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Focus On What You Do Best ft. Todd Smith ML127
Categories: Podcast
LET'S PARTNER UP AND MAXIMIZE YOUR FIRM


In this episode, Jim & Tyson interview Todd Smith, an appellate lawyer from Austin, Texas who runs his own law firm; Smith Nobles Appeals and is the president-elect of the Austin Bar Association. Listen as they go over Todd’s business and discuss about his mindset running his firm and helping lawyers with appeals, marketing strategies and systems, paying special attention to the importance of building personal relationships and networking. 

 

Register to MaxLawCon19, June 6 and 7 in St.Louis.

 

Topics:

  • Todd’s Journey to managing partner of a small law firm
    • Judicial clerkship with the Texas Supreme Court > Interest in Civil Appellate work
    • Big Law
    • Wanted to be a Texas Lawyer
    • Went Solo and hanged his own shingle
    • Formed a Law Corporation and took in Partners
  • Lawyers can’t handle their own appeals?
    • Mindset
    • Persuade a trial lawyer to hire an appeal lawyer

 

“Look, you are really good in what you do, you are a successful trial lawyer, you get good results for your clients, and if you don’t get a good result you are smart enough to handle an appeal. But what you really ought to be able to do is focus on what you do best, and this is what we do… (…) We want to help you strategize… ”  

 

    • Marketing towards Attorneys or Clients
      • Best work comes from referrals
      • Lead magnets
      • Re-design of website
    • 2019’s first quarter goals
      • Intake process
      • Calls > System > Information > Engagement
    • Building Systems
      • Forethought and planning
      • Technician or entrepreneur
      • Executing
    • Time management
    • Logistics: Having an office in Austin and an office in Houston
      • Managing people
      • Working with his wife: firm administrator
      • Slack and Zoom
      • Technology
    • Advice bringing your spouse into your firm
      • Set up boundaries
      • Don’t let the office stuff spill into every aspect of your personal life

 

  • Networking

 

    • Social media relationships
    • What really made a difference for Todd was real facetime and establishing personal relationships

 

Register for the MaxLawCon19!

 

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 or like us on Facebook and comment!

You can also go to MaximumLawyer.com or, if you’d prefer, email us at: info@maximumlawyer.com

 

Jim’s hack: James Clear, sends out an email at the end of every year with a link to all of the book summaries that he’s read that year. Interesting, useful and shareable content.

 

Todd’s tip: A time management app based on the Pomodoro technique. Focus Keeper.

 

Tyson’s tip: A technology test website for when you are hiring employees. Employ Test.

 

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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: Focus On What You Do Best ft. Todd Smith

Todd Smith
Everything in our business in our profession is about establishing personal relationships and maintain this. And you guys talk a lot about some great technology tools for doing that. But really, at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for that actual face to face direct connection, especially to reinforce anything that you’ve done or the connections that you’ve made over the internet or electronically. That’s the kind of thing that I just think you have to do is get out in the community, particularly believe in community, meet the folks that are most likely to send you business.

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. Welcome

Jim Hacking
to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking. And I’m asking major monogenic, ICER, my friend Good to hear your voice How you been?

Tyson Mutrux
Good just in the car driving? So nice little morning drive. How about you,

Jim Hacking
I just got back from my last strategic coach meeting of the year and I got a lot out of it. It was pretty energizing, it was in a different group. Because I missed my regular meeting. My dad was in the hospital a couple months ago. So I got to be with a whole new set of people. And it was a nice reset for me.

Tyson Mutrux
So for the listeners that don’t know what strategic coach is, I think most probably do but some don’t. What is it? Like? How would you describe it?

Jim Hacking
Dan Sullivan is a guy who has been coaching people since the 70s. And he has put together this coaching program, I go up once a quarter I meet with a lot of other business owners. It’s not cheap, but we meet four times a year. And we have a day together where we’re sort of outlining the next quarter. And you know, for me, you know, I did that Colby test, and I’m a 10 Quickstart. So for me to really have some structure to my entrepreneurial bent has been really helpful.

Tyson Mutrux
And that means that you jump into things, but you don’t finish them as I was. I mean,

Jim Hacking
my follow through is low. Yes, that’s right. I have good ideas, but my follow throughs week,

Tyson Mutrux
would you recommend doing it? Or you know, redo it? I have the word?

