In this episode, Jim and Tyson will talk about the struggle between trying cases, litigating cases, working on file and running a law firm; the dichotomy between doing the work and running the practice.
Jim and Tyson will go back to the roots and discuss about their struggles and how are they overcoming them. Also, they will go over their short term and long term goals.
It all comes down to what we always say in The Maximum Lawyer Podcast… Delegate. Focus on what you do best, and what’s best for the firm.
Hacking’s hack:
If anyone is thinking about redoing their website, they really need to talk to Seth J. Price.
https://blusharkdigital.com/
Tyson’s tip:
“You shouldn’t do anything unless you are confident in doing it” If you are not confident, it is going to show.
Jason Selk
https://enhancedperformanceinc.com/
//
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Transcripts: Being a Lawyer VS Running a Law Firm
Tyson Mutrux
So I’ve got to figure out a way of being able to still try those cases, but also run them. And I think it’s possible, I think I just got to do a better job of delegating other tasks.
Jim Hacking
To me, that’s ideal, because that’s going to let me maximize my impact on the greatest number of cases, and thereby doing the things that I like to do the most. Run your law firm the right way.
Unknown Speaker
This is the maximum layer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking, and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m facing metrics without giving.
Jim Hacking
I know you’re on your way to trial. I just want our listeners to understand the devotion that my brother Tyson has to this podcast where he’s looking at jury instructions, and he’s taking a break in order to record this week’s episode. Yeah, you
Tyson Mutrux
know, we have our responsibilities. I enjoyed doing this. And as we are speaking, I’ve got a book of jury instructions next to me just making sure mine are good to go. And yeah, so I’m pretty squared away. So I’m a little more I’m a little different situation than most we get most of the stuff done yesterday. And then we’re going to wrap things up this morning and close this morning. So I’m pretty squared away. So I’m excited about to talk about what we’re going to talk about.
Jim Hacking
If you were in Illinois, you can use our friend Kurt Loise book on jury instructions, you know, maybe you need to write a book about Missouri jury instructions.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, I have zero interest in writing a book about jury instructions, but I’m happy to read Kurt’s look on jury instruction, and maybe one of the other Missouri listeners can write that book. Do you want to introduce our topic for today? Yeah, we’re gonna talk about letting go. And that that struggle that we have between, you know, trying cases, litigating cases working on file, and just running a law firm. And it’s a struggle that I’m trying to work more on as a as of late, especially, I’m in the mobile jury trial. I’ve been thinking about it more lately. So that’s the topic of the day, and it was something that you had come up with that was a good idea.
Jim Hacking
Well, you’ll recall, when we had the conference in St. Louis, on the first day, we had that end of the day session with Seth, John Fisher and Mitch and you and I up on the front of the stage. And we talked about sort of that dichotomy or that battle between doing the work and running the practice. And somebody I think it was Joe asked us to gauge if we could estimate how much time we spend on the firm. And as opposed to doing the work of the firm. And then ideally, where we wanted to get. And I remember that everybody had sort of varying answers. And I know that there were a couple of wide eyes when I told people that I only wanted to do about 20% of my time working on actual cases. So I think this is a topic that resonates with a lot of our listeners, because until you grow and have like, in your case, a partner, and in my case, a partner, but also, you know, people that have different roles in the firm, that for many of us were just juggling, juggling, juggling. And it gets back to our old book, the E Myth, where Michael Gerber talks about the tactical work versus the entrepreneurial work and the work of you know, growing the firm.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and here’s my problem is I don’t think 20% working on legal work is good enough. I really don’t I understand you may be doing a very, very finite thing. Or maybe you’re not, I don’t know. But what I’m finding is, it’s very hard to do that small percentage of legal work and do it effectively. And when the opposite is true is true. When it comes to marketing, or just managing employees, things like that, I think the percentages need to be higher. And the only way that you can make those hires taking some things off your plate. And we know that’s true. Part of the problem that you guys probably struggle with a lot I know I do is just I love trying cases, but I also love running a firm. And so what are the things that need to be taken off my plate we’ve been doing a lot of this with Chris is, is taking as much off of his plate from a managerial and firm running standpoint, to make it where he’s just trying cases. And I I don’t want to be in that role. I don’t want to be just trying cases. But I think I need to focus on some of the things that are kind of bogging me down. What are some of the things that are really easy, that are bogging you down?
