Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson Mutrux catches up with Brett Trembly, founder of Get Staffed Up and author of 24 Months to Freedom, to talk about hiring, delegation, offshore teams, AI, and what it really takes to build a law firm that doesn’t depend on the owner for everything.

Brett shares the moments that made him realize working harder wasn’t going to solve the problems in his firm, including trying to manage the business while his daughter was in surgery and working from the beach instead of being present with his family. Tyson and Brett discuss the hiring decisions that helped Brett finally break through that ceiling, why he still believes an executive assistant should be one of a law firm owner’s first hires, and the mistakes owners make when they hire someone but fail to properly train them.

They also get into the economics of offshore hiring, Get Staffed Up’s expansion into paralegal roles, how to measure whether a team member is actually working out, and what AI could mean for intake, legal assistants, and law firm staffing over the next five years. Brett explains why he believes AI will reduce some staffing needs while making the right people significantly more productive.

Listen in for a practical conversation about hiring better people, delegating the right work, using AI strategically, and building a law firm that gives you more freedom instead of creating another job.

What You’ll Learn

• Why working harder eventually stops working as a law firm grows.
• Why Brett believes an executive assistant should be one of your first hires.
• How offshore hiring can change the economics of growing a legal team.
• Why hiring someone without properly training them sets both sides up to fail.
• How KPIs and even your own energy can help determine whether a hire is working.
• Where Brett believes AI will replace roles and where humans will still matter.
• Why law firms may need intake managers instead of traditional intake teams in the future.
• How better systems can help a firm grow without everything depending on the owner.

Timestamps

00:00 — When your law firm starts taking over your life
05:07 — The moment Brett realized he needed to start hiring
09:33 — Building a hiring system and finding A-players
13:55 — Offshore hiring, costs, and the new paralegal model
19:19 — The first hire Brett recommends for law firm owners
21:33 — The training mistake law firm owners keep making
24:34 — How to know if a team member is actually working out
27:27 — The three roles law firms need most
28:00 — AI vs. humans and the future of legal staffing
32:13 — Maintaining quality while scaling a staffing company
36:07 — What law firm teams could look like five years from now
38:05 — Tyson’s custom case management system
40:02 — Get Staffed Up and MaxLawCon 2026

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Full Transcript: 

Tyson Mutrux (00:00)
Today's guest is Brett Trembly, and Brett has been around Maximum Lawyer for a long time. He's the founder of Get Staffed Up, author of 24 Months to Freedom, and he's spent a long time helping law firm owners figure out how to get work off their plates and build teams that don't need the owner involved in everything.

I've got a recent book about that, if you've not seen it. It's very similar. But the thing is, Brett helps you actually do that with his business, which is awesome. He learned a lot of this the hard way.

At one point, his daughter was in surgery and Brett was pacing the waiting room while dealing with something happening back at his law firm. That's a pretty brutal way to realize that maybe the business you built isn't giving you the freedom you thought it would.

So we're going to talk about what happened after that, the hires that changed his firm, some hiring mistakes he made along the way, how he learned to actually delegate, and where AI fits into this whole people versus technology conversation.

Get Staffed Up is also one of our premier sponsors at MaxLawCon this October, so we'll talk a little bit about that and what they're bringing to Atlanta this year.

Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett Trembly (01:06)
Thanks, Tyson. Glad to be back, dude. What's going on?

Tyson Mutrux (01:10)
Not much, man. We were chatting a little bit. You're down in Miami, which I'm a little jealous of.

Now, I will say it's 94 in Missouri. What's the temperature down in Miami?

Brett Trembly (01:20)
I think it's like 90.

Tyson Mutrux (01:23)
So you've got the beautiful sun and better temperatures.

Brett Trembly (01:27)
I always tell people, one summer I was driving down from Chicago and went to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. I've never been hotter or sweated more in my life, dude.

At least we have the ocean, so it's usually like 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity here. The yearly average, I just discovered a few days ago, is in the low 80s or high 70s.

But dude, in the Midwest it's like 100. It's just awful.

Tyson Mutrux (01:57)
Yeah. The other day my wife and I were sitting outside watching our son's soccer practice and we're like, my gosh, the air just isn't moving. It was just sitting there. There was no breeze. It was awful.

