Organizing and Scaling a Criminal Defense Firm with Stephen Hamilton

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is thinking about expanding? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Jim and Tyson interview Stephen Hamilton, a prominent criminal defense attorney from Texas. Stephen shares his journey from solo practitioner to managing a multi-office firm.

Stephen shares the challenges and strategies that exist when scaling a firm. One of the strategies that is needed to scale is to get rid of the micromanager mindset. As law firm owners, it can be tough to remove yourself from professional situations or feel you are the face of the firm. Stephen emphasizes the need for owners to think about the people you need to make the firm stronger and more successful. From there, it is important to let them do the work and come to you when they need help.

Many firm owners might consider opening multiple offices, which can be very difficult. Stephen speaks on the best way to go about opening multiple firms. One thing to keep in mind is deciding on a universal system of doing things across all firms. Opening a second, third or fourth firm that are under the same name but doing different things will not lead to good work and successful cases. It is important to think about the current structure you have and how to expand that to another site.

Listen in to learn more!

Jim's Hack: The value of spot checking and having someone in the firm who takes this task on to ensure procedures and processes are followed.

Stephen’s Tip: Use the app Fathom, which is a notetaker. It records and transcribes meetings that even writes an email detailing what needs to be done.

Tyson's Tip: Use the Whoop Band, which is an app that tracks your sleep and stress levels to keep up to date on your health.

Episode Highlights:

• 8:48 The challenges and strategies for scaling a criminal defense firm
• 14:36 Discussion of the firm's customer service-driven approach 
• 16:55 The challenges and strategies involved in opening multiple offices 
• 23:00 Different motivations behind selling or merging firms.

Connect with Stephen:

• Website
• Email: [email protected]

Resources:

• Join the Guild Membership
• Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube Channel
• Follow us on Instagram
• Join the Facebook Group
• Follow the Facebook Page
• Follow us on LinkedIn

Transcripts: Organizing and Scaling a Criminal Defense Firm with Stephen Hamilton

Jim (00:00.982)
Welcome back to the Maximum Warrior Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson (00:04.417)
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up

Jim (00:07.602)
Tyson, it's good to see you buddy. I hope you had a good day in court. It's good to be back in St. Louis. I've been gone I feel like a month and I'm glad to be back here and recording with you and I'm excited about our guest

Tyson (00:20.003)
Yes, I am too. I think it's interesting. that energy that you're feeling from Jim, he's faking the funk because two hours ago we tried to record, his voice sounded way different. I'm gonna let everybody know you're fighting off COVID, you're at the end of it, tail end of it. So you've been fighting it off. But he's being a trooper today. Today's a recording day. So I like the energy that you're bringing in. So it's good stuff. Hopefully you're feeling better.

Jim (00:50.252)
Yeah, well let me go ahead and introduce our guest today. It's Stephen Hamilton. He's a very successful criminal defense attorney from down in Texas. Stephen, how are

Stephen Hamilton (01:01.264)
Well, gentlemen, how are you guys?

Tyson (01:06.135)
Living it up, living it up, man. You know, Jim did say something, like very successful criminal defense attorney. I don't know if I know any, I don't know many criminal defense attorneys that has things as really streamlined as you do. It seems like you really have things well organized. Let's kind of start with that. Where does that come from? Because I don't want to get into the bio stuff. Let's just jump right in. So where does that stuff come from?

Stephen Hamilton (01:37.19)
I think for me, know, I grew up as a trial attorney. I love trying cases. I love criminal law. What I realized at some point in time was I would see a lot of very successful criminal lawyers, people who were great in the courtroom, but they weren't necessarily great business people. And so you would see them toward the end of their career. And oftentimes it was really sad because they would be in the courtroom

know, shuffling around at 80 years old or wherever the case may be. And I always said to myself, if I'm in the courtroom at 80, I want to be in the courtroom at 80, not that I have to be in the courtroom at 80. And so I just started putting plans in place, realizing that the way to build a business was first you have to be a good lawyer. I disagree with the philosophy that

you can take a marketing person, at least in criminal law, and then build a practice that way. I think you have to have a skill set. You need to know what you're doing or hire the people that are good at it. But then I think that, you know, process -wise is because we are in court so much in criminal law, you have every time you're in court, my partner would tell me, when you go to court, we lose money because you

that's where you are and you're handling the cases and it's great but we're not able to handle you know more clients and do more things and so we we looked at a lot of the way other businesses worked it and then maybe more the personal injury practice and and started to build over the last six seven years a process that would allow us to take good care of clients but be able to take care of more clients.

