Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a lawyer looking for some tips on how to foster better relationships? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, hosts Jim and Tyson chat with Martin Parsons, owner of Legal Advocacy Headquarters in Carterville, Illinois. Martin shares his inspiring journey from a 24-year military career to becoming a lawyer.

Martin shares what he has learned about business relationships. Building relationships with people will lead to success. Working hard and making good connections is key to growing a successful business. For Martin, he advises clients to practice due diligence and the importance of documenting conversations and emails to make sure you are safe in case deals go sour. 

Having good relationships with business partners is also very important to maintain a successful firm. Martin, who works with his wife provides some insights on how to maintain a good relationship with spouses who are also colleagues. Communication is the foundation of any good working relationship and more so when spouses are involved in the mix. For Martin, this involves being open and honest about the wins and losses with his spouse to ensure it does not affect the business.

Take a listen!

Jim's Hack: Grab Gary Vaynerchuk’s 250 slide deck about “How to make 64 pieces of content in a day” Especially if you are struggling with making content for your audience.

Martin Tip: Read this book called “Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day” by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, which goes through the process of how to choose a focus point.

Tyson's Tip: Bring in outside people to train your staff or educate them about a certain topic.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase using these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Episode Highlights:

  • 8:22 Valuable lessons learned about relationships in business
  • 18:36 Advice on maintaining a good relationship while working with a spouse 
  • 20:23 Importance of clearly defining job duties 
  • 21:11 The need to separate work from home life to prevent disruptions

Connect with Martin:

Resources:

Transcripts: From Soldier to Solicitor: The Inspiring Journey of Martin Parsons

Jim (00:01.058)
Welcome back to the Maximum Warrior Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.26)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up Jimbo?

Jim (00:07.639)
how you doing, Tyson? It sounds like you're at an arbitration or some such thing.

Tyson (00:10.804)
I just got done, I've changed, so I'm not in my suit anymore, but arbitration went well. We got done pretty quickly. So we got a lot of the prep work done early. So yeah, it went well. think now we just gotta wait. It's a high -low, so we can't really lose, because the lowest we would get is 250. So we're in pretty good shape. So I'm not too worried about it. But yeah, how are you doing?

Jim (00:33.506)
Nice. I'm great, I'm great. I'm having a good day. I just got done with my immigration show, so it's recording day for me. And what else? Just living the dream, having fun. Went to the gym this morning. Everything's good.

Tyson (00:48.178)
Nice, well let's get to our guest today. The guest is Martin Parsons. Martin Parsons, your, Martin owns the Legal Advocacy Headquarters, a law practice in Carterville, Illinois that specializes in advising small businesses and nonprofits and assists with trademark registration. Martin views his relationship with his clients as a partnership in their business or nonprofit success. We can get into more of the details of this bio in a little bit, Martin.

Welcome to the show. We're happy to have you.

Martin Parsons (01:21.173)
Hey, thanks Tyson. I'm excited to be here.

Jim (01:23.886)
Well, Martin, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you like to do, how you like to spend your time, how you make money, all that good stuff.

Martin Parsons (01:29.943)
Right. Yeah. So I'm a, spent 24 years in the military and did some time at one of the places that Tyson was at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, a couple of different summer camps. So I retired and then I went to law school. I'm a late in life lawyer and initially worked at the law school doing VA disability claims appeals. And then through some kind of long COVID walks decided my wife and I decided to do our own thing. So.

opened my practice and then decided to keep it very narrowly focused with small business. And the nonprofits initially was just sort of a thing like, we'll do those too. But recently it's real. That part of my practice has grown more than the small business side because here in deep Southern Illinois, there aren't many attorneys who do it or do it in a way that nonprofits can, can afford it. So that part's been really.

We have a couple of unique subscription models that helps with that. So, and then my spare time, I love to read. I'm a huge reader. I'm always reading something. I just finished a book that we'll talk about later. And just spending time with the family, love to travel, love to travel. So.

Tyson (02:50.098)
Alright, Jim, before you ask question, I gotta ask about when you were at Fort McCoy. Did they have McCoys there whenever you were there?

Martin Parsons (02:58.943)
yeah, mean, McCoys has been there since like the nineties. mean, I, and I was there back in late eighties. and it was there, it was there then it might not look, it may have looked a little different then like many of the barracks did at that time too.

Tyson (03:02.931)
Okay.

Tyson (03:12.22)
Yeah. It's pretty fancy now. They got screens all over the place. So, okay, cool. I was just curious. All right, Jim, go ahead.

Martin Parsons (03:19.173)
Ha

Jim (03:23.362)
Well, let me thank you for your service, first of all, and anybody that was in those places where Tyson was, that I know that that was hard work where you were. So thank you for that. Talk to us about being a late in life lawyer, as you called it. What was that like going to law school and how did you interact with the, always thought that the two years I took off between undergrad and law school helped me. How about, how about you? What was it like going through law school and observing these young people who thought that it was just so hard to be in law school?

Martin Parsons (03:52.939)
There was a lot of that for sure. But it really worked out. I was very fortunate. I was the oldest person in the class, oldest guy in my class. There was one other guy who was one month younger who also happened to serve in the Army National Guard. But my classmates really just embraced me. It was really pretty fantastic. I started law school coming out of a divorce, sort of a

change of, there was just a lot of life stuff happening. So I came to law school out of a divorce, kind of just wanted to keep my head down, do my job, go to school, you know, do this thing and knock it out and go back to my apartment. And several of these young, my classmates wouldn't let me, they just, they included me in a lot of things and very supportive and helpful. And then I was able to help them bring a little perspective at times to the, the,

challenges that they, as you said, they kind of perceived that they were running into. But it was an uphill battle at first. I hadn't studied, hadn't been to school in years. So figuring that out was hard. I my first year of law school, my grades were not stellar. They improved as I went along, as I figured it out. But it was a great experience. really, I love to learn and read. So I was right in my element.

Tyson (05:20.146)
All right, so Mart, I want to ask you, maybe get into the weeds a little bit, but I'm curious. So in your pre -interview questionnaire, you said something that's really interesting to me. give me a second, because I'm going read through both of these. The one aspect of your firm that is most successful, said, client service and satisfaction. We work hard to be accessible and easy to talk with. We designed our office space to be client -focused and comfortable.

Many of our clients who have never worked with a lawyer remarked that it was not the experience they expected. Okay, so that's not the full thing you said, there's a little bit more, but then the aspect that needs the most work, you said marketing and client acquisition. And I…

To me, seems, those two, if the client satisfaction's there and you focus on that, but then it's not leading to more clients, it just seems a little off. So I wanted you to talk about that, because you can probably get a little more clarity. But I do find that interesting, because sometimes what we'll do is we'll provide this amazing service and the clients are happy, and then we're not getting referrals from them. So talk about that a little bit.

Martin Parsons (06:28.795)
Yeah, and I think I filled that survey out several months ago and it has, in the last couple of months, I've been getting more more referrals. And partly because it's taken longer to get started. I've been at this a couple of years because we're so narrow, small business and nonprofits. We do trademarks and I'll do an occasional will or power of attorney for some friends.

because of that narrow focus, it's taken a little longer for that word to get out and the referrals to come. But it, for some reason, in the last few months, it really has started to take off because you're right, you would think that from that fantastic customer service and the things that they're getting and feeling when they come see us, there would be more referrals. And they were starting, we are starting to see that slowly, I guess, maybe.

Maybe I'm impatient.

Jim (07:33.026)
How did you decide your practice area and what led you to decide to do trademarks?

Martin Parsons (07:41.371)
I had, so the small business and nonprofits, I worked at a small firm briefly out of law school, about a year out of law school before I went to do the Veterans Clinic and they did small business and nonprofits. So I had been exposed to it. In my former life in the Guard, I had owned a couple of different small businesses. So I had an interest in it. My dad had small businesses, so sort of in the family.

And then when we decided to do our own thing, we had ruled out things like family law, criminal law, didn't really want to go deep into trust in the states. doing just kind of a serve, you know, what do I like to do? Who are the people I want to hang out with and spend my time with and serve? And small business owners and nonprofit founders were the people that we really came to. And then a friend of mine who was here locally, who did IP work and was going to be leaving the area.

is actually who suggested trademarks to me. So I learned about it from her and it goes very nicely with the small business advice that we're providing and even non -profits.

Tyson (08:53.534)
So Martin, are there any things that your parents did that you picked up from that either you really don't like that they did or that you really did that you do like that you've picked up and added to your firm? Because my parents are both small business owners and they do some things that I think are fantastic, but sometimes it just drives me crazy some of the things they do. From a business standpoint, it's not a good idea. So I wonder if you learn anything from your parents like that.

Martin Parsons (09:21.303)
Yeah, I definitely did. I one of the big ones is the value of relationships, that people do business with people. It was one of their recurring themes, and even now when I call home to tell them how things are going, I get the same two or three mantras. But that's one of them I learned from them, is the importance of relationships, and taking care of people, and customer service. Probably the things that I didn't like that they did with my dad,

was sort of a serial entrepreneur is he just bounced from one thing to another. there was hardly any, he had one very successful endeavor, which was a restaurant in a small town that was very successful. And he sold it got out and then went to another business he had for a year or so and then another one and another one. So he bounced through quite a few. So one of the things that I've learned and try to…

share with my clients is, you and I've seen from my own practice, it's not a quick thing. It takes time and you've got to stick with it. You can't just bounce from one to the other. Some things that I saw in how they worked and some due diligence that my dad did a lot of, he trusted a lot of people, probably common. And as we know, if it's not in writing, then things happen or in a good writing. those are things that I, from my own practice,

and that I try to share with my clients is the importance of documenting things regardless of how good a friend they might be or your family member. We've got to put it in writing because otherwise how do we know what's really going to happen or supposed to happen?

Jim (11:02.786)
Let's talk about your firm set up. what kind of a structure is it? Is it just you? you have helpers or what's the team like?

Martin Parsons (11:10.539)
Yeah, I'm the only lawyer at the moment. And then I have an assistant who is my wife, who used to be the admissions director for the law school. That's kind of how we met after I was out of law school and working there. So we both left the law school at the same time. So she's my assistant and she's her customer service is just fantastic. She thinks of all those things.

that I don't follow up cards and emails and notes and tracking birthdays and other events and watching the news for things that happened to their kids to send little messages to let them know that we saw that and congratulate them and welcoming them when they come in. All those things is her she's just fantastic at so that's that's part of our really great customer service I believe and in addition to

It's kind of how our office is set up. When you first come in, we just have, like a, it's almost like a living room with very comfortable chairs and a coffee table. You know, don't walk right into a reception window or even a desk. it just feels a little different. come back to the conference room and it's right next to our kitchen. And it's kind of like coming to our house almost with sort of the vibe we were going for, which I learned from a mentor of mine when I first started.

practicing, she did most of her interviews with clients in the kitchen. Just meeting in the kitchen, sometimes over a beer or other cocktail. She met a lot of clients and she didn't often wear shoes. So we haven't gone that far.

Jim (12:51.049)
You

Tyson (12:56.24)
I am intrigued by this. When you described it, I'm picturing you all having conversations with your business clients in a kitchen almost, but it's a really interesting approach. I really like that. I like the approach that you take when it comes to clients and everything too. That's pretty cool. Let's talk a little bit about the book. Why the book? Why did you want to write the book? What was that about?

Martin Parsons (13:24.183)
So when I left the law school in this area, it's not a big area. you're familiar, you guys are in St. Louis, not that far away, in Carbondale, SIU. In this area, in our two or three county area, because of all the work I did for veterans, I was the veterans guy. So any time a judge or a lawyer or anyone had a question related to veterans, call Martin. Call Martin. So they'd call the law school or they'd text me.

And so as when we decided to go out and do our own thing and not focus on veterans work specifically, even though the, our logo and our brand has a very, I think, military look to it. And that was intentional. I needed to do something to let people know I knew other things or that I was doing something else. And since I loved to read, I stumbled on somewhere, this gentleman named Mike Kapusi, who talked about the

the short, helpful book, The Shook, and having this small book that you can use like a calling card or like your business card. I thought, that sounds great. I've always kind of wanted to write a book. There's an incentive. So I did and wrote the book and then have used it. worked out. I had a deadline to do it. I've worked with a nonprofit called Dog Tag Bakery that helps disabled veterans learn to be entrepreneurs.

and they had asked me to give a session on legal business issues. So that was my deadline to finish the book so that they could have it, have a tool to use. And then when I go out and do presentations or meet clients, I've got the book. So it's just a great thing. It shows expertise in many clients' minds that I might know something, because I wrote a book.

Jim (15:16.44)
Talk to Liz Martin about the process of writing the book and what you've done to promote the book.

Martin Parsons (15:22.583)
The process was just kind of grinding it out. I'm a big David Letterman fan from old days. He used to have the top 10 list. So that's where the title came from, top 10 legal mistakes that entrepreneurs make. once I decided it was going to be a top 10, I picked 10 chapters and 10 mistakes and then dug into thinking about all the things that entrepreneurs make in that. then fortunately, my wife was very, it takes a lot of time.

nights, weekends, and we were on a kind of a short deadline. So she was very gracious, gave me the time and space to do it. And it was right before the big rise in chat GPT that might've been a little bit of helpful in structure, but just kind of grounded out. And then I learned to…

know, how do I publish it? I just study. I love to learn things. So I, instead of sending it off to somebody, I figured out how to publish it and how to get copies and ultimately landed it's landed on Amazon because that's really the most reasonable way to get copies made and printed. I don't really sell it there much. It's mostly just so that I can order copies as I need them to give to people.

And then I use it. I speak to chambers. I'm on several different chambers of commerce and anytime I go to speak, I've becoming the business law expert. So end of last year, I made the rounds at four different chambers of commerce to talk about new laws in 2024. And I took books with me and I presented at some other rather specific conferences and I take books there to typically give away in exchange for an email.

what I try to get in exchange for that. Because that email list is important, as we know.

Tyson (17:21.496)
So let's talk a little bit about some tips you might give to people. What are a few tips you might give to people that want to write their own book and publish it themselves? Because we've had a couple people talk about it in the past, but no one recently. So I am curious if things have changed a little bit.

Martin Parsons (17:39.659)
Yeah, I mean, they're definitely changing, you know, because chat GPT definitely or any other GPTs definitely make it easier to get going to have an outline done, get kickstarted for sure. But it's definitely something that anybody can do. You can do it. It's not it's not hard. There are it takes time. And that's the challenge that most of us have the period when I wrote it. Fortunately, I had the time if I was setting about and I

because I thought about writing another one for nonprofits that I just haven't found the time for because now I'm working and have more to do. But there are businesses that'll help you write it. There's some that are specifically targeted at lawyers where they'll interview, they'll kind of like this, they'll do an interview, they have a structure, they'll ask questions, get your tone of voice and they'll take that information and ghost write your book and do everything.

all the way to publishing, creating the covers, getting you copies along the way. But it's definitely doable. There's different ways to do it. I've moved away from, I still have hard copies, but I moved away from that to digital copies. And there's different ways to be able to give those away as PDFs or Adobe or a MOBI files that people could read on a Kindle that makes it really inexpensive that you really don't have to have a big investment in

buying a box of a hundred books to give away. You could have a QR code on your business card that someone scans, takes them to a landing page, they put in their email, and they get an electronic copy of your book.

Jim (19:21.602)
So what does the future hold? What are your big plans for world domination?

Martin Parsons (19:24.887)
I want to add more nonprofit clients. That part of my practice is the part that I just really enjoy. Being able to help them. I love just helping people who want to help other people. It's fantastic. And as I mentioned before, I've got a couple of subscription options that make it pretty affordable and accessible for them for 95 bucks.

They can call me, 95 bucks a month, can call me, email me, and ask questions to stay out of trouble. We've got a couple other levels that give them some different levels of work, which for nonprofits is good because they can budget for it better than just the expenses that come up when they don't. the nonprofit founders and entrepreneurs mentally are a little different. Entrepreneurs, we want to do it all, at least initially. We want to learn how to market and

We want to do everything. We don't want to give any of it up or much of it up, but nonprofit founders seem to be more ready to just say, you know what? I don't know. I don't want to know. I just want to help people. You take it. So they've been more likely to get involved with the subscription and do those things. So the nonprofit side, I really want to keep growing. And then I really enjoy the trademark side. It's creative.

And the people who doing those things are creative, coming up with fun names. And so I really like that practice area too that I'm starting to try to get more work in.

Tyson (21:03.668)
I'm gonna go back to…

Martin Parsons (21:03.96)
And I don't know if I'm not ready. haven't thought you know a lot of thoughts about growing the practice yet even Still get my own stuff figured out

Tyson (21:13.556)
I think that that's a natural thing. I do want to go back for a second, because you work with your spouse, I work with my spouse, Jim works with his spouse, and I'm seeing it more and more. Do you have any advice you'd give to lawyers that are considering that as an option?

Martin Parsons (21:32.117)
Yeah, it's, it's, you've to have a good relationship and, being able to communicate open and honestly, mean, like any relationship communication is key, but we've definitely worked through some of our things. before we worked together, when I was at the law school, I didn't have a secretary and assistant. I had law students and you can't really count on them for much. not completely, or at least not, know, then anyway, I didn't really have people to delegate to or that often.

So, or answer to because I was sort of on an island of sorts. She didn't, she had, she answered to the dean, but didn't have to work for somebody either. So we've had to navigate working together and working for each other, but we've been able to do it because we can communicate with it. And if I get a little tense or short, we're able to talk about it. So I think communication is the most important part and deciding who, what everybody's job duties are.

I sometimes have to remind her that she's not an attorney and that legal advice, because she likes to give advice. She is a, you know, she's a mother and a wife and she likes to give advice. But that's not her arena. So we've just worked on defining those boundaries. And I think that's the other things that are important. Each of us knowing our lanes. And I have to work on giving stuff up, not responding to every email that comes in.

because that's what I'm used to doing. giving those things up to her and let her do her job so that I can do my job better and more efficiently.

Do you have any advice, Tyson and Jim, for you've been doing it longer than I have with your spouses?

Tyson (23:18.844)
Yeah, I mean, I'd say, I mean, your advice was sound. really was. But I think the number one thing is that this is your job. This is my job. like just like anyone else, but like it's got to be even more clear with your spouse because.

there's more of the tendency that you want to kind of step on each other's toes. And if you don't, if everybody in the firm doesn't know who's doing what, then you could, you could have some real issues. And so we had to, we stumbled through that for the, probably the first six months, but I once we figured that out, it was like, okay, we're, cooking, it, if you, got to figure that part out because otherwise you do have, it could cause some issues at home. And so that'd be like my number one bit of advice.

Determine the rules write out the rules make sure that you're both very clear on it then a lot of those issues won't become issues Jim what do you say?

Jim (24:12.718)
For me, I agree with all that. The big thing for me though is leaving work at work and not bringing stuff home. I think that's the big headache is when you're trying to fall asleep and one of the other of you says, hey, this thing, I forgot to tell you, this thing happened at 1 .30 today at the office. I meant to tell you earlier, but, and then you're like, so it can be disruptive. Yeah.

Martin Parsons (24:32.277)
Yes. Yeah, I second that. Because I'm not the one. don't get my work email on my phone. I don't have notifications on my phone for my work email. But she does. so instead of me, I'm not typically the one bringing the work home. That's exactly what will happen, Jim. Going to sleep and just like, Joe emailed in and they said yes to the contract.

So yeah, leaving that separation is important. We're working on that. We're not as close on that.

Tyson (25:09.748)
We're not close at all on that one Jimbo. It's like you were speaking to my wife or something. I try to enforce like a no business in bed rule, it has never been enforced. that's how it happens sometimes. But Martin, we are going to start to wrap things up. Before we do, how do people get in touch with you if they want to talk to you?

Martin Parsons (25:15.491)
Ha ha.

Martin Parsons (25:34.455)
My email or our websites legal advocacy headquarters calm. I'm on LinkedIn Martin Parsons or Martin D Parsons on LinkedIn My website has contact information and a contact form probably just the best the best spot legal advocacy headquarters

Tyson (25:54.664)
Nice. All right. So while we before we get to our tips and our hacks of the week, we are I'd like for you all to gosh, man, I'm out of all the way to cut that part. I have I've not done that in years, maybe. All right. All right. We're going to wrap things up before I do. I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. Just search Maximum Learn Facebook and you'll find us there. And then we would love to have you in the Guild Max Law Guild dot com. We have a lot of great members there that just share a lot of

tools that they use, lot of the knowledge that they have, it's just a great group of people, so we'd love to have you there. And while you're listening to the rest of this episode, if you could help us spread the love by giving us a five -star review, it would mean a lot to us and we'd really appreciate it. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim (26:42.062)
Well, I was on my walk today listening to Gary Vee and I was reminded of the fact that he has this like 260 slide deck that he gives away for free. It's very, very good. It's on how to repurpose content. And you know, we have a lot of people who struggle to create content and struggle to know how to repurpose content. He talks about the seven big platforms and it's like a step by step by step that as he says,

proudly, but it's also true that if other people could charge $2 ,000 or something for this, it's free. So if you just Google Gary Vaynerchuk social media slide deck, you'll come right to it and it's terrific.

Tyson (27:24.658)
I love it. Free is good. I like it. All right, Martin, we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. Could be a book, podcast, quote, tool, whatever, you name it. What you got for us?

Martin Parsons (27:38.295)
Yeah, I'm a book reader, so I've got a book called Make Time. Make Time. It's, you know, the central focus is about choosing a focus point. It's a lot of similarities with The One Thing by Gary Keller in that initial thoughts, but it's written by a couple of Silicon Valley guys, self -proclaimed time geeks. So after the initial part of it, then it's got these 87 little tips and hacks about how to…

how to do that, how to pick that one thing, how to focus on that one thing. I hadn't heard of the book until recently watching a couple of YouTube videos that randomly stumbled on it. So some of the tips have been very helpful.

Tyson (28:19.752)
like it. Very good. I've never heard of that before, so I'm going check it out. Not that I need another freaking book to read, but I added another one yesterday to my list. Actually, I bought it. I actually bought another one yesterday. Anyways, I got it. I got the recommendation from our buddy David Haskins. So my tip of the week is actually not the book. My tip of the week is…

Martin Parsons (28:27.711)
Ha

Tyson (28:43.164)
bring in outside people to help train your people. And so one of the things that we've been focusing on is getting referrals and

We're not the pros when comes to referrals. And so what we've done is we've actually scheduled different people that we know are pretty good at referrals. David Haskins, he came in and he didn't necessarily speak on referrals. It was pretty much a marketing workshop. It was pretty cool. And it was about social media. And it was loosely related to referrals. And a lot of it had to do with social media marketing and how the team could do it. It was a really fun exercise. He did an amazing job.