Jim Hacking
Yeah, I think I am going to redo it, John Fisher’s in the group. And there’s some other members of our group that are in there, it’s, it’s good, it’s really helpful for me and gives me some structure. And it also gives it a lot of the changes that we’ve thought about this year in the firm have really come about because of what I’ve learned in Strategic Coach.

Tyson Mutrux
Alright, so we’ve got a guest this week gonna introduce him. Yeah,

Jim Hacking
so I’m really excited. It’s one of the fellows who’s pretty active in the group, we’re happy to have him his name is Todd Smith. He’s an appellate lawyer, based in Austin, Texas. He is president elect of the Austin Bar Association. That is a very impressive fellow. Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Smith
Thanks for having me, guys. I’m glad to be here with you.

Tyson Mutrux
I got to talk a little bit about what you do be a little more, I guess, a little more specific, the more in depth and then how you kind of went down that road to doing what you do?

Todd Smith
Well, you know, the path for me to get from law student to managing partner of a small law firm was interesting, for sure. I went to law school, I thought I wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer, or starting out as a prosecutor, and then possibly going into criminal defendants at some point. And then I get to law school. And of course, you know, you’re exposed to all kinds of new ideas and institutions and so forth. And then I did reasonably well enough so that I had some law firms that were interested in talking to me and I thought about, oh, well, there’s this whole idea of a civil practice, which I didn’t have a lot of exposure to. And I wound up getting a judicial clerkship with the Texas Supreme Court that sort of sparked my interest in the kind of work that I do now, which is civil appellate work. So I wound up from there going to work for a very large law firm, big law, and spent six years in their Dallas office. And then back in 2003, came down here to Austin with the same firm, and really decided that at that point, you know, big law and working on national pharmaceutical dockets. And that sort of thing was really wasn’t where I wanted my career to go. I wanted to be a Texas lawyer. And I’ve had enough exposure working for the appellate court and doing some of the things in my career that I knew I wanted to do appellate work. And that was harder and harder to get as a mid level or senior level associate in a big law firm. And then, so I decided to go ahead and hang my own shingle and I started out as a solo with solo for about three years or so. And then I wound up forming a law Corporation and then having some other folks come in with me, and that was back around 2010. And here we are. Not

Jim Hacking
I tell a lot of other lawyers and new lawyers in our office that our biggest competitor when it comes to immigration is a lot of people think they can do it themselves. And I would think that, as an appellate lawyer, you might see that as well that a lot of lawyers think, oh, I can handle my own appeal. I know the case better than anybody else. So why would I turn it over to an appellate lawyer? specialist but I’d love to hear since you do have so many lawyers listening to the show your mindset on how lawyers should think about working with appellate counsel

Todd Smith
is absolutely in your spot on there. Jim, that’s the biggest challenge in business development for an appellate lawyer is how do I persuade a trial lawyer who has worked the case from start to wherever the point it is now, to turn loose with his case, and not only the case, but also the revenue that actually in the way things have gone with law practice in the last 10 years or so. Like every other aspect of business in the economy, lawyers have been been pretty hard pressed to turn loose of good paying clients and hand them over to somebody else. But that is our business model. I mean, we work with other lawyers directly. And what we tell them is, look, you know, you’re really good at what you do. You’re a successful trial lawyer, you get good results for your clients, on the off chance that you don’t get a good result, you know, you’re smart enough certainly to handle an appeal. But what you really ought to be able to do is focus on what you do best. And this is what we do. We handle civil appeals, not only actually in the appellate courts, but we help trial lawyers get ready for appeal. And that goes all the way back even as far as before the case is filed. So you know, our involvement is, we want to help you strategize about some complex issues, or thorny issues, in your case, help you steer clear of the landmines that can come up in cases along the way, even as early as trial or pre trial. And then of course, help you set the case up for the best possible outcome on appeal. And one selling point I suppose to that is, you’re down in the ditch, you’re fighting the battle, you’re in the arena, so to speak, it’s hard to keep your eye on every ball that is in the air at that time. And so what we’re able to do and sort of be that not completely disinterested, but neutral observer, with a view to trying to keep all the balls in the air and keep them aligned properly, so that, at some point down the road, when there is an appeal, we will have the case in the best position for success.

