In this episode, Jim and Tyson will go through 3 different topics. First, an upsetting article about how prominent suicide actually is amongst lawyers. Then, a real life example about how it is not a good idea to have all your eggs in the same basket, and finally, an awesome tip on how to increase your Google reviews.
Hacking’s hack: Also a book. “Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You”, by Daniel Priestley. About how to build a man in your firm.
Tyson’s tip: A book. “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. It teaches rules of power and manipulation. Very interesting.
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Transcripts: Lawyers’ Topics
Tyson Mutrux
I think a lot of is just we have so many clients that are all needing our attention that are always all wanting something from us. And it’s hard to meet all their needs a lot of it, we take home a lot of the stress to our families, or wives or kids. It takes a toll on us. I mean, I even sometimes I’ll be at home, I’ll be thinking about my cases, and it’s very stressful.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. You’re back on the maximum lawyer Podcast.
Tyson Mutrux
I’m Jim hacking. And I’m Tyson music.
Jim Hacking
Morning, Tyson, good to hear from you. Hope you’re doing well.
Tyson Mutrux
Thanks to you. We’ve got three topics we’re gonna talk about today. So two of them, or somewhat depressing one of them is really good. It’s gonna be a great tip. How to Increase your reviews, you want to introduce the other two topics?
Jim Hacking
Yeah. So in the Facebook group, we were talking yesterday, CNN publish piece broadcasts a piece called Why are lawyers killing themselves. And we posted it to the Facebook group. And you and I were just talking about it off the air. The article was pretty upsetting. I knew that suicide is a problem for lawyers. But I didn’t necessarily know that it was as prominent as it is. I myself have had several attorney friends killed themselves in the last couple of years, one of my old mentors named Paul pesante, he owned his own firm, he was doing very well, a medical malpractice firm doing very, very well. And he was always sort of a mercurial fellow he would have times where he was really happy in the times where he was really sort of in a dark mood. He had a great sense of humor. And he taught me a lot about plaintiffs work. And he’s a great, great lawyer. But a couple of years ago, he went up on top of a parking garage and shot himself. And so I’ve always known that this is a problem. I think this is something that lawyers and other people don’t really talk about that much suicide in general, but I think it’s an important enough topic for us to talk about here today and, and sort of help give our listeners an avenue to talk about this kind of stuff.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And I think that in that article, it says, attorneys are the fourth on the list of professions of highest suicide rates. And it’s, it’s really shocking to hear and you’re right. I mean, Paul, Paul was one of the like big PI’s slash med mal attorneys in St. Louis. I mean, these are highly successful. And then there was a criminal defense attorney about a year and a half ago that also shot himself, it’s really sad. And I, I often think about whenever it happened, I thought about you know what, to drive them to do it. And a lot of it is just, I think a lot of is just we have so many clients that are all needing our attention, that are always all wanting something from us, and it’s hard to meet all their needs. And I really think that that’s stress. And I think there’s things outside of the actual firm, their personal issues going on as well. But they have a lot of it, we take home a lot of the stress to our families, or wives or kids. It really is it takes a toll on us. I mean, I even sometimes I’ll be at home, I’ll be thinking about all my cases. And it’s, it can be very stressful. And I There are a lot of resources out that I think that people need to reach out to and I and I’m glad you’re bringing up this topic so that there’s something that it’s important for us to point out, it’s not all doing our taxes or marketing or working on case files. There’s other other things going on in our lives. And so I think it’s important topic to bring up and I just want to encourage people that if you’ve got issues, especially in Missouri, no, Missouri has most bars, do you have phone numbers, they’ve got services you can reach out to that are usually free. So I really encourage people if you’ve got issues going on, they should reach out.
