. Usually we do it and you can steal from the person or so. So someone opens up a president and they keep it the next person will say all right, I’ll present or I can stick with the one that someone had. We really can’t do that remotely. Actually,
Michael McCreedy
I just came up, you just inspired me. Why can’t we if you’re using it on Zoom, you have it each person has it there it’s opened and then you could somehow maybe if you use the phone as well as the the computer, you could then have the president on a on a zoom and then people could steal it and take it that just, you know, there seems to be some way that you could do that.
Speaker 7
You could but here’s the problem is that you know, when you’re doing it live, you physically move present, right? Well, you just stole my present. And now my bottle of scotch is sitting in front of you. And then Jay comes along and says oh no, no, I’m gonna take that. So we can’t physically move it. The other thing is logistically at the end is how do we get all these presents that remember. So what we’re going to do, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have everybody pick a name, you know, almost like a Secret Santa. And then that person will be responsible for buying the gag for that person and shipping it to them. And then but we’re gonna have people open them up on screen. And so we’ve we’ve, we’ve had just a lot of fun with that over the years. The difficult part is when you’ve got new staff that I’ve never been to one of our Christmas parties. They don’t understand how you know how raunchy, some of the gifts can get and just tell off color. So we need to try to come up with with really detailed explanation. You know, here’s some things that other People have gotten from other years. But you know, and then you know, people can open them up on screen, you know, on screen and say, oh my gosh, look at this, you know, it’s a pair of Donald Trump underwear or whatever. So so we’re going to incorporate that.
Michael McCreedy
Over the years we’ve had between the, the extensive blue shark, white elephant party and the drinking, there have been some contentious moments as those gifts moved around. So, Jay, leave it to you. But Michael, it’s possible to just adjust the mic slightly.
Speaker 7
Let’s see, adjust the mic. Perfect. Oh, okay.
Jay Ruane
All right, that’s great. So like, you know, I love what you’re doing. And I can give you one tip, I found this company that’s based in LA called Drink Smith. And I’ve ordered from them three times now in the last couple of weeks, they sell pre made cocktails, with like organic juices, and they have this uniquely chambered bottle. So they say, pressurize the drinks. So the fresh juices at the bottom, and you have to twist the bottle to cause the mixture. So it’s like fresh juices, and the cocktails are amazing. We’ve ordered now three times, I’ve got another one on the truck for delivery today. Every time we get them, you know, we it’s the name of the company is drink Smith. And it was a bunch of bartenders got together to put this out for specifically for like Office happy hours. And it’s better than just having like a bourbon in water. It’s like a true bourbon drink. So we love it here. And I’m sending some out to all the members of my office as part of some of our stuff that we’re doing for holidays. So you may want to check that out. But one of the things, one of the things I want to talk about with you is systems in this term, because I got to meet you sitting at one of John Fisher’s mastermind sit next year, and I kept turning to you, instead of turning to whoever was leaving the room. But somebody said something to me interesting lately, and I want to get your take on it and then talk and follow up question. They said, systems make a good person, great, but they can’t make a bad person good. And the quit. And I want to know if you agree with that. And then the second question is COVID, COVID, Corona, whatever you want to call it has really challenged the way our firms are operating now. You know, there’s talk this week of a vaccine, say everyone in your office can get the vaccine February 1. Does that mean February 2? We’re just opening back to business the way it used to be? Or Is there stuff that you can take from what we’ve gone through over the last 810 12 months at that point? And make your firm even better?
Speaker 7
Yeah, let me address that part first, because we’ve had, we’ve had the executive team talking about this quite a bit. And we’ve made it clear from day one, that working from home, not a permanent solution. You know, I think that a lot of our positions can work from home, if it was designed as a work from home position. But here’s the problem that we run into is a lot of our people have got children, and children at home, and they don’t understand dads at work. You don’t understand them that moms can’t do that. So people who work from home generally have to dedicate the offense, they close the door to know not to disturb them, the husband, the wife, though not to disturb them. So that can work. But we’re not going to be remote law firm. There’s something that is lost. positives are that we don’t have to meet a client. Okay, I mean, everybody is now accepting the fact that we do electronic signatures. And we can do intakes on the phone and we’re signing up 30% of the people electronically. The reason why we have physical offices were for people to come in. And when people aren’t coming into the office, physical offices aren’t as important and manning them not as important. So we do plan that we do plan on coming back to the offices, everything clears up. However, we have also expanded our, our, our job description, searches, start hiring some people from around the country. So I mean, there’s some very talented people around the country that don’t live in Chicago that that very easily can promote. We really started our job searching around the country.