Tyson Mutrux
Do you market more toward the attorneys or towards clients? And how do you market to those individuals?

Todd Smith
You know, I’ve gone back and forth over the course of my career, because, you know, I came in and when I started my firm, it was the very early days of sort of Internet Marketing. And of course, you can reach a very broad audience, as you all know, through the internet, but I have always found that my best work comes from referrals, I’ve set out immediately to establish relationships with trial lawyers who are in a position to connect me either directly, you know, sometimes get hired directly through a law firm, or to essentially refer me to their client. And then you know, that’s obviously a warm referral. Right? So those relationships have a tendency to work out as well. But really, the baseline relationship for me in terms of my business development, is with other lawyers, particularly trial lawyers who know what I do, I think I’ve established a decent enough reputation that they feel confident referring cases to me or folks that I’ve worked with before. And that’s where I really am right now is the best source of work for me as lawyers, not only trial lawyers, but lawyers that I’ve worked with previously, who I think have some confidence in what we’re able to do to help them out and help their clients out. I wonder if

Jim Hacking
you couldn’t do a lead magnet, something along the lines of 10 things an attorney should be thinking about when trying to decide whether to appeal on their own or top 10 Mistakes lawyers make handling their own appeals?

Todd Smith
Yes, I actually have thought about that very idea. And top 10 list, of course, as you know, is very popular and easy to digest. I’m going through the process of revising, and rebuilding our firm website right now. And because what we have currently isn’t set up for the delivery of lead magnets, and it’s not just compatible with that concept. So we’re overdue for a redesign, but I’m actually in the process now of being able to set that up and then got a lead magnet designed and ready to go. That’s not the particular one. But that’s definitely on my list of lead magnets to put together. And I completely agree. I mean, that’s, you know, if I can, can sort of break through that initial mindset of this is my case, I know the case better than anybody and I should be the one to handle it. Not only to educate along the lines of what you’re talking about Jim, but also to help showcase why this works best. Obviously, it works best for me and my law firm because we want to get work that that helps pay the bills and keeps us going. But really, I mean, my belief is that it’s very difficult, difficult as it may be to help a trial lawyer break out of that mindset. They’re not going to do this myself. You know, once we’re able to show them the value that we bring to the cases and it’s even on a on a assaulting bases, I mean, we don’t have to step in and take over everything. And we can come in and consult and help shepherd them through the process. But once we are able to break that mindset, and I think it’s clear to the folks that are hardest that we do bring a lot of value. It’s I really liked that idea a lot. And it’s good for me to hear that you’ve come up with an independently because it’s affirming of my own thought process.

Tyson Mutrux
Alright, Todd, so we are recording this in mid December 2018 is right around the corner, what is one thing that you want to accomplish in the first quarter of next year,

Todd Smith
I need a lot of work on my intake process. And I’ve been working to try and set that up, we’ve really not had a very organized process in the past, it’s been someone calling me up directly. To try it either to if it’s a lawyer to talk about the case, or we do still get a lot of calls from folks, I don’t know, a great description and sort of off the street, you know, not direct referral types. And we’ve struggled over the years with how to cope with those calls. And, you know, I’ve tried to train various staff members to deal with us, and it usually works, okay. But we need a much better system in place for our basic intake that not only gets the basic information just for me to look at, and consider but also helps to, on the front end of our processes, so that we can use that as a data entry point, to enter information into our system that we’ll be able to use later on for various purposes, like creating engagement letters, you know, touches down the line, putting the information into our practice management system, and so forth. And I, I’ve thought a lot about that. And I’ve got a lot of detailed thoughts about it. And it now I’m actually getting to the point where I’m starting to execute on that. So that’s definitely going to be among our very top priorities for the early part of 2019. That and just systems in general, because I mean, I know, I don’t have to talk to you guys about the importance of systems. And that’s been a challenge for us to put together as well.

Jim Hacking
Talk to us about that. Talk to us about the problem with building out systems.

