In this BONUS episode, Jim gives a talk at SLU Law. He will talk about his early days as a lawyer and his journey as a law entrepreneur who now runs his own immigration law firm, going over his mindset, his business, his firm and his marketing strategies.
“This is a lot of work, but to me it’s worth it and it’s fun. I am having more fun that I’d ever would’ve had, and I’ve had three really big law firms in St. Louis talk to me about coming in to that firm and I’ve turn them down every single time, and I laugh when I do it because I would never be able to do half of my crazy shit if I went to one of those big firms. And if I hadn’t agreed to be the plaintiff in that law suite, I don’t know what would’ve happened, I don’t know how many kids I would have. I don’t know what kind of life I would have; I would have a very different life probably. So I’m very grateful for everything that’s happened and I am exactly where I want to be.”
Jim Hacking
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Transcripts: I Am a Law Entrepreneur, And I Am Exactly Where I Want To Be
Jim Hacking
One of our most popular episodes of the maximum lawyer podcast has been a talk I gave at SLU law a couple years ago. So I thought I’d do another one. I recorded this one that I did just recently with some students in a law firm management class. Hope you enjoy it. Hi, everybody. How are you guys doing? Good, good. I guess it’s the end of the semester. Right? Yeah. All right. So just a little bit about myself. I grew up in St. Louis. I went to St. Louis University High School, St. Louis University in St. Louis University Law School. So I hit the Jesuit trifecta. When I was done with college, and before I went to law school, I thought I was going to be a priest and I moved to Denver, Colorado, to study to be a Jesuit. I lasted all of six months. And when I came home, I was sitting on the couch watching Oprah. And my future boss called me it was a buddy of mine from high school named George Fitzsimmons, his father, George called me and said, Hey, Turks, we got this case we’re working on we have 30 plaintiffs. And the cases are all jumbled up and we need you to come down and work sort of as a paralegal. I do the mail. And this is a really successful plaintiffs firm. So I got to work at a law firm for two years, between undergrad and law school. And it really set me up for success. I worked with some really successful lawyers, some really smart lawyers. And they did a lot of really complicated cases. And I got a lot of great experience. I got to back then before the internet, if you wanted to research about a case, the American Trial Lawyers Association had the system where you would fax a request to Washington DC, somebody would go look up similar cases. And then they tell you what other lawyers around the country had cases like that. And so once the faxes came back, then I would go to those law firms, and I’d copy the documents that we needed for our case, and then I’d bring them back to St. Louis. I got to go all over. Yeah. Yeah, so now you just do it all on the internet. But back then that’s how we did it. So I got to work on a case where a son had died in a in a GM truck that had been pierced, and we went down to Atlanta and got all the documents, and it was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I got to do a federal pretrial filing. Before I went to law school, I got a lot of really good experience. One day I was sorting the mail in the mailroom, and to the partners came to me there’s one on either side, and I’m like putting the mail on the thing. And then they’re working me over they’re like, Hey, Jim. And I’m like, yeah, they’re like, hey, we want to sue Blue Cross and Blue Shield. They, they’ve been doing funny business with their with their finances. And it just so happens that you have Blue Cross and Blue Shield because you work at this law firm. So we want you to be the plaintiff. So I said, Yeah, sure what the heck. So they filed a big class action lawsuit. It was me and one of the other one of the lawyers, cousins versus Blue Cross and Blue Shield. So just put that in the back of your mind because it will come up later. All right, so I finished up at the law firm, they had a big send off party. I started here in 1994. I held the door open for a young lady from who was originally from Egypt, who grew up in Chicago, went to the University of Illinois held the door open for her on the first day of law school. And we were in the same section I sat in the front, she said in the back, I was very attentive to the class, she was back in the back talking and clocking around with her loud shoes coming in late. And we eventually were in Law Journal together. And when we were second years on Law Journal, we hated the people that were above us making us do all the work. And then we became the editor in chief and the managing editor. And then we hated all the kids who weren’t doing any work on law journals. So we had this early bond, and a year after that scene was you back when the law school is on the old campus, there’s a mosque on campus. And so after I left the priesthood, I was sort of done being Catholic, and I was looking for a new religion, new outlook on life. And I started going to the mosque at sluice campus without telling Amani, my future wife. And one day she caught me on the way to the mosque. It’s sort of freaked her out, but we talked about and then eventually I converted to Islam, and I became a Muslim in 1998. We got married a year later, in 1999. When we graduated from law school, I got a job at a law firm, a medium sized firm. And I worked at this firm for two years. And I liked it. It was sort of general commercial litigation. But there was a partner there who was a real jerk. And he was very mean to everybody that worked there, including me, he cussed me out in the lobby of the law firm with clients in there. And there was a partner there who worked only on that jerks cases. And I saw early on, that that attorney had to work on that jerks cases and take all of his abuse, because that’s that attorney had no cases of his own, because he was working on all of his work