Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a lawyer that would like to work on their public speaking skills? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Jim and Tyson are joined by Kerry Barrett, an expert in on-camera media training for Fortune 500 companies. Kerry shares her insights on public speaking and offers tips for lawyers to improve their on-camera skills and connect with potential clients. 

Public speaking can be a very intimidating thing to overcome. For lawyers, public speaking is something that needs to be mastered as there are instances like tv work or in person court hearings and trials that provide the space to speak in front of people. Carrie provides some tips for lawyers to get over this hurdle. One way is to step outside of your comfort zone and find ways to make yourself and your name known to people. Apply to be on a podcast about the legal field or research media opportunities to network and let others know who you are. It is all about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.    

Communicating to people as a lawyer can be a tricky task, especially if someone is not well versed in speaking with clients. One issue Kerry identifies for lawyers is that most speak to clients using legal terms. Clients do not know any legal jargon, so it is important to break down what is being said in simple terms. This also applies to lawyers who are speaking on camera. In this setting, lawyers are performing and not simply delivering information in a courtroom. What is being provided in terms of content needs to be laid out in a way that can be understood easily.

Listen in to learn more from Kerry on public speaking!

Jim's Hack: If you find yourself with a few minutes to spare, just pull out your phone and record a TikTok to see what happens. Get the content out there and then deal with graphics later on.

Kerry’s Tip: When you are on stage or you're in front of a camera, there are two things you always need to have. One is a plan and one is presence. The plan is that you understand your delivery and the presence is what comes into play when all that other stuff goes sideways.

Tyson's Tip: Ted Talk called the 100 Days of Rejection, where this guy puts himself through 100 days of possible moments of rejection from people. It is a great watch for those that struggle talking to people, being on stage or doing videos.

Episode Highlights:

  • 4:19 Advice on teaching public speaking skills
  • 7:09 Discussion on common mistakes lawyers make on television
  • 17:14 How lawyers can build connections with potential clients
  • 20:06 How to use simple language for effective communication

Connect with Kerry:

Resources:

Transcripts: The Most Effective Strategies for On-Camera Presence and Public Speaking Skills with Kerry Barrett

Jim (00:00.91)
Welcome back to the Maximum Warrior Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.429)
and I'm Tyson Mutrix, what's up Jimmy?

Jim (00:07.374)
Tyson, it's funny, I don't think of you as someone recording from the car. I often record from the car, so it's pretty funny to see you pulled over on the side of the road to record this podcast. That's real dedication.

Tyson (00:17.849)
Yeah, yeah, I don't know you remember back in the day though like we had We had multiple where we didn't do video. We just did audio. It's like seven years ago We'd be like driving down the highway doing a podcast Yeah, it's a different world now. It's all that we do video on all these so I have to be stopped but yeah, it's uh, it's a This is different, but I'll tell you the lighting is really good for so I'm it's not too bad pretty good Very good. All right, do we want to?

Jim (00:23.296)
you

Jim (00:29.006)
Yeah.

Jim (00:42.83)
Yeah.

Do you want to introduce your guest?

Tyson (00:46.362)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure Kerry doesn't want to hear us talking about recording seven years ago. But it must go on, absolutely. So Kerry Barrett is the preeminent on -camera media video trainer and creator for Fortune 500 companies. Perfect for me today, sitting in the back of a truck. Founders, executives, and entrepreneurs, she teaches virtual and video presence and on -camera readiness for a broad spectrum of situations ranging from…

Kerry Barrett (00:49.516)
No, I do. The show must go on.

Tyson (01:14.555)
Formal talks, video content and social media and media interviews to everyday sales pitches over Zoom. As an Emmy award -winning network news anchor who overcame a debilitating fear of public speaking, Carrie offers a unique perspective as someone who has 25 years of experience in front of the camera. And we'll get into the rest of it in a little bit, because it's very cool. And maybe I'll get some advice on how I should have set this up a little bit better. But Carrie, welcome to the show.

Kerry Barrett (01:39.948)
Thank you so much for having me. That was a very nice intro. It's almost like I wrote it myself.

Tyson (01:46.523)
Almost like you wrote it yourself, yes.

Jim (01:46.638)
Indeed.

Kerry Barrett (01:48.55)
Thank you. It's great to be here.

Jim (01:50.926)
Kerry, tell us about your debilitating fear of public speaking and how you overcame it.

Kerry Barrett (01:55.884)
Oh my gosh, yeah, I'm not joking. It was like back of the room, puddle of my own vomit. There's a good chance that I might have peed myself and I was definitely passed out. If not, I was hyperventilating into a brown paper bag. And that goes way back. That's back to middle school that I started to struggle with that. And the interesting thing is, and I'll try and make this the bridged version of the story because it can get rather lengthy, but I…

Tyson (02:12.397)
you

Jim (02:18.016)
you

Kerry Barrett (02:24.844)
I started out as a pre -veterinary medicine major in college and organic chem put a fairly quick stop to that. And my enjoyment of partying also put a fairly quick stop to that. And so I took a year and a half off and I had to figure out what it was that I was going to do to make a living, right? And my friends are graduating and I'm still sort of stuck behind and I still hadn't found myself.

So my school, my college, had started a new communications program and it was very broad. It was everything from international business and language to speech pathology. There was some journalism in there, a little bit of marketing PR. And so it was a huge spectrum. And surely I thought there was something in there that I could do to make a living. And so I re -enrolled in the communications program and then I was trying to make up for lost time. The story's getting lengthy. I'm about to wrap up, I promise.

And so I got an internship at a local news station and lo and behold, I loved it. So now I had to figure out how it was that I was going to overcome this fear and not just overcome it, but actually get good enough at it that somebody would pay me to do it and people would actually watch. And that was not.

Tyson (03:26.941)
you

Kerry Barrett (03:48.342)
There was not a moment where that change happened, but it was, I like to call it sort of exposure therapy. I had to do it every day. If I didn't want to do it, you know, I carry him out of a job. And so it was that exposure over time, little bites that helped me overcome that.

Jim (04:03.534)
you

Tyson (04:05.983)
This is a, I'm very excited about this topic. I have several questions that I want to ask you about. Um, so I am, this may be a little odd question, but I've been trying to like teach my kids the importance of public speaking and trying to find ways of teaching them to just have a better presence and just be able to speak to people more clearly and look at them in the eyes. Cause it's these days, everyone's kind of look at their phones. So.

Any advice that you would give my kids, because I think it would probably apply to adults as well, any advice that I could give to my kids on public speaking and doing a better job.

Kerry Barrett (04:45.996)
I mean, anything that I say will be broadly applicable, whether you're a lawyer or executive or whether how old are your kids?

Jim (04:51.278)
you

Tyson (04:52.704)
13, 9, and almost 8.

Kerry Barrett (04:55.936)
Oh my gosh, my kids are exactly the same age. So it also applies to an eight year old. And the interesting thing is, is that kids today, obviously, as you mentioned, have grown up in front of the lens. They're almost too casual about it. Whereas, you know, my age and older tend to be a little too rigid about it. One of the easiest ways to sort of…

Tyson (04:59.009)
well.

Kerry Barrett (05:23.752)
direct your child is to have to practice. Honestly, it's to open their phone and it's to practice. If you have to record on the backside rather than looking at your face over here so they can practice eye contact. My oldest is 13. She's very, very shy. And I say every day, I want you to raise your hand once in school, right? Whether it's to answer a question or ask a question. And the goal there,

Jim (05:43.584)
you

Kerry Barrett (05:51.308)
while it's not applicable to someone who is an adult, is to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. So for an adult, that may be to hop on the phone and create a video or to apply to be on a podcast or to show up on a live stream or to look for media opportunities. And…

It's every single day, but you're right. It's eye contact, it's energy, and it's understanding how to message as well. One more thing, this is a long answer. But if you can get your child, if they do really struggle, getting them into an acting class, or getting them into some sort of performance that has to do, whether it's singing or dance, acting specifically, helps them understand how to deliver, how to hold an audience.

Tyson (06:42.691)
you

Kerry Barrett (06:45.292)
And then additionally, it gives them the skills to deliver that they can use, you know, basically for forever, for their entire life, because they understand no matter how nervous they are, they know how to deliver and they know how to hold an audience.

Jim (06:53.23)
you

Jim (07:01.294)
Speaking of holding an audience, a lot of lawyers would really like to be on local television. What do most lawyers get wrong about being on television or trying to get their stories told?

Tyson (07:06.678)
you

Kerry Barrett (07:10.986)
Legalese. Hands down, it's legalese. I also think, because lawyers have lived in their expertise for so long, they assume that whatever language it is they're using is also applicable to a potential client or an audience watching TV. So having an outsider come in and say, this is too long, this is too…

this is too complex. You can say this in three words rather than six. So do it in three and keep your words short. I don't want anything over three syllables. The other challenge is while many lawyers are, you know, if they are courtroom or trial lawyers, they're exceptional at analytics, data, research. They know how to perform in a courtroom, but they're delivering information. When you are speaking on a stage or you are…

Jim (07:51.406)
you

Kerry Barrett (08:08.502)
you know, getting in front of the camera, it's not just an opportunity to be a human virtual white paper. It's not, it's not, you're not a deliverer of information, you're performing. And so moving from, I'm a deliverer of information and facts and data to a performance mindset is the biggest challenge. Anytime you're in front of an audience, you're a.

Tyson (08:10.887)
you

Tyson (08:16.135)
you

Tyson (08:30.714)
you

Kerry Barrett (08:33.778)
performer and that applies to your local media or your national media outlets as well. One of the easiest ways is to create social media video, cobble together a reel of some sort and start pitching yourself. But you have to know how to perform because it's not always the best mind that gets on TV. It's a person who makes good TV and what makes good TV is somebody who's interesting, somebody who is intriguing and can hold an audience.

Jim (08:49.102)
you

Tyson (09:03.048)
That's so true. I don't know if you all know who Tony Kornheiser is, but he's one of the co -hosts of PTI, and he always talks about on his podcast about like sports. There's a TV show, and that's why things are done a certain way. It's not about the sport, it's about the actual TV show. And so it's about entertaining people, and I think that that's an important part of it.

Kerry Barrett (09:18.986)
Yeah, we entertainment or infotainment is big right now. Like if you go on LinkedIn, you'll see, you'll see sort of stodgy old stoic type, you know, horizontal videos with the wall of books behind them. That stuff doesn't really work anymore. It is, there's a balance, a fine balance between entertaining and being informational or providing education. And you can.

Jim (09:45.536)
you

Kerry Barrett (09:45.676)
even in the legal industry, overlap the two.

Tyson (09:48.552)
Yeah, so Mr. Beast just posted about that the other day, about how they're producing less videos, but they're spending a lot more time on making them entertaining. So I think that's a pretty valuable lesson. So I do maybe have sort of a boring question, though, because Jim and I, we had gone to a couple of conferences, and there was this person that was always there, and his shtick was that he would make it so you would look good on TV. Okay, and it was…

Kerry Barrett (10:17.11)
Mm -hmm.

Tyson (10:18.618)
I will say the there were these before -and -after pictures and they did he made a difference. Okay, he definitely made a difference So are there certain like tips or tricks like like do's and don'ts you should wear this color Don't wear that color like he would take if I remember correctly I think I saw somewhere like he would he took like paper clips and put it behind the guy's suit So it made the suit so it wasn't all bunched up and everything So I just wonder like like how much of that is is important for for video. I like look at this

Kerry Barrett (10:23.628)
Yeah.

Kerry Barrett (10:30.974)
Yes.

Kerry Barrett (10:36.856)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Kerry Barrett (10:45.324)
That's why I have this next to my desk because if I'm wearing something that is, and for those of you listening, I'm showing a claw clip or a banana clip for those of you who are older like myself so that I can actually sort of cinch my jacket or my sweater behind me. So you're right. There are some things that work on TV that are sort of best practices. Something to note though.

Jim (10:55.886)
you

Kerry Barrett (11:13.132)
Just because you love it on yourself in person doesn't mean it's good on TV, right? Black and white are generally not good colors on TV. White because it blows out the iris of the camera and it's very hard for the videographers or robotic cameras even to adjust the iris to account for two people on the set, which is you and whoever the host is.

Jim (11:19.086)
you

Jim (11:36.718)
you

Kerry Barrett (11:39.766)
Black tends to absorb all the light, so you end up looking kind of like a blob sitting there. None of those, neither of those are good looks. So standards, that's okay. I see, and I thought it was gray. So, there you go. Don't wear a hoodie. No, I'm just teasing. Wear a hoodie if it applies to your brand.

Tyson (11:49.744)
as I sit here in all black right now too, so. I got a little gray right here, so it's good.

Jim (11:53.966)
And I go for it. I like hoodies.

Kerry Barrett (12:03.468)
Standard things that are applicable no matter where you are and this sort of applies to the stage as well or any anytime you're in front of a lens, whether it's for media or something else. No small patterns. So no small polka dots or paisley or stripes. For men, that doesn't necessarily apply if you're wearing a tie. Sometimes our ties have those sorts of designs on them. What I would do though is put it in front of a camera before you go on set.

Jim (12:04.512)
you

you

Kerry Barrett (12:32.332)
and see if it more raise, if it dances back and forth. That's, anytime you wear a small pattern, that is a possibility. Aside from they, your clothes stretch and they sort of sit weird and you don't recognize it when you're in person, but on TV you're.

your field of vision is so narrow, the audience's field of vision is so narrow, it's in that little box that every sort of thing that's out of place, flyaway hairs or clothes that don't fit right, they immediately hone right in on them and once they've done that, they're not listening to anything you say, they're focused on that annoying flyaway hair that they just can't, they wanna lick their hand and put it down. So solid colors, brand colors are great. If you are unsure of what to wear, blue,

Jim (13:04.97)
you

Jim (13:17.088)
. . .

Kerry Barrett (13:19.008)
is universally flattering. There is not a shade of blue that doesn't work on everybody. So if you're unsure, you don't have time to prep, wear something that is solid and wear something that is blue. Women can get away with a little more color, right? That's changing even a little bit more right now, but jewel tones look great on women. So like emeralds and ruby and sapphire garnet.

those sorts of colors, rich, saturated color, look great on camera as well. Yeah.

Tyson (13:53.736)
So I have a quick follow -up, Jim. So I noticed that you're wearing some dark glasses. Jim's wearing some dark glasses. Both of those show really well on screen. Is that by choice? Is that by design? Or is that something that's, like, is there something to the glasses as well you should focus on?

Kerry Barrett (14:09.9)
Jim, your glasses. I too am not fashion forward with my glasses. In fact, I've heard that these narrow frames are out right now, but I still like them, meaning they're not, they're not in the.

Jim (14:11.31)
I'm just teasing. No, no, these are, I have the thickest glasses. I've had glasses since second grade, so I'm just lucky to be able to see anything. So no fashion intended.

Kerry Barrett (14:31.404)
can be tricky because if you don't have the right angle of light, you get that reflection or glare. And while that seems like a minor detail, again, with people are so hyper focused on one image in front of them on their screen, they get really distracted by, I can't see his or her eyes. They just look like two white circles there. And the other thing that that does that, they,

Tyson (14:51.14)
you

Kerry Barrett (14:59.524)
gets in the way of is your audience being able to make eye contact with you. If they can't see your eyes, you have lost outside of a smile, probably the most important element of creating a rapport with whomever is watching you. And they won't be able to necessarily recognize what it is that they don't trust.

but it's that they can't look in your eyes. And if you think about the way a news anchor is framed, let's say, I mean, framed on, you know, they're on the desk and they're anchoring the news. If you think about how that's framed, generally it's a fairly tight shot, right? It's sort of like the way that we're all framed now, right? We're close up. We're not far away and you're not seeing our whole body. That's not happenstance. That is a very intentional move by…

Jim (15:24.16)
you

Jim (15:37.77)
Hmm.

Kerry Barrett (15:52.908)
the station, the producers, whomever, to allow the audience to have eye contact, right, virtual eye contact with the anchor. It establishes trust. So if your audience can't see your eyes, it's, yeah, you might as well not even go. So I would say check when you're on set and see if there's reflection in your glasses. And if there is, if you can do without them while you're there, go ahead and take them off.

If you can't, then you're just going to have to navigate your way through that and do the best that you can.

Jim (16:28.526)
I've often heard that the most popular news anchors have really big heads and luckily I have this huge, a huge noggin, right? And so I make, you can't see, but I make all my TikToks, let's see. They're very close, my face is very close. People on the comments are always like, brah, step back. Like, why are you so close to the camera? I don't know, I just like doing it that way. I got into a habit of it. People think it's sort of crazy, but that, yeah. When you're scrolling through it definitely does.

Kerry Barrett (16:51.788)
It makes you stand out. Get out.

Jim (16:57.358)
One of your expertise is helping people connect with an audience. And I was sort of serious about the hoodie. Lawyers don't wear hoodies on videos. And so I try to be real approachable. My clients are immigrants, so English isn't their first language. And I try to do a really good job of speaking in very, very plain English. And I try to talk slowly. But what are other ways that lawyers can build connections with potential clients through video?

Kerry Barrett (17:05.388)
No.

Kerry Barrett (17:24.46)
Absolutely. So we talked a little bit about legalese. I like to say if your audience doesn't understand what it is you're saying, they are out, right? You may catch them for a few seconds, but as soon as they feel stupid listening to you because they don't understand the words that you're using, they're out. And at that point, it is very, very hard to bring them back. So having somebody who's not

Jim (17:43.2)
you

Jim (17:47.854)
you

Kerry Barrett (17:54.252)
in the legal industry, listen to your messaging, listen to what it is that you want to say is key because the outsider is the person who's going to be able to tell you, I don't know what that word means. And you're using, again, an expert language that is unattainable or not known by your audience. So having somebody from the outside sort of watching and listening, that's key. So understanding how to talk to them, meeting your audience where they are. So…

in terms of dress, maybe it means slightly elevated dress than your audience. You don't wanna be super dressed up. And generally speaking, you don't wanna be dressed in a way that's, I don't know another word to use besides beneath, but you don't wanna wear something that looks too casual. Like you're not engaged with the audience. That is variable.

Again, all of this is art. It's not science. It's not data and statistics. It's not one plus one equals two. It's what works for each person, what works for each audience and the format or the medium through which you're talking. So understanding how to overlap your personality with the audience. So understanding the audience demographics and insight onto your audience is also a key way to drive connection because if they don't understand what you're saying and it's specifically for lawyers,

Jim (18:54.894)
you

Jim (19:07.936)
you

Kerry Barrett (19:16.076)
That's one of their biggest challenges. The other thing is to create what I like to call back pocket stories. So stories or analogies that take complex issues or problems within your industry and breaking them down into something that is easily understood by your audience. Hemingway wrote short sentence.

Jim (19:32.)
you

Kerry Barrett (19:45.452)
So I'll give you an example of one, something you shouldn't do. One of the most essential skills you need to get noticed is an exceptional pro in your field of work. Thus boosting your salary is that of communication, right? How would you say that for an audience who you need to have understand you? Communicate better. It's gonna boost your profile and it's gonna boost your salary. So dialing things down and using plain, simple conversational languages.

Jim (19:50.144)
you

Jim (20:08.75)
you

Kerry Barrett (20:13.426)
absolutely key and it's usually one of the things that people who have lived in their area of expertise for a long time and know the language forget.

Tyson (20:22.312)
Okay, was this Hemingway thing a back pocket story? Is that when you had canned ready to go?