Jim Hacking
I think that with lawyers, in particular in with my friend, Paul, for sure. I think that what makes us good lawyers sometimes is our intensity. I think lawyers are pretty intense people for the most part. Obviously there’s all kinds of different kinds of people, but especially in litigation when you’re in that lifestyle. You are someone who brings a lot of passion to your cases, you’re sort of strong willed, you’re willing to go to fight with other people. And I think that sometimes you can turn that inward on yourself, and it just sort of eats at you. And I think that there’s still even in 2017 a big stigma about mental health. I think health insurance doesn’t cover it like it should. And I think that people aren’t getting the treatment that they need. I do think that the Missouri lawyer Assistance Program and other similar programs around this country are real Important, I’ve been in therapy for a long time. And I think most people shouldn’t be in therapy, especially lawyers. And I just think that we need to really knock down these walls. Because we all have moments of darkness and moments of self doubt, and depression and depression is a real pathway towards suicide. I think depression is not necessarily logical. It’s much more chemical. And in the article, they talk about one attorney who was coming, you know, his kids were leaving the house, he was in his mid 50s, he was generating 600k a year in legal fees. So objectively looking at him, no one would ever think that he would be someone that would kill himself, but yet he was. So I think that we just need to pull off that scab and, and let everybody just sort of acknowledge that this is a real thing. And the article talks about how in our profession, it can be very adversarial, at times, you should most of the time, and with physicians and things like that they
Tyson Mutrux
those professions, they’re working as a team together towards a common goal. And we as attorneys are not that way. We are more adversarial, we’re going against each other. And so my thought on that is, is that I know that we’re in an adversarial system, but don’t take it home with you. And don’t take things personally. Whenever you you’ve got a adversarial proceeding with another attorney, don’t take it personally, just, it’s part of the job, don’t take it home with you, and don’t hold it against another person. So my thoughts on that, you want to get on to the next topic or get some more to say about that? No, I’m
Jim Hacking
ready to talk about the next topic. And it’s not nearly as sad as that one. But it did bummed me out last week. And I thought that it’s something that we could talk about here. So a couple years ago, one of my buddies who works at a big firm referred, a local smaller university to me to help with their immigration work. And I’ve been handling the work for about a year and a half. And I’ve gotten really great results for those clients. So the first case I got hired to handle was a case where someone’s h1 B visa had been denied the hit appeal that it had been denied, and I put together a new package, refile that, and I got that case approved. And I’ve got some really good results for the clients. But I’ve always said that they thought that I was not responding quickly enough to their needs. And one thing I’ll say is that business clients, when it comes to immigration are just different than than individual family based clients, they do sort of expect that, that high level of touch that sort of bigger firms offer and so last week, when I dealt me with my client, they told me that they were making a shift to one of the bigger law firms in town to help have them handle their immigration work. And so, you know, I had a range of emotions. One was that I was certainly sorry that I hadn’t met their expectations, even though I’ve gotten them really good results. I think it’s a lesson too, for me, in that I’ve been stretched, I’ve been really stretched, and I have been slow and getting back to them. And so I couldn’t storm off and blame them and send them on the letter or just, I could have lost it and just gone off on them because of the cases that I’ve won for them. But at the end of the day, that’s all on me. And so I’ve just sort of had to sit with that for the last couple of days. And I thought I’d share with you and listeners to one, let everybody knows certainly that I am far from perfect, I got a lot to learn still into. I think that it’s a it’s a clarion call for me that I need more help more support in order to be able to provide that kind of service to clients that need it.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I’ve got a couple of thoughts on that. The first one is the Navy sort of got outside of your niche, and maybe you shouldn’t really be diving into that area, I may be wrong about that. The other part of it is that results don’t matter that much. I mean, you’re against it, you’ve done a really good job for them. And sometimes it’s the hand holding the matters with clients. And so results don’t matter as much as we think they do. I think that this is just me, I may be completely wrong about this. But just based on this one scenario, and maybe moderately good results, plus a lot of hand holding are far better for a client than really great results and no hand holding. I don’t know if that’s true. I’d like to see some sort of study on that. But I think the fact that you were sort of outside your niche sort of created the issue where you couldn’t handle this much because you were doing these other things. I think if you were only working with business clients, then this probably would not have been an issue. What are your thoughts on the niche part of it doesn’t you sort of stepped outside of your niche a little bit?
Jim Hacking
A couple of things. One is the per my contact at the university flat out said that, Jim, your great attorney, you do great work. I think that you do your focus though is on family based immigration and And that we need someone who’s focused on business based immigration. It’s not that they couldn’t do the work. It’s just, you know, a minute I interviewed an associate a couple of weeks ago who worked at fragment, which is the biggest immigration law firm in the country. And this person spent all year doing immigration work for one client, one corporate, huge client. And and she had a team there were like, five, two attorneys and three paralegals that did nothing but work for this one firm. So I think there’s something to be said for that. I also think I jinxed myself because the night before that happened. On Monday night, we’re watching Better Call Saul and solve or Jimmy, Jimmy McGill’s partner. She’s an attorney. And she only has one case or one client, and she does all of her legal work for this one client. And that night before this conversation I had with the university, I said to him, and he said, Can you imagine just having one client and having all your eggs in one basket with one client? And what happens if they get rid of you? Now I don’t, that was not the case at all with this university. For me, we have a ton of open matters and incoming cases and all that stuff. And this is really why I went out on my own first place. Because when I was doing the TI defense, we had three clients and we had three attorneys. And I was always worried. I didn’t want to be beholden to one attorney. So I did sit with it for about 24 hours. And I was I was upset and and sort of kicking myself and I I think I think our friend joint Holmes would be good to talk to about this, because I think she deals with sort of these big corporate entities like universities and corporations who who do need that level of hand holding. But I think your points well taken that, that it’s not necessarily outside my practice area, and that I know how to do the work. I’m certainly competent to do it. But as far as the way that clients expect to be handled, I think that’s something that I wasn’t necessarily used to.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’d imagine I don’t I don’t represent businesses at all. But I’d imagine and you have to tell me whether it’s true or not. So I’d imagine that the business clients probably need more hand holding, is that right? For sure. I kind of figured that I’d say this sort of what the White Glove treatment. All right, well, let’s move on to the next one. Because I think the next topic is awesome if the results you got were ridiculous. And I really think that some people are not going to believe the results. I think that they’re not going to think that they’re legitimate. And they aren’t legitimate. I’ll say that right now. But you did something that is just, I mean, you told me you were going to do and I didn’t believe that you’re going to do it and you did it. So I’ve teased this enough. Tell everyone what you did, and then how you did it?
