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Episode 76 ft. Ryan Locke – Case Study: Criminal Defense: From Public to Private
Categories: Podcast
LET'S PARTNER UP AND MAXIMIZE YOUR FIRM


In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Ryan Locke a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta. Actually, he runs his own law firm; the Ryan Locke Law Firm. They will go over his career, the things that drove him to be a lawyer, his past from the public sector to private, his struggles running his firm and marketing.

 

The Firm: https://thelockefirm.com/

Ryan’s podcast: https://thelockefirm.com/georgia-appellate-review

Ryan’s biggest piece of advice: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE:

“when going solo, I thought about not having an office, but then I realized clients in criminal defense need to know that you’re legit and have that experience. That experience has to be good from beginning to end.”


Hacking’s Hack:
Stand out! Check out this card:

Ryan’s Tip: An App. On Mac: Text Expander. On Windows: Phraseexpress. You type something and the it punches in more text than you type. Semi-automate documents!
https://textexpander.com/

Tyson’s Tip: https://www.process.st/
Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.

Thanks so much for listening to the show! If you want to know more about this and keep on maximizing your firm, please join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/403473303374386/ or like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MaximumLawyerPodcast/ and comment!
You can also go to http://www.maximumlawyer.com/ or, if you’d prefer, email us at: info@maximumlawyer.com

Do you want to get on the show? Shoot us an email or message us!

The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm.

 

 

Resources:

 

Transcripts: Ryan Locke – Case Study: Criminal Defense: From Public to Private

Ryan Locke
When you’re with another more experienced lawyer, they will refer you cases that they don’t want to take. And the cases that they don’t want to take will be your good cases.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum layer podcasts, rely upon podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up, Jimmy? I know but

Jim Hacking
Eisen, it’s cold, man. It is cold.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it is a whopping 20 degrees. It’s not as cold as it’s been though. It’s It’s okay. But it’s still pretty cold. And then you have the windshield. Plus you have the snow, which doesn’t help. So Kimball was just one of those days, I

Jim Hacking
guess. I just feel like we haven’t had a hard winter in St. Louis, in a couple of years. And so it looks like this year is gonna be a pretty tough one, which is fine with me. I like the change of seasons. But it’s been interesting so far.

Tyson Mutrux
And equal, it’s not have been that bad. I mean, it’s it’s been pretty mild. For the most part, we’ve had a couple of those patches, where it’s been really, really cold. But you’re right, like last few years, it’s been great. So I’m not going to complain about anything, because it’s been pretty awesome. So, but we have a guest, I don’t want to keep our guests waiting too long. You want to introduce our guests.

Jim Hacking
Our guest today is a longtime listener who I had the pleasure of meeting for lunch a few weeks ago when he and his wife were in St. Louis. His name’s Ryan lock from the Ryan lock law firm. And he’s a criminal defense attorney down in Atlanta. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Locke
Well, thank you. And I will complain about the cold. It’s been freezing down here in Atlanta. And we’re not used to it. But thank you, thank you very much for having me. All right.

Tyson Mutrux
So you know the deal, I want you to dig a little bit deeper. And instead of giving us like the surface level, I do this, I guess, tell us a little bit about you, your family and your law firm.