David Haskins, he's really smart person when comes to marketing. He's got a of cool ideas and so it was fun. We that yesterday and so…

Tyson (29:30.78)
Don't hesitate to reach out to outside people. We've done it where we've actually paid people to do it too, where it's worth the money. It is absolutely worth the money if you pay people to do it. We hired a nutritionist once where she came in. We paid her to give us a remote training on what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat, like some practical tips on eating. So I highly encourage people to reach out to people outside of the legal industry, outside the legal space to get training for your firm because they know things we don't know.

I think it's important. Martin, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I love the fact that you, I know you did this kind of later in life, but I love that you, that's something you wanted to do. You went out and you achieved it. I think that's really cool. That's really admirable. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your story.

Martin Parsons (30:21.183)
Yeah, thanks Jim. It's great to be here. Appreciate the opportunity.

Jim (30:25.262)
Good work, man.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a lawyer looking for tips to improve how you conduct business? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, hosts Jim and Tyson speak to George Campbell and Jordan Teague, co-founders of Campbell Teague law firm in Greenville, South Carolina. They discuss their journey of establishing the firm, driven by a desire to innovate within the legal industry.

George and Jordan talk about the importance of figuring out who you are and what kind of lawyer you want to be. It is easy to get overwhelmed and lost in a practice that does not mesh well with your lifestyle. George emphasizes the importance of finding out who you are and then looking for a firm or practice that fits best. If you want a fast paced work environment where you are head down and hammering out cases, then that is what you need to keep in mind when searching for a firm. 

Making decisions in a firm is a difficult task and George and Jordan talk about their process to making these tough calls. For them, their decisions are made based on their core values of autonomy, ingenuity, fitness and integrity. It is important as a lawyer to work with clients in a way that is helping them. Credibility is key to maintaining trust with clients and colleagues alike.

Listen in to learn more!

Jim’s Hack: Use FlightAware.com which provides flight status and can provide insight on your flight details.

George’s Hack: Use a password manager to keep track of passwords as well as maintain better privacy.

Jordan’s Tip: Make a pros and cons chart to reduce client’s options down to make quick decisions.

Tyson’s Tip: Check out the associate bootcamp for lawyers

Episode Highlights:

  • 8:45 The importance of understanding one's personality type in business
  • 11:07 Core values that guide decision-making processes within a firm
  • 20:00 The importance of AI, blockchain, and crypto in the legal field

Connect with Jordan and George:

Resources:

Transcripts: The Best Practices for Building a Successful Law Firm with Jordan and George 

Jim (00:00.94)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.331)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up Jimbo?

Jim (00:07.694)
Tyson, looks like you're still on the road. We've been recording today. It's been a good day. How about you?

Tyson (00:13.809)
It's a very productive day for me. So that's good. But yeah, I'm ready to get home. I can tell you that. let's get started. So this is going to be a fun one. I was just thinking, I don't know if we've ever had a podcast where the guests were in the same room with each other. can you think of one podcast we've ever done in eight years that the guests are in the same room?

Jim (00:40.91)
We haven't had two guests at once very often at all, so probably 10 or 20 times altogether. So no, I would say no.

Tyson (00:47.405)
Yeah, so this will be a fun one. So let's get to our guests. This will be good. So we have George Campbell and we have Jordan Teague. And I'll give brief bios for each of you and then we'll kind of go into it. But Jordan is the firm's self -professed nerd in the basement with a passion for merging law and technology to help her clients become more effective, efficient, and forward thinking. George is a veteran trial lawyer and an international business manager.

and has worked for the last 15 years in the legal and financial sectors to obtain justice and drive value for local and global businesses. Over the last decade, George and Jordan have combined their experience to found Campbell Teague, a full service law firm headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, where our buddy Brooks is out there. And so that's pretty freaking awesome. I don't know if you know Brooks, but Brooks Derrick, but excellent. George and Jordan, welcome to the show.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (01:41.901)
Yeah. Thanks for having us. Glad to be here.

Jim (01:47.246)
So guys, tell us about your firm, how it got started, why you started it, and what you do.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (01:54.287)
You looking at me? Yeah, go for it. Take a crack at it. we started this firm back in 2016. Jordan and I were in the same class at Furman University and went in different directions. She went to work for a national marketing agency. I went straight to law school at University of Georgia. And as happenstance, we were seated across from each other at a co -work space in Greenville called Open Works. And I think the poor guy running the co -work was trying to figure

out where to put Jordan and he said, there's another lawyer here you should sit next to him you'll be friends. Little did he know that that was much anxiety inducing to her and then we recognized each other from school and struck up a conversation but after a couple of months working next to each other and

coffee conversations, we hatched a plan to stop working for the man and do our own thing because we realized we both looked at the legal industry in the same way. And I think a lot of that came from having worked outside of law and realizing that other businesses don't do things the way lawyers and law firms do. And there are lot of good reasons for that. And that is part of our ethos that the legal industry is woefully behind, if not backwards in the way they run their operations.

and serve their clients. So that's a little bit of the background we got into. was just the two of us and then we began hiring lawyers, doing more cases. And we have a pretty broad range because of our own natural range. and I are both litigators by training. She was in consumer financial protection and financial services litigation. I started as a prosecutor on the White Collar team and was involved in all kinds of crazy cases. But…

We also thought that that litigation training made us better lawyers in the contract, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory, anything else. Because at the end of the day, the courtroom or the arbitration panel or whoever has the monopoly on decision making is where the rubber meets the road. And you can see now that we've got really a whole generation of lawyers who've never seen the inside of the courtroom working as an expensive outsourced back office in these large, especially multinational

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (04:12.347)
law firms and it's a problem because they don't know what they're drafting they don't know what they're doing and they've never had to enforce any of their good ideas before a judge or a jury. So we have tried to be full service but we really don't seek out a specific practice area or industry sector we're not

Labor and employment only doing management defense. We look at specific types of clients who are usually entrepreneurial or privately held businesses and they value speed, efficiency and results over a big name, a fancy office and a high bill. So now that we've got about 10 attorneys scattered around and a pretty diverse practice area with clients from Australia to Abu Dhabi.

Yeah, the only thing I'll jump in and add, George mentioned that being seated next to the only other lawyer in the coworking space was anxiety inducing for me. So I'll correct the record a little bit. It wasn't anxiety inducing. I think I was just a little annoyed. And the reason I was a little annoyed is that I was going to that cowork space to escape other lawyers and the typical law firm vibe. And I think this is relevant to even why we decided to go into business together and start this firm. I'm also a developer.

I've been coding ever since I was a little girl, probably since I was nine or 10 years old. And so I thought, this is awesome. I can practice law remotely for this other firm, but I can be with my people. You I can be sitting with all these other developers. And then of course I got seated across from the one or the lawyer and it obviously ended up being one of the best things that's ever happened for me. but

That was where I was coming from is I just, I'm tired of the typical law firm energy and the typical lawyer personality that's very risk averse, typically produces mediocre work product. And that's a whole other thing that we can, we can get on. But so I was trying to escape that. And so that's where that was coming from.

Tyson (06:16.535)
Yeah, that's a really interesting way that you all came together. I wonder in the process of actually making this official, what were some of your concerns? And how did you all resolve those concerns? Because you all were working by yourselves, and I'm assuming you kind of wanted to work by yourselves, and then you all decided to kind of work together. So what were your reservations in getting together, and then how did you all work through those?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (06:47.161)
I mean, I think a simple one is simply, are we going to get clients? Is this thing going to succeed or is it going to fall flat on our face? And are we going to have to crawl right back to the big firms that we slam the door on? And I think that's obviously a really typical concern for any new.

business owner or entrepreneur trying to figure out, I do it? And what most find when they finally take the leap is it's much easier than you think. And if you're like us and you take things seriously, if you're even just the one that returns phone calls within 24 hours and you do what you say you're gonna do, then you're already in the upper echelon of legal service providers, I think. So that was definitely a concern, but I think that quickly evaporated when…

We've been rolling for two or three months and we just saw the flywheel start spinning.

Jim (07:38.712)
Talk to us if you could about how it was easier than people think it's going to be. Because I think that's a real issue for a lot of people that are waiting on the sidelines to get in the game. I think that that's something people put a real mental block on. So talk to us about how it was easier for you than you thought it might be.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (07:57.773)
I would say as a threshold matter, it's really, and I've seen this as an entrepreneur myself and representing entrepreneurs. You really have to know yourself if you're capable of being an entrepreneur.

I think in the legal profession there are three types of lawyers. There are the sort of crazy entrepreneurs like us who jump out and take the leap. There are the early adopters who are willing to go take a chance on a smaller firm or growing firm. And then there are the sort of, must have big law attached to my name to feel secure. And it's very important for lawyers to know which one of those three are you by personality.

because we have another classmate from school who is a very bright lawyer at a global firm, did an IPO for public company, became their general counsel, is now in a C -level position in management for that company. And he's had a stellar career and he looks at me and says, I wish I could do what you do because you control your time.

but I would go absolutely crazy out of fear if I tried to do that. It's not that he's not capable. He could have all the work he wanted, but the simple anxiety or the fear of being out alone on his own and not being within that large corporate structure is debilitating. So that would be my first thing to tell lawyers is know who you are and then look for that kind of environment. Because if you have to be in big law to feel safe and to be productive, you probably need to find a better big law.

Don't try to go out and launch your own firm.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (09:27.639)
And then if you're even an early adopter, find a boutique, find some crazy people like us who already did the awful slogging through the startup phase and have got some momentum where you can go in and add value and still participate in the building and the growing, but you don't have to take that first crazy leap. And then the last thing would be for the people who know themselves enough to know that they can absorb a nauseating amount of risk. They can sit and say, I have no idea if we're going to make payroll next month.

But I feel pretty good about it. So let's just keep working and see what happens. That's what it takes in the early days. And if you are that kind of person, I can tell you with 100 % confidence that if all you do is return phone calls within 24 hours and be nice to people, you will have enough work to feed your family. And I don't care where you are in the country. The bar is really that low and people are, we talk about access to legal services across the country and why it's a problem and how expensive it is, but there's work to be done and there's demand out.

for people who just want to do good work and doesn't matter what market you're in.

Tyson (10:34.231)
Jordan, anything to add?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (10:37.287)
I guess the only thing I'd add is reading between the lines. think what George is saying is it was very difficult. Yeah, but we were okay with it Yeah, because we do kind of fit in that first category, which is we would rather have the

set of headaches and risks that come with entrepreneurship than we would being in a big firm. And so, yes, it was very difficult. We have worked our tails off. We've slogged through a lot of issues and, you know, business development, trying to figure out how do we onboard employees? How do we manage people? It's all very, very difficult. But I would not trade that for the set of problems that I'd have in a big firm. Yeah. I control of your calendar is worth everything. I mean, that to me,

Tyson (11:20.963)
Yeah.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (11:22.017)
is I'm willing to pay a very high price for that to be able to go home and eat dinner with my kids every night at 630, regardless of what's happening. So I think it's all a matter of, there's no difference between price and sacrifice. What do you get willing to give up to have something else?

Tyson (11:38.402)
Let me ask you all about decision making. So when you have to make a tough decision, what is your oldest process? How do you all do that?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (11:47.619)
Throw a dart. Okay, I have a different answer. That's what George does. So we are very serious about our core values and we filter all major decisions through those. So our core values are autonomy, ingenuity.

fitness and integrity. And in no particular order, I guess you could put integrity at the top of the stack and hopefully everyone views that as table stakes, although we found not necessarily because lawyers are really good about being sneaky with definitions. And the thing is that integrity doesn't mean just not telling a lie, right? It means so much more than that. It means doing the right thing when it's painful to you.

And so that often is a filter we have to run through big decisions through because it can be tempting to find the technicality where you're not telling a lie and you can kind of out, know, wiggle out of something pain free. So do you want to talk about the other core values and how they? Yeah, I think that's the whole point is I would just add to that that my…

One of my earliest mentors told me that you have only one stock in this game as a lawyer, and that's your credibility. And everyone knows it takes a whole career to build it up and two seconds to lose it. And the minute you lose it, you're worthless as a lawyer, especially in a courtroom. So we take that dead serious. And along with our other core values of autonomy, we want people to be empowered to make decisions.

We don't always completely defer, but we give serious weight to what other team members are saying, even staff members who aren't lawyers. We look at fitness very seriously. Jordan and I are both CrossFit junkies, but…

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (13:30.763)
One thing you see across the legal profession is that we're unwell. We are mentally unhealthy. We are physically unhealthy. We are spiritually unhealthy. And that does not make for peak performance. So we put a priority on the ability of our team to be not just physically fit, but mentally and spiritually sound as well. Because unless you're fully integrated as a person, you're not going to be able to serve your client in a knowledge industry.

And the last one being ingenuity, which is we really look for a creative solution and we refuse to just accept, well, it's always been done this way. So I guess that's what we got to do because that may not be in the best interest of the client and a little bit of extra fitness and elbow grease and ingenuity can go a long way in finding a solution. And then I think maybe one other thing you're getting at, if we have to make a tough decision as between the two of us as, as co -founders that.

that we do a lot of business disputes and shareholder disputes, what people call business divorce. And this can range from public companies to a mom and pop plumber in South Carolina. And open communication and integrity have gone a long way that we've built enough trust over the last almost decade that I don't even have to, I don't even have to ask Jordan to know what she's going to say for something, but because I always do.

We have an unlimited amount of trust in each other and a lot of times we just delegate. I just tell Jordan, you handle this and she'll do it. And we know when to speak up if something's gonna be a problem or if I've got a particular position on something. But.

I think a lot of people in a partnership situation try to avoid conflict because they've got enough conflict with their day -to -day work. But if you don't go ahead and address the problem or the conflict or disagreement or whatever it is, it's only going to come back worse later. So honest, early communication is the best thing you can do. And I've seen that across business, not just in law firms, as operating other companies where if you've got a problem with a vendor or supplier,

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (15:40.609)
customer, especially even say someone you owe money to as a business operator, the worst thing you can do is stop communicating. It only breeds problems. So I would say keeping that open line of communication and addressing everything head on and just coming to a resolution. But we've got a 50 page operating agreement that we painstakingly drafted eight years ago and I don't even know where it is. We've never looked at it one time. Yeah, I guess one more point to add.

We also like to think of things running through a matrix of, is this a reversible or an irreversible decision?

Because obviously, if it's an irreversible decision, we need to know, and we need to give this decision thought from every angle. We need to both feel really good about it. If it's a reversible decision, then it's kind of just a cost -benefit analysis. And then that would be a situation where, you know, if it's not something that I really care about, I'm just going to say, George, handle it, and whatever you're happy with, I'm happy with, or vice versa. So that's also…

you know, a framework that we run everything through. Is this something that we can walk back easily or not?

Jim (16:50.828)
You guys mentioned team members and I'm wondering how has the firm grown and scaled and how, how has that part of the experience been as easy as starting?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (16:59.471)
No. Jordan and I got lucky in starting and this dovetails off of your last thing of difficult decisions.

I cannot stress enough the importance of choosing your partners carefully, but that is so critical in every business, especially in our business. But as the firm has grown, it's also important. It's a little bit less important because at the end of the day we make the decisions, choosing the people you hire carefully is very, very important. I've made one mistake that I made early was trying to hire more

revenue producers or lawyers, people who are billing, rather than hiring someone to just handle the administrative and operations stuff.

Probably that was because I like doing operations. I enjoy it and it's fun, so I was happy to go do that. But what I should have done was hire an operations person so that I could be billing at a premium, rather than having young associates or paralegals that I'm training, because that's just inefficient. So I would say, as anyone grows, the first thing you should do is find someone who can handle operations before you begin bringing on other lawyers, because you've got to get your head out of paying the light bill.

calling for the pest control guy and the janitor or whatever else you have in an office. Then the next thing would be as we've grown, we've gone through different iterations. We're not the same firm we were.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (18:27.759)
in 2017, we're not the same firm we were last year. We've had a lot of stuff change just in the last year, which is for the better, but it kind of goes up and down and we had a global pandemic and kind of other things that happened that have made it not a smooth transition. And we're also in a generational shift.

where everyone's talking about, everyone used to make fun of us millennials. I'm kind of the baby of Gen X and Jordan's, guess, the true elder millennial. But now it's gone to Zoomers who…

really kind of don't want to work or have other priorities or different things. And so that's been very difficult as well. we could get into this later on a different day. But I think that you're going to see a problem with a lot of, we came on board where minimum billings at big firms was 2000 hours plus just to keep your job.

too much of a grind. And now the pendulum swung too far the other way, where I'm genuinely worried that kids coming out of law school in last four years, I've seen they're not prepared. They don't know how to write. They don't know how to articulate their thoughts.

they're not going to have the work experience to be able to have something to sell as they mature in their careers because they just didn't get enough reps in. They haven't played enough games and it's because they're just not putting the time in. -hmm. 100%. And back to your point earlier about delegating, especially things like operations, I think this can be counterintuitive for a lot of lawyers who self -selected into a profession where

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (20:06.479)
They're here to be the expert, right? They're here to know everything. They're here to produce the work product, the deliverables. I know even for me, you I mean, we already talked about how I'm the nerd in the basement. You can just lock me in there for 14 hours with bread and water and I'll probably make something really great. And so it's a mindset shift if you're going to run a firm that

That can't be your only focus area anymore. You have to really learn that skill set of delegation. It's something that I have to work on daily. It doesn't come naturally to me. But if you're not willing to let go of, you know, even things that may seem small like operations or things like elements of casework, then you just can't grow because there's a cap on the number of hours in a day. And yeah, we've been able to raise our hourly rates pretty nicely over the years, especially with the areas of expertise we've developed. But there's a

healing there too, right? So I think that's definitely a challenge a lot of lawyers have to overcome when they're trying to run a firm.

Tyson (21:07.181)
I think it's really great. I can tell you have a really great relationship. I think that's fantastic. It's absolutely necessary It's funny because the successful yeah the successful firms either have a really good relationship like you or they don't talk at all which is also a weird dynamic to like but they have like some sort of intermediary, but the

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (21:14.351)
Two more in the same room.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (21:25.518)
Yeah.

Tyson (21:26.817)
When it comes to the actual workload, who does what? What do you do and then Jordan, what do you do? What's the difference between the two when it comes to workload?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (21:38.873)
So we actually have some similar interests, although we diverge in areas. So I'm heavily focused on emerging technology. that's AI, that's blockchain, crypto. That's almost all I do, although I sprinkle some litigation work in, like we were talking about before we jumped on here. And I'm still really passionate about that. That's how I cut my teeth as a young lawyer, and I never want to stop doing it. So I would say I'm very heavy there and very strong there.

What about yourself, George? Most of mine is focused around private equity and finance and business litigation, whether that be international mergers and acquisitions or arbitration or…

other types of shareholder disputes or putting deals together. I like the puzzle piece of the litigation, the deal side, which is fun, but we're both technophiles. love technology. We do a lot of work in crypto and those kind of overlap and intersect, especially in that area.

And then as it comes to the operations side, a lot of it depends on what we're dealing with and who just has time. We both have young kids and it's a matter of who's just available on deck to handle whatever comes up. But that's where it really, like I can't stress enough, pick your partners wisely. It really pays off.

Tyson (22:58.807)
Yeah, and that's really what I was getting at too, is like from like an org chart standpoint, what's the workload when it comes to the org chart? like if someone has a final say, like who gets the final say?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (23:10.895)
Yeah, so, you know, I think that a lot of firms structured like ours would have failed a long time ago. Because like we've been talking about, we really are great friends and we've just we've never had a problem resolving.

I mean, I can't even really think of lot of disagreements that we've had. I think those probably actually happen more on client matters and their opinion on strategy and what we should do. Yeah. You know? I think we've just been very fortunate that, and you know, I trust that it will continue to be that way, that…

we've been able to function. And you know, there are a lot of things in life where it's that way. You know, I mean, we're both married and my husband and I, have to work through things. We have different opinions and we don't necessarily have a particular person that gets a bull vote. But I think that there's probably some unspoken rules about who maybe has a deeper knowledge and expertise in certain areas. Like I think I probably defer to you on finance for instance. Yeah, I think that's…

Yeah, we, and I know, we know what's more important to, because you have to get to know people. I know what's more important to Jordan. And if it's not as important to me, just whatever she wants to do. And I'm happy with that because a successful business and a successful business relationship is more important than dying on a hill of what color we're gonna paint this wall. I mean, it's just not worth it.

But I think George is right. I lot of businesses can't handle that. Somebody's got to have a bull vote or somebody's got to declare. And you miss the benefit if you do it that way. You miss the benefit of a consensus. And that goes back to the reversible, irreversible decision. And so if we look at something that's really an irreversible decision, it's important to get consensus. That's why you see the Supreme Court, when they can, they want to have a nine zero decision.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (25:07.879)
And it's why boards of directors try to get a unanimous vote for everything they do. But yeah, okay, so I can think of an example. I wasn't thrilled about a vendor that you wanted to use. And I'll keep this high level just to not throw anyone under the bus. But I said, okay, let's give them a try. It was a terrible decision. Yeah, and it didn't go well. But that's fine. You know what? It was a reversible decision. We just canceled the vendor agreement and

Jim (25:30.646)
Okay.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (25:35.928)
and now we're fine. So I think that's a pretty good example of where it wasn't that important to me to get this service in place. And it was important to the firm. I do understand that. And I'm glad that George pushed us towards looking for good vendors, but this particular one didn't work out. And it's okay. We moved on. Took our ball and went home. Yeah. We needed this particular service provider or particular service. We just picked the wrong provider.

And so we got there in the end. I made the wrong decision on the front end, but hey, mean, that's okay. And I mean, not to be cheesy, but that really is how you grow and become a better leader and become a better business operator is by making those mistakes. So I don't think that either of us have regrets in that particular instance or in general.