was for the one attorney who was a jerk. And he was stuck because he had kids and a kid in college. And he had a wife who wasn’t working at the time and he had to just take take this and I got yelled at once this guy got yelled at every day. So I always swore to myself that that wasn’t going to be me. So we’re going to get married on June 19 1999. And I had everything worked out because I was going to leave that firm, a buddy of mine who had worked at grain Ritter, which was the firm that I worked at before I went to law school. Pool became the first lateral hire at a big firm in town called Lewis rice. And he had been so successful at Lewis rice that they decided to do more laterals. And so I had an all time I did an interview, I got hired. And it was all it was all set. I got married on June 19. We left for our honeymoon on June 20. And then we came back on June 27. And then I was going to start at the new law firm on the 29th. Oh, I should mention that during law school, I told my wife, my future wife about this lawsuit that I was involved in James Oh, hacking the third vs. Blue Cross Blue Shield. And she had said to me, you know, that’s a bad idea. St. Louis is a small legal town. And you never know when that might come back to bite you on the butt. I said, Oh, no, nothing bad’s ever going to happen to me. So turned out she was right. Because when we got home from our honeymoon, I was supposed to start the next day, I was gonna double my salary. And I hit play on the answering machine, because back then we had physical answering machines. And it was the managing partner who’d hired me and he said, Hey, Jim, don’t come in tomorrow. There’s a problem. Well, in between the time that they hired me, and the time that they started, they brought in a new partner from Thomson Coburn. And he himself had just landed a new case that he was going to work on full time. And the name of that case was James Oh, hacking the third versus Blue Cross Blue Shield. So my job offer was rescinded. And I had no job. And everybody my two buddies at the old law firm said those guys that lose rights or hassles, and the guys that loser I said, those guys that put you on that lawsuit, they’re assholes. So everybody was an asshole, but me, but I was the one with no job. So I didn’t really think those guys are assholes. I’m just saying that’s the way it was all portrayed. So again, I found myself sitting on the couch, watching Oprah. I had nothing that I had nothing to do here I am right with a big stack of debt. And so my buddy called he was studying at Wash U. And he had seen a job placement on their job board that there was a maritime firm in St. Louis that was looking to hire an attorney. And so they were looking for someone who knew how to research and write. And the fact that I had been the editor of the Law Journal made them hire, they hired me. And so I stayed there for 10 years, and I did maritime defense. I didn’t know anything about maritime law. I didn’t know anything about the Jones Act. I didn’t know anything about barges, I took a deposition of a deckhand. And everybody in the room knew that I didn’t know what I was talking about. So they put me on a boat up in Clarksville, and I rode down to Anheuser Busch. It took me three days to get there. And I did all the deckhand work, it was a lot of fun. The job itself was really cool. But at the end of the day, I was defending insurance companies who were fighting over dents to their barges and damage to their boats. So it wasn’t really that fulfilling. One day I went to see a friend of mine, I was in Edwardsville. And I’ve referred a case to my friend Amy Gunn, who had been the year ahead of me, and she won her case, and her client hugged her. And I said, ain’t nobody ever hugging me when I’m fighting over barge damage. And I decided that I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to keep doing that. And in the back of my mind, at this law firm we had, even though the two guys that I worked with treated me very well, I became a partner, we only had three clients or four. And I was worried that if one or two of those clients went away, and there were three attorneys that I would be stuck without any job. And I had kids and kids on the way and all this stuff. So I went to my wife and I said, Baby, you know, I’ve been wanting to have my own law firm. Since the day we graduated. She goes, really this is the first I’ve heard about this. And so, yeah, I said, Yeah, I really, I’ve really been thinking a lot about this. And so she said, Well, I want you to do one of those spreadsheets that you just showed up there of all the where the money’s gonna come from. And I was like, oh, man, I don’t want to do that. And I don’t know how to do that. I said, everything’s gonna be fine. She said, No, no, I need it. So I went, I went ahead and worked one up. And just for the record, our first one to three years looked nothing like the spreadsheet that we had. Alright, so the reason we had two and a half kids at that point, right? So um, she said,
Jim Hacking
she said she’s, but the one thing she did have, because she worked at this fine institution was health insurance, and a steady income. So I knew that we could pay the mortgage and have health insurance every year. And that was enough. After six or nine months of me cajoling and saying, I want to leave this partnership. We’re making really good money to go out on my own with nothing. She agreed. And so, and this is in 2008, right? So right when the economy shut the bed, is when I went out on my own right. And so this is brilliant, pure planning. There’s just no doubt about that. I am brilliant, and you should all listen to me. So so the reason I thought that it would work is because for years while there was a barge attorney, the people that I would see at the mosque would ask me to help them with their immigration matter. And I would always try to refer those to immigration attorneys in town. And those immigration attorneys would say, Jim, stop calling me I have too many cases. I don’t I don’t need any more cases. So I thought that would be a good problem to have. And what I thought I would do is