Kerry Barrett (20:27.372)
No, I actually I'm working on I'm actually working on a talk. So I pulled together a couple of sentences. He talked about using monosyllabic simple words, right? I talked about don't use any word that's over three syllables. Explain it like you would to your grandmother. You want it brick to forehead obvious. And then one of the other things that he used in his writing style was analogies so that they can sort of take.

unfamiliar concepts or things that are complicated and difficult for them to understand and put it almost in a box that's familiar to them. And when it's familiar to them, then they can, they have a way to label it. They have a way to judge it and they have a way to decide if it's useful to them. You want to at least get your audience there rather than having them shut you out from the get -go.

Jim (20:56.974)
you

Jim (21:14.784)
you

Tyson (21:17.064)
Alright, so I want to ask you you mentioned framing a little bit ago and I think the thing I struggle with maybe the most is on some of the videos is getting the background looking right and is there like some formula like Jim's got a really good background I like his background that he normally records in front of I watch YouTube videos and there's like man that background looks fantastic like is there a formula to this like what is the trick because I Be honest with I can't figure it out. I suck at it and I need to hire someone to do it is what with the problem?

Kerry Barrett (21:25.856)
Yeah.

Jim (21:33.166)
you

Kerry Barrett (21:40.844)
cough

Excuse me for coughing. There's not a formula. And it depends on one person's aesthetic really versus another. But there are some basic principles that will always apply. Number one, you don't want to have your background terribly cluttered. You want it to be visually interesting.

Jim (21:51.168)
you

Jim (22:03.296)
you

Kerry Barrett (22:04.044)
but not so much that people are focused on whatever it is behind you rather than on your face. So for example, if you have a lot going on in the background, in fact, I have a stack of books behind me and I wish it wasn't there, but if you have a lot going on in the background or you have something in the background that is blurry and your audience is gonna be sort of leaning in and squinting their eyes and trying to figure out what the heck that thing is, then it's got to go. I like to take a screenshot.

Jim (22:08.526)
you

Kerry Barrett (22:33.836)
have somebody else look at your background. And the reason that that's important is because you have things in your background that you see in your videos all the time and they've sort of become white noise where someone who doesn't have a familiar sense of your background or hasn't seen it before, hasn't watched a video will notice immediately if something seems out of place. The other thing is that you usually wanna have a little bit of contrast with whatever is going on behind you. So if you have a…

Jim (22:39.584)
you

you

Jim (22:50.318)
you

Kerry Barrett (23:03.532)
light gray wall, maybe you want to wear something bright. If you have a light gray wall behind you, don't wear a light gray shirt because you're going to blend into the background and you want to have a little bit of pop, if you will, especially on TV. The other thing is you want to have a little bit of depth. So it doesn't have to be a ton, but you don't want to have your back up against a white wall, like a foot away from it. That has a sort of a hostage -y feel. So if you're in an area,

Jim (23:32.27)
you

Kerry Barrett (23:33.324)
where you don't have the ability to physically give your shot depth, what I would do is put your back to a corner of your room. So if you've got your corner here, sit in front of it facing away, and then you've given yourself a little bit of depth just by using that geometry of your room, your walls to do that. You wanna make sure that.

Jim (23:40.27)
you

Kerry Barrett (23:59.148)
they're appropriate and that there is, you know, visually that they're aesthetic, but that's a way to give yourself a little bit of depth as well.

Jim (24:07.47)
All right, so Kerry, tell us what is it like to work with you? What is your setup or how can you help? Most of our listeners are law firm owners or people who are thinking about going out on their own. What does it look like to work with Kerry Barrett?

Kerry Barrett (24:22.412)
It depends on what you need and what you want. Generally speaking, I have something I call my Confident on Camera coaching package. It is a three month program. We do a 90 minute diagnostic that involves shooting a video and a lot of questions and a lot of conversation and me asking additional questions. And then we put together something based on that diagnostic, where your skill set is.

to what your needs are and what you would ultimately like to use this new skill for, how you would like to leverage it. If you want to go on the stage and you never have the desire to be in front of the camera, right, while the skills overlap for the two, it is a different skill set. You have a stage, you don't have a stage on camera, you do have a stage in person. You use the skills in a different way, you deploy them. So,

It's a three month program. I also do one -off sessions, intensives, 60 or 90 minute intensives. I have VIP days that are six hours where people can work with me intensely, obviously through that six hours getting whatever they need done, whether it's content creation, whether it's skills, training, et cetera. And then I also do group coaching and I do keynotes and workshops for companies and organizations.

Jim (25:38.222)
you

Tyson (25:46.248)
Love it. That's excellent. Well, we are going to start to wrap things up. I've enjoyed this podcast thoroughly. So really good stuff. But before I do wrap things up, I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. Go to Facebook, search Maximum Lawyer. You'll be able to find us there. There's over 6 ,500 members and we'd love to have you. If you want to join us at one of our quarterly masterminds, you can go to maxlawguild .com. If you're interested in joining the Guild, a lot of great people there. We actually had a video.

Kerry Barrett (25:46.54)
And that's it.

Kerry Barrett (25:54.164)
Thank you.

Tyson (26:16.12)
It's got still we had a I guess it was in Austin last year We did one on videos and how to shoot video that Jim put a lot of work into which was awesome last year So actually it was Scottsdale and I'm getting I am getting him mixed up. Yeah, and that you know Scott's to last year then we did a the Zapathon to and in Austin but anyways you if you want to join us for one of the goes one of those go to max law at guild calm and while you're listening the rest of this episode if you don't mind giving us a five -star review because I guarantee you got something out of this episode because I

Jim (26:27.916)
Scottsdale last year.

Kerry Barrett (26:28.972)
Ha ha.

Jim (26:32.878)
ZAP -a -thon.

Tyson (26:45.464)
Carrie has just she brought the best stuff today. So if you if you don't mind giving us a five -star review We would greatly appreciate it helps spread the love to other lawyers around the country Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Kerry Barrett (26:46.986)
Thank you.

you

Jim (26:56.142)
Well, I agree with one thing you said. For sure, Kerry brought it. I mean, Kerry, sometimes these guests come on and they're like, you can find out my really good stuff behind my paywall, right? And so those are like the worst and those are really hard to interview. But for my hack of the week, I have a new habit, Tyson. You're going to be very happy to hear about this. So I find myself sort of frustrated sometimes waiting on other people, waiting for my wife to come out, waiting for my kid to go to school, all that stuff.

Tyson (27:09.492)
Oh boy, am I? I don't know. We'll see.

Kerry Barrett (27:15.692)
Thank you.

Jim (27:23.438)
And I'll be out in the front yard getting ready to get in the car and do you know what I do instead of sitting in the car being mad I make a tick -tock. Yeah Yeah, so so if you find yourself just do it for over the next week If you find yourself with three to four minutes waiting on somebody else just pull out your phone Don't worry about the background just do a tick -tock and just see what happens people are getting way too rigid way too Oh, it's got to be perfect Just get the content out there and then deal with graphics and shit like that later

Tyson (27:30.692)
Oh, okay, very good.

Kerry Barrett (27:31.602)
Thanks.

Kerry Barrett (27:44.46)
you

Tyson (27:53.128)
Yeah, Jim is one of the most impatient people I've ever met. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna give you some crap I'm gonna pull pull the curtain back a little bit Jim at the end of this I guarantee Carrie at the end of this he will buy it I'll see you later. He hangs up right away. He's out. He's gone. There's no chit chat. He's done It's yeah, that's right. He's gone. But anyways Carrie we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack to all of our listeners. Do you have one for us?

Kerry Barrett (27:55.852)
Hahaha.

Jim (28:04.43)
No.

Kerry Barrett (28:05.15)
He's out. Leaving dust in his trail.

Kerry Barrett (28:19.724)
I was gonna mention moving into the performance mindset, but I realized that I gave that away in the middle of the podcast already. So I'm gonna move on to another one, which is when you are on stage or you're in front of a camera, there's two things you always need to have. One is a plan and one is presence. The plan is you understand your delivery, you know exactly what it is that you're delivering and you know to whom you are delivering it.

Tyson (28:31.788)
you

Kerry Barrett (28:40.684)
The second, the presence is what comes into play when all that other stuff goes sideways. When you forget where you are or you forget what you're saying or something goes wrong technically, then you have the presence to be able to carry the show, right? The show must go on. Standard show business fare. So plan and presence. Two things you have to have any time you get in front of the lens and any time you step on the stage.

Jim (28:48.594)
you

Jim (29:00.494)
Thank you.

Tyson (29:05.935)
great advice. I'm gonna teach my kids that when I get home. So I hope I have not given this as a tip. If so, it's still worth it with today's episode. So there's a TED Talk. It's called the 100 Days of Rejection. 100 Days of Rejection. So if you do struggle talking to people or being on stage or doing videos, check out 100 Days of Rejection. And it's this guy that put himself through 100 days. He just made up things like…

I've got to go ask someone for $100 today. Like things like that where he, I've got to go ask for a free coffee. So he would go to the coffee shop, hey, do you might give him this to me for free? And it taught him that like, rejection's fine. Like nothing bad ever happened to him during this. And cause he really, really struggled with it. And so I thought it was, it's a really cool Ted Talk. So it would, I think it would really help everyone when it comes to sales, you know, talking to clients, but talking to juries.

Kerry Barrett (29:50.188)
you

Tyson (29:59.695)
shooting videos, whatever it may be. So check it out. But Carrie, thank you so much. Just a great episode. Really, really love all the… You know what you're talking about. So really appreciate all the knowledge that you shared.

Kerry Barrett (30:13.292)
I appreciate you having me on, thank you. You got it.

Jim (30:15.726)
Thanks, Kerry.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is finding it difficult to manage finances? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Jim and Tyson delve into financial management within law firms.

Many law firm owners struggle with financial management, especially when it comes to paying themselves a salary. Jim and Tyson share the importance of paying yourself as a law firm owner. There is discipline involved when establishing how much money you receive as an owner. Many law firm owners feel they can take however much they want because they are in charge and bring in clients. But, this mentality is how lawyers end up with a struggling business, so it is important to determine and maintain a balance.

Jim and Tyson discuss the emotional and psychological challenges law firm owners face when it comes to handling finances. It is so easy to get lost in the amount of money that starts to come in when things get busy and more staff are hired. It is important to maintain good financial habits to ensure not only you as the owner are given a decent wage, but your employees and all necessary expenses are paid. Hiring a good accountant or bookkeeper for a firm is key to ensuring nothing is out of the ordinary.

Take a listen to learn more about responsible financial management!

Jim's Hack: Download the ChatGPT Apple iPhone app and just talk to it. You can ask it all types of questions and it gets better each day.

Tyson's Tip: Challenge people to not drink for 30 days and see how it makes you feel.

Episode Highlights:

  • 1:38 The importance of paying yourself a salary 
  • 15:20 The psychological barriers associated with financial management
  • 18:13 The importance of reflecting on financial matters

Resources:

Transcripts: How Do You Pay Yourself?

Jim (00:01.198)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.677)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up Jimbo?

Jim (00:08.27)
Well, this is take two. We had a little bit of a fiasco earlier trying to use Riverside, which usually is very, very stable, but I'm glad that we were able to reconnect and get this thing going.

Tyson (00:19.557)
Yeah, for anyone using Riverside, you know it's a really good platform. For some reason, Jim's side would not record, which was weird. But we figured it out. We're good to go. And I liked your intro on that one too. You did the full name instead of just Jim Hacking. James Oliver Hacking the third. And I even did my full name, but that's OK. How you doing, man?

Jim (00:46.254)
We'll save it for next time.

Tyson (00:47.941)
We'll save it for next time. You doing all right?

Jim (00:50.894)
You sound very chill. What's going on?

Tyson (00:53.605)
I don't know. I am chill. I just, I got my workout in this morning, you know. I don't know. Anytime I get my workout in, you know how the feeling is. You're restless if you don't get the workout in. Got it in, felt good. So I'm flying to Vegas. Gonna see Jason tomorrow. This is gonna be fun.

Jim (01:09.422)
And we're both.

Yeah, I was just going to say we're both traveling today. So I'm off to Florida. You're off to Las Vegas. Is Becca going to be with you?

Tyson (01:18.629)
She'll be out there as well. She's already out there now. I think, well, I guess it's 8 .30 that time. I don't know what time she arrives, but she's scouting places for the Guild Mastermind when we go to Vegas. So she's multi -purposing. Yeah, absolutely. Pretty cool. So we're both going to go to Jason Selk's event, which is going be a lot of fun, I think. It'll be a lot of fun. You were going to go, but you're doing other things. So.

Jim (01:30.67)
Nice. Oh good, so she made the most of it.

Jim (01:44.302)
I already had this trip planned when he announced the dates. That was the big problem. And we'd already rented a house on the beach. So I'm not that, I'm not that disappointed.

Tyson (01:53.317)
No, not at night. I get it. I get it. But you had an idea for a topic today. And so go ahead and introduce it. I think it's an interesting question.

Jim (02:03.982)
I'm actually pretty excited about it and it struck me because like so many members of Maximum Lawyer, I'm reading Buy Back Your Time and it's really a terrific book and it's not going to be my hack of the week, but it is a terrific book. And in there, there's a concept, he says something that you say often and it's so funny. Sometimes you need to hear things several different times before it really sinks in, but…

Many times when you and I start a hot seat and people complain slash alleged slash claim that they can't hire anybody. Um, your, your go -to requests and focus is usually on, uh, how they are running their payments to themselves. In other words, are they, are they starving their law firms from the cash that they need in order to grow? And so.

hearing that from someone other than you for a different time, it just stuck with me and I thought it'd be a good topic for us to cover because you are very strong on this topic.

Tyson (03:11.493)
Yeah, so what's the first question I always ask or I usually ask? What's that first question I always ask? Yeah, so like, do you pay yourself a salary? Because, and I've been thinking about this since you told me the topic. And I was like, where does this come from? And I don't think it's as simple as, oh, we're not taught this in law school. I think it comes from early on when you start your law firm and…

Jim (03:16.526)
How do you pay yourself?

Tyson (03:38.693)
The mistake that I think a lot of people make is they just say, OK, case comes in, I'll pay myself a portion of that case. Case comes in, I'll pay myself a portion of that case. And as you start to scale, or you try to scale, you realize how unsustainable that absolutely is. Because early on, it's a couple of cases at a time, right? But then,

Ultimately, it becomes quite a few cases. And if you took a portion of every single case, yeah, personally, you're going to make a bunch of money, but you're going to strangle your firm. All those cases will come in. You'll never get those cases done because you don't have enough people to work on the cases. And then you're going to have unhappy clients. It's going to snowball. You're going to get into that gridlock that we talked about.

And it all stems from the way you were handling money from the beginning. And if you could tweak that and just a little bit by giving yourself a salary, that thing, I think that one thing alone could solve at least half the problems.

Jim (04:40.91)
Well, I'm going to go a little bit further than that. And I think that people do oftentimes view their law firms as a cash machine and that they can just sort of shake some money out of it when they feel like it or when they need it. I don't know that they, and this is something that I certainly have struggled with is the discipline to, you know, the, the, the reason I think you're saying that you should pay a salary is that sort of set, you sort of live within your means. And when you think that you've got all this money coming in, it just becomes really easy to spend.

And so I think that's, that's one piece of it. And I was thinking about it, you know, so much of what we talk about when it comes to owning a law firm is a blessing and a curse, a strength and a weakness is, you know, if you've been working for someone and being paid a salary for a long time, then you have to live within the money that you make. Right. So the blessing and the curse is that when you are then your own boss, you get to decide how much you get paid. You get to decide when you get paid.

And it's much more fluid and there's not anyone really telling you no, right? And so one question I've been asking a lot of people lately is who tells you no, but I think it feeds right into this because when we don't have a check or balance and we don't have scrutiny and we don't have boundaries that people can get in trouble, especially when it comes to quarterly taxes. So, and then, and then then it becomes this vicious cycle where you're just sort of.

robbing Peter to pay Paul and moving money around and you don't have the right amount of money in accounts. You're not setting aside money for taxes or things like that. So this can get really, really sticky.

Tyson (06:15.429)
Yeah, and we haven't even touched on profit first or anything like that. I do think if we start with the basics, like the money management stuff, I think it would be really helpful. You touched on something that is really, really important. It's that, especially when it comes to small firms and solos, it's the connection, such a tight connection between your personal income and the firm income.

and you've really got to take care of the home front and make sure that everything is solid there. Because if you don't, you are going to be robbing Peter Depey Paul because you're going to be robbing it from the firm. So you're going to be taking too much out of it, which is really going to be that stranglehold. So I think that that's a really important point that if things are not okay at home, it's going to have an effect on.

on your firm because you're going to, to support your livelihood, you're gonna have to suck more money out of the firm, which then means you're not gonna be able to pay people to help you scale the firm, which means you're gonna ultimately just, you're gonna plateau. You're not gonna have, you're not gonna keep growing because it's impossible for you to grow at that point because you don't have enough cash to support it.

Jim (07:35.118)
Yeah. And in my mind, I'm picturing the end of Star Wars, A New Hope, when Luke knew he had to drop that bomb down the hole. And I say that because I want people to hold steady on taking out that money early, because you might think to yourself, oh, I've arrived. I can now take out the money. I can now spend the money like I want. But if you can hold off and use that money to leverage yourself and to, as the author says, buy yourself more time or buy employees to do more work,

You're actually going to make more money the longer you wait to take the money out of your firm, if that makes sense.

Tyson (08:10.757)
Yeah, if you're going to be aggressive with the money, which I'm okay with if you want to be aggressive with the money.

Because the return, you can get massive return to be aggressive. Be aggressive by investing in the firm as opposed to investing in yourself personally. So consider lowering your salary, taking draws based upon performance. So quarterly draws based upon performance, based upon certain percentages that you have in place, stick to those percentages. And then if you do that and you can take that money that you're leaving in the firm, you can use it to…

hire or buy equipment if you need equipment because that is something that you're going to have to do is buy computers and all that and pay for software. But then also be aggressive with hiring. If you came to me and you say, hey, I'm sort of a cash crunch because I hire too aggressively. OK, it's a fairly easy fix. Is it a fun fix? No, but it's a fairly easy fix. But if you tell me, hey, I'm in a cash crunch because I've sucked all the money out of the business, well.

All right, now you're in a pickle. And that is a… It's harder to get out of that pickle than it is if you bought too much equipment or if you hired too many people. Those are things that you can solve fairly easily. Now, is it fun fixes? Again, no, but it's easier to fix than if you're sucking all the money out of it.

Jim (09:37.102)
I wasn't just blowing smoke earlier. I really do think you're good at sort of spotting this sort of faster than I do. Um, and I'm wondering what are the, what are the signs or symptoms that you see that make you ask that question? Cause you usually shift to that pretty darn quickly. And, and I'm just wondering maybe may why is that? Um, and B what are the things that you sort of set you off thinking about that when you're talking to someone?

Tyson (10:05.925)
That's an interesting question. The easiest one is anytime they start to talk about cash crunch in any way, or if they mention anything about a roller coaster when it comes to cash flow, I'd say probably the number one indicator would be they talk about cash flow being a roller coaster. And that's almost a telltale sign of, not everybody, but with injury firms, it can be a little bit different. But…

with many firms, if you're a family law firm and you're telling me you're having a cash crunch, that means you're sucking too much money out of it because if you have like a roller coaster, there's no reason for that. There's some sort of mishandling of how you're dealing with your money. Either you're not sending invoices out timely or…

Or it could be a compound of all these things where you're not sending invoices out timely. And then you get around to sending all of them at one time. And then you're so behind on all your personal bills that you suck all the money out of the business. And then you got to, it's just your keep, you keep repeating it. But it's anytime that they really get into cash crunch, I don't have enough money to hire. It's a roller coaster when it comes to cash flow.

