This week on the podcast Jim and Tyson chat with Tom Kayes, a civil rights lawyer representing people beaten and sexually abused in prison, victims of police misconduct, women sexually harassed by landlords and other housing providers, and delivery drivers in the gig economy.
7:47 a successful Uber strategy
10:09 starting a firm 2 weeks before lockdown
11:43 the workspace you want to create
15:45 managing many different practice areas
20:10 what would you delegate if you could
23:38 automations and outsourcing
Jim’s Hack: Re-do your phone home screen to put all social media on the farthest screen inside a folder to make you more mindful of the time you spend on social media.
Tom’s Tip: Don’t try to build systems in your business before you do the things, build them incrementally as you learn about it.
Tyson’s Tip: The text function Twilio to send out text messages.
Watch the interview here.
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Transcript: Starting a Firm Two Weeks Before Lockdown w/ Tom Kayes
Speaker 1
Run your law firm 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.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum ROI Podcast. I’m
Tyson Mutrux
Jim hacking and try some new tricks. What’s up, Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Oh, my friend. How are you Jason?
Tyson Mutrux
I am doing well got in the pool last night. It was cold outside but warm in the pool, baby. So it was good. But yeah,
Jim Hacking
oh, we had a little bit of drama here at the office yesterday had to let a Lawyer Go. And it was it was somebody who was well liked. But they had done some things that we couldn’t let them continue. And I was sad to see her go. But it was obviously the right decision. And now we’re sort of dealing with getting the team on board.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it’s never a fun time. It’s my least favorite thing of running a firm is letting someone go. But sometimes it’s just necessary. And from what you talked about in The Guild, it was it was not excusable. So I can’t blame you at all, but just suck she had to get through that.
Jim Hacking
Well, let’s go ahead and introduce our new friend Tom case. He’s a civil rights lawyer up in Chicago, he helps people that are in detention or jail who are abused, and he also represents people in the gig economy, which is pretty exciting. And we’re glad to have him on the show. Tom, thanks for being with us, man.
Tom Kayes
No, thanks. Thanks for doing this guys. I have probably listened to all or nearly all of the episodes. So you know, appreciate what you guys are doing.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, that’s the best kind of listener is what I hear is the ones that listen to every episode. So I
Tom Kayes
highly, highly bingeable. Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux
So let’s talk about your journey a little bit. Tell us about how you got to where you are now, when Where are you started?
Tom Kayes
Yeah. So there’s not a whole lot of intentionality to it until recently, you know, I graduated college with kind of a, not a useless degree, but a degree that doesn’t point you in a direction. And I just went to these kind of on campus interviews, and this kind of this guy came in, who had like a husband and wife, fair housing plaintiffs firm up in the mountains of northern California, and I just liked the guy didn’t know anything about fair housing law, really, you know, I had a bunch of people telling me, I should go to law school because I didn’t have anything else to do. But I wouldn’t work for this guy I really liked and still keep in touch with with him and the other lawyers there. And the family is like kind of a mentor, second father figure. And I spent three years there learned a lot about fair housing law and and plaintiffs work and kind of how that small business was run. I felt kind of comfortable going to law school after that. went to law school. Did okay, you know, did did some clerking that got kind of clerkships and weird times, so I have these weird four and five month periods between them to do so I, I spent the first one at a well known consumer class action shop on the plaintiff side here in town, or in Chicago, I spent the second one at a really well regarded kind of civil rights firm that mostly does wrongful conviction work here in the city. So you know, yeah, I got to kind of by the time I was ready to make the first like, what law firm am I going to work at? To start my career choice after the second clerkship, I worked at a tiny plaintiff side fair housing for plaintiff side, consumer class action firm, and a plaintiff side, traditional civil rights 1983 firm. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I went back to the, to the Fair Housing Furman said, Hey, can I open up Chicago office? And, you know, we did that. And it was actually it was working pretty well. We had some good, good relationships with referral sources sources in Chicago and Indiana. But um, then I got married, and we got pregnant. And I don’t know if you’ve ever taken any fair housing cases, but it’s not a you’re not going to be buying any yachts. And, you know, my wife was a lawyer, you know, to two folks worth of, you know, nice law school debt. And, you know, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after we had a kid. So I panicked. And then I went to one of the big, big law defense firms here in town, that, you know, that they’ll, if you got a couple of clerkships and a GPA, and you’re not too old, they’ll kind of take you. And, you know, I went there and I basically wrote motions to dismiss securities and consumer class actions for about two years, you know, which is fine. I mean, talk about, you know, you got six kinds of coffee machines. You know, you’ve got people waiting to help you on moments, like there are people whose only job it is to help you find the right people at the firm to help you. Like I remember they I needed like, a video edited for a pro bono case. And there was a guy in New York who did that or like, data mined out of a 2 million, you know, row spreadsheet, and there’s a guy in the New York office in the bowels of some office buildings like The Master of Excel. So it was kind of a nice experience to practice that way. But, you know, kind of tell pretty close, it’s kind of, we’re nice people, but they weren’t my people, you know, nice place to work, but not not my thing. And