that I would do law for immigrants. I knew how to do the personal injury from the barge work, and I thought I would do car accidents, wills and estates and immigration. Now, I had done Pei stuff. I I had taken one bar class for the wills and estates. And I’ve never taken immigration. So I do have a little bit of bravado in me. And so what I did was I knew that immigration would probably the be the thing. So there was an attorney that I knew, who actually used to work with Mary Pat and had to leave that firm who had done immigration and he had gone in house at some not as an attorney, but working at a company. And he helped me make sure that I wasn’t making mistakes on my immigration case for the first year. So after a while, I started noticing that he was making more mistakes, and I was, so then we decided to part ways but when we really started, it wasn’t a little room about from here, to their to the wall. That was the whole room. We rented space from my buddy John, who was best man in our wedding. And my The one thing I knew right away was I wasn’t answering that damn phone. I had to have somebody do the the mail and the little stuff, and I could do the lawyer stuff. And so Adela sat over there. I hired a young lady. She was 19. She sold cell phones at the mall. She was Bosnian and I figured that a lot of my clients would be bossy. And so I would I needed someone who’s bossy. And so Adela answered the phone, and they call for me and she’d say, Okay, please hold for Mr. Hackney. And she put the phone down, then I’d go pick it up, and then I talk. That was at work. And so at first, I mean, I did these crazy wills. And I did car accidents, for sure, dealing with insurance companies, banging my head on the wall on these little fender bender cases there, it was terrible. And the cases that I had that were complicated, I kept referring out to my buddy, Gary Burger, or to John Simon, because I would get the case far enough where it was then screwed up, and somebody else had to fix it. So then they so then I said, this is crazy, I need to focus on one thing. And that thing for me was was easy to pick was immigration. And so in 2008, no, that’s when I went on my own 2008, I went on my own 2010, we moved out got our own space. And I’ve just been doing immigration ever since 2010. And we’ve grown little by little, it’s much more like this and like this, then like this. It’s sort of gradual, gradual, gradual, gradual, then goes up. And so somewhere along the line, I read a great book by Seth Godin called Tribes. And I realized that I had to build a tribe. And in order to build a tribe, I had to pick one thing, and that Americans attention spans are so small right now are so short, that I wanted that if people thought of me, they thought of one word and that when they thought of one word, they thought of me and I decided that that word was going to be immigration. And the interesting thing about immigration lawyers is they’re all real busy, immigration lawyers are busy. There’s a very much a need for good immigration lawyers, there are immigration lawyers compete with three things. They compete with other good immigration attorneys. But it’s very collegial. They compete with bad immigration attorneys, and they compete with no tarios or people who think they can do it themselves. So there are a lot of people that prey on immigrants. And so if you do a good job, and if you are trustworthy, and if you are a professional, you’re far and away better than most of the people that immigrants get stuck with having represent them. So being basically competent, we were able to really grow our practice. And the cool thing about immigration is that if I help someone, go from being a student, to then get a work visa, then I can help them later get a green card. And then after they get their green card, I help them get their citizenship, and then I help them sponsor their mom and dad. And then Mom and Dad sponsor the kids. And it all starts over again. So as it’s really helped blossom that way, by having that, that repeat contact with our clients. And so, in 2016, Amani left the law school and came to work with us. So right now we have three attorneys, and we just hired two that graduated from law school just this year. They’re taking the bar right now. And so they have both volunteered and they’ve taken immigration, and they volunteer to this place called the micro project. So they had a lot of experience with immigration more than more than more than I did when I started in more than a lot of law students. So that’s sort of us. We have an attorney who works full time for us. He lives in Wisconsin, he does all of our overseas stuff and a lot of our research and then we have Adela, the lady who worked at the cell phone store, She now runs our Office, she’s been with me 10 years come August. And it’s funny because she and I, as people have joined the firm, she and I can like talk without saying anything. Like I’ll give her an assignment. She’ll get it all done, and everyone else is like How did that even happen? Like there’s this weird telepathy thing that we have going on. But we have another guy who works at the front desk right now we have about eight employees. So we’ve really grown over the last 10 years. It took a long time and a lot of hard work. And other than having children. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I’ve had to face a lot of my weaknesses, especially around money and money management and organization. And I want to talk to you a little bit about this book called The E Myth revisited. Have anybody heard of this book by Michael Gerber? Okay, so Michael Gerber, I think smoked a lot of Hot back in the 60s, and was just coincidentally, the three guys who were first in my class in law school, they all smoked the most pot. But anyway, Michael Gerber came up with this concept of the E Myth, the myth of the entrepreneur. And basically, he said that when you start a business, you’re in constant conflict with yourself. And the reason you’re in constant conflict with yourself is because there’s three roles that the business owner has to fulfill. One is to be the entrepreneur.