Michael McCreedy
It’s funny, we just talked about that on our Tuesday show, which was, you know, look, we were talking about outsourcing overseas, but you know, some of the most successful lawyers domestically are in the panhandle of Alabama, where cost of labor is a lot less. And you know, as being in Chicago and the New York Metro and DC, there’s such a premium and that we are we paying an exorbitant premium just to get people to get downtown, the commuting costs are tremendous. So I’m giddy about the idea that I feel like to a certain extent the band has been ripped off. But I’m sort of with you that there’s a certain amount that you you gain by being together. That, you know, I’m hoping that we, I think that you know, like most things in life, we will see a greater movement towards certain positions being telecommute, and I feel like things that might burn people out five days a week, commuting an hour each way is very different than three or four. And the idea that you may be able to retain people longer by having that mental health day where they don’t need to fight the traffic and the commuting. I think that’s gonna go a long way. Given that we now know, we’ve had a test period, who does work well remotely? And who doesn’t? That’s been a, an eye opener to see what does work. And one of you guys was mentioned a moment ago, I think maybe Jay was, you know, the idea that like the people that were a players, you know, they were a players remotely, and they followed the systems and the people that were on the bubble, you know, those are the ones that we had, and most of them are been washed out. But the people who went home who are not a players, they’re the ones we really struggled with. And I think that how we hire going forward, knowing that that telecommute is gonna be part of that formula may be different than what we did before we knew somebody was going to be in the office full time.
Speaker 7
You know, that ties into Jays first question about whether process these make a bad player, a good player, and also with you in terms of who you’re hiring and what what traits you’re looking for. So we hire for traits, not roles. For the most part, we teach the people at our firm because they need and the processes they need to run. But we can’t we can’t teach somebody how to be a good worker. One of the personality traits that we like, are people who follow directions, and like systemized, in the answers to everything. Now, that’s not what you want. If you’re Google, you want a form and creative people, I don’t need creative people. I don’t need a whole team of creative people. Okay, I need people that can do the work and follow the systems and the way that we’ve set them up. Certainly, there’s room for analysis. And there has to be, but you know, if you have that personality trait, if you have somebody that just wants to do things their own way, and rebels, that’s not going to fit within our firm. So I really haven’t had a problem with, you know, with with with poor performance on our systems. You as an employer, as the boss, I have to present I have to provide them with the training. And I have to provide them with the tools. Okay, if I give them the training and the tools, and they’re on their own, because you should be able to see if you can’t see with our training and with our tools. And the question is either you don’t have the mental capacity, you’re just not quick enough to do it. Or you’re not a hard enough worker. And I’m guilty
Michael McCreedy
about is the idea that right now, and I guess I will say for myself, I hate to admit it. But there are times we have a limitation, we have so many applicants that are willing to get to our office on a daily basis, the idea that you’re doing a national search gives you so much more of an opportunity to find people that will fall into your systems, you may get somebody who’s like they have six out of 10 things, but you can get them to come to the office on Monday. Whereas I’m I’m cautiously optimistic that as we move borders around, that we will be able to get eight or nine of our 10 things that we really want more easily. That again, maybe it’s different in your market, but I’ve had issues where, you know, we get people that might be great, but we can’t make it worth their while to get downtown. I’d love to be at a point where I’m able to get some of those people that were eight 910s that I just couldn’t grab otherwise.