Ryan Locke
Well, I will start the beginning I was actually born in Wichita, Kansas. This is my secret shame. And when I was very young, I moved to Maryland where I grew up, my dad is in the Air Force. And so I’m a closet midwesterner by birth, which my wife is from Missouri always reminds me of that. Whenever we drive back to St. Louis, where she’s from. But so I grew up in Maryland, I think I was first exposed to the law. When my freshman year in high school, I joined our high schools mock trial team. And I thought standing up and talking in front of people was great, and everything else was the most boring thing I’d ever done. And I remember we would have long meetings with the in this local lawyer’s office. And God bless her is after hours, she devoted so much time to us. And I remember sitting there thinking, this is awful. Like, this is so boring. This is tedious. You know, all these different rules. I just like to stand up and talk in front of people. Well, I eventually came over to really like both sides. And then I went to University of Richmond for college and competed a mock trial there. And then I went to law school at University of Georgia, down here in Athens, Georgia. And I continued to do trial stuff and really enjoyed it. When I graduated, my first job, my wife was working for the State Department in Mexico. And we were living in Matamoros, Mexico. And I started working for pro bar, which is a project of the American Bar Association, which does asylum and other types of pro bono immigration release. And that was really cool. And I done some clinics in law school. But I really enjoyed meeting the clients, and sitting and talking with clients and learning about them. And being able to, you know, I mean, most people, we said, well, you know, there’s just not much we can do, but for the people who we could help being able to tell them, hey, we’re here to help you. And we can do that was really, I think, kind of opened my eyes to the the real power in representing powerless people against big interest. After we left Mexico, we came back to Atlanta, and I started working for the public defender’s office, here in Fulton County in Atlanta. And that was the same deal where it really combines my enjoyment of being in the courtroom of standing up talking in front of people, and also really helping people. And I did that for a few years. And then about four and a half, five years ago. I started my firm, and I started doing criminal practice exclusively originally. Now I’ve transitioned to doing mostly personal injury work, and then I continue to do Criminal Appeals and a lot of those are appointed and it kind of Here’s my little like public defender pulled over section. And that’s my, my limited legal career in a nutshell.

Jim Hacking
Ryan, talk to us a little bit about the transition from working in the public sector to hang out your shingle. How did that go?

Ryan Locke
That transition was everything. And it’s funny because I, at no time in my life before, like, literally the day that I did that, did I ever think I would own a business. And even when I was doing it, I didn’t really say, Oh, I’m gonna start a business. I just thought, Oh, well, I’m going to do what I’m doing. But, you know, I can wake up later in the morning, and I can do it in my sweat pants from home. And, and it will be great. And so the, I mean, the nice thing is that I knew how to do the law, for the most part, and I knew what I didn’t know, you know, I was familiar enough with criminal law that I wasn’t worried about that. Learning how to run a business has been quite really an education. And from, you know, marketing, I never thought about how I get clients, I just figured they would come, you know, just like, in my prior jobs, there were just tons of people out there. You know, we just went did work. And I never really thought about that. I mean, my big advantages were, I started paperless. And that was a really great decision, because I didn’t have to deal with any back to converting or backlog or anything. I also started with the case management system, even though I knew that I would under utilize it for a long time. For the same reason I figured once I started, if I started using it, then it would be easy to just kind of keep with it. And it would be expandable. If I’d be bringing more people on or originally my I guess I’ve always had a more boutique firm than a volume firm. But I thought, well, you know, if I start taking a lot of volume, I’ll be able to deal with that.

Tyson Mutrux
Right? Since you started your firm, what do you think is the biggest piece of advice or best piece of advice you’d gotten from another attorney?