Those are usually any variation of those is usually where I want to hone in on that part of it to see if maybe there's something else going on. And I'll be honest with you, I don't think everyone is honest with us whenever I ask them those questions because it's just not something that you want to advertise to the world. But they know. And asking the question alone is enough for them to realize, OK, I've got to figure some of this stuff out. I need to start. All right.

Jim (11:36.908)
Ha!

Tyson (11:52.165)
pay myself a salary, set aside money for certain things, put them into certain buckets. If you use the profit first method, you know what I'm talking about. Even if you're not like, I think Susie Orman, I think is that she's like that financial guru where she talks about putting money in jars. If you understand that concept, that's essentially what you're doing whenever Jim was talking about setting aside money for taxes is you put money in jars, quote unquote jars, but they're really bank accounts to set aside that money for certain things. Set aside money for…

quarterly bonuses or for bonuses, set aside money for draws. So you're putting all this money in buckets. So it comes into that main bucket, the big bucket, your operating account, and then you disperse it from there into other buckets. That way, you know exactly how much money you have to spend on those certain things. So you can kind of go crazy with that. But for starters, though, if you are having some of those problems where you're having that roller coaster of cash flow,

If you feel like you have a cash crunch, if you can't hire, those are pretty good signs that maybe you're paying yourself too high of a salary or you're taking too big of draws or you really have no system at all.

Jim (13:04.558)
I think another aspect of this too is I'm surprised by how often we talk to people and we ask them, what's your average case value? How many cases are you signing up a month? How many cases do you have the capacity to sign up every month? And it's sort of dough in the headlights where they haven't really spent much time planning the outcome that they wish to achieve. So I think that if you're, if you're just wandering around aimlessly hoping to get more cases, like that's pretty.

vague and nonspecific. If you can drill down and say, this is what we need for me to be able to pay all of our bills, to pay our team members and to pay me a proper salary, leaving enough money in the firm for a rainy day. I think that part of this too is that people just aren't focused on signing up enough cases.

Tyson (13:55.973)
Yeah, and there is so much wrapped up in that. I 100 % agree with you. So, and I'm going to just to start with the stuff about the average fee and all the kind of how long a case takes. If you think that that is a very stressful thing to do, just do a really simple one that's not going to be, you know, it's not going to be a perfect way of doing it. Just take your last 10 cases, determine how long it took each of those cases to take.

So figure out an average of those, just write it down in days. I'm just going to give you a super simple way of doing it. So 10 cases, right? How much did you make on each of those 10 cases? And I'm talking about resolved cases. Your last 10 resolved cases. So from start to finish, how long did those take in days? And then how much did you make on each of those cases? That's going to give you some basics, just starting point on how to get a rough estimate as to what a case is worth and how long it takes.

What that will allow you to do alone is predict how much you're going to make in the future. And with what Jim, what you're talking about is, OK, so I know that a case is worth $5 ,000. And I'm just making up numbers. So a case is worth $5 ,000. And I know it takes 100 days to complete. So I know that, and maybe you don't get paid all up front, right? So you're getting paid over time. I know that if I only sign up two cases this month,

that in a hundred days, I'm gonna have an issue, right? So you need to figure out, and maybe it's an issue where you're scaling, and so you're gonna have to figure out financing in a hundred days because you had a slow month, okay? Fine, whatever it is, but if you're focusing on those things and figuring out how many cases you're signing, how many calls are coming in, how long a case takes, what is it worth to the firm?

those basic things will allow you to plan and then it'll allow you to avoid a lot of those cash crunches that we're talking about because you can predict the future based on your past.

Jim (15:55.918)
One other thing that I think is really important is sort of the secretive nature of this. A lot of times, like you said, people don't want to admit it. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want to look at it. And so I think that some people sort of suffer this in real silence, especially if they're trying to put on a brave face for a team that they have, you know? So there's no shame in any of this. It's all about trying to get better. But I think that too often people…

do this all on their own and they keep thinking that right around the bend, something's going to get better instead of being more deliberate about it.

Tyson (16:31.749)
Yeah, and I think you have more of a insight as to like the human mind than I do because it just, you know, what you've gone through and you've done a lot of soul searching and digging on this, like, why? Is it ego? Is it something else? Is it shame? Is it fear? What do you think?

Jim (16:53.806)
I think it can be all those things. I think number one, it's probably oftentimes a habit. Um, just bad habits develop, you know, you start that, you know, when you, when you start that firm for the first year and a half, you sort of have to live like that. You sort of have to live in that era of, you know, Oh boy, we got a new case and now I can pay some bills. Right. So that that's just by definition, but you have to sort of mature your way out of there. You have to sort of grow out of there.

And as always, you got to be beginning with the end in mind. And so if you allow yourself to continue those habits, after you have more responsibility on the financial side, more obligations, more people relying on you, that can really, really be dangerous. And I think that's exactly what we're talking about. It's that they, they haven't grown past that stage of just shaking the cushions and seeing what change falls out.

Tyson (17:46.181)
Yeah, I can't remember how Alex Hormozi puts it. I saw him talking about this the other day. And he talks about it quite a bit, is where if you don't learn the lesson, and if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, and you don't learn the lesson, you are going to lose, ultimately, you're going to lose to the people that are able to learn those lessons and move on from them. So.

Hopefully you can take some of these things that you're learning today and you can say, okay, I'm gonna learn from my past. I'm gonna reach out to someone. I'm gonna figure this out, whether it's you get a bookkeeper, an accountant, whatever it may be, someone to help you sort out some of this stuff. I think that it's gonna allow you to grow in ways that you probably can't even see yet.

Jim (18:30.35)
Well, that was going to be my hack of the week to find one person to be honest about your finances with. It doesn't have to be your spouse. Probably should be your spouse, but it doesn't have to be your spouse. Might be your therapist, might be an accountant, might be a bookkeeper, but don't, don't rely on your own misguided or twisted thinking when it comes to money. Um, when it comes to, uh, balancing the books and, and, you know, structuring things properly.

Um, cause it can really, it can really mess up everything and it can really serve as a threat to you and to your firm.

Tyson (19:04.101)
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to hide it from your accountant. That's one person. But I mean, I guess you could. It'd be tough.

Jim (19:10.734)
Well, well, I mean, I talked to I talked to a lawyer this year who has a criminal defense practice. It's a largely cash practice. And I think that that person would tell you they're not honest at all with their CPA or their bookkeeper.

Tyson (19:24.965)
I don't know how you're able to do that, but I guess, yeah, that's a, well, I guess if it's cash business and you're not, okay, well, that makes sense. I guess that's an easy way of doing it, but yeah, don't do that, don't do that. All right, Jimbo, anything else? I'll give you final words on this. Anything else you wanna add?

Jim (19:31.31)
Right.

Jim (19:43.31)
Well, I think that we beat ourselves up a lot over different things and I think it's easy to be hard on ourselves. But this is something, you know, I've heard so many lawyers say, I went to law school so I didn't have to learn math. And that's something I used to say, or I don't like to look at my numbers. Well, your numbers are there whether you're looking at them or not. So why not shed a little sunlight on it, spend a little time reflecting on it, like during the day?

So it's not the thing that wakes you up at three in the morning sweating and worried. So if you're not dealing with it one way, you're going to deal with it another way. And that's, that's true financially. It's true psychologically. It's true emotionally, um, all those different ways. So I would say, don't let this be something that sort of haunts you instead. See if it's something that you can turn around.

Tyson (20:32.005)
I like it. Very good. All right, so I'm going to wrap things up before I do. Jim, you might have to come up with a new hack of the week, but it's OK. Or you can use the same one. But I want to remind everyone, join us in the big Facebook group, search Maximum Lawyer, and you should be able to find us there. Just a lot of great information always there being shared on a daily basis. If you want to join us in the guild and be able to join us in Vegas and Scottsdale and all the amazing places that we go to, go to MaxLawGild .com.

Jim (20:39.98)
Mm -hmm.

Tyson (21:01.957)
and join us in the guild and If you've gotten something from this episode or any of the past episode We'd love it if you give us a five -star review that would be we would really appreciate spread the love to other lawyers that need some help Jimmy hack of the week

Jim (21:16.878)
So you'll be very proud of me. A couple of weeks ago I put on Facebook, I, I, uh, when we, when we switched over to Salesforce, we were able to combine our reporting into one app. So now I have a Salesforce app that shows me intake stuff and operation. I can run all my reports on there. So I had extra space on my, on my home screen. I put a picture of my home screen and some people said I should organize my Kindle, Goodreads, Audible and Libby app into one. So that freed up even more space. So I had some space and I asked friends,

what apps I should add. And somebody suggested the chat GPT Apple iPhone app in that you can actually just talk to it. So now I have a new friend on chat GPT and you can pick which voice you want to respond. It doesn't do like current stuff right away, but if you want to ask it lots of different things, it's getting better and better all the time. So I'm sort of having fun with it.

Tyson (21:57.317)
That's pretty good.

Tyson (22:12.005)
Dude, it's a cool, it is really, it's weird. The kids love it whenever I talk to Chad GPT. It is a, because you, it does things like ums and, you know, mine's a female voice. It's like the, whatever the default is. And she'll go, or it will go, well, Tyson. And like, it's like, it is so bizarre, because I know I'm talking to a computer and it's wild, but yeah.

I think it's really good though. You're right though, because I've asked it to give me hours of restaurants and things like that. It wasn't able to access that. But yeah, I like it. Very good. All right. So my tip of the week is, all right, so I'm going to read a post that I saw on X. And it says, why do all the zero alcohol people constantly talk about not having a hangover anymore?

I have a drink or two every day, but I can't remember the last time I got blasted so bad I had a hangover. Alcohol isn't the issue, extremism is. And I saw much of the comments and it was very negative towards people that don't drink. And I was really kind of taken aback. And there's a few people that say, one, this was a very judgy post, by the way, for people that say they just don't want to drink. But then there was a lot of judgment towards people that don't drink in the…

comments, and I thought it was kind of odd. So here's my tip. If this is your perspective, I challenge you to just try it. Try not to drink for a little bit. Just give yourself a 30 -day break and see if you benefit from it. And if so, great. You can do it some more. And if not, keep doing what you're doing. I have no judgment. I post in that. I mean, I have an occasional drink, but I can tell you I usually regret it the day after because I just feel crappy. But I used to…

I talked about a lot in the past where I got a lot of bourbon, I still own a lot of bourbon, I would have a drink or two a day and didn't think anything of it. I can tell you, significant difference in between a lot of things when it comes to my health when it comes to drinking versus not drinking. This is talking towards a very specific audience today, Jim, but that's my tip of the week. If that's sort of your response, if you kind of sided with the person that posted that, just my challenge to you is to give it 30 days, see what you think.

Jim (24:36.846)
Most things on Twitter are pretty negative these days, so I'm not surprised that the comments sort of turned vitriolic right away. I'll be interested to see if we get any comments to your tip of the week.

Tyson (24:46.949)
Yeah, we shall see. But thanks everybody for listening and have a great day. Jimbo, safe travels. See you, dude.

Jim (24:55.31)
See you buddy.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this podcast episode, Tyson tackles the sensitive topic of employee termination. His tips include: acting promptly, communicating directly and respectfully, and having a termination plan, particularly for remote workers. 

Some of the points Tyson dive deeper in this episode is to avoid prolonging discussions during the termination meeting, being objective, and not disparaging the employee post-termination. You could also offer support for the employee's transition and being transparent with the team are also highlighted. 

It’s the leader's responsibility to make tough decisions for the firm's health which includes the tasks of parting with employees. But hopefully, these shared tips will make things a little easier. Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

  • 01:31 Making the decision to part with an employee
  • 03:41 The preferred method of being direct and respectful when parting with an employee
  • 06:38 The importance of being open with the team about a termination
  • 07:33 Considering offering help to the terminated employee
  • 10:05 The necessity of seeking legal counsel and support

Resources:

Transcripts: How to Part with an Employee

Tyson (00:01.422)
Hey everyone, Tyson here with another Saturday episode and today I'm gonna talk about a tough one, but it's one that we're all gonna have to face at some point if we have a practice that we plan on growing. Part of growth is change, okay? And sometimes that means that you have to part with employees. So we're gonna talk about that today. I'm gonna give my advice on…

what to do if you've got to let an employee go. Before I do, I do want to remind everybody that if you want to get stage one of maximum lawyer and minimum time, just text stage one to 314 -501 -9260. 314 -501 -9260. Even if you don't want stage one, if you just want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you or if you have any…

tips or any type of topic you want me to cover on the show, I'm happy to discuss it. But, all right, so I guess it wasn't this week, it was last week. We had to actually act pretty quickly and terminate an employee. And it is probably the least favorite thing that I do as an employer, as an owner. It's awful. But I want to talk about today just because it's kind of raw.

And I want to give you my perspective. You're going to want to make sure you speak to an employment lawyer before you take any actions. You want to make sure you've covered all your bases. Even states that you're an at -will state, make sure you take precautions and make sure you get the proper insurance. I would recommend that as well. So let me give you my perspective. Let me give you a few tips on…

What to do if you've got to fire an employee. And the first one is one you're gonna hear from just about everybody. And it's interesting because you do get some rumblings of, you know, give people the chance to kind of redeem themselves. You hear that sort of talk, everyone smiling. And I think that that's bad advice. And I don't know who said it, but I've heard the advice that the first time you think about the f -

Tyson (02:32.014)
about firing an employee is probably when you should do it. And I'm not all the way on that side of things, but I will say that when you've made the decision, do it right away. This is something where we made the decision on a Wednesday, and I wanted to do it on a Wednesday because of some timing issues with the leadership team.

We had to do it the next morning, but we did it first thing the next morning. And by first thing, I mean the moment.

that we could, we did. So it was bright and early, first thing, we did it. And so that's something where, I just, out of respect, what's the point of, there's a few reasons for that, really. Out of respect for the employee, that's a major part of this, is what's the point of having them hang around when you know that you're gonna get rid of them? I mean, that's…

It's not fair to them, it's not fair to you, it's not fair to the rest of the team. That's the other part of this too is how is that fair to the rest of your team where you've got someone that they're relying on that is not gonna be there, okay? And is not gonna be there in the coming hours or days or weeks. They need to be able to move on, your team needs to be able to move on and know that that employee's not gonna be there, so.

And I am sure there's exceptions to everything I'm gonna tell you. And that's fine, not everything that I'm gonna tell you is gonna be, you know, none of these are absolutes. But the next thing is, is when you actually make the decision, my preferred method is, get straight to the point, okay? If you've ever seen Moneyball, Moneyball is a really good, it's a really good way of doing it. I'll be honest with you. I've done it multiple ways and, um.

Tyson (04:34.606)
My way is pretty quick. Essentially, whenever it happens, when we call them in, I say, such and such, just to let you know, this is gonna be your last day here. And I thank them for the work that they've done. I'm not accusatory at all, that's another one of my tips. There's no point in being accusatory, there's no point in getting into explanations. If you're gonna offer a severance,

have all that drawn up, give it to them, say we want you to review this and take it with you, let us know what you want to do with it. You have a right to consult with a lawyer, whatever your state is. Obviously you're gonna want to make sure you follow that advice too, but there is no point in having some long drawn out discussion when you do this. There's just not. If a discussion needs to be had later about something like the severance, you can do that later.

but they're not gonna make any wise decisions in the heat of this moment and neither are you. Their emotions are gonna be high, your emotions might be high, hopefully not. Hopefully by the time you've gotten to this point where you've been able to think this through and you're not emotional about it. And I don't wanna say you need to be disengaged, but you kinda do, where you go into it and…

You gotta be very objective. Go into it, you've made the decision, let them know about it, and move on from there. So those are a couple of my tips whenever you're actually doing it. Afterwards, I do think it's important that you're open with the team about it, you address it with the team.

Letting it just kind of linger is a bad idea because people start to draw their own conclusions and you don't want them to be able to do that. So you go in, don't talk bad about an employee that you just let go. Just let them know they're no longer with the firm. If you need to give a brief explanation, do that. Do it without talking badly about the employee and move on from there. Something I did, I did leave out and I want to make sure I do.

Tyson (06:59.502)
bring this up. And I do think that this helps quite a bit. When you do it, I think it's important to say to the employee that you're letting go, hey, we're happy to help you transition into your new role at another company. We're happy to help you in any way we can. Now, that's gonna depend on the situation. If it's something where it was very contentious, you're probably not gonna wanna do that. But if it's a situation where it's not super contentious, maybe you terminated them for…

Maybe it's job performance. You're not really mad at the employee. They're just not great at their job. That's a situation where, okay, maybe you're willing to let them know, hey, we're happy to help you transition into your new role at another company as best we can. Now, if it's something where they're stealing from your firm or something like that, you're obviously not gonna do that. So this is one of those where it's not an absolute. It's just something to consider.

that maybe can help you in this situation, because this is not gonna be easy. I don't, like I said, I don't like doing it. You just gotta do it, right? I'm gonna give some credit to Jay Ruane on this, because I think about, anytime I have to do this, I do think about something, some advice he gives. He says, look at a picture of your family. And…

you're doing this because that's the best thing for your family. It really is. Where I'm making a tough decision, but I'm making the tough decision because that's what's best for this firm. That's what's best for my family. And that's true. It really is. That's why you're doing it. You're doing it for all the right reasons. And you gotta remember that. And you gotta remember also, you're not alone in this. It's a tough thing, but…

We all have to do that from time to time and it's not fun, but it's a necessary thing that's gotta be done. And that's why you chosen to do this, to make the tough decisions, okay? You're there, that's why you're in that leadership position, that's why your employees look up to you. They expect you to make those tough decisions. And with this most recent employee, it was tough, but…

Tyson (09:19.918)
the team hasn't really skipped a beat. I think they kind of saw it coming. I'm not going to get into the details as to the reason why, but they kind of saw it coming, I think. And so I think that there's some relief there with the team because they knew it was coming. The employee ultimately probably knew it was coming. I think that that's generally true. You do hear that sometimes where people talk about how the employee usually knows. I've had that one time where they didn't see it coming and that's the painful ones. Those are the really painful ones that…

when you catch the employees by surprise, those are tough. Those usually become a little bit more drawn out than what you want them to be, because there's a little bit of explanation going on because they're asking a bunch of questions. And then I think the last tip that I'll give you, and again, I'm gonna remind you, you're gonna wanna make sure you've got some sort of plan put in place that is the same plan, okay? You need to have a termination plan.

but you also need to run this by your own legal counsel in your state, okay? So just keep that in mind. This is something where I've consulted, luckily I've got a really good friend that is an employment lawyer that I've been able to run the things that we do by, but you need to do the same, someone in your state. And this is, you need to have someone with you, okay? You don't do this by yourself. I one time have had to…

do that by myself and it was not fun. It was not something I would advise. It was just a timing thing where it needed to be done and I did it by myself. It ended up being fine, but you just for multiple reasons, you want to make sure you've got someone else there that's with you that is, I mean, partially for support, but also just as a witness, right? You want them to.

that you want there to be a witness there as well. I guess, you know, there's one last thing I almost forgot to bring up and that is if you have remote employees, you need to have a termination plan that accounts for that. And I've heard of some firms where they let the employee keep the equipment. Okay, I've had it where we don't. I think that if we had an employee that has worked.