Jim (03:36.952)
So let's back up a little bit. How did your practice get started? Why did you focus on criminal? How have you been able to grow? mean, just so everyone understands the scale of your firm, I think most criminal defense attorneys think of themselves and their paralegal and their phone person or whatever as a good -sized firm. Talk to us about what your setup is and how you were able to build such a big enterprise.

Stephen Hamilton (04:04.254)
So we have myself, my partner, one of counsel and 15 other lawyers right now. We're in the process of hiring three more lawyers. So hopefully by the end of the summer, we'll be through the process and have three more on board. We have a total of about 60 employees. So legal assistance, staff members, we've moved more into the case manager type where the case managers.

focus on the client and the paralegals handle the back end work, to speak, separating those two out. We have seven different offices throughout the state of Texas with three more coming on board, hopefully by the end of the year, but definitely by the middle of next year. And so right now we really are focused in growth in Texas and then hopefully after we reach a certain point of comfort level, then we're looking

other states that we could expand into as well. Our goal this year has been to meet, talk, and at least look at law firms that meet our requirement, where you may have a person or several lawyers who are tired of the day -to -day. They don't want to run the back end. They don't want to deal with signing up to clients. They don't want to deal with the business model. They hate payroll. They want to be in court, right? That's what they want to

And so we're really looking for firms that fit that and in a market that is where we want to be and that could be profitable. And so we're looking to absorb firms, to buy firms, to bring people on board in criminal law. A lot of times you, as you asked, you know, how did I get started? So I came from Oklahoma to Texas

past the bar and my stop was Lubbock. And I thought, well, I'm only going to be here a couple of years and then I'm off to bigger and better places. And Lubbock's been a great place for me to raise my kids. It's just a really good, healthy place. Dirt blows a lot, but other than that, you know, and if you want to go someplace, you're either a six hour drive or a one hour plane ride to wherever you want to go. I started

Stephen Hamilton (06:31.504)
as most people do as a solo practitioner, I had one partner for a little while. I did door law. So whatever walked in the door, I was your guy. I did a bankruptcy practice for a while. I did a little bit of PI work. I did family law. I've always said that if I had to do family law again, I literally would go sell cars before I started doing family law.

And back in, when I got licensed in 1998, we didn't have some of the protections that are there now. So, you got on the quarter point list and you started getting cases. And so, I was a six, nine month licensed lawyer and I tried my first felony sex case, right? Crazy, nuts, nobody, and I got a not guilty. And then the judge was like, oh, okay, so we'll give you another one. And I got another not guilty and I had like 10 in a row. And so, by the time I was like a four year lawyer,

I was very dangerous because I thought I was the best thing since last bread, about the three to four year mark, right? Then I realized about the 10 year mark, well, I was really not a very good lawyer back there because I didn't connect with people like I did when I was growing up. And so, you know, at the end of the day, that's sort of, I guess what most criminal lawyers do. That's certainly my process was get a court appointed case. Then I started trying a lot of cases.

And what I realized was my area that I really liked was the area of alcohol offenses. So I sort of became the guy in my area for DWIs. I took all the science classes, I went to the labs, I bought the machine. I'd spend whatever I made that year, I'd probably spend half of it in learning the science. Sort of just grew from there when my partner and I got

connected then we had three offices in West Texas and then We had another partner who sort of took care of the Dallas area and as that partnership ended We just stayed in that market and built it from zero And that was what three years ago almost almost three years ago now. That's one of Our most busy offices is the Dallas Fort Worth area