Ryan Locke
When you know, I’ll still remember when I, when I was starting, I kind of took a tour. And I visited, the nice thing about being a public defender here in Atlanta is that there are a lot of X public defenders, and a lot of people who have gone out and started their own firms. And so I just started meeting with them, you know, people who’ve gone out two years ahead of me five years, 10 years, and ask them, What should I do? The two best pieces of advice. The first was, I thought about not having an office. And one attorney said, No, you need an office. Because you know, for criminal you need people to come, they’re going to be giving you a lot of money up front. And they need to know that you’re legit. And it kind of had that experience. And that was really the first time I thought because I was thinking from, from my perspective, I can talk to him on the phone. And obviously there’ll be dazzled by me. And then I can just meet him at a Starbucks. And then obviously, they’ll give me 1000s of dollars. And then I’ll go and I’ll do amazing lawyer work and they’ll love me forever. And what’s so hard about that. And that was the first time that I started thinking about my firm as a customer experience, where when people are coming, they’re having an experience. And that experience has to be good from beginning to end. Even if it is, you know, not I could be more efficient in some ways. Or I could save money in some way. If the customer experience isn’t good, then they’re not going to, you know, talk about in the timeline that when people refer people to me, and that was especially important in the criminal context, because everyone who’s coming to me is already having a terrible experience. But no one’s coming to me as a criminal lawyer and saying, Thank God, I got to hire you. You know, finally, I’ve been accused of robbery and I can’t wait to live this law and order experience. Everyone was having, you know, it’s the worst period of their lives. So that was number one. Number two, was when you get space, rent space from another more established lawyer. And this was good for two different reasons. The first is that you can ask that lawyer questions. And that lawyer has a lot of stuff that you can just kind of use, like that lawyer is gonna have a lot of books you can use the office, you know, is gonna be nice. You don’t have to worry about who’s going to meet them up front, because that lawyers figured it out. I mean, you got to pick a good office, right? But that removes a lot of stuff from your plate that you just don’t have to deal with. And number two, and this really helped me do both on the criminal side on the passenger side is when you’re with another more experienced lawyer, they will refer you cases that they don’t want to take and the cases that they don’t want to take will be your good cases. Like some won’t Be great. But, you know, I remember when I first started out, my very first case was there was a domestic violence battery in our master cord. And I drove to that person’s house, I drove 15 minutes that person’s house, I sat with them for two hours, I quoted them a fee of $1,000. And then they had to talk about it. So I went back to my car, and I sat in my car for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, while they talked about it, just thinking, I can’t believe this is happening, I’m going to be rich, that I, they’re gonna pay me $1,000. And this is great. And then they did, and then no one hired me for two and a half weeks after that. And then I thought, Oh, my God, this is horrible mistake. So, you know, thinking that back, then that was a good case for me. And, you know, to the lawyer who I eventually rented space from, that was the kind of case that he didn’t want to deal with. And so that kind of relationship was really beneficial.

Jim Hacking
And then, when you first went out on your own, how did you think about marketing? How did you think about, you know, spreading the word about your firm and about your practice about your transition from criminal defense? What were the things that you did that worked? And what were the things that you sort of wish you hadn’t done?

Ryan Locke
You know, there’s less that I wish I hadn’t done and more that I wish I had done. Just because I was in that early stage, I was always behind the eight ball and marketing, I feel, because it was something that I just didn’t really think about, because cases started coming in, I just started working them. And particularly in a criminal firm, cashflow is easy to fix, because everything is paid up front. And so if I was low on money, I would take up more cases, and then I’d be fine. So I was never really thinking too far in advance about where the case is going to come from how I’m gonna mark it. I tell this to to business people, and they like start laughing at this point. Right? When they’re like, you just you just kind of open a business and hope that it would like a Field of Dreams situation where he just hoped they would come? And the answer was really Yes. I mean, I just no control over. I’ve always focused on referrals on attorney referral, because the cases tend to be better. And the clients who are referred to me, almost always hire me. And back in when I was doing mostly criminal, maybe like, I don’t know, half to two thirds would would always hire me. Now, when I’m doing personal injury, pretty much if I want to work with that client, they’ll hire me if it’s a referral. And I also found that it was easier to like, I knew how to market to other lawyers, because I knew how to hang out with other lawyers. And so my strategy was like, I hate, I hate networking events. And like, and I hate big, you know, big rooms full of lawyers and business cards, and all this, you know, what I like to do is, like, go out to eat for lunch, or go hang out somewhere. And so I started doing that. And, and that helped. And in identifying lawyer referral sources. And then kind of keeping me top of mind, I also targeted I knew in the same vein of renting space from someone who’s more experienced than me and has good cases to give me that they don’t want. I identified other kind of prominent lawyers, and then would network with their associates, because I knew that all right, if you know if I invite, you know, super prominent criminal defense, Atlanta criminal defense lawyer to lunch, he’s probably you know, he may not even go to lunch with me, if we do, it’s gonna be 30 years old, or May, it’s gonna be kind of difficult to form a really good connection. It’s gonna take laptop, but I can make friends with his associates. And that’ll be easy. And then maybe they’ll think of me if the associate has to refer out a case or they’re thinking about that. So that was the big, my kind of big marketing strategy then. I’ve also always had stuff to handout, like the T shirts, and pants, just all those kinds of tchotchke. Magnets. I have a little keychain tag. These are great because they’re very cheap to produce. On the front is my firm’s logo on the back is it do it says I do not consent to any searches. I wish to remain silent. I want to call my lawyer Ryan lock then has my phone number right there. And so, you know, I was giving those out to everybody to and even people who, you know, with my friends, I would say hey, you know, start a firm, you know, have this I make a joke like, I know you’ll never need it, but then they would put it on their keychain. And once it’s on the keychain. It never comes off. And I still have y’all hanging out with friends. And I’ll look. And I’ll see, you know, the keychain tag, it’s still on there, I had the same idea with T shirts, right, where it’s a t shirt, which is kind of a cool design on the front. It says lock it down and lock spell my last name loc ke that has a cool Atlanta Skyline I paid a designer, I can’t remember 50 bucks, 100 bucks, maybe to design a couple of these for me. And you know, it’s just kind of a cool shirt. And I just hand them out to people I know. And the idea was, I still had T shirts that I got in high school that are in circulation, because it’s so hard to throw out a t shirt. And so that was the same idea where, you know, you have my T shirt, and then you’re thinking to me, and then you’ll refer me cases. And so this is stuff that I give to people who I think are going to my friends and other lawyers and that kind of thing. The unsatisfied clients, who I think will refer me stuff. And then at least I know every couple of laundry cycles, they’ll say, oh, yeah, Ryan has a law firm.