Speaker 7
You know, so So what I the way that I look at it is, you know, you guys, both run firms and respected and they’re a good culture. It’s a great place to work, right? I mean, I’m not I’m not saying anything, people, my firm wouldn’t tell you. You know, we’re very careful about who we let in as part of the team. But there are a lot of players out there that are working for see law firms, and they’re not being challenged. They’ve been doing it forever. And so we really tried to appeal to those kinds of people not necessarily looking for a job. It’s good and now A GE that they used is that if you’re in a long term relationship, you know, you got a boyfriend, girlfriend. You know, I don’t really want another I don’t I’m not looking for a girlfriend. But you know, let me let me see what the personal ads today and just something attractive Wow Who is this person and and that’s kind of how we look at our job search is we’re looking for the people that you know are comfortable, they’ve got a job really good at what they do, they know that they can be better, they know that are better places to work out there. And we try to appeal to them. And I mean, I’ve had I’ve had people tell us that I wasn’t looking for a job, but your job posting spoke to me more than one person that said our job posting has spoke to I look at social media, as one of our greatest recruiting tools is people that are looking at our firm to work there look, and our social media is who we are. Right? You know, it celebrates birthdays and accomplishments and, and fundraisers that we’re doing and, you know, we’re a fun place to work and, and that that’s the kind of person that we want to attract.
Michael McCreedy
Just give me an idea. We you know, I don’t think we do our birthdays on social media. That’s a that’s a that’s a great idea. What do you do do anything something we’ve had some success with, with internal recruiting, you know, having a bounty for for people with the firm bringing their friends who may not be looking, but knowing that it means something to their, to their bottom line if they bring in good people.
Speaker 7
Yeah, you and I have talked about this, I’ve never implemented a bounty. But I will say that some of my best hires have been recommendations. Hey, you know, my bet my friends been working with such and such a firm for 15 years. Now I’ve got a little bit with working in person, I’ve got a little bit of a different dynamic than you, my main office is on the south side of Chicago. And so an attractive part of working at my office is not having to go downtown. Alright, so we have attracted some some really high quality people that just don’t want to go downtown anymore. And now they can come to our south side office, the drawback of being on the south side is limit the geographic scope for the people that can come to Iraq. So anybody on the north side is not going to travel all the way to the south side to come to our firm. But we’ve got reject downtown things. So we got to try to get
Michael McCreedy
people, you know, price benefits, all that has satellite offices out there, the main office being downtown, but I live this experience, I get it. I had blue shark when it started in Bethesda, Maryland walking distance from my house, which was freaking awesome. But people from Virginia didn’t want to come to Maryland. So by putting something in DC, you’d get the people that could come from anywhere. And it’s like you had that that is definitely an advantage. But what you can’t get is the people who are local, where it’s like it’s a dream job, it just limits the scope Chicago’s large enough that you’re fine limiting it to a third of your geography because there’s just the population is so massive that you probably still have talent. And I can see that right there are people who are are a players downtown, that you could that you can attract because they’re like, Hey, we can pull right into the into the joint don’t have to fight traffic and, and public transportation to get to work.
Speaker 7
I’ve been I’ve hired attorneys that literally live in my neighborhood, I used to live a mile from my office, and I can’t I can’t can’t underestimate how nice it is to avoid a commute. For years now, when I was living there for years, I didn’t even have a computer at home, when I needed a computer all for I could just run into the office anytime I needed. And I’m dating myself a little bit, but the boy was you know, being a mile from the office, if, if, if I woke up at five in the morning, I could go work for an hour or two and still be brought back for breakfast. So that was a benefit.
Michael McCreedy
You know, you’ve been great. I don’t want to geek out too much on the PI specific since you know, our audience is pretty general. But one of the things that when we went when we went virtual that everybody was sort of struggling with was checking on productivity, what are some of the things I know you have a ton of metrics that you look at, but what are some of the key metrics that might be good for our general audience that you’ve looked at to ensure that you’re getting solid productivity from employees when you can’t see what they’re doing day to day?