Todd Smith
Well, you know, when I started, I started this practice in 2006. And so, you know, doesn’t sound like that’s all that long ago. But in terms of technology, it really is. There’s been so much that’s happened between 2006. And today that really has put folks in solo and small firm practices in a much much better position to compete against larger practices. The issue, of course, is I have the age old problem, am I going to be the technician? Or am I going to be the entrepreneur? Because as the managing partner at my firm, I mean, no one else is in a position to sort of drive this this boat of installing systems. The problem that I’ve found is everybody, particularly lawyers, I think this is just indicative of the profession. Most folks are just just want to take care of what’s in front of them for that day, because so often they’re putting out a fire, they’re dealing with an emergency, and our professional as challenging as it is taking that additional step to think about, alright, well, how can this be done better? You know, I’ve done this task 20 times, what can I do to automate it? You know, as you fellas know, that takes a lot of forethought and planning and time to be able to harness or at least recognize, well, I’ve got this issue, how do I deal with it in a way where I can systematize it where it takes less time when you cut down, you know, the opportunity for human error. And so for me, the issue is, too, I like what I do as a lawyer. And so I’ve not really been able to convince myself to totally turn over the day to day law practice to someone else, I’ve got help. I’ve got two other lawyers that work with our firm, they did a great job. They’re very good lawyers, I’ve had various levels of administrative help. And I just so far haven’t found the right combination. So that I felt comfortable, being able to give over a lot more of the job of systematizing, our firm. And so I still have my hands really, really deep into it. The good news is, is I’ve identified a lot of what we need. The challenge, of course, is finding the time to actually execute on that. I feel good about where we are right now that I know what has to be done. And I feel good about a lot of the other pieces we have in place to help with that.

Tyson Mutrux
Okay, sounds like me, you’ve definitely get a lot of thought and you’ve worked on it. But maybe there’s some things where you can just set aside more time. So how can I guess how you manage your day? Because it sounds like you’ve got to get a grasp on it, but you need a little bit more effort into it. So you want to talk a little bit I guess how you manage your day and maybe some things you think you can possibly improve upon. So you could you can do that planning.

Todd Smith
Sure. And I really have no excuse for how I manage my day because I’m a big Michael Hyatt fan and I follow his courses on goal setting and data They management actually use his paper planner, most of us use almost everything, electronic these days. So I’m pretty purposeful in how I go about setting up, you know, my weekly tasks and my daily tasks, and how those all fit into the bigger picture, it’s just been a matter for me of execution, something comes up, you know, there’s a fire that needs to be put out that day. And so you know, one of my tasks will fall by the wayside for that day. And it, you know, I have all the pieces in place, I’m sort of, you know, pointing the finger back at myself on this, obviously, but I have all the pieces in place to do it and do it right. Again, it’s just a matter of the execution. So I’m, I think I’ve finally reaching the point where I’m realizing, okay, really for for this to turn into what I want it to be, I really got to dedicate the time block it off on the calendar, you know, I’ve been pretty purposeful and how I set up my schedule, I don’t, I don’t take unscheduled phone calls. Generally, I’ve got a online booking service that I use, that helps me manage my calendar and in calls coming in. So really Tyson, the biggest challenge for me is just executing on the plan, even if it’s a plan that I drew up, and not getting distracted by the day to day stuff that comes up and running a law firm, and minimizing every other distraction to I mean, that’s that’s the key, I think I’ve been pretty successful. And I’m not on the email all the time, I pretty much of limited myself to checking email twice a day, although that that’s a challenge, too. But really, I think as long as I can execute on a plan that I’ve drawn up, I’ve definitely got the ability to get there. It’s just for me a matter of now I’m looking at, oh, it’s the end of the year, you know, what, what goals have I been able to accomplish? Or what am I not? What do I want to accomplish in 2019. And of course, everyone has sort of Indivior overwhelm to at this point. But I’m very optimistic about being able to get the stuff done, I just have to actually follow the plan.

Jim Hacking
I talked to us about having an office in Austin and an office in Houston, tell us about your team and sort of how you do the logistics of managing people?