Jim (26:25.622)
One of the other things we've seen La Fremona struggle with is letting go of like areas of running the firm or little, you know, parts of the job. What, what have you guys let go of to let other people grow into a position?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (26:42.125)
We have got an amazing operations manager.

and being able to just cut out a lot of the day -to -day stuff that she can handle from payroll to administrative tasks to dealing with vendors to all the basic stuff that you don't have to be a lawyer to do. And a lot of people think that being an entrepreneur or being in business is being able to have your own little dictatorship and could not be further from the truth. If you want to be successful, you just want to show up four times a year and collect a check.

the end goal where you say I'm a business owner I don't have to deal with any of the operations in the business apart from my day job and I show up and the business is profitable because you've built a system and you see this with small private companies family -held businesses when they go to sell the business there's nothing to sell because outside of these core people there are no systems there's no processes there's no cash generating machine so we're we're not anywhere close yet but our long -term vision is what's some

that we can create that's going to outlast us, it's going to have its own ethos of generating value. And then if we've done that, then regardless of whether we're here or not, or whether we're operating or running the business or not, it will still continue to be successful. And I think larger firms tend to do better at that, probably just because of size, and therefore it's harder for one key man or key woman to be so key. I think that boutiques, if you can call us that, have a harder

time and so I think that's kind of our uphill challenge but one that we're really excited about is how can we do this with a smaller firm. Yeah so to put a bow on your question we've got the operations piece fairly well sorted and now we're looking for the sort of technical expertise of other lawyers as we're hiring and training lawyers so that we can spend more of our time advising and mentoring and helping clients where needed and have the necessary legal expertise

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (28:46.097)
expertise to run those practice areas or run the firm as needed.

Tyson (28:52.453)
I like it. I gotta say for having the two of you on here, it's actually much easier when you are in the same room. Because sometimes you'll have two people and they're in different rooms and they're kind of talking over each other. So it actually worked out pretty well. So this is pretty good. We are going to wrap things up because we are…

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (29:01.167)
That's what we thought.

Tyson (29:15.395)
think we're kind of over time, but it's fine. I've enjoyed the conversation, so it's good. Before I do to wrap things up, if people want to reach out to you all, they, let's say they have a case to refer you out in South Carolina or something like that, how do they reach out to you all?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (29:28.375)
Our website, CampbellTeague .com, that's Campbell like the soup and Teague like league but with a T. I've had to do that a time or two before. Yeah, hit us up on the website. You can find both of us on X or on LinkedIn. We try and deal with matters globally and litigate around the country.

Texas, we've been to Texas, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, you name it, we'll go anywhere, we'll travel. We're based in South Carolina with little satellites in Chicago and DC and New York. But we've got a broad range of states we're admitted to and if anybody has a complex issue they need help on, we'd be happy to dive in and support.

Tyson (30:11.737)
Sweet, love it. All right, so we are gonna wrap things up. Before I do, you wanna join us in the big Facebook group. We would love to have you. Just search Maximum Lawyer on Facebook and you'll find us. Also, if you wanna join us in the Guild, we'd love it. We have our quarterly masterminds, four times a year obviously, quarterly. The next one coming up is Vegas. This should come out before Vegas, I think. So we're pretty excited about that. First time going to Vegas. If you wanna join us there, go to maxlawguild .com.

If you got something from this episode, which hopefully you did because there's a lot of great content, then we'd love it you gave us a five -star review. It really does help us spread the love, so we'd really appreciate it. Now let's get to our tips and hacks of the week. So George, hopefully you've got yours ready to go. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim (30:57.366)
So this will be ironic since you're the pilot, not me, but there's a new, it's new for me, it's a website that I found that I really have gotten sort of addicted to when traveling and it's called flightaware .com. can put in your flight number and it'll tell you where your plane is, what kind of plane it is, it's like more detailed than you'd ever want, but it's great because the airlines a lot of times won't really tell you what's going on for reals. So I like checking out.

when, especially if there's any kind of delay, then I jump on that thing, trying to figure out is it a crew thing, is it a plane thing. If it's mechanical, then I'm probably just going ahead and starting to rebook a new flight, and I love it.

Tyson (31:39.553)
So I was looking up, I want to show you a different app. FlightAware is fantastic. It's a really good app and it's free. I use something called ForeFlight, which you gotta pay for. I don't know if they have a free one, but I think it's funny. What I'll do is I'll put up, like when I'm on a flight, I'll put it up on the chair. They got like behind the seat, you can put the phone on there. And it's got synthetic vision where, let's say you couldn't see, you could actually see where you're flying. So…

And when you're in an airplane like that, you can't see what's going on. But I'll put it on there and people will be like, what's he doing? Because you can actually see where we're flying. And you can see the ground coming in. It's actually really cool. anyone that's got four flight, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's a really cool thing. yeah, flight aware, it's really cool. I use it all the time. If I see a plane and I want to know who's flying it or whatever, it'll actually show me the call number and everything. So yeah, flight aware is great. I like that a lot. You got me on a topic where I'll geek out on it. I like it.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (32:15.525)
Have a sweet.

Jim (32:31.63)
Right.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (32:32.477)
Yeah.

Tyson (32:33.451)
Alright, George and Jordan, always, as you know, have to a tip and hack, so what you got?

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (32:35.821)
Yeah, you, I'm an instrument rated pilot as well, but a Garmin fanboy. So I may have to give ForeFly the second look to see if I can use it. The one I would do is, I think this was hot, not is not given enough attention as using a password manager. I'm a big fan of one password and the close runner up to that would be Proton Pass from the Proton guys in Switzerland.

Using a password manager just changes your life. It absolutely makes everything so much easier and your ability to keep yourself safe in a crazy world out there. So that would be my tip of the week is get a password manager, preferably one password or Proton Pass and stay safe out there.

Okay, my tip is for lawyers trying to advise their client and make a decision. sometimes a client will come and say, you know, what should I do? And lawyers like to just bloviate on and write 12 paragraph emails and ramble on for 30 minutes on the phone. Don't do that. What you're going to do instead is you're going to make a pros and cons chart. And this is going to force both you and the client to actually reduce down to writing what the real options are so that no one

is illusioned by the idea that maybe there's some secret option D that isn't on paper. So you'll write down the real options, pros, cons. You'll jump on a five minute call and you'll make a decision. Fact.

Tyson (34:06.041)
I've got a client that's supposed to give me an answer by five o 'clock about an offer whether she's gonna accept it or take the case trial so I may do that with her. Yeah exactly we got an hour and 20 minutes. That's great so for me what we did this last weekend is we called our an associate boot camp where we put our attorneys through it and I talked a little bit about in the guild but

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (34:16.644)
Quick, hurry.

Tyson (34:32.353)
It's something where we it's essentially a training we put them through a boot camp But we went through a lot of topics and and they spent the entire Saturday with me it was it was a lot of fun And they were really engaged in everything, but I really if you all if anyone's got Staff or attorneys that you you need to get up to speed and like we record all of us We basically have a now we have a training program that we have

that we have put together for our attorneys, so we can replicate it. I highly recommend it for everybody because you can get people up to speed very, very quickly. And then if they've got questions, they can ask during it, obviously. But then they can go back to the videos and look at the slides and answer all the questions that they have. So for anyone that's not doing that, I do recommend it, especially if you're trying to get people up to speed. And I know it's really difficult sometimes whenever you're busy doing other things.

you will save yourself a ton of time by doing it. All right, that is all I have. George and Jordan, thank you so much for coming out. I really appreciate it. Enjoy talking to you all.

George Campbell And Jordan Teague (35:35.715)
Likewise, thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah, thanks guys, I enjoyed it.

Jim (35:38.84)
Thanks guys, that was great.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, hosts Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux explore the milestones and challenges of achieving stability and success as a law firm owner. They share personal experiences, emphasizing the importance of financial stability, client acquisition, and effective management systems. 

This episode highlights the emotional rollercoaster of running a firm, the significance of cash flow management, and the impact of personal financial decisions on business growth. Jim and Tyson also stress the need for clear benchmarks to measure success and the value of setting meaningful, personalized goals. Their insights offer valuable guidance for law firm owners striving for sustainable success.

Jim’s Hack: Re-read books. Like:

Tyson’s Tip: Rethink the things that you are saying

Episode Highlights:

  • 04:15 Recognizing financial stability 
  • 06:47 The necessity of focusing on acquiring clients for law firm success.
  • 09:19 The importance of managing cash flow
  • 12:59 Different growth stages of a business 
  • 16:25 Essential benchmarks for managing a law firm effectively
  • 18:35 The challenges of taking time off as a law firm owner
  • 20:29 The pressure to respond to clients promptly, affecting his mental health
  • 21:39 The importance of aligning goals with personal aspirations for success
  • 22:10 Understanding what one truly wants in their practice

Resources:

Transcripts: What to do When Your Law Firm Hits a Plateau

Speaker 1 00:00:01 Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson metrics. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Jim Hacking 00:00:23 Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:26 Well, damn, Jimmy, that's pretty damn flat. And I'm Tyson. What's up bro?

Jim Hacking 00:00:30 Oh geez. You're the one. You're the one who's sick, not me. I should bring the energy. Bring the funk.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:35 Bring it. I was expecting you. Normally will bring this like, let's go. And I. Well, that's.

Jim Hacking 00:00:41 Because usually we recorded eight in the morning. Now it's 230 in the afternoon.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:44 Yeah. You know, and we do every once in a while do some of these in the afternoon. But the, the morning ones like that's where I like to do like my best work in the mornings because like I can, like I've got the energy because afternoon right around this time is usually whenever I start to kind of to hit that wall and it's not even a wall.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:01 I started to decline in quality, but for sure. Yeah, today I'm still I'm fighting off Covid. I've been in bed, so I actually have a blanket over top of me. Now I'm in my basement and I've got the bar behind me. There's Diagon Alley, obviously that, but that's, I see it, that big old Lego set behind me. But no, I've been I don't know if I've ever been sick where I've been in bed for this many days in a row. Like from Monday night until today, I've been, like, sick. So in yesterday I went and got. I think it was yesterday. What's today? Today? Thursday.

Jim Hacking 00:01:32 Yeah, it was yesterday.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:33 Yeah. Yesterday I got get tested and I got Covid first time. First time since this all started. I've got Covid that I know of. Who gave.

Jim Hacking 00:01:42 It to you I.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:43 Don't know Amy and I were talking about this I think the. So there was this guy I went to jiu jitsu. So I've still been going to jiu jitsu, even though my shoulder, I've got a torn labrum, but I've been I've been like going and just essentially watching.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:57 And I'll do some of the things that I can do But there was this guy the other day. It was on Saturday and I was looking at him and I said to him, I was like, man, you look tired today. And he was like, yeah, just like, you know, having young kids and everything. And he just was not didn't have the same energy. And I would bet money that he has Covid, but he gave me Covid because it's like, you know, when you look at somebody, there's not the same when they're sick. That's that he had the sick face. And so I this is me in hindsight looking at at the time I didn't realize that but I so I think it's that guy. I'm not going to say who is Nate what his name is. Not that anybody would know, but I.

Jim Hacking 00:02:35 Would suspect airplanes myself.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:37 Well, I haven't been on a plane lately, so you're the one. I think that every time you've gotten, you probably got on an airplane.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:43 Well, one.

Jim Hacking 00:02:43 Time Ismail gave it to me, and that was after flying to San Diego. So, yeah, probably all three.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:48 Are you at four times? I think I told somebody three times. Okay. Three times. I told my doctor yesterday, I was like, yeah, buddy might have it four times okay. Three times, three times. So it's just a matter of time. You get your fourth one.

Jim Hacking 00:02:59 Oh, God, I hope not. That was this last one was the sickest I've ever been in my whole life.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:03 Well, I've kept like in my head. I keep saying like, okay, it's not going to be that bad. It's not going to be that bad. It's because like, because of what you said. And then everyone else I hear that's gotten this strain, it's really bad. I mean, what's weird is, is that it's not it's not like the flu, right? Like the flu, I feel like is like this consistent thing where you hit this peak and then it kind of goes away.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:22 I feel like Covid is more like this thing, like you hit you in waves, like wave after wave, and the waves keep getting stronger. And I think I've finally gotten past the strong waves where it's starting to kind of hit the cell. These waves will have these boost of energy, and then it'll go away. And like the heart, I don't know about you. Like the hardest part for me has been the energy just sucked the energy out of me. And like, that's the part that sucks for me.

Jim Hacking 00:03:46 It was the coughing. My chest hurt, my throat hurt. I never cough that much.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:50 So I've had very little coughing. When I do. It's it's this. I feel like it's almost random. I don't see it coming. It's very dry cough, but it's only happened a few times. It's mostly mucus buildup in my nose. That's the main. That's what's driving me crazy. Other than the energy. Yummy. It's. Yeah. It's fantastic. But now, with that nice, nice introduction, you want to introduce our topic.

Jim Hacking 00:04:15 So you came up with it. So we were kicking off topic for today and you did come up with one that we both sort of liked, which was how did we know when we had sort of arrived or that we were going to be okay. And I think that's a good that's a good topic for discussion. I think. I mean, I think there's an ebb and flow to all of it, but I do think there's sort of plateaus that you get to in your career. And for me, the first one was when I sort of literally had to stop, like looking around for money to make payroll. Like that was the first time where I really felt like, oh, this is nice. I have enough money every two weeks to pay Adela. And that was just a real turning point for me. I thought, yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:55 I think that that kind of comes and goes, though, in a way like especially as you scale a little bit, like you have to like you kind of go to achieve that next level.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:05 I do think that that kind of it gives you more of that cash crunch a little bit than anything. But it to me it's the same. It's very similar, though it is. It's like whenever you have that amount of money where you're like, like you're making enough money, where things are consistently coming in, where you're like, okay, I don't want to worry about paying for dinner. Like I don't have to worry about, you know, get paying for groceries I'm okay with, like, we're going to be fine with our mortgage and all that. There is a certain point where all that kind of just disappears and you don't think about it anymore. Kind of. The reason why I want to talk about this, too, is because a lot of people write when they're about to make it, they give up, you know, like they say, okay, I'm, I can't do this anymore. But if you stick it out, a lot of this is just it's just a matter of sticking it out.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:53 And as long as you can stick it out for long enough, you can take the heat, take the pressure. It'll turn into something good that you're going to get to make a really good living off of, or at least a decent living. You're going to have, you know, freedom. But it's going to be a different type of freedom than working for someone. But it's a lot of it has to do with I think it has to do with making money. What's really funny is I'm always talking about processes and systems, and you're always talking about getting cases in. But from the beginning, the thing that I cared about the most was getting clients. And whenever I would go speak to classes, I would say, I would ask, ask them what? What's the most important thing about practicing law? And I would get all these answers. And none of them was getting clients. Not one of it. Not one of them would say not. And I don't think ever in the history of me asking that question, as a student said, getting clients, it's always about, oh, you have to be ethical and you have to you have to make sure you're doing a good job, yada, yada, yada.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:47 And I would say, like, those are all all really, really important things, but you can't do any of that unless you get cases. And that's what you've got to focus on is getting cases even if you're working for a firm. And I tell the story about Debbie Champion, the one that she told in your class about, like, the ones without cases are the ones that are expendable. And so you have to, at the beginning, focus on getting cases, because otherwise it's it's going to be a really tough road to hoe.

Jim Hacking 00:07:13 You and I had the opportunity to talk to a lawyer this week, a law firm owner who hadn't signed up any cases for two months. And I think it both it gave both of us a big kick in the butt and we were like, oh, what's going on here? Like we had to do sort of a little bit of a different analysis.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:28 Yeah, that was a, What was the feeling you had when you heard that?

Jim Hacking 00:07:32 Well, the person didn't seem too overly worried about it.

Jim Hacking 00:07:35 I had the sense that they had some kind of other cushion, that maybe it's cash in the bank from being out in private practice, you know, for a big firm for a long time. Maybe they had a partner that sort of helps them through month to month. But, you know, for you and I, when we were the primary breadwinners, that would not have flown, right. That just wouldn't do it. I think that, it would have scared the crap out of me.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:57 I mean, I had a feeling of almost despair when I heard it. I just that would worry me if that happened to me or you right now, especially when we have so many employees, that'd be really bad. But if you've I mean, back then, I mean, even back then, I don't know if I ever went two months without having a client. I mean, that would have been that would have terrified me. I remember going a few weeks without getting a client and thinking, oh man, like, what am I going to do? What? What's going to happen if this stays the way it is? And the thing that you said, maybe you're right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:28 I mean, maybe, maybe they do have a partner. And we didn't we didn't dig into that. Maybe we should have. In hindsight, their.

Jim Hacking 00:08:34 Hair was on fire. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:35 I feel like it's like I feel like maybe it should have been, don't you?

Jim Hacking 00:08:38 Yeah, yeah. And actually I was talking to my son this email today and he said he's sort of at a plateau and he sort of feels like things are cooking and he sort of wanted to do next what to do next. And I said, go get more clients, go get more clients. That's what I said. That solves a lot of problems. It can bring its own problems. But, you know I wanted to say something to you that you often come back to and garyvee often comes back to when it comes to that those plateaus, or those times where you feel like you've sort of arrived. And that is a lot of it can depend on how much cash you're pulling out of the business. So I think we become so intertwined with our firms and they become so much of our personality.

Jim Hacking 00:09:19 And obviously they take up a big all of our working day and a lot of our energy and time that we think that we can just pull out cash like an ATM. And we don't really. I think sometimes lawyers don't even have an accurate evaluation of whether their firm is working or not, profitable or not, because they're taking so much money out of it. And if they left it invested in there, like Jeff Bezos did with Amazon for decades or years and years, where, you know, if you have to evaluate the firm on its own two feet, or if somebody else were evaluating it and just treated you as a salaried employee with X amount of expense. I think that that's one thing that really sort of gets in the way of people feeling like they are safe or arrived, because they haven't been very disciplined in how they keep boundaries between themselves and that money sitting in the operating account.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:12 I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but if you if you look at some of our peers, like we if you and I wanted to like we could we could really go barebones with our operations.

Jim Hacking 00:10:25 You're always proposing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:26 This. No, no, I'm not proposing it. I'm just saying we could if we wanted to. We could go really bare bones with our operations. And we can make, like, firm. From a personal standpoint. We could make a lot of money and we could, you know, like, you know, look like ballers and have these. We could probably pay for Ferraris and all that, like, like that cool stuff. Right. But we've we've instead chosen to take a different route and take make some sacrifices and Not take the money out and keep it in and continue to build this thing because we have this bigger vision for it. And so there there is a point where you have to make that decision, okay, are you going to. Is that what you want? Do you want to build something bigger with a bigger vision, or are you comfortable with just kind of stay in the way you are and just sucking that money out of the business? And there's neither way is the right way.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:16 But just know that if you were going to do it the way where you're going to suck the money out of it and just take that money for you personally, you're not going be able to grow it. I mean, you're not going to grow it the way you want to. You're going to have a really cool, awesome personal life. But I also think you can have an amazing life outside of the firm by paying yourself a, you know, a good salary. I'm taking good draws from the from the firm that are based on schedules and percentages and all that. But you you could have both and that you don't have to just take all that money out and use it on yourself personally, because you're not. I don't think you're going to be at the end. You'll be as fulfilled, right? And that's just my personal opinion. But, I mean, I guess maybe some people are happier with the other way, but you and I, I think just chosen a different route.

Jim Hacking 00:12:02 Well, if you are I mean, it's sort of simple math.

Jim Hacking 00:12:05 If you're pulling too much money out too often, that's going to hinder your ability to hire people to help you do the work. So therefore, you're going to be doing all the work and you're really just a hamster on a wheel. You have a job, but you're your own boss, right? So but you still have a job. If you delay that gratification and keep that money around and don't take it out and use it to pay salaries of other people in whatever areas of the firm that you want or need them to be, you can really get to a point where you have lots of people doing lots of the work so that you can do what you want to do, and you can take long vacations and you can be away from the office. And but as long as you're not progressing in hiring and growing, then you're just going to be stuck in that same wheel that you've been in for ever since you opened the firm.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:54 Yeah, so I read this. I think it's a post from her Mozzi this week.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:59 And it was the difference between getting from 1 million to 10 million. Okay, so it was getting from 0 to 1 million was essentially having something that's like a fourth of the way built. Right. So you're like you you've kind of have it working. Right. And then getting from 1 million to 10 million is having this thing that's half built. And then getting from 10 million to 100 million is having this thing's like, that's like three quarters of the way built. And I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it, because it is kind of true. Like whenever you do get to that million point, it's like, okay, I kind of have this thing that works, I'm making this money, but you have all these other areas that need work. And then once you like, when you grow from there, like you're you're constantly it's like whack a mole sometimes, but then sometimes you get these areas that are okay. They're running very, very, very well. And then you move on to this next thing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:56 But like I think it's a really interesting concept like we're like and I think it's also a concept that if you with like with the topic that we're talking about, like, you know, when did we know we were going to be okay. Like if you're, if you got things like a fourth of the way figured out and you're, you're to seven figures, okay, you're okay. And I actually okay is not even saying seven figures but like, okay. Like you're, you're making enough money to, to pay all your bills and you're, you can make payroll and all that kind of stuff. But like, what do you think about that idea, though, of, you know, something quarter built, half built, you know, three quarters built?

Jim Hacking 00:14:32 I think any time you can get it to objective standards versus your gut, it's better. Like right now I have a great aunt who's sick and she's going to get sicker. And so to try to take the emotion out of it, I said, you know, we don't know what's going to happen over the next 2 or 3 years.

Jim Hacking 00:14:49 Let's try to put in benchmarks so that when something happens, we know what to do. So sort of like that. In case of fire break glass. Like if you if you know that or if you, if you give yourself these benchmarks to hit, that's when you maybe get through. I mean that's going to make you work harder to.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:05 Yeah. You know it's people are so avoidant to that of that though. Like in case of fire break glass like I had, I've assigned this task to three people and none of them have completed the task where I wanted them to create a list of things that that are unlikely to happen, but they could happen and what to do in an emergency. And like, they've all like gotten like some of them done, but not many of them done. I think people are so averse to actually thinking about that, that what I think is because I don't think it's going to happen. But I think part of it is that they they don't want to think about it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:39 Yeah.