Anyways, let's get into you.

You've told this story about your daughter being in surgery before. You're in the waiting room and dealing with an attorney at your firm.

For the people who haven't heard the story, what was happening at the firm that felt so important that it pulled you away from being present with your daughter?

Brett Trembly (02:32)
I'm probably mixing up two stories.

There was my son being born, and I'm screaming at opposing counsel on the phone for intentionally not respecting notices of unavailability.

Then there was the time my daughter was in surgery. I was getting a report from my office manager that money wasn't coming in and things were happening.

I emailed the attorney who was my first attorney hire and said, "I'm getting a report that you're not getting work done. What is happening?"

His response was basically, "Don't worry about it."

Tyson Mutrux (03:11)
Yeah.

Brett Trembly (03:12)
I had been told, "Hire someone better than you. More experienced."

So I did that.

I guess this was 2016, so about five years into the firm. I hired my first lawyer and said, "Here's the legal work. You've been practicing almost 12 years. I've only been practicing about seven. You're more experienced than me. You're going to run with this litigation. No problem."

How he was managing the files is one thing, but it turns out he wasn't coming into the office every day.

You might wonder, how did I not know this?

I was in a different part of the building because we'd grown and needed more space. The marketing coordinator and I were in a different office.

My office manager said, "Hey, this guy keeps leaving at two every day. Sometimes he pops back in around 5:30 before I leave, and it's just weird."

It turns out he was behind my back setting up his own law firm and grooming the clients. He was asking them, "Hey, if I were to leave, would you come with me?"

It was all behind my back, and I had given this guy an opportunity.

Those are some of the things we go through as business owners. Sometimes we make really good hires. Sometimes we make a good hire and it's good for a while, then it sours. Sometimes we hit it out of the park.

They're growing pains if you learn from them. If not, it's just chronic pain as a business owner.

Tyson Mutrux (04:44)
Yeah, I think most of us have been through situations where we're dealing with a difficult employee or someone trying to screw you over. I've definitely been in that situation before.

Was that the thing that made you say, "Okay, I've got to change right now?"

Was that the moment, or was there another point where you flipped the switch?

Brett Trembly (05:07)
This is my 15th anniversary of the law firm, so a lot of stories and memories from early on come together.

But the switch for hiring actually happened before that.

I was on the beach with my daughter, but I had my laptop. I was trying to set up another practice group for marijuana law, basically cannabis, because that was the big thing and Florida was going to legalize a certain amount.

I'm thinking, "I could be on the forefront of this."

Then I thought, first of all, I should be with my daughter. Second, I can't even be successful at the main thing I'm trying to do. Why am I trying to do this too?

If you saw someone else trying to pivot, not because they were so successful that they could, but because they couldn't be successful at what they were already doing, you'd say, "Wow, that person does not have it together."

That was my "I need to get it together" moment.

I started hiring, and the firm really took off from there.

Tyson Mutrux (06:16)
Whenever you're in the early days, you're just grinding and grinding. You think, "Okay, I'll just work a little harder."

I remember in the early days of my firm, I would literally carry a box around with the things I needed to do.

I'd carry everything in the box, get everything done that day, and then the box would be empty.

I eventually got to the point where the box was too full. I couldn't get through it all in one day. I couldn't just work my way through it anymore.

Brett Trembly (06:42)
Like a literal cardboard box? What was in there? Papers?

Tyson Mutrux (06:44)
A literal banker's box. I would carry a banker's box home and to work.

I had client files in there. I would keep track of everything that way.

It was crazy. It was a nutty thing to do.

Brett Trembly (06:52)
The only guy I worked for before I started my firm would put that banker's box on a dolly and take it around.

That's a great visualization because that's literally taking our work home with us, right?

Tyson Mutrux (07:14)
A hundred percent. That's what I would do.

Brett Trembly (07:18)
I understand when people hear this and shut off. They're like, "Yeah, but I'm starting a business. There's so much to do."

I get that.

For the first few months, maybe the first year, you're an entrepreneur. You're going to need to live the way most people won't so that eventually you can get to a place where you're enjoying life and your business is providing a lifestyle you otherwise wouldn't have.

Neither you nor I are going to tell somebody, "Show up at 10, leave at five, never work hard, never work more hours."