Tyson (11:42.222)
for us for several years. We'd probably let them keep the equipment. It just depends on the equipment and how long they worked for us. But if it's a situation where, like we usually buy all of our equipment through Best Buy. And so something we've done is we just let them return it to Best Buy and then Best Buy refunds our money. That's something that's happened before. Or we also have a setup where it's all

It's all kind of set up part of our system where they can box it up, take it to a UPS store I think or a FedEx. I can't remember which one we use, but take it and they ships it back to us. Pretty easy. But have some sort of process in place. You've got remote employees because those can be trickier, right? The equipment's not in your office. It is somewhere else and you've got to get it back if you want to get it back. So…

That is that that one that one can be a tricky one. So you want to make sure that you you've got that locked down All right. I think I've given enough to this episode If you do have anything you want me to cover just remember text me 314 -501 -9260 Happy to do that Until next week. Remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, buddy

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you thinking about becoming your own boss and starting a law practice? In this podcast episode, Jim and Tyson interview Margeaux Thomas, a seasoned lawyer who specializes in business divorces. Margeaux shares her transition from working in a large firm to establishing her own practice.

Margeaux provides some insights on establishing her own practice and some things she had to consider beforehand. One thing was connecting with other lawyers in her circle who provided some tips and tricks to getting started on her own and what was needed to become her own boss. Another thing was understanding that as a lawyer, you can always pivot and work at another firm if starting your own doesn't work out. This mentality helped Margeaux in becoming more confident in her ability to succeed.

Margeaux shares her thoughts on how to partner up in a law firm and what to focus on. Looking at a business partnership like a marriage is something Margeaux tells people that come to her for advice. It is important to communicate to a potential business partner about the roles each person will have, finances and each other’s risk tolerance to decide if it is something to move forward with. It is also crucial to get a prenup or operating agreement to ensure both individuals are on the same page.

Listen in to learn more!

Jim's Hack: Read the book “Already Free” by Bruce Tift. It is about the intersection of psychotherapy and Buddhism and talks about the value of therapy.

Margeaux Tip: Read the book “Domestic Assistant Advantage’' by Steve Riley. She learned to hire a personal assistant to help with personal tasks to expand her reach. https://amzn.to/3TmuDS8

Tyson's Tip: Use TEMU to order office supplies.

Episode Highlights:

  • 2:17 Discussion of learning curves 
  • 9:24 Insights on partnering in a law firm 
  • 14:26 The importance of building a team earlier when starting a business

Connect with Margeaux:

Resources:

Transcripts: How You Can Successfully Navigate Business Divorces in Small Family-Owned Businesses with Margeaux Thomas

Jim Hacking (00:01.23)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast.

Tyson (00:06.974)
You're Jim Hacking.

Jim Hacking (00:08.334)
Oh, sorry, I forgot.

Margeaux Thomas (00:10.427)
you

Jim Hacking (00:11.47)
I've been doing too many. This is our fourth one today. Let me try that again. Thank you. Actually, we should just keep that. That would be good. Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:20.894)
And I'm TastyMutrix. What's up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking (00:23.598)
Well, once again, I screwed up the intro and surprisingly, you let me re -record it, so I appreciate that. How are you doing, man?

Tyson (00:30.14)
That was That was funny. I don't know if you've ever done that where you just didn't say your name. You just said, welcome back to Max Miller podcast and you just stopped. That was good. So, yeah, that's good. No, I'm doing all right. What about you?

Jim Hacking (00:40.59)
I think I was having a brain fart.

Jim Hacking (00:45.326)
I'm great, you wanna go ahead and introduce our guest?

Tyson (00:47.614)
I absolutely do. Our guest today is Margo Thomas. And Margo is an experienced lawyer and speaker with 15 plus years of experience representing individuals and small businesses in commercial and real estate litigation, including class action cases and numerous trials on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants. We'll get into the rest of this in a little bit. Margo, welcome to the show.

Margeaux Thomas (01:10.779)
Thank you for having me.

Tyson (01:12.22)
Before we go any further though, so Margo is not spelled the normal way. It's M -A -R -G -E -A -U -X, which you might say is the normal way. Are you from Louisiana? Like where does the E -A -U -X come from? That's fantastic. I love it.

Margeaux Thomas (01:26.907)
It has a French origin, but I'm not. My parents just like the spelling, but it throws a lot of people off, believe me. People mispronounce my name everywhere I go.

Tyson (01:32.894)
I love the spelling.

Jim Hacking (01:36.334)
Well, Tyson's name and Tyson's last name is M -U -T -R -U -X. So he probably gets a lot of the same mispronunciations that you do. Margo, why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey, where you started from as far as law school and where you are now.

Margeaux Thomas (01:51.611)
Well, first let me say, like, I started my firm in 2016 and this was one of the podcasts that I listened to when I started my firm and I took so many tips from you guys. I feel like you guys are like the OGs. So I'm really honored to be here and there are so many things that you talked about back then that I implemented that I'm really happy that I did because it really changed my small firm over the years. So yeah, so I started my firm eight years ago.

Jim Hacking (02:04.43)
Oh nice.

Margeaux Thomas (02:19.099)
And before that I was practicing in a medium to big law firm with hundreds of attorneys and mainly representing banks, defending them in commercial litigation. And then, you know, I just always felt like, you know, there was something else behind the curtain and something else that I wanted to do. And I took a very big leap of faith, you know, eight years ago and here we are. So.

Tyson (02:46.654)
I mean, how's it been? I just want to kind of check in. What's the journey been like for you?

Margeaux Thomas (02:53.723)
It has been amazing. Like I really like the business of law and I didn't realize that I'd never run a business before and…

There's such a learning curve from working for somebody in a big firm. You don't have to deal with the marketing or the HR or the management or any, none of that was second nature to me. And I felt like there was so much of a community that I wasn't even aware of until I went out on my own. And there were so many people who were like, here's this resource and talk to this person. And I just feel like I never would have experienced that type of community had I not switched gears a little bit and went in a different direction. And I hear.

people say they go back into a law firm because they hate these things but I really enjoy them you know I feel like it's it's interesting it's thought -provoking you know it's always it's very challenging and you know I feel like the practice of law is one thing but the business of running a law practice is a whole nother thing and you know you either love it or you hate it and you know I think I'm fortunate enough that I got out here and I really like that piece of it so.

Jim Hacking (03:57.07)
What were the discussions that you had with yourself before you actually went out on your own? And then what did you think those first 10 days after you started your firm? What were you thinking?

Margeaux Thomas (04:09.307)
They had a lot of mental back and forth about whether I could do this. And I originally was going out with a partner who was in the firm that I was at. And right before I was supposed to start, he dropped out and said he couldn't do it and he was staying. And at that point, I was like, you know, I'm not sure if I can do this on my own. So that was a big part of it. And whether I had the confidence, whether I could do it, I just catastrophize the whole thing as to I'm going to be like.

desolate and homeless and jobless and you know, no money like and my husband was just like listen You can just get another job like it's not that big of a deal like, you know It's not the end of the world if it doesn't work out pivot. So, you know, just stop, you know over that catastrophizing the situation. So that was certainly

you know, the thought process going into it. And then, you know, I just had to take a look at the mirror and tell myself a lot of positive affirmations that I could do it. And then it was crazy. Like after I was like, I really quit my job and I really liked my job and it was a very lucrative job. And I was sitting at my dining room table, like I have no job and I don't know. I didn't have a lot of clients. I didn't have a book of business. I was like, this could have been the worst decision. But I was there at that point and it's, you know, sink or swim. So, you know, it worked out.

Tyson (05:23.87)
How long did it take to get your feet under you where you're to the point where like, okay, I can do this. This is okay. You know, like did. I mean, did it hit right away or did it take some time? Talk about that a little bit.

Margeaux Thomas (05:35.355)
A few days after I quit, one of the biggest cases that I was working on, that client decided to come with me. And I didn't know that was gonna happen until I left. In fact, I was just like, yeah, I'm leaving everything, because these aren't my clients, but they were like, we wanna continue to work with you. And that was, I mean, that made my first year. That one client, that one case made my first year, and those people were…

you know, small business owners who would, you know, build a franchise, you know, that was very successful. But I think they saw a little bit of themself when they started in me, which I'm very fortunate for. I didn't know that they were going to do that at all. But, um.

you know, it really changed the trajectory of that first year. And it gave me some like some time to reach out to my network and build a pipeline. And, you I was just really fortunate that that happened. So, you know, that one case and then, you know, just telling everybody, everybody that I knew this is what I do. If you know anybody who needs it. And at that point, I would literally take any case. So it didn't even matter. I mean, I would drive an hour to speak to somebody to get a case because I didn't have, you know, I didn't have a lot of

boundaries as far as any. I just wanted to bring in money, I wanted to bring in cases, I figured I'd figure it out. So at that point I would take anything and I was telling anybody I would take anything and people would call me and you know I would take the cases.

Jim Hacking (06:57.358)
What areas of practice have you focused on?

Margeaux Thomas (07:01.755)
Oh, I consider myself a business divorce lawyer. So that's what I do. We do business divorces. Businesses that are breaking up. There are a lot of small family owned businesses, you know, partners, spouses, children, a lot of family disputes that.

Unfortunately, there's some larger communication issue or personality dispute that is causing them to go their separate ways. So we help them sort that out and move forward and purchase the rest of the business or sell their part of the business and move forward. So that's what I do.

Tyson (07:39.134)
Have you given a thought to maybe like in the next 10 years, like what that looks like, 20 years, the shape of the firm? I'm just curious how far you've dreamt and how far you've gotten into that goal.

Margeaux Thomas (07:55.771)
So I think the future looks like me moving out of the more, the legal work, the day to day and really focusing more on the management and the growth of the firm and the…

you know, retaining talent, finding talent, training talent, that type of thing, marketing the firm. Because those are the things that I've really grown to love a lot, you know, and I thought, you know, I really had an internal conflict about that for a long time because, you know, I like practicing law, but I really do enjoy the business side of things. And, you know, I'd like to, I've had younger lawyers who have, you know, started here and went to law school and I, you know, I'd like to see them grow, you know, with the firm. And I want to be a part of that. And I just want to kind of hone.

those leadership skills so that I can build a firm that I love that other people can prosper in.

Jim Hacking (08:44.59)
I really like your niche and I'm wondering content wise, it just seems something that would be really.

to content that regular people could consume. I mean, just the idea of business divorce. To me, you summed up your entire practice in two days, in two words. And I just think that, you know, you could keep an eye out on news stories about business breakups. I think that you could tell your own stories. What kind of content creation strategy have you had around that? Because I just think there'd just be, there's probably stuff in the news every day.

Margeaux Thomas (09:18.587)
I do a lot on LinkedIn. That is our major platform. So we post a lot there about.

you know situations that people find themselves in and how to navigate that and just the emotional part of it because you know a lot of these people have underlying relationships they've known you know they've been friends since grade school you know and then they decided to go out on their own and they built a very successful business but they can't get past this roadblock with their partner so our whole platform is talking about you know what it feels like to go through that situation and you know the tools that are out there and resources and you know just to tell people you know we've

We're business owners. We've been there. This is what we help people with.

Tyson (09:59.518)
So given your experience with what you do, and then also you were about to partner with someone and then they decided not to do it. I do wonder, have you given any thought to maybe adding a partner at some point? And then also on top of that, what advice would you give to people considering partnering up with someone else? I'm really curious what your advice would be.

Margeaux Thomas (10:27.195)
I think that I would partner with someone at this point. I mean, I like the autonomy of not having a partner. I realized that about myself. And, you know, I'm…

I love the personality test. I'm a very high D, like, you know, when it comes to disc and the dominant profile. So, you know, I enjoy that and I understand that about myself and I don't, I don't honestly want to share that with anybody, but I do want to grow the firm and bring in people who can prosper in this environment. So for me, I don't think, you know, I think that that worked out in my favor at the time. It didn't seem that way, but after years of, you know, reflecting on that, I think that was the best possible thing that could happen because it made me develop a lot more self -confidence and what I could do that I might.

not have been able to, you know, who knows what would have happened if we had went forward. But, um.

You know, and you know, I just had somebody contact me yesterday and they're like, I'm considering a partnership. What would you say? You know, you deal with all the ones that fail, so you should have a great idea. I was like, you know, it's very much like a regular marriage. Like, you know, I could write the prenup for you and get all the legal stuff in order. But like you need to go to premarital counseling. You know, you need to talk about the the financial things like do you want to grow it? Do you want to pocket the distribution? Like are you guys have the same risk tolerance? Because, you know, those are things that come up in every marriage that create

people going through divorces. You know, it's the exact same thing, especially in family businesses or spouses that go out of business or really good friends. They have the exact same issues that you have in your marriage that you just feel like you're not heard. You feel like you're alone. You feel like you're doing it all. Those are the same things that people repeat in a real marriage. So my advice to them is, yes, get an operating agreement. That's going to help you. There are ways to…

Margeaux Thomas (12:12.283)
protect yourself financially in this situation. Get a prenup, yes. But you really need to figure out whether you like this person, whether you can work with this person. And that's gonna determine, you can have a very successful business, but hate each other. And that can affect your mindset and a lot of other things that cause you to be very unhappy in this business situation. So I tell people, there's a lot of business coaches out there who can talk both of you through that process of getting to know whether you are on the same page before you go into this marriage.

business marriage together.

Tyson (12:43.806)
So Jim is a big believer in like the Colby score. Would you recommend, because you mentioned disc, I mean, would you recommend potential partners doing some sort of testing before they get involved in a partnership?

Margeaux Thomas (12:57.371)
Absolutely.

I told you know that I said I had the exact conversation yesterday because it was like, you know, I know I'm a high D and if I were to meet my husband took this too because I'm his proponent. He's an S and a C, right? We balance each other very well, you know, and if you are both very high D's and that tends to be the person who goes out and starts their own law firm, there can be a lot of conflict there with, you know, law firm, you know, solos coming together because they both have this very dominant trait and want to do things their way. So yes, I think that's something that's a conversation.

started for you know a lot of things.

Jim Hacking (13:32.174)
I'm wondering if you've had any situations involving law firms in particular, whether there are things that you've learned in those cases involving law firms. Because I would think that just like lawyers can be extra nasty to their spouses when they go through a marital divorce, that's probably true in a business divorce. So what advice do you have for everybody who might find themselves in a partnership they're not so happy about?

Margeaux Thomas (13:56.987)
Yes, I've certainly had law firm breakups and those tend to be even more contentious because there are lawyers involved. So they say that lawyers make the worst clients. I wouldn't say that about the ones that I've represented some great lawyers, but you know, they want to be involved in all the details and even if it's not their, you know, practice area, it just makes it very contentious and difficult. And, you know, those are particularly difficult, I will say, to unwind, even if the financial part is not.

difficult. There's a lot of emotional, you know, there's just a lot of emotional issues that have to be worked through and…

You know, I think that I've represented people in all different fields, you know, doctors and lawyers, and you know, they have a lot, like I said, they have a lot of the same traits. There are a lot of different things, creative things that people can do to hurt each other. But, you know, in all of these cases, the underlying issue is, you know, this is a business decision. And I know you know this person and I know there's some emotion involved, but you know, this isn't about your children. You know, this is about money. This is about a business and you have to put on the same hat that you put on.

to come into this business to make it successful to get out of this business and try to just get them to focus on that aspect.

Tyson (15:10.782)
Yeah. Some of the advice I got was before, you know, partnering was a couple of things like don't expect to be friends with them after the partnership ends. Oh, that was one thing. And then always when you draft your operating agreement, you make sure that you do it with the end in mind. So I don't know if that's good advice or bad advice. I know that's good advice that I received. But if you were to go back to 2016, would you have done anything differently from

from how you've done it and if so, what advice would you give yourself?

Margeaux Thomas (15:47.323)
I did everything on my own for a very long time. I was listening to some of your podcasts about…

no unscheduled phone calls. I used to answer the phone. People call and just, I'm the first person on the phone. Like, how can I help you? There's no consult fee. There's no anything. I was like, why am I doing this? I gotta, you know, I gotta stop doing this. But, you know, I did that for a long time. And I think that if I had put some of those things in place, the process in place a little bit earlier, it would have saved me. You know, I just, I worked way too much.

I mean, I was doing the business of law, I was doing the law, I was working weekends, I was working holidays, vacations, weekends, and that wasn't good for my mental health. I had two small kids, I had twins, they were two at the time I started this firm. It wasn't good for my marriage, it wasn't good for my kids. I I learned a lot doing that, that that's not sustainable. So I think that if I had put more faith in my ability to build a team earlier on, I could have taken some of those things off of my plate earlier.

Jim Hacking (16:53.742)
So what do the next couple years look like? What's your plan? What are you going to do as far as developing more business or growing and stepping away from some of the practice? What are your goals?

Margeaux Thomas (17:05.659)
bring in some more A -Team members, work very closely with my recruiter to find some great talent, train them, retain them, and spend some time working on marketing, which is really what I love to do.

Tyson (17:23.678)
You know, we've been talking about A players quite a bit and we've mentioned on the podcast quite a bit lately too, but I do have noticed a little bit that sometimes the not so A players think that they're A players, which makes it a little bit more difficult in the hiring process. And so like the salary expectations and things like that, whenever they're applying, we have seen sort of a weird phenomenon going on right now. But I wonder…

What's it like for you for hiring? Because it's interesting because PI for us, it's just weird. It's just a different, I feel like this is just a different breed of attorney that wants to be a PI lawyer versus like a criminal defense lawyer versus like real estate. So I wonder what the market is like for you all in hiring and if you find it to be like good market right now, bad market, what are your thoughts?

Margeaux Thomas (18:18.875)
It's a good market right now, but I just think hiring in general is so difficult. It is so difficult. I mean, I've hired so many people that were like, you know, I want to be a paralegal and then they get in there and then they're in…

school in two months and I was like, you know, and they're leaving and I was like, I asked that question five times during the interview and you're like, no, I'm a career paralegal and you're at the same time filling out your law school LSAT and all that, you know, so it's very hard and people, you know, change their minds and they're multifaceted. They have a lot of needs and, you know, just dealing with people is a very difficult part of, you know, keeping them happy and, you know, giving them what they want and, you know, allowing them to feel heard is a huge part of the process.

figuring out who is a good fit and…

quickly so that you can get them out of there if they're not a great fit, which is something I have definitely, that is a mistake that I've made, kept people that I knew that were not a good fit way too long because I just didn't want to have the hard conversations. So yeah, I think it's a good market. I'm optimistic. I have a recruiter that I work with very closely and I'm optimistic that we'll bring in some great talent this year and we'll see what happens, but I'm trying to look at it optimistically. So we'll see.

See you soon.

Jim Hacking (19:34.702)
Do you do much for referrals like from attorneys or from maybe the attorneys that work on, you know, setting up these companies? Does that, does any business come that way?

Margeaux Thomas (19:44.475)
Absolutely, we get a lot of referrals because a lot of people don't want to touch these type of cases or you know They're just transactional attorneys. One of the first attorneys I met when I started this firm was like I do transactional law I don't want to go to court. I was like

We are matchmaking heaven. Great. You know, he sent me so much business and I don't know what he was doing with those cases before he met me, but it worked out very well for me when I was starting my firm. So yes, I try to align myself with a lot of transactional attorneys who are in small firms who, you know, set up businesses and you know, those businesses, they call them back and say, I have a contract dispute or I have a dispute with my partner or a vendor or client. And we take those cases and it is a great referral relationship.

Tyson (20:26.238)
I love it.