Speaker 7
Now, the first step, of course, is you need something that can track all of this. So our case management system tracks all of this. And we have different positions in the firm that have different metrics that we keep track of. But across the board, we keep track of how many cases worked on on a weekly basis, how many notes were created. How many tasks were completed. And I think that those things will translate to anything. For example, our negotiators, we keep track of how many settlements they have per week, how many negotiate how many demands they sent out. So every firm, every practice area is going to have their own key key performance indicators, right? That those that it will keep track of, you’re going to be able to know whether the works being done or not. But you know, that the case has worked on tasks notes. I think what else client contacts we track, which is really important.
Michael McCreedy
Something, Jane, if
Unknown Speaker
you have a question,
Jay Ruane
I have a question about that. Because there’s sort of a, there’s sort of a debate, whether you want to have, you know, for a role, here’s your 10 KPIs, or here’s your one, what, where do you fall in that spectrum? When it comes down to it, because, you know, you can overwhelm your people with a lot of KPIs. But at the end of the day, there are sometimes one real thing that matters. And so So how do you how do you sort of deal with that spectrum? Michael,
Speaker 7
I, like I’m more of the time. Okay, I think there’s just different different things that different people do, different positions do. And when you get to the point that you’ve got two people doing the same position, then you can compare the two. And you can see that now, we have never implemented quotas. You know, all of our data, for everybody in the firm all of our KPIs for 30, people who share among the firm, so everybody can see what everybody else is doing. If you want to know, you know, how you’re doing go look at the case managers, you know, go look at,
Michael McCreedy
do you have somebody who manages that data and those KPIs to produce them?
Speaker 7
Here’s the best part is that my case management generates them. And every Monday morning, they get an email with their numbers. And each person puts in their own numbers. Okay, I could automate that. I mean, I could I could have those numbers pre plugged in, I want them to look at their own numbers in, like, 2345 minutes.
Michael McCreedy
Can you break that down a little bit?
Speaker 7
Yeah. So Monday morning, everybody in the firm gets an email. And it shows how many cases they worked on how many settlements they had, how many tasks they completed, you know, whatever their KPIs are, then we have a shared XML document. And each person has got their own tag or their own sheet. And so they will go onto that sheet for them. And they will fill in their numbers. How many cases that I worked on last week? How many did I complete? So we do that every Monday, and then then we aggregate?
Michael McCreedy
This information is not already in your case management system. This is stuff that they’re putting,
Speaker 7
it’s coming from the management system. But the idea in this Excel sheet, everybody can see everybody else’s computers. And, and you know that there’s a little bit of competition, right? Everybody wants to, you know, have have the most settlements, the only thing I don’t share the dollars and cents. So I don’t I don’t tell anybody, how many, how much money in fees or settlements do but in terms of productivity, should them enters that information themselves. And if you want to know how you’re doing looked at look at one of the, you know, I had five settlements, this is like a, you know, well, and the month before that he has nine, well, what am I doing wrong? And we do go over there Person that our annual revenue, but they kind of take care of themselves. I mean, I could put in place you did this, we tax, you must do this many. You know, this many client contact what we’re doing, everybody works pretty hard.
Michael McCreedy
And one of the things I’ve struggled with is every time I’ve tried to have something like James talked about a metric, what you’ll find is people move to whatever incentivization you give them. And the truth is you want a well rounded employee doing everything. And so the moment you know, you see that you’re incentivizing a task, you’ll see behavior move that way, which is life and people but you that may not be in your best interest. It really, you want to focus on it. It’s one thing and you want to sort of like remind people, but if you put too much of a thumb on that, it’ll end up being disproportionate and things that you’re not measuring, you know, which are still important, don’t get done or don’t get focused on.
