In this episode, Jim and Tyson will go over a list of the 10 things lawyers should say no to; the traps that can become time sucks, the things that can become distractions from growing our firm and focusing on our practice.
1. SAY NO to new advertising avenues until you master the ones you are already using and advertising that you don’t understand.
2. SAY NO to any sales calls.
3. SAY NO to potential clients that you have a bad feeling in your gut about.
4. SAY NO to matter types that you are not familiar with or lack the system necessary to handle accordingly.
5. SAY NO to volunteering on a board unless you have oodles of time.
6. SAY NO to doing things just because you’ve always done it.
7. SAY NO to things that you shouldn’t be doing.
8. SAY NO to negative people, influences and employees.
9. SAY NO to distractions.
10. SAY NO to an unhealthy lifestyle.
Hacking’s hack: Follow a friend of mine. James Ashford.
He has a lot of great tips, he is really good in automation and a certified Infusionsoft partner.
Tyson’s tip: Have all your cases easily accessible in some format where you can easily flip through or go through the case status.
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Transcripts: The 10 Things Lawyers Should Say No To
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
At me, it’s just me and you today, how you doing?
Jim Hacking
Hey, you know, I always enjoy having just you and I on sometimes we’ve had some great guests lately, but I’m excited about today’s topic. And I’m also excited about your big trial coming up.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, that makes one of us. So just get it. We’ve already done jury selection. We did it Wednesday. Yeah, Monday, we start the Whopper four to six week jury trial. 60 Plus witnesses 35 of those are gonna be lab technicians and chemists. So it’s going to be hopefully the government then the first half of the trial puts the jury to sleep. So gonna be fun.
Jim Hacking
I was at the Billy Joel concert last night. And guess who I ran into your opposing counsel?
Tyson Mutrux
Jim Della? Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Cool. Good guy. He’s a very good guy. Yeah, I look forward to working with him on this case. It’s, I mean, we’ve been working with each other for three years. So actually try the case is gonna be fine. So he’s a really good guy. So I’m surprised he’s not out prepping witnesses or something.
Jim Hacking
Well, maybe he was at the Billy Joel concert.
Tyson Mutrux
He might have been very cool. If you want to introduce our topic, or
Jim Hacking
topic today are the 10 things that lawyers should say no to. These are things that we don’t often say no to, these are the traps that can become time sucks, the things that can become distractions from growing our firm focusing on our practice. And so let’s roll right into it. Our first thing that lawyer should say no to say no to new advertising avenues, until you master the ones you’re already using, and to advertising that you don’t understand. So this is sort of one of my pet peeves, or one of my issues that I bring up a lot. And that is that it’s so easy. You know, I think there’s a lot of us as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as the people that run law firms, we have personalities that make us open and receptive to new things. And I think that’s a real blessing for us. I think that’s sort of why we’re not doing the nine to five working for the man working for the big firm. And we’re sort of more inclined to want to do our own thing. But the curse of that is that we also want to jump on every new thing. I mean, you and I give a new tip and a hack every week, if everybody did all those things that would sort of drive them bonkers. And so I think it’s really important to strive for mastery to really focus on making sure that the the systems that we already have in the software that we’re using, and the programs that we’re using are really serving us well and not just serving as a distraction.
Tyson Mutrux
And actually, I think it’s funny that your first tip is one that you were the worst ad and it’s following the shape, the shiny ball is really kind of funny. So a shiny object as it bounces around. And the last part of this is is kind of a li Rosen thing where he says, don’t use advertising techniques that you just don’t understand, which is a very valuable tip. So I’m glad you brought that one up. And I really hope that with our tips and our hack, people are not going out. And trying every single thing that we try or talk about, because that’s a bad idea. Pick the ones that are right for you, and then leave the rest alone. I mean, you don’t need to be trying every one of these things, even if each one of them. If you think each one of them is really good. You don’t need to be trying to use each one of them. Let’s go to number two. Number two is to say and this these tie together, say no to any sales calls, okay? And if you need something, you’re going to know it, okay. So you don’t need to take every sales call that whenever they call you, even if you’re answering your phone, just respectfully decline the call, say, you know, I’m in the middle of doing something sorry, if they say Can I call you back, you know, I’m not really looking for that product right now. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Move on to the next thing, because they will eat up a ton of your time. I used to take a lot of these calls just because I was so new, and I thought I needed everything. And it’s really just something that’s just gonna distract you. It’s going to keep you from doing the things you need to be doing, it’s going to waste your money. And you really need to avoid those sales calls at all cost.