Jim Hacking 00:15:39 I'm not worried about that so much. I'm more concerned. So like, Dean Jackson has a list of signs that he's living the life the way he wants to live. So I know I'm doing well when write something like that, It doesn't have to be break glass. It can be anything. But, you know, sort of. And I think that's where a lot of the value of maximum layer comes is that people have seen us sort of hit those benchmarks and know, you know, the scary thing, I think, is when you're in that first phase, when you don't know if you're going to get somewhere where you're going to get and what it's going to look like and how you'll know when you get there.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:10 Yeah. There. Yeah. There are those certain things like that. You you need to make sure that you're hitting like, if I, if I'm just kind of spitballing here with you as to like the things that you need to make sure that you're, you're hitting, you got to make sure that you're generating clients.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:25 Right. You should get that have like, at least like one like referral source where you're regularly generating clients, not something where you're just randomly generating, but something where you're regularly generating clients. You got to make sure you got someone that's going to answer your phones, make sure you're managing the cash flow. I mean, you have to make sure that you that.

Jim Hacking 00:16:44 Your cases are being handled properly and in a timely manner, that you're closing out cases Pieces properly. You know, I took a long time before I was like, actually closing out cases. I like to just keep them open in case there was more to do or someone wanted to hire us. Again, just having good structures and systems and, and I think the best benchmark of all is if you're not doing everything when when someone tells me they're doing everything, that's just to tell that they're stuck in their control freaks.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:09 Yeah, the number of cases I remember. So I was in that suite with a lot of other attorneys for a while.

Jim Hacking 00:17:14 I remember.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:15 And the thing used to be like, how many cases do you do you have how many cases do you have? And it's such a misleading, a bad metric because what you just said, you might have a bunch of cases because you're not closing anything out. So you you sign up a bunch of cases and then all you, you've got this massive caseload that's swell, that's swollen, and you can't do anything with it because you've got so many of them and you've already been paid on some of them. So especially like people that do take money up front, you know, like they've been paid on the case. So they they're incentive to close it out. It's not great Right. Like we're like, the way you do it. I think you get paid a little bit up for, I don't know, but a little bit up front. You get paid some up front and then some at the end whenever you're closing it out. So you have an incentive to close that case out.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:59 Like, I have a massive incentive to close the case out because I don't get paid anything. I'm going. I'm actually negative money until until we get the case settled. So. But other people like that, you may yeah, you may have a great massive caseload, but that doesn't mean shit like that doesn't mean anything. That just means that you're not closing cases out fast enough.

Jim Hacking 00:18:18 I think another benchmark in the scheme of things is when can I take a day off from the office and things keep moving? Oh, I like that. And then when can I take a week off without contacting the office? Like, that's those are some pretty big personal headspace kind of benchmarks, I think.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:35 How long it is starting your firm, do you think that you were able to do that, whether it's a day off or a week off or whatever? How long do you think it took?

Jim Hacking 00:18:44 When I showed up at Strategic Coach, I knew that I hadn't had a free day in like three years, so that would have been probably 6 or 7 years ago.

Jim Hacking 00:18:54 So that would have been that would have been ten years in. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I took vacation and stuff, but I was always checking email and talking to Adela and all that stuff.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:02 Yeah, I'm trying to think of like whenever I for the first time, like, I could probably take a day off and not call it, but like, if I'm. That's easy. Like a day off is easy, but.

Jim Hacking 00:19:12 You have to say. And things have to keep moving.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:14 Yeah, that's part two. That's the other part. They have a week off now, a week off it took jeez it because I'm not 14 years in technically now I'd say let's see I can go back to it was before it was before Covid probably like 19 or so 2019, 2018 like so it was like right before Covid and that was that was tough for me at the time. So would that have been like that would been nine years. So like nine years in eight years, nine years. So that's yeah I mean yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:43 And that's one of those things where you I don't know, like why do you think that took so long. Why do you think we knew? We knew what we should, should do and shouldn't do? So why do you think it took us? Took us so long? Well, for.

Jim Hacking 00:19:53 Me, I'm compulsive about signing up cases. So I always wanted to be bringing in more business. Because even though you hit those plateaus, you're still worried that, like you said, you said to me just right now, man, if we didn't sign up a case for a month or two around here with the size that we're at, we'd be in big trouble. So that's something that I don't think ever goes away.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:10 Yeah, I think that's part of it, too, to me. Like, I've always had this. A lot of it came from my dad, but a lot of it came from like just going to business school where they, they talked about the, the customers, everything. Which is interesting is like, that is not what lawyers are taught, like lawyers are like lawyers are taught, or at least they have the.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:29 I get the impression that lawyers think that they are everything and not customers or everything. So I always I've always had this thought like, okay, if a client's calling in or has an email, they need to be responded to right away. And so I think that's where a lot of my compulsion comes from. It's not necessarily getting the clients in. It's it's taking care of the clients. You have. So that part I've had to let go of quite a bit where like there was a, an email I did respond to earlier today where the client had emailed me three days ago whenever I was like near my sickest and I was, I just emailed, I was like, hey, I just want to let them know. Like I had not wasn't ignoring his email, just said, hey, it might be a few days before I get back to you. I'm at home sick with Covid, but I'll get back to you as soon as I can. It's like one of those things that kind of gnaw at me where like, I want to make sure that a client doesn't think that they're being ignored because that could that could easily happen sometimes.

Jim Hacking 00:21:17 It's all good, man. I wouldn't feel bad about that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:20 It's all good, man. I you know, it's funny about this topic. I feel like we talked very little about the topic, but I do think we there's a lot of other things that are relevant to whatever you're, you're trying to figure out if you've made it or not. And I think that there's I think I think there's a lot in here that I think will benefit people. If you're if you're worried a.

Jim Hacking 00:21:39 Lot of it's going to depend on what you paint your goals to be like, what you what you dream of and what you want to have. And I think early on when we started Maximum Lawyer, you and I were often saying things like, you've got to do it like this, you've got to be like us. But to me, where I really ended up after a couple of years, maybe 2 or 3 was where do you say you want to be? Where are you and how can we help you build that bridge, that gap? Or why aren't you where you want to be?

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:06 Yeah, but with that, where do you say you want to be? Right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:10 We gotta we gotta ask that question. But then we also have to dig really deep and figure out, is that really what you want? Are you just saying that for because you think that that's the right thing you're supposed to be saying? Because there's a lot of that to where people say that they want something, they don't know why they want it, they just think that they want it. And that's something where I think that's something we deal with quite a bit in the guild, where people say that they want something sometimes they don't really want that. Sometimes they come to the conclusion that, oh, maybe I'm okay with where I am right now, and I just, I want something different. So that's that's something we've got to get to figure out sometimes too. I'm also looking forward to listening to this whenever I have a clear head, because I am, I am interested.

Jim Hacking 00:22:47 You'll be like, did I say that I was on medicine? I don't remember any of this business.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:51 No, I'll remember it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:53 I just I am interested to hear because I'm not thinking the clearest with with my, what's going on with me, but. Yeah. All right. Ready to wrap things up, brother? I am all right. I want to remind everybody to join us in the big Facebook group. We'd love to have you just search Maximum Lawyer on Facebook and you'll find us. And then if you want to join us in the guild, where our next quarterly mastermind will be in Vegas. So it would be great to have you join us there. Go to Max Law guild.com, and we would really, really appreciate it if you'd give us a five star review on Apple or wherever you get your podcast. It helps us spread the love to other listeners and other law firm owners across the country. Actually, across the world, we have people all over the world that listen to this, which is pretty cool. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking 00:23:40 Reread books. You probably don't need more books. You probably just need to reread the good ones that you have.

Jim Hacking 00:23:46 So somebody asked on Twitter like the other day, what are the I was really excited about this. What are the books that you read more than once or that you read regularly? So I try to read Atomic Habits and Limitless and maybe traction, but definitely Limitless by Jim Kwik and Atomic Habits by James Clear. And so I tweeted those out and Jim Kwik had a real nice reply. So that made my day that he took the time to reply. I think both of them are really good about just getting your mind right and like if I'm in a slump or feeling down, those are both really good ways to get really small, incremental, practical ways to sort of turn things around. I had put down Gary Vaynerchuk Book Day trading attention, but I just got to the last section, section four, where he goes over all the platforms again like he did in jab, jab, jab, right hook. So I feel like I'm sort of reading a book again, but it's all updated, so anytime you can check in with the things that have helped you be successful, I think you'll get to a deeper understanding of concepts than you do just by bouncing to the next book.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:42 Yeah, there's a there's a few that I've already reread and like I would, I will. I'm going to I'm going to reread 33 Strategies of War because I think it's a it's a really good book.

Jim Hacking 00:24:50 Thinking Grow Rich. I've read probably 6 or 7 times.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:53 Yeah, thinking thinking grow Rich is another one that I've read a couple times, trying to think of some other ones that I've read. I don't know, it's one of the things my brain is not working the clearest right now, but there's yeah.

Jim Hacking 00:25:04 It's all good.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:05 The 12 week year, I read a couple times, which I thought was a it's a really good one.

Jim Hacking 00:25:08 Yeah, we were on a big kick for that for a while.

Speaker 4 00:25:10 Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:11 And it's funny because like what's really interesting about 12 a year, if you look at a lot of these other other programs, for lack of a better word, a lot of their principles are based. I don't know if they're based on the 12 week year, but the 12 week year is a big component of all of them.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:25 The way they break down the goals and everything. So I think, I think it's really interesting how that applies to so many different books.

Jim Hacking 00:25:31 Ultimate sales machines. Another one you and I have read a couple of times because we love it so much.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:35 Oh yes. That's yeah, I love Ultimate Sales Machine. I cannot believe he's dead. Chet Holmes that's just it's a sad. That's a that's a loss lost to the business world. He's just like, just simple things. Like there's a chapter in there where he's got the concept of touch at once, like, if you could take that, that principle alone, touch it once and and apply it to everything that you do, you could shrink the amount of time that it takes you to do things just exponentially. Because think of how many times you touched that piece of paper, that one piece of paper that's been on your desk for, I don't know how many months, and that you keep coming back to it. If you just do something with that damn thing or that email or that that case, whatever, it would solve your solve a lot of problems.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:15 So I think there's just a lot of great wisdom in that book. So my I gotta explain mine a little bit. My tip of the week, if you find yourself saying, oh, I'm just kidding to something, you might want to rethink the things that you're saying. So sometimes you'll see people say something, right. They'll make a comment about something and they'll, they'll, they'll say it in a serious manner, and then someone will kind of call them on it. They'll challenge them on it a little bit. I won't say call them, but challenge them a little bit. And then the person said, oh I'm just kidding. So either you don't really believe in the things that you're saying, or you're not wanting to stick up for the things that you're saying or that you're talking about. So try not to say, oh, I'm sorry, or I'm just joking. If you really mean the things that you're saying, and if you find yourself kind of backing off those things you're saying, maybe you shouldn't, maybe should rethink some of the things you're saying.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:03 So I, I've been noticing that a lot lately on lots of interview shows where someone will say something and then they'll back off of it, even though they, they initially meant it and then they back off of it. So like if you if you mean something, say it and stick to it. Right? Don't apologize for it. There's no need for that. Don't say you're joking. Just stick with it. So that's my tip of the week. And it's one of the things like Jimbo I couldn't imagine you doing that. I just don't I if you mean something, you usually stick to it. Just like you're going to say, oh, I'm just joking. So, but.

Jim Hacking 00:27:34 I have been thinking. I have been thinking about just saying less. I'm in a spot right now where I just feel like saying less. So that's.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:39 Interesting. I think that that's I think that that's important too. Or just not having an opinion on something like that or share it. That is one of those things where like, you don't have to have an opinion on something.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:48 Yeah, that's the other thing. Yeah. Oh Kirk Herbstreit was talking with us today. He goes he said, you know I feel like that, you know has grown up. You weren't supposed to talk about religion, sex, politics. But now I feel like that's what everyone that's all they're talking about. And I think that's true. Like yeah, yeah, you don't have to share your opinion on everything, you know, and you don't have to have an opinion on everything either. So both valuable lessons. So say les I like that. That's good. All right Jimbo, this helped cheer me up a little bit. So I appreciate.

Speaker 4 00:28:17 It. Good I'm glad.

Jim Hacking 00:28:18 Buddy I hope you're feeling.

Speaker 4 00:28:19 Better. Thanks, man.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:20 I'll see everybody later.

Speaker 1 00:28:23 Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Grab David's Freebie: The 2-Step Mindset Hack to Reprogram Your Life for Success

Are you a law firm owner who is thinking about improving the culture of your firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, co-hosts Jim and Tyson welcome back David Neagle, a bestselling author and founder of a global consulting company. The discussion centers on fostering a culture of success within law firms.

For David, fostering a culture of success within law firms involves a mixture of different things. One of these things is for those in the legal field to understand that there are no mistakes, only lessons. Focusing on mistakes can make employees feel guilt and shame for doing something wrong. But, if a mistake is turned into a lesson, people are more likely to be open and trustworthy with what they do. Thus truly leads to a healthy and successful business.

The internal voice of a business owner can affect the culture of a firm. These voices can be fear or the ideas from friends and family. It is important to separate those voices to understand what you want for yourself and your business. Other people’s ideas can control how you think and view your success and can drive a wedge between you and success. David suggests to determine what it is that you want and make a decision to follow the voice that will get you there.

Take a listen to learn more from David Neagle!

Jim's Hack: Listen to the speech called “The Day You Turn Your Life Around” by Jim Rohn to help get your mindset right.

David Tip: Read Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ book, which delves into how to step into your genius.

Tyson's Tip: Spot check core values with your team.

Episode Highlights:

  • 5:07 The importance of embracing mistakes to foster a successful law firm culture
  • 5:34 The need for law firm leaders to view mistakes as opportunities for learning
  • 9:41 The process of shifting firm culture 
  • 15:47 How individuals' internal voices affect their mindset and firm culture

Connect with David:

Resources:

Transcripts: Building a Culture of Success by Embracing Mistakes with David Neagle

Jim (00:00.77)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.388)
And I'm Testimutrix. What's up, Jimbo?

Jim (00:08.106)
Tyson, I'm excited. I don't know how many episodes we've recorded today, but I'm excited about ending the day with a bang with one of our favorite past guests. Everyone has always had great responses when he's been on the show, so I'm excited.

Tyson (00:22.488)
I am too. going to jump right in and David, forgive me if I don't give your full bio because I don't think, I don't really think you need much of an introduction to our audience for the most part, but I'll do the beginning of it. For those of you that don't know, David is a speaker, bestselling author, founder of the multi -million dollar global consulting company Life is Now Inc and host of the business daily news ranked podcast, The Successful Line.

So it's it's the host of the business daily news ranked podcast successful. Make sure you all know that the successful mind David welcome to the

David (00:51.613)
Hahaha

David (00:57.394)
Hey, thanks for having me guys. Pleasure to be

Jim (01:01.282)
David, you've been on the show many times before, but one thing we haven't talked about is I never knew you got in an accident on a dam.

David (01:08.084)
Yeah, that kind of started my whole redirect journey in life, so to speak. I did in September of 1989, I was water skiing on the Illinois River. I got separated from the boat and I got caught in the current and I got sucked through the dam in Marsales, Illinois. I was one of only two people at that time that survived going through

Jim (01:31.576)
how did that then lead into your transformation?

David (01:34.696)
Well, here's the thing. When I came out on the other side, I mean, thank God I had a life vest on because if I had not had a life vest on, I wouldn't have ever resurfaced. I literally thought I was dead once it sucked me in. I thought, that's it, it's over. But then I popped up out on the other side just before I was ready to black out. Like I was right on the edge and it sucked me back down again, tumbled me around.

It broke my back. had all these puncture wounds all over my body from whatever debris was on the other side of the dam. So I'm in this current and it took me around an island in the middle of the river. And as I went around this island, I reached up and grabbed a branch. And as I was holding onto this branch, I thought to myself, I've got to get out of here. If I don't get out of here, two miles down the river is another island in Ottawa, another dam in Ottawa, Illinois. I probably won't make that one. So

started to unbuckle my life vest and push this branch into the life vest and buckle around it because I had shredded my hands. I peeled them like an orange, both of my palms. So I'm hanging there and it was one of those kind of cry out to God moments. My son had just been born in June and I said, God, please show me how to turn this around. And as soon as I said that, his face flashed across the screen of my mind.

And it gave me like this extra energy that came out of nowhere because I was exhausted trying to swim against the current to get to shore. And I was really fit in those days. And as I was hanging from that, said, you know, I don't know. At that point in my life, I felt very lost. It was a high school dropout. It was not going anywhere. We were going through a bankruptcy. It was just a really bad time. It couldn't hold a job. And I was asking God, said, if

Let me live today. I'll figure out whatever this is whatever my problem is and I said literally said this I'll spend the rest of my life teaching other people and I don't know where that came from. I hadn't been thinking about that prior to this It was not a thought in my mind Anyway, long story short they they pulled me out out of a river rescue came up. They pulled me out I had broken my back it took a while for me to heal and get back to work But that started me asking a new

David (03:56.55)
in my mind and the question was, why am I here? I'm not here to do all these mistakes and play small and I'm here to do something. What is that? And I kept asking that question and as long and during through the process of asking that question, I started making slightly better decisions until one day I made a significant decision, which is a whole nother story. It's the one where I was on the forklift and I tripled my income in a month. And I'm like, there's something going on here,

I do take it all the way back to just a few years before that in 89 when I went through, excuse me, that dam and I started refocusing my life in some direction. I didn't know where I was going, but I started asking different questions. I was a young guy, I was in my 20s, I think it was 22, no, what was I, I was about 23 when I went through the dam.

You know, nobody my age was asking questions like that, especially not from the part of Chicago I was from. It was all about survival. So that's really what started

Tyson (05:04.248)
It's a hell of a story. I have heard that story before. It's a hell of a story. They should make a movie out of it, actually, is what they should do. So the reason why we wanted to have you on is to talk about how to create a culture of success to propel your firm forward. And one of the things you'd mentioned to us before was just about mistakes and how some people are,

David (05:10.467)
I've heard that before.

Tyson (05:29.616)
Many people are punished for mistakes, but I guess what advice would you give to law firm leaders looking to create a culture of success by maybe embracing those mistakes?

David (05:42.644)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I believe that there are no mistakes in life, there's only lessons. And when you use the word mistake, it's intrinsically attached to shame and guilt in the lives of most individuals. So they beat themselves up internally, they do damage to their own self -esteem. For some people, it becomes paralyzing because that becomes the dominant influence over their thinking and they don't get out of it.

And the other thing that it does is that because of wherever you find shame and guilt in somebody's processing psychological processing These are people that will lie and keep secrets. It just goes hand -in -hand. mean shame is you don't want somebody to know What you just did your you're highly embarrassed. You're shameful for what you've done So if you can keep that a secret most people will When you when you if you have that problem in your firmer enter any

You don't have somebody that is fully functioning and participating in the advancement of where everybody's going together so Many years ago. We took the idea that Because I was teaching this I wasn't necessarily practicing it as much in my own company But we still tolerated mistakes well, but we literally changed the narrative like there's no mistakes. There's only lessons we I learned a tremendous amount from Reed Hastings book

The Netflix book, right? Like I really love the philosophy of the way he started and built that company and we were going to view everything as This is something that's necessary to move us forward We're not going to shame and guilt anybody nor ourselves and we're going to give an open platform to learn From that and it changed Everything within the dynamic of the company at the time for us it did and then I started doing it with my clients and it did the It did the same thing, you know and almost everybody

that we would train with this would adopt it. Some people would self -select out because it just wasn't not part of their moral standard, if you could believe that. But when it comes to revealing secrets, that's a very powerful thing in the personal background of the average individual because everybody carries them. And the only reason we carry them is because we process through a filter of shame and

Jim (08:10.552)
So David, I practice with my spouse and she's pretty close to a perfectionist and she does not like mistakes and she has high standards for the team. So how can you help me reframe that with her in a way that keeps her happy? Because she's always worried about losing our law license, which I understand is important, but also creating a culture that's sort of more understanding

or growth oriented when it comes to changing the way we do things.

David (08:45.108)
Because you will never go beyond the level of the person setting the standard, which would be you or your wife in that scenario. People will only be able to live up to what your standard is and you never engage their genius, or rarely do you engage their genius. A person will engage their genius when they're completely engaged and they feel that they have the free flow form of bringing ideas to the table. Now, this doesn't mean

people run off willy -nilly doing whatever it is that they want, right? I mean, there's operating standard and procedure, there's understanding in the legal platform of what's allowed and what's not allowed. But when we're talking about day -to -day operations, setting visions and goals for individual areas of a business or the firm

What can they do to make that better? We need people thinking. We need people open to thinking, even if they don't immediate apply it, but bring it to you as a suggestion for what it is that they want to do. If we don't allow them to try, then we rely only on our own genius and we never get there on our own. We need people thinking that are in the field, that are touching customers, that are working within, and we want them fully involved, you know, so that…

They have an emotional stake in what's happening, not just, gotta keep my job

Tyson (10:16.456)
So David, our firm went over, has gone through a culture shift over the last 18 months to two years and was not easy, but it also required that we replace many of the people that we had before. And I don't know if that's the right way or not, but for people that are looking to change the shift or shift the way their firm culture is currently, where would you point people to start? Like how would you recommend that they

start the change.

David (10:48.59)
Well, the idea would be for the owners of the firm to go away together, create a vision for where you're going, right? A really solid vision, even if it's only for a few years. And then once you get that fettered out so that it's very understandable, you bring it back to the team and you begin to sell the team on that vision. And this is where you'll have people that either have buy -in or they self -select out in that process.

when you present it to them, the idea is where do you see yourself in this vision, right? So not where do I see you in this vision, where do you see yourself in this vision? How does this vision help you attain your goals and your dreams and the things that you want for your life and your family? And if they're not 100 % in, they're 100 % out, which is a great position to be in because then you know what you've got to work with.

And you can hire the A players that you need if people do self -select out. And some do. Some get to a point where they're like, this is as far as I want to grow. I don't really want to grow anymore. And where you're going is not what's comfortable for me. And you give them the room and the idea that they can select out if they want to. When we first did it, we had people self -select out of our company.

with most of the companies that I've worked with, there's always a person here or there that does. I've never seen like a mass exodus or anything, but I know of a mass exodus. So, know, Gary Vaynerchuk is? Yeah. So before COVID, I was doing some, I had Gary as a guest on the podcast. We were doing some work with him and we were with him up in New York and he told us a story about when he sat down with his brother.