Tyson Mutrux
Ryan,

Ryan Locke
what do you enjoy the most about what you do? What I enjoyed the most is talking with my clients, figuring out what’s going on, and then figuring out a good solution. And particularly with my appeal stuff, it’s something that I learned early on, it was kind of like a real revelation in how to approach some criminal defense cases, but also criminal appeal cases, is I realized, you know, I can’t win 100% of these cases. In fact, I’m gonna lose a lot of these cases. And in the beginning, that was really, I interned for the public center in law school before I worked there. And I remember when I interned there, my big conflict was, well, what’s the truth? What happened? Because, you know, at the end of every law and order episode, or at least most of them, you know, what happens? Oh, he did it. Oh, no, he was innocent. And that does not happen in real life. And that really bothered me, I had a need to know, I eventually realized, well realize it’s not like that. And for many things, I’ll just never know. But it doesn’t, you know, for my representation, that’s not super important. I can be a zealous advocate without knowing the truth. Sometimes, it helps not to know the truth. But then my next thing when I was working for a public defender, and, and then private practice, I was really down because I was like, Well, I can’t, some of these, I can’t win. And I had to come to terms with the fact that there may not be a path to winning in every case. And it may be that even if there is a path to winning, that the chance of us actually making it to the end of that path is, you know, 2% or 3%. You know, everything has to go our way. And then, you know, the Supreme Court has to agree with our kind of crazy theory, and then we would win, but that’s unlikely. So I know I can’t take enjoyment at figuring out what actually happened. And I can’t take enjoyment in figuring out in winning, because, you know, in, in criminal cases, you you just don’t win all the time. And so now I think I take the most enjoyment in kind of in cleverness in taking a case and figuring what is the best possible strategy? What’s the most, what is a clever way to win this case that other lawyers might not be thinking about? And what is kind of the best kind of like golf, you know, I’m not a good golfer. But I’ll be happy if I’m, you know, less bad than I was the last time and kind of say, what I know, I’m playing against myself, or say, How can I make this case, the best version of what’s presented to me? And then the next one, how can I do it better than that one? And in Criminal Appeals, you know, a lot of it is, is researching law and crafting brief and writing. And so there’s always room for improvement there. And then for my personal injury cases, it’s sometimes it’s how can I investigate this case in a better way than I have in any my other case? How can I try a new negotiation technique with this adjuster and see if that kind of works? Let me try some new things in this demand letter. You know, once we file suit, let me try something different in these depositions. And so I think that that enjoyment is, you know, for me now, it’s figuring out the strategy. And then seeing if, how well that strategy work.