Tyson (08:51.567)
So Stephen, seeing a criminal defense firm that is scaled is one of the rarest things I've seen. It is just such a unicorn. What is it that makes you and your firm different that has allowed you to scale as opposed to many of the other firms, 99 % of firms that just can't scale as a criminal defense

Stephen Hamilton (09:12.648)
Yes, I think the hardest part for me was realizing when I needed to get out of my own way, right? Because I'm a micromanager and I'm a perfectionist and I want everything done in a certain way. And so you can't do that in scale. You reach the point in time where you can drag people so far, as they say, at least in Texas, right? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him

So looking at from the standpoint of really understanding what we wanted to do, which was we wanted to have a statewide firm that it could not be built just around me. And that I think was the first thing that helped us really scale. Texas changed the bar rules in 21. And so it was the first time that I could ever do it, first time anybody could do it, that you could practice under a trade name.

I got out of the attitude and the mentality of, Stephen, the lawyer, look at me, look at me, I'm on the bus, I'm the guy. And I branded, we branded the Texas Criminal Defense Group, because that's what we are, right? We're a group of really good lawyers. We hire good lawyers. If you're a young lawyer and you want to learn how to try cases and be in the courtroom, you're a fit for us. If you're a young lawyer and you, you know, there's

We all get nervous. I still get nervous when I pick a jury. I always say, when I stop getting nervous, I need to go do something else. But they're trying to match the people to where it is. So if you have that mentality, I can't teach you how to want to be a trial lawyer. I can teach you ideas and here's how I would cross and these are points and things like that. But sometimes you get…

So the answer to your question is, you got to figure out where the people are that you need. And like we need trial lawyers, we need, I think in the Civil War you call them pre -lit lawyers, right? We call them negotiation lawyers, people who are really good at that, right? More the touchy -feely type stuff. So that, you you can talk with the prosecutor or try to communicate. You need really

Stephen Hamilton (11:36.284)
back in and we separated out and we have been working on that separating out the legal work from the customer service, right? So that people know that that's just sort of the process that we go through. I think those things have helped us when we're looking at it not just being a solo or one or two man or woman firm.

Jim (12:00.098)
How has the experience been for your associates? I would imagine that there are a fair amount, like you said, who don't want that hassle of finding the clients and doing all that back office stuff. Talk to us about what it's like to be an associate at your firm.

Stephen Hamilton (12:14.142)
Yeah, it's a good question. mean, sometimes, you know, our associates are there for three, four years. I've got some associates who've been seven, eight years. My longest associate last year left to go out on his own. He was a 10 -year associate, right? Really good guy, very smart guy. Just was ready to go do something different. So for us, what we talk about really is quality of

It's very stressful to be a trial attorney. So we want to take as much stress off so you can focus on what's really important. And I remember, you know, years and years ago, it's like, okay, I got to be in court at 830. And then I'm going to try to get there early so I can get that done so I can get back because I've got a new client that's, you know, potential new client. And it just, you're doing so much that you're really

you run the risk of not being really good in one area. So I think what the associates would tell you is most of the time, you know, we try to take really good care of them, lots of opportunities for them, but really their whole goal is focused on their cases and their clients. And most of the time, that's another thing we do. We just charge one fee. We have a caveat. There are some cases that

will charge an additional trial fee, but most of our cases are one fee. So what that lets us do for the client is talk to the client about, I'm not gonna come back to you when we can't get it negotiated out the way you want it with the DA and say, I need more money if you wanna go to trial. Because I always did not like the feeling of the clients telling me,

I want to go fight this DWI, Steve, but I can't. I can't come up with that much more money. And then I've had prosecutors say, well, we're going to at least make him pay or her pay your trial fee. So we'll see if that actually happens. So we, we just, we're very aggressive and we tell clients, if you want to go to trial, then let's go to trial.

Stephen Hamilton (14:30.522)
especially on the lower level DWI cases, right? You're probably not going to do jail time. If you lose, you're probably going to get probation anyway. So I don't understand why it is that you would plea to something unless, you know, there are reasons obviously that somebody would take a plea deal, but I wanted to take money out of the equation to

Tyson (14:54.511)
I think that makes a lot of sense and I think it also, I think that's more of justice than what the other business model is. No offense to people that do it the other way. I understand why you do it,

We are running law practices, which does have that component that we've got to think about. So you have a plaque in your office that says, don't negotiate with terrorists or prosecutors. And I think that's a good philosophy when it comes to practicing law. How do you apply that same philosophy to the business world, or do you?

