99 Things You Should Stop Doing with Jim and Tyson

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you an attorney who needs some tips on what to avoid doing? In this live podcast episode, hosts Jim and Tyson discuss 99 things that lawyers should stop doing. 

Jim and Tyson go over a long list of things attorneys should not do and provide advice on what to do instead in order to become more successful in the legal field. One of these is to not schedule hour-long meetings. Truthfully, most meetings do not need to be a full hour. Go into meetings with a defined agenda and don't waste time talking about things that are irrelevant. 

Attorneys are known to work long hours with little sleep. Tyson and Jim really emphasize the need to get enough sleep to maintain good health and to be more productive. Set boundaries on when you need to finish your work in the office and transition over to doing things that help you unwind. That could be implementing a hard stop at 5pm and putting your phone on silent until the morning. 

Many people fall victim to saying yes to everything as a way to keep the peace and avoid conflict. As attorneys, you will be busy with a lot of moving pieces throughout your day. You will not have time to take on every case or please every client. Learn how to say no and get comfortable with the feeling.

It is important to not compare yourself to others and focus on your own goals. The legal field is full of aspiring attorneys who want to be the best in the business and will try to compete against their fellow colleagues. This can really eat away at many people’s self esteem and progress. Tyson and Jim talk about the importance of focusing on your own goals and not letting other people’s progress affect your own.

Mental health is an important thing to focus on. It is important to focus on both your personal mental health and that of your team. Think about the decisions you make as a leader that affect their work and personal lives. Make it a priority to have routine conversations with your team to understand how they are feeling and how to adjust expectations.

Take a listen to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

• 1:39 Avoid wasting time on unscheduled phone calls and hour-long meetings
• 3:13 Prioritize getting enough sleep to maintain good health and improve productivity
• 8:23 Discussion of the importance of saying no
• 18:13 Focusing on your own growth and improvement
• 26:36 Importance of considering the mental health of both yourself and your team

Resources:

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Transcripts: Metrics That Matter with Tim McKey

Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson metrics. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:00:23) - 99 things you should stop doing today. We want to go through these relatively quickly and again, when we're done, you can get up and talk about something that you're going to stop doing or something you're going to start doing, or some big takeaway you've had from the conference. So we have those three mics. So just be thinking about that, because we'd love to get as much feedback from you as we can. And then then that'll be it for this year's conference.

Speaker 3 (00:00:46) - You had me laughing. I was kind of smiling because I was just hearing you talk about running to the back of the room, and I wish I had something to sell to you, because you'd run to the back of the room and nobody.

Speaker 2 (00:00:53) - Runs to the back of the room faster than I.

Speaker 3 (00:00:54) - Do. That's right.

Speaker 3 (00:00:55) - So all right, we're going to start. We are going to go fairly rapid fire because we don't want there's 99 of these. So we're going to go fairly quickly. Bookkeeping. You should not be doing your own bookkeeping. If you are doing your own bookkeeping right now, what you need to be doing is getting on the internet as we speak and putting a job post out for a bookkeeper.

Speaker 2 (00:01:11) - If you missed Adam's great talk on bookkeeping, make sure to get the recordings. By the way, the recordings you should be getting in about two weeks. It takes the awesome fellows from the casino who have done the audio and visual to get that to us, so we'll have that for you in just a little bit. And don't let me forget at the end, Tyson, we got to do our thank yous. Yes. All right. So some of these suggestions of the 99 things we also got from guild members. So we give a little shout out to the guild members who did this. But many people, including our friend Greg Steel, said stop taking unscheduled phone calls.

Speaker 3 (00:01:39) - No question hour long meetings. If you're scheduling our long meetings and they actually have to be an hour long meeting, you need to go into it with an agenda. Each meeting needs to have some sort of an agenda going into it that way. There's got to be a defined time. It should not be an hour. It's very rare that you actually need an hour for a meeting. It's I mean, if you give me an hour long meeting, it drives me nuts.

Speaker 2 (00:01:59) - Yeah. I would assume they should be 15 minutes and work backwards from there. Stop freaking yourself out. Freaking yourself out does no good. It does nobody on your team any good, and it's not going to help you be clear of thought in order to get out of the problems that you're having.