Jim Hacking
Well, at the moment, we’re transitioning to an accounting firm and that’s that’s brought its own set of headaches, not because of the new firm, but just because of the state of things. And so we’re the transitions been taking up a lot of my time. But you know, when Adele and I started it was the two of us in a little bitty office and now we have in September we’ll have five attorneys, and we’ll have probably seven or eight support staff people. And so you know, management is definitely not my forte. Luckily, my wife’s here to remind me to have meetings and to develop an employee handbook and those kinds of things. I want to get back to your point too, about having not enough cases, and I want to have a stage in my career at some point where I don’t have any cases, I think that I enjoy cases. And right now I’m taking sort of the more complicated cases in the office. But I honestly think that I can help more people, by directing lawyers, in telling giving them tips on how to handle the cases that they have. But to really be stepping away from the cases all together my, my idle, and all of this, of course, is such a price. You know, Seth has grown that firm, to monumental heights in my mind. And, you know, he’s not handling the cases on a day to day basis. I mean, he gets called in on complicated stuff. And that’s sort of the role that I want to play. I love
Tyson Mutrux
step two, you know that, but I cannot, I’m not sure I can take that step and completely extract myself from the law. He’s basically in a CEO role. And I get that it’s he does a lot of, you know, pulling levers and pushing buttons. And that’s, that’s good. And for the most part, that’s my role, but, but I don’t want to give up that, that part of being a lawyer, and I don’t think you’re a lawyer anymore. I think you’re at that point, just a CEO. I mean, you might as well just surrender your law license, because you’re not actually doing legal stuff. Are you fully comfortable and 20 years saying, you know, I’ve been running this firm, and I’ve been practicing for 20 years, but I’m happy. I mean, are you okay with that?
Jim Hacking
I’m gonna be happy with it. If I can do it in two years, my friend, that’s my goal. That’s my plan. And I know, that’s
Tyson Mutrux
not my point. No, that’s I’m saying 20 years looking back to now, what are you going to be happy that you gave up practicing law,
Jim Hacking
one of the main reasons I like to still have cases is because of the stories I like to be able to tell the success stories. And that’s sort of part of my marketing, too, is telling our success story. So here’s the thing. We’re Tyson and I live, the biggest law firm in town, it’s called Brian cave. And the last time I checked, there’s nobody there named Brian or cave, working on cases. And so to me, I just look at impact. And also I look at, you know, making the firm dependent on me or a personality. And I think that if we’re ever going to talk about selling the firm or transferring the firm to somebody else, that as long as it’s Jim dependant, that’s a problem. And it’s funny, because my marketing is starting to shift away from Jim, Jim Jim, to the other people in the firm, we’re having Amani and Andrew to start doing some videos, and we’ve revamped the website, which makes it a lot less, Jim focused. And I think that’s important. And, you know, one of my favorite books that I’ve read is a very short book that I recommend to our listeners called Built to Sell. And that is that, you know, if it’s all Jim centric, then as soon as Jim leaves, there’s nothing of value to transfer. So yeah, I’d be completely comfortable with that, because I can honestly help and more people. If I handle one less case, I mean, I don’t know if that’s the exact number. But and I probably should try to do some math on that. But if I can help 10 more people get further up the immigration ladder, by stepping aside and not doing that actual work. And instead, you know, coaching and teaching other people how to do that work. And to build systems to make that work, you know, more automated so that I’m out, I will probably miss handling cases. And it’s not an either, or I can always sort of ease in or ease out. But for now, I’m really focused on trying to make it was dependent on me, and then maybe later on, I’ll take cases back,
Tyson Mutrux