Speaker 7
Yeah, there are great books that I’ve read about incentivizing employees and it’s hard because you need the incentive to match up with the law. If the behavior is that you’re looking for, and sometimes it has the reverse effect, sometimes it impacts some other metric. So finding the right incentives is difficult. This is not incentivized. This is the general data that everybody has. And we need, we need people who are self motivated. One of the one of the things we say around the law firm is our competition, other law firms, our competition is ourselves. I don’t care what anybody else is doing, we’re in the top 5%, whatever we’re doing, what we can do better for ourselves. And, and we can, and we can improve in different areas. And once you’ve mastered, so, I’ve got a young attorney who’s just been fantastic for my firm, even last year, you know, he just settled cases, settled cases, and not for short money. And he set goals for himself. And I suggest, I mean, you can’t do more than you’re doing with no, that’s not my point. He was I wanted to map through this. And then next year, I’m gonna go on to a different skill has already mastered, you know, how to negotiate and settle cases, by doing by meeting our goals. And now I can move on to something else. I didn’t tell him to do that. Right. These are the kinds of people that we try to hire that are self motivated. You know, that they do it for themselves and do it for the firm, not because there is a supervisor telling them what to do.
Michael McCreedy
Gotcha. Jay, you get the final question.
Jay Ruane
Wow. I mean, that’s just how do you find those people? That’s really the skill set. And that’s what I want to get from you. And maybe some advice to the people who are listening, you know, how do you find those people that are self motivated, because, from my experience, even the most self motivated people, they tend to ride sort of a roller coaster, because, you know, your work life is only part of your whole life. And so someone who’s self motivated in their early 30s, could change when they’re in their late 30s. And now having kids that type of thing. So how do you find those people and keep them working for you
Speaker 7
by two different questions, retaining them, once again, learn culture, how to be in an environment that you like, our culture is not by accident, right? It’s very deliberate the things that we do, you just need to find your own sweet spot. It can’t teach culture, just, you know, it develops the skills that you can do. But in terms of finding people, you have to understand that the hiring the right people is so important. I just don’t think enough people put up time and money into it. You know, we have used recruiters, I would gladly pay, you know, $5,000, or somebody would screen all these applicants and show me two or three hours. We we’ve hired two people, right? I mean, we when we have in the NFL Draft, okay, you draft the best player, even if you don’t need that position. When you come across the quality candidate, you find a place for this. And we have we have somebody who has applied for one position, and said, You know what, we really think you would rate this position and hire him that way. We, we have a very broad, very broad search radius, you know, our country, our job descriptions are very, very detailed. But once we and we can read out many of the resumes, but when we start getting good quality resumes, that’s when the work really starts. So for example, if the person is going to be on the phone, the first thing we do is, before an interview before anything else, please call this number and ask for extension 123. And in one minute or less, why you’re the best person for this job. Right. And we get a voicemail, and if the voicemail is high, you know, I you know, I’ve always wanted to work in a law firm and your law firm looks kind of cool. And I mean, we know you’re leaving a voicemail for one minute, you better be prepared, and you better come across well on the phone. My name is Michael McRaven. I’m young attorney. I’m really really ambitious. I love your firm. I think I can learn a lot from it. And I think I could bring a lot to your firm. Here’s some of the things that are important to me. Hope you consider this quick. So we don’t even bother with with phone interviews. Take 10 minutes. So the next step would be a phone interview where we can ask you know, we do what we all do. We do our zoom meetings now. We do a lot of personality, testing, and personality testing our money. I mean, we’re investing money to find the right person to hire the wrong person, we lose so much more money, a bad lawyer.
Michael McCreedy
What do you like for personality testing?