Speaker 3 (00:02:13) - Is anybody from Jim's team here? If you are, raise your hand because this is there we go freaking your team out. Stop freaking your team out with all of your madness. Stop freaking your team out.

Speaker 2 (00:02:23) - Number six saying just this one time, oh, I'm just going to fix this this one time, or I'm going to go take care of this little task one last time, because it's not one last time.

Speaker 2 (00:02:32) - You'll keep doing it over and over and over until you just stop doing it, saying, just this one time, you might as well just keep doing it.

Speaker 3 (00:02:40) - Binge watching Netflix when you should be working. Work times for work time. Okay, go to go to the office with something in mind that you're you've got to have a defined schedule, well defined schedule, and get the work done. Don't spend your time on Netflix or on Facebook all day. Get the work done.

Speaker 2 (00:02:54) - There's somebody on this stage who has a tendency to send out angry tweets, and and that person is wearing a hoodie, and that's because he's been watching too much news. And Tyson will let me know that I'm rage tweeting again. Just totally wasted energy.

Speaker 3 (00:03:09) - I'll send him a screenshot of it and then he usually deletes it.

Speaker 2 (00:03:12) - That's what you really mean to say this, Jim.

Speaker 3 (00:03:13) - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Next one is sleeping too little. I to be honest with you. I've got this problem. I do go to bed late and I get up early and I don't sleep enough.

Speaker 3 (00:03:21) - But it's extremely important to get for your health to get sleep. I acknowledge the fact that I need more sleep, but please get more sleep. It's for your health.

Speaker 2 (00:03:28) - Some people feel like they need to approve every expense. Give the people who are helping you the authority to spend a certain threshold of money, and then have a process for any expenditures over that amount. But you do not need to be involved in the approval of every expense.

Speaker 3 (00:03:43) - Set some limits. Yes. Next is updating your clients. Thank you, Heather Ford, for this. I mean, you don't need to be updating your clients every day. You've got people that can do that. Hopefully you do have people that can do that for you. If you don't hire some staff and let them update the clients, the more that they build that relationship between the clients and your case managers or paralegals, whatever you call them, the better it is for you, because then they're going to trust them more, so allow them to give those updates.

Speaker 2 (00:04:07) - Ryan Anderson falsely claimed that he was the most disorganized person in the world, because that happens to be me. I did the exact same thing he did. I didn't leave my passport. I left my cell phone in my car, so I had to borrow the baggage guy's phone to call my wife to get my phone back. But along those lines, one of the things I'm notorious for signing up for subscriptions that I don't use anymore, right? Because I just forget about them. And a great trick if you want to find your unused subscriptions is cancel a credit card, because then they'll all start bothering you to let you know that you're not there. Not being able to bill you. And you're like, oh shit, I have that subscription. I don't even need that anymore. So that's a good way to get rid of that.

Speaker 3 (00:04:43) - Yeah, you should get in touch with your bookkeeper that you're going to hire, and you're going to have them constantly monitor this to make sure that you should have a review every single year, at least about your subscription.

Speaker 3 (00:04:52) - So make sure you do that. Next thing is stuff you don't want to do. If you don't want to do it, then you should not be doing it. It's a pretty simple thing and we do it every day we find ourselves, oh my gosh, I got to do this again. And then what happens is you never do it right. No matter how good your task system is, it doesn't matter. You're just not going to do it. So stop doing the things you don't want to do. Delegate those things.

Speaker 2 (00:05:13) - You'll notice if you pay attention that some of our stop doings are contradictory. Right? And and it's because different people in this room are at different stages and are having different experiences. So. Take what you like and leave the rest always. But this is one that I think we can all agree on. Ignoring your hobbies. Ignore your hobbies at your peril. You've got to have some kind of outlet besides exercise. I think it's something that you just do to get your mind off things.

Speaker 2 (00:05:37) - I like to work on Legos, the Star Wars Legos with the kids, or go to their softball games with no more play practice with nor. So you've got to have other things to do just to stay balanced.

Speaker 3 (00:05:46) - Repetitive tasks. If you find that you're doing something over and over and over again, automate it. It's pretty simple. Stop doing repetitive task or delegated to somebody.