No. We're grinding and hustling early on out of necessity.

But it doesn't have to become every weekend where you're up until two in the morning trying to get legal work done because you didn't get anything done all week because you were so busy doing consultations, making sales, networking, and everything else.

That's the trap I fell into.

Why was I trying to do all of that myself?

I can't really answer that other than the fear of failure. I was terrified that if I hired someone, I wouldn't be able to pay them, and then the whole world would point at me as if the whole world cared about what I was doing.

We get into our own heads. We all have a little bit of main character syndrome.

We care about what we're doing. We've gone to law school. We want to do well, be a lawyer, and be a big deal.

Very few people say, "Hell no. I'll swing for the fences, and if I miss, I'm on to my next thing."

You've got to get over that shame.

Tyson Mutrux (08:50)
It is a weird thing because you eventually realize it's not going to get better. I can't just work my way out of this thing.

But then you have all this fear.

Do I have enough money to hire someone? Is it actually going to work? How do I know how to hire someone?

You have all these questions going through your mind.

I feel like you've done a really good job of solving the hiring problem. How did you do that?

Was it a painful process? Did you make a lot of mistakes, or did you get lucky early on?

Brett Trembly (09:33)
I had a very good mentor early on who taught me how to do a very in-depth hiring process.

I used to make people click a link and read this long post about how to apply for a job. Buried in the post were very minute details about how to apply the right way.

If you didn't do it, meaning you didn't read every word, my email would automatically delete your application.

You had to email me and say, let's say, "I am your next receptionist," put a dash, then spell your name backward in all caps.

If you didn't do that, you were never considered.

I got some hate mail for that, by the way. People were super pissed.

But the people who did it the right way would get a nine-step quiz.

Question number eight was always something like, record your voice and leave us a voicemail after hours, or for a marketing position, shoot a video and send it to us so I could see your personality.

There were so many things we did throughout that process. It was a lot of work.

That's why I turned over all the legal work. I went knee-deep into building this system.

To me, that was recruiting A-players.

I got really good at hiring awesome people.

I had started a company called The Hiring Pros. I had white papers and everything, and I was going to teach people that system and how to recruit and maintain really high-quality people.

It's like when you walk into a Chick-fil-A.

I told my kids the other day that I actually want to lie, submit a resume, and apply to work at Chick-fil-A because at any Chick-fil-A I go into, people are friendly and they know exactly what they're doing.

That's leadership. It's management.

I want to know what they do, just because I'm trying to learn.

Then I coupled that with offshore hiring and thought, holy cow, there are amazing people who cost a fraction of what the overhead is here.

I put those two things together, and I think that's where the magic happened.

I'm always saying, "Hire. You've got to delegate."

But if every time you hire someone you're thinking, "That's another eight grand a month I've got to come up with," and then another eight grand, and another five or six, that's daunting.

The other trap people fall into is just continuing to add overhead.

You're thinking, "I've got a lot of money coming in, but it's all going out. My quality of life isn't better. I'm working harder than I've ever worked just to provide for other people."

Margins matter, dude.

As small business owners, we've got to try to run on 15 to 20 percent margins so we can actually enjoy a life that's commensurate with the risk we're taking.

We're signing leases. We're hiring people. We're putting our names on the line.

At the end of the day, we should reap some of that reward.

You guys have your masterminds and do a lot of great coaching. Making sure our overhead doesn't climb just as fast as our revenue is so important for small law firm owners.

Tyson Mutrux (13:11)
I'm curious because at one point we were really heavy on remote team members.

We're more stateside nowadays, although we're still remote and have a hybrid model.

When it comes to overseas team members, pricing used to be really cheap. We used to hire through Upwork all the time.

At some point, for certain positions, I felt like the hourly prices for an overseas team member were starting to creep close to what you'd pay an American worker.

Is that still happening?

What does pricing look like for an American team member versus somebody in another country?

Brett Trembly (13:55)
We've always done monthly pricing, so I don't always break it down hourly.

When we started in 2018, it definitely was a lot cheaper than it is today. Inflation hit everywhere. People need more money.

It depends on where you live in the U.S., and it depends on the position.