Jim Hacking
Jason, I don’t know if I’ve told you this. But we’ve been working with an Infusionsoft certified partner, we have now outsourced all of our inbound calls. And so the call center sort of figures out whether or not the person is a current client or a new client. And then if they’re a current client that is put them through to our office if they’re a potential new clients, and they’re in charge of trying to get them set for a consult or screening everything and these people, the company we’ve been working with now for about a month and they’re continuously shocked by my refusal to take calls like that each day it sort of dwindles at first they would try to put through five calls to me now it’s down to one a day about but they they’re all always amazed how I don’t take calls. And some of these people like from lawyers.com. And other places, they’re really sneaky, and they’re really crafty. And they act like you know, we have a relationship together, or they act like this is something that, that I really need, you know, some kind of software or some kind of sales call. And they really are time suck. So it’s been a great gift. And I have to deal with those things.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, yeah, and you need to punish those people, right? They will go on a blocked list, they will not we will not answer their calls. Our people know not to answer those calls in work. And what they’ll do is, but some of them will say, Well, you know, I’m calling Tyson about a case, right? And so Oh, oh, wow, you call about a case. And that’s why the intake process that call filtering process is so important and having scripts, because if you have these scripts, you will have a list of questions that are going to lead out these sales calls, because some of them will say, Well, I’m calling about a case, if you left it at that, then they would get right through. But if you have a series of questions that you ask them that are the specifics about the case, then you’ve got a way to filter them. So that’s that to go to number three.
Jim Hacking
Number three, say no to potential clients that you have a bad feeling in your gut about. We’ve all had those moments, where the client who comes in talks about it’s not about the money or it’s not about this or that it’s about the principle of the matter, or they’ve they fired to other attorneys, or even just as simple as you know, I believe that clients come in the way that they’ll be if the client is very, very difficult. My wife Amani has been dealing with this guy who’s very nice, but I think he’s forgetful and maybe even on the edge of Alzheimer’s or something, because he he’s asked us the same questions, literally, six times. And he even asked him money last time, if he could record the answers to his questions. And the next day, the next day, we got an email where he asked all the questions again. So we’re just going to have to turn that fella down, even though he’s nice. Or one thing that I like to do too, is not necessarily turn them down, but to say, Look, I’ll take your case, but then charge them double. And then if they take it, then it’s sort of worth it. Because you know, it’s going to take that extra time. So I don’t always ban people, but I do listen to my gut, and I adjust accordingly.