Speaker 2 (00:05:54) - You should not be doing the initial screening of hires. You should not be doing the initial screening of hires. You should be higher up in the food chain. You should be later on in the process. So you don't want to be the ones doing that initial screening. Let somebody else do it. Even if there's only two of you and you're hiring a third person, let somebody else do that initial screening, get their impressions of the people, and that'll cut down on the time you spend in interviews.

Speaker 3 (00:06:15) - Alex, are you still in the room? What's the name of the program you use for videos? Interviewers? I can allow you to screen a lot of those interviews.

Speaker 3 (00:06:24) - Really good, really good tip ordering supplies. You should have an office administrator for that. If you are ordering supplies, you should have an office administrator. The mail.

Speaker 2 (00:06:32) - Now, I was just talking to Cain earlier that I started in the mailroom at a law firm before I went to law school, but you don't need to be doing the mail anymore. Lets somebody else do the mail, even if it's a service.

Speaker 3 (00:06:42) - Oh, this one's big. And hopefully end of yesterday with Dr. Selke and then Gwynn this morning hopefully, you know that negative self-talk is very destructive. Stop doing it. Do some of the stuff that with the PCT and the SF. If you find yourself doing the PCT, apply the SF. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the video when it comes out in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 (00:07:01) - Generating invoices. Now, if you're in a place in a firm where you're doing billable hours and you need to check over the invoices, that's just fine. But don't be the one to actually do the mechanical work of generating the invoices.

Speaker 2 (00:07:11) - That comes from Russ and Devin from the guild. Make sure that you let somebody else do that.

Speaker 3 (00:07:16) - Absolutely. If you have things in your firm that a VA can do, go ahead and hire a VA to do it. It's going to free up your people in the States. If if your VA's are overseas, it's going to free up their time to do more meaningful tasks. So stop doing that work that a VA can do.

Speaker 2 (00:07:33) - This one got a ton of tears in the side of the guild when we were talking about it. Too many practice areas. So this is something we talk about a lot. There have been plenty of presentations on Niching down, but when Ron told the story of how he had given up one of his practice areas, like everybody was cheering. So the sooner you can do that, the better.

Speaker 3 (00:07:49) - It's a great one. Immediately updating clients. This is from Heather Ford. A lot of the things that whenever it happens on a case, you don't have to immediately pick up the phone if you don't want.

Speaker 3 (00:07:57) - I mean, you really don't need to pick up the phone to call your clients. Let them know right away. You can have your staff do it, or it can wait till the next day. You don't have to do it immediately.

Speaker 2 (00:08:04) - I think we can say one other thing you should stop doing is using the same slide twice, because we had that one twice, apparently. So it.

Speaker 3 (00:08:10) - Was similar. It wasn't the same. They were similar.

Speaker 2 (00:08:12) - This comes from my friend's presentation two years ago. Stop the bullshit. So just stop the bullshit. Stop telling yourself all these things that aren't true. Be real. Be accurate with your thinking.

Speaker 3 (00:08:23) - I think this may be Jim's problem. Saying yes too often, saying yes to things. It's okay to say no. You're not going to hurt people's feelings. People tell me no all the time. It's completely fine.

Speaker 2 (00:08:33) - I came home with a sweatshirt that said yes on it in huge letters, and a money started yelling at me and said, no, no, you can't wear that chasing shiny object.

Speaker 2 (00:08:42) - So chasing shiny objects. This is another gym issue. I don't know if anyone else here suffers from chasing shiny objects, but I often find myself distracted by the next cool thing. I will say that I've been with File Vine longer than any other piece of software, and I've had some employees with me very long time, but generally I'm always on to the next thing.

Speaker 3 (00:09:04) - Or the next thing. Again, ignoring financials. Ignore your financials at your peril. I cannot stress this enough. If you want to scale your firm, pay attention to your financials, get a financial advisor, work with your accountant. You need to have financial experts helping you with your financials.

Speaker 2 (00:09:19) - One of my favorite presentations of the whole weekend was Bill Ferris's presentation on Setting Expectations. And I think that's so important. But along those lines, allowing clients to push you around, one of the there are many, many reasons why you should have lots of clients. But the best one is, is that it gives you the freedom to fire them when they're terrible.

