One of the things of growing a firm; it’s like raising a kid, it’s like an organic thing; it’s alive.
In this episode Jim and Tyson interview Attorney Mike Campbell and go through the issues of running and growing your own law firm.
Mike Campbell graduated from the University of Missouri in 2011 and after working as an attorney for other lawyers for a couple years, he decided to take the leap and open a solo practice. He runs his own law firm since 2015. http://mikecampbelllaw.com/
Staffing
Should I hire someone?
Major issue for Mike. As the firm grows, more work needs to be done, and if you want to keep on making a good job with clients and results, you’ll need to eliminate, delegate and/or automate. If your systems are in place, sometimes the only way is staffing, and having people working for you is not easy.
What are we doing well? What should we do better? And what we should stop doing?
Tyson’s Tip: A podcast; “How I Built This”. http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
It is awesome. They bring on people with established businesses to talk about how they built their companies.
Hacking’s Hack: Believe it or not, an INK PEN. Write down your tasks and things to remember, you will be more effective.
Mike’s Tip: Ring Central. https://www.ringcentral.com/
A web based app, a cloud service. An online office. Lots of great tools, check it out.
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm.
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Transcript: Case Study – Attorney Mike Campbell
Jim Hacking
One of the things about growing affirm, it’s like raising a kid is that it’s an organic thing that’s alive, that changes over time that has different threats, different successes, different problems, and to take that time to reset and just sort of analyze where am I at? What am I doing? Right? I think that goes right along with Tyson’s automation and delegation stuff. Run your law firm the right way.
Unknown Speaker
This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer podcast. I am Jim hacking.
Mike Campbell.
And I’m Tyson mutex. What’s up Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Oh, excited to have our very first lawyer guest on the show Attorney Mike Campbell. Mike, how are you?
Mike Campbell.
I’m well, how are you two gentlemen doing this morning. Great.
Jim Hacking
Great. We’re excited to have you on the show, Mike.
Mike Campbell.
Awesome. I appreciate the opportunity.
Jim Hacking
So tell us a little bit about your practice, sort of when you finished law school, how you got started and how you came to own your own firm.
Mike Campbell.
Sure. So I graduated from the University of Missouri in 2011. I immediately started working for a local general practice firm. I did some family law and decided that wasn’t for me at all. And then another local lawyer asked me to come work for him, helped me work in his practice. He primarily did personal injury, criminal defense workers compensation, worked with him for two years, built something really good with him. And all along. I think he knew that I was ambitious. And so he supported my decision, actually to start my own practice. And so whenever I decided to make that leap, he was on board. It was a great departure. So Well, it’s been close to two years that I’ve had my own firm here in Columbia, Missouri, where I focus on personal injury, criminal defense and worker’s compensation.
Jim Hacking
So how did you pick where to put your office and how did you sort of go through that?
Mike Campbell.
Well, I was driving to Ashland, Missouri, which is sort of like a suburb of Columbia every day, and I decided that I was spending so much time on the road, I get really stressed out when I drive. I don’t know, not from St. Louis. So I’m not used to your guys’s kind of traffic, but I picked my office just for location. So I am in the village of Cherry Hill, which is directly across the street from my house. And it’s also a great location because the parking is great. The clients I have who come out there appreciate that. They don’t have to look for a spot like as in downtown Columbia. And then recently, I’m from a small town. Tyson’s familiar with Centralia, Missouri, and I just opened a practice there as well. So I have two offices. And I go to Centralia once a week.
Mike Campbell.
It’s funny, Mike, you listed the two armpits in Missouri. Ashland is a trillion so yeah.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, yeah. Tyson drops the hammer right out of it.
Mike Campbell.
So I went to holtsville. And those are like our two biggest rivals. So yeah, absolutely. It’s a
Mike Campbell.
guy on Centralia the armpits? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jim Hacking
Hopefully, this will be lost on most of our listeners.
Mike Campbell.
So I hope so, Mike.