Jim Hacking
One is the manager. And one is the the technician. So you guys have heard about this. Okay. So it’s a, it’s sort of like a book, like, he teaches concepts by telling a story. And in that book, it’s about a baker named Sarah, right. And Sarah is really good at the technical work. She’s good at baking pies. And that’s what she likes to do. Her and her grandmother taught her how to make pies. So she loves making pies. So because she makes pies, she’s very good at the technical work of making a pie, she makes the best pies in town, that makes her think that she wants to have her own bakery, right. And so what Michael Gerber talks about is the entrepreneurial seizure, where the technician becomes convinced that they have to start their own law firm. Now does that sound from the or their own bakery? Does that sound familiar? That was me, I had had that entrepreneurial seizure. And I kept bugging my wife to start this firm. And so as the entrepreneur, the entrepreneurs job is to think of big thoughts to think of the way to make the firm grow, to think of ways to expand the business. That’s my strong suit. That’s what I like, I can do the technical work. I’m good at it. And now having done it for 10 years, I’m a lot better at it. But the question is, is that the best use of my time, right, and then there’s this other role, the role that I really stay away from that I don’t really like. And that’s the manager, right? The manager. So the manager just wants to make sure that everything runs on time that everybody does what they’re supposed to do that all the rules are followed that you have meetings and procedures and firm handbooks, and probably half the stuff that you guys have been talking about in this class, which is all very important. But it’s also not my strong suit at all. So I did this personality test recently. And it said that I’m a 10 on a fast start. So I’m really good at starting things. But my follow through is not so good. Right? So here’s the best thing. So for years, Adela, who is my office manager was banging your head on the wall because she had this crazy man up here, who just wanted to think let’s try this. Let’s try that. Let’s do this software. Let’s do this. Let’s go find cases over here. Let’s see if we can help people over there. Right. So she was banging her head on the wall for eight years. And then one day Imani came, and Imani is manager, Mani likes, rules and order and handbooks and all that stuff. So now they have an ally, and Nadella has somebody that I have to listen to, right. And so it’s sort of leveled the playing field. And so now we actually have meeting on Monday, which I can’t believe every Monday we have meetings. In fact, I’m in meetings all morning, and I don’t, I don’t like it. And I’m trying to think of ways to get out of the meeting. I’m always scheming to get out of the meetings. But I understand the value of the meetings, because the meetings is how we make sure our cases stay on track, right. So my job now is to figure out, Where is my time best spent? That is my number one job as a lawyer who owns a law firm is where is my time best spent? And there’s a corollary to that is, what do I enjoy doing the most. So it’s okay. It’s okay to do that. And it’s really been hard for me to accept that I don’t have to do everything. And I don’t have to be good at everything, and that I’m not good at everything. I thought I was being a great manager, I thought I was being a great boss, but I was driving people crazy. It’s just not my just not my bag. So now what we’re doing is we sort of come up with all the work that needs to be done in the firm. And we have a long list of all the tasks and things and crap that needs to get done. And we’re filling out more people. So the technical work is actually the easiest, I think to find people to do. You can find lawyers to do the technical work. Right. And you have to have the manager and Amani is really good at that. So we live together. Obviously We’re husband and wife, but at the office, I see her maybe a total of an hour a day she’s off doing her thing. I’m doing my thing. She’s got a full caseload, I have a full caseload, but we’re we’re sort of farming that stuff out. So we’re in this neat period right now where the firm is growing. And different people are like we have someone now. Now we have like a part time bookkeeper in the office. And so the lawyers are all getting completely out of tracking down clients to pay their bills, which is cool because one, I don’t like to do that. And to you don’t build this conflict that you have with your clients when they haven’t paid their bills, right so you have someone else who’s just like an attack dog. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen that. idea of Will Ferrell when pearls knocking on the door to get the rent. So we have pearl in the office. And she just says I want my money, bitch. And so that’s that’s that’s her job right. Sometimes Imani likes to play the role of pearl sometimes. But so it’s really, it’s really it’s sort of an organic growing thing. So that’s, that’s a real important concept that’s really at the core of what we’ve been trying to do. And, and when I say that it’s this is the hardest thing I’ve had to do other than raise kids, I really mean it. Because I just want to spend all my time here, I understand the value of me doing technical work, I understand me contributing to management stuff, I just don’t like it. I just don’t like it. And now 10 years out, it’s like we have a 10 year old kid. And the kid is sort of wanting to do more, right. And so I’m always gonna be drawn to the big picture, I’m often drawn to the flat the shiny object, which is a problem. I was talking to my one of my IT guys the other day