Jim Hacking
Ryan, talk to us a little bit about your firm setup, your support staff and how things work at your firm on a day to day basis.

Ryan Locke
It’s me, and I have a paralegal, Fernanda and she’s been working for me for about maybe seven months, eight months and If it was, everyone told me when when I was hiring her, because I talked to people too, when should I hire a paralegal and all this? Oh, you shouldn’t hire her a year ago. And then, and then I was like, come on guys. And then I did hire her. And then we started working. And I realized, oh, yeah, I definitely should have hired her a year ago, the amount of like the amount of help that a paralegal or an assistant brings to just kind of managing files and doing a lot of the administrative stuff, to free me up to meet with clients. And to kind of think more high level about the cases, has been just invaluable. And so, you know, day to day, we rent space from a workers compensation firm here in Atlanta. And that’s worked out well, because they don’t handle personal injury cases. I don’t handle workers comp cases. And so we refer a lot of stuff back and forth. Like I said, we’re paperless. And so all of our case files are in Dropbox. We’re a Mac office. And so we use a native Mac OS app called daylight to run our practice. And it’s kind of a general business management application, that you can kind of use in any, in any type of sector. And so we use that the nice things about that are, it’s, it’s very easy to manage tasks in daylight, and it’s very easy to get emails and today like, so from the mail dot app, you can, there’s a little plugin. And so when I’m looking at an email, it will automatically link it up to the project that it’s about the contact, but it’s about and I don’t have to do anything. So that’s been, that was always my biggest friction with other practice management applications, was getting emails into the application. And so much of our stuff is, is done by email that was ending up to be a real hassle. The tasks are nice, because every type of case that we take, we have what they call a pipeline for that case. And the pipeline is also broken up into phases. So that, you know, when I create a case, and then assign it to a pipeline, it will automatically populate the tasks that I want, but not like all 120 tasks. So we have, you know, if we’re opening, you know, a personal injury automobile case, you know, the first phase is set up the file and some tasks are automatically signed, Fernanda, and some are to me, and we’ll move it to the requesting documents and bunch of different tasks, and then the reviewing documents and bunch different types. And so that really helps us to stay focused on what needs to be done, even when we’re not. So that we’re not spending so much time looking at a case and thinking what do I need to do in this case? We know, okay, these are the things that have to be done. And the computer will tell us to do them, and then we’ll do it. And that frees up our thinking for kind of the more high level strategic stuff about a case where, you know, I don’t have to worry if we requested the 911 tape and the Dash Cam, because of course, it’s going to be assigned, I could think, Alright, you know, what businesses around there that might have cameras like, Oh, let me call these people, no police for, like, let me drive out there. And look, I don’t have the mental weight of worrying about yes, this standard stuff is going to be done. I guess that’s most of our data. Of course, we use, you know, we use word like, like everyone else does. You know, we use the Adobe suite for PDF, we use one of the effects providers for effects. Let’s say we do some E signing and we do that through Adobe, and that’s worked pretty well. That’s our kind of day to day experience. What do you think you struggle with the most? What I struggle with the most is, it was marketing. Because I just didn’t really think about it that much. And I didn’t really have an incentive to because for the criminal cases, people would refer me cases. And at least here in Georgia, we don’t typically pay referral fees other lawyers for criminal case, but we will for personal injury cases. And so it started where, you know, I had had these good cases, but I’m paying out in referral fees because other lawyers have referred them to and so now I started thinking more about okay, I need to think more seriously about marketing to, you know, non lawyers, so that they will think of me when they need to hire a lawyer when someone’s injured. And so that’s been a shift Do a shift that. I mean, you know, luckily, I was lucky before that I didn’t really have to take that aspect seriously. But now Now I do. I think the other thing to do marketing is a difficulty. I think the other difficulty is wearing, what kind of wearing the CEO hat, and also wearing the lawyer hat. I never took a business class, I studied psychology in college, never took a business class in college. Law School doesn’t teach you, at least at UGA, they didn’t have anything to teach us how to run a law firm. And I think there’s a kind of a large, I guess, the kind of implicit assumption is, you’re probably not going to start a law firm. So no one ever really sat down and talked to me, like, Hey, you should be you should be looking at key performance indicators. And tracking those to figure out the health of your firm, you should know where your business is going to be coming from so that you can plan you should budget, right? You should think about how much money am I going to put towards marketing? How much money am I going to put towards firm improvements, etc, rather than just kind of moving along, and figuring it out as you go along? And so I think that’s also a difficulty. And I think it’s a difficulty for a lot of small, firm lawyers. Because I can always sit down and do a lawyer thing, because I know how to do legal work. And I’m good at it. Sitting down to do a CEO thing is hard, because I’m, I’m every day, I’m still learning how to do the things. So I think that’s also at this point in my firm’s life a big difficulty. Ryan,