Todd Smith
Sure. Well, that’s one of the fun things about our firm. I mean, I started out so that was easy. I went and subleased an office from a law firm, where a friend of mine was a partner. And it was just me, literally, you know, to go through our growth. Eventually, I started getting my wife to help out with certain things. And my CPA decided, You know what, she’s doing some stuff for you, you need to put her on the payroll. So I did. And so Julia is our farm administrator and has been for about 10 years. Now. That’s an interesting experience. I know, Jim, you have something similar in your law firm that has its own challenges. But so what we did initially is we actually had another office in another part of Texas for a good long time. And I had someone approached me about coming into my firm. And so we decided, all right, we’re going to do this and do things between two locations. And we’re going to use technology as best we can to implement this plan. So since then, what we’ve done, of course, we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. But now we’re, we’re big advocates of slack. I’m a big advocate of zoom, we have a Slack team, and we’re constantly communicating within slack about various issues, Team related issues, administrative issues, we’ve got channels for our matters, and working with a lawyer from another location, that’s always great, so that you can have those sort of real time communications. And then we do all of our farm meetings over Zoom video calls, what I’ve started doing there, that’s turned out to be a really good thing. I think as we started recording those periodic meetings, and then having our virtual assistants basically go in and enter the topics and in time mark the topics in the notes section, we have a Tetra page set up for that, so that we we upload the video in the meeting video to Vimeo and then link it to a Tetra page and have notes entered in about what topics repairment at what time markers. So it’s really helped to kind of document things that are going on in the farm and helps me not to have to repeat myself, you know, 20 times over, I can go back and refer to those for meetings. But really, that that sort of technology that helps us as a dispersed team, sort of be in front of each other on a regular basis, even though we’re not quite 200 miles apart, has really been a big plus. But on top of that, you know, we do get together periodically. It’s not Houston is not a terribly long distance away from Austin. It’s a couple hour car ride. So I get over there. I’m trying to get over there more often. But I do get over there periodically and the folks from Houston will come to Austin from time to time so we we do get face to face time as well. And so, I think yes, there are challenges I’ll say in Running offices in multiple locations. But our technology platform is sets that we’re really on the same system. So we don’t really have many challenges there. And then as long as we can keep the lines of communication open, I say it works really well. That’s where we run into challenges is when we’re not actively communicating with each other in tendency, particularly among folks in my practice area, is to sort of work in silos, we try really hard to avoid that. It is a challenge. But I think this is one of the things I was getting at talking about technology earlier is we do have the ability now to really work as one unit, and much more efficiently and better than we could have done it even 10 years ago. And what I’m doing now was, it wasn’t impossible, but it would have been a lot harder. If I had started off with the same exact structure back in 2006, when I started this technology really is is a facilitator for us

Tyson Mutrux
to talk. I’m just kind of curious, what advice would you have for people that are considering green their spouse into the practice? Because I know something that Jimmy does, and a couple other people that have been on the podcast, they’ve brought their spouse into the firm. So what is your advice to those people that are thinking about doing something similar?

Todd Smith
Well, probably the first and best thing to do is to set up some kind of boundaries about you know, when is it okay to talk about work? You know, it is a natural tendency, I think you’re not in my wife works from home. By the way, I should mention that I work out of the physical office, here in Austin, it’s only about a mile away from our house. But Julie works from home and always has. And she’s very part time, but she’s got her hand and all the details of the business, particularly, you know, all the admin side, the accounts payable, receivable, and bookkeeping and all the management side of things. And so she plays a critical role. We’re not together during the day all the time. And so the tendency is, you know, we’re cooking dinner or cleaning up after dinner, or doing something else around the house, a tendency is to launch into the conversation about whatever the issue of the day was the law firm, we have tried really hard to not do that to try to protect our, our own times and family from that intrusion, you can’t always help it. And there’s, there’s going to be times when something just has to be dealt with, or you really something is just at the forefront of your mind, and you really need to talk about it. But we have found that if we can sort of keep our work time to more traditional work hours, then it benefits our family life to not have our boys have to overhear conversations about work. And they actually they will remind us from time to time, it’s like Mom, Dad, you don’t need to stop talking about work. So we have that sort of built in reminder. But I think really, it’s a it’s a matter of just taking care to not let the office stuff spill into every aspect of your personal life. Because as a solo or small, firm lawyer, it’s hard enough not to have that happen. That when you work with your spouse, you know, this also can intrude upon your personal relationship. And yeah, you’re right, Tyson, that is a challenge. It’s important to bring that up, and hopefully offer some advice to folks have a good honest conversation with your spouse about what their role is, what you expect of each other. And try to as best you can to keep your work conversations to work hours, those would probably be the best initial pieces of advice I would offer.