Tyson (12:22.992)
of course, yeah.

David (12:38.016)
really kind of redirect the vision of VaynerMedia and they literally had to let go of about a hundred and twenty people because What they really and they only had about two hundred and forty people in the business at the time Because the first hundred and twenty that batch of people they came in they were all friends family So on and so forth that helped them there were bodies that could get work done, but they realized they hit a plateau

And now they needed talent and they needed to be able to pay for that talent. that they, I mean, I got nervous when he told me how many people he let go. But like what a courageous thing to do to be able to take himself to the next level. But it was the vision that did that. Him and his brother sat down and said, we're never gonna get where we wanna go with this batch of folks. They got us this far, but there's no way they can come to the next level because they don't have what we need to get there.

Jim (13:35.97)
David, that's great. And when you were talking about the shame and blame that sort of goes along with people's baggage of, you know, how maybe how their parents treated them making mistakes. One thing we've noticed with some of our younger lawyers is they have a hard time admitting they made a mistake. How can we make it safer for them or easier for them to just sort of come to

You know, obviously, a lot of times we ask them to come with a solution, but how can we give them that space to sort of have those conversations?

David (14:07.892)
So the idea would be to let them know that there's not a negative ramification on a first time mistake. So here's the idea. There's a difference between a mistake and negligence. There's a big difference. If I'm working for you and I'm trying to do the best that I can and I screw something up and I've been well trained, that's a mistake. Here was my intention, this is what I was trying to do, I made an error.

I apologize for the error, let's sit down and figure out how we can do it right or better next time. However, if I'm operating from negligence and I'm not self -assessing what's going on, I'm not holding myself personally accountable for my own work, that's a much different situation. And generally what happens is that you know about that before they do. So

usually having a face -to -face meeting with them about what's with the issues that are going on the idea of There's there's free room to make mistakes is not something that you just toss into the mix It's something that's constructed into the company you decide you're gonna do it you create a vision you bring everybody in you sell them on the vision you have the people that are gonna stay the people that are gonna go and then you talk about this idea of We're

to do the best that we can, need everybody in their genius to do that and mistakes are going to happen. So what we want to do is look at mistakes as lessons to grow, which means that you have to be 100 % responsible for your mistake. We're not going to fire you, we're not going to tag your pay or whatever because you made a mistake, but part of that responsibility is that when you've made one, that you come to us with it first to let us know if you catch it first so that we can sit down and figure out what went wrong.

so that we can do something different. So you're training them on literally how do I process this mistake? And then I've had to do some side training with people sometimes where it's like a mistake doesn't mean you're a bad person. Because in the example that you're giving me, that's an internalization from childhood, right? They have to cover the mistake because something would go bad if they found out. They did not have the freedom to make an error.

David (16:26.484)
and then have somebody help them correct thinking or behavior or learning new values or whatever it is, skill set, maybe it was a skill set error, they were immediately went 100 miles an hour into some kind of punishment or embarrassment or shame around it. Now, if somebody did that with me as a child, the first thing that I would do is try to hide something the next time that I screw something up. And then that becomes a lifelong pattern.

Tyson (16:54.152)
Yeah, GMO is a great question, that's a great answer too David, because that's something that I've seen quite a bit too. I want to read you something that you posted in August of 23 on Facebook and it's the voice that you listen to is the voice that you believe and I wonder how do you think that that internal voice affects the culture of the firm?

David (17:22.814)
for the individual or for the collective.

Tyson (17:25.734)
Yeah, so as the business owner, your internal voice, so that voice, the voice that you're listening to is the voice that you believe. So whether it's a positive internal voice, a negative internal voice, tell me or explain how that affects the rest of the firm. Because sometimes I talk about this how an attitude is kind of like germs, right? It's easy to pass it on, whether it's positive or negative.

David (17:50.42)
That's good, I like

Tyson (17:54.342)
So do wonder what your thoughts are on that when it comes to, because we do talk to a lot of attorneys that are in different situations. They could have a pretty positive mindset, they could have a really negative mindset. So what is your view on that, that internal voice and how it might affect the rest of the culture in your firm?

David (18:14.718)
Okay, so here's when it comes to the voice in our head, I try to teach people this idea so that they can separate what the voice is. First of all, I categorize them into three separate voices. You have you, which would be you knowing you, your higher self or whatever your belief in God would be. That's one voice. The second voice would be fear. And now fear is not a bad thing.

If you understand what fear is and what it is that you're going to do with it. And generally fear tells you what not to do. It gives you warning of some kind. And then the third voice is others, which is anybody else from your past that's replaying a voice in your head. When a person hears a voice in their head, I ask them to isolate it and name it. Who is that person or what is the voice? Is it you? Is it fear? Is it others? If it's others, who? Who is the person?

Because the negative things that you'll hear inside your head are never you. It's always somebody else's voice. It was internalized and programmed as a child. So you'll be like, yeah, that's my mom's voice, or that's my dad's voice, or that was my football coach's voice, or whoever it is that it might be. Now here's the, let me just explain fear really quick. First of all, fear is not a bad thing. It's biological, it's prehistorical.

It's in the reptilian part of the brain. But the idea is that because we have an intellect and consciousness, when we recognize fear, we're supposed to say, okay, I see fear. Like my fear detector's holding up a red flag and saying something's wrong here. Now I'm supposed to bring my intellect in and determine what the truth is around it, right? Providing that it's not the kind of fear like where somebody's gonna jump you with a gun or something, you know, like there's a tiger in the bush. That's different. That's the fight, flight, or freeze idea.

But for general fears, because we're only born with two fears, all other fears are programmed. And then you isolate what it is and you determine whether it's a fear or not. But ultimately what gives you the voice is your internal voice. We're yes, we're going to do this. No, we're not going to do that. We have to watch out for this. I mean, that's where you start to bring your intellect into the conversation. Now, when we're talking about your voice versus others voices,

David (20:43.316)
This was where the most important part of the change goes. If you find out you're listening to the voices of others in your head, you're not taking full authority for your own life. So, now this sounds wild to a lot of people, but when you begin to think about it, you realize the impactful truth that's behind it. For the first 20 years or so of our life, everybody had authority over us. We had to ask for permission for things. People told us where to be, what to do, how to dress.

going to school. It was always somebody else of authority in our mind. So all of those other voices get a representation in our mind of an authority above our

In today's culture and for the last little while, we've gotten away from the idea of significant rites of passage that other indigenous tribes around the world practiced to let a person completely step into their adult male or female of who they really were, not just to prove that they were now an adult, but to take ownership of it and to be given the responsibility of it. They then have the authority

The that they're an adult it became a conscious application in their life We don't do that with kids anymore or very little of it. So we kind of meld into adulthood We know consciously where the adult were responsible But what we don't realize is that there's still voices of authority that are taking over their process of the way that we think When you can separate that and you realize

this negative voice or this other voice that's telling you what to do is not you, you can step in consciously with your own intellect and say, no, I'm not listening to that voice. And then you ask yourself the most important question of your life always, which is, what do I want? Because that will always move you in the direction that you want to go. Now, even if you don't know what it is at the moment, that's where you stay. What do I

David (22:50.91)
Because what you want will get you out of the situation or build upon what you're doing or take you to the next level. Usually voices of the negative kind are coming from somebody else and they're backward in nature. It's not something that's healthy, nor does it lend to us making good decisions in the future. So we do have to, at the time that we live in, that humanity's in now, we need to remember and remind ourselves

We're the ones in authority of our own destiny in life. And even if it's down to the micro level of that destiny, your family, your children, your spouse, the firm itself, and consciously hold that position so that you're asking you what you want and you're not hearing another voice in your head tell you what you should want or shouldn't

Jim (23:45.912)
Tyson and I recorded a whole episode once of this show and it was called What Do I Want? And we asked it, what do I want? What do I want? What do I want? And what do I want? Right? Like emphasizing each of the four words totally has a different tone to it. So why does determining what it is that you want help spur action, David?

David (23:56.468)
Yeah.

David (24:09.288)
Because most people are raised hearing that they can't have what they want. And if we will just admit to ourselves what we do want, everything in our life is going to the destination of why we're here. That's what I believe. I believe we're all here for a purpose. That purpose existed before we got here. And yet we're never taught how to recognize what it is. And very simple.

The way that we learn to find it and recognize it is by honoring what we actually want in life and taking action on that. that, yes, in the beginning it sounds almost like a greedy, selfish idea, but when you're coming from a place of consciousness and you're applying it, it's not. What it's doing is it's opening the doors to your genius, why you're here, what you're supposed to do. It really gives you direction. know, every other form of life,

has instinctual direction. It doesn't wonder what it is, why it's here, what it's gonna do, where the food's gonna come from tomorrow. It just does the same thing every day. But our greatest power is our ability to choose. So like when you said about listening to other people's voices, if you're choosing from what you want, not only are you going after what you want, so you have the energy to do that, you have the discipline built in to do that,

It's something that you want to do so you don't have to make yourself do it. It allows you to have a much more exuberant attitude about what you're doing because you're buying in yourself. You're acknowledging what it is that your soul is really here to do.

Tyson (25:53.616)
I that David. We could probably talk to you for the next three hours but we want to be respectful of time so I'm going to start to wrap things up. I've learned a lot already and I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of great things out of this episode but before I do, I know that you've got a lot going on in your life so if people want to get in touch with you or work with you in some capacity, how do they get in touch with you? What's the best way?

David (26:21.012)
Well, the best way for them to learn anything about us is to go to the successful mind podcast. Cause they can sample us there. They hear what we do. Everything's free. There's, there's no charge. They can learn a tremendous amount. and I believe Tia gave you a link that's lifeisnowing .com forward slash PG thatch maximum lawyer. That's for a handout. it's called, that we're all born to be a success. It's a free download.

they could pull off and they could take a look through that. That's a great place to start because it asks that question, what do you want?

Tyson (26:58.584)
And we'll have that in the show notes too, so for anyone that doesn't want to try to write that down, we'll…

David (27:03.165)
Yeah, don't try to write that

Tyson (27:04.642)
We'll make sure it's in the show notes for you. All right, we're going to wrap things up before I do. you're interested in Maxim Lawyer and being part of our community, we would love to have you in the big Facebook group. Just search Maxim Lawyer on Facebook and you'll be able to find us. There's also a Facebook page and then there's also the guild that you might see on there. And that's for our membership group and it's maxlawguild .com if you're interested in the membership group. We would love to have you in there.

we would ask that you please provide us, give us a five star review if you've gotten something from this episode or any of the other episodes. It does help spread the love to other lawyers because we're here to make sure that they get better. They are better at marketing their firms, getting more clients, doing a better job, being healthier. So if you could give us a five star review, we'd really appreciate it. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim (27:58.978)
I know David's a big fan of Jim Rohn and I've noticed on Amazon there's a lot more Jim Rohn content than there used to be. So I've been listening the last couple days to the day that turns your life around, but anytime you can spend listening to Jim Rohn and getting your mindset right is good. And Amazon has a lot more of that Nightingale Conan stuff than they used to. So it's really easy to check it out on there.

Tyson (28:23.303)
Very cool. It's weird that you mentioned Jim Rohn because I saw a post about him today. It like a long post about it. read it. that's just interesting that you brought it up. David, we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack. Could be a book, could be a podcast, could be a quote, you name it. What do you have for us?

David (28:42.868)
Well, one of the things that I mentioned here in the conversation was the Reed Hastings Netflix book. It really, you know, the crux of the love and the cooperation that's within the way he strategically built that company is something that's brand new to the world. I mean, there's been some copying of it since he wrote it, but that's the original as far as I'm concerned. And talk about helping you understand the power of your own mistakes and attempting to try.

and step into your genius. I think it's a great book to start

David (29:19.144)
You're muted.

Tyson (29:22.93)
What a rookie move. That's very good, David. Thanks for sharing that. So this morning, I ran into Josh Evans. He's a guild member, and we were chatting a little bit. then afterwards, we had a quick coffee with each other between podcast episodes. there were some words that were printed and taped to his laptop. And I said, what is that?

So those are our core values. And I said, that's interesting. he apparently, his laptop had broken, so he was using his paralegal's laptop. And he apparently asked them, basically spot checks them on core values. And so she has got to the point where she's taped it to her laptop so she knows the answer right away. And the tip is that he'll give them prizes when they get things like that right. I thought it was an interesting idea. We don't do things like that. But I do think it's an interesting idea if he spot checks them on things like that and they get it right, they get a prize.

I thought that was a cool idea, so I figured I'd pass it on to people. was a cool little thing, yeah, absolutely. I think it was also cool of her to think, hey, I might get asked this again, so I'll take it my laptop. But David, as always, pleasure talking to you. I can't wait to have you on again. It's always fun, and hopefully people will reach out to you, start listening to your podcast if they want to hear more from you.

David (30:19.934)
That's awesome.

Jim (30:22.126)
That's great.

David (30:26.481)
Yes, for sure.

David (30:39.422)
Thanks guys, thank you very much. Good seeing

Jim (30:40.408)
Thanks, David. Good seeing you guys.

Tyson (30:42.962)
Thanks David. See you Jimbo.

Join the Guild to grab our Case Roadmap.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you looking for a quick hack to measure performance? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson introduces the "15 Minute Mile Concept" as a metaphor for evaluating employee performance. 

The 15 Minute Mile Concept can be used to determine if an employee’s performance has improved and if so, if they are still a good fit for your team. It is important to not consider a slight improvement enough to keep someone on a team if there are still other aspects that are not great. Tyson shares the importance of looking at aspects of your life where you only highlight one good thing but ignore other areas. It is important to take the time to work on areas of your day to day life that need improvement, both professionally and personally.

Take a listen!

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:24 The metaphor of the "15 Minute Mile"
  • 2:13 How slight improvement doesn't equate to meeting performance standards
  • 3:13 The danger of exaggerating small performance improvements  
  • Ask us a question about starting your own law firm here!
  • Peak Performance Intensive with Dr. Jason Selk, sign up here!

Resources:

Transcripts: The 15 Minute Mile Concept with Tyson Mutrux 

Tyson (00:01.144)
Welcome back everybody to another Saturday episode. This is Tyson Mutrix. Today I want to talk to you about just a concept that kind of popped into my brain in the middle of one of these hot seat, actually I don't know if my mic was close enough to be honest with you. Testing, testing. Welcome everybody to another Saturday episode of the Maximum Lower Podcast. This is Tyson Mutrix. And today I want to talk to you about

idea that kind of popped into my brain as we were in the middle of this hot seat and I'll call it the 15 -minute mile concept and so I We can't talk about the details of What we talk about in the hot seat, so I'm gonna I'm gonna make up another scenario so let's say that You're you're considering an employee terminating an employee, okay,

This is a different scenario than what we talked about on the hot seat with this guild member. so let's say you're considering terminating this employee. But before I get to that, so that's kind of the setup of what we're going to talk about. I want you to think about the, actually, I'm going to restart this whole section.

Tyson (01:27.575)
camera where I did

Tyson (01:33.486)
All right, so let's say that you are considering terminating an employee. right, so let's call her Susie. So Susie has been performing badly for quite some time, okay, not doing great. And then all of a sudden you see that there's a bump in her performance. She's still well below average, but she's improving, right? So you're thinking, you know what? Susie might be on the way

Susie might be on the way up, we should give her another try. She kinda stays at that for a while, but you're thinking, hey, she improved, she's good. And so I kinda think about it like this, right? For anyone that doesn't know about running a mile, I'd say a decent time is probably eight minutes. And I'm talking about for

people that run on regular basis. Like really, really good is like six minutes. Like there's like the four minute mile. Those are like elite runners kind of a thing. But 18 minutes is pretty bad. Okay, so let's say that you've got this person. Let's call the person Suzy. All right, let's say Suzy runs an 18 minute mile regularly. All right, and.

all of a sudden she starts running a 15 minute mile. That's a pretty good improvement, right? From 18 minutes to 15 minutes. So that sounds great when you're talking about the improvement. But the reality is is that Susie's still running a 15 minute mile and she's terrible. You wouldn't put her on your track team. You would not put her on your track team because she's absolutely terrible. She's running a 15 minute freaking mile. That's bad still. That's really, really bad. And

Sometimes I think what we do is sometimes our employees are running an 18 minute mile and then all of a sudden they run a 15 minute mile. And this could be anything you can think of, doesn't that be employees, where you see a slight improvement? So you see a slight improvement and what you do in your mind is you exaggerate that improvement to think it is this massive improvement. In reality, it's still bad. Suzy's still

Tyson (03:56.558)
Susie should no longer be in your firm, but what you've done is you've exaggerated the improvement and in your head, she's good now. But in reality, Susie's still bad. Susie is still running a 15 -minute mile and Susie should not be on the track team. So that's the concept of the 15 -minute mile. Think about all the other things, other areas in your life where maybe you've done that, where you've seen a slight improvement. You then ignore all the bad and you think, oh, we're good.

Look at those areas, see if you can improve in those areas, see if there's things you can stop doing, and maybe that'll help you out. But that's all have here for you today. I wanna remind you to make sure you shoot me a text, love to hear from you, always do. It's great to hear the feedback you're giving me. It helps me shape the episodes that we're doing. So make sure you keep them coming because that's how I know what to do. If you don't like something, that's probably more important than if you do like something.

but I do want to know that we're giving you the right content. So make sure you let us know. 314 -501 -9260. Also comment, if you give five star reviews on the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it. If you don't like something, just text me please, because we'll fix it. Don't give a one star review. And luckily, I don't know where they would come from, but we do have one or two one star reviews.

There's no comment on them, it's just a one -star review, which kind of is aggravating. But if you don't like something that I talked about, I would actually love that you send me a text about it, we could talk about it, and if I'm wrong, hey, I'll do a podcast about it, it'd be great. If you want to come on the podcast, I'll talk to you about it. But if you are liking it, which the vast majority of you are, based on the feedback I'm getting from you, which I love to hear, if you gave us a five -star review, I'd really,

especially if you'd mentioned like the Saturday episodes. That way we can kind of differentiate it. It is really, really helpful. But that's all have for you today. Make it a great day. Have a great weekend. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, everybody.mum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is looking to scale and market your firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, hosts Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux interview Steve Mehr, co-founder of Sweet James Accident Attorneys. Steve shares insights into the rapid growth of his firm and the challenges of managing multiple offices.

Steve provides some insight on how to scale a firm. Scaling a firm and managing growth includes knowing when it is time to hire more staff and build up a team. This might involve investing money now to hire in order to be ready for scaling in the near future. Investing in people can pay off for a firm if there is traction with clients and connections are being made to bring in more business.

Steve shares the marketing strategies that have worked for his firm. It is important to ensure marketing involves a mix of showing audience results as well as focusing on a few key figures of a firm so clients can match a face to the business. Sweet James Accident Attorneys takes advantage of marketing through traditional media, such as radio and TV commercials to get clients. Credibility on traditional forms of media is a great way to increase business for a law firm.

Take a listen to learn more!

Jim's Hack: Read the book “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle.

Steve Tip: Read the book “Scaling Up” by Verne Harnish and to use AI in the mail room to effectively track and manage mail that goes through a firm.

Tyson's Tip: Focus on conversion when redesigning your website. Clients need to know how to contact your firm.

Episode Highlights:

  • 8:45 Insights on investing in people and the challenges of scaling
  • 11:03 Discussion of the need for technological advancements
  • 13:35 The challenges of managing growth
  • 15:55 The marketing strategies for a large firm

Connect with Steve:

Resources:

Transcripts: Building and Managing a Successful Law Firm with Steve Mehr

Jim (00:06.934)
it didn't do the countdown. I didn't see it. Okay, here we go. Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:08.274)
It did.

Tyson (00:15.61)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up

Jim (00:19.087)
Tyson, how are you doing man? How did court

Tyson (00:22.35)
It went well, it was quick. was one of those in and outs and then I got to have coffee with Josh Evans between podcasts, which was fun. I went gym, court, podcast, coffee with Josh, and then back podcast again. So that's why I'm in the back of my truck right now, it's because I just had coffee with Josh. It sounds like you're getting your energy back, which I'm happy to hear.

Jim (00:47.244)
I'm faking it till I make it, but I am feeling a little better that headache I had this morning. So Steve, you don't know, I'm on the backend of COVID, my third time of having COVID despite being vaccinated. It's the worst one I've had. I'm, it's okay. It's okay. Tyson, you want to go ahead and introduce Steve?

Steve Mehr (00:59.739)
wow, I'm sorry.

Tyson (01:04.668)
Yeah, so this is one of my favorite bios that I will ever read for two reasons. One, it is very short, but the other one is just the content of it.

Please forgive me, Steve, if I pronounce your name wrong. it's either Steve Meir or Mair. Mair, okay, so I was gonna go with Mair, but I thinking maybe Mair. But Steve Mair is not just an average personal injury lawyer, but a businessman first. That's the bio, that's it. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Mehr (01:22.133)
It's Mayor.

Steve Mehr (01:36.544)
How's it going? Happy to be

Jim (01:40.62)
So Steve, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience. Tell them sort of who you are, how you came to practice law, and then build what you've built.

Steve Mehr (01:52.46)
Okay, yeah. I am currently the co -founder of Sweet James Accident Attorneys. We're headquartered out here in Southern California. And we operate right now in California, Nevada, Arizona, and just launched the Dallas office in Texas. We have about 400 -ish employees, 50 lawyers, and we're probably…

one of the largest, if not the largest, single event personal injury law firm on the West Coast.

Tyson (02:28.02)
So Steve, I kind of want to jump right in. Something like this takes time to build, right? It's not something that you can just dump a bunch of money in. I guess you could. You could dump a bunch of money into it and kind of like a startup, but that's usually not how these things evolve. So at what point did you start to realize, okay, you all were onto something and you started to see that growth where you weren't just a few people in an office, you're at 400. Where did you start

that progress and what was it that started that?

Steve Mehr (03:05.258)
Right. Well, actually we did launch the firm in 2019. So it's a fairly new firm, but it's not my first rodeo. I used to be one of the principals of Jacobean Myers and kind of brought that brand back to life on the West coast. And I had an exit in 2000 and ended 2018. And then in 2019, partnered up with James and I had a

I had a concept and we aligned on that concept. And he's like, what are we gonna call this thing? know, Berkner -Meyer, Mayor Berkner. And I'm like, no, we're gonna go with Sweet James, which was his nickname. And he's like, are you sure? And I'm like, I think this is gonna work. we were, you know, in 2018, the laws, I believe, changed in California where they allowed trade names finally.