Speaker 2 (00:09:37) - Right? So do not allow clients to push you around. And just like Jack Welch was saying, that he always is looking to get rid of the lowest performing employees. I think you need to think you need to regularly review who the clients are that are pushing you around, or pushing your staff around.

Speaker 3 (00:09:53) - By raising hands. Be honest. Who has an underperforming employee?

Speaker 4 (00:09:58) - Uh oh.

Speaker 3 (00:10:00) - I mean, you make some tough decisions and find another opportunity for them. You should not be keeping under-performing employees.

Speaker 2 (00:10:06) - Yeah. And to that point, I was saying to somebody today that the one thing about people that come to Max is that when the business owners go home, some people are getting promoted. Some people are getting fired, and you're usually going to the bookstore to buy a bunch of new books. But yeah, underperforming team members need to go and you can do it kindly. Like you said, skipping the gym. So this is something that I suffer from. This was actually one from Amani, my wife.

Speaker 2 (00:10:30) - Skip the gym at your peril. You got to do that. You got to take care of your body. You got to get your muscles moving and your body moving.

Speaker 3 (00:10:37) - This one's from Becca. Waiting for the time to be right. It's never going to be right. Jump on it. Act now. Get act now.

Speaker 2 (00:10:45) - We talked before about software hopping, but this is a real thing. I mean, we've been doing some analysis lately about how much it cost us when a good employee leaves or even when a bad employee leaves, we need someone to do. What's the analysis of how much productivity do you lose by jumping from one piece of software to another? We had one piece of software that we were we were on, and Amani said, I'm going to wait six months to see if you're still on it before I start to learn it. And for that particular one, we were already off it by the time, so she never had to learn it.

Speaker 3 (00:11:13) - This one's from Elise. She just doesn't know it.

Speaker 3 (00:11:16) - Letting Eloise tell you what to do. That voice in your head is lying to you. Stop listening to it, okay? Stop letting Eloise control your life.

Speaker 2 (00:11:26) - Number 34 not systematizing routine tasks. We just had a wonderful presentation on that very subject, so we'll move right on to 35. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:11:34) - Quit making excuses, okay? Quit making excuses. Does you? No. Good.

Speaker 2 (00:11:39) - Number 36 focusing on the problem. Dr. Silk's presentation yesterday I thought was fantastic. If you didn't catch it, definitely. Everyone has a copy of the book. Make sure you watch it when you get the recordings. But that whole mindset shift from focus on the solution versus the problem was huge.

Speaker 3 (00:11:55) - Stop putting yourself last, okay? The reality is you should be putting yourself first. We're taught to to be more modest and not do that. You've got to stop putting yourself last. You should be first and everything else will fall in line. You got to be able to take care of your family. You got to take care of your health.

Speaker 3 (00:12:09) - All that starts with you.

Speaker 2 (00:12:11) - Tyson came up with 37 and 38. When I first saw him, I thought they were the same one. But paying yourself last is actually something that a lot of you talk about, and that should be alarming. I think if you're going to do that, it should only be for a limited amount of time. You cannot do that for too long and you got to give yourself a deadline. On this date, I'm going to start paying myself, even if it's only $500 a week. You've got to make sure that you're getting paid, no question.

Speaker 3 (00:12:34) - Avoiding those tough conversations in our guild hot seat the other day, there were some tough conversations that need to be had. Once people left and they went and had those conversations, they've already reported back to me, and some really good things are happening in their firms because they had the courage to have those conversations. You should.

Speaker 2 (00:12:51) - Too. Overcompensating. I would say we don't see that this much in our community, but it is a problem where people are trying to show off or be bigger than they really are.

Speaker 2 (00:12:59) - That point that Elise was making yesterday about just being honest and honestly assessing where you are and leading with your vulnerability, it's so much more impressive and so much easier to connect to a person who's being vulnerable and honest versus pounding on their chest saying how great they are.

Speaker 3 (00:13:13) - So I hit the button. That's fine. Another one is hitting the snooze bar. This is kicking the can down the road. Quit kicking the can down the road. Quit hitting the snooze bar. Take care of the action now.