Speaker 7
i It depends on the position, we use the discontent, we still use the Myers Briggs because people love those kind of questions. But for for higher level stuff, I use the J Hennekens test is axiomatic pricing, you know, it’s 100 p 250. bucks. But when we’re hiring attorneys, we’re high level hire, I would never hire somebody without that test. When you, when we see how spot on it is, alright, so here’s the thing with testing, for me, gets a lot of red flags that I might not have seen, they might have aced the interview, they might have aced the resume, but personality testing will show you now everybody’s got their own predilections and their own personality, what you really need to watch for are ones that are so ingrained, that nothing you can do is going to change them with that personality trait. Okay, and and, and that’s not always bad. But once we know what those traits are, then we can accommodate them and make sure they fit within this system. Here’s a perfect example, I’ve got one of my star employees, off the charts with status and recognition. Okay, he just loves status and recognition. So that, of course, translates to pay, you know, I’ve got to pay him well, but it’s much more than that, is that, you know, when he settles a case, you know, we make a real point to say, you know, hey, so and so just settle this case, and this is what he did firmwide. So when you know these things about people’s that, how they communicate, you know, some people are introverted, some people just will not come to come to my firm administrator, or we won’t come to me, we have to go to them. So all these things, you’re trying to create a team, and you’re trying to find the best people to fit in the best positions, and work together as a team. And I’ll finish up with one thing that I learned a couple years ago that I really liked. So I started my firm, and I always felt it was a family, right, we treated everybody like family. And it’s a great analogy. And it should be however, if every ever every family might have a crazy uncle out, okay, so I’m just some relative who was just a nut, or just a not a pleasant person, he’s your family, there’s nothing you can do about them. So we changed the analogy is we’re a team. And now everybody is on the team, and you owe a responsibility to everybody else to carry your weight, to act as a team, you never say that’s not my job, you help everybody else. And if you can’t help the team, you know, we’re gonna replace you, you know, we can’t replace a family member. At now, just because you have all the data and the metrics in the world. And, and you want a team environment, there’s still that personal decision, right? You know, I’m the I’m the final say, and I go against the data sometimes on decisions, but at least the data is there to make an informed decision. You can’t run a business strictly on numbers, not not not illegal business. There are cases we shouldn’t take, because they’re not going to be financially worthwhile. But we’re going to take them out of principle. But anyway, treat treat, they treat the to treat the office like a team and not a family.
Jay Ruane
Or like that’s great like that a lot. Awesome. Well, thank you.
Michael McCreedy
Thank you so much. This is this has been great. And I hope we get to see you in person sooner rather than later. It’s been too long.
Unknown Speaker
All right. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks, guys.
Jay Ruane
Thanks so much. Have a great day. Thanks.
Becca Eberhart
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Jay Ruane
All right, said wow. You know I always say we’re gonna do another half hour show today and and we never go in half hour, but that was just an hour of pure gold. I mean, you know, almost an hour of course. But, but I gotta tell you, I’ve got from notes that I I’ve taken to myself, like six or seven takeaways, just stuff that I want to be thinking about over the next couple of days. What were your takeaways? No, absolutely.
Michael McCreedy
Like he does stuff. I mean, I’ve spoken to Michael a lot. So there’s things that he’s actually helped to, we’ve sat down and looked at Smart advocate with him as a firm, but little things, you know, I’m doing social media, I hate the sort of regurgitated social feed that a firm needs, but he’s like, Yeah, put birthdays on there. We already already doing them internally. Why aren’t they being done externally, he does a great job of sort of his recruiting process. I feel like, you know, look, I have a full time recruiter, we do a good job. But I see this and I’m like, Hey, we got a long way to go, we could continue to raise the bar. And it dovetails to our last conversation, which is moving the geographic boundaries, so we can get the people that fit the culture, and have that internal drive. And something again, I struggled with talked about on the show, the idea that because of gr geographic limitations, I feel sometimes you take who you can get who checks six, seven, maybe eight boxes, but we should be getting eight 910. And, you know, Michael, I think is an inspiration when it comes to pushing you because you see, he could do it, you can do it. Yeah, you
Jay Ruane
know, one of the things that’s really interesting to me taken from this conversation is, you know, two of my really, you know, rock solid staffers now live in Florida and my practices here in Connecticut. Now, they were with me here in Connecticut, and subsequently moved, and technology allowed it to do it. And I’m thinking to myself, while we’re having this conversation, maybe there’s somebody who’s a rockstar, that’s the perfect fit for us, in you know, Tahlequah, Oklahoma or in, you know, Des Moines, Iowa, and maybe I should be expanding my footprint, even looking for some of the the intake positions, the legal administrator positions, that type of thing. Because it really with technology, there’s no reason necessarily, to limit yourself just to a small geographic footprint, unless that’s something that you’re specifically looking for, you know, in the office, that type of thing.