you made a good point early on what we were saying, then, you talked about the stories and your deal missed the stories. To me, that’s everything, because the stories come from the clients and the client, or the what, what spread the stories to their friends spread the love about you and your firm. So that’s part of the problem. If I think of the most respected injury lawyers in St. Louis, the number one that I think of is the one you’re gonna think of, and that’s John Simon. And you know, what John Simon does, he tries cases. And that’s why he is so respected. And that’s why we as a firm don’t want to give that up, we’re gonna keep trying cases. That’s why we have such an audacious goal when it comes to trying cases. So I’ve got to figure out a way of being able to still try those cases, but also run it for, and I think it’s possible, I think I just got to do a better job of delegating other tasks. For example, I’m going to give up a component of the marketing. I’ve already hired Kent to work on some my marketing, unfortunately, I can go steal him away from you completely. But if I could, I would. Everybody’s trying, extremely loyal to you. But luckily, I’ve stolen a big chunk of the time. So I don’t think there’s going to be anything left between the two of us or after the two of us take our time. So but that’s sort of the initial stages is there’s a lot of this strategy that I’m not going to give up. So I think If I were to look probably five to 10 years in the future, my role would probably be strategy. It’s still trying some cases. But I want to remove myself from the pre shelf stuff. I do know that there’s an issue I’ve got where I’m working too much on the pretrial matters, that can be handled by an associate or that can be handled by a paralegal, for example, just me completing discovery responses, it’s we’ve been so bogged down lately, I’ve been having to do a lot of the discovery responses myself. And that’s unacceptable. Honestly, I think that’s something that can easily be delegated. But we’ve got to probably hire some more staff and soak up a little bit, which we will we’re in the process of doing all that. But we first have to as another part of this, we’re looking for office space. And so we’ve got to have enough space to fit all these people. So it is all in the works. But I’ve just got to pull the trigger on some of the stuff.
Jim Hacking
I’m glad you brought up John Simon, because I’m looking at his website, and we think they have 15 attorneys now. So you know, when I knew John, he was at another firm, and then he left with two other guys. And eventually the partnership broke up. And now they have a firm with John and his brother works there, his son works there, his daughter works there. And then there’s 11 other attorneys. And you know, you’re right, John is still trying cases. And now that you mentioned, and I think I have now found who we should have for our 100th episode on the podcast. I don’t know if John knows what a podcast is. But I think I think if I asked him nicely, he he’d come on the show, and I think it’d be a really good episode for our listeners. So I’ll try to set
Tyson Mutrux
that up. That’d be that’d be a pleasure. I think everyone would like that. That’s good.
Jim Hacking
Well, so what’s holding you back from I know, you like doing the cases, and I know you’re doing things other than trying cases. And and Chris is focused on trying cases. So what are the things that you’re doing that are preventing you from doing more of what you want to do?
Tyson Mutrux
I think it’s just the overwhelming amount of just work in general. And I think that that’s the same problem that seems to be the main issue that most attorneys have are the head of the conference, and they talked about it quite a bit. It’s caused by growth, which is a good thing. But that’s what’s caused a lot of it. I mean, we’ve gone from the two offices, and now we’re going to have to get more space to add more people. And we’re adding more people more space, we’ve got more cases, we had. I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, and we tripled what our goal was last year for the number of cases we want to bring in. And that’s created substantial infrastructure problems. And we’ve, we’ve got to the point where we we turn down and refer out good cases now we’re having to take only great cases, which is good, also good for us, but to the point where we are no longer able to take the good cases. So I would like to beef up and be able to take those. So what’s stopping me honestly, I just need to sit. I’ve gotten away from my weekly planning meetings. And so maybe that’s what I need to get back to is like weekly planning to get us back up. I mean, I wouldn’t say we’re off track, but get myself back on track and get to get to getting that stuff organized.