All right, so we are getting up against time. So I'm going to start to wrap things up. I just, there's something about you, Margo. I just like talking to you. You're just like so pleasant and to talk to you. So I love it. And I like to have some, I like to have people on that are not in the same practice area sometimes so we can kind of, we mix it up. So it's really cool. I agree with Jim. I think it's a very good niche. So that's awesome. But I'm going to wrap things up before I do. I want to remind everyone, if you want to join us in the guild, we would love to have you go to maxlawguild .com. If you've not yet joined them,

big Facebook group, do that, that's free, just search MaximumLawyer on Facebook and you'll be able to join us there and if you've gotten something from this episode or any of our other episodes, if you give us a five -star review, we would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking (21:13.87)
I was listening to Benjamin Hardy talk the other day and he mentioned a book and the name of the book is already free. And it's about the intersection of psychotherapy and Buddhism. And my therapist is Buddhist and my coach is Buddhist. And so to get that book from a totally sideways way, I feel like I'm understanding the work that we've been doing together so much more fully and differently. And so my therapist was teasing me like, ah, now you got the playbook. Now you know what I'm doing, but.

It's the explanations of why you go to therapy in the first half of the book are probably the best distillation of the value of therapy that I've come across. And so I'm just like a third through the book, but I'm really enjoying it.

Tyson (22:00.382)
I like it. You love that therapy, baby. You're all in on it. All right, Margo, so I'm going to put you on the spot in a second. So I'm going give you a second to think about it. In a second, I'm going to ask you what your favorite episode has been or topic of one of the episodes. So just give you a second to think about it. But before we get to that, and by the way, if you can't come up with something, we'll cut that part out. But…

Jim Hacking (22:02.912)
Ha!

Tyson (22:25.886)
But if someone wants to get a hold of you, let's say that they're thinking about a partnership or getting out of a partnership and they want to consult with you, what's the best way of reaching out to you?

Margeaux Thomas (22:35.739)
Thomaslawplc .com is our website. 703 -957 -2577 is our phone number. So give us a call or there's a ton of resources on our website and ways to contact us.

Tyson (22:49.214)
We'll put that in the show notes too so that people don't have to write so fast. All right, so before we get to your tip or hack of the week, do you have a favorite episode? I'm just curious because you've been listening for a long time. Can you think of one?

Margeaux Thomas (23:01.839)
Excellent. I honestly think it was the note unscheduled phone calls and you know just putting a barrier between myself and you know just being interrupted constantly and that extended to emails you know just turning off that

dinging emails so that every time an email comes in, you don't react and get distracted. And, you know, that was a huge shift for me because, you know, when I was in a big firm, the phone would ring at my desk, right? But it was very different than going out on your own and, you know, everybody having your number and potential clients calling. I mean, we were representing banks. So, you know, it wasn't like my phone was ringing all day. So it took me a little bit. I heard that episode and I definitely was like, you know, I need a call service or intake person or something so that I can focus on the deep.

work and I really think I still do that today I don't even have a phone that rings on my desk anywhere so I like that.

Tyson (23:58.142)
Alright, do you have a tip or a hack for us?

Margeaux Thomas (24:02.107)
So a book, Domestic Assistant Advantage that I read a while ago, it's by Steve Riley who started Atticus. And, you know, I just having someone when I was.

In my law firm, I spent a lot of time in the firm and I was like, you know, my kids, I couldn't keep up with their, you know, dress down days and bring this to school day and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, just hiring someone just as a personal assistant to deal with all that calendaring has allowed me to expand my reach and I can be on boards and I can coach a team and I can make sure that my kids are in the right outfit when they get to school because I have somebody who deals with all those details, which I was completely not able to do. So just having that domestic assistant, not a legal assistant,

assistant but somebody who just deals with the personal stuff has been a game changer for me.

Tyson (24:51.518)
That's a really good one. All right, we get to my tip of the week. Jim, do you like to save money?

Jim Hacking (24:57.454)
I do.

Tyson (24:58.302)
Okay, so I don't know if you've been on this. I'm sure a lot of people have heard this, but something I had not thought about until fairly recently is using Tmoo for office supplies. You can get super cheap stuff on Tmoo for like, I'm talking like super dirt cheap. So before you go and buy something for your office, whether it's equipment, it could be a power cable, whatever, like you name it, go to Tmoo first and you like something that might cost you like $20 on Amazon.

is like $2 on T -MU. It might take you a couple weeks to get it, but I'm telling you, it is a way like saving like a lot of money. So just my two cents, T -E -M -U. But Margo, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. It was definitely a pleasure talking to you.

Margeaux Thomas (25:44.155)
Thank you, appreciate it.

Jim Hacking (25:46.094)
Bye Margo. Thanks.

Margeaux Thomas (25:47.673)
Bye.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this podcast episode, Tyson shares insights into his firm and the recently revised office hours. The firm shifted from team-specific hours to a more unified approach, introducing one mandatory 15-minute office hour from 12:45 pm to 1:00 pm, and two optional slots at 8:45 am and 3:45 pm, all in central time. 

This office hour change, aims to simplify scheduling, foster better communication, and improve productivity. 

Episode Highlights:

  • 01:12 Tyson explains the new approach with mandatory and optional office hours
  • 03:09 Tyson details the new office hours structure, providing flexibility and opportunities for communication within the firm
  • 05:17 The positive impact of the changes to office hours and encourages feedback from the listeners

Resources:

Transcripts: Adjusting Your Office Hours with Tyson Mutrux

Tyson (00:01.005)
Hey, Tyson here with another Saturday episode. I'm going to do something this week and Becca's going to kill me because we use these podcasts. We use the video portion on YouTube and on social media. And Becca's going to kill me because I'm catching up because I was sick and I had a response to a motion for summary judgment due. So I have set up a studio in the back of my truck while my daughter's playing basketball and I'm recording this episode. But.

I actually think it's pretty good setup to be honest with you. I've got a camera mounted on my sunroof and I've got a whole setup back here. So it's actually pretty cozy. I actually like it quite a bit. Lighting is pretty good too. So sorry, Becca. But this week, I actually want to talk about office hours and I want to give an update to our office hours. For those of you that have listened the past…

Office hours is something that we've implemented and I really, really like it, but we've adjusted. And I want to talk about the adjustments because just because you decide to do something doesn't mean that you always stick to that thing. Adjusting and making things better is really important. Getting feedback from people is really, really important too. So that's, we've made some adjustments based on what our people have told us. But before I get to that though, I want to remind everyone to, if you want to get,

maximum, minimum, minimum time. If you want to get Stage 1 absolutely free just for being a listener, all you have to do is text us the just the words Stage 1, text that 2 -314 -501 -9260. So just text us Stage 1 -314 -501 -9260 and that will be texted out to you right away.

It comes back to you instantly, I think. So text us and you'll get that pretty quick. And also, if you have anything that you want me to cover, text me. I'd love to hear from you. We get a lot of great text messages, a lot of feedback from people. So really appreciate it. All right. So let's get down to it. So let me talk about what we have done when it comes to office hours. Before, what we had done is we had…

Tyson (02:20.97)
different, each team had their own set of office hours. And I thought this was a great idea, right? I thought that this was a brilliant plan and that, so everyone knows that each person has a different, or each team has their own set of office hours. And so you know when to show up to them. It just didn't work out because there's so many different sets of office hours. There's so many different teams. People found it kind of confusing, even though we had a whole list of everything, people found it really cumbersome. And,

There was a camaraderie part of it that people missed out on. They wanted to be able to kind of talk to each other, hang out with each other. So what we have done is we've adjusted that and we now have one office hour. And this is not an hour, by the way, it's 15 minutes, but 12 .45 PM central time is it's for 15 minutes. So from 12 .45 until one is mandatory office hours is what we call mandatory office hours.

Plus we've got two sets of optional office hours and we want people to attend at least one of these where you can attend all three if you want, but all you do is turn your light on and we use clicks. You can be red if you're not available, green if you're available. Yeah, do not disturb as well, which is when you're like really dug in and you want to get some work done. So we've got those as an option. And so we've got our normal huddle at 8 .30 AM.

And right afterwards, so we want to be done with that by 8 .45, it goes right into our first optional office hour, 8 .45 to 9. And then you have your mandatory at 12 .45 to 1. And then we have another set at 3 .45 to 4. Those are all central time. And so that allows a little bit more flexibility. It gives people the ability to communicate throughout the day. It also allows people to communicate.

about something that maybe happened early or mid afternoon that needs to be conveyed to someone before the next day. And it gives the teams a lot more flexibility when it comes to communications. And it also, I will tell you, it has also, for the people that think that they've got to, or not think, that they really want that connection to other people, it really allows them to have that because you've now got…

Tyson (04:46.791)
three different ways, three different times to communicate with people. Plus that's in addition to the daily huddle and in addition to other meetings that we have and other daily meetings that we have between the teams. So it does, there's a continuity piece that is really there and people don't feel as confined to, oh, these are my office hours. These are, we're kind of stuck with these office hours and we can't do anything about it. So this also with the 1245 block,

you know that everyone is going to be available every single day. And there might be an exception every now and then, but you know that they're there to, they're going to be available. And this is the time where no one should be putting anything over these. So there's no one scheduling lunches over these. There's no phone calls, no meetings, no court appearances. Cause let's be honest. I mean, how many court appearances do you actually have between the 12 and one o 'clock hour? Has it happened before?

To me, yes, but maybe I can probably count on three fingers how many times it's happened. So it is a pretty safe hour and it's been pretty good. People, by the way, we had some resistance at the beginning of the office hours. Now people love it, right? People love the office hours because they can actually get work done. And it was funny because at one of our quarterly meetings, I was getting a little bit pushed back. And this was early on, I think, one of the, I think it was maybe.

maybe third quarter of last year. And I just showed them the data. I said, you can tell me all you want about it, but let me show you the data. You're getting more tasks done. We're selling more cases and we're just doing a better job. So it is one of those things where they can't convince me otherwise at this point, but it doesn't matter. They don't have to. We've got buy -in from the entire team, which is pretty awesome. But I want to give everyone an update on that. Hopefully you've gotten something from this episode. If you did…

Text me 314 -501 -9260. I would love to hear from you and get some of your ideas. I would really, really appreciate it. I always love hearing from you every single week and I just love doing these Saturday's shows. So if you've got more things you want me to cover, I would love to do it. But until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who needs a tool to visualize the work of your team? In this podcast episode, Jim and Tyson interview John Grant about implementing the Kanban methodology in legal practices.

John provides some insight on what the Kanban methodology is and why it is such a great thing to add to law firms. Kanban boards are used in the project management space and can be used as a tool to outline work. It is often used in scrum meetings among teams to break down goals. For example, if a team is working on a project to streamline the intake process, a Kanban board can be used to visualize how that process can go using columns and cards. They are meant to allow users to see workflows and identify areas where there is a roadblock. It can be customized to the likeness of any team!

John shares some of the templates he has created that can help law firms succeed. One is a litigation workflow, which can be used to help outline a case. There is a column for intake and research, one for strategy, one for mediation/negotiation and then one for the trial process. This lays out the whole case in front of you which when visualized can help see the whole picture. The transactional template is similar but might not include a trial phase.

John provides a few examples of different types of Kanban boards. One of them is BusinessMap, which is great for large firms due to the amount of users that can utilize it at once. KanbanZone is another tool that is great for lawyers as there are functionalities that work well for the type of work lawyers do. Choose a Kanban board that works for your firm to maximize its great benefits!

Listen in to learn more from John Grant!

Jim's Hack: Read the book “10 X is Better than 2 X”, by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. There is a concept in the book about how we ease ourselves out of the day to day practice of the firm by using free days.

John’s Tip: Make policies explicit. It is not just about what the policy is and what I want you to do, but getting to the why behind the policy. 

Tyson's Tip: Use sticky notes to start putting stuff on the walls as a starting ground.

Episode Highlights:

  • 2:59 The Kanban methodology and its application in law firms
  • 7:36 The benefits of using visual Kanban boards to manage tasks
  • 12:51 Recommendations for tools like BusinessMap and Kanban Zone 
  • 15:46 Best practices for setting up a Kanban board for litigation

Connect with John:

Resources:

Transcripts: Enhancing Efficiency: Kanban Boards for Legal Workflow Management with John Grant

Jim Hacking (00:00.974)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.378)
And I'm Tyson Mutrex. What's up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking (00:07.366)
What are you chomping on? You got some gum?

Tyson (00:09.735)
protein bar. It's a no-cow dipped chocolate donut protein bar.

Jim Hacking (00:11.021)
Oh, very good.

Jim Hacking (00:16.134)
I meant to tell you that, you know, I know you're big on vegan. We went to the four seasons now, the kitchen that they're, they're tearing out their whole kitchen. It was a Gerard Kraft kitchen, and it's going to become a Gordon Ramsey kitchen. But Amani got some seafood with vegan, uh, squash noodles. They were so freaking good. It was so good. It tasted like they used, um, what are they use? Almonds or some kind of cashew milk or something that tasted really good.

Tyson (00:45.338)
You man, I'll tell you like people, people knock vegans. I get it. It's fun. That's why, but I've had better food as a vegan than I ever had as a, as a non-vegan. It is just night and day. Cause people have to get really creative. They have to get really, like, and this comes from like a steak person, man. I was a steak person. So I, it's, I'm way healthier because of it too. But anyways, let's get on with our guest today. We've got

John Grant, who is the founder of Agile Attorney Consulting and the Agile Attorney Community of Practice. He's a certified process improvement expert who helps law firms and legal teams bust through their workflow bottlenecks to create practices that are more profitable, scalable, and sustainable, usually without adding a headcount or investing in expensive technology. You can learn more at his website, agileattorney.com, or by looking for at.

J.E. Grant III or various permutations of the Agile Attorney on social media. I don't normally do the full one, but I thought that last part was important. So John, welcome to the show.

John E. Grant (01:50.873)
Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. Sorry for throwing big words into my bio. I forgot that I wrote it that way.

Tyson (01:57.211)
It doesn't matter how simple the bios, I will screw it up every time. So all good.

John E. Grant (02:01.499)
No worries.

Jim Hacking (02:02.578)
John, walk us through how you got to here today. So how, what's your experience? Why did you do this? What's going on?

John E. Grant (02:08.678)
Yeah, I'll give you the quick bio, which is I come from a family of lawyers. I, of course, wanted nothing to do with becoming a lawyer as I sort of ended my undergrad education, wound up in the technology industry, had this great experience with kind of one of the great, maybe less heard of success stories of the…

the late 90s and early 2000s, which was I got on early with Getty Images, or actually a company that was a predecessor to Getty. We were disruptive innovators, right? We used technology to create better client experiences, customer experiences, and disrupted and then consolidated the whole dang industry around ourselves. And I think everyone, you know, you see Getty go by all the time today.

And then I got a wild hair and went to law school anyway. Went into practice, actually went back, was in-house at Getty for a brief amount of time for a number of years, not quite a decade, but I had my own IP boutique practice focused mostly on copyright trademark stuff. And then eventually learned that I was able to use a lot of the things that I learned in my technology career, and most of that was in operations in the tech career.

to apply to my law practice and I learned that I like doing that stuff, working on the practice more than I liked working in the practice. So I hung a shingle as a consultant a decade ago and for the most part I've been doing it ever since.

Tyson (03:42.822)
So I think you and I, I think we will get along really, really well. I think we would hang out and build a talk like dorky system stuff quite a bit. I would really enjoy it. You're big into Kanban method. And the first time I ever saw a Kanban board, I didn't know what was called a Kanban board. It was 2011. It was, I'll tell you the exact day. It was March 4th, 2011. And it was the birth of our first…

John E. Grant (03:52.539)
I'm all for it.

John E. Grant (04:02.54)
Right.

John E. Grant (04:06.046)
Okay. Ooh.

Tyson (04:12.318)
son, first child. And I remember just kind of stumbling through the hallways and looking up and seeing they had this really cool board. I had these different columns and I'm thinking, wow, that's cool. What is this? This is a really neat way of getting things done. And then I don't remember what I Googled it, but I finally figured it was called a Kanban board. It was the coolest thing. And we use it. We use Kanbans really heavily in our firm.

John E. Grant (04:24.086)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (04:41.632)
Nice.

Tyson (04:41.85)
I wonder what drew you to it though.

John E. Grant (04:44.97)
Yeah, so I came to, and Kanban Kanban, I've learned it as Kanban. I don't think it really matters. I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know what the right way to say it is. It comes from Japan. And I first, you know, I maybe had encountered them without knowing it, but the place where I first learned about Kanban boards in the context of sort of project management process improvement was when I started,

doing more and more around the Scrum methodology. And I won't deep dive, but there's, you know, a few different high level methods. And what's interesting is a lot of them use ComDOM boards. It's a really effective tool. So there's lean and lean manufacturing, and that's probably the place where the hospital where your son was born got it. There's been a big push, you know, through the sort of late nineties and two thousands to do lean things in healthcare settings.

Where I encountered it was through the Agile lens. And again, I initially came into the Agile methodology through Scrum and Scrum is a tool that uses a lot of Kanban boards for project management. And, you know, and initially that was my thought, right? As I was doing more and more of this work with lawyers, I thought, well, hey, this Scrum is really interesting. It's transforming the technology industry.

Is there something in this for lawyers? And the answer is yes, although not in the way that I thought. And so I tried for a couple of years and had paying clients, some of whom are still with me, I should add, that were trying to do Scrum on their legal practices. And it eventually broke down. And one of the things that is true about the Scrum methodology is that it's really well-suited when you have a team that can be dedicated to a single project.

And that team, if you're starting to do multiple projects, scrum starts to break down. And in the tech world, when they're talking about multi-projects, they're talking about three or four or seven. And of course in a law firm, that's like an extreme multi-project environment, right? If each case is a project, you're dealing with dozens, maybe as many as hundreds per lawyer, hopefully not quite that many, but it depends on the practice, right? That's not unmanageable for certain practices.

John E. Grant (07:08.158)
Um, and so scrum really did start to break down, but it was through scrum that I learned about this thing called the Kanban methodology. And that, you know, I think the reason that I reached out and was like, Hey, I, we should do an episode together is that you did one of your Saturday, you know, sort of snack size episodes and you were talking about your Kanban board. And I was like, Oh, that's great. But that's just step one. And like, I would love to come on your show and talk about what are the other parts of the Kanban methodology.

that are really useful for lawyers because it is sort of a methodology in and of itself at this point.

Jim Hacking (07:44.41)
Well, giddy up, let's do it. So tell us what was missing from Tyson's little bite-sized portions. Where do lawyers need to take Kanban?

John E. Grant (07:45.995)
Yeah, okay.

John E. Grant (07:53.787)
Yeah, so there are kind of five components at a high level to the methodology, and the one that is almost always the starting point for people, although it doesn't have to be, is make the work visible. And usually that's make the work visible using a Kanban board. And Tyson, I think probably part of what you get from it, and I'd love to hear what you say, is when you're a knowledge worker, when your craft is something that is…

inherently hard to see, right? It lives either as ones and zeros on our devices or in the gray matter between our ears. We don't get a lot of physical, you know, visual sense of the work that we're doing. And the Kanban board is a visual fiction, right? It lets you in the form of the columns on the board representing maybe different stages of your workflow or stages of your process and then the cards on your board representing

Depending on the level you're working at, the cards can represent matters, which are relatively big projects. The cards can represent tasks, which are relatively small projects. It can be somewhere in between. There's no one way to do it. But there's something really magical about making the work visible. And again, I'd love to hear, Tyson, as a Kanban board user, how's that been for you?