Stephen Hamilton (15:30.824)
When it comes to running the practice, the mentality that we have is we want to be customer service driven, but we have a way that we do things. And in that way, what it means for me and what it means for my law partner is we're okay if clients aren't necessarily our ideal clients. We

We're really good with clients holding us responsible for what we say we're going to do. But we're also really good at holding clients responsible for what they agree to do when they bring us on board. Because it's that old real estate philosophy, right? 20 % of the agents sell 80 % of the homes. And so where you have to worry about in all areas of criminal law, all areas of law, I'm sure, but in criminal law, because I know it

Who is going to suck the life out of you? It's not the 95 % of the clients that are good hard -working people you're working for. I've tried cases Tyson where we're walking back across the street and the clients got his hand over my shoulder. It's okay. Mr. Hamilton. I'm gonna be okay, right? That's the philosophy that we're looking for. But when you do have those 5 % of clients, you know, one thing that we've all learned is you've got to be able to fire them and fire them fast and

all the philosophy of it's just going to be okay, just a few more days or a few more weeks. And so we have our rules, we have our procedures, we do those things. And if you violate those rules from a client standpoint, if you're aggressive to the staff, we fire clients that treat staff like they're, you know, their personal step and fetch it, that type of thing. So I think that's more of the philosophy. And that doesn't mean I won't negotiate with

I mean, we discuss cases all the time, but we know where our end result is. And if we can't get there, then it's really just, we're sort of wasting time. We might as well get on to the fun part and get a jury picked and move forward on

Jim (17:46.156)
I think a lot of people have a hurdle, Steven, with opening that second office. So how did you make the jump and the leap to say, okay, we need a second office, and then how did that become easier as you opened more offices?

Stephen Hamilton (18:01.438)
Yeah, that's a great question. So definitely the first one is the hardest. We were in West Texas and so like my first office, main office was in Lubbock. We had started getting more cases, you know, down south, right? So like the middle and Odessa area. And so I would turn those cases down and then enough calls came in. We started taking those cases and we would do a lot of driving.

And as you know, like there's a base fee that you're going to get. People charge different fees for a criminal case, but in general, it's going to run in a certain range. So you can add some additional travel time, but as we kept going, it became, we need someplace down there. Like we've got enough business to come in the door. I was really lucky on the first one. We did a lot of interviews. We found a good lawyer.

He fit our culture and the way that we did things. He was aggressive, trial type guy. And so we did it, we set it up. What we learned in that first one was we learned as many things we shouldn't have done as we did. So it wasn't perfect by any means. And for a while, those two offices, they ran completely different each other. And what we learned over time was,

you're much better, we're much better off centralizing a lot of the work. And so when we put in the third one and the fourth one, and now we're at seven and we're hopefully have three more by the end of the month, end of the year, early part of next year.

how do you use things from each office to help? And so, for example, the paralegal might be in office A, but that paralegal has primary responsibility for one area and then is doing work in other areas. So our legal assistants are able to cover regardless of where they are. We're not jurisdictionally limited. That was one of the bigger things with both the lawyers and the staff that was hard because

Stephen Hamilton (20:14.554)
No, I want to, you know, I've had lawyers and really good lawyers like, no, we need to focus just in this area. You do it different over here. That happens over there. And so really focusing on trying to keep a system in place and not letting people jump off the train, so to speak, when there's problems. we, the other thing we did that I'm really pleased with is we, we took a lot of things we're doing. I'm sure we've missed some,

We have really good SOPs and so they're drilled down. So if there's a change, if we need to draft an occupational license, for example, when somebody loses their driver's license and we need to give them a temporary one, this is the process we follow. Now, step A, 4A and 4B may be different in Dallas than it is in Houston. That's fine because there's a different step for that, but everybody stays in the same procedure.