Jim Hacking
When you talk about growth other than space and office space and all that stuff. How do you know that you’re growing? Like, what are the benchmarks? Or what are the metrics that you’re watching? To let you know that you’re growing
Tyson Mutrux
leads, obviously, I mean, it’s an obviously when new cases is the next one. And then there’ll be number of cases that are settling is a key indicator for personal injury cases. So there’s a point in most injury firms were. So you start your firm, and you’ve got a low period where you’re not making any money, you’re just paying out money, paying out money, paying out money. And so if you don’t have that bankroll, you’re screwed. I don’t think a lot of people that are shifting to in personal injury know that and or they’re doing it the wrong way. They’re not spending money on experts, but we sort of hit that benchmark where we’re settling multiple cases a week. Now we’re we’re pushing these things through at every week, we’re having new cases settle so that that’s a huge benchmark for us. So the key ones are leads, just like everyone else. The next one is is the actual conversions and the cases we take on. And the final number of cases that we settle per week.
Jim Hacking
How does that manifest itself in what you do you tie some like, what role are you having and sort of tracking that? Or how are you keeping track of all that
Tyson Mutrux
we track those in two different ways we actually track them through Infusionsoft with lien. And we also track them in trial works with our leads in our new intakes. And so every time a new intake comes in every time a new case comes in, everyone in the firm is alerted with an email so that and I can track all that I can pull it up by day, I can pull it up by month, year, whatever ever I can do take a custom field day, whatever it may be. So that’s how we’re tracking those.
Jim Hacking
So what do you want to let go of Tyson? What are the things that you want to do less of,
Tyson Mutrux
you know, honestly, this may sort of sound but I kind of want to get stopped doing the day to day BS deal with clients. And I’ve done a lot of that. I mean, I’ve given off a lot of that. But there does come a point it seems that in every case the clients want a piece of you. So they want to discuss the case of the you can train your employees to answer every single question and they still want to, at some point speak with you. And I think that that’s reasonable. I really think that that’s reasonable. But I think I’m running to the same problem that you have run into where marketing yourself can become an issue, because they want you where they don’t want the firm. And I think Chris, and I honestly have done a really good job of marketing the firm in general. And so I think it’s getting better, there’s less emphasis on me. So the videos aren’t just me anymore, it’s me and Chris, and we have staff takes pictures. And so it’s not just us anymore. So I think we’re getting that way. But there is a part of it, where I just I want to step out of that day to day, which we’re working on it, which means we need to hire an associate, in make that happen, we actually hired a contract associate. This time, last time we were hired associate didn’t work out. So we cut her loose. And now we were doing a little different, we’ve got a contract attorney doing a little bit of work for us. And if he works out, they’ll they’ll get more and more work from us. And we’ll hire one full time. We’re sort of dipping our toe into this, and then this is going to help. But it’s hopefully it happens a little faster than what it’s doing right now.
Jim Hacking
Having met 70 of our listeners at the conference, what do you think, would be the goal for most of them? Where do you think most of them want to have that balance of trying cases or handling the kind of matters that they handle? Or do you think there’s anybody in the group who wants to be sort of more of a CEO type,
Tyson Mutrux
I think the majority of the people do want to have the balancing because they don’t want to give up. There are some like Jay Ruane, who is really good friends with Ryan McCain, I think there’s a lot of people like better like that. They do want to be the CEO types. And there’s nothing wrong with either one of those. But we emphasize quite a bit doing what you love, and delegating everything else. And so ultimately, what I would want to do, I want to really offload everything, but the trying cases and strategy, I’m in the process of doing that. And that’s, that’s where we’ll be probably in five to 10 years, I don’t want to say 10 years, I’d say probably three to five years.