Tyson Mutrux
It can be hard to do, especially if you’re new, if you’re just starting out, you want to take every case, to the door, that’s money in your pocket. And you really need to resist that urge. And everyone that’s listening to this, they’ve got their list of clients that they know, are bad clients, and then they know they need to let go. Because early on, they ignored their gut feeling. And they said, You know what, it’s money in the door, it’s money, my pocket, let’s, let’s say the case, and now they’re regretting it. And so if right now you’re listening to that, and you’re like, oh, man, he’s right, it may be time to maybe dump that client. Because think about all the stress, you’re gonna let go of all the frustration you and your staff are having with that client. Just let them go, let them go. Let them go to their attorney get help from someone else. Because the truth may be that another attorney may be a better fit for them than you. So let him go by let’s jump in to number four, say no to matter types that you are not familiar with, and perhaps more importantly, lack the systems necessary to handle effectively. So this is a key one, if someone calls you about the hey, you know what, Jim, I got this really good idea for this, this case, I know you probably don’t handle these, but it’s a really good idea. It’s, you know, no one else is doing it, I think we can make a lot of money on it, guess what, kick it down the road, because you have no system set up for it, you’re probably not going to handle the client very well, you’re able to handle the case very well, because you don’t know what you’re doing yet. Get the systems in place before you’re willing to take on a new practice area, need to learn a little bit about it, kick it down the road, give me
Jim Hacking
I’m always happy when I turned down a case I never regret turning down a case. I’d much rather refer to a specialist. And I do think that issue, you know, as we as we narrowed our practice, and we got rid of doing things, like PII that we only did periodically, it just got us to be much more efficient on the things that we’re good at. And it’s just so much easier to send someone over to you and let you handle it or some other attorney handle it and just sort of move on to the next best thing.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And then I get to call you and say Hey, Jimmy, I got a check for you and it makes you really happy.
Jim Hacking
That just happened this week. So I’m very happy. All right. Number five, say no to volunteering on a board. Unless you have oodles of time now. I think very few of us have oodles of time many of us have a family. Plus, you know the practice of law plus running our firm and you know, it can be an ego thing you know, where people ask you to serve on this board or that or they ask you to take on a volunteer role on some project at at the kids school and I think that if it’s something small and manageable, that’s much better than like an open ended a year and your commitment. Amani and I sort of made it promise to each other one that we wouldn’t join a board without talking to each other first. And to that, we’re just going to sort of take a break from boards until we have the kids, you know, older and a little bit more independent, because it’s really hard. And it can be a huge time suck. There’s so many great organizations out there so many great causes, and I get all that. But I think that to sort of satisfy that urge to help people and to do things, you know, without thinking about the benefits to yourself, I think that’s great. But I also think it’s good to do it in a limited way, and not some some kind of way where you’re just really having to take on a lot of work and effort and basically building something as you’re building your practice.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, I completely agree with that I volunteer for one organization, it’s I guess, I call it an organization at Missouri bars, Veterans Program. And that’s once a quarter. Other than that, I don’t, I don’t spend a lot of time doing that kind of thing, just because it is such a time suck. But I’m going to add to this networking group. So don’t spend a bunch of time on networking groups unless you’re just make a ton of money on it. And it’s completely worth your time. If you have tons of time, go ahead and join all these networking groups, these boards, but other than that, don’t do it, it’s going to be a time suck, spend time with your family work on your cases, it’s just avoided if you can, let’s go to number six, stay notes, doing things just because you have always done it, let go of things that aren’t working anymore. So this goes back to two times we’ve talked about this on the podcast, go through your systems, go through the things you’re doing, you need to do at least a at the very least a yearly evaluation of your systems and throw out what’s not working, keep what’s working, refine your systems, you’re going to find out what’s broken, you’re going to find out what’s working, what’s not broken. So go through your systems, figured all that out and get rid of the stuff you’re just not using. Here’s an example. Go through your budget and see what you’re spending on marketing and systems that any technology that you’re using these monthly plans that you signed up for, find out which ones you’re not using at all, just cut them out, you don’t need to pay more, you’re gonna put that’s just putting more money in your pocket. And it’s not wasting your time anymore. So cut those things out of what you’re doing.