If you're hiring somebody for 10 hours a week because you need them to do one task, like pack boxes because you're shipping shirts to new clients, or help seasonally with something, there are a lot of reasons to hire domestically.

If you're hiring a paralegal, for example, I don't think it's even approaching the same cost stratosphere.

Tyson Mutrux (14:47)
Right.

Brett Trembly (14:48)
That's a new thing we're launching, by the way. Paralegals.

I'm pretty excited about it.

People have been asking me about that for years, and I've always said no because it needed to be actual attorneys in Latin America.

We hired someone to do the training because we don't want to just sell something we feel is BS.

With admin positions, I still don't think it's anywhere near the same cost as a domestic person.

But I'm not anti-domestic hiring.

Tyson Mutrux (15:17)
No, no.

Brett Trembly (15:20)
I love my team here. It's just about being smart and putting your resources where you need them.

Tyson Mutrux (15:25)
I was more curious about your costs and whether that had affected you much.

It sounds like you answered it well.

I want to hear more about this paralegal thing. I didn't know about it.

When is that launching? People are going to be excited about that. That's awesome.

Brett Trembly (15:43)
Yeah, I know, man.

A name a lot of people would recognize is always saying, "Whoever figures that out is going to be a billionaire."

I don't think it's going to be quite that crazy.

But look at the economics behind the paralegal position.

My law firm has three divisions and three partners. Each runs a pod, as we call it.

Over time, after six or seven years, a paralegal might resign for all the normal reasons people move on in life.

In Miami, we're paying good litigation paralegals $90,000 to $100,000.

Tyson Mutrux (16:27)
For a paralegal?

Brett Trembly (16:29)
For a good one. A litigation paralegal.

Tyson Mutrux (16:32)
Ooh.

Brett Trembly (16:33)
What would you pay?

Tyson Mutrux (16:35)
Middle of Missouri, I'd say $50,000 for a paralegal.

St. Louis is probably $60,000 to $75,000, something like that.

We can hire remotely too, which is nice.

Brett Trembly (16:48)
We're now paying around $33,000 or $34,000.

That's a huge difference.

When you hire domestically, you also have all the plus, plus, plus that comes with it. You're talking about $100,000 or $150,000, and now you're paying around $33,000 all in.

The people we're recruiting are actual lawyers trained in Latin America.

Obviously they're not trained in the U.S. legal system, but it's not that far off. They can already walk the walk and talk the talk. They love legal work.

We hired a longtime paralegal who I think people will recognize when we're ready to announce her. She's building out the training and will be doing the mentoring.

We also have something new we're launching where all of our staffers are being put into masterminds.

They're 15 to 20-person peer-to-peer learning masterminds.

If you're a family law attorney using Clio and you have a staffer through us, we'll put your staffer into a cohort with other staffers working for family law firms using Clio.

It'll be facilitated learning and peer-to-peer learning.

Tyson Mutrux (17:59)
Nice.

Brett Trembly (18:00)
Our field got flooded.

Everybody thought, "Everyone's making money there. Let's go do that."

And that's okay.

Competition pushes you to innovate.

For a long time, we didn't want to get into the training game because every law firm is so specific.

Then it finally dawned on us that we can't train specifically for the Mutrux Law Firm, but we can provide ongoing development, peer-to-peer learning, and general education around things that are coming down the pike.

There's AI.

We'll be able to give our staffers AI exposure that'll help law firm owners without the law firm owners having to do much.

By increasing the value proposition, hopefully there's even more value there.

Tyson Mutrux (18:47)
I love that.

Let me ask you about something.

You spoke in Miami to some of our people at one of our masterminds, and you talked about what the first hire should be.

That's one of the big questions people always ask: "Who should my first hire be?"

Victoria Collier talks about her Core Four. I don't know if she ever talks specifically about who the first hire should be.

That was maybe two or three years ago when you spoke. Has your opinion on that first hire changed since then?

Brett Trembly (19:19)
Dude, it was probably five years ago. That's how fast time goes.

Tyson Mutrux (19:21)
Was it five years ago? Wow.

Brett Trembly (19:23)
It's been a while.

Do you remember who I recommended first?

Tyson Mutrux (19:31)
I don't remember.

I'm going to guess receptionist.

Brett Trembly (19:35)
No, definitely not.