Jim Hacking
So I think that’s really smart to put the office close to your home. I think the grind of driving back and forth every day is a lot of wasted time. For a long time. My office was five minutes from my house and I could be at work very quickly usually took me about a song or a song and a half to get to work. And recently, we moved our family house and I’m sure that eventually we’ll move our law firm closer to where I live. I’m a big proponent of that,
Mike Campbell.
you know, Jimmy and Mike said something that was actually really interesting, because it sounds like he really thinks about it from a client’s perspective. He said, You know, the parkings really easy to get to like that’s one of the first things he said and that’s I think that’s overlooked by a lot of attorneys when they’re looking for an office. So I think that’s smart. You’re thinking right away. I’ve got to find a spot that’s got really easy parking. And I know Jim, you’re not familiar with Cherry Hill. But in Columbia, it is far better than parking downtown downtown’s terrible. There’s not enough parking garages. But he’s got a very, very convenient location. I think, Mike, I think you picked a great spot. Thanks. I
Mike Campbell.
appreciate that. And one of the things I really looked at whenever I was looking to put an office space was, you know, are there other attorneys out there? They’re not and then also, accessibility. So you have parking, but my building also has an elevator, you know, so it’s not like folks have to climb steps or anything like that. And it’s not hard to get to. I mean, by the time you drive downtown and try to look for a spot, you can already be in my office and upstairs in my office meeting with me. So it really is a lot more accessible. Then some of the places I looked downtown.
Jim Hacking
Are you finding more clients coming from around the immediate area of the office or do they still come in from Colombia,
Mike Campbell.
the people that come to my Columbia office, they come from all over over the place and the road out there is not that bad. It’s all you know, four lanes. And so it’s really not necessarily the immediate area, more or less the same people who would go downtown still come out there. Alright,
Mike Campbell.
so Mike, I kind of want to jump into the issue while you’re here because I think it’s something an issue that we can maybe take a long time on, and I don’t want to take too much time on it. So will you give her buddy your just a quick summary of what issue you’re having?
Mike Campbell.
Sure. So staffing, staffing is a major issue for me. When I first went out on my own, obviously, I did not have any staff, it was just me. And so I decided to make the leap to hire two employees, two part time employees best decision I made scary decision. Now I’m at another growth phase where I need you to decide do I bring on a paralegal? Do I bring on a contract attorney? Do I, you know, what are my options?
Mike Campbell.
And how long is your firm in a row?
Mike Campbell.
It would be April 15. So year and a half. So that’s incredible growth.
Mike Campbell.
I think that’s fantastic. Yeah,
Jim Hacking
walk us through the mindset. Mike, tell us what your thought processes, sort of what led you to hire the two part time people before and sort of where you’re at now, what’s making you ask yourself these questions about hiring somebody else?
Mike Campbell.
Well, so whenever it was just me, and I’ve heard you guys talk about this before, whenever you brought on staff, your first thought was, I need to be there by eight o’clock, I need to beat everybody there to the office. And so I enjoyed being by myself, since I didn’t want to have that obligation. But I had too much work to do. And it was, it was things that I didn’t need to be doing. So I have one staff member, her only responsibility is to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and request medical records and medical bills. And she comes in every Tuesday and Thursday morning, she works in a medical office. And she comes in and she just does that. And that’s her only job. And then the other one is a college student who does most of my intakes, and then takes those intakes and puts them into I use Clio, and then returns calls for me. And those are all tasks that I feel like if I were doing them, I wouldn’t be helping my firm grow, I wouldn’t be helping my clients on their cases. And now I’ve sort of reached another hurdle here where even with that extra help, there are tasks that may be a paralegal could be doing for me drafting certain documents, looking at certain documents speaking with clients, because of the amount of volume I’ve recently seen come into the office terms of injury clients and criminal clients.
Jim Hacking
And so you’re seeing an uptick in that and you’re sort of keeping track of the caseload.
Mike Campbell.
Yeah, yeah. So I was fortunate enough to have a couple good things happen this summer. And when you resolve a good case, or couple of good cases, you are immediately excited. And then you think, oh my God, what’s going to replace this case? So fortunately, I’ve had that. And plus, and so now it has gotten to a point to where I’m in the office, you know, 1214 hours a day, and doing things that maybe someone else can be doing.