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, and I just stumbled upon a really easy way to do that. And that is to either change your credit card number or to change the credit card number in the accounts because that’ll let you know when like, I just lost my credit card, I had to order a new one. So now all these people that have been billing me have been sending me notices saying, Hey, I got like, I got one from render forest. And I had to scratch my head and like what in the hell was render forest? And I know that’s from Yeah, it was from our project with Infusionsoft. And I’m like, Nope, I don’t need that anymore. So that’s an a real nice and easy way to uncover who who’s billing you for things you might not be working on anymore.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a pretty good idea. It’s also a pain in the butt. Because Bank of America changes my card number about every three months. And so it’s a huge pain in the butt. So, but if you intentionally do it, it’s probably a good thing. Because you’re ready for it. You want to go on to the next one.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, number seven, say no to things that you shouldn’t be doing. This is one of Tyson’s favorite points to make. And so I’m glad to be the one making it. I think that as long as you’re doing the things that you shouldn’t be doing, then you’re going to really limit your growth. If you’re answering the phone, if you’re taking out the trash, if you’re licking the stamps and sending out the envelopes, you just you just have to figure out a way to let someone else do that you might want to have a part time mom, or a virtual assistant really take over a lot of these things. I think answering the phone is one of the biggest time sucks, these are all things that you just have to get rid of. And it might take a leap. It might mean you don’t make as much money right away. But I think it’s absolutely essential that if you want to position yourself as someone who is an expert, and someone who should be highly sought after and highly compensated, if you’re doing all this low level tasks, you’re just losing out.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, get over your egos. I mean, really, it comes down to that if you are listening to this, and you think that there’s not one thing in your firm, that someone else can do that you can’t do, you’re you’re fooling yourself. I mean, you really you really are everything that you do, someone else can do, other than how they thought that popped out of your head, though, that’s your probably your biggest asset. So if you can outsource everything and work on the things you want to do, or enjoy doing, then do that. I mean, that’s what you should be focusing on. Because that’s going to make the happiest that’s gonna get you home to see your families the best. So just cut all that out. And you know what, not everybody’s at that point when you first start out, you aren’t doing everything. But as you become more successful as you get more clients, you need to start offloading those things so that you can focus on the more important things. All right, let’s move on to number eight. And that is to say no to negative people, influences and employees and i It’s funny, I think Jimmy on our first or second podcast, we talked about this and how important this is and it’s true to this day. It’s always been true. If you have negative influences other people or, you know, that employee that’s in your office, it’s driving a freaking crazy, you need to get rid of them, you need to get rid of all the negative people in your life surrender people with positive people supportive people, people that are going to really do good. And then get rid of all the other all the other negatives, it’s going to make you happier, it’s gonna make you less stressed out. And it’s just gonna be better for you in the long run.
Jim Hacking
I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. And you know, on Facebook timeline, it shows you things that people said or did or interacted with you years ago, and there was a birthday wish from a friend from college who has really turned negative and sour, and he’s just mad about everything. And just is like counting the days until he retires from a big law firm. And it was just really interesting for me to reflect on how little contact I have with that friend. And the reason I don’t is just because spending time with him just really brings me down. So I’ve been a real big believer in surrounding yourself with people that are positive and moving in the right way. And that’s why things like the Facebook group that we have in John Fisher’s mastermind and, and legal minds and other great organizations are, you know, collections of people just even if it’s one on one time, Joe Vitale and I’ve been spending time talking to each other each week. And it’s just been great to be with people who have that growth mindset.
Tyson Mutrux
Joe and Joe, he really does Joe is such a positive person he may be maybe the most positive person I know he’s such a good guy. He’s very, very energetic and excited about things appointed with the Facebook post really quick, is if you’re one of those people that puts negative Facebook posts on Facebook all the time, I want you to think about how how you view people whenever they put negative posts. And maybe that’ll convince you to stop putting negative posts like that on Facebook, because it makes you look like a dope. All right, it just does. Stop doing it. So this is gonna be a bonus tip for me this week. If you’re putting negative stuff on Facebook, no one cares about it one. Number two, you look like a dope. So stop doing it.
Jim Hacking
That’s funny because we love the Billy Joel concert last night and we had such a blast my son and I took him and we just had the total amount of fun. We parked foolishly in the city hall lot and the morons that run the city hall lot. They closed all the gates, there were 300 cars in the lot, and there was no way to get out. So I quickly posted the picture of me stuck. And then I was just complaining about what morons, they were and I after a couple minutes and the cops came in, let us out. I took the post down just because I didn’t want to be that negative, especially after having such a good time.