Your first hire should be an executive assistant.

Tyson Mutrux (19:43)
I do remember that now.

And you still think so?

Brett Trembly (19:45)
Yes.

I guess it doesn't really matter what you call them.

If you call them a receptionist but they're doing your email and calendar and saving you time, or you call them an executive assistant or admin assistant and give them some light reception duties, it doesn't matter what you call them.

You're going to need a little bit of everything.

Tyson Mutrux (20:06)
It does matter for pricing. It can affect your rate for sure.

Brett Trembly (20:11)
Especially domestically, right?

But I would try to hire somebody who's really good.

You said earlier, and I say this all the time, you can't work your way out of the ceiling you hit when you're doing everything yourself.

Every hour you spend doing administrative tasks, money is flying out the window. You're costing yourself so much money.

A really good assistant will learn the firm.

They'll do a little bit of email, a little marketing, and a little reception.

Then you'll hire again, and that person will help you vet the next hire.

Next thing you know, that person is your office manager. They know everything about the firm.

I have that exact scenario across from me.

One of my partners is sitting here. His assistant through Get Staffed Up has been with us for six years.

She started as his personal assistant.

She could almost run the firm at this point. She's trained so many different people we've hired because he found a rock star and then gave her what he needed.

He didn't worry about the title or say, "You only answer the phone."

When it's just you, you normally don't have the volume for a dedicated full-time receptionist anyway.

Tyson Mutrux (21:33)
I'd agree with that.

There's a problem you see a lot where people hire someone, don't give them any training, and then get mad when the person doesn't do the job the way they wanted.

If I remember correctly, you have a story about an intake coordinator where you basically handed him the phone without giving him much training.

Then you got frustrated when he didn't handle a call the right way.

Brett Trembly (21:59)
Dude, I'm standing over his shoulder listening and thinking, "I can't believe what he's saying."

Then I'm like, who wants to work for a guy like me?

I would've quit on me.

I'm surprised you remember that story.

We're busy as hell, so we don't hire.

Then we finally decide to hire, and we have to decide who to hire, who to go through, domestic or offshore, whether we want referrals, what we want to pay.

Weeks pass instead of us just making a decision.

Then we finally hire the person, but we're so busy going to court or responding to emails that we don't sit down and train them.

If it were easy, everybody would do it.

I don't have a perfect solution for training other than it's hard at first, and it gets easier.

Eventually, you're no longer the person doing the training.

But those initial hires take time.

The more you record yourself explaining things and can tell someone, "Go back to the recording," the more time you can save.

There are some hacks to get it done.

But there's a lot of the blame game where people say, "You guys found me somebody who sucks."

Maybe.

But maybe you blew it.

I don't mean that from a judgment standpoint because we've all done it.

Tyson Mutrux (23:21)
Is there anything you all do to help with that?

It sounds like you have the peer-to-peer groups, which I think are amazing.

How do you make sure your people are ready when you hand them off to an attorney to start doing the work?

Brett Trembly (23:41)
You think you know they're ready, and sometimes they're not.

That happens.

I wish it was perfect and we could say, "We've figured this thing out. We have perfect humans. In fact, they're robots. They never fail."

But we have a 12-week, systematically designed training program for the first quarter.

There's a lot of mission-specific and soft-skills training happening in the background while they're starting to work for you.

After those 12 weeks, we put them into the peer-to-peer mastermind.

That 12-week program keeps getting better and better.

That's your onboarding.

It should take six to 12 weeks to onboard somebody, and then you should know whether they're going to succeed.

Tyson Mutrux (24:34)
How do you know they're doing a good job?

I've always been curious about that too.

Brett Trembly (24:41)
The more organized the law firm owner is, the easier it is for us to know.

We're still not doing day-to-day oversight of every little task. That kind of oversight isn't cost-efficient.

Tyson Mutrux (24:58)
Sure.

Brett Trembly (24:59)
If you have KPIs, key performance indicators, start with five to seven very simple ones.

"Here are the things I need you to do."

Are those things getting done reliably? That's a good indicator.

Is the person really responsive? That's a good indicator.

Then there are things that are harder to measure.

Does the person give you energy, or do they sap your energy?

If you find yourself not wanting to contact that person and instead just doing things yourself, that's a really good sign.