Speaker 2 (00:13:22) - Trying to be somebody else. There's a lot of comparison that can happen, especially in the guild or especially as you come to a conference like this. You see people on stage. There's only one of you, and I honestly believe that. People say, why do you give away all your systems? Why do you give away all of your approaches? Why did you tell us everything you know about email marketing? Because no one's going to send the same email as me and it's fine. No one's going to do the same marketing as me.

Speaker 2 (00:13:45) - Just be yourself and the people. Your tribe will will gather around you because they like what you have to say, and you're not going to be there for everybody.

Speaker 3 (00:13:54) - Forgetting the people that got you here. When you go home, I want you to hug your loved ones, your spouse, your significant other, your kids, and thank them for allowing you to come here and learn so much. They're the ones that are helping you get here. They've gotten you here. Thank them. Right. Your team members thank them. Remember those people who's.

Speaker 2 (00:14:12) - Been to the doctor and waited for an hour, an hour and a half to get into the doctor? Don't do that to people. Don't do that to people. Over scheduling is a real problem, and it's an outward facing client facing problem that really, really pisses people off.

Speaker 3 (00:14:26) - Blaming others. Okay, it's really easy to blame people on your team for not doing something right. You might want to look in the mirror and say, maybe that was my fault.

Speaker 3 (00:14:36) - Maybe I should have done a little bit better job of training. Quit blaming other people for other things.

Speaker 2 (00:14:41) - Getting in your own way. There are so many ways that we get in our own way. I thought Dr. Stewart's presentation this morning and Jason's presentation last night about all the chatter that goes on in our head and how there's Dr. Stewart, talked about their activity and there's quiet time and. Just you can really block yourself by getting so caught up in the activity that you're not in that quiet time at all.

Speaker 3 (00:15:03) - Next is this is from the Sandy van playbook. Making your own travel arrangements. You could hire a VA that just does this. So quit making your own travel plans when you come to Max law. Next time when you go to one of the masterminds, have a VA do it. Take care of all the travel for you. Have. Have a list of rules for your travel and have them arrange it.

Speaker 2 (00:15:22) - I think number 48 is one of the most important in the whole list, and that's putting the urgent ahead of the essential.

Speaker 2 (00:15:28) - Stephen Covey talks about the the tyranny of, of the little task that you have to do immediately and how that, that just overwhelms everything. So you might be running your firm right now, urgent matter to urgent matter. And I get that right. But if you can't outright start working on the essential long term things, carve out some time each day. And like Dr. Selke said just to, how can we make it a little bit better tomorrow? But you've got to start carving out time. 15 minutes, 15 minutes, five times a week is an hour and 15 minutes. You can get a lot done to improve your systems so that the urgent comes down.

Speaker 3 (00:16:05) - This is I'll give I'll make another Dr. Selke reference where sweating the small stuff that is that weak minded thinking. Strong minded people do not sweat the small stuff. Stop sweating the small stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:16:17) - How many people have a day go by or two days go by? Or even I've had two weeks go by where I just realized I've been operating on autopilot.

Speaker 2 (00:16:25) - I've just been going, going, going from thing to thing, thing to thing without a whole lot of awareness. Don't do that. Try to break that pattern.

Speaker 3 (00:16:32) - Forgetting gratitude. This is a really good one. We do this every day at the dinner table. I really recommend that you do something similar and encouraging your children. If you have children to do something similar, like starting out with it, because it can be really, really easy to go weeks and months without really not thinking about being appreciative for your circumstances. So at the end of this, you know, do some gratitude internally and be appreciative of where you are.

Speaker 2 (00:16:57) - This should be don't fail to celebrate your wins. I think a lot of people don't celebrate their wins in two ways. One, they don't celebrate their wins with their team. And I'm talking about on a case by case basis or a firm improvement basis. They don't celebrate it with their team enough, and they also don't celebrate their wins publicly. So for me, the greatest content that I come up with is when I talk about success stories of our clients.

Speaker 2 (00:17:23) - That's the best thing that people love to read about. The clients love it. So I would encourage you to don't forget to do that.

Speaker 3 (00:17:31) - This next one is Thinking small and it's it's a lot like that middle or middle class mindset. Right? You think that your your ceiling is down here in reality it's really up here. But you're thinking down here. So you need to stop talking to yourself that way and thinking small.