Tyson Mutrux
Say there you go. I’m glad you did that. Even though you just call them morons. But I’ll let that was.
Jim Hacking
Well, that’s what I that’s what I put on the Facebook post. And it was true. All right, yeah. I think he mixed up some of these in order just to make it so that I had to be the one to talk about them. I think you put the ones that I suffer from on my list so that I had to talk about them. So you could my
Tyson Mutrux
year the one that shows odd gave me even so now this is audio so you go right at it though it’s I think it’s good though. It’s that you’re you’re identifying your weaknesses. So that’s good. Yeah. And,
Jim Hacking
you know, I listened to pretty much every episode of the show a couple weeks after he recorded and then it’s always good for me to hear a second time because I’m usually trying to think of what to say next or listening to you. It’s good for me to hear everything. So number nine is say no to distractions. And I am clearly one of the people that suffers from this the most I when we were at Icahn with our friend, Jason Osterley. He saw me sitting there with my iPad, and I was bouncing around from email, to Facebook, to Twitter, to email to Facebook, to Twitter, and he said, dude, you’ve got ADHD, you just can’t sit still. It’s really important for me, I mean, just right now it’s, it’s 818 in the morning when we’re recording this and it looks like you have about 15 tabs open on on Google Chrome. So this is definitely something that I need to work on. When I don’t start my day with distractions. When I wait to check email when I wait to check social media, I’m much better off and once I get into it, I really lose a lot of my productive time.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, so I think if people pay attention maybe over the next week about how how much distractions really affect your time. I’ll give you an example. And this gonna sound bad. It’s not really a distraction, but how one little thing can really set your day off course. Yesterday I was about to walk out the door and I was taking my son to school and my wife says, hey, you know we need a gallon of milk. I said, Okay, I’ll grab a gallon milk for us. So normally we’ll drop them off and go straight to work. But what happened was I took him I took him to school, dropped him off, had to go get a gallon of milk, brought it home and as I was approaching, I noticed that it was trash day and some of the trash had not made its way out of it. It basically come out of the bag. And so I started has had to start cleaning that up. And then I got a phone call right after that. And then I was on the phone call outside and I still want to go back inside and say goodbye to my family. So it took another 20 minutes because I was on the phone and then so instead of me getting it basically delayed me getting it Last by about 45 minutes. So just that one thing of going to get a gallon of milk really set my day really off by 45 minutes, which I mean, you know, how am I I try to go structure get keep everything organized. And so if you let one little thing and obviously I’m going to get my family some milk because they need to know, but just limit distractions because they can really alter the course of your day. All right, Jimmy, let’s get to number 10. And number 10 is say no to an unhealthy lifestyle. Now this is one of my biggest vices is donuts, I love donuts. And I’ve given up doughnuts for a while because I love love the sweet the love the sugar and but it’s bad for me. So I’ve been you know, you know, monitoring my health, but I want to drop lbs around the waistline. So I’ve given up don’t stop eating the sugary snacks. And, you know, I’ve been working out more and I’ve gotten away from running. And so I think it’s really, really important to because for your stress levels, for your health for your families to really be healthy. And you identified that not too long ago where you wanted to get in shape. And so you’ve been walking and running and taking care of yourself. And luckily, you’ve got a very healthy wife, Bonnie, who really takes care of herself. So I think it’s really important. So say no to the unhealthy activities, take a walk at lunch, eat a salad, eat a small dinner, things like that, just just the basics. I got a really good friend of Scott shooty, who runs a gym and he’s really awesome, because he’s like, he’s like I teach the basics and just eat healthy workout a little bit. And you’ll be fine. I mean, maintain, you know, do your maintenance, and you’ll be fine. So just focus on the basics. You don’t have to do some, you know p90x type of exercise and diet and everything else. Do the basics, eat healthy. And don’t overdo it. You can have your chocolate sundae or something like that. But don’t have one a day. Yeah. So just eat healthy, be healthy. So give me what you have to say about that. That’s good stuff. I
Jim Hacking
mean, since I started working out more regularly, I’ve been sleeping better. And to me that’s, that’s the key to my day is getting to bed early, getting good night’s sleep, you know, I don’t drink I don’t smoke. And food is sort of my go to crutch. But it’s been it’s been good to be exercising again and to the sort of clearing my mind and you know, when you exercise, it sort of just gets those endorphins going. And it relieves a lot of the stress that goes along with with what a lot of our members deal with every day.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. All right. So that was number 10. Math week, we got them all you want to do your hack of the week.