You have to ask, "Why am I doing that? What's the reason?"

It's your gut telling you this person drains you.

Tyson Mutrux (25:38)
I once had this attorney whose office was right outside mine.

Every time I'd walk by it would be, "Hey, Tyson."

It got to the point where I would put my headphones in and walk as fast as I could, hoping not to be seen.

Brett Trembly (25:56)
Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux (25:58)
It was the worst.

You're right about that.

What's interesting about what you do, and this is going to sound really awful, so I apologize to everybody in advance.

Brett Trembly (26:09)
Can't wait.

Tyson Mutrux (26:10)
The hard thing about an attorney or employee who's in the office is that if I have to fire them for something like that, it's really going to suck.

They might actually be decent at their job, but I just don't like the energy of being around them.

With something like Get Staffed Up, I can kind of trade them in.

Maybe that's not the right way to say it, but if the energy doesn't work, you know what I mean?

Brett Trembly (26:33)
Yeah.

People avoid that conversation and contact their account manager saying, "I'm done with this person," all the time.

We're okay with that.

One, it's part of the service we provide.

Two, if they've only been with you a few weeks, there's no need for an hour-long sit-down where you're telling them how much you care.

It's still transactional at that point.

I don't think I've ever let someone go who had been with me for more than two years where it was like breaking up by text.

There's context for those things.

Tyson Mutrux (27:07)
That's funny.

What do you think is the biggest need law firm owners hire you for?

What's the thing they really need the most help with?

Is it answering phones? Emails?

What are the most-needed positions?

Brett Trembly (27:27)
Our three biggest positions are executive or administrative assistants, intake specialists, and legal assistants.

For executive assistants, it's somebody saying, "Help keep me organized. Answer my emails for me."

I know there are AI tools out there, but it's not the same.

AI will definitely help you cut back on the size of your team, but you still need people who are enhanced by AI.

Tyson Mutrux (27:54)
Let's stay on this topic for a second because this is a little more interesting to me.

Do you really think we're going to need fewer people?

Or do you think we'll just do more with the same number of people?

Those are two different things.

Brett Trembly (28:09)
It depends.

I hate that answer, but it depends.

I was just speaking to somebody at lunch who works with an AI voice solution.

I'm very passionate about intake, by the way. I'll get on my soapbox about intake.

To answer your previous question, executive assistants, intake specialists, and legal assistants are our big three if you follow the 80/20 rule.

There was a big PI firm with 13 people answering the phone.

Tyson Mutrux (28:57)
Like a round-robin kind of thing, or whoever got to it?

Brett Trembly (29:00)
Yeah.

The person I was at lunch with works for an AI company, and she said, "I secret-shopped them. All 13 were horrible."

She wasn't just saying that to sell them something.

So yes, there's going to be some replacement of people.

If you can have one or two intake people running the system backed up by AI, those two people may get as much done as the 13 people.

You'll have fewer people, and the people you do have will get a lot more done.

Tyson Mutrux (29:30)
Here's an interesting question.

Would you rather have a human doing an average job answering the phone, or a voice AI answering the phone?

Brett Trembly (29:44)
I would rather have the best customer experience possible.

Tyson Mutrux (29:49)
Which one do you think gives you that?

The reason I say average is because I think the average firm has an average receptionist.

They're not fantastic. They're just average.

Or you can have voice AI.

Which one is going to give the client the better customer experience?

Brett Trembly (30:07)
As a blanket answer today, I think it's still a human.

But it depends on the person on the other side of the phone.

In a few years, if an 18-year-old calls, they're not going to have the same reaction to an AI person as a 55-year-old.

Tyson Mutrux (30:25)
I agree with that.

It also starts with your marketing and your messaging, right?

What does your website look like? What's your social media like?

You're already targeting a certain person.

You have to target the right person.

Brett Trembly (30:37)
Exactly.

Everybody has a different business model.

Target and Walmart are very different.

Down here, Publix versus Winn-Dixie can be a very different experience.

Being a business law firm, we lean into humans.

If I'm doing volume work like trademarks and my people want quick AI answers because they're quirky entrepreneurs, I could absolutely see AI providing a better, faster experience.

Tyson Mutrux (31:16)
Yeah.