Speaker 2 (00:17:46) - This next one, 54, is also one that came from Ron. Is that, as you know, who has had that situation where somebody contacts you might you might need a little bit of money to make your nut for the month. And it's a little bit outside your practice area, or it's something you're trying to get rid of and you just say, oh, I can just take this one. That one case is going to prevent you. It's going to give you a whole lot of urgent, and it's going to prevent you from improving your systems on the things that you really want to be doing.

Speaker 2 (00:18:10) - So you've just got to actively say, no.

Speaker 3 (00:18:13) - Jimbo, we have a duplicate forgetting your hobbies. So I'll skip over to the next one. Yeah, comparing yourself to others. This is so, so terrible for you. It really is. You think, oh my gosh, that other lawyer on the other side of town, they're just killing it. They're making so much more money than I am. Stop it. Because you have no idea. You need to focus on yourself. What can you do and not focus on other people?

Speaker 2 (00:18:36) - All right, so number 57 comes from my son Yusuf, who's sitting back there with the big fro. And so when he was in Montessori, when he was five, we had a check in with his kindergarten teacher and we said, Mrs. Huisman, how's Yusuf doing? And so at Montessori, it's very kid driven activity. What do you want to do? And you get to go and do that. And so he had a lot of kindergarten activities, and we asked Mrs. Hillsman, how is Yusuf doing? And she said, oh, he's just a wonderful boy.

Speaker 2 (00:19:03) - He's a wonderful boy. She said, but you know what? Sometimes we find him down with the three year old's. Really? What's he doing down there? He's polishing the silver. That was one of the little tasks that they could do. They could actually polish old silver. And we've developed that. Yusuf doesn't know. We've developed that into a whole concept inside the guild, which is when you develop an expertise and you like to go back to do things that are easy or that were fun or comfortable that you used to do, like almost in a nostalgic way, like, like for me, sometimes, like I'm not really learning anything, going to another citizenship interview, it's not really a great use of my time, but sometimes I like to do it. Don't do that too much. Don't polish the silver too much.

Speaker 3 (00:19:43) - The next one is delaying the inevitable. If you have a tough decision that needs to be made today, make the decision today. If you've got something bad you need to tell to a client or an employee, make the decision today because mentally it's just going to eat you up.

Speaker 2 (00:19:56) - As I mentioned, one of my. Presentations was bills yesterday. And that's overpromising or under delivering two sides of the same coin. You are setting yourself up for big headaches by overpromising.

Speaker 3 (00:20:10) - Totally agree. Next one is always giving an answer right away. Sometimes it takes some time to think, right. You've got to. You've got to think about things. So when you're talking to a vendor or a client or an employee, it's okay to say, hey, let me think about it overnight and I'll get back to you. So you don't need to give an answer right away.

Speaker 2 (00:20:29) - Don't sit at your desk all day, you know, move around. You can go on walking meetings with people to two people walking together. You're not even face to face. There's a different level of clarity that comes when you're walking with a colleague. You can also get a standing desk, and you can even just move into a comfortable chair, as opposed to your desk chair.

Speaker 3 (00:20:46) - I like this one. I don't watch the news anymore.

Speaker 3 (00:20:48) - And I and Jim, I've noticed a difference from in him since he stopped watching the news. He doesn't rage tweet as much as he used to. So it's just not productive these days. It's you can get your news other way elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (00:21:00) - Things like file buying are great software that we that allows us to stay in contact with our clients or our cases is great, but now we can bring our whole law firm home in our pocket. In the old days when I wanted, if I wanted to work on a brief, I had to save it on a disk, bring it home, put it in my pocket, bring it home, plug it in, edit it, then come back, delete the old one and reinstall it. Right. But now we have our whole law firms in our pocket. Literally. Try not to do that. Try not to bring your work home. Try to have clear boundaries with your time.

Speaker 3 (00:21:27) - And this will help with that. Keeping the phone notifications turned on. Turn that off.

Speaker 3 (00:21:32) - If you're getting email alerts on your phones, turn it off because you know it's driving me nuts, right? You're trying to watch a presentation and a phone alert comes up, and then another one and another one turn them off. They're not productive. Pick a time during the day to check your email. That's how you should check your email.