Jim Hacking
One of the things that’s been great for me to be in Strategic Coach this year is that it allowed me to figure out a little bit that I’m weird, and that I’m okay with being weird that it’s I’m not like everybody else, not everybody comes in every morning and shoots a YouTube video, not everybody wants to stop trying cases or stop handling actual legal matters. And the cool thing is, is you’re right at the spectrum, and you know, we can all find our own place on the spectrum. And I’ve just really been empowered this year to say sort of, you know, this is what I want, this is what I like and what I want. And what I like is to meet with potential clients to find out what their problem is to diagnose their problem, and then give the solution to other people in the office to work on. And then if I come in at the end and handle the interview, or in your situation, if I come in and try the case, then to me that’s ideal, because that’s going to let me maximize no pun intended my impact on the greatest number of cases, and thereby doing the things that I like to do the most.
Tyson Mutrux
No, and I think that that’s ultimately ultimately the goal. And Chris and I was gonna help, we’re going to be trying, especially the bigger cases, in teams like this case, I’m trying now it’s a really small case, but it’s one of the ones where we firmly believe that if they’re not offering what is owed, then we try the case. And so that’s what we’re doing. But what we’re going to be doing in the future, what we’re doing in the future is trying cases as team, that way it’ll allow me to step into my role is trying a case and offloading a lot of that pre trial stuff. So that that will help. So what is your goal? Or what is your approach to getting to that yourself?
Jim Hacking
Well, one thing is that I gather smart people around me, I’m sort of that kind of a person, I like to I’m lucky that the people that we have in the office right now are very positive and happy and interested in working on cases. We also thank you knocking on wood, by the way, that was me. We also have, you know, people who need our help. So it’s an interesting time to be an immigration lawyer. And so what we’re doing is we’re just delegating the workout more, we’re getting people involved in cases earlier, we’re also getting people involved in handling consults other than me. And so it’s getting to a point where you can really sort of see the future and the future for us, I think Is this me sitting around thinking of big thoughts and then finding the people around me who are good at implementing them. You know, the other thing from strategic coaches that we took this personality test called the Colby index, I talked about it before and and I’m a 10 Quickstart. So that means that I am really, really good at thinking things up and coming up with ideas, but that my follow through is not the best. And so having people around me who sort of fill in my gaps has really, really helped.
Tyson Mutrux
So I want you to talk a little bit about the strategic part of this strategy part of it, because if that’s something that I’m going to commit to by next week to I, by Monday, I’m gonna get back to my routine, Monday afternoons from one to four, just sitting in a room locked, no one bothering me no interruption turning my cell phone off, back to strategy, because that’s it’s ultimately important. And I’ve got to make a change, they’ve got to get back to what I was doing. So I’m going to do that. I want you to talk about strategy and what you learned about strategy, what they talked about at Strategic Coach about how important it is? Well, first
Jim Hacking
of all, I’m gonna try and call you or get a hold of you sometime on Monday afternoon just to disrupt you, but we walk. Yeah, so with coach, so far, we’ve had two meetings, and one of the things is sort of how to measure success. And we talked before about the gap in the game, how, you know, we spent a lot of time looking off into the distance of where we want to be, instead of looking behind us and seeing what we’ve accomplished. So that’s been a really positive thing for me. And because of my sort of hard time with follow through, the one thing I committed to at my last strategic coach meeting is to journal each day and to give myself tasks to do and just to be sort of more rigorous, because I’m such a free spirit. And I’m sort of so far away from being able to focus intently like that, but I’ve really had to build out systems to help me do that. So the strategy piece comes from, I think, knowing myself knowing what my strengths are playing to those strengths, and then showing up either with other people or with hacks, no pun intended to help me sort of get around the things that I am not necessarily drawn to or strong at.
Tyson Mutrux
And is this something that you learned over time? Or is this something that you learned from Strategic Coach? Where did you learn to acknowledge this stuff?
Jim Hacking
Well, I think mostly it was from being around other people who were like me. And I think the conference really helped with that, too. I think it was a, it was a really empowering experience for me, and for everybody else there. Because we are unique, we are unique in that we’re lawyers and within lawyers were unique in that we mostly own our own firms. And we’re unique in that we’re positive people. And and we’re unique in that we want to build something cool, that we can tell people about and impact people. And so, I mean, most lawyers aren’t like us. And so I’ve been in this really great space in 2018, where I’ve been able to sort of sort of step out of the shadows are stepped into a place of comfortableness and leadership in exactly who I am.