about changing my online calendaring system. And he said, Oh my God, we’ve tried every single system that there is, and now you want to change back to when you already had. So that’s sort of how I go. All right now, that’s one big concept that I want to talk about. Another big concept that I wanted to talk about, because it’s my favorite thing. And that’s marketing. And just as I think Michael Gerber was brilliant in what he came up with, with the E Myth, there’s another fellow that I follow named Dean Jackson, who’s a marketing expert, right, not a lawyer, I think it’s really important as lawyers to find out things from other fields, if you are doing what all the other lawyers are doing, you’re doing it wrong, right. And so Dean Jackson has this brilliant concept when it comes to marketing, about the before unit, the during unit and the after unit. Okay, so the before unit is when you’re marketing to your clients, this is how this is this is the time period from raising their hand to express an interest in what it is that you have to sell until such point as they hire you. The during unit is from when they hire you until you’re done completing the task, whatever the legal issue is that they’ve hired you. And then the after unit is interested in two things, repeat business, and referrals. So he has a whole a whole system of it’s called the eight profit activators, which you can download the book for free. And he walks you through all the things you have to do for the before unit, the during unit and the after unit. And as a person in charge of marketing, my job is to make cases come in the office, right. And so I spend a lot of my time thinking about the before unit. And the after unit during unit is sort of by doing a really good job for somebody and continuing to market to them while you’re doing your job for them. That’s that’s marketing to them. Because when they’re your client, they’re not talking to any other lawyer in the world. And so you can really build up good rapport with them in the during unit and Tyson will talk to you on Thursday about the during unit he’s really good at that. My strong suit is the before unit. And my second strong suit is the after unit. So the before unit, how do I get the phone to rank? How do I do this? So on our webpage, we have about 950 pages of content. You guys were talking about content being important and content is very important than law firms. My law firms website, we’re actually in the middle of migrating to a much more mobile friendly site. So we’ve cut back a lot of the content, but we’re combining it and we’re putting it out little by little. But originally I had about 950 pages and those are all written like one blog posts at a time, right. And it’s all about immigration, everything’s about immigration. So what I wanted to do was to become the unofficial Wikipedia of immigration law, where if you have any kind of question about immigration, they come to me and I’m not worried about SEO, I’ve never been worried about SEO, SEO has always fix itself because I’ve always done good content. If you write good content that’s targeted, it’s always going to be beneficial to you. And every time Google does an update. I do better I go up because we have good content. We also have right now about 325 YouTube videos. So my big dream after coming from this little office like this was to one day have my own little green screen studio. And for a while it was in the garage of my house. But now I have my own little office at the law firm. It’s a closed off room. It has a green screen. It has camera it has three sets of lights. I bought all of it on Amazon including the camera the camera was 600 bucks, but everything else was about $300. So for about $1,000 I can what I do is I show up to work on the way to work I think about a question that somebody asked me And then I go in and I shoot a video of it, then we send it off automatically to this place called Rev. Rev transcribes it, the transcriptions done, they push it automatically into WordPress. And we have a blog post with the video. I can do the whole thing. There’s a guy in Pakistan that edits my video, and we can do the whole thing in about a my work 20 minutes of work. So
Unknown Speaker
blog posts or Yeah,
Jim Hacking
yeah, I do. I kind of combined. I miss blogging. I was talking about this yesterday, because I like to write I missed the blog post. But yeah, I mean video right now. Everything is just so video centered that this is yeah. How much does that cost the rabbit in the transcripts? $1 minute. So most of my videos are $4.04 minutes, four or five minutes. So for five bucks. Yeah, Tyson has some of the cheaper. Yeah. Is everything in English? That’s a good question. So the new thing I’ve been doing is interviewing my clients after they win an immigration. So I’m lucky, I don’t do DUI DUI clients don’t ever want to be on camera, immigration clients. Right now. I have it all built in, where everybody expects to be in my newsletter, or in my videos. And so I just did my first one that we translated into Arabic. So I’ll talk about that in a little bit. All right. As content, we don’t, I should, it’s just, I just add some I mean, we are condensing it. And they’re all yelling at me, because they said that some of it’s sort of too short. And so we’re we’re, we’re going to do this longer stuff, longer content. But yeah, I don’t really manage I, I don’t really spend much time, like I said, on the mannequin, so I just go. Alright, so then the key, the key, the key, the key, the key to our marketing, the number one thing that we do is our email newsletter. All right now, the one thing you’d have to all promise me to do is that when you start your law firm, you will have a system in place on