Jim Hacking
My hack of the week is to suggest that our listeners follow up a friend of mine, his name is James Ashford, I met him at iKON this year, he presented twice, I think he went to one of his sessions. He advises accountants on how to grow their practices over in England. And I will put in the show notes, this week’s YouTube video that he did was just terrific. It was about how we don’t necessarily do a good job of conveying the value of what we do to our clients. And it’s about maintaining communication with them throughout the representation and letting them know that we are working on their case and how we’re working on the case and how the work that we’re doing on their case makes their life easier. And just it was really a good kick in the pants for more more contact from our office for us to be able to tell our clients and convey to them, you know, throughout the representation, the job that we’re doing for them. So James has a lot of great tips. He’s really good on automation. He’s an Infusionsoft certified partner. But this stuff is not necessarily Infusionsoft based. It’s just about sort of good governance and great ideas.
Tyson Mutrux
I like it, like a lot. Alright, so for my tip of the week, I am going to remind everyone to please go to Facebook page join asked to join the group, we have a lot of great discussions going on there. Then also go to iTunes, give us a five star review, we really want to spread the word and I’ve checked the reviews last week or two weeks ago and actually we got pretty good bumping reviews were really appreciate that. And wherever else he’s podcast gets review there if you if you’re like engineer, right, so my tip of the week is a little more abstract. It’s not really concrete. But I’ll give you a concrete takeaway as well. But the idea of the tip is to have all of your cases easily accessible in some format, or you can easily flip through or go through electronically, the case status. What we do is whenever we do these 12 week, here’s right in the middle of it. And this is the concrete part of it is I have each one of the cases that we’re actively trying to settle quickly, because we we’ve identified it as a case that we can easily get it settled or released file suit and get that part of resolved through a trial. And so I’ve got them all in a bound packet. And so every single case that we’re actively trying to get done is in this pack and it’s got I can turn a sheet and it tells me everything I need to know about the status of that case and I simply update it as the case moves. And so the idea is to have it have wherever you put it, whether it’s on a Google spreadsheet, whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet, whether it’s on paper, have them all accessible in one place, so you can easily flip to them. Now, I have all of our cases, obviously, in Infusionsoft and I can easily access them there. You know, it is Jimmy, click the Contact record. And I’ve got actually every single case we have and I can flip through. But usually I have to click through the file. But with these specifically talking about, you know, I want to be able to flip through and identify what’s going on the case right there. I know, I know, Alex, when he’s, he’s got a great system, he shared a spreadsheet on mastermind experience, which is pretty awesome. So reach out to him if you got any other questions about that. So that is my tip of the week. Jimmy, anything else?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, Tyson, when I came back from the mastermind, I sent the report from Infusionsoft to XL of all of my own cases, the cases that Jim himself is handling. And it and I updated every other day, if I add a new case, or I take off the case, it’s just really to keep track, because I have this goal of getting below 100 open cases of my own. And so I’m like at 138. And I’ve been moving down slowly since the mastermind. So just seeing that reminder every other day or so of where I’m at. It’s just I think we can I think with technology, we can really get, you know, far away from our cases. And I think that actually physically touching our cases, or at least, you know, being mindful of each case that we’re responsible for, even if it’s one that meant like many of ours are dormant. We’re just waiting for USCIS to make a decision. It’s just good to stay in contact with your cases. I know that sounds basic, but I mean, like actually in contact with. So I think that’s a great tip.