Jim Hacking
I think that’s the number one issue if you’re doing things that other people should be doing or could be doing. If you’re doing $10 An hour work when you should be doing $300 An hour work or big picture stuff that’s sort of even unquantifiable from a cash perspective. I think that you really want to separate out what you’re doing that only you can do versus the kinds of things that you can outsource, don’t you think Tyson?
Mike Campbell.
You took the words out of my mouth? Because I was thinking, Mike, had you gone through the process of looking at okay, what can I delegate? What can I eliminate? What can I automate? Have you done all that?
Mike Campbell.
You know, I have I did a couple of months ago, I need to go back and revisit that. And I’m trying to put the systems in place. So that when I do delegate, you know, it’s clear, as clear can be on what are the steps you take to get this task accomplished. If it’s a letter representation, you know, an entry of appearance, or it’s a letter to an ERISA carrier or something like that. I’m putting those systems into place. So when I do delegate, they can get out, but I need to go back and revisit that for sure.
Mike Campbell.
And you mentioned something else. I mean, there’s, there’s multiple balls in the air here, right? I mean, it’s not just do you have enough work to delegate to other people? And that’s one part of it. You know, another part of this is also, do you have the finances that back it up? And one of my questions is, are you tracking your numbers to know 56789 10 months into the future that you’re going to have the resources to pay these three people?
Mike Campbell.
Right. And so that’s where the fear came in. Early on, was looking at my overhead, could I really justify bringing a couple of people on and I just decided, yes, I think I can do this because it’s going to free up my time, too. go hustle. Like you said, Tyson always hustling. And we get more cases meet more people get out there in the community. And fortunately, that worked out really well, because it did free up that time. My overhead right now, I don’t know, if I could bring on someone, you know, full time for salary with benefits. And so it is a little frightening. To try to figure out what to do.
Mike Campbell.
In my opinion, I think you need to go back to the Delete delegate, diminish kind of mindset, see what you can pare down and see what you can continue to delegate. And then also add in an automation element, as you know, adding on another person, it’s an added cost, it takes way more of your time. If you can add in an automation element, maybe to some of this, you would be able to maybe even bring your overhead down, okay, instead of having to hire more people, you bring overhead down, and you make yourself more efficient. So I mean, in you know, the workbooks one of the Gemini do so that’s, that’s obvious. But I think if you haven’t done that in a couple months, maybe before looking at hiring another person, because I think with paralegal stuff, you can teach a lot of that stuff, because I’m sure you have a demand letter that you do a certain way, you have a petition that you do a certain way. These are so called paralegal activities, but you can easily teach them to someone, just like Jim Jim has a very set checklist on how he does his immigration stuff. I think if you don’t have that, maybe you need to revisit that and add those into your practice.
Jim Hacking
And Mike, I think that lawyers are often and I’ve been guilty of this too quick to hire. I think that there comes times in our practice, because you know, it is a roller coaster where things are very, very busy. And our knee jerk reaction is oh, I need to hire someone, I need to hire someone. And I’m not discouraging you from hiring someone that’s like Tyson said, you know, that’s something that you know more about the situation on the ground than we do. But I would encourage you to think, How can I hire the least to do this? How, what’s the least amount I can hire? What’s the least amount I can commit to what’s the, you know, what are all the things that need to get done? And then try to find that person as opposed to saying I need another lawyer to handle half my caseload. And I’m not saying that’s what you said. But it’s just sort of a tricky situation. Sure. It makes a lot of sense.
Mike Campbell.
And Mike, what are some of the things that you’ve tried to this point that is not working?
Mike Campbell.
Well, you talked about in the past the Infusionsoft building the campaigns, I have not jumped onto the Infusionsoft train yet what I’m doing, I use Clio, I’ve been building templates, checklists, the problem I’ve had is trying to build those systems while at the same time still getting cases and not having those systems available. So that we, you know, we can funnel every case through the lens of this is the checklist that we use for this type of case, this is the system we use. So I think my biggest problem is, I’ve got to do this for a DUI, I’ve got to do this for personal injury case, I’ve got to do this for a workers compensation case, and trying to figure out, if I need to just shut the office down for a week, and just build those things, or take a week off and just build those things and put them into place. Or, you know, just kind of keep plugging away at it one day at a time. And hopefully in a couple months, those things will be available for my staff to use. The way I look at it is that if my staff does something wrong, and this might be the wrong way to look at it, if my staff does something wrong, it’s because I haven’t given them the right tools they need to do it right. Does that make sense?