Brett Trembly (31:17)
So the answer is what you said.

It depends on who's on the other side of the phone and the experience you're curating.

I don't think it's one size fits all yet.

I've still never personally had a phone AI interaction that I've been in love with.

In my Cybertruck, which we've talked about a little bit, Grok is phenomenal at recognizing my voice if I'm upset and answering me quickly.

But I haven't had a phone AI interaction that I've loved.

Have you?

Tyson Mutrux (31:45)
I was impressed by one.

I ordered a pizza, and I can't remember which city we were in because we've been in so many cities over the last few years.

I called the pizza place and ordered a pizza.

I was very impressed by it.

But this was in the earlier days of AI, so I think I was more impressed by the fact that I could do it than the actual experience itself.

Brett Trembly (32:10)
Yeah, sure.

Tyson Mutrux (32:13)
Here's another thing that's interesting to me.

Because of Maximum Lawyer, we've had many sponsors over the years.

This isn't a sponsorship plug, but if we put our name next to another brand and a client has an issue with them, we hear about it.

We get messages saying, "Hey, I've had this issue with X. Can you do something about it?"

It's usually a case management system.

I will say this about Get Staffed Up: I don't think I've ever gotten a complaint or had someone reach out to me about Get Staffed Up.

How do you maintain that level of quality control?

Because lawyers like to speak their opinions. They're very opinionated.

That's kind of a nifty trick you've got going on.

Brett Trembly (33:10)
That's one of the nicest compliments I could ever receive, for sure.

We had a period about five years ago where someone we do a lot of work with who coaches lawyers said she'd heard somebody say, "The quality at GSU has gone down."

I'm like, well, that sucks.

That person may have had an interest in saying that about us, but nevertheless, I was very disappointed to hear it.

I thought, "I'm going to go through all our systems and make sure we still have really high-quality staffers."

That's the only time I've ever heard something like that.

Obviously, with the volume we do, there are people it doesn't work out with.

But going back to the hiring system I told you about at the beginning, it was really thorough.

We used that for a lot of years to screen out people we didn't think were up to the quality we wanted to put out.

I know there are a few companies cheaper than us, but dude, we work really hard on the technology, the people, and the treatment behind having a really high-quality company.

Tyson Mutrux (34:36)
Do you still do all those things in the hiring process?

Over the last few years, some of those tactics have been beaten up a little bit.

People post screenshots saying, "Hey, look what they're expecting me to do."

Are you still doing those things?

Brett Trembly (34:49)
We don't do as much.

It's not because they've been beaten up, although you're right. You could blow up on social media as a terrible employer because you asked somebody to do so many steps.

It's more because we've redesigned the software and the system.

This is why scaling and growing any company is tough.

You can't necessarily keep doing the thing that got you there.

Sometimes it still works.

But imagine you're a talented person sitting in Colombia.

We say, "We're ready for you."

Then weeks go by.

"We think we're going to match you with this person."

That doesn't work.

"Okay, we've got you an interview."

It takes forever.

Eventually you're thinking, "Well, this company sucks. They promised me something they didn't fulfill."

We're trying to find people and start them on careers.

We don't do part-time. We're trying to find serious people.

We need to recruit them very close to when the client is ready to hire them.

As we've grown, that's necessitated moving away from such a lengthy process.

Tyson Mutrux (36:07)
You mentioned the three types of people you place for law firm owners.

With AI and everything else going on, if you fast-forward five years, do you think you'll have the same three positions?

Will you have fewer? Different ones? More?

What are your thoughts?

Brett Trembly (36:30)
I love my intake soapbox because I'm passionate about how easy it is to design a really killer intake system.

Most people just flush away their marketing dollars with really bad intake.

They're really hard on their vendors.

"How's my SEO doing? How's my PPC?"

Then they're flubbing it all with really bad intake.

AI software, especially for intake, is going to get really good.

But it's going to break.

It's going to break a lot.

You're going to need an intake manager to make sure the AI isn't blowing your leads for you.

I think intake will still matter, but it'll be more of an intake manager than necessarily an intake specialist.

I also think paralegals are still going to be really important.

But software and AI will help them get more done, which may lessen the amount of legal assistance you need.

There's some really good legal software out there right now.