So we launched this thing in 2019, but we had a template. So we were able to scale very fast. And when COVID happened, it happened within seven or eight months of us being partners, which was kind of a bad omen for a car accident firm, especially in California. No one was on the road. But I actually saw that as an opportunity since I knew the market well and I knew

grabbing market share would be very difficult. So COVID was kind of that window that allowed us, while everybody was retreating, we picked up the best radio spots, the best billboards, signed permanent contracts with them, drove tens of millions of dollars into traditional media to help establish the brand.

And when we exited COVID, it kind of just catapulted the firm. So we added 200 of our staff just got added last year. So we've been just growing very fast. And it's not easy, obviously, being in the type of field that we're in. definitely believe in saying hyper -focused and in a niche. we definitely niche down and we're just a single event.

Steve Mehr (05:12.997)
We do car accidents, we do slip and falls, wrongful death, and that's about it. We don't do mass torts, we don't do environmental disasters, class actions, so we're very narrow in what we do, but we're very good at it.

We about 45 teams that are lawyer -led, 25 of them are litigation. 20 of them are pre -litigation. So we do trials. We got $23 million last year as a jury verdict. We settled a case just two months ago right before a trial for $13 million. So kind of assembled a team of very talented people. And that's it. But yeah, is to kind of answer your question.

It did take a lot of capital in order to scale this fast. it does take a lot of talent. So I kind of look at my role as Chief Talent Officer. I'm running a talent agency, if anything.

Jim (06:13.752)
Steve, tell us what it looked like sort of on day one and then what you're envision, what you envisioned for say the first 18 months or what your plan was pre -COVID.

Steve Mehr (06:23.341)
Right. Well, we had to change really fast, obviously. But initially, it was to have a better mousetrap, so to say, from a branding and marketing perspective. Obviously, everything starts there. If you don't have clients, then you don't have work and you don't have revenues. So the initial steps were to just create that better mousetrap.

from a branding and marketing perspective. so, and that started with the name and the logo. I know it's a little bit quirky, but it was designed to just kind of stand out. So we get calls pretty much weekly where people are saying, you know, I saw, I see your ads everywhere. And I always thought to myself, sweet James, what a silly name for a lawyer. But when I got in a car accident, it's the only name that would pop into my head.

So, and to me that means the advertising's working.

Tyson (07:25.884)
So with that number of people, really, it's like, it almost like boggles my mind. Like it's just a lot of people, a lot of offices to manage. But I want to focus more, I think on the recruiting side of things. How do you, how do you?

manager recruiting and how do you make sure that you've got a good pipeline of people that are going to be a good fit for the firm? Because keeping a culture with that many people is probably pretty difficult. So how do you make sure that you, with that number of people, you're able to recruit the right type of people into the firm?

Steve Mehr (08:02.783)
I think one of the keys is you have to always be hiring, even when you don't need people. And the reason is, let's say you need to hire a lawyer today. The odds that that lawyer that is qualified that matches your culture is actually looking for a job this week or next week is probably pretty slim. So if you're always hiring, so we're always, we always have ads for pretty much every position.

and we have a very large database of resumes that are going through. And if we find a rock star or someone that's super talented, we hire them. Even if we don't have a position for them, we hire them, we bring them on the team, we'll figure out what to do with that person. Sorry, I think.

Jim (08:43.682)
You're good. You're good.

Steve Mehr (08:44.417)
Okay, we're good. Okay. So yeah, so we're always hiring and accumulating resumes. So when we need to fill a position, we generally will go then back into our database. And if the resume looked good, they'll usually do one or two rounds of interviews, even if we don't hire them, but we have all that data. So that makes the hiring process much easier. So right now we're in a spurt of hiring additional pre -suit paralegals and essentially,

my head of HR slash recruiting, it's like, I interviewed these dozen people. Which ones do you think would be a good fit? I'm like, will bring them in for another round of interviews. And so that's definitely been a key to being able to scale fast and find talented people. It's just something you do year round and that's an investment you have to make year round. So we're always running, whether it's ads on Indeed or messaging people on LinkedIn, this is a year round, like day to day thing.

Jim (09:45.346)
What do you think most lawyers and law firm owners get wrong when it comes to growth? Clearly you embrace growth from the outset. We talked to lot of lawyers who are scared and reluctant and sort of shy away from growth and specifically fast growth.

Steve Mehr (10:00.01)
think making the investment in the people is a scary thing to build teams when you don't always have the work. part of my job here, my primary job here, is really to be working on next year. So modeling out, how many teams do need to bring online? And you don't always get it right. And then you've got to make those tough decisions. And sometimes we've had to collapse a team or two because we were too early.

And that's not always a great position to be in, but the only way you're to catch hyper growth or be scaling is if you're always multiple quarters ahead. And what does that mean? That means I'm making investment before it's necessary. And I think people would rather just kind of take their pay and not put that money on the table and bet, you know? And that actually makes our job much easier, you I guess as a hyperscaler in the legal space.

I don't have a lot of competitors that are doing those type of things. I mean, if I can give advice to people, if you're in a market and you have some traction with clients, just really, it makes sense to make that investment, you know, and make sure you niche down your hyper focus, but you've got to invest in people. I almost always think you've got about 10 % more staff than you need. So if you've got 20 people in your firm, you probably should have two people that are twiddling their thumbs waiting for

the extra work to come and you're always training them and doing whatever. And at our size, obviously we have a lot more people than is necessary, but they're there to catch the next wave of

Tyson (11:41.534)
So Steve, you say something that I found really interesting in the survey that we sent to you before the podcast. And you said that there's so much opportunity in today's legal environment to build the law firm of the future. And the most interesting part of that sentence to me is the law firm of the future.

I wonder what you believe the law firm of the future looks like. I wonder if it looks like it is now, but I'm guessing that it isn't because you put that in there. So what does the law firm of the future look like?

Steve Mehr (12:20.509)
The easiest way I could make some kind of connection is look at where medicine was 15 years ago. You had a lot of small solos, you had a few large partner practices, and then they got gobbled up by either healthcare insurance companies or hospitals, and they've turned kind of into these conglomerates where now these providers are generally multi -state, and they're ran much

efficiently and professionally like a business and they have actual back offices and things like that where a lot of these solo practitioners didn't have that in medicine 15 years ago. And I think legal is going through the same transition right now. And there's going to be winners and losers. And I think, look, if you're a small solo practitioner, I think you're probably going to be OK. But this middle of the market, these firms that have, I'd say, from 30 to 100 employees, those are the ones that are really

either going to shrink or they're going to have to consolidate and scale up. And not all of them are going to be able to do that because today to be at scale, have to be top of class in your business. Like we have a business intelligence unit that handles our data. We have five in -house software programmers constantly, know, massaging what our needs are. So, you know, these capabilities have to be built into what the law firm of the future looks

and we've deployed AI in our mail room. So right now we could scan a thousand documents. 900 of them will end up in the right client's file with the right naming convention. And the 100 that the AI gets confused on, it'll flag a human being and say, hey, I think it's this client's file. And I think this is a notice of a deposition at this time, but can you verify that that's what I'm looking at? And then, and with very minimal human input, you

that'll get pushed into a client's file. So we went from 30 people in the mail room to essentially six right now. So these are the type of investments that firms are need to make. And I think a lot of lawyers, because they're classically trained, they have their head in the sand and they're like, well, I've always done it this way, I'm gonna hold out as long as possible. So all they're doing is they're either shortening their own shelf life in the future, or they're ensuring that they'll never get to

Jim (14:45.752)
So Steve, we're an immigration law firm. Tyson's a personal injury lawyer. One of the things that we've struggled with as we've grown is management. We've had a hard time building out the systems and developing good managers. We sort of say, well, you're really good at this job, so you'd be a great manager at watching over the people that do what you do. What's your philosophy on management over the

Steve Mehr (15:14.105)
I have a robust management structure. generally govern by consensus. Obviously, if I think the team's making a wrong call, I'll override it. But we have an executive managed team. I'd say there's probably 17 people in upper management and about 15 people in middle management. There's a department head, and then each department head answers to a managing attorney of sorts.

So I think management's definitely required, but I think management's job should

making sure that the KPIs that you have set, whatever those goals are, are being met. And then those team members are either being mentored or trained to meet those goals. And if they're not making the difficult decision of raising to HR or to whoever makes the final call of this team member cannot hit these KPIs. And that's where you got to make difficult decisions of, know, do we replace this person or is it a training issue? I mean, I think most people when they show

If they show up to get a paycheck, they're motivated and it's usually a training issue. If they're not trained properly, they're not going to be motivated. So a lot of issues could be solved with a lot of extra training. But then occasionally you get just people that just no amount of training can help them. And you've got to identify those people early on and be able to replace them with people that could help the whole organization.

Tyson (16:44.318)
So Steve, for a while I've been thinking about something that Seth Godin had said about, and I'll probably butcher this, but it's essentially that the future of law firms is like they're, for law firm marketing it's gonna be more smaller firms, people are gonna sort of gravitate to the smaller firms.

And I don't know if that's true, I don't know if it is or isn't. I do know it's easier to market, I think, a smaller firm because you can kind of point to a character. People seem to be drawn to characters. If you think about people like Steve Jobs, like, know, Apple's a gigantic company, but they were primarily drawn to Steve Jobs. Now they're kind of drawn to Cook is a central figure at that company.

So how are you able to market a company like Sweet James whenever it is so large? mean, do you focus on the character? Is the marketing more towards the potential client? How do you shape your marketing so that it is the most effective?

Steve Mehr (17:48.437)
Yeah, I mean both. I mean, if you look at our, let's say our Instagram account, you'll see James is probably in 60 % of the videos and he is the central character around our marketing. as we've evolved and grown larger, it's essentially quite a bit of work. mean, he's either live on the radio or on TV almost every other day and he's shooting commercials and videos. And so that's kind of taken a life of his own.

But I do agree with you. For us, I'd probably say it's 60 % character -based and 40 % just really pounding results into the audience. If you're looking for results, you need to call us. So that's generally how we handle the marketing.

Steve Mehr (18:42.815)
But I do think you need to have a differentiator, obviously, if you're marketing. And I do think it is easier for smaller solo practitioners right now, easier than it's ever been. With digital and being able to get your message out there, whether it's paid social or free social, there's a lot of avenues to generate clients. And this kind of comes back to what we talked about earlier. This middle of the market's gonna really fall out. You're gonna have the large brands, and then you're gonna

know, of solos with their characters that are strong in the community or in particular cities or in particular regions. So, you for us, we want to be kind of one of the larger brands. I'm aware consolidation is happening. We're not scaling just for the sake of scaling. We're scaling to make sure we have a good home for all our employees and their families in the future. And to me, that requires the firm to be of a certain size.

Jim (19:42.922)
You and your firm are clearly taking advantage of some traditional forms of media that a lot of lawyers have written off. And when you talk about radio and maybe direct, I don't know if you're any direct mail, but can you talk about sort of the opportunities in those, in those channels that people might be ignoring when they think they have to do everything on Tik TOK?

Steve Mehr (20:02.067)
Yeah, our traditional media is probably, I'd say, 75%, 70 % of our spend. This year we're going to spend about $60 million, which is a very large number on media spend. Last year, to give you an idea, we spent about $38 million. So you can kind of get an idea of the growth. And so that $60 million, would say, TV and billboards.

are the number one item for the ad spend. And then followed by radio. And then I would say equivalent with radio, we spend PPC, which last year we barely spent anything on PPC. Like maybe out of $38 million, we might've spent one or two million. This year we're gonna spend significantly more. Part of that growth in ad spend this year was really backing

our traditional spend with more digital buys. So we get a little bit higher market penetration in the areas we're in. So we're spending more on digital this year than we have ever spent. But the firm was built on a traditional trajectory. And like I said, think partly having a catchy name, having a character like James who's very personable, he's very, I always tell people he's like magic in a bottle.

we were able to grow the firm with a traditional spend in a market like LA, that's kind of our primary market, Southern California. And then we have a secondary hub in Phoenix. We have about 100 employees in the Phoenix office. So we were able to do it with a traditional spend.

Tyson (21:53.628)
So my question is pretty simple, I think the answer might be a little more complex. Why do you think that TV and billboards are still effective? Because for me, like my brain, I used to work for volume firm. understand the marketing part of it. It is effective. And it's expensive. As you've demonstrated, it's extremely expensive to do. But why do you think that it still works? That's my question.

those still work when we have all these other media outlets that they can consume all day, why is it that TV and billboards are still working?

Steve Mehr (22:34.159)
is I think regardless of how famous an internet celebrity is, they're not viewed the same as a TV celebrity, as a silver screen or, you your tube. So I

Steve Mehr (22:49.294)
you know, I don't know who's the guy, the most famous guy on YouTube is MrBeast, but if you still ask, you know, 10 random people, I'd say one out of 10 might know who he is, but if you ask someone who the most famous person on TV is, 10 out of 10 people will know. So I think the credibility you get on TV is not equivalent to the type of credibility you would get on, you know, whether it's, you know, any of these other mediums. So, and people wanna say, oh yeah, I hired that guy.

And the problem is a lot of these guys on TV, they're just marketing lawyers. They don't know what the hell they're doing. And I'm by no means a trial lawyer, but we have a very effective trial team that gets very big results. So for a large advertising firm, I would probably argue we probably are the largest advertising firm that's truly, really a litigation firm. We get big results because we push and we litigate these cases hard. And for a lot of these advertising firms, as we know, they're just more…

Some of them don't even have litigation shops. They're just the pre -litigation churn and burn type of a shop. But I think definitely being on TV gives you a certain amount of credibility that we can't get in social. We wouldn't be able to get, we run YouTube commercials, we run paid social, Facebook, and we're everywhere with our size ad budget. And we're just not gonna get that credibility in these other mediums. And I think hopefully that partly answers your question, it's just a credibility.

Jim (24:18.018)
Steve, please talk to us a little bit about running offices in three states and then deciding to open a new office in Dallas.

Steve Mehr (24:26.188)
It's challenging. I think it comes down to your having good people and a good operations director. That's the most important thing. I definitely wouldn't be able to have these other offices without strong operations directors. And that's kind of the key position. My operations directors in both Arizona and Texas, they're non -lawyers that come from

other law firms and they've been either the COO or they've been, you know, they're very high level people. Now we handle, we have like a unified back office. So we have one office that handles accounting for all states. We have, you know, one records department. You know, so we do have unified, I call them office services. So we have an office services suite that supports all offices and that makes it a little bit easier. So when you open an office in another state,

you're not building out another accounting team and another records team and another claims team and all of these other pieces that you would need. So you do have to have some back office energy that you implement.

Tyson (25:40.34)
I just I find I find your growth to be fascinating. I think it's really cool I just I think it's really neat to watch you and I I am curious to see how in the future the It does seem like Morgan and Morgan's trying to come on strong you all are coming on strong inside I am curious to see what the next 10 years look like and looks like and we'll find out it's it's something that we live through and we'll figure it out, but I'm gonna start to wrap things up before I do though You want to people how to reach out to you if they

Steve Mehr (26:01.895)
All

Tyson (26:10.294)
want to ask any questions about the episode?

Steve Mehr (26:12.958)
Yeah, of course. My email address is steve at sweetjames .com. S -T -E -V -E at sweetjames .com. Feel free, if anybody wants to reach out, ask a question. Yeah, I'm available.

Tyson (26:27.006)
Cool name by the way, I really like the name. Yeah, it's fantastic, Dan. All right, let's wrap things up. I do want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, just search Maximum Lawyer. You'll be able to find us there. And then if you want to have more high level conversations with people, we'd love to have you in the Guild, maxlawguild .com. A lot of great people there. And while you're listening to the rest of this episode, while we give our tips and hacks of the week, we would love it if you would give us a five star review.

Jim (26:28.908)
It's awesome. It's awesome.

Steve Mehr (26:29.628)
Thank

Tyson (26:57.01)
spread the love to other attorneys all over the country. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim (27:02.84)
don't know if you've talked about this book before, Tyson, but I just started a book by Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code. It's about how people think, you're just natively born with talent, and really, that's not true at all. And I'm enjoying it so far, so I recommend that

Tyson (27:18.364)
I don't know if we have either, it's a good suggestion. Very good. Steve, we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. It could be a podcast. It could be a book. It could be a quote. You name it. Do you have a tip or hack for us?

Steve Mehr (27:32.23)
Yeah, definitely. So a book that I make all my managers read, it's kind of, I think it's very relevant to law firms, is Scaling Up by Vern Harnish. So I don't know if you guys have read that. And we also use on the mailroom side, our document management AI system is foundation AI.

Steve Mehr (27:58.618)
ran by a guy named Vivek, he's a super smart guy. My tip is the book and my hack is Foundation AI on the mailroom side.

Tyson (28:09.47)
Love it. Great suggestions. That's two guess in a row that I've recommended. Something for AI that I'm about to now go and look at. So appreciate that, So my tip of the week is, so we are redesigning our website. And what's really interesting is we get a lot of great designs and pretty designs, and that's fantastic. But what I keep telling them is I don't care if it's pretty. I just, I care that if it's designed based on sound.

Steve Mehr (28:19.706)
Yep, no problem.

Tyson (28:39.464)
conversion principles, that's what I care about. Is it going to actually lead to clients? And so my tip is to focus whenever you're redesigning your websites on that, on conversion, more than making it look pretty. Because there are a lot of pretty websites that will get you no cases. And so you have to be very, very careful about that. And just because you have something that's extremely unique, if they can't figure out how to get in touch with you, it means nothing. So focus on conversion as opposed to making it look pretty. That's my tip of the

Alright Steve, thank you so much, really appreciate it. I would love to binge your ear more in the future because I think it's really cool the things that you're doing. I think we could all learn a lot from you and thanks for coming on and sharing some of your

Steve Mehr (29:20.91)
Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Thanks, Dyson.

Tyson (29:23.176)
Love you, Thanks, Steve.

Jim (29:23.192)
Thanks Steve, that was great bud.

Steve Mehr (29:24.688)
Yep, thanks guys.

Join the Guild to grab our Case Roadmap.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you struggling to maintain the success of your law firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson delves into the three things that are killing your law firm.

Tyson shares the three things that can hurt a firm. One of these is inconsistency. This is something a lot of people suffer from and it can really hurt the growth of not only a business, but your own goals. Figure out methods to stay consistent with your goals or tasks. Utilize reminders, alarms or scheduling assistants to get the ball rolling. The second thing is the lack of processes. It is important to have processes in place for things like training to ensure you avoid turnover.

The last thing that is killing your firm is draining all the money out of a firm by not having a system in place to ensure people are getting paid. To avoid sales flow issues, make sure all of your bank accounts are in order and you understand how money is coming in and leaving all accounts. These three key things will help you stay successful!

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:24 The three main issues affecting law firms
  • 1:12 How inconsistency in daily tasks negatively impacts law firm growth
  • 3:08 The importance of having systems and processes to prevent bad hires 
  • 4:00  How mismanaging cash flow drains resources 
  • Ask us a question about starting your own law firm here!
  • Peak Performance Intensive with Dr. Jason Selk, sign up here!

Resources:

Transcripts: The 3 Things That Are Killing Your Law Firm

Speaker 1 00:00:01 Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hocking and Tyson metrics. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:24 Welcome back to another episode of the Saturday morning podcast I'm Tyson Metrics. and today I'm going to be talking about the three things that are killing your law firm. Some of them you already probably know, but you still are not doing anything about it. And why is that? That's a question maybe we need to talk about. And if you have some questions about that, shoot me a text. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Just text me (314) 501-9260 if you are struggling with things I would love to try to build to help you out a little bit because I get it. These things we're going to talk about, they can be difficult at times, but you need to fix them, okay? Because these are the things that are killing your law firm. You say you want to do all these grand things and these great things, but the reality is, is that you're not doing it because you're doing these things.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:12 there's probably some other things you're doing too. But these are the, the main three things that are killing your law firm. So let's let's jump right into it. Number one, you know what I'm gonna save number one. Let's go in reverse order three. Let's go with number three inconsistency. So you know you need to be shooting that video a day. And guess what you're not doing. You're not shooting the video a day. You know that there are you know every single day. And I'm trying to think of something that might be applicable without giving away the next one. And that's part of what it is. But okay, so maybe you need to be every single day or a few times a week reaching out to a potential referral partner and you're not doing it or you need you know, that every week you need to have at least one networking lunch. You're not doing it. So you're not you're not generating the business that you should be doing it. And the thing is, is, is we're really talking about whatever your your process goal is, to use a phrase that that Jason Selke uses.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:13 So those, those things that that process of working the process and you're not being consistent with that. You have to be consistent. So inconsistency is killing you. So whatever that thing is that you need to be doing, because there's one thing that you know you need to be doing. I'm not talking about the in the business stuff. There's there's always that thing that's on your desk that you need to freaking do. Okay. I'm talking about that important thing that you know you need to do to be growing. That's what I'm talking about. And so you need to be doing that thing and stop doing that thing that's sitting on your desk and checking your freaking email or wasting time doing something else, you know, scrolling on TikTok or YouTube, whatever it is. Do the freaking thing. Get it done. Okay, that's so important. All right, number two. And this is why I want to give this away. Because I almost said this. But it's you don't have processes. You don't have any sort of process in place.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:08 There's no system. Okay? So when you hire people and this is a bonus, bad hires are killing your law firm too. But that's because you don't have systems and processes. So what you do is you freaking have a bad hire or you, you turn a good hire into a bad hire because they don't have the freaking do. I've been hired. Okay. what do I do? Oh, I don't know what you do because I don't have a process for it, or I don't have time to freaking train. You get the processes in place. And so maybe, maybe your process goal. So that one thing you need to be doing that on a consistent basis is creating a process. Maybe one a day or maybe, I don't know, one a week. Guess what? There's ChatGPT to help you with some of this stuff. Okay. You you can use it to build you a framework to start with. And then you can fill in some of the details. So there are these things there tools that are there for you for free that you can use.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:00 Start freaking using them. There's no excuse at this time okay. There is no longer an excuse, so just freaking do it. Okay. let's get to number one. And this is the thing, guys. This is the thing that you do on a regular basis that is killing your firm. It's absolutely killing you. You're draining all the money out of the firm. So you're saying I don't have any money? And what you're really saying is I'm sucking all the money out of the firm. I'm not. I don't have any systems in place for how I should get paid. I'm not paying myself a salary. You go do yourself a favor, especially if you're a new lawyer or young lawyer. Read profit first. It'll explain you how to set up all your bank accounts. It'll give you a system that you can use that's really, really effective. You can give yourself quarterly draws. You can pay yourself a salary, a modest salary. And then that way you don't have these massive cash flow issues.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:51 And you don't, you know, I don't have enough money to pay in place. You have plenty of money to pay employees Usually. I see this all the time. I'm like, you know, we have these hot seats. We have people in the guild that we're doing these hot days and they say they don't have money. The reality is you have money. You're just wasting the money or you're sucking all the money out of the firm. So that is that that is a massive issue that if you can fix that, it'll solve a lot of your other problems. But if you can solve the cash flow problem, it will solve a lot of your problems. It's not going to solve all your problems, but it'll solve a lot of your problems. All right. That's all I have for us today that I. This is one of my quicker episodes. I didn't talk as much, but that's probably a good thing. You stop doing these three things. It's going to go really long way to fixing your firm.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:34 All right. Make sure you text me (314) 501-9260. Would love to hear from you. It's always a pleasure. Until next week, they'll remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care everybody.