Mike Campbell.
Always, that’s always true to address the the Infusionsoft thing. I think there’s a couple of different ways of looking at it. And you’re talking to two people that have done it completely different ways. You can do it yourself. That’s why I’ve done it. And it takes a long time. And I can give you some pointers on how to do it, or you can do it. Jimmy did and Jimmy hired someone. And Jim’s had two experiences, I think, and you can speak to this, Jim, but I think you’ve had a bad experience and then a really good experience. So it really depends on who you hire Jimmy, you want to talk about maybe the hiring part of it to maybe hire someone to do the automation for you.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, well, I think we need to all step back, though, a minute. I think that one thing Tyson’s taught me is that it’s really good to record what you’re doing all the time. I’ve gotten to the point now where I really think I’m gonna record most of the conversations I have and take nuggets out of all those to really, I don’t think you need to stop business and build out the campaigns. I struggle with this all the time I always liking to trying to repair the boat while I’m steering the boat. I’m trying to make the boat bigger. I’m trying to keep any leaks from from bursting in the seams of the boat. But at the same time the boat has a destination and that’s you know getting all of our clients to the Happy police they want to be right. So it’s tough. It’s I think it’s an eternal struggle. But I think that one thing that you can do, I mean, for Tyson with his training, he’s been really good about, you know, recording it, videotaping it, transcribing it and turning it into a manual. That way, it’s more organic, and it’s not slowing you down. You can’t do that, obviously, all the time or in every situation. But I think that instead of thinking of training or procedure, creating, as a standalone, separate part of our practice that the more we can integrate that into the culture and into our mindset and our workflow. It’s really gonna go a long way.
Mike Campbell.
Sure that can I just say one thing for anyone who might be listening, which is all of the problems and struggles that I’m having right now could have been quantified and multiplied if I would not have been doing the things that you guys have suggested I do. Being involved with John Fisher and the power of a system and putting those things into place. I’ll give you the best example. A couple of weeks ago, Tyson was talking about uploading videos to a web platform. It was I texted him as soon as I listened to the podcast and said, This is a game changer. All the things I do now are video tutorials. I think
Mike Campbell.
that’s great. I mean, video tutorials are fantastic. And you it’s funny, you definitely deserve some credit, you jumped right on it started right away. I mean, you were doing within a day of
Mike Campbell.
fantastic. I have been doing them ever since day in day out. Every time I do something new. Like Jim says, I just say how can I put this in a video tutorial, so I don’t have to do it again.
Jim Hacking
And one of the other things that you mentioned earlier in the call that I think is really important is that you are reassessing now where you are. And it’s different from where you were when it was just you. And one of the things about growing a firm, it’s like raising a kid is that it’s an organic thing that’s alive, that changes over time that has different threats, different successes, different problems, and to take that time to reset either on a monthly or quarterly basis and just sort of analyze where am I at? What am I doing? Right? You know, one of the things we do around here is we ask, you know, what are we doing? Well, what could we do better? And what should we stop doing? And I think what should we stop doing has been the biggest assist for us in you know, letting things go and asking those questions of myself, I think is good, too. You know, what are the things that Mike doesn’t have to do anymore? I think making that list and sort of just keeping track from now until Friday of the kinds of things that you either don’t think you should be doing, don’t want to be doing or don’t need to be doing. I think that goes right along with Tyson’s automation and you know, delegation stuff.
Mike Campbell.