Tyson (09:13.126)
Yeah, so we are, ours, we do have some based on tasks, some based on project. We have, so our, our actual trial calendar is on a Kanban board. It's divided by month. Okay. So it has different cases. We also have each team has what we call a big board. It has every case on it to show where it is in each, each phase. Uh, and then we also have like where we are when it comes to actual tasks. Um, and they, these are, some are divided by litigation. Some are divided by pre litigation. It depends on.

John E. Grant (09:24.566)
Right on. Yeah.

John E. Grant (09:33.56)
Yeah.

Tyson (09:42.034)
you know, what team is working on it. And, but then also on top of that though, with what you're talking about, you take different colors, right? So that can mean different things. So there's different tags or there's different dates on there. And you can add all these different elements to it that you can look at it. Okay, boom. I see that case is, I mean, let me use it. I'll use one on the trial calendar. Okay, I know that, okay, that one's set for trial in this month, but we're still in written discovery.

John E. Grant (09:49.43)
Yeah.

Tyson (10:10.258)
Um, that means we've got some work to do, right? And then the trade actually has the date, the specific date on it. So I can look at it just visually right there and know exactly where we are with that file and a split second. So that's, I mean, that's just, just a few examples as to how we use it.

John E. Grant (10:21.773)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (10:25.298)
Yeah, no, and I love that. And it's, you know, when I'm working with new clients, a lot of what I'll, the place where I'll usually start is with that big board, right? So basically it's got a high level workflow that represents the, the typical flow for the matters that you handle.

And then yeah, color is great. You know, if you've got a few different matter types inside of that, right? If you're a divorce firm, you might have one for divorce with kids, a different color for divorce without kids, a different color for modifications. Right. And then what's great about that is you can take a step back and visually get a sense of, oh, what's my mix in my practice. Right. And you can run a report and you can get a percentage and that's one way to process information, but there's something about that visual pathway that just really seems to hit home in a different way.

than the more analytic, right, thinking fast and slow, the system to slow pathway, it's different. So that's great.

Jim Hacking (11:21.337)
So I'm…

way behind you guys when it comes to using Kanban. And I did buy the big ass calendar from Jesse, I forget his last name, but it's huge. And I've got all my calendar on there for the year and I got different colored stickers. This is like the first time I've ever done anything like this. But last night my wife asked me about some weekend and I just, I sat there and I thought and I could visualize the whole thing and I knew exactly what was happening that weekend because

John E. Grant (11:40.183)
Mm-hmm.

John E. Grant (11:48.119)
Yeah. Totally.

Jim Hacking (11:53.065)
in a virtual world or with a team that's sort of spread over.

John E. Grant (11:56.446)
Yeah, so I mean, I don't know, Tyson, I don't know what tool you're using for your firm. Vinny, tell me.

Tyson (12:04.946)
So we use, we're in the Zoho universe. So, but so for our case management system, we've got Filevine. And what we did was with what you were talking about is we didn't like that the tasks were hidden, right? They were kind of, you have to get the tasks. Like you can go and look at all the tasks, but like, it's just like a lot, a bunch of tasks, but like on a Kanban board or Kanban, I'm at the chain. I can't, I'm not gonna change. I'm saying Kanban. Okay. Yeah. I can see them all on a, and you can see.

John E. Grant (12:08.299)
Got it. Okay.

John E. Grant (12:12.267)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (12:18.359)
Mm-hmm.

John E. Grant (12:26.486)
Yeah, either way. No, you'd say it either way. Truly, there's not a right way.

Tyson (12:31.87)
Like, okay, who's it assigned to? Like someone's way behind because all of their tasks are like, so yeah. So we use Zoho to manage our tasks.

John E. Grant (12:35.486)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (12:39.414)
Got it. Yeah, yeah. So, and that's the thing, right? So I would say pre-pandemic, I was maybe a little bit too dogmatic in the sense that I really liked to start people with a physical board. So whiteboard, draw some columns, cases become sticky notes and run it that way. And the thing I like about…

using a whiteboard and sticky notes is that there, the user adoption is really easy, right? There's no learning curve. Everyone knows how to use those tools. Of course, in the pandemic hit, and no one can be in the office at the same place at the same time. And so all of the clients that I was working with, if they hadn't already started to migrate to online Kanban boards, then they did it real quick. I find, and you know, this is…

again, maybe being a little bit, pedantic's not the right word, but I don't wanna be like too snobbish about it. There are some tools that have Kanban boards that aren't good at promoting the Kanban methodology. And then there are other tools that do both, right? That are Kanban boards that do the Kanban methodology. The ones that are reasonably accessible and easy to get started with are Trello and Asana and…

I run into a lot of law firms like, I'm already paying for Office 365, so I'm just gonna use Microsoft Planner. And that's fine. Like for getting started, it's great. It, you know, I encourage people, use the tools you have. Let's add complexity as you can articulate a need for complexity. But pretty soon with those tools, you're gonna break down in terms of where you can go with the method, if you care about going with the method. Just making the work visible is incredibly powerful.

So I'm not saying anyone has to go the next steps, but probably a good segue. Well, and I should say the tools that I like, there's two that are my go-tos. One of them is called Business Map. It is maybe a little bit better suited for larger firms. One of the things about Business Map is their default license is 15 users. And so smaller firms find that to be a little bit of a reach. If you've already got 10 or 12, no big deal. But if you only…

John E. Grant (14:48.994)
you know, a three or five person team, then buying a 15 user license seems like a lot. The other tool I really like is called Kanban Zone. And part of what I like about them is that they've worked a lot with me to add features and functionality that are useful for lawyers. And I've actually worked with them. We've got some great templates on their tool that are good, you know, get you started for basic legal workflows. So the thing about the methodology that I like about those tools,

is when you get into these other components. So you've made the work visible, you got a board, now what? And one of the things that I'm trying to do when I work with a team that's adopting Kanban is to get work to flow better. So one of the things about the board and Tyson you alluded to it a minute ago, it lets you see where work is stuck and it allows you to be more intentional as a business owner, as a process manager.

to go in and try to figure out why is this work stuck? What things can I try to do to get it unstuck? And so the real focus of the Kanban methodology is to make sure that work is flowing in a smooth and predictable way. Sometimes that's also a fast way, but as you know, right, we can't control the speed of a lot of parts of the legal process. And so I try to say,

while speed is nice, smooth and predictable is better. In fact, you know, there's the thing you'll hear from military folks sometimes that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I liked that a lot, right? I had a personal trainer for a while that was a former army ranger, and that was his mantra all the time, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And it's true, right? Because if you go too fast too quickly, you're gonna…

pull a muscle if you're in the gym or you're gonna sort of move fast and break things which is not really what you're trying to do when you're handling someone's legal case. So establishing flow is really sort of the next the next piece to the methodology and it you know that can manifest itself in a lot of different ways. There's sort of two places that I find can be really impactful. One of them yeah of course yeah yeah.

Tyson (17:08.766)
So can we, before we get to that, we'll leave that as a cliffhanger for a second and let Jim ask you about that one. I do, I don't want to get too far down the path before we kind of step back a second. And can you tell people maybe best practices on the actual setup of the board? Let's just start with a really basic for people that have never done it before. So can you kind of give them a basic understanding of the way it should be structured and the way maybe you think it should be, because I'm sure that, you know, 10 people might have different opinions.

John E. Grant (17:25.998)
Sure.

Yeah.

Tyson (17:38.038)
on how it should be structured. But can you give maybe the most basic structure?

John E. Grant (17:38.516)
Yeah.

John E. Grant (17:41.93)
Yeah. Sure. Go ahead, Jim.

Jim Hacking (17:44.39)
And then I'm going to have a hypothetical project and you can maybe walk us like, because we bought a building a year and a half ago. This would have been very helpful to have. And I thought we could throw that in as a hypothetical to your method.

John E. Grant (17:52.61)
Hahaha.

Yeah, yeah, there's a whole genre of Kanban for construction projects, which is not my jam, but yeah, it's a big thing. So Tyson, your question, I think… So the templates that I've built that are part of the Kanban zone ecosystem now, and I'm happy to do it for anybody else, there's really two high level ones. One is more for litigation workflow and one is more for

John E. Grant (18:25.662)
When you're just getting started, I think the easiest and probably best way to start your litigation board is just follow the rules of civil procedure or criminal procedure if that's where you are, right? And so there's an intake column, there's maybe an initial research or whatever wrapping your head around the case is, strategy.

Then there's a pleadings, there's maybe written discovery. A lot of teams I work with will split written discovery and oral discovery, again, depending on what their particular matter type is. Experts are on there too, if that's something you deal with. Coming out of that, you've got your post discovery motions, usually MSJ, sometimes there's a mediation negotiation phase that happens in there. And then you're talking about trial prep, trial and post trial.

And so pretty high level buckets at first. As you get more advanced with it, you might start pulling some of those buckets apart and saying, okay, well, we're in pretrial, but really pretrial has three or four or five different sub phases the way that we deal with it. And so you can sort of build those in. But I wouldn't, I usually say don't go to that level of detail too quickly, right? There's some magic in just getting started and then add complexity when the thing that you're using,

asks for complexity. If you're on the transactional side, it's kind of similar, right? There's an intake, there's a initial strategy. Usually there's a drafting, an internal quality control, a client approval, negotiation, execution, and then post-signing wrap-up, whatever it happens to be. And I think each of those can be columns on the board. And again, for most transactional practices, that covers the basics.

Jim Hacking (20:14.115)
All right, so.

I threw out a hypothetical, but that was probably too construction based. I have a different one for you. So let's, let's say, cause this is actually a true thing. Let's say that July 1st, my senior attorney, his wife is kind of is on a sabbatical and they're going to go live in France for a year. So we have to think of everything that we need to do to make that work, all the different aspects of it. And then like, we're going to have to have the whole lead up to when he's gone. I mean, he's going to work for us. We don't know yet part-time quarter time, halftime, whatever.

John E. Grant (20:19.298)
Sure. OK.

John E. Grant (20:31.34)
Love it.

John E. Grant (20:36.12)
Yeah.

Jim Hacking (20:45.813)
So how would you analyze that?

John E. Grant (20:48.214)
Yeah, so that's interesting because that's a project in and of itself, right? That's not like you managing the work that is your client work through your law practice. That's a project. And so for that, I would actually say, let's build a task level board, not a project level board. And so the project itself is, I don't know what the guy's name is, you know, Jim. It's great. Andrew. Andrew works from France for a year. And.

Jim Hacking (21:10.297)
Andrew.

John E. Grant (21:16.602)
And so you call it Project Blue with an EU. And then, right, Andre, love it. Yeah, Project Andre. So in that setup, what you're gonna do is set up your board. So the basic Kanban board is really just three columns. It's to do, doing, and done, or ready, doing, and done. And what you would probably start with is fill that to do column.

Jim Hacking (21:21.986)
Yeah, we were going to call it Project Andre, because that's French for Andre.

John E. Grant (21:44.918)
with the brain dump of all the things that you think you've got to figure out. And then once you've filled it, I would probably add some columns to the left. So I would say, I'd maybe add a column that is this week, I would add a column that is next month or this month, and then beyond that, a column that is like soonish, right? Doesn't have to be set in stone, but what you're gonna do then is

you've now basically got a ready for work now, you've got a ready for work sometime this week, ready for work later this month, and you're going to take all those tasks that you created, all that brain dump that you made, and you're gonna prioritize it. What is the order of events? What are the things that need to happen today? Is there a predecessor, successor relationship between these things? And then you're going to,

the two of you or whoever on your team is responsible for figuring this stuff out, you're going to manage it through the in progress column, right? So you're going to pull work from ready. You're going to bring it into working. Um, and then you're going to work on just that one thing until it's all the way to done. Right? So the board I described a minute ago, uh, you know, for, for a matter level board, what that really is, is a

breakout of the in progress column and it's saying there's lots of phases to in progress. The board I just described for you is really a breakout of the ready column saying okay well there's we got to build sort of a funnel that is able to get work into my active attention span, right, my finite capacity and we want it to come in more or less the right order, right? Probably doesn't have to be perfect but you can sort of sort that out.

And then you can put those two concepts together. So you might say, okay, you know, in terms of my working column for Project Andre, there's gonna be an initial drafting or creating the policy or giving you an email about the software that they're gonna need, whatever it happens to be. And then there's gonna be a Jim review and approve column. And so there's like an initial work and then there's an approval and then there's a done.

John E. Grant (24:06.49)
And the nice thing about that, and this actually is a great segue into one of the concepts I was going to talk about a minute ago, is you want to limit the number of balls that you throw into the air on that project at any one time. Because if you just say, okay, we got to do all the things, then you don't know where to start, you don't know where to finish, if there's something like that.

well, okay, before we do any of this, we gotta figure out what VPN provider are we gonna use in Paris so that we can get into our network systems, right? Whatever it happens to be. But if that's the first thing that needs to happen, you wanna maximize your learning about the project by doing that thing first, because that's gonna have a cascade through on all the rest of the work. And so the concept that I was gonna talk about a minute ago is to limit work in process.

to limit the number of balls that you're juggling at any one time, because you want to get some things to done before you start a new thing in whatever your workflow happens to be.

Tyson (25:13.53)
I think that's great because I was going to ask you about that specific thing. So I'm glad you covered that. Um, we are getting close to time, but I've got more questions. I want to ask you, um, there is. Yeah. The, the, so I got really big into a world with that email and I believe many of the concepts. One of the things that he talks about in his book, Cal Newport talks about in the book is like you, you're doing everything like.

John E. Grant (25:22.626)
Sure, we can always come back and do a part two if you want to.

John E. Grant (25:30.4)
Yeah.

Tyson (25:40.306)
like in one place, right? Like you're not jumping from place to place. And so what I really like about Cain Band and something that we've been really, really working on over the last nine months is everything's in the task. So the notes in the task. So if you're having conversations about the note or the task inside the task, like so you're doing the work in the task. It is, so any tips or advice on how people can do things like that? Cause like that part's really important. It's gonna, it saves so much time.

John E. Grant (25:51.435)
Yes.

John E. Grant (26:07.382)
Yeah, I think that's a great point. So, and I love that book too, right? And the email inbox is a black hole of productivity, right? It's just not, you know, whatever, the hyperactive hive mind thing that he talks about in that book.

And then everyone's like, oh, well, I'll put it in Slack or I'll put it in Teams and I'll get the thread and that'll work and it's no better. In fact, it can be even worse because the interruption capabilities of those tools are really, really high. And so I think where Cal Newport goes in that book and what certainly works for me and my clients is that the card becomes the Slack channel, right? So all of the communication relative to that project, that matter lives in the card.

and you don't have this other place and this other interruption that is coming in. And the different systems have different ways of signaling like, hey, this card that you're an owner of or you're a watcher of has an update and you should go pay attention to it at some point. But again, one of the things I like about Business Map and Kanban Zone is they both let you control how often those communications pop up for you. So you can say, oh, I want this to happen in the app or I wanna get an email digest or.

or whatever it is. And so it really allows you, and this is related to limited work in process, right? And this gets into the deep work stuff from Cal Newport 2. Monotasking is far and away the most efficient way to complete a chunk of work. And every time you have your attention span fractured, you invite all kinds of trouble. And so if you can use the Kanban board and the Kanban card to…

become that deep workplace where you're monotasking on that project. It's like, oh yeah, hey, I need to get something from Tyson on that. I'm going to at mention Tyson inside of the card. And then Tyson's got settings in, you know, in your version of the thing that's like, yeah, okay, great. Show me all of my at mentions once a day or twice a day, and I'll go triage and deal with them that way.

Tyson (28:09.318)
Yeah, and if the right platform is, if you have the right platform, you can do, you can create a subtask within that, that way, which is another way. Yeah. Which is another way. Yeah. And so I, I am at the stop there. Uh, we, we had the, we're getting close to time. So we're, you and I are going to continue, continue conversations. Uh, this is, this has been fun. I mean, the time just flew, but, um, I'm going to wrap things up before I do. I want to remind everyone to, if you're interested in joining the guild, we'd love to have you go to maxlawguild.com. It's a.

John E. Grant (28:15.378)
For sure. Yeah, yeah. And they almost all do that.

John E. Grant (28:23.694)
Sure.

John E. Grant (28:27.455)
Yeah, I love it.

Tyson (28:39.166)
great place with a lot of great people. If you got something from this episode, which I'm pretty sure you probably did, then give us a five-star review. It'd be fantastic. We would absolutely love it. And if you're not in the big Facebook group on Facebook, go to search Max Malor on Facebook and you'll be able to find us. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking (29:01.286)
There are a lot of us talking in the Guild about the book 10x is easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. One of our prior guests just shared on it and Becca did a podcast on it. It's a tremendous book, which is not necessarily my hack. My hack comes out of the book. And it's this concept of how we ease ourselves out of.

the day-to-day practice of the firm. This is something that a lot of people have a lot of hard times with. And one of the concepts that Dan Sullivan talks a lot about is free days. And I always thought that the great benefit of free days was that you come back rejuvenated, you get time away, you get to think, and that's all true. But another benefit of the free day that I hadn't really thought about is that when you're gone, people have to figure shit out.

Right? So when you're gone there, so them exercising that muscle of starting to figure things out on your own. And it's almost like when your kids get old enough to be left alone without a babysitter, like maybe the first time you go over to the neighbors for an hour, then the second time you go out to dinner with your spouse or your significant other, then the next time maybe you go for a short weekend away, like, and sort of easing into that.

experience. I think that the analogy comes true too with, you know, sometimes people just want to like, I'm going to be out of here and I'm going to delegate and I'm going to give all this stuff, but I think that the activity of being away has another value, which I hadn't really thought of, which is this idea that people then start to figure things out.

Tyson (30:42.162)
I like that a lot. And that there, you know, he, uh, Cal Newport does talk about it in the book a little bit about like when you create that friction, which is, which is good, but very good Jimbo. Uh, all right, John, 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. Uh, what you got for us.

John E. Grant (30:59.274)
Yeah, I'll segue on that, which is one, because one of the things that I didn't get to is this idea from the methodology around making policies explicit.

and being really clear, not just about what the policy is and what I want you to do, but getting to what's the why behind the policy. So I've got a template that I use with a lot of my clients that I use, but the key part of it is that before we draft a policy, or sometimes after we draft it, but the first part of the policy is always, why are we doing it this way? And I think if, Jim, to the point of your hack, if you engage people around the why, then they're more likely,

if they don't do things the exact way you would have done it, you've got a better chance that they're going to get close enough in terms of meeting the purpose of the thing. And so, as you leave instructions, make sure there's a why statement in there, including to your clients. Give them a why. Why do you need this piece of homework? Why do we need this thing? I think you'll get much better work and sometimes faster work if you said it that way.

Jim Hacking (32:02.822)
That's awesome.

Tyson (32:04.286)
Love it. Good advice. All right, for my tip of the week is, this relates to what John was talking about earlier. If you just want to start simple and start putting stuff on the walls, Jay Muir recommended this to me a while ago, and I think it's really great. If you just go to Amazon and search like whiteboard roll or something like that, like there's a bunch of different, like instead of like having to pay for like a, you know, expensive thing you put on the wall or a whiteboard, you can buy these whiteboard rolls. And we actually did this at our house where like you, we just take a black line and just mark.