So that anybody can, legal wise, can take care of it wherever it is. Same way with lawyers, right? I might be talking to somebody in a Houston office. I might be doing an interview with a client that's in San Antonio, but we're centralized and our software, we know what's going on in each case. And when the lawyers don't, then there are triggers so that we can go back in and look and say, why is this data not there?

because I would just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what was going on. And if the data had been there, if you'd put it in the notes in the billing, then it would have taken me five minutes to talk to the

Tyson (21:56.143)
You know, wonder what, hearing you talk, it sounds like you still have a lot of passion. You've been doing this for a long time. You've had a lot of success. And it made me wonder, what keeps you motivated? What keeps your engine going? Because it's not always the easiest thing to do, but you've continued to grow. You've continued to expand your firm. So what is it that keeps you going?

Stephen Hamilton (22:19.87)
think for me, couldn't imagine I'll be 57 in December, right? What does retirement look like for me? I'm not the guy that's just going to sit around on the back porch and you know, at 60 or 65 and you know, read the newspaper. I mean, I technically read it online now. What I like the most, I think, right? Other than being in the courtroom is I like the fact that we try to help.

people. Like at the end of the day, our clients are not commodities or not widgets. They're human beings and they have a life. And I'll give you this one scenario. Years and years and years ago, I was representing this gentleman. His name was Mike on a DWI. He had already been to the pen because he'd had three DWIs. He got out of the pen. I didn't represent him on that. He got another DWI. All right. So now he's looking at going

up to 20 years in the penitentiary. And the prosecutor, who is a good friend of mine now, and the judge, he worked out the deal with me to get my client into DWI court. Now it was the first time that we could do it with a person who'd been to the penitentiary. So, it's very intensive things, good rehab. It's not easy. I'm not sure I could go through that court, right? I mean, you mess up, you go to jail for three days.

Fast forward, they meet every week. I'm walking up to the court, months later, I'm going in the courtroom, we're trying to jury trial. That judge is actually the DWI court judge. So I see Mike coming out and he stops me and he tells me something that has stayed with me for probably 15 years. And that is, Steve, this is the first time in my life that my twin nine -year -old girls mean more to me than the bottle. And

when you get that type of connection with a person, right? I think that's why I enjoy what I do. I like being able to fix people's problems and I want to give people the best opportunity to figure out what an amazing life they can live because I've certainly been blessed to live an amazing

Jim (24:40.768)
So I can attest Stephen's negotiation prowess. We had a mastermind a couple months ago and Victoria Collier came and presented on selling your law firm and I was selling my law firm to Stephen and I got hoodwinked, got bamboozled, I got swindled. Stephen bought that thing out from under me for like

quarter of what Victoria said it was worth but I bring that up because you said that you're on the lookout and have taken over other criminal defense lawyers and sort of bought their practices. Talk to us about that process because that's something that really interests me Stephen.

Stephen Hamilton (25:18.824)
Yeah, so it's new for us, right? We've had several that, and we have several we're looking at now. What I'm trying to find, what we're looking for is, what does that person really want to do? So I think you can divide that group up into three areas, right? One, they just want to sell. Is there a profit in their firm they want to sell? And there's so

ones that happen is there's not necessarily a good valuation on it because they've got a whole bunch of open cases. Maybe they've got court appointed cases, those types of things. Second is they want to close their practice and go to work for somebody. So they're a good trial attorney. They would fit our mode, but they don't really have a book of business or assets that would transition, but they're going to need some support.

in being able to close down their practice because sometimes judges won't let you off cases. Sometimes you've been paid for cases, you've got to finish and those type of things. And then those firms that are looking for mergers. So maybe there are two, three, five lawyers, but they don't want to handle the back end, the marketing, all that. They want to actually just move forward in an equity basis. And so that's the way we divide out when we're talking to people and looking at

Tyson (26:45.849)
I love it. I would love to… Sorry, my truck's shutting down. All right, we'll pause. right. All right, I'd love to hear… Golly, damn beeping. All

Steven, I love to hear everything about, I just love talking to you. It's funny, I'm gonna call Jim out. Jim was texting me, he's like, I love talking to Southern guys, especially when you're not feeling well. There's just something about interviewing you, it's just great. You're always positive, you're a great spirit, and it's just, it's really cool. It's a pleasure getting to interview you again. But I am gonna wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, we would love to see you there.