And Mike what Jim’s talking about because Jim taught me this, you need to mark down everything. And Jim may not even remember telling me to do this. But a long time ago, he told me to just spend a week and write everything down that I do every single thing. Going to lunch, you know, I mean, all the everything. So you keep a little journal with you and mark down everything. And you’re gonna see a lot more stuff that you can eliminate, or that you can delegate or that you can outsource whatever it is, than you think. For example, as simple as just doing the video stuff. You can use virtual assistants for a lot of little small things. And they work on an hourly basis. And as soon as you upload it and give them the work they do it, it’s the turnaround time is pretty small. Even though it may seem like oh, I don’t need to delegate this or it’s too small of a task. You add up all the small tasks, and they make a lot of the tickets a big part of your time. If you can get that part of it knocked out by just making a list and see which things you can outsource. You’re gonna save yourself a ton of time at each week, I guarantee it
Mike Campbell.
sure makes a lot of sense. Can I ask you a question, Tyson? Absolutely. Would you kind of talk about the training day? I’ve kind of seen this lately. It’s you go through something on your training manual. Is that right?
Mike Campbell.
We do two different ways. So the first way is we’ll pick a part of the training manual to go over for that week. One week, I actually we are having an issue with not getting all of the information from every lead as it comes through. I think that people were thinking, Oh, we don’t really need the email. And that’s one of the most valuable things that I do need from a lead even though we’re not taking the case. And so we went down and talked about the things we need from every single lead no matter what that was one week, or I use Max at the office and Kelsey and Angie use PCs. And so I’ve converted them to using MAC’s and so one of the trainings that we did was an hour long training on the basics of using a Mac. So anything it is to we can do to improve the efficiency of the office. Anything we can do to improve their skills. One week was on how to improve our skills on requesting medical records. So you can either pick A portion from your employee manual, which is good. I think that’s something that John Fisher is sort of doing is pull points that from the employee manual, or you can use things that actually help with your your office and in efficiency way that aren’t necessarily in your user manual. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We will also meet, I’d say probably every six weeks, we don’t really have it on a routine. But we’ll sit down. And we’ll just simply ask the question, what are we doing that needs to be improved? What are we doing? Well, and then actually, the first part of it, what are we doing that needs to be improved? Gives me a list of ideas for training to improve our what we’re doing or what our processes are. So that’s another way of doing it.
Mike Campbell.
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, you know, I’m kind of learning this on the fly a little bit. So it’s having guys like you guys, go through this stuff. And then, like I said, connecting with all the people, we’re all alumni of the among us, I guess, of the mastermind experience. So it is just awesome. I can’t imagine not having these problems. Like I said we’d be multiplied. If I didn’t have resources like this available.
Mike Campbell.
Yeah, mastermind experience, we can go out and plug that because I think that was its career changing is what it is being a part of that because such a great group of people, smart people. And then also let’s make sure plug jump Fisher’s book is the power of a system. You mentioned that before that if you’re doing personal injury, litigation, personal injury law, you should definitely read that book, it definitely tells you the systems you need to put in place to handle personal injury cases. Yeah.
Jim Hacking
The other thing too, about John’s group, and about what we’re trying to do with the podcast is it’s just plain and simple that running your own law firm is hard. And it’s difficult, and it can be isolating. And I think just having people to bounce ideas off of I mean, I’ve been inspired by some of the things you’ve done. Mike, tell us a little bit about your Facebook Live thing that you did last couple weeks.
Mike Campbell.
Sure. So I’ve done a couple of different things. And this came directly from the mastermind experience motivating me to do these things. Getting outside of my fear of being seen on Facebook on a video, I just decided to start doing different videos about things I care about. So I was at a safety conference a few weeks ago, and I really am concerned about roadway safety. Some of the things I did was summarize what I had learned. And my thought is, is that someone’s more likely to click on that and watch that for a minute and a half than they are to read a post, I write about the same exact issue. And I’ve gotten some really good feedback. And the other thing I decided to do separate from my law firm, was just interview some people on fire, talk about the amendments that are coming up as proposed for the election. So I covered the amendment six, and amendment three, I was hoping to get someone on talking about amendment four, but that didn’t pan out. So someone’s exploring. I’m just having fun with it. And I really don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m just doing it anyway. Does that make sense? Sure. That’s
Mike Campbell.
how we started the podcast. Yep, absolutely. And I think that what you’re doing with the political talk is fantastic. I think you’re building a community of people that around you, I think it’s awesome. I think that’s a great idea.