Jim Hacking
That’s great advice. And I agree. Amani, and I try to keep things separate. We don’t always succeed, that’s for sure. And we’ve had our kids give us that same reminder, the flip side of it too, is that you do at least with a mom and I both the lawyers, we get to trade off work with each other. And there’s a lot of benefits from a family standpoint, in that one of us can usually be available somewhere. So there’s, with all things there’s pluses and minuses. Todd, I would think that someone like you, who has a lot of business come from lawyers would benefit a lot from all the networking that you’ve done. Obviously, if you’re the head of your Austin Bar Association, you’ve you’ve met a lot of lawyers, give some advice to our listeners about that networking piece of things. No. So much. We often we talk about electronic and internet stuff on here. But talk to us about old school networking.

Todd Smith
Sure. Well, you brought up the bar. And that’s a great example for me. I think that face to face networking, sort of old school style, there’s really no substitute. And I’ve heard it said that one of the great things about social media is you can you can build a relationship on social media that you can actually follow up on or verify in real life by meeting the person that you’ve been, you know, Facebook friends or a Twitter follower of in real life. And it works both ways. You can use social media to sort of augment your, your direct personal relationships, that for me, what really has made a huge difference was I met Tim earlier, having subleased an office, from a friend’s law firm, when I first started my, my, what was then a solo practice in that building just happened to be in the same office just happened to be in the same building as the Austin Bar Association. And I was relatively new to Austin at the time, I’ve only been in town for three years. And I didn’t know I was working for a big firm, I wasn’t getting out and didn’t know just a ton of people in the legal community. But the one thing I did that I think made, the biggest difference for me was all I had to do to go and meet people and network with other lawyers was ride the elevator down in the same building and go to their almost daily CLE luncheon presentations. And so I picked the sections, I was interested in litigation section, appellate section, so small firms section, and so on. And I, I started attending those educational lunches. And of course, you know, Austin, we have a relatively large bar association, we’re more than 4000 members. But the people who are coming to those CLE lunches, tend to be the same folks, you know, folks who are interested in networking with other lawyers, folks who are interested in being educated on a particular topic. And a lot of times, there was an opportunity to introduce yourself and say, who you are and what you did. And so I found that to be a great opportunity that, to me, that was one of the keys when I first started out was letting people know who I was what I did, and getting to know them and establishing a personal relationship with them. And just going to those CLE lunches to me was a great foot in the door and created for me a lot of relationships that I’ve maintained, to this day. So you know, you have to watch out, you know, you don’t want it to be just a giant Business Card Exchange, because you know, those don’t tend to go, there’s not a lot of productivity or work that comes directly out of just exchanging a bunch of business cards at a luncheon or any other networking event. But really, if you can connect with people, just chatting with people with those events, or something similar, where you can actually establish a personal connection. And then, you know, maybe follow that up with a social media connection, if it is appropriate to the situation. And then, you know, touch base with them periodically. It’s really not rocket science. It’s just a matter. Everything in our business, in our profession is about establishing personal relationships and maintaining this. And you guys talk a lot about some great technology tools for doing that. But really, at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for that actual face to face direct connection, especially to reinforce anything that you’ve done, or the connections that you’ve made over the internet or electronically, if you’ve got the ability to do it. If you’re wanting to create practice in your town, and establish those relationships there. That’s the kind of thing that I just think you have to do is get out in the community, particularly the legal community, meet the folks that are most likely to send you business. And so for me, obviously, it was the trial lawyers, and that was a, the Austin bar was a great way for me to make those initial connections. And, as you mentioned earlier, Jim, I mean, I’ve, I’ve liked it so much that now they’ve managed to convince me to be the president next year. So I’d say it’s, I can hardly be a better cheerleader for the bar. It’s been a really, really good organization for me to be a part of, and it’s led to a lot of benefits for me, and I’ve gotten a lot out of it personally and had the great opportunity to give a lot back to