Lots of great activity. If you want to have great conversations with people like Stephen, we'd love to have you in the guild, maxlawguild .com. A lot of great people just like Stephen in there. And while you're listening to the rest of this episode with our tips and hacks of the week, we'd love if you would give us a five -star review. We would really appreciate it. All right, Jimmy, what's your hack of the

Jim (27:50.552)
The value of spot checking. The further you get away from the front lines of either handling cases or handling leads, you have to build in systems to allow you to spot check. And you're not going to have the bandwidth to check every single lead or every single case, but there's no substitute to just randomly checking out a lead or randomly checking out a file and seeing what it looks like. So you've got to make sure that if you're not doing that, someone else is. Otherwise, as my

Mother -in -law used to say, when the cat's away, the mice will play. So one of the best ways to make sure that people are following your systems and your procedures is spot checking. And then if you find that, things aren't being followed on this one particular case, then you have to start to ask yourself, how is that scaling? Is this happening in lots of cases? And then you have to start scratching your head and doing a deep dive.

Tyson (28:44.875)
I think that's great advice. I think that that's sound. think that's something you've adopted over the years and that's made a huge difference in your firm. really, I think that's great advice. Stephen, all right, you know the deal. We asked our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. It could be a podcast, a book, a quote, you name it. But what you got for us?

Stephen Hamilton (29:04.978)
Yep, so I had two, so I had to pick one. The one that I would recommend is Fathom, the note taker for, AI note taker. We use it all the time when we're talking about anything that's a Zoom or Google meets. I love it. It records it. It transcribes it. It uses AI. So when we're talking about, I need, this is your responsibility or this is my responsibility.

at the end when I get off the call, I've already got a to -do list. If you pay the fee one and not the free one, but if you pay the a little bit of a fee, it'll actually AI will write an email that you can just drop in and say this needs to be done. And now we're starting, we use it all the time in the law office and training, and we're starting to test it with clients to when we do the, you know,

trial prep and meetings and those things we can put in their file so that there's no confusion on what it is that we've told them or they've told

Tyson (30:13.907)
I can't wait I didn't need another AI to check out but I'm gonna check it out. Thanks. Thanks a lot for that It's kind of like all the book recommendations I have Love it. I can't wait to check that out. So I've got my app pulled up for a new device that I got thanks to Jeremy Danielson He recommended it. I got the whoop band. I don't know if either of you have that but he told me he's like listen you like data This is gonna help you optimize your body your health. And so you and I was hooked when he said data

But it really is incredible. So it tracks your sleep. does a lot. I mean, you wear it while you're sleeping, but it tracks your sleep performance. So I'm pulling it up. It's got all these charts and everything that I'm showing it to Steven and Jim, but it's really cool. It shows you throughout the night, your stress levels. It shows you your stress levels throughout the day. So it is really interesting, because I looked at it yesterday, and there were times where I was stressed that in the moment did not realize I was stressed. But after looking at the chart, in hindsight, I was like,

Yeah, those were stressful moments for me, but I didn't really, I hadn't processed it. So it's really interesting. It gives you a lot of data. And as you, as you progress, as you feed it more data, it unlocks other things because it, cause it can, cause it can show you trends and everything. So it's, it's a really cool thing. So I definitely recommend it. Whoop. You really, you pay for the subscription, you get the band for free. It's kind of how it works. There's other things you can buy with it, but I have the band and the subscription. It's really cool. I highly recommend

Steven, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. A lot of

Stephen Hamilton (31:42.341)
Thank you guys very much for having

Jim (31:44.568)
Thanks, Stephen. Yeah, for sure. See you, bud. Bye, buddy.

Tyson (31:45.881)
Go enjoy your vacation, man. We'll see you later. Bye.

Stephen Hamilton (31:47.442)
Alright, bye guys.