Jim Hacking
Well, it’s interesting, because I think the part of this was a result of me being just about losing that university client. But our friend John Fisher has a mastermind group and a Facebook group attached to that mastermind group. And John will periodically post contests and things like he wanted, he invited everyone to try to have lunch with someone once a week for a month or two. And he’s always giving us little challenges. He has a YouTube channel and a Facebook, live channel, youtube contests and a Facebook Live contest to see who could do it the most and those kinds of things. So about a month ago, John posted that he was going to have a contest to see who could get the most Google reviews in 30 days. And I meant to participate in that. But I was just sort of busy. And I knew that if I put my heart into it that I would win, because I had a plan on how to do it. And so I should probably back up and tell you a little story before I get into this. So when I was in high school when I was a senior in high school or junior, going into my senior year, they had a student council election program and student council election. And I wanted to run for a job called the Internal Affairs Commissioner. So that means I was in charge of all the parties and dances at the high school and I and I ran for that spot. And when I ran for that spot, we had like 200 kids in our class. And this is back when we had dot matrix printers and I wrote out on my computer one letter to each of my classmates and I delivered them. I did direct mail when I was in high school, I had a buddy in each homeroom, distribute the letters to everybody the day before the election, and I won in a landslide. So I wanted to do something similar with John’s contest. So the new contest was whoever could get to 100 reviews first on Google would win a free ticket to the next mastermind, which is on September 7, in Washington DC at the office of a friend set price. By the way, anybody who’s interested in that should really think about going it’s really gonna be a special one. I think all of John’s mastermind groups are special, but this one is going to be great because it’s a software so I’m really excited about that. Anyway, my plan was that Infusionsoft I have tagged over the last month or two 200 of my so called champions and champions are people who refer me all the time, never asked me for anything, who I love working with, who sort of preach what a good job we do for people and really have been allies of the firm. And so What I decided to do was send a very short email to each of those people. And this is based on a class that I took a course that I took with Dean Jackson called Email mastery. And Dean has a concept called sending a spear emails short, personal and expecting a reply. And I made it look like it came from my iPhone. And it basically said, Hey, Tyson, can you give me a quick favor? And then I said, I’m in a contest with some other lawyers. The first one to get to 100 reviews, wins a free ticket to this mastermind. Can you help me out? Here’s the link. And I sent that out on Thursday morning. And by Friday night, I was up to about I started with a team. So I was way behind John Fisher had about 70 sets had 80 and Bill Khalil Reuleaux. up in New Jersey, they had about 90, and I kept texting you during the day, as my numbers kept climbing. And by Saturday morning, based on nothing but that email, and some Facebook targeted just messages that I sent directly to clients and attorney friends. I got the reviews all done in about 40 hours, I went from 18. Now I have about 118. So I got about 140
Tyson Mutrux
hours. That is that is just incredible. So did you get any pushback at all from these emails that you sent to your your top 200?
Jim Hacking
Oh, no, no, no, everyone was like, happy to do it love to do it. I hope you win. I mean, I think that one element of the email was the contest itself, that that really motivated people in a way that was different than just asking for a review, I think that I sort of got people engaged with it. And they were all sort of rooting for me. And these really are, these really are my friends. I think a lot of past clients have become friends. And I also think that I had a lot of goodwill built up with these people. And I don’t ever really asked him for anything. So even people that I’ve just given advice to, by email, some of those people were willing to help. And so I also I have a private Facebook group for a lot of our immigration clients and friends. There’s about 1430 people in there, and we got six, six reviews off that. So all in combination, it really worked out well.