Speaker 2 (00:21:46) - We got this from a couple of guild members, including Cade checking the bank account every day. That's just not good for lots of reasons. You're either going to stress out or be overreliant on it. Don't. Don't spend that time checking the bank account every day.

Speaker 3 (00:21:58) - This is one of my favorites keeping toxic people in your life. If you have people that are bringing you down on a daily basis and you're constantly thinking about those people, cut them out of your life. It sounds harsh, but it's it's what you should do.

Speaker 2 (00:22:08) - This one's for my wife, so maybe I should take a lesson from it. Just don't go to bed mad. I think it's great advice.

Speaker 2 (00:22:13) - Try to work things out beforehand. And speaking of bed, here's a bonus one. Since we have that duplicate, if you wake up in the morning thinking about the same problem person three times in a row and they're not your spouse, you need to get rid of that person out of your life.

Speaker 3 (00:22:26) - It's good advice spending money you don't have. If you're putting everything on credit cards, stop doing that, okay? That means you you've got something going on and you need to talk to your account and figure it out. Stop spending money you don't have.

Speaker 2 (00:22:36) - Glory days, glory days. Forget your glory days. Whatever you did in the past, whatever great things you've achieved doesn't mean shit. There's someone else coming. Someone younger, someone leaner, someone cooler, someone smarter, someone more technologically savvy. They're coming to get you. So whatever you did, you're 50 years of combined experience. Nobody gives a crap.

Speaker 3 (00:22:55) - And if you have employees that keep trying to drag you into the past, you might have to have some tough conversations.

Speaker 3 (00:22:59) - You know, I really I really like things the way they used to be. Well, that could you might have to have those tough conversations fighting every battle. You've got employees that work for you. Send them out to battle. Let them battle. Okay. That's why you've hired them. You don't need to fight every battle.

Speaker 2 (00:23:16) - Or you can choose not to have some battles.

Speaker 3 (00:23:18) - That's also.

Speaker 2 (00:23:19) - True. So anyone trying to please everyone and Andrew gave us this one, trying to please everyone. You're never going to please everyone, so don't even try.

Speaker 3 (00:23:26) - Manage your own email inbox. I think all of you know my opinion on email. I'm not a fan of it. You should not be handling your own emails. If you have someone answering your phones, you should have someone answering your email.

Speaker 2 (00:23:36) - I believe I've said this at every max law con that most law firms that I encounter are woefully understaffed. We're asking, and this is including my law firm. We're asking too much from our team members, and we need more help.

Speaker 2 (00:23:52) - So don't be scared to hire.

Speaker 3 (00:23:56) - Ignoring your best referral sources, you should have a list of your best referral sources and check in with them on a daily or a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis. That way you can maintain that referral relationship.

Speaker 2 (00:24:08) - Micromanaging can be a form of polishing the silver, where you're trying to get other people to do things the way you used to do them, or you want them to do them. Micromanaging will eat up all of your productivity.

Speaker 3 (00:24:17) - Stop procrastinating. I know that for those of you that have ADHD or other things, it's one of those things that can you you've got to find other ways to to get around the procrastination. I know it's really, really difficult, but procrastination is very destructive. Stop procrastinating.

Speaker 2 (00:24:32) - And Beck is like, that's coming from the two guys who finished their slides this morning.

Speaker 3 (00:24:36) - That's right. Exactly right.

Speaker 2 (00:24:38) - Trying to do everything. Don't be trying to do everything. You can't be everything to everybody, and don't try to do everything. And that's on the macro level of practice areas or everything related to your firm or just on the day to day basis.

Speaker 3 (00:24:50) - This was from Jim's great presentation yesterday, sending blow horn emails to your list. They don't care. Quit sitting those blown emails. They just don't care about you beating your chest.

Speaker 2 (00:24:59) - Stop making it all about you. When I tried my first case, I kept coming back. My my mentor was sitting next to me, and I kept. I kept asking her, how am I doing? How am I doing? It is not about you. And that's true about everything related to your firm. It's not about you. It's about the best interests of your client, fighting for your clients and building a good atmosphere for your team to work.