Create the columns and you can put your sticky notes, you know down the line as you as you need to go So Jim for your project you can do that just use sticky notes. It's really simple So if you want to start basic, that's a really basic easy way cheap way. I'm looking at a roll right now It's like, you know $17 for eight feet, but the one we have is like way bigger It's like 50 feet and it was like $20 So you can get a lot of rolls of whiteboard paper. So and it just sticks It's just static electricity just sticks to the wall. So really handy but

All right, John, thank you so much. Uh, a lot of fun, really enjoyed this. Um, I can't, can't wait to keep the conversation going. So thank you so much.

John E. Grant (33:05.974)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great, all right, thanks.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is overworked and needs more support? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson Mutrux discusses the crucial role of delegation in law firm management. 

Running a successful law firm is all about delegating tasks to other employees. Delegation is all about taking things off your plate and allowing yourself as an owner to focus on other important tasks. As an owner, you need to trust your team to do well and allow them to take on the responsibility of doing certain things. If you don’t have trust with your team, there will be no growth and you as a law firm owner will become overwhelmed and burnt out.

Tyson identifies a few tasks that can be delegated to other team members. One of these are routine and repeat tasks such as scanning. Delegating this to another person can really take the stress off of an owner. You can even create a process for scanning that makes it more efficient. Legal research is another time consuming task that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Growth tasks such as drafting documents can be given to a junior staff member or a legal student to allow them to build that skill. 

Listen in to learn more about delegation.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:23 The importance and impact of delegation
  • 1:17 Tips for identifying routine tasks suitable for delegation
  • 5:57 The impact of delegation on team empowerment and growth

Resources:

Transcripts: The Art of Delegation with Tyson Mutrux

Tyson (00:15.15)
Okay, test, test, test, test, test. My eyes are looking rough, it was late night. All right, here we go.

Don't worry, I didn't go drinking. I just was up late. Oh, here we go.

Tyson (00:38.67)
Hey, it's Tyson and I am in Las Vegas right now for a Jason Selk event. It's a little seminar I'm attending that he's putting on. It starts in about 45 minutes or so, but I wanted to get in a quick episode. And today I want to talk about delegation and the art of delegation. It's not something that you're, it's not just about, you know, getting rid of the things that you don't want to do.

It's just not, it's not that it's about actually, you know, taking things that, um, off your plate so that you can do the things that are the most important things. I think this is a really fitting one to do while I'm in Vegas for Jason's event, because he talks about focusing on really that one thing, like, you know, one thing at a time. What's that one thing you can do to move, move the ball forward one, one inch at a time and really focusing on the most important tasks. And this is.

really what it's about. And so I've talked about this quite a bit over the years and delegation is super important, but it's also really, really difficult because sometimes it's just easier to just do that one little thing. Oh, I'm just going to get it done. But then all those things pile up. You talk about task switching, which is another issue, and it really becomes a problem. So we're going to talk about delegation today fairly quickly. These are Bytesays episodes, so that's…

why do it but it delegation matters okay it really does matter it's something that will take you if you can figure this out all right if you can take delegation and figure it out it's gonna help propel you right it's gonna help you grow your firm it's gonna help you and growth can mean a lot of different things Jim and I talked about that a lot growth doesn't mean you know adding you know 50 offices growth just means whatever success is to you so growth is getting better at your craft.

success could be that you're able to spend more time with your family, right? Growth can mean many, many different things, but it begins with delegation, being able to offload some of the things that you shouldn't be doing to other people. It's really going to empower your team, too. And this is another thing, too. We had recently, we had a changeover with an attorney and…

Tyson (03:03.79)
And speaking to the case manager was really interesting because when I was talking to her, I told her, I was like, listen, we're going to be relying on you more. And she felt so much more confident. And she was way happier because she knew that we trusted her. The attorney that was working with her did not trust her, was doing a lot of those small tasks themselves. I'm not going to say if it's a man or woman, because it doesn't matter. But they were taking those tasks on themselves.

And so the case manager just didn't feel valued. She didn't feel trusted. And whenever I'd let her know, hey, we're going to start relying on you a lot more. She loved it. And so there's that part of it too, that you have to really remember. It's not just about offloading things from you. Your team, they want more to do. They want to be trusted. They want to be empowered. So remember that part of it.

So let's go through some things, ways of identifying some tasks. And we're going to start with three, OK? We're going to make this really easy on you, especially if you're having issues trying to delegate, OK? So any routine tasks or time -consuming tasks, these are things that we'll use the example of scanning, right? So hopefully you will learn. No one is scanning, but if you're solo, just a true solo, just you, then you might be scanning. But if you can offload those tasks. But scanning is one of those things. It's a really.

routine tasks task. It may not even be that time consuming, but it's a really routine task that you can offload. Anything that's really time consuming, many of you might try to fight me on this one, but it's fine. Legal research, if you could find a way to offload that, legal research could be really time consuming. And if you can find someone in your office or even outsource it, where they're doing your legal research, and even if you insist on writing whatever you need to write,

That could be something that could help you help speed up the process for you. So and start with the tasks that are necessary. So we're talking about where do we start when it comes to delegation. The tests are necessary, but they're not necessarily they don't necessarily require a level of expertise, especially your level of expertise. So we're talking about scanning, scheduling, document filing, basic research. And then now let's move on to.

Tyson (05:29.166)
Number two, tasks that are outside your expertise, all right? How about that? You don't know everything, no one does. So you're gonna identify those tasks that someone else could perform better than you. And this could include, it could be research, right? It might be the writing part of it and many other administrative duties. Maybe you're not very good at making phone calls to certain people, okay? That's something where you can delegate to someone else. All right, then let's go to number three.

And this is where there's really opportunities for team growth. So identify, number three is identify opportunities for team growth. So look for tasks that, where maybe junior staff could take over or an associate, like drafting documents, maybe you have an associate or maybe even you have a case manager that you could trust to draft some higher level documents. They don't, they're not, you can give them some sort of criteria to use, but.

it's going to require a level of expertise, but not quite your level of expertise. And they can draft these documents under your supervision or under someone else's supervision in the firm. That's another, that's a sort of a elevated step of this where you have got someone underneath you that's then delegating to someone else, which would be pretty good. But remember, you've got to choose the right people for delegation. Not ever, you can't delegate.

Every task to one person, right? You got to figure out who the right person is. Consider work workload, right? Some people might be overworked. And so don't, a mistake that many people make is they go back to the well, right? They go to the same person over and over and over again. Next you know you've burned that person out. So don't do that. Provide training. This is another part of it too. All right, so right now I'm training a different case manager on some things and it's time consuming. But you know what?

it's gonna save me a ton of time in the future on certain things. And so we're doing some demand training and some hammer letter training and all that, where I'm really going deep with her, but it's gonna save me a ton of time on the back end. So consider the training part of it too. So remember that. So I'm gonna wrap things up. A lot of this is about empowerment, not micromanagement. This is about taking things off your plate.

Tyson (07:49.71)
This is about freeing up your time to do the most important tasks. And as you're doing this, provide feedback. Give your team feedback so that they know and they can get better. Don't just go to your office and complain because they're not doing it right. Give them feedback so they can get better. Because I know a lot of you probably do that. Mastering this can really transform your practice and your life. So please work on this. This is a skill that you have to work on.

As a reminder, if you have something you want me to cover on these episodes, make sure that you send me a text message, 314 -501 -9260. I get a lot of great ideas from you all, so please keep them coming. I would love to hear from you, so give me a text. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Join us at the next Guild Mastermind in Minneapolis on April 18th and 19th! Click here for event details.

Are you an attorney who is interested in joining a supportive group of fellow attorneys? In this podcast episode, Jim and Tyson explore the impact of their mastermind group for lawyers. 

Jim and Tyson discuss the great things that have happened since beginning the quarterly mastermind sessions. One of these things is the ability to learn different ways of doing things from lawyers of all backgrounds. There are multiple ways to succeed and many people tend to not realize that. But, sharing perspective in the mastermind has created this notion for members. Working in law can be stressful and competitive, but Jim and Tyson share how participants are able to network, share ideas, overcome struggles and get validation from their fellow attorneys. The mastermind sessions are all about fostering a supportive environment for attorneys to grow and learn.

Jim and Tyson share their methods for preparing for mastermind sessions. Starting off the mastermind sessions with a few questions help set the tone for the day and get people thinking about their work habits, business decisions and how they interact with clients. Mastermind sessions are all about digging deep with members, helping them understand their problems and receive positive feedback from others.

Take a listen to learn more!

Jim’s Hack: If you find yourself in a rut doing the same thing over and over, just do one little thing differently to be disruptive.

Tyson’s Hack: If you think that you may have hired too many people, go through an exercise of picking your top 6 people that you can’t work without to narrow it down.

Episode Highlights:

  • 5:23 Exploring the benefits of running a mastermind
  • 7:30 The dynamics and perspectives of participants in the mastermind
  • 9:22 Planning and setting the tone for mastermind sessions
  • 23:04 Discussion on the importance of making small changes 

Resources:

Transcripts: Unleashing the Power of a Mastermind: Transforming Legal Practices

Jim Hacking (00:00.938)
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.384)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up, Jimmy.

Jim Hacking (00:08.514)
Well, my friend, today on recording day, we always record on the first Thursday of the month. Today is the first day of February. It's hard to believe how fast January went by, and of course, I still think it's 2002. So things are moving very quickly.

Tyson (00:27.092)
in the army. That's when I was in the… Dude, man, as we're talking, I feel jacked. I lived through the day from my fingertips all the way up to my shoulders. I'm just like, my arms are about to just explode. I was going to tell you something before, just like, I know it was funny because I went to go give the kids hugs this morning when I got back from the gym. I couldn't even squeeze my hands. It was like…

Jim Hacking (00:47.362)
That's a strange thing to say.

Tyson (00:56.156)
I couldn't even pick something up if I wanted to. But I was going to tell you something before we started. I wanted to make sure we recorded it. So I got off the phone this morning with a friend of ours. She's also a Gildian. But a client had called. I don't know if I should say this, but I'm going to anyways. One of my clients has been calling around. And yeah, like asking for a.

Jim Hacking (01:20.25)
Oh.

Jim Hacking (01:25.602)
Second opinion?

Tyson (01:26.672)
Yeah, like, yeah, trying to get his basic second opinion and maybe like hire another lawyer. Well, I think it's funny is like it is a it's a client that I have told given the exact same advice now less than five times and she won't take my advice. And I told her exactly what was going to happen if she didn't take my advice. That has happened. And now she's not happy about it. And if you juxtapose that with this other client that I got the phone with where the current offer is $400,000.

Jim Hacking (01:29.846)
Better deal.

Tyson (01:55.14)
We're probably going to end up around 500,000. They're like, Tyson, we trust you, whatever you want, let us know. It's just like, it's so many, so many of these truths that are so true. It's like this other case, not worth near as much, won't listen to me. It's a pain in the butt client. And then you get this other one. It's just like, Hey Tyson, we trust you. Like whatever, like whatever you recommend. It's, it's just so.

I'm going to take pride, actually, I'm going to fire the client because it's something we had been talking about in the office for a while, like this particular client, she's a real pain in the butt. I'm just going to, I'm sick of dealing with her. I'm just going to send her on her way. So this is just advice to anyone that's dealing with that. Just send those people on their way. They're just not worth your time. The low value clients are just usually not worth it. That's it. That's all my mind this morning. So I want to get off my chest. How about that? This is my counseling session.

Jim Hacking (02:45.579)
We could do it.

We could do a whole podcast just on that. I mean, you know, when you have, you know, it's always the clients with the $50,000 case versus the clients with the half a million dollar case that are so much harder to deal with. I mean, not always, but so often is it's, you know, that whole 80-20 rule that 80% of your headaches come from 20% of your clients. It's, I think, you know, one of my favorite things to do is to fire clients. I haven't gotten good and worked up and fired a client in a while, but I probably need to do that. It's…

It's cathartic. It lets your team know that you're standing up for them. It's gonna free you up to work on more high value cases. And most importantly, it's gonna free you up from the mental gyrations of dealing with this fool.

Tyson (03:32.036)
Yeah, well, and the thing that made me the angriest was that she said that she thought that I was going to sabotage the case if, uh, if, uh, if she fired me. And I'm like, what? It just, it just, things like that just drive me through the roof. It's like, that is, it just, it's like, whenever they try to, they try to tack you whenever it comes to just, uh,

your character. That's when it's like, OK, now you're getting me mad. But yeah.

Jim Hacking (04:06.074)
Just know that is how that person walks through life. Right, like that's a hard way to live. That's how they're choosing to, that's their worldview. That's how they approach everything. They think everybody's their enemy, even their own lawyer. And you know, those are the worst when people, oh, nice product placement there for the Guild water bottle.

Tyson (04:22.609)
Oh, nice.

Um, quick timeout. Is my, is my video glitchy?

Jim Hacking (04:30.795)
No

Tyson (04:31.564)
Okay, because I got a notification that it wasn't getting it because I've got I'm using my bluetooth

Jim Hacking (04:34.442)
Every now and then it's fine. The audio for sure is fine. The video, they'll catch all the video up.

Tyson (04:41.432)
Okay, cool. All right, so do we want to, with that nice segue Jimbo, do we want to talk about today's topic?

Jim Hacking (04:48.642)
So, back in 2018, when we were having our annual conference, for the first time we had a mastermind the day before, I think, yeah. And we really, really enjoyed it. It was time set aside for people in the guild. It was time where we got to hear from people about what was going on in their lives, and everyone liked it so much that our friend Paul Yoko Baita suggested that we do that quarterly.

And we have pretty much done that quarterly ever since. And it's an interesting thing running a mastermind as opposed to attending a mastermind. So we were talking about what a good topic for the podcast might be. And I think that sharing the things that we observe, obviously with anonymity preserved, would be a good topic for us to talk about sort of the mindsets that we see, the…

changes that we've seen people make in the shifts.

Tyson (05:50.204)
Yeah. It is interesting because when you go to these, sometimes there are, it's weird. I feel like each one is different. At least I don't see the same things in the room. Sometimes you'll see a common thread. I will say this too. It is important how you start the day. It's important who you start with. There are certain things that you do have to sort of do it just.

You have to tweak things just a little bit. I think you and I have, and Beck have kind of learned this a little bit. But I think one of the most important lessons is that sometimes we think there is a way and there's one right way and this is the way and you've got to do it that way. And I think that there's there, we have that thought because there are several people and companies out there that tell you that there's a way. But the reality is, is there's.

I was sitting in a room in Scottsdale a couple weeks ago with some really successful lawyers, all doing it different ways. And so I think that's an important thing that people need to know. There's not just a way of doing things that's the right way. There are several different ways that you can achieve success. There's several different ways of being happy. And so it's not just like you do this one thing.

and this is how you do it and you become successful. There's a lot of one things.

Jim Hacking (07:21.226)
One of the great things that I really enjoy is the fact that we'll have people in there running seven figure firms and we'll have people who have just started out and are just sort of scratching the surface of their greatness. And so to see the interplay between those types of people is really, really powerful. That goes to your point about people doing things differently.

I think that a lot of the value of the mastermind comes from hearing the things that you say to other people or the things that other people say to you. I think…

your time on the hot seat is probably the least valuable just because it's hard to take it all in and really where you get the insights are from the side conversations, the observations that you make, the things you put in your notebook. I think that in our group, we had, like you said, different people coming at it from different perspectives and also we had some people that were being pretty hard on themselves and I think that another great thing.

about taking a day every quarter away from your life and your schedule is that you get validation, that you're on the right track, that you're doing the right things, that you have the right mindset. And I think that that's just another benefit of the mastermind.

Tyson (08:40.416)
I was looking up something, Jim, and there's this principle, and I had to look up what the principle was called. I couldn't remember the name of it. So Occam's razor. I always forget the name of it, but it's the rule that the simplest solution is almost always the best. And it's funny is because when you get people sometimes on the hot seat and they're talking about this very complex thing, right? And it's…

They've really in their head, it's they've over complicated it. It's way more complicated And then the answer is like so simple like such a simple solution and then they kind of like it's that moment where you see them and like someone has told them like Quit over complicating like this is like do this thing instead and they're like you can't you kind of see like the stress just fall off of them like

Oh, it's like, wow, you're so right. Like, I love those moments.

Jim Hacking (09:42.25)
Yeah, and those moments were, we had a lot of those moments in our group. Um, we had people who were struggling, people who were, um, honest and vulnerable. And, you know, you said that, you know, we've sort of gotten to a point where we sort of structure the day a little bit, cause we know, uh, who's who we might want to lead off, how that's important to sort of set the tone. I, I spent.

my time before we started. I mean, one funny thing was we had a video set up with a laptop, which we don't usually do. So I put on like serene scenes on YouTube and just ran it all day. So that was just sort of setting the tone in the room. And I did it a little bit more organically. I just sort of talked about how masterminds had helped me before, the kinds of things that I'd learned during masterminds. And I sort of start off the mastermind with two questions, which…

I always like to remind people of. And number one is from Dan Sullivan, which is, if we were sitting here a quarter from now or a year from now, what would have to have happened for you to feel like you made progress to where you wanted to be? And the other from Jerry Colona, which is, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions that I say that I don't want? So that sort of gave people something to riff off of. And then I did something very different this time. I let people share when they were ready. So I went off script. I kept everyone on the timetable,

I just, and I thought, oh, we might have some really awkward silences. Not one, not one awkward silence where people were, everyone was ready. The, usually by the time that the person was ending, the next person was ready to go. So it really worked out well.

Tyson (11:20.576)
Interesting. I'll have to try that sometime. The, what I, and I do wonder if this, I mean, it seems like people like it whenever I tell them, I'll give them the order. I'll say, hey, like, okay, the next three people are going to be this, and then we'll go into the break and then I'll tell them, okay, after the break, it's going to be these three. I usually don't tell them the full day. I don't know, maybe, because there are sometimes people are ready, they're jumping at the bit to get going. Like, they've got a big issue that they really want to talk about.

Jim Hacking (11:23.498)
Yeah.

Tyson (11:49.508)
that is pressing. And so I have switched it up before. I've never done what you just said, but I do like that. That's a cool idea. Have you had the moment where the solution comes in the first couple of minutes? I'm talking really, really quick to the point where you have to move on to a new topic.

Jim Hacking (12:13.246)
Yeah, sure, sure. But, you know, oftentimes that's a superficial kind of a thing. So that's when I would sort of encourage them to go deeper and do something a little bit more personal. Yeah, but that is, that can be painful, especially if people are fast talkers or if they, you know, sometimes people know what they need to do and they just need to hear it from other people.

Tyson (12:32.888)
Yeah, I'm not gonna say who the person is, but there was a person that I did have, not this year, or not this quarter, but a previous quarter where the person was like, all right, here's the answer, let's move on to the next thing. And it was interesting because you do have the different dynamics at play where we did solve many, many problems with that person because they were like, all right, we've solved that problem, now let's get on to the next one. But sometimes where it does take some time, like we…

Tyson (13:04.29)
This one we had, I posted a little bit about it in the guild about there was some role playing and I'm not going to get into what.

Jim Hacking (13:10.974)
I really want to know about this because something unusual happened right, I think, right after lunch. And I know you can't talk the specifics, but I think the exercise itself I want to hear about.

Tyson (13:21.168)
Yeah, so one of the members who had been to the trial lawyers college, he kind of used, and I think the technique was from this, but he had another member stand up and basically they looked at each other and he had them say some things. And then he had another guild member pretend to be the person's spouse.

And then they kind of looked at each other and told each other certain things. And then he had them sit in this room. So they picked a part of the room that we were in. And like, OK, where is your happy place? Where's the place that you feel the most comfortable? And they chose the spouse as the person to do the role playing with, because this was the person that they were most comfortable with.