Mike Campbell.
And I was just gonna say the for I look forward to this podcast every week. So it is, you said the practice is isolating? It really is until you realize there are a lot of people out there having the same issues, and they’re willing to give you free information on how to deal with those issues. So thanks, guys. Oh, thank you.
Jim Hacking
Well, I think this was our best call yet, don’t you Tyson?
Mike Campbell.
Absolutely. For sure.
Jim Hacking
So I think it’s time for our hacks and tips. And Mike’s tip for the week. So Tyson, why don’t you go first.
Mike Campbell.
So I hate to plug in other podcasts. But I’m going to this is actually by NPR and it’s how I built this. It is awesome. It’s not a really old one. And it’s fairly new. And they bring on people with established businesses to talk about how they built their companies. It is really awesome. They had the founder of Samuel Adams on not too long ago. They’ve got the music mogul la read this week. It really is good and gives you pointers on how to start your business. Even if you’re kind of starting from the ground up. Things like that. It’s I think it’s a fantastic podcast and I’m pretty sure about 30 minutes age.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, that’s guy Roz. I’ve listened to a couple of the episodes. They’re really fantastic. And I’ve learned a lot just from listening to the two that I’ve listened to.
Mike Campbell.
If you’re only listen to two of that one, listen to the one on Samuel Adams and then also the one on Airbnb. Both really good.
Jim Hacking
So for my hack of the week, my hack, believe it or not, is an ink pen. Tyson has been running around with his little moleskin journals for a while now. I have started writing down my task us in writing down things to remember. And it’s just been so much more effective for me, I bought my own little notebook so I can look cool like Tyson, it’s really made a big difference in writing down the six things I want to get done each day per the Ultimate Sales Machine and keeping track of things, it just gets it out of my brain and frees me up to do bigger thinking.
Mike Campbell.
If you really want to nerd it up, Jimmy, there is a pen holder that goes over the front cover of the moleskin. It’s really nerdy. But I’ve added that to it. It’s really good. So I recommend it.
Jim Hacking
Alright, Mike, what do you got for us,
Mike Campbell.
I’ve been using RingCentral. Now for almost a year. And I love it. It is a web based application. It’s a cloud service. So it allows for phone calls. And it allows for faxing over the emails, I’ll never go back to traditional faxing. Again, I send all my faxes out via email, all of them come in through the web based application. And then I have the app from my phone that I can I can call out from my cell phone, and it puts my office phone number as the caller ID. And then I can check all of my faxes for them to my staff, from my phone, and then check voicemails for my phone as well. It’s fantastic.
Mike Campbell.
I use it as well on Jimmy if you do, but I also use RingCentral. I think I’ve had it for three years, three and a half years now, I agree with you, it’s a really great resource for you. Something else you can do is if you have the desktop, which is this is really handy, much more handy than you might think, just picture you’re at the office at the end of the day, and you need to get on the road. Although I’m not advocating that you start the drive and talk on your cell phone, if you need to, you can do a call flip, and you can flip it over to your cell phone and vice versa. Where it without interrupting your call is really great resource. I mean, that’s just one small tool. There’s a bunch of tools, but I think it’s a great
Mike Campbell.
tip. Yep. And even if your internet sources weak, I found that you can actually just call out on your cell. And it just allows for you to call out on your cell using your cell service. So if you’re having some spotty internet service at the office or something, and it still mask your number, it’s fantastic. All
Jim Hacking
right, so this will bring this episode to a close gentlemen, thank you very much. And if you liked this show, please be sure to share it with your friends. We’re seeing a steady growth in the number of downloads each week. And it’s because of great people like Mike who are listening and sharing and telling other people about it. Make sure to like us in iTunes, give us a good review and check us out. I’m maximum lawyer on the Facebook group. So if you search maximum lawyer, you’ll find our Facebook group. We’re gonna get that up and running now here to try to spread more information during the week when we’re not actually podcasting.
Mike Campbell.
Also, we’re now on Google Play, not just iTunes. We’re also on Google Play now. So your friends. Thanks, guys.
Mike Campbell.
Thanks. Thank you.