Jim Hacking
I understand that you have recently started a podcast of your own. I was wondering if you could talk to Tyson I little bit about that.

Ryan Locke
Oh, yeah. Yeah, my big pushes for 2018 are doing more content, marketing, and getting furious and systematized about it. And so I’m starting a podcast. And I also want to start something on a YouTube show or something to kind of get involved. And I think it is easier than I thought and also more, kind of more difficult than I thought. So I’ve actually setting up the thing. Pretty, the podcast, it’s Georgia appellate review. And it’s, it’s talking about oral arguments in Georgia and appellate lawyers in Georgia, and both the skill and art of oral ads. And so I thought, Oh, great, I can I can talk to all these lawyers. And it’s stuff that I want to know to write, I’m interested in, how do these really good palate lawyers do it? Right? Like, what do they how do they approach the cases from a philosophical standpoint? But also, you know, what are they? How are they doing? And how do they outline? What do they think about as they’re doing? How do they prepare? The I realized quickly that the, it’s easy to sign up your first couple of people to come and talk to you. And then the editorial calendar is very long. And the people, you know, are quite small. So that has been a it’s fun. And but it’s also a kind of, of planning, planning out what you’re going to do beyond, like, the next episode is, has been a interesting challenge. But it’s also so much easier than I thought, like, it’s, I mean, I don’t know, not all lawyers, but a lot of lawyers are good at just talking particularly about what they do, and particularly the other lawyers, and, you know, there’s so many good technical solutions, that it’s, it’s easy to just start. And, you know, I mean, for a while I was wringing my hands about what what should I call it? And who, who should be on there and on will people laugh at me. And, you know, what should I do? Should I record Skype calls? Or should I be in person or, and these decisions are important, but they’re good answers to all of them. And then it’s easy to just kind of go and just like in hiring. Fernanda, my paralegal. This is the kind of thing that I wish I had started a year ago. But I’m glad I’m doing it now.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. Jimmy, I know that you and I can both relate to just the starting and some of the pains when it comes to making sure we have good guests on the podcast, things like that. And then, you know, with us, we had you know, we originally were recording through Skype, and then we record a podcast and then the recording wouldn’t work. And so a lot of lot of fun, a lot of growing pains, but it’s it’s a lot of fun. So we are sort of up against that don’t want to go too much longer just because I want to respect everyone’s time. So before we get to Jimmy’s hack of the week, I do want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group. It has been on fire lately, a lot of people getting involved in the discussions. We really appreciate that so get involved in that. Also, if you do enjoy Podcast, make sure you go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast and leave us a five star review. We really appreciate it. Jimmy, what’s your second week?