Okay, so comfortable place, comfortable person. And so they have this conversation, right? They have this conversation about what the issue is. And by the way, this is all unscripted. Like this was all just like, he looked, no, the guild member said, hey, do you mind if I try something? I was like, sure, let's do it, right? So like they do it. And I mean, it ended up with a.

Jim Hacking (14:31.842)
You didn't see it coming.

Tyson (14:43.88)
with a pretty big revelation and a pretty big solution to the issues. And it was really cool. But it was one of those things where it's not like a simple, like, here's the issue, let's deal with it. Because sometimes it takes some, you have to dig. Sometimes you have to dig and dig and dig and dig and dig. And there are times where you don't get to the solution until the very end. It takes some time to get there. But it was cool to see because we were all kind of like, it was like there was this like this aha moment. Like,

Ah, we get it. Okay, this makes sense. It was cool. And I mean, it forced, I mean, not forced, it led me to like share some things that I don't usually share with people. Like with like, I pulled him aside afterwards because we ran out of time. I would have said it during the actual hot seat, but I pulled him aside and told some things afterwards that, you know, I don't really tell people. And it was, it just kind of was one of those cool things where like he was very vulnerable. He was willing to participate in it.

It was cool. It was really, I'd never seen that before in a, in a, in a mastermind.

Jim Hacking (15:45.09)
That's really great. And speaking of digging deep, you know, sometimes you'll get people who've been to the mastermind over and over and, and sometimes talking about the same things. And that can be a little bit, uh, troubling, but it's also, uh, interesting to see what it actually takes for them to, uh, move. Right? So movement is what we're after. You know, it's one thing to know something.

We always sort of giggle and laugh that you know after the mastermind Somebody's getting fired somebody's getting hired and somebody's you know taking less time at work and that's all good stuff, right? So it's just interesting as a as a thought experiment and as a People watching experiment sort of like you said earlier that you know, the two different clients handling things differently It's really you know people are complex and people bring all their baggage and all their all their history and their experiences to

the running the law firm and how they interact with their team. And it's just really, really cool to see how that plays itself out.

Tyson (16:49.58)
Yeah, you were talking about the, um, the ones where people bring up the same thing. I love the moments because you and I are not in every single one, right? We're in up and we're in different rooms and we've had it where there's like three rooms before and four rooms before. And it's, it's funny because you'll have a member say, listen, Jim, like you said that two hots or two masterminds ago, like this is the same. Yeah. Like.

Jim Hacking (17:11.518)
Right, I remember when you said that in St. Louis.

Tyson (17:14.708)
like why having you take an action on that? And so people are getting called out and that's why I like it, that's why I love about it is because you're gonna get called out if you're sitting in that same room with someone that you were with before and you've not done the things you said you were gonna do. So that's part of it too, because it's not like you're in the room with a bunch of people that aren't willing to share their opinions, right? One, we're lawyers and two, they're guild members, they're usually pretty, like they're more than comfortable to speak their mind.

And so you're talking about successful people that are willing to share. And so I think that part's pretty cool too. And it's funny because it doesn't have to be you and me. There's other people that are gonna call them out for it. There's several people that are willing to do it.

Jim Hacking (18:00.194)
So some might say that after having done this for a couple of years now and doing this regularly, and obviously you and I do two hot seats a month in the guild itself, what sort of your approach to it or what value are you getting out of it by being a participant in the group? Because I have some thoughts, but I'd like to hear that from you.

Tyson (18:21.968)
I think there's two questions there. So that my approach, you know, I used to take a very direct approach. Like when we were, you and I started the guild, like we, I was the first person cried, I mean, like, I think the first two people cried. Uh, yeah. Um, I, we've learned a little bit. I, I've, I have learned to take more. It depends. I was, here's what I'd say. I have, it depends on the person on the hot seat. Sometimes I have to take a very, a very active role.

Jim Hacking (18:35.55)
Yeah, we had to back it off a little bit.

Tyson (18:50.916)
Sometimes I take a, I'd say the majority of the time I take a very hands-off role, because I tell people in my group, I don't want this to be this situation where I'm asking all the questions. Everyone needs to be jumping in, we all need to take part in this. And so I take that approach, and because there's sometimes where like, I mean I have things to add, but not as much as what someone else might have, because they may have been in that situation. So that's the approach. What I learn, I mean I,

I learned something off of every single hot seat. So I usually take, I've changed the way I take notes. I used to take very active notes on every single person and I've got, so I've got very detailed notes from the early hot seats. And then I would pick out pieces from each of those, but then it got very hard. So now what I do though, is I now just participate more like active listening where I'm just listening and not writing.

And so what I'll do is, because what I would do before is I would use that almost as like a cross-examination or I can go in, well, you said this and I'll pick, you know, we'll kind of pick it apart. Now I just do more active listening, but I now I listen and I'll just, if I hear something that I know I can implement, I'll just write it down and I'll, and so it's, I leave with far less notes. I usually with like one page of notes, it's as opposed to like dozens of pages of notes and I'll just, if it's something I want to implement, I'll implement it. But it's, um, that's how, that's my approach.

What about you?

Jim Hacking (20:17.726)
I take a lot less notes than I used to and I have developed this sort of strange little thing where I hear phrases and the phrase is what's important and the phrase is what I write down and then and even at the end of the mastermind we have everybody go around and talk about like what's your big takeaway or what's the one thing you're going to do. I'll list all of my takeaways and they're usually quotes or just slightly different takes on things. I love it when people say something a little bit wrong and dealing with immigrants on YouTube.

it's great because someone will say some little phrase and I'll grab it and I'll say, that would be a great video or that would be great content. And so with the mastermind, when I hear something, uh, that's just a little bit off or something I can play with, like, what can I play with or not necessarily that's something I could implement that would, that's, that's good stuff, but also like, what's the energy here? What's the phraseology? Why did they say it that way? How does that affect me hearing that? You know what, you know,

I spend a lot of time thinking about that rule from evidence. So what's the effect on the hearer? Like, I think about that a lot. Like, how is this affecting me? What I heard, how does it affect me? And so I'm much more organic than I used to be trying to stay present, like you said, active listening, and then trying to just suss out. You know, I have stuff written all over my notebook. I'm drawing, I'm doing all this stuff. And so when I pull it all out at the end, it would probably be total less than a page, yep.

Tyson (21:42.168)
Yeah. So it's, I'll give you an example. So we did the hot seat the other day and I texted you about this. You had this line that it, and so I've got to actually have it in front of me because I'm going to put it up here. Um, so it's, is that something, cause the, the person said something, uh, and you said, is that something you want to overcome or something you want to stick with? And, and I was like, Oh, that's freaking gold. It's just like a golden line. Like you can, you can use that to so many, like.

Jim Hacking (21:52.13)
Ha ha.

Tyson (22:10.308)
Like, cause like think about like how many things like throughout the day, like I bet every day you could use that line. You know, you know, Tyson, is that something, is that something I want to overcome? Or is it something, something I want to stick with? No, I want to overcome that. Like it's just like, like you said before, you're like, you know, the answer, but it's like, it's such a good line. Like, so yeah, there are several things. I, I did say this thing. I wrote down myself that I, I'm a, you know, this is gonna, I'm gonna pat my back for a second, but like, I said this line during, uh,

hot seat in Scottsdale. I said because they were talking about revenues and all that and then we were talking about like how their profits were like they weren't making any money and I said it's because revenue is an ego number like that's what it is like it's like you were talking about you and I were talking about before like the number of employees you have it's an ego number that's all those things are like so um like there are things we're like that we'll say we're like oh that's kind of that's kind of good we'll write that down uh but it's usually the other things that people say I agree I agree that's why like

Jim Hacking (22:56.528)
Mm-hmm.

Tyson (23:08.624)
I will, like your line, I'll write things like that. Like those are my notes. Like with the way you're telling me. Like those lines that they think, like to them, I don't even think that they hear it coming out of their mouths. But to us, we're like, oh my gosh, that's crucial. But that's a big deal.

Jim Hacking (23:26.018)
Well, it's so great that you got so tickled by that quote and that you texted it to me because this morning, my wife and I were in a pretty intense conversation and I said, hold on, hold on, I'm gonna quote myself. And so, and it was the exact right phrase for the exact right moment. And she was like, blah, like.

Tyson (23:36.197)
Thank you.

Tyson (23:44.42)
That's fucking great. Oh, I guess I should, now we're gonna have to put an E on that or bleep that out. I don't think I've accustomed this podcast. That was good. All right, let's wrap things up Jimbo. We both have calls in four minutes, but I wanna wrap things up before I do. Wanna remind everyone to join us in the guild. We would love to have you go to maxlawguild.com. There's just a lot of great people there that are just always willing to share. If you've gotten something from this episode or from any of the other episodes.

We would love it if you'd give us a five star review so we can help share the love with everyone else. And if you're not quite ready for the guild, that's fine. Join us in the big Facebook group. Just search Maximum Lawyer and you should be able to find us. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking (24:27.394)
Well, given the fact that we were talking about the mastermind, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the next mastermind, which is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 18th and 19th of 2024. Looking forward to that. One of the great things about having this little side gig with Tyson is we get to pick places we want to go. And my son is a freshman at the University of Minnesota, so I'll get to see him while we're up there and spend some time. That being said, for my hack of the week, it is this.

If you find yourself in a rut, doing the same thing over and over, in different parts of your day, and you're getting down in the doldrums and you're like, da da, time to make the donuts. If you just feel like you're doing the same thing every day, just do one little thing different. Or as my wife would say, differently. Just do one little thing differently. Brush your teeth with your left hand. Drive a different route to work.

Take a walk when you usually would have a snack. Just one little thing, and just keep track of that each day. Just try to do that one little thing, or one little thing. Just try to be disruptive to your spot where you are. Try to be, you know, just wiggling out of the tough spot that you're in, so that you can start making better gains. Because to me, change and recalibrating usually comes from taking a small little step.

Tyson (25:55.896)
Yeah, pattern interrupts. I completely agree with those. Perfect. All right, so let me tell this really quick story. We had an employee that was kind of having that. And I said, I had the person walk me through their morning. I said, okay, tomorrow morning, you're gonna not do those things. And I want you to just go to Starbucks. I want you to go to Starbucks. Like I said, where's the closest Starbucks? She told me. And so she went to the Starbucks instead. And she like, it was funny. She's like.

her routine had completely changed. But she said it made such a massive impact. So you're totally right. I think it's great. So my tip of the week is, I've given this advice to a couple people lately, so I'm gonna give this as the tip. If you think that you may have hired too many people, go through this exercise.

Pick your top six or 10 or whatever it may be. I like six, just make it forces you. It's a smaller number. Who are your, if you were to pick six people from your team to keep, and you couldn't keep anybody else, who would it be? And so like how like you're picking a basketball team. Go through that exercise. It could be 10 if you want, whatever it may be, but make it a small number and it'll tell you who your essential people are. And so it's an interesting exercise. It's a very difficult exercise, but something I recommend.

All right, Jimmy, that's a good one. I will talk to you more later. See you in a little bit. See you, buddy. See you, bud. Later, dude.

Jim Hacking (27:26.082)
Alright bro, thanks man. Later dude.

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who needs help measuring the success of your firm? In this podcast episode, Tyson delves into the creation and implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for law firms. 

Establishing KPIs for law firms are important because they show how a firm is progressing and what needs to be done to further drive success. Setting up and maintaining KPIs can be difficult, but Tyson provides a few tips on how to customize KPIs and ensure they are working for the firm. It is important to ensure that KPIs are tailored to different roles. Staff within law firms have different tasks and roles and there will be different KPIs needed to measure them. For example, a KPI might be used to measure how many files a case manager reviews every week. But for a receptionist, a KPI could be an average call time or how many calls are being taken a day.

Tyson shares the importance of reviewing your KPIs and adjusting them as the firm grows.  KPIs also need to be adjusted with individual performance. Job tasks will change over time as people take on more responsibility or change the way they are doing their work. KPIs will need to change alongside this as they will reflect new ways of working. Make sure to communicate these KPIs to staff and let them know when and why they are being adjusted.

Take a listen!

Episode Highlights:

  • 2:05 Tips for customizing KPIs to align with the unique objectives
  • 4:41 Setting KPIs that are challenging and attainable for team members.
  • 6:27 Importance of reviewing and adjusting KPIs to align with evolving needs
  • 8:13 Tips for effectively communicating the purpose and importance of KPIs

Resources:

Transcripts: Tip for Establishing KPI's (Key Performance Indicators)

Tyson (00:01.494)
Hey, it's Dyson and this week I am back with another Saturday episode and I'm going to be talking about tips for establishing KPIs. Those are key performance indicators for those of you that don't know what KPIs mean. They're an extremely useful tool for measuring and driving success for your firm and for really any company. I was listening to a podcast the other day with Jeff Bezos and he was talking about KPIs.

the largest companies use them, the smallest companies should be using them. They're really, really important. Um, before I get to this episode though, just as a reminder, if you are interested in joining the guild, go to maxlawguild.com. It's a wonderful community of amazing attorneys where they share, you know, their, their just best advice, best tips, uh, collaboration. And it's just an, it's just amazing group of people.

We have quarterly events where like we're going to be in Arizona soon. We'll be in Scottsdale. We're in Miami last year. We'll be in Vegas coming up. There's just a lot of cool places, just a lot of great people. And so if you're interested, go to maxolgill.com would love to have you, but let's get into the show. And we're going to talk some more about KPIs. So we just went through and we had our leadership meeting last week where we were talking a little bit about.

Revising the KPIs and we went through all of them and created new scorecards for everyone not new scorecards, but we edited the scorecards that we had for everyone and I fear this would be a really good episode to talk about KPIs because it's something that you do have to give it some Thought and it's not the easiest thing in the world. It's a it's a really challenging thing But it's something that once you have it it's a tool that allows you to make sure everyone's rowing in the same direction and that everyone is

is rowing just as hard as everyone else. And that may be, it's something that's really, really challenging to get just right. And we by no means have it just right, but it's something that we're constantly working on and we're striving to make sure that we're getting better at it. But let me give you some of the tips for getting KPIs in place. So here we go.

Tyson (02:21.35)
Let's first though talk a little bit about just the importance of KPIs. They are…

Tyson (02:37.475)
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do that, but let me let me redo that All right, so let's jump in a little bit more with damn it

All right, so let me jump in with some tips on getting your KPI set up. They're something that they're really going to help you align your team members, the actions that they're doing to the overall objectives of the firm. So number one, make sure that you tailor the KPIs to the individual roles. Each position in your firm. So it's not like you can just take a KPI and just slap it on everybody. It just doesn't work that way.

Each position in your firm, it's going to have its own set of unique KPIs because each role has its own unique purpose, right? A case manager role is going to be completely different than a receptionist role. You've got different objectives for those positions, so you got to make sure that the KPIs help reflect that. So for example, a case manager's KPIs might focus more on

Okay, how do we make sure that the cases are moving forward, we're getting the progress, but we're also having clients that are happy, that wanna refer us cases, okay? Compare that to, let's say, a receptionist, right? The receptionist's role is to make sure that, you know, they're the voice of the firm, that when people call, they're getting questions answered, or they're getting routed to the right place, and they're not missing phone calls. You, there's, they're completely different objectives. So,

One of the KPIs for our case managers is to the certain number of file reviews that they have to do every single week. And that's to make sure that the files are moving forward and as a part of the file review, they have to make sure that the client has been communicated with. And when they do the file review, they're supposed to update the client as well. There's a lot that goes with it. So that is one of the KPIs. You've got to do so many of those a week. When it comes to a receptionist, one of the KPIs is the average call time. Okay, you don't want the receptionist

Tyson (04:44.934)
on the phone for a really long time, she needs to get that call to the right person, the right person, and if you have them on the phone too long, that means that you're probably not getting them to the right people in a timely fashion, okay? So that's just a couple examples of the KPIs that we have. We have, you know, I'll get to this in a little bit, but you wanna kinda limit it to three. You don't wanna go any more than three. Some of ours have two, some of our people have one.

Many have three, but you don't want to do it. You don't want to have more than three. All right. The next tip is you're going to want to make sure you're balancing aspirational and achievable KPIs. And that's something that can be tough because you want people really hitting the ball out of the park, but you have to also make sure that it's reasonable. If you set KPIs are just.

never going to be achieved. People take them seriously and they'll get discouraged and they're not going to work for you. Okay, that's a big problem. So you got to make sure that you that they can actually attain these kpis because they're going to be rated on these Okay as a part of your job scorecards. This is how they're going to be evaluated on a regular basis And if your team consistently hits their targets without effort though You're going to raise the bar because if they're always hitting it, it's just too easy. You need to you need to push them a little bit more but

You're gonna be aiming for that continual growth that way you don't have that complacency and you know That's obviously the opposite of the those unattainable goals because if you do that, they're just gonna get discouraged and they're It's gonna really demoralize them. So you don't want them to disengage So invest that effort in finding the balance that you need and it's gonna take some time You're not gonna get it right the first time most likely It's gonna take some time for you to really figure out what that balance is

Third tip is consider perception and motivation. Understand how team members, they're gonna perceive their roles and their contributions to the firm. The KPIs, they should not only reflect their responsibilities but they should also resonate with each team member and that in each position, that way they can value the work that they're doing. Make sure that you're having some KPIs.

Tyson (07:08.342)
that really do get to the core values of the firm, the values of the individual, and that way you've got this alignment that boosts motivation and also job satisfaction. So take that into consideration as well. Tip number four, regular reviews and then adjustments. Okay, so KPIs are not this thing that you just set it and forget it and that they're always there. It's not like a core value, okay? Core value, those are gonna be set in stone, you're not gonna be changing those. Those are gonna be there forever.

KPIs are going to change. They're probably going to change, I wouldn't say regularly, but they are going to be things that are going to change. So regularly review them in the context of both the individual performance and then also the firm's evolving needs. I talked about Jeff Bezos, but Jeff Bezos talks about making sure that you're not, you don't have these KPIs that people are using for years and years and they…

there have been several people that have changed over time. And by the time that 10 years after that KPI is created, no one knows why it freaking exists, right? You don't want that to happen. So you're gonna, because sometimes the KPIs aren't necessary anymore. What was necessary 10 years ago is no longer necessary. Your firm is probably completely different. So make sure that you are constantly, I would say least yearly, looking at your firm needs and see if the KPIs.

fit those firm needs. That's a really, really important part of this. And then the last tip I want to get to is just clear communication and support. Whenever you are introducing these KPIs, you're going to want to make sure that you're communicating clearly why you're using KPIs, why they're important, how they contribute to the firm's success. Having this communication to the team, instead of just dumping them on them and saying, do these things.

it's gonna go a long way to get buy-in. And that's one of the things that's gonna be the most challenging part of this too, is getting that buy-in. And I can tell you, you're gonna have some people that are not gonna like it. I'm just gonna tell you, we went through the whole top grading changeover and many of the employees that don't like accountability, they really struggle with KPIs. So just keep that in mind. You're gonna get a lot of, well, I like the way things used to be. Too bad.

Tyson (09:28.822)
Okay, you're gonna have to get past that and they're gonna have to get past that. It's something that's gonna be necessary for your firm to grow to take you to that next level. And it's also gonna be very rewarding for you and for the employees because they're gonna see the progress that you and the firm are gonna make in overtime. All right, that's enough with KPIs for now. As a reminder, if you have something you want me to cover on the Saturday episode, shoot me a text. Just text me 314-501-9260. I would love to hear from you.

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

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