Tyson Mutrux
I love it. Some of the things you said just gave me some really good ideas. I like keeping myself so I love them said, I’ve got to wrap things up. You have anything else you want to say before we wrap things up?
Jim Hacking
No, I’m ready for my hack. You ready for it?
Tyson Mutrux
All right. Before we get to those, though, I want to make sure everyone goes to the Facebook group and joins there. There’s lots of great discussion, you and I could not even exist anymore. And it’d be it’d be just fine, because there’s so much going on there. It’s pretty awesome. And then also, please go to iTunes and give us a five star review. If you enjoy the podcast, arguable you’re so my hack
Jim Hacking
is that if anyone’s thinking about redoing their website, they really need to talk to Seth J price are friends at Blue Star digital. And I’ll tell you this, why my website went live on Friday. So I’ve been puttering along with my very text heavy, very slow loading, and very hidden comment section or contact us section on my website for many years. Will Ed has convinced me to trim out a lot of my content. Seth and his team and I are working on that. But I had the most amazing thing. So the site went live on Friday. Tyson, I don’t know how many, how many Contact Us hits you get off your website, every month, I would say for the most part, I get about four or five. Since Friday, I’ve had 10 I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it. It’s just it’s like it’s real, substantive stuff. It’s people that these are the people that were on my website before that we’re not reaching out to us for whatever reason. So literally, we usually have four or five a month, and we’ve had 10 In three days or four days. So I’ve just been blown away. And the site is super fast. It’s easy to find. And we’re just we’re just going to rock the house. Now.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s actually really interesting. I added recently, I sort of forgotten I’d done it. It was one of those things. I did a late night binge. org on the website, and I put a text us and we’ll call you little formfields on one of the pages of the website. And it is like there’s nothing else all you do. All they do is enter their first name and their and their phone number and it sends me an actual email does not send me a text but they think it’s an attack. And I’ve gotten all the leads from that. It’s pretty incredible. I mean, it gives us no other information but it’s an easy way of getting leads. So that’s that’s really incredible, great results that assessor already getting. And he’s he’s got a really good offer for maximum lawyer listeners. So they need to call him about that he and I mentioned the other day and I don’t want to mention it Ace is not available anymore, but he was talking about potentially offering it to listeners. So they need to give him a call. Alright, so my tip of the week. So the other day, I heard a quote, Jason Selke. In one of his books, he’s actually our coach. And it’s paraphrasing it, basically, you shouldn’t do anything unless you’re confident and doing it. Because if you’re not confident doing it, it’s going to show and people are going to know that whenever you’re meeting with a client, or you’re trying to case and you’re not confident about it, they’re going to see it. And so you need to be prepared in a lot of it has to do with you know, in your mind being prepared. And then also just being prepared in general. So, the tip of the week is, just don’t do anything unless you’re confident and doing it. And that if you have that mindset, you’re going to change your thinking and actually be prepared before you go into something. So that’s my tip of the week.
Jim Hacking
All right, well, Tyson, I always enjoy having guests on the show, but there’s really no substitute for you and I talking things through and helps me clarify my thinking, joy by telling I’ve been having some calls lately, but this has been great. I’ve enjoyed this episode a lot.
Tyson Mutrux
I like it to be like going back to the roots a little bit. It’s funny, Joey and I last thing Joe and I had a we sat down and had about an hour session a few weeks ago as after the conference. And we did his segments and blocked out a segment. It was a it was a blast. And he and I did a Zoom meeting and we put it we had a whiteboard on Zoom or either zoom or blue jeans, whichever one has that whiteboard function. It was a blast. So I think he recorded I think we’re talking about releasing it somewhere. So I’ll talk to Joey about releasing. That was a lot of fun, but alright, Jimmy, I’m gonna go it’s been a blast. I’ll talk to you later.