Speaker 1 00:05:50 Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is thinking about buying or selling a firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, Jim and Tyson are joined by Tom Lenfestey, founder and CEO of the Law Practice Exchange. Tom discusses the bustling market for buying and selling law firms, particularly in the personal injury sector. 

Tom shares his insights on acquisitions and why some firms are ready while others are not. Not every firm will be fit to be bought or sold. An ideal firm will be on the market for purchase when it has gone through the necessary changes to become successful. If a firm is bringing in good business, lawyers are making a good salary, processes are ironed out and in place and the technology is up to date, potential buyers will be calling.

In the buying and selling of firms, deals can fall a part. In the legal space, deals fall through due to the emotions of both the buyer and seller as well as the fear to sell a firm that has been in business for a long time. For lawyers, it is natural to think about the ways in which something won’t work. But, that creativity can be used to think about the ways in which it can. That shift in mindset can really allow law firm owners to be confident in closing a deal to sell.

Listen in to learn more!

Jim's Hack: Read the book “Built to Sell" which will have you get prepared to sell a firm.

Tom’s Tip: Read the book “Die with Zero”, which goes through how to control your life and experiences. It helps put perspective on why you are here and what your purpose is.

Tyson's Tip: Look into the app edX, which gives you free courses from universities and colleges across the USA.

Episode Highlights:

  • 10:19 Discussion on the ideal size and caseload for a law firm to be ripe for acquisition.
  • 11:44 The impact of emotions and reasonableness in deal dynamics
  • 18:29 The impact of emotions and reasonableness on deal success

Connect with Tom:

Resources:

Transcripts: The Complexities of Buying and Selling Law Firms with Tom Lenfestey

Jim (00:00.911)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.952)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up, Jimbo?

Jim (00:07.702)
my friend, we're here for another great episode of Maximum Lawyer. I'm excited to be with you again.

Tyson (00:13.972)
I'm looking forward to it. I was telling our guest Tom that I am sitting in a Walmart parking lot charging my truck. it's nice little adventure I'm having. You want to introduce our guest? We can jump right in.

Jim (00:27.926)
Yeah, well, so it's so great because this is one of those rare instances where I said, hey, let's have Tom on the show. And Becca said, Tyson said the same thing. We're already scheduling it. So I don't know that that's ever happened before. our guest today, I'm sorry, Tom Lentfisty, he's the founder and CEO of the Law Practice Exchange. helps lawyers.

through the next chapter of their legal career, whether it's succession planning, exit planning, or strategic growth through law firm acquisition. He's a leader in law firm sales, and he's develop a marketplace for people wanting to sell their law firms or buy law firms. Tom, welcome back.

Tom Lenfestey (01:08.986)
Yeah, thanks, Jim. Thanks, Tyson, for having me. And little do you know, of course, you know, I just pinged each of you, right? And you just planted that message in your head of, you know, time for another podcast. No, it's, that's right. That's right. No, it's great to be back and great to kind of, you know, do a refresh. I think a lot's changed in the marketplace in the last couple of years. So look forward to discussing.

Jim (01:20.825)
subliminal

Tyson (01:32.57)
So let's jump in with not quite that yet, but we'll get into that in a little bit. what got you into this type of work? Because it's not completely outside the law, really. You're still somewhat within the law. You have one solid foot, at least in the legal space. But what got you into this?

Tom Lenfestey (01:56.388)
Yeah, my story Tyson really is I tell everybody, know, half jokingly, but mostly serious is jealousy. As a practicing attorney CPA, I was sitting in the seat of a lot of, you your listeners and, you know, community. I was helping these other professional business owners like dentists, CPAs, doctors, insurance advisors, financial advisors. I was the lawyer sitting in the seat and they'd come to me with a structured deal

A dentist would say, yep, it's time to retire. I've got a buyer for my practice. They're going to take over, pay me a million bucks. They're getting a bank loan for it. And I'm going to stay on for a couple of weeks and I'm going to be gone. And I'm like, that is tremendous. And then as I was building my own practice, it was really kind of the feeling of how do I do this? Right? How do I, as a professional business owner, you know, do what these other professional business owners have accomplished?

And so that really led me to start searching around of who in the marketplace or who was out there helping this marketplace for lawyers who was, you know, transacting deals openly because that's a lot of what I saw was it's great if you can complete an internal sale or a succession, but for most lawyers, especially solo owned others, they may just not have that opportunity. So there needed to be a marketplace where you could really go and find your buyer

Really what I found out is nobody was. So that was a little over a decade ago and then since then steadily through education, promotion, helping on transactions to just kind of build that out. But really that was it. was, man, lawyers should be able to do this too. And selfishly, I wanted to be able to do it for my own firm.

Jim (03:43.48)
So when you began building your firm, did you do it with an eye towards someday being able to transition out of it and how did that impact the way you structured things?

Tom Lenfestey (03:53.572)
Yeah, I think the only smart thing I did, Jim, when I started my firm was I didn't name it after myself. And I don't think I really did that with an eye towards Exit. I just did it with an eye towards, Lenfesty isn't the catchiest name in the book, right? Like the last name. And I did want there to be some market recognition outside of just me, right? And so I really didn't start it that way.

I did start it with a plan for having succession, adding partners otherwise, but really not to build it to exit, right? And I think that really was triggered by the more I started doing law practice exchange, I had to really exit out of my own practice to do so. And that's really what motivated, you know, those different steps to kind of build out the succession plan and really implement so I could.

exit, but you know, keep practicing just in a different world.

Tyson (04:53.444)
Alright, so let's get into the market. I am curious about the market. You teased that a little bit. What is the market like right now? We just had someone on. He's running a PI firm. They say that they're the fastest growing in the country. I don't know if that's true. And he was saying how in the future there's going to be a massive consolidation, a lot like doctors and hospitals.

with that, I'm curious what the market's like, given what he said.

Tom Lenfestey (05:27.046)
The market's busy, especially compared to a couple years ago when we talked. The steady push from me, but from the law practice exchange has been to build this marketplace, right? Get the word out there to lawyers that you can buy or sell law firms. And there's a good proven process to do it successfully. But I would tell you today, Tyson, it's the busiest we've ever seen it and it grows.

exponentially for the market. Still very niche. We're not talking about being able to sell laundromats, right? Or, you know, stock shares on the New York Stock Exchange or anything else. This is, you know, two lawyers for the most part. But personal injury and our plaintiff firms are really leading the way because there is consolidation, but there is exit and succession. And they're really changing a lot based on, I mean, you guys know this through your community.

but the investments that they're making into marketing, into systems. And what we're seeing is some of the traditional players can't keep up. And so as you know, the model kind of shifts to bigger personal injury, you know, other more strategic business operations, one, those are looking for growth and they look for growth through acquisition. So if you're a big PI firm in your state,

or multi -states for you to go into a new location, a new geographic market, you definitely can. But you're spending from zero to build up for recognition. Much more of what we're seeing is acquiring a proven brand in that marketplace. And then maybe you want to integrate your brand over time, but you have case inventory, you have new leads and new clients and cases to work from in doing

So personal injury is for sure leading the activity in the way. There's a lot of activity and noise coming out of Arizona based on personal injury and ABS in Arizona. But with other practices as well, we get, you know, on average five times as many buyer inquiries right now as we do sellers moving into the marketplace. Not all those buyers are ready. Part of our, you know, commitment is to help buyers get ready.

Tom Lenfestey (07:43.702)
or some of them are interested and never will get to that point. Their own firms or their own lives aren't ready to really acquire. So they're not qualified at this point to do so. But the overall goal is to really generate that so we can make more matches and make that marketplace

Jim (08:02.498)
Tom, why are you seeing more interest in buying and selling firms? it because of Baby Boomers retiring? Is it because people want to grow? What are the driving forces right now?

Tom Lenfestey (08:13.314)
I owe lot of, I think, credit to groups like yours, Jim and Tyson. I mean, I really think from the buyer side, our buyers from a generation, if you want to think about it for the law practice exchange, we typically deal with, you know, different generations. On the seller side, we have the boomers, as you mentioned, Jim, we have some others younger, right, some Xers that have decided to get out and, otherwise. But for the most part, we have the boomers and they're entering the selling

you know, process at a slower rate. But on the buy side, we have a lot of law firm owners, some boutique firms that have built better systems. They want to build a better business. And I will tell you, they're more entrepreneurial and probably a little bit more risk tolerant than most of the other lawyers out there in how they're going to do things. And so as they build this business, they're looking for growth.

and acquisition or growth into a new market or growth into a new practice area or a large book of business. For them is something they can do, but they can do it because, you know, they're not the owner and the attorney sitting in that seat doing everything. They're the owner manager and they've really built themselves into a better system. So overall, that's a lot of why I think we see more buyers. They're coming from that next generation of lawyers who have worked with, you know,

masterminds, coaching groups, others, or independently, they're just focused more on this is a law firm, but it's a business. Some of our sellers have built great businesses, but they really kind of, you know, worked into it over a 30, 40 year career. They didn't focus on really building those systems out. It just kind of happened as a necessity

Tyson (09:59.781)
So is there a certain size of firm or a certain caseload that you're looking for that is ripe to be acquired? Because I'm really curious about that or is basically anything on the table if you're a solo you got ten cases you could sell I got it to me like there seems to be there has to like some sort of some sort of like sweet spot

Tom Lenfestey (10:19.942)
Yeah, I think the sweet spot is if you're a personal injury attorney doing 500 cases a year, you've got a good brand in your community, whether it's a major Metro or otherwise, but you you've got a good brand that's generating right a good marketing platform. That's a good place to be. Once you get above a thousand cases a year, it's a lot easier transaction. It's a bigger transaction typically, right? But it's an easier track transaction to do because you've got a lot more history.

A thousand cases, can really take past case settlement, times those thousand cases, things kind of normalize a little bit more for you. So at a thousand cases, that becomes more interesting to those looking for, I need the player in the market, right? For less than that, or even less than 500, if you have 10 cases, there's probably somebody out there, but they're really looking to, you

buy you in an of counsel and affiliation on those 10 cases and other things that may be referred to you in the next few years. There's definitely a purchase transaction there, but there's not significant goodwill value there. The real value comes as the firm grows and scales and builds a lot of firm entity value as compared to personal brand.

Jim (11:40.108)
most deals go with each side having a representative like you or do you sometimes, I don't know if you ever do a dual agency model, how does that work?

Tom Lenfestey (11:53.594)
Yeah, absolutely. So typically, because this is still a fairly niche market, I mean, you guys know there's some other players, you know, our focus has been building the marketplace and really helping make matches, those different opportunities. But we typically find ourselves, Jim, dedicated to the deal versus the seller or the buyer. And, you know, recently we kind of shift around our model because even when we were repping the seller, like, hey, hire us to sell your firm.

we would end up doing a lot of work for the buyer as well because they didn't have representation or, you know, there's no buy side law firm business broker out there to do that to help them. So maybe they're dealing with an attorney or a CPA, but that attorney or CPA maybe has never gone through this before, you know, for a law firm. So we've really kind of shifted around different things where hopefully we can help add value to the deal if it's meant to happen or not meant to happen.

from a consulting side because we do believe, you know, both need help. The seller, of course, needs help and the buyer needs help. The other thing that allows us to do in that middle position, if we've matched and help with deal structure negotiation, just kind of mediation, right? And sometimes that's, you know, emotional counseling to the seller. Like, I know you're saying this, but I think that's an emotional response because you're just afraid of retiring, right?

you're afraid of exiting your firm. That's the number one reason we don't have more sellers moving into the marketplace is because emotionally, a lot of lawyers don't know what they would do if they weren't a lawyer, right, of that generation or otherwise. And so there's emotional barriers or excuses or delays that come up through that. And even during the deal discussions, those pop up. And so we can be there to really help the seller, but then also tell the buyer, like, look,

This is what they're dealing with. They're trying to process a loss of control, a fear over financial stability, a, you know, whatever else, and really work with the parties to see is there a deal to be had? And if there's not, that's a good place to stop and kind of exit as well, because these are deals that we tell everybody they're transition based, where buyer and seller are going to have to work together afterwards, mostly, right? And you want to make sure that the deal is truly going to be a win

Tom Lenfestey (14:17.506)
If it's not, then somebody's gonna resent that, not give the efforts and the transition plan afterwards, right? And it just, it may work, but it's not gonna work as well, as if it can really come in and both parties are vested and they fit and they feel good about the transition.

Tyson (14:35.58)
So I'm really curious. let's say I come to you. I say, listen, Tom, I'm turning 1 ,000 cases a year. I want out. I want a clean break. don't want to be of counsel. I just want to sell the firm. I guess, what can I expect the paperwork that I need to get together for you? What does all that look like? I'm really curious. What's the setup look like? How long does this process take? Things like that.

Tom Lenfestey (15:04.334)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things Tyson that we really changed is, you know, we invested in, you know, software to build out what we call the marketplace, which openly allows you, if you wanted to do that, you could go now and create an account, create a listing, right? For a confidential, you know, opportunities, explore with buyers, everything else. But that really just helps with the matching function, like finding, you know, potentials that are out there and discussing.

What we would then do is really say, look, you need to know what the value is, Tyson. You've got this firm. What is the value? What should you be asking for? What should you be expecting for it in price? But also what kind of payment terms are you gonna get? Your payment terms on 1 ,000 PI, strong brand, all the metrics of where leads come from versus 100 PI, which is referral, and you really don't know where the leads come from.

the payment terms, not just the price, the payment terms are gonna vary greatly on that. But typically when you start with the valuation, you're starting with, you know, profit and loss statements, tax returns, payroll summaries, right? You're starting with those financial reports. And then we're really going into what we call, you know, background information to determine where do you sit in the market? Like the key value drivers for us, like there's market ranges on multiples, right?

There are certain caps that you're always going to hit, but where in a range does your firm stand? How strong are you? How weak are you? Right? You know, do you have a website that says you practice every single practice area in the world when really all you do is two things? Well, that's not a great brand to put out there. It's a tough one for buyers to see and everything else. You know, if you don't know where your clients come from, that's a negative value driver, right? Like those different things that we'll really work with in the valuation.

Valuation we tell everybody is the first step because it lets you know what's possible. If you get a high valuation and strong purchase terms, then you may be motivated to sell and you can communicate to a buyer on what you want, whether that's an internal buyer, like looking at an associate who you want to have you buy out or an external. The other thing is what we've seen with a lot of our personal injury is they get to a certain size that internal candidates really they've outgrown

Tom Lenfestey (17:23.652)
The value is so significant that really they have to look to external for that consolidation that your previous guests may have talked about anything else because they've gotten so big, you know, one of their associates or long -term senior non -equity partners potentially can't afford it even with, you know, private equity funding, anything else in there or doesn't want to take on the risk, right? They'd rather partner with another firm or another group of attorneys to do so.

So we see a lot of those different transactions, but it really does start with the valuation, which hopefully gives you a benchmark of your value, but also where that comes from. Like why, right? Why do I sit here in this market value, this price? Why is my firm low? Why is it high? Otherwise, and then really our goal is what do I do with it? Like if I have a price, great, but what do I really do with it? Who would be my buyers?

right? Should it be an internal? Should it be a firm that I'm going to merge with? Should I look at a true marketplace? I got an awesome PI firm, 1500 cases revolving everything else. What kind of marketplace buyer is out there for me and what kind of terms should I

Jim (18:37.772)
There been deals that you thought would never get to the finish line or had there been deals that you thought, this one's a slam dunk that unraveled? What makes cases or deals fall apart?

Tom Lenfestey (18:51.204)
Emotions, right? think emotions and fear really is the biggest deal killer besides time. mean, time definitely, you know, the more time it takes to move forward, the more time it takes to produce, you know, a financial report that the buyers ask for, you know, all of those things can kill a deal. But to answer your question, Jim, yeah, absolutely. There are, there have been deals that, you know, we're like, great, we'll close this one. And it's stretched on in due diligence for nine months because, you

They used a different bank, you know, the bank took forever, asked for all of this different stuff, right? And the parties, you can just see them getting worn down, right? Just getting worn down from that. But surprisingly, you know, they stick it out because they both are committed to the opportunity and they do get that deal done. And then, you know, there's others that, of course, were like, there's no way this is going to work. But I tell everybody as much as lawyers sometimes can go

you know, right away, give me an idea. I'm going to tell you five ways that that idea is not going to work. Like naturally for lawyers, we go to thinking why it can't work. That creativity can be used in a powerful way. And they come up with structures that maybe we didn't even talk about, but that works for them. Right. And it'll work for that deal that we really said we thought was dead, but they've come up with an alternative that really does work.

So the creativity of the lawyers that are involved, sometimes that can be a negative, but a lot of times that can be a positive. I think the biggest thing is just being, having reasonableness in the process. And that's where, again, just reverting back of, that's why we say everything starts with valuation. If you jump into a market and say, hey, I got a thousand cases, I think my firm's good, I heard this Len Festy guy say a multiple range is this, this is what I want for my firm. But you you've got a 10 % profit margin.

you way overpay your people, you just have some high risk of departure, some other issues, your case inventory is strong now, but your intake looks really bad, so you're not replenishing that inventory, well then your firm's not worth that much. But if you jump in and that's what you expect without having the knowledge of really what is the value, that's where kind of that reasonableness issue pops up and kills deals, right? And I always go back to reasonableness,

Tom Lenfestey (21:15.866)
Hopefully it's just a lack of knowledge because this is a very unique area, right? Not everybody buys or sells a law firm, you know, every day. Most only once potentially, although we've got some good serial buyers out there. So that's a great thing. But for most it's really give me the knowledge. Hopefully if they accept that as this is what I can expect or this is what the process is going to look like and they can, you know, kind of ride along, then they'll get the deal

Tyson (21:44.86)
So why does it matter if you've got employees that are going to leave? Why does it matter if you've got a high turnover? Why does it matter if the intake team's a mess if you're going to end up absorbing all of the leads anyways and you're going to be taking over the intake process?

Tom Lenfestey (22:02.054)
Employees are assets. They can be liabilities, but to most buyers, right, they're assets. Meaning, you know, we're going through a deal right now. It's a very impressive firm. Everything else, they've got a workforce of 300 employees, everything else. Our sellers are concerned about, hey, we want to make sure these employees stay. Our buyers are concerned about, hey, we want to make sure these employees stay, right? It's usually a mutual concern to really keep

the employees in play, because if it's been working right, then they're truly an asset, right? They're an asset to the deal, because if you're an owner and you're going to exit, you're gonna sell your firm and you're gonna maybe transition for six, 12 months, 18 months afterwards. Who does the buyer really look to to make sure the work still gets done? Who does the buyer look to to make sure

You know, they know the systems or they know the clients or the referral sources, depending on practice area, like personal injury can be a little bit different, but you know, for like estate planning, for real estate, a lot of those are the non -attorneys know the referral sources, like the realtors and the advisors and everything, way more than, you know, the actual owner attorney. And so they can really be a true asset to making the transition work successfully. And they have a lot of the knowledge.

And if there's disruption, whether it's paralegals, non -attorneys, but when it's attorneys that depart, that can just spin off competition, anything else from that side. Most of our buyers actually want to come in and if they look and see there's some good senior associates or others, the number one question is, would they be open to being potentially a non -equity partner? Somebody that we can really make as our market partner?

you know, in this transition that we can kind of promote. Maybe they don't have equity, right? They're not taking ownership of the firm, but hopefully they're going to take on a little bit increased role and responsibility. Not all of it. We're not asking them to do that, which the seller may have looked to them previously to do, but they're going to take on enough to help the buyer and become part of that buyer team, which, you know, hopefully works. The buyer has a good knowledge source there in the market to kind of continue things.

Tom Lenfestey (24:25.616)
They're taking on a lot of the management, integrating their systems, but to that employee that's moved up as well, hopefully they have more financial opportunity, more growth opportunity within the buyer's regime without taking on all the risk that they would have through ownership acquisition themselves.

Jim (24:44.652)
Are there things that people get hung up when going through the deal process that they shouldn't focus on? And are there things that people don't highlight in their attention but they should be spending more time thinking about?

Tom Lenfestey (25:00.198)
Absolutely. So the first thing they should not focus on is knowing what things are going to look like at step 10 if you're only at step one, right? It's really, again, it's something as lawyers here, right? We want to know, like we want to plan. What is step 10 going to look like? And just as an example of that, Jim, a lot of sellers come in and say, you know, great, what type of buyer, right, for my firm?

kind of advise them they should be open to all, which means you should be open to a law firm that's gonna come in and treat it as a merger. You should be open to an experienced, you know, individual attorney that's going to come from, you know, in -house counsel or from another firm that wants to come over and really be your internal successor. So you're gonna rename yourself as a partnership and kind of transition that way. You should be open to a boutique firm, you know, in another town that's gonna say, hey, we wanna buy you.