Michael McCreedy
And look with domestic hires, at least for now, you can fly those people in. So it’s not like they can’t come for a period of time for training, given that everything’s online anyway, they may just be getting that initial day or two. And that’s what we did, we just on boarded to South Carolina lawyers over the last couple days to expand the criminal footprint down there. And in doing so, they each flew up, they had already done a zoom with everybody. And then they got the second touch, where they got to see people in person, you know, again, it, it is not, you know, we are already trying this is not easy, because you have two things, you also have the person at the other end, where you know, very often people are looking for jobs, there’s so many scams and different job partners in Craigslist has failed to deliver is that it got too flooded, you couldn’t find the real jobs in there. Because there was so many get rich, quick things going on, that people move to indeed very expensive for us. So while I’m playing that game, it is not easy, you know, you can put your ads around the country. We’ve also experimented indeed, as a program called indeed hire where it’s a 10% placement fee. So it’s not extraordinary compared to a local group that might be 15 to 25%, where they essentially put those ads out there, and you only pay when you hire. And we’ve used that as a way to try to crowdsource something nationally, because if you do a national search, the cost on indeed is x is crazy. I do a whole show talking about how to leverage it. Because for me, I built my firm on on Craigslist, and it was free. And then 2535, maybe 45, depending on your market per ad, not crazy getting more expensive. But the indeed, clicks are so pricey. And then if you have a lawyer and you say I need somebody who has this experience, I need criminal defense in Connecticut three plus years, it dramatically reduces who you get, you still get some clicks, right? They’re not dense, but it’s not crazy. But if you want intake, and you put that out nationally, it’s you know, it’s just a click fest, and you’re, you know, the cost is so high, all of a sudden, those recruiters don’t seem so crazy anymore. And it’s, I go back and forth,
Jay Ruane
you have a click the Click fest that indeed really kills me because I mean, you have people who literally will just submit their information to every open job like that, you know, that’s their, you know, you put somebody else for intake and you’ll get somebody who’s a warehouse worker and you’re saying, You’re not what we’re looking for, we’re not what you’re looking for. And you know, I just paid for your for your resume that we’re never going to actually go through.
Michael McCreedy
Right. But right now, at least in our market, it is still very, very powerful. And the but it’s expensive and that dealt like everything is getting more expensive. You know, we talk to you about healthcare shooting up, recruiting is going up and like it’s not like our our revenue is going up as proportionately to what we’re seeing. So I feel like you know, again, Looking for the more specific you could make it with experience. But when you get out of the legal space, where you don’t have requirements that are hard, it just opens floodgates. And it’s, it’s tough.
Jay Ruane
Yeah, it’s tough. Well, that’s a downer way to end the show on a downer. No, no.
Michael McCreedy
We’re gonna figure it out and look. So we have our core people in South Carolina. And I think part of it is focusing in on an area. It sounds crazy, you do a national search? In theory, that’s a great idea. I haven’t figured it out yet. I find sometimes if you say, Hey, here’s our and you start to get a sense for a market for what pay is for what you know, of what makes you know, what is good and bad expectations. They’re like, it’s a challenge. Again, we’re not won’t be our last time talking about recruiting. We talked about always being recruiting. But you know, again, we talked about last show, whether it’s overseas, I think there’s a whole nother world of how maybe this is the question, will you find a guest for this? How do you recruit nationally, in a cost effective manner?
Jay Ruane
All right. Well, if somebody out there has an answer to that question, please leave us a comment down below or send us a DM we would love to talk to you. Maybe bring it in on the show to talk about recruiting nationally, in our in our, you know, in our space, because these are the types of answers that our people, our audience who wants to grow their firm are looking for. And with that said, I think we’re gonna end the show this week. I want to thank you for being with me. As always, I love spending this time with you. So if you want to catch this podcast, you can certainly do it syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast as well as our standalone. You’re always welcome to go back on maximum growth live here on Facebook, you can watch all of our prior shows. With that, I’m going to leave you now. My name is Jay Ruane from firm flex. He is Seth price from blue shark. We’re gonna wish you a fantastic weekend. And we’ll see you next week on Tuesday with another edition of maximum growth live. Bye for now.
Speaker 1
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