day one, to capture the name, email address, and phone number of every single person that contacts your law firm, every single person, because you will develop an email database that will be worth its weight in gold, we now have over 10,000 people on our email list. And that’s one person at a time calling the office sending me an email talking to me on chat on the computer talking to us on chat, asking us questions. One person at a time, we now have 10,000 people on our email list. And you have to have a good CRM, I use Infusionsoft Tyson uses Infusionsoft. That’s like client relation management software. And so every Monday or Tuesday, we send out a newsletter that talks about immigration, talks about me, and talks about clients success stories, and client success stories are the number one thing that people like the most. So right now, when I walk out of an interview with people, they asked me, Jim, can we do our picture, right, and now I started doing videos with clients. So in my office, I have a whole wall of all of our clients having gotten their picture taken outside of immigration. So it’s all become part of the culture, where people want to be in that newsletter. And sometimes people get mad when they’re not in the newsletter, right. And sometimes we have people back log, because we have so many people that want to be in the newsletter. So invariably, whenever we send out this email, somebody writes back, at least I’d say every, every week, we send out the email, we probably get five or six emails from people saying, oh, Jim, I’m glad you sent this email. I have this cousin who has a situation, can you help them? Right? And so it’s just a way to remind people and then we put stuff in there. Like when my daughter plays softball, or my son won the Chess Championship. You know, I wrote an email once about my son, Ibrahim, and this, this guy from Iraq, who was thinking about hiring us when we met my dad’s name was Abraham, and he just you build this connection by the one thing I don’t do is talk about what a great lawyer I am ever, I don’t ever talk about what a great lawyer I am. And now I’m doing videos for the clients. They’ll do that for me. Right? I don’t have to I don’t have to do I don’t do any of that stuff. Alright, so the email, did you? Yeah. What was the software use? It’s called infusion soft, like Constant Contact. It’s sort of like on the next level, because the other cool thing about Infusionsoft is, is that when someone contacts me, so if you called our office and said, Jim, I’m interested in the sign of life, you’re going back to Iraq, I think something bad’s going to happen to me, we can tag them with a little tag on their record. And then they’ll get a series of emails that no one else gets, it just talks about a sign. So for you guys, if you have someone who wants to start up a business, you can send them a series of emails all about the things that they need to know to run their business. So email, website, YouTube. So seriously, I get six or seven or eight comments a day on YouTube and and invariably people are asking me to schedule a console. So what will we do? So our call to action is to schedule counsel. So the cool thing about immigration is you can practice in all 50 states. So because immigration is federal, as long as I’m not giving advice about specific state criminal statutes Other than that, I can pretty much do all of it. And a lot of immigration happens without me ever actually meeting people. There’s things we handle for people overseas, so I can hit, I can bring a spouse, from Romania to somebody in St. Louis just as easily as they can someone in San Francisco. So our call to action is to get a console. And so we have Skype consults, and we charge $100, for the consult, and they get 25 minutes with a lawyer to ask whatever questions they want, right. And we also offer face to face consults, obviously, for people in St. Louis Amani was really instrumental in having us add that $100. And it’s been good not only just for the simple revenue of it, but it also keeps people who probably aren’t gonna be able to afford us as lawyers from calling. So we get a lot of people who don’t necessarily want to pay the $100. There’s some people who get the get their answers answered, and they’re good, but it usually shows a seriousness that makes it worth our while to spend attorney time meeting with those people. All right. So Mary, Pat’s right, I did teach this class. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
with the emails you send out weekly? Do you contain legal content? And and then after the emails, how many people actually unsubscribe from
Jim Hacking
that list? Oh, that’s great. So that’s great. So first of all, just real quick as an aside, last week was my 19th wedding anniversary. So I put in the subject line, it said Happy anniversary, Mary Pat, it was the highest, it was the highest open rate we’ve ever had, it was 44%, which is freaking crazy. Usually our open rates around 20%, which is still pretty good. Our bounce rate is about, we probably get about 20 bounces a week. And then our unsubscribes is one or two people a week, and I hardly ever get actual complaints about our email. Alright, so I did teach this class once or twice. And one day, there was a student who I one of my students for the whole semester has become a very good friend of mine. His name is Tyson nutrix. He’s coming on Thursday. And did you guys already go to the small farm solo conference? Okay. So I’m going to tell you a story. So Tyson and I went to that small farm solo conference. And when we were at that small farm solo conference, so this would have been in 2009, we met a lawyer from Kansas City. And just like Tyson, this lawyer was very gung ho on the practice of law of building a firm he was you know how it is at that small firm sola conference, everyone’s patting each other on the back and saying how great they are. No, you’re great. You’re great. No, you’re great. And that’s what our podcast is. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But anyway, this guy, Jonathan, I really liked him a whole lot. I liked him a ton. I thought he was a real go getter. I thought he was gonna do great. And I would follow him from time to time on Twitter. I had to stop following him, because politically, he was sort of out there. But very sadly, last year, I got a letter from Jonathan. It’s so this guy was at the same conference, Tyson was that, and Jonathan sent me this letter. And he said, Dear Jim, I’m writing to tell you that I have reached it was a form letter, I have reached my lifelong dream of selling used BMWs. And I thought you might be interested in buying a used BMW. I was very sad for Jonathan it really bummed me out. But I compare that to Tyson. So Tyson, dove all in to this stuff. like nobody’s business. Like the first time I showed him Infusionsoft, when he came over to my office, his eyes were like this. And he signed up for it right away. And so Tyson, Tyson had worked at a local firm in town. And they separated from him because he was bringing into many cases, which I still think is bizarre. But Tyson and I used to have go out to lunch, and we go out to lunch. And then we go back to my office, and we’d shoot the shed and talk about Infusionsoft and marketing and all this stuff that I just told you about. And one day we said, you know, it’s fun talking about this stuff, we should record these and make it into a podcast. So two years ago, we did just that. So every week for the last two years, we’re coming up, I think our next episode is episode 100. We have done a half hour to an hour long show with either ourselves just the two of us talking about something about running a law firm, or we’ve had guests. And interestingly, a lot of people like the episodes where it’s just he and I, because we fight a lot. And they’re sort of mean to each other. But we’ve had a lot of really great guests, a lot of really good successful lawyers, one of whom is our friend, John Fisher, who wrote a book called The Power of a system. If you’re going to open up your law firm, you should get that book, he will send it to you for free, just say his name is John Fisher. He’s a medical malpractice attorney in upstate New York. And if you just say that Jim and Tyson said that you’d send me your book, he’ll send you the PDF, but I’ll also send you an autographed hardcopy up right. And so Tyson I, we’ve never had the same guest twice. We’ve probably had about 60 guests. So for the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to sit around and talk to really smart attorneys who run their own law firms. We recorded one today, and we did it on Facebook Live with a guy named Sean HAMP, who lives in Cincinnati. and runs a law firm in Arizona. He’s not licensed in Ohio. He moved there because that’s where his wife is from. But he runs and manages a five attorney criminal defense law firm in the northwest corner of Arizona over by the Grand Canyon, if you can believe it. He hasn’t been to Arizona since January. So I got to spend 45 minutes talking to Sean and Tyson today about this stuff. And it’s really great because my dream is to open another office in San Diego over the next 10 years so that when my daughter goes to college, Imani, and I can live half our time in San Diego, and half our time here. I think there are a few more immigrants and Sandy, she’s gone. I know. She said, we’re going we’re going this weekend to check it out. I think there are a few more immigrants in San Diego than there are in St. Louis. So I think we’ll do okay. But having that podcast and having that ability to talk to really smart people, and to get resources has been invaluable. And so this year, Mary Pat was kind enough to allow us to use some space here at the law school. And so we had our first ever maximum lawyer conference. Yeah, in in May. And so we we did no advertising, we did nothing. And we had 70 people. And I would say 60 of them flew in from somewhere else. And most I mean, we had somebody from Ottawa, we had like four guys from LA, we have we have a big fans in Cleveland, and in in Atlanta. And it was so weird, because we have this Facebook group, which you’re all welcome to join. It’s called Maximum lawyer just join the Facebook group. And people now that Facebook group is alive on its own people, someone will throw out a question at like nine at night, and I’ll be I’ll be going to bed. The next morning, I’ll get up and they’ll be 10 answers for people about how to run their firm. And it’s become this own living thing. But when everybody came to town, they’re all these people that we’ve been talking to on the podcast or in the Facebook group for the last two years. It was like old home network, it was like going to see your fraternity brothers or sorority sisters, just like we all knew each other, even though we had never met it was really surreal. We had a great conference. A lot of the people that have been on the show spoke at the conference, we’re going to do it again next year. And we didn’t have one person complain about one thing. And I think that goes just real quick. I think it goes to the fact of mindset. The people that listen to our show, have a real growth mindset are positive people. And you know, some people got bumped on their flights, some people got rained on on the way over here, nobody complained. Everyone was happy. It was it was really one of the coolest things other than my wedding that I’ve ever been to. So um, yeah.