Speaker 3 (00:25:20) - Next one is wasting money on garbage vendors. I'm not going to ask for you to raise your hands on this one, but I know some of you are spending money on vendors that are not making you any money. You need to get rid of them.

Speaker 2 (00:25:29) - Our friend Jay Rain gets a lot of work done late at night, but most people, I think, do much better when they get up early.

Speaker 2 (00:25:34) - So I think going to bed too late is a little take on getting enough sleep. I think if you want to decrease your stress, go to bed a little bit early er and get up a little bit earlier.

Speaker 3 (00:25:45) - This one's pretty self-explanatory. Quit dropping bombs on your team, just especially if you're doing it on a on a weekly basis. You are going to push them out of your firms. Quit dropping those bombs on them.

Speaker 2 (00:25:55) - Stop taking your problems out on your team. You know, I was in this little resentful period where I was thinking some people weren't carrying their weight. And at the end of the day, as a law firm owner, every problem is our everything is our fault. Anything that's wrong with our law firm is our fault. Nobody else is.

Speaker 3 (00:26:11) - Hiring crazy people. And it might be crazy people, might be bad employees, but you need to have a filtering process to prevent you from hiring crazy employees. So stop hiring them.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21) - Stop skipping your vacations. Stop denying yourself time to rest and relax.

Speaker 2 (00:26:26) - Stop skipping your weekends. Make time for yourself and you've got to have. I'm a big believer in working really hard when you're working and relaxing really hard when you're relaxing.

Speaker 3 (00:26:36) - Totally agree. Ignoring your team's mental health. Not just your mental health, but your team's mental health. Thinking about the decisions that you're making that affect them, what's going on in their lives and stop. Ignore them. Having those those regular conversations with them is important.

Speaker 2 (00:26:49) - Overanalyzing everything. Number 87. We see so many people who just think about things, think about things, think about things. It's just an excuse. It's just a way to avoid taking action.

Speaker 3 (00:27:00) - So next one forgetting to get that Google review, you need to have a system in place for getting a Google review, especially at the end of a case. So you got to make sure you make the ask. I know it's uncomfortable for you to make the ask, maybe, but have an employee do it instead. Make the ask for that Google review.

Speaker 5 (00:27:15) - Stop cutting.

Speaker 2 (00:27:16) - Corners. It takes time to build a practice. We see a lot of people, especially after a weekend like this. They want to just jump ahead and be like the people that they see that are really kicking butt. Don't do that. Take your time, build it right, build. Build the support structure for what it is that you want to achieve.

Speaker 3 (00:27:35) - We're on the homestretch here, Jimbo. Refusing to give yourself a break. Give yourself some grace, okay? What we do is tough. It's not easy. We get you get angry clients. You got defense attorneys that are terrible. It can be a tough job. Give yourself a break.

Speaker 2 (00:27:48) - Maintain clear boundaries with your clients. Let's go. We got a minute left. Let's knock them out. So definitely maintaining clear boundaries with your clients is really important.

Speaker 3 (00:27:56) - Underpaying your team. Okay? And you know who you are. Okay? Give your team a raise. Pay them more money. They'll stick around. You'll attract more talent. Quit underpaying your team.

Speaker 2 (00:28:06) - If everything is important, nothing's important. You've got to be able to say no to most things and to prioritize.

Speaker 3 (00:28:12) - Overstimulating with caffeine or any other substances. Stop doing. It's not good for you. It's not good for your firm. It's not good for your family.

Speaker 2 (00:28:19) - Kelsey Bratcher has taught me many things, but the number one thing that he's taught me that is purely evil is duplicating your data, having to re-enter data over and over. So you've got to use Zapier or other tools to push your data all the way through your system using voicemail.

Speaker 3 (00:28:33) - I know you all may think I'm crazy about this. You can not leave a voicemail with our firm. It is amazing. So get rid of it. Find a way for it. Get an answering service. Have your team answer it. Do not have voicemail 10s left.

Speaker 2 (00:28:44) - Stop resisting change, settling and not joining the guild.

Speaker 1 (00:28:53) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content go to Maximum lawyer.com.

Speaker 1 (00:29:05) - Have a great week and catch you next time!