Tyson Mutrux
Did you send these through Infusionsoft? Or did you send them just regular, regular email?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, sometimes using soft but I made it look like it’s just a simple text email.
Tyson Mutrux
So for the listeners that don’t have Infusionsoft Don’t fret, I think what you can do is you can just copy and paste your list into a blind carbon copy, and send the same email yours, it’s just not gonna be as personalized. So I guess you could also manually type in each one of the emails and do it that way. But that’s great. I told you, I wouldn’t do it until because I wanted you to tell me so bad. So I, I told you, I didn’t care about the competition, if you just tell me and I wouldn’t do until the competition was over. And the competition was over it. Probably 36 hours in the time you told me, which is incredible. But I’m going to do that this week, to come up with some other competition, that it’s for, I don’t know, maybe my competition that I’ve got to beat Jim hacking and get more more reviews of them, because I had doubled the reviews you had. And then now you’re killing everybody. I mean, it’s it really is great. But something that Gary Burger doesn’t sell the show, it’s really, really smart is that while he is teaching one of his co E’s that he teaches periodically, in the middle of it, to let everybody know, hey, check your email. You’ve just gotten a request for me for reviews. If you’ve if you’ve gotten something good from this CLE please leave me a review. And he’s got a ton from that. So that’s another little trick on how to get reviews easily. But you’re gonna say something?
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And you got me sort of motivated was I saw a post that Google is giving greater weight to people that have a lot of Google reviews. So that was another thing that sort of kicked me
Tyson Mutrux
into gear. Yeah, that was Larry Weinstein. He actually put that on the Facebook page, I believe. And that’s I was wondering about that myself. And I don’t remember. But a couple of weeks ago, I’d mentioned that on the podcast. And then he posted the article. And sure enough, I mean, and so that’s gotta be it has to be an emphasis for for everyone, if you want to get moved up to the Google. All right. So you want to talk about your tip of the week? Yeah, I’ve got an interesting book. And it’s got an interesting name. So I don’t know how I feel about the name. But it’s called the 48 Laws of Power. Have you seen this book? No, it sounds like a Tony Robbins kind of thing. It is, by system, the author of The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene. And it’s, it gives me different principles of power. And it’s really, really, I’ve gotten through about half of it. And it’s sort of the reason why I’m uneasy about it’s it’s manipulative. It really is. It just tells you how to manipulate people. It’s sort of in a way, just written differently. It’s like the Robert Cialdini book Influence In a way, where give you the principles, but influence, he actually goes through the science, everything else this one doesn’t do this, he just tells you the principle is and then how to manipulate it really. So it’s an interesting book, it’s an interesting way on how to view things. So I recommend it if they don’t take advantage of it. But it’s, it is really interesting.
Jim Hacking
My hack of the week is also a book. So when we went to infusion con, you know, I became friends with James Ashford, that guy that advises accountants over in England about how to build their practices, and he recommended a book that has really been terrific, I think you’re gonna like it a lot. It sounds a lot like John Fisher and the kinds of things that we talk about as far as getting demand for our for our service. It’s called oversubscribed. And it’s a pretty simple book written by a guy named Daniel Priestley. And I really, really recommend it. It’s, it’s about how to build demand in your firm. And it talks about ways that you can make it so that people really view you as someone who is in high demand, and they feel lucky to get you as their attorney. It’s not written for attorneys. But in there, he talks about, you know, one of my favorite restaurants in town as puppies, and Patty’s has a line out the door whenever you go there to eat they, they are oversubscribed. And so because of that, people think, ooh, this barbecue must be so good because that yet people are standing in line outside the restaurant in order to get in. And I think that this book posits that we can build sort of similar systems into our firm to allow our clients to find us to be oversubscribed. Yep, happy
Tyson Mutrux
is an example of such a good example. It was really interesting. If you remember, there used to be a restaurant right next to it. And I think their thinking was, they were actually there was a series of restaurants and I think every time a new restaurant would move in, they would think oh, I’m gonna get overflow from patties that people are gonna want to stay in that line that long. And it was always empty. And what eventually happened was is patties in a buying that space and expanding into that restaurant, that restaurant space. And because the demand I remember the first time I went I was like, This is ridiculous. But it really is like good and the but the demand is you can just tell like everyone’s enjoying it. Everyone loves it. So that’s mentally people think oh my gosh, is everyone else’s like it is and I must have I must need to like it. It’s a good example oversubscribed and who is the author Daniel Priestley? Has he written something else? And he’s just a marketer from England. Okay. Well, anything else? One of a lot in this episode, but in the short talk about it, but we’ll wrap your week. Appreciate it. All right. I’ll