Unknown Speaker
So this has created a lot of great ideas. A lot of time. Yeah. So what percentage of time spent in marketing? And what does that translate into hours? And then what’s the, what’s the risk?
Jim Hacking
Yes, I’m so glad you asked me that question. So at the conference, it’s alright. I got sorry, it was at the end. I probably missed that last one at the conference. We took a we our last session of the day, we had a Mitch Jackson, who’s a social media lawyer expert that you should all follow on social Mitch Jackson, the streaming lawyer, John Fisher, who I told you about wrote the book, and our friend Seth J. Price, who does our website. He’s a lawyer, who does SEO and runs his marketing as a website company that does lawyer websites. And then Tyson and I and somebody enjoy vitality assets, that very question, what percentage? He said, what percentage? Do you spend your time doing law stuff versus this other stuff? And what percentage do you want to do? And John Fisher said he wanted to spend most of his time working on med mal cases. Seth price has 25 attorneys and he doesn’t handle cases at all. Tyson says he wants to spend most of his time being in the courtroom. And Mitch, Mitch does a lot of trial work. And then me and so I said that I only wanted to be doing 20% of my time doing legal work. And everybody started yelling and throwing things at me and saying you’re crazy. I like doing the law. I’d like to in law, I spend probably way too much time on legal cases. And I’ve been trying, there’s sort of this ebb and the flow to it where I try to cut back on the number of cases. But then we get busy and I take some I’m having right now I’m handling the more complicated cases in the office. So right now, I would say that I’m probably spending 60% of my time on cases. And if I were spending 10% of my time on cases, our firm would be growing much faster. So actually, there’s this unofficial we won’t talk about debate between two people at our firm about how much I should be spending my time doing legal work versus how much time I should be doing marketing. She has no interest in bringing in cases she does well on consults and she likes doing that. But she she doesn’t know where the cases come from. What it takes to get there, she did her first video the other day, she’s dipping her toe in it. But I honestly believe that the less I do lawyer work, the more money that we will make and the bigger the firm will get.
Unknown Speaker
You don’t do television? Oh, no, he isn’t doing like you’re
Jim Hacking
gonna do you have any magazine ads or write or newspaper? Like most most immigration lawyers think if they put an ad in the local Spanish speaking newspaper, they’ve done their job. And this is obviously a lot more sophisticated than that.
Unknown Speaker
That’s what I kind of wanted to get at your advertising and what you consider advertising. I shouldn’t say what you consider, but it’s not typical. To me.
Jim Hacking
It’s education. It’s all about education. Like I said, that Wikipedia thing. It’s all about how do I teach people so that they can make a good decision. That’s all I want. So my perspective, which is a unique perspective, and which a lot of people don’t agree with is you should do as much as you can. I’m waiting to the extreme on that. And I recognize that, but that’s sort of my perspective. Okay, so here’s the thing, real quick. Every year, Tyson and I make the same offer to this class. And that offer is this, that if you want our help, we will help you and we will help you a ton. We will help you, we’ll introduce you to people, we’ll teach you about systems, we’ll teach you whatever you want to know, we’ll we will take you under our wing and run with you as far as you want to go. Every year we make that offer. Every year, we get one or two emails the week after this, and then we never hear from people again. So I am making that promise to each and every one of you that if there’s a practice area that you want to get into, and you are scratching your head how to do it even now, before you get to law school, I will help you as much as I can. Literally as much as I can. People ask me, Jim, why would you ever tell other people what it is that you do? And the reason I do that is because most people won’t do this. Most people won’t do. Most people will stay up at night like Tyson did. Till three in the morning building out a system to get all of his medical records, automated Tyson can push a button for one of his clients and all their medical records, because he did that work. So this is a lot of work. But to me, it’s worth it. And it’s fun. I’m having more fun than I ever would have had. And I’ve had one too. I’ve had three really big law firms in St. Louis, talk to me about coming in to that firm. And I’ve turned them down every single time and I laugh when I do it because I would never be able to do half my crazy shit. If I if I went to one of those big firms. And if I hadn’t agreed to be the plaintiff in that lawsuit, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know how many kids I would have. I don’t know what kind of life I would have. I would have a very different life probably. So I’m very grateful for everything that’s happened and I’m exactly where I want to be.