Right? And we'll exit you out and do that. So all these different options, but it's really hard for attorneys. They want to know what step 10 is going to look like, what that is going to be painted as. And sometimes it does vary depending on the buyer. So what I'd say is have knowledge in making the decisions at the time you need, knowing what hopefully the end goal is and what you're working towards. But the fear of just, need to know what it looks like. Well, the market's going to tell you a

Does it take six months to sell your firm or two years? The market potentially would tell you what those opportunities are out there and how that's going to work. And the other thing I would say from the standpoint of really working through is there's a real fear of our sellers of loss of control. I've run this firm, I've owned this firm, and I think it's a pretty standard entrepreneur. I don't think this is just to lawyers.

But it's, know, I've done things the way I've wanted, right or wrong. Like I walk in, I control my schedule. If I want to work seven days a week, I work seven days a week. If I want to do this. But the best story I've had with that is, you know, if you can get over that there's going to be a solid transition plan and hopefully you found the right buyer, that loss of control also comes with benefits. And, know, as a story to that, we had a plaintiff attorney, you know, that we had really helped with

Tom Lenfestey (27:24.718)
told me many times as we went through it, like, I'm really, you know, I'm really worried about this. You know, I liked my control, my fiefdom, everything else. This gives me pause, this gives me pause. But we made our way through. And as we got through, when we closed the deal, you know, was two days later or something, you know, had him on the phone, just checking in to see how things were going. And he said, you know what was weird? You know how I so worried about loss of control, right? You know, that loss of control. I didn't

I didn't also realize that it came with the benefit of it ain't my problem anymore, right? Like there are certain things he's like, I woke up and immediately thought payroll isn't my responsibility, right? So I don't have control over like, you know, processing payroll, but it's also not my obligation to meet payroll. And it's, you know, these different things that it comes with more freedoms. And that's really it, right? As an owner, sure. We have lots of control. We can create our own freedoms.

But when you become a non -owner and you're on your exit path, you gain a lot more. And you gain control, hopefully, over more of your personal life that you probably didn't have or your personal time. So I would say those aspects definitely

Tyson (28:36.676)
I'm sure by you saying all that, there's several people like kind of dreaming of that day and that they're very interested. So I'm going to give them the URL. It's the marketplace, I'm sorry, lawpracticexchange .com. that the correct URL, correct?

Tom Lenfestey (28:56.068)
Yep, yep, thelawpracticexchange .com. And again, they can go there. The marketplace is an account creation, allows you hopefully to just learn and when the time is to explore finding a buyer or seller or to transact. And our team's always there. So that's what I tell people is, our goal is to support just like you guys have done for your community. But our goal is to really support on the buy -sell transactional side. There's questions.

We're there to help with answers when needed.

Tyson (29:27.06)
I was playing around with the website a little bit. It's a really cool website. At a minimum, would say everyone should go check it out just to check it it's a really good website. check it out. Who knows? Maybe you might not be curious now, but you might be curious in a couple of years about it. So check it out. All right. We're going to get to our tips and hacks of the week. Before I do that, though, I want to remind everyone, join us in the big Facebook group. Go to Maximum Lawyer on Facebook and join us there. And then if you want

Join us in the guild. We have a lot great a lot of great people inside the guild that are always willing to share their expertise Maxlawguild .com and while you're listening to the rest of this episode If you don't mind giving us a five -star review We would greatly appreciate it helps us spread the love to all the lawyers around the world really I said country last episodes really we have people all over the world that listen to this So would love to love it if you'd give us a reveal Jimmy. What is your hack of the week?

Jim (30:23.554)
I do have a hack of the week, I actually have one more question for Tom. And I'll give my hack and then I'll ask the question. So, apropos to our discussion today, we've spoken a lot on Maximum Lawyer about one of my favorite books, Built to Sell, which if you haven't read, you should. It's great.

great way to focus on the things you can control to get ready to sell. But there's a podcast too. There's over 450 episodes of Built to Sell podcast. So if you haven't checked that out, check that out. My question Tom is have you ever had someone come to you wanting to sell their practice and ended up buying someone else's practice or have you ever had someone come to you wanting to buy a practice and ending up selling a practice? Because that seems like something I would do.

Tom Lenfestey (31:05.99)
Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a lot of people, you know, in different stages. I tell everybody, probably depends on the day right now of are you a seller or a buyer? If you're having a really good day, then you're a buyer, right? You're looking for growth. Everything seems to be functioning really well. And maybe if you're having a bad day or just feeling a little exhausted, you're more of a seller. So to answer your question, yes, we've had a lot come in that said, hey, I think I'm interested in selling. And then they don't, right? They don't move forward because that's

really what they want, they're just maybe having a bad day or right, they thought they were gonna be done to do something else and they're reinvigorated and sometimes that's the coolest part is if you have a great firm and you're not really done yet but you can contribute by acquiring other brands, really seeing that process as it goes, yeah, it can be an awesome experience and to your point Jim, Built to Sell was one of the things that, it's one of the books that I read that was,

You know, for me, such a simple read and such a great story to just kind of impact and say, you know, build a business, right? That is a business. That's not just you. It's not an extension of you or anything else. And so that was definitely one of the motivating factors for me in starting the law practice exchange.

Tyson (32:22.052)
cool. Alright Tom, we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. It could be a book, it could be a podcast, it could be a quote, whatever you can think of. So what you got for us?

Tom Lenfestey (32:34.596)
Yeah, well would say, know, again, Built to Sell, you know, is out there as a tremendous book to go read. I know you guys have talked about traction. To me, that's different stages, right, of where you are in your law firm operations or anything else. But, you know, from a podcast side and just totally off the wall side, there is a book called Die with Zero. Die with Zero. Have you guys kind of gone through that before?

But, you I won't spoil it for you, but for those really looking at, know, where do I control my life and my experiences, right? Am I being controlled by my business? Am I really participating? And what does the future look like for me, my family, everything else? The number one thing that we get sellers telling us that they want to sell their firms for is to spend time with their grandkids. And usually it's because they have been six, seven days a week in their firm.

and hadn't spent time with their kids as much as they wanted to. And now they regret that and they wanted to vote as much time as they can to, you know, their grandkids who of course grandkids are way better than their kids. They're perfect, right? But overall, Die was Zero. It's, you know, a pretty simple read, good, you know, audio book to kind of carry forward. But I think really helps put perspective in why are you here and what is that purpose and how should you really live life under

Tyson (34:00.0)
Good lesson to I like to hear those stories For me my tip of the week is I discovered so I saw someone posting on X about Like these seven free classes that MIT had and then it redirected to this link to an app It's called X ed. So yeah, I'm sorry edX edX Which it's it's got a bunch of free courses some you got to pay for but bunch of free courses though like from universities all over the country so from

Decoding, you name it, they're free on this app. So I want to share that with everybody. EdX, it's a really cool app, so check it out. Tom, thanks so much. Pleasure having you on again. It's cool just hearing everything you're doing. And for everyone that needs a reminder, check out thelawpracticexchange .com. Thanks, Tom.

Jim (34:50.094)
Thanks, Tom.

Tom Lenfestey (34:50.342)
Thanks guys, appreciate

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Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, co-hosts Tyson Mutrux offer invaluable advice for young lawyers. Tyson shares 14 essential tips he has learned throughout his career, emphasizing the importance of building genuine relationships, giving grace, and understanding one's worth. 

Even though these are rapid-fire tips, we hope that you feel encouraged and take something away that you can apply to your law firm and life today. The overarching theme in this episode, is to guide young lawyers in effectively navigating their careers and embracing the challenges of the legal profession. Listen in and be encouraged.

Episode Highlights:

  • 02:51 - Tip 1: Give Grace 
  • 03:50 - Tip 2: Build Relationships 
  • 04:57 - Tip 3: Have Difficult Discussions 
  • 05:57 - Tip 4: Make Yourself Indispensable 
  • 06:45 - Tip 5: Find Your Passion 
  • 07:42 - Tip 6: It's Okay to Start Over 
  • 08:42 - Tip 7: It's Okay to Leave the Profession 
  • 09:36 - Tip 8: Being a Lawyer Isn't Your Identity 
  • 10:27 - Tip 9: Avoid Being a Bulldog 
  • 11:22 - Tip 10: Embrace the Difficulty 
  • 12:11 - Tip 11: Let Them Doubt You 
  • 12:49 - Tip 12: Don't Give Free Advice 
  • 14:08 - Tip 13: Don't Discount Your Fees 
  • 15:37 - Tip 14: Know Your Worth 
  • Ask us a question about starting your own law firm here!
  • Peak Performance Intensive with Dr. Jason Selk, sign up here!

Resources:

Transcripts: 14 Tips for Young Lawyers with Tyson Mutrux

Tyson (00:01.932)
Welcome back to another Saturday episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. My name is Tyson Uetrix. Many of you already know that by now as you're actually, I don't want to say

Tyson (00:13.454)
Welcome back to another episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. This is Tyson Mutrix and today I've got a fun one for you especially if you're a young lawyer. I'm going to talk about the 14 tips that I have for young lawyers.

Tyson (00:32.246)
scratch my nose. I'll just do the full intro over again. Hope you cut it a little bit more. Yeah, edit it a little easier.

Tyson (00:47.192)
Welcome back to another episode of the Saturday podcast. My name is Tyson Mutrix and today I've got a really good one. It's for young lawyers. This is advice for young lawyers, but I will tell you much of this will apply to the majority of attorneys, maybe all attorneys. But this one, I do want to speak directly to young lawyers because sometimes we get misguided advice. Sometimes we get bad advice, but.

These are 14 tips that I've learned over the years. There's probably more things I could talk about. I'm gonna go through it fairly quickly. I may do separate episodes on each of these just so you know I can expand on them, but I'm gonna go through these fairly quickly because I think it's important. Before I do get into this though, I wanna remind everyone that I would love to hear from you. This is another episode that I'm recording from Charlotte for the Quarterly Mastermind and it's one of these things where I'm recording these because they're on my mind.

That's why I'm doing it right now. They're on my mind. I had a few extra minutes I wanted to talk about them. But I've had several people come up to me and mention a Saturday episode. Or even in the actual, some of the hot seats, they said, hey, well, you said this on the Saturday episode. So then they apply it to the situation, which I think is really, really cool. Same thing comes with, you text me. I love to hear those comments. It's so cool to hear.

And so it just shows me that I wanna make sure we're providing value and that you're getting a lot from this. And by you letting me know that, it lets me know if I'm on the right track. And if I'm not on the right track, tell me, text me, say, I don't agree with you on this one. And here's why. And if you convince me, guess what? I'll record another one saying, I got this text message from such and such and they said these things to me and it's changed my

And even, you know what, I might even do an episode if I disagree with you, but I just love to hear from you and I wanna make sure we're providing the absolute best material for you that helps you with your practice. That being said, I wanna jump into this episode. That way we can spend a little bit of time on it. Like I said, this is gonna be, it's gonna be kinda rapid pace, cause these are short episodes and there's 14 of these, so let's go through them as quickly as possible. Number one.

Tyson (03:10.1)
is maybe one of the hardest ones you'll do. It's give grace. I was a hard charging lawyer at the beginning and I really wanted to just go, go, go and be aggressive. That is not the right approach. Give grace. You're gonna appreciate it when you need it. And luckily, luckily, I once had a really good mentor in Eli Hedowski at the firm I worked for.

at the very beginning. And then the other thing is I also luckily encountered some attorneys on the other side very early that gave me grace. And so giving grace is one of those things where it's an investment, okay? Giving grace is an investment, trust me, because someday you'll need it and when they return the favor, you're gonna appreciate it. The next one is don't network, build relationships.

You'll get this idea, I'm just gonna go around and I'm meet with all these different people and I'm gonna have coffee with this person and drinks with that person or I'm gonna go to these networking events. I have a pretty big problem with networking events. I don't want you to network. I want you to build relationships. Building relationships is the way that you build a firm that you want. If you want a bunch of referrals, you build relationships. You do not

network. Okay? Now, you want a network of relationships, not a network of people, because that's not going to do a lot for you. You can know a lot of people. I wouldn't even call it a network. That's just a bunch of people that you have their names in your phone. You want to be able to have relationships with these people. So build relationships. Focus on that. And there was this once, I heard this quote or this saying,

And it's, don't ask if you want to grab coffee or have coffee, something like that. like, do you want to sit down and talk? I can't remember what a phrase, but the phrase was, it was essentially like, hey, let's just go do this thing and we're just gonna sit there. It was, gosh, I think I want to talk about this thing. Let's just cut that part out, the coffee part of it, because I can't remember the phrase. So we're just gonna cut that part

Tyson (05:40.726)
I think that there's an easy transition in there, so I'm just trying to think about

The next one I want to get to is have the difficult discussions as quickly as you can. There will be times where you had the really difficult conversations, whether that's with a client or an opposing attorney or your spouse or a really good friend. It doesn't really matter. Those things will eat at you and they'll eat at you and they'll eat at you. And what you'll find is the vast majority of the

It's not gonna be nearly as bad as what you are playing out in your mind. It's probably like 95 % of the time. It is far better for you, far less painful for you, by the way. Because you think about the pain, the reality is it's gonna be far less painful for you instead of you losing sleep for months and months. You just get it out of the way this week, get it out of this week today, okay? Make those difficult decisions

have those difficult discussions very very quickly. You want to make difficult decisions quickly too if you can but it's another topic. Number the next one number four make yourself indispensable so if you're working for a firm you provide them as much value as you can okay as much value as you can you make yourself indispensable but or and okay so and get as many as client clients as possible okay bring in as many clients as possible.

If you don't do that, you are dispensable. So providing a lot of value to your employer, really, and you might think, well, this is your bias because you're a law firm owner. No, no, no, no, no. I did this whenever I worked for a firm. Whenever I applied, I wrote my cover letter and my resume was all targeted towards that firm showing how I would provide value to them. I viewed them almost as if they were a customer. That's how I viewed it.

Tyson (07:40.546)
I think employees should do the same thing. If you really want to make yourself indispensable, that's how you do it. If you want to be able to make it where they can't fire you, they can fire you, but you want to make it where it's going to be really painful if they do. So you provide them a ton of value and you bring as many clients as possible. And you do that, they're not going fire you. It's going to give you a lot of power because you have leverage. If you want leverage as an employee, that's how you get

Make yourself indispensable, provide a ton of value, and get as many clients as possible. Number five, find what you're passionate about and do that. This one I'm wavering a little bit over the last couple years after hearing from people like Eric Weinstein. I think he's a professor at Harvard. I know he's a professor. He was on the Chris Williamson podcast.

He was talking about, because we've, you know, as Americans, we talk about follow your passion. But something he has talked about is do what you're really, really good at and learn to become passionate about it, right? And so when I say follow your passion, I kind of mean that, okay? I kind of mean that. either way, either way, this is gonna leave me in number

if you can't, if you don't find that passion or if you find that the thing that you thought you were passionate about, you're not passionate about, or you're not good at it. Because if you think you're passionate about something, or if you are passionate about something and you start it and then you're not good at it, you will lose your passion for it. And that's part of why Eric Weinstein talks about this, is that find something you're good at and learn to become passionate about it. And so if we go on to the next one.

If you don't do that and you're not passionate about it, it's okay to start over. Whether you start a law firm or you work for a firm or whatever or as a lawyer, it's okay to start over again. It's okay. No one will judge you for it. And actually, you know what? Most people will praise you for it. congratulations. You know what? Good for you. That's fantastic. Good for you for moving on or figuring something else.

Tyson (10:06.496)
or finding what you want to do, or finding what you want that you love, whatever it is. But you will be praised for doing it. You will not be criticized. So just know that. The next one. It's okay to leave the profession. All right? There are a lot of people

Tyson (10:29.422)
How do I say this? There are a lot of people that have ended their lives because they're lawyers and they hated it. This is a profession that just isn't for everybody. And that's not a bad thing. It's just not a bad thing. It's just not for everybody. And so if you find that this is not what you want to be doing, who cares? Go do something else.

It's okay. This is easy for me to say at this point, but honestly, I wouldn't care myself. Who cares what your parents think? Who cares what your friends think? If they truly love you and care about you, they don't want you to be miserable. They want you to be happy, right? And we can talk about happiness in another podcast, it's not really a destination, but we'll talk about it in another podcast. But they want you to be happier.

and they want you to be able to seek happiness, at least if they care about you and they love you that they do, and if they don't, then don't care about them. Who cares what they think? And so it's okay. It's okay to start over, and it's okay to leave the profession. Number eight, being a lawyer isn't who you are. It's what you do. It's not who you are. And sometimes we wrap ourselves too much in it. Starting at Christopher Nicholson the other day,

and we were talking about how a friend of his kind of puts it on almost as a cloak of armor. That's a really dangerous thing. If you do it, if you say, I'm going into court and I got my suit on, it's sort of this armor that I've got on, I'm okay with that, but if you wrap yourself in it every moment of your life, that's a dangerous thing. So be very careful about

Number 10, you don't want to be a bulldog as a lawyer, okay? I'm just telling you right now, guess what? People hate bulldogs and they're not effective. okay, so think about this. If someone's a jerk to you, are you gonna give them what they want? No, not necessarily. Do you think a judge is gonna want to give you what you want if you're a jerk? Nope, not at all. And they'll find every reason that they can.

Tyson (12:51.384)
to not rule in your favor. It's a human nature thing. This isn't something, may not even be conscious, okay? So I'm not saying that, I don't like you, so I'm gonna automatically rule against you. No, no, no, it's a human nature thing. Subconsciously, they're gonna be like, they're probably gonna try to find a way to really screw you over, is what's gonna be. Same thing works with clients.

You know don't be a bulldog to your client and don't make them think you're a bulldog because this is not an effective technique But other opposing counsel was talking about giving grace, right? Just wait you become a bulldog. I know bulldogs and guess what they're on a list of mine and They will never get a favor from me. You need that discovery extension. No, sorry not happening. Yeah, we'll follow motion compel That's it. We'll send golden rule letter and we're gonna send out we're gonna follow motion

We're gonna make you work for it. Your client's gonna be pissed off at you. So instead be a fox. You want to be a fox. You don't want to be a bulldog. A fox is smart. A fox is clever. A fox is, in my mind, it's someone that will give you grace. That's what you want to be. You want to play the long game. Bulldogs is short game. There's lots of games.

You play the short game, you're going to have a short profession. Or not a very successful one. Be a fox.

Tyson (14:30.37)
The next one is this profession is hard. It's supposed to be. Embrace it. The sooner you can embrace it, embrace it being hard, the better. Enjoy it being hard. You don't want it to be easy. You don't. You want this to be hard. There's a reason why you're a professional. You're a professional. There's a reason for that. It's a hard thing. Not everybody can do it. Embrace

Number 11, let them doubt you. This is a great one for me. Let them doubt you. Get that chip on your shoulder, okay? That is their weakness. Okay, let them doubt you. That's their weakness. Let them think that you're not gonna be successful and then lean in and dominate, okay? Let them doubt you. Who gives a shit if they do? Go do your thing and go dominate. Don't give free advice.

Don't give free advice. You'll be abused for it. They will, your family members, your friends, they will just eat at you and eat at you and eat at you. I understand the occasional, hey, what if I get a traffic ticket? What should I do? Go hire a traffic lawyer. They're gonna help you out with that. But don't give free legal advice. It diminishes your value, okay? Which leads to the next

Don't discount your fees either. Again, diminishes your value. well, I want a discount. We don't discount our fees. We have a very, very firm rule in our firm. We don't lower our fees. But there are two exceptions to that. Or I guess there's really one exception to that. We will lower our fee if we

have a settlement and just not enough insurance money available but there's a lot of bills and maybe there's issues with liability. So with a lien statute there's a formula and everything but if we're going to get more based on all this settlement distribution than our client we don't do that, we don't take more than our client. So we have one rule about lowering fees, we will lower it so that we don't get more than our client. There's an exception to that, that's why I was getting to it with exception. There's one exception to that and that's this.

Tyson (16:54.998)
If the client doesn't take our advice and settles a case for less than what we think they should, and they kind of are rushing the process, I will not lower my fee. That's how much we believe in this. And there's a lot of attorneys that will, they just cut their fee, cut their fee, cut their fee. I had a defense attorney the other day, and this is part of the reason why. She says, well, you can just cut your fee. And I said, we don't cut our fee. And an attorney a couple months ago, well, you can just cut your I don't cut my fee. That's not something I do. And I just told both of them, you don't cut your fee?

You're not going to cut your fee. I'm not cutting my fee. It diminishes my value. It diminishes the value that we provide. So don't cut your fee. Just because they ask for it doesn't mean you should give it to them. Don't cut your fee. It diminishes your value, and it'll just keep happening to you. And especially if you're an injury firm, if they know that you're just going to cut your fee, just keep lowballing you. And guess what? Your settlement values will keep going lower and lower and lower, and that means your fees keep going lower and lower.

Okay, these are algorithms too. So they'll be tracking all this data. The last one I want to get to is know your worth. And this is related to what we just talking about. If you're working for a firm and they're abusing you, what I mean by that is, I don't want to overuse that word. If they are taking advantage of you, leave. Go start your own firm. Go to another firm. Someone that's gonna pay you what you're worth. Now that doesn't mean that,

you should overestimate your worth because we've had plenty of associates or applicants that they want an outrageous amount of money for not knowing jack shit. And that is to me, that shows me your naivete that you are not very realistic. And if you're not very realistic about your expectations,

we're going have a difficult working relationship. And I understand some inexperience and things like that. And I also understand that there may have been some job candidates over the last few years have been getting some really terrible advice about salaries. But there is a ridiculousness element to it. That being said, if you have the skill set, if you know that you can add a lot of value to the firm, or if you're a law firm owner,

Tyson (19:19.414)
If you know as a law firm owner, you're going to do a really good job on a case, know your worth, and this goes back to, there's no low on your fees, okay? You're going to do a great job. You know you're going to do better than the other firm out there that you're competing against. Know your worth, stick to your guns, and charge what you need to charge, okay? Whether you're an employee or a law firm owner. Get paid what you need to get paid.

Alright, that's the last one I have for you. That's all we have for today. I want to remind everyone to give me a text, shoot me a text, I'd love to hear from you. I love hearing all the texts I get all the time. Get them all the, basically every day at this point. So make sure you keep shooting me a text, I'd love to hear from you. Even if you're just calling, texting to say hi, I'd love to hear from you. 314 -501 -9260 is the texting line. So I would love to hear from you.

Until next week though, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, see you everybody.

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