Jim Hacking
So my hack of the week is something that happens every year around this time. So for those of you who don’t know, the king Elvis Presley himself was born on January 8 1935. And I had a case, seven or eight years ago with an attorney. Down in Memphis, I think he’s a huge fan of the king. And instead of sending out a Christmas card, or a holiday card or a New Year’s card, he sends out an Elvis Presley birthday card. And I will scan this in and put it on the website, because at the trip, he’s got a whole little story about Elvis every year, there’s different news about Elvis. And then he has this message as this holiday season draws to a close, we bring you greetings from Memphis, the home of the king and the birthplace of rock and roll on the 83rd anniversary of his birth. Then as all lawyers do, he has a footnote. And on the footnote, it says, some of you know that my mama shares the King’s birthday. If you’re anywhere near the cultural center of the universe on January 8, be sure to call and wish her a happy birthday. Oh, that just cracks me up, I think I think it’s, it’s unique. It’s fun. And it comes after all the other holiday cards, so it sort of stands out.

Tyson Mutrux
Love it. That’s really good. It’s funny, because I think that’s a really good point, though, that you’re making that I don’t think you tried to make is that nine times throughout the year to stand out. And that is the like send things on like Donut Day, not Christmas. Like things like that, like you just read to everybody. And that really stands out. I mean, and that’s something that you think about every single year, you’re expecting it. So great marketing, that’s incredible. But Ryan’s the you know, the routine. So do you have a tip of the

Ryan Locke
week for us? I do. And it is an app recommendation. If you’re on the Mac, it’s called TextExpander. If you’re on Windows they have, it’s a different app called phrase Express seems to be one of the better ones. And it will it is a text expander in the sense that you type something, and then it punches in more text than you type. And I found this to be a very easy way to kind of semi automate documents. And the barrier to entry is super low, it’s super easy to punch in, to put in whatever text you want. It’s very easy to you know, understand how it works. And so I use that for so for example, like discovery objections or objections to discovery requests. We all have, you know, eight or 10, standard discovery objections. And I just have little keyboard codes for him. And so when I need to put it in, I just typed the keyboard code, it puts the objection right in there. And it saves me tons of time. You can also like release, I know on the Mac version, you can share it with your team. And so I share a lot of them with Fernando my paralegal so that she knows the exact language to use in responding to certain things. It makes me feel better because I know exactly what is going out for these certain things and makes her feel better, because she doesn’t have to worry about drafting it. So you can just do it. And so I think if you it’s a very easy way to kind of speed up the process of putting together documents and communicating

Tyson Mutrux
the great little hack. I like that I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it. That’s that’s pretty awesome. Very good. All right. Well, my tip of the week is something that was recommended by listeners, Jim Hart and Ryan McKean. Through John Fisher’s mastermind experience, we recently split up into groups. And we’ve got these little mini boards of directors, which is pretty cool. And something that they recommended was was process Street, it allows you to sort of put you all of your processes in one place, it’s actually really cool. I’m in the process of putting a lot of our user manual stuff into it or office manual stuff into it. And then also, we’re hiring someone. So we’re on putting into sort of an orientation, getting, taking the stuff that I had in Infusionsoft before that was automated and putting it into this, which is also sort of automated, but it’s actually really, really cool. So for example, one of the things that you have to do as people know, whenever you hire someone, there’s all these this paperwork that people have to fill out. Usually what we’ll do is we’ll email Jill and Jill will send us the paperwork signed and it’s sort of process well, you can actually put all these documents inside of process street doubt that allows them to download or completed if they can just fill it out on a PDF right there and then upload it. So you have it all right there. It’s actually really, really awesome. I was playing with that last night and then I also had some putting in our core values and really talking about the firm and why we do what we do and everything. So it’s, it’s really, really good. So I really recommend it. It’s at it’s fairly cheap. I can’t remember the price, I think, I think and maybe $15. But there’s maybe $50 a month, but I think it’s right around 15 bucks a month. It’s, it’s pretty cheap. So that’s my tip of the week. Ryan, thank you very much for coming on. It’s been really good. I think there’s a lot of lot of useful nuggets that people are going to get from this. So we really, really appreciate you coming on.

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