One of my buddies from law school has really good software, but maybe you have a sponsor in that area, so I won't say it.

Tyson Mutrux (37:45)
You can say it. It's okay.

Brett Trembly (37:46)
It's called SimpleDocs, and they have SimpleAI now.

When you're drafting and reviewing, it's really freaking good.

I think that's going to make everybody more efficient.

Tyson Mutrux (38:00)
Yeah. We don't wall off information like that.

That's not what we're about.

Brett Trembly (38:04)
Yeah, that's fair.

Tyson Mutrux (38:05)
If someone's got a recommendation, let's say it.

We actually built our own case management system, which I'm pretty proud of.

We call it Foxy.

We're not selling it. It's just our own thing.

I'll show you in Miami. It's pretty awesome.

Brett Trembly (38:14)
Dude, I would love to see it.

Part of my lunch conversation today was about my awful experience building software out.

You sign up for software, then spend months and tons of money trying to customize it. You never get anywhere, but you're still under contract.

When you say most of the complaints from your members have been over CRM and case management software, I have the same complaints.

It's tough.

I'd love to see what you custom-built because that's a monster undertaking.

Tyson Mutrux (38:51)
I've said this before.

It is the best case management system on the market.

It is.

We're not selling it.

It is by far the best case management system on the market.

I've been in a position to see all of them. I've seen behind the scenes, the back ends, the front ends, everything.

It's the best on the market. Bar none.

Brett Trembly (39:08)
You're deploying the Cartman strategy, right?

You're locking people out of the amusement park so the line starts building up.

They're banging on the door, and you're saying, "No, no, no. I'm not selling it yet."

I like that.

Tyson Mutrux (39:20)
Becca's going to kill me for saying this.

I don't think I would ever sell it.

We've talked about maybe giving it to members for free in MaxLaw.

But then there's the maintenance cost.

Brett Trembly (39:37)
You've got to support it.

Tyson Mutrux (39:40)
Exactly.

You have to support the whole thing.

You can't just give it to somebody and then when it breaks say, "What are you going to do?"

You have to support it.

We've talked about things like that, but I don't think I want that headache.

I've got this thing that I love. It's great. We get amazing work out of it. We're way more productive.

Beyond that, I don't think I want to do anything with it.

But we'll see.

Brett Trembly (39:58)
Yeah. I'd love to look at it personally.

Tyson Mutrux (40:02)
I'll show you everything.

I'm going to wrap things up because I know you're busy and we're pretty deep into this.

We're going to be in Atlanta October 8th and 9th.

You're one of our premier sponsors, and I really appreciate it.

We've worked with each other for quite a while, and you all have always been great.

I love when we have great sponsors because they take care of our people.

I just want to say thank you.

Brett Trembly (40:29)
Absolutely.

Tyson Mutrux (40:31)
Are you going to be out there yourself, or are you sending a team?

Brett Trembly (40:35)
Definitely the team.

I'm still undecided.

Tyson Mutrux (40:38)
Well, now you have to.

I'm not going to show you the system unless you come out.

I'm not showing you Foxy unless you come to Atlanta.

Brett Trembly (40:42)
That's true. I know. All right.

Tyson Mutrux (40:45)
Although I love Miami. I'd love to come out to Miami.

Maybe I'll fly out to you. We'll see.

Brett Trembly (40:51)
My firm is still in Miami, but I moved to Palm Beach.

I'd love to have some people check out Palm Beach.

It's really nice, man.

Tyson Mutrux (41:01)
Love it, man.

You send me a formal invite and I'll come out there.

I'm not going to invite myself, but you send me an invite and I'll make my way out there.

Anything else?

Did I leave anything out that we should cover?

We've covered a lot of different things, but is there anything else we should have hit?

Brett Trembly (41:15)
No, we covered a lot.

Like you said, we've been longtime sponsors of MaxLaw. We love MaxLawCon and the whole group you guys have curated.

We're excited for October, and we're happy to be involved.

Tyson Mutrux (41:31)
Sweet, man. Appreciate it.

If you don't have your tickets, go to maxlawcon.com.

Thanks, Brett. Appreciate it, man.

Brett Trembly (41:36)
Awesome, Tyson. Thanks, buddy.