Tyson Mutrux
Oliver i That’s a really a great example of just different strokes for different folks, because I always hear mixed reviews about going to those meetings, and some people like them, some people hate them. So it’s really it’s kind of good to hear someone, they get a lot out of them. And so I think that’s great. Alright, so Todd, we’re going to wrap things up, we’re moving over time. But with five, we’ll start to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group, where people like Todd are engaged, sharing their best advice, sharing great ideas, which we all truly appreciate. Some get involved there. And please go to iTunes or wherever your podcast give us a five star review. Jenny with Dragon elite. Alright, so

Jim Hacking
there’s a fellow that I follow. His name is James clear. He wrote a new book last year called atomic habits, which I actually haven’t read yet. But he sends out an email at the end of every year with a link to all of the book summaries that he’s read that year. So what he does is he summarizes each book that he reads in a given year. And then not only does he summarize it, he also comes up with three sentences to describe the main concepts from each book. So last year, he read and summarized 55 books and they can be fiction or nonfiction. Most of them are the kind of books that we read in this group, the kind of leadership and management books that we do, but I think that it’s just a really great example of he’s creating content. It’s Not about him. It’s interesting. It’s useful. And it’s shareable. And I think he’s really built a great blog, in large part with the summaries. And I think it’s something that we could do or learn from, in that it doesn’t always have to be about us and our practice area

Tyson Mutrux
like that. That’s actually really cool. Well, that’s the link. Again,

Jim Hacking
his name is James clear. And his website is James clear. CLE ar.com, we’ll put a link in the show notes.

Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. I tied, you know, the routine, what’s your tip for haggling.

Todd Smith
I’ve got a tip. And it’s an app. You know, we talked about a little bit today about time management and avoiding distractions. And a lot of listeners may already be familiar with this general technique, the Pomodoro Technique, which is managing your time, when you’re directly focused on a task and 25 minute chunks. And so there’s an app called Focus keeper that implements this technique for you and it runs a timer, you start the timer, and it counts down and 25 minutes, and let you know when the 25 minutes is over, and tells you to take a five minute break. And then when that five minutes is up, it automatically starts another 25 minute timer. And then I think it’s cycled through that like four times. And it will prompt you to take a longer break, like a half hour break. I think most of these settings are are customizable. But I have found that if I’m really trying to get something done, I really want to minimize distractions. If I’ll just pull up this app focus keeper. It’s a typical app, you can get it on iTunes and the other distribution sources. But for me, if I’m working on a briefing, I’m just like, Alright, I gotta, I gotta turn off the phone, I’m not looking at email, I’m not gonna look at Slack. If I just set this timer and make myself abide by it and work in those big chunks, I’m really very happy with how productive I’m able to be. So I would highly encourage folks to check that out. There’s a lot of other good options for implementing the Pomodoro Technique. But focus keeper has been an app that’s worked very well for me.

Tyson Mutrux
I really liked that I bought an hourglass that six months ago. And the problem with the hourglass is it doesn’t reset, you’ve got to you got to reset it yourself. Which sounds like a really simple thing. But not whenever you’re trying to that repeat of time that you were talking about is really, really crucial. So I think that that’s really important. And then I actually broke the hourglass. So I don’t even have it. So exciting. It’s a really good stuff. So my tip of the week is actually so I’m hiring again. And I use the advocate skills tests, which are really awesome. Jim Hart introduced me to them. And I think they’re really, really good. One thing that I think that they’re lacking is one of two things. One is the the personality test, which I’ve implemented. Another one is a technology test, and test candidates skills with technology. And I think that’s really crucial, especially when you run an office like yours, Todd, where you’ve got people that really had to have the basic skills down to been on the basic skills down, they can’t help you with your firm, they just can’t because you’re gonna be spending too much time trying to teach them how to do the very basic things. And so Jay relaying told me about a website called employee test, EMP loi test.com. And it’s really good. It’s got all these it’s got other skill sets on there, too. But one of them is just a basic technology test. And they sent me a sample of it, it’s really good. So I recommended employee test comm. So if you’re looking to hire you and make sure that they got the basic technology skills, and you want to verify all those different things, all the software’s that they know how to use on the resume, or half of them are too old or are BS Anyways, if you want to verify that, given that time. All right, Todd, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been really great. We

Todd Smith
really appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate everything you guys do for folks like like me and my firm.

Jim Hacking
Thanks, Todd. See, buddy? Yep. Great week.

Unknown Speaker
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to maksimum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

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