then out of the blue, I get this recruiter call. And I remember exactly what she said, she said, there are these three guys who just sold a litigation finance hedge fund for about $200 million. And they’re starting a plaintiff’s firm, that you fit the mold of what they’re looking for. And this was a shop Keller Lincoln. And I think they’d been around for about maybe a month or two, when I got that call. And I started talking to them. Yeah, it seemed like an interesting idea. Like, imagine a plaintiff’s firm that has a bank role the size of like a fortune 500 company, and kind of the damage you can do. And I met with the guys, and, you know, just seemed kind of too interesting. And it, you know, the pay was was right for the needs with the family. And so I went there, and I think I became the second camera if I was the second or third, non founding lawyer, and employee at Keller. And, you know, we had some cool stuff. So there’s this guy, Warren, postman, who came to Keller about the same time I did, he was friends with these guys. So two of the three founding partners clerk together on the Supreme Court with Warren. So like, in this crew, I was I was really the dumb one. After graduating, like in the top five of the law school, clerking twice, like I was very much the dumb one. And Warren had this idea that, you know, all these companies have arbitration clauses, mandatory arbitration clauses, and class action waivers. And he took that knowledge combined with what he saw on the mass tort space of kind of mass client acquisition. And he said, Well, what if you what if you go to an Uber or Lyft, or DoorDash, and you start running ads, and you sign up 1020 3040 50,000 Uber drivers, and then you go to Uber, and you say, you know, on Monday, I’m going to file 50,000 arbitration demands with triple A, and then in a week, they’re going to come to you with a bill, for the filing fees of about $2,000 Each, some two weeks, you’re gonna owe $100 million. And you know, that that strategy, especially when you combine it with the fact that you can you can move to compels the plaintiff, right? So they go, I don’t want to pay, you go to federal court, and you give some poor district judge the opportunity to say, you know, look, Uber, you’ve been moving to compel people in arbitration for 10 years, Turnabout is fair play, pay the damn fees. And, you know, that strategy was, was pretty successful. I wouldn’t say anything, but Keller did a press release, after I left where they said, you know, in the first couple years, we’ve made $200 million doing this. So it was pretty successful. But my part of it, which I really enjoyed was kind of logistics part, because, you know, as you guys know, I think you both have pretty high volume practices, it takes some doing to keep track of 1000 5000 10,000 100,000 people. And it takes some doing to kind of integrate the flow of client intake information into a database in a way that lets you keep track of everything and not have your head explode. And so my, you know, my life was kind of building first by myself, and then gradually glommed on, you know, employees and contractors and helpers, to keep the technology side, and then kind of client personnel client management side, rockin and rollin as we built that ship, and eventually, that turned into basically a call center, where I think when I left, we had, I don’t know, 40 4050 full time, people. And so it was just a really cool experience to kind of help grow that practice in that company. And frankly, one of the coolest parts was doing it with, you know, resources, like now I have my own little firm, I do not have the bank role of fortune $500 company, and I really missed the days when it was just going on daddy’s credit card, you know, but you know, it’s a wonderful experience. And I think, you know, those guys are gonna continue to do pretty amazing stuff. But basically, once I’ve been there two years, you know, things were starting to hit, I got my first kind of sizable payout. And, you know, I’d always I always kind of wanted my own shop, to do my own stuff. And I think, you know, what’s cool is the stuff that Keller Wagner was it wasn’t really, you know, it wasn’t my kind of passion. And, you know, the stuff I’ve always enjoyed the most is kind of the trial work and, and getting to know the individual clients and when you have 300 and something 1000 clients, you’re not developing close relate, especially from my position as basically the ops guy, you know, you’re not developing close relationships. So, you know, I decided to kind of take that money say thanks and Uh, you know, finally felt like I could, I had enough runway to, to start a plaintiff’s contingency practice. And so I, you know, I split. And I started my firm, about two weeks before Chicago went into lockdown for the pandemic. And I’m just, you know, kind of slowly going at it, I think the goal is to focus exclusively on the cases, I feel the most strongly about, which are the prisoners, civil rights cases, some of the police misconduct cases. And then I also do sexual harassment and assault in the housing context. So landlords, housing providers that take advantage of tenants, and it’d be nice to build a really strong docket of kind of those cases. But in the meantime, you know, I need to make some money. So I still do some wage theft in the gig economy cases, you know, they’re very, they’re very righteous cases. And they’re very, kind of straight on to law. So I do a bunch of those kind of keep, keep some cash flow coming in. And I also do a little bit of consumer class action, just based on the relationships I’ve made, and kind of the skill set you develop in that area. But the hope is, in another year or two, it’s gonna be the sort of mostly the Civil Rights trial work. So there’s way way longer than you probably want it. But that’s kind of the story of my life.
Jim Hacking
No, that was great. And Tyson texted me, this is gonna be an easy interview. Yeah, so lots of angles, we could go here. I mean, part of me wants to talk about that fear that you had when the baby was coming to go work for the insurance defense firm, but we can skip over that. Once you decide you wanted to have your firm be when you were deciding to leave Keller, what did you how did you frame? Not so much like the practice areas, but like the lifestyle? What did you want to have? And, and I do I, I’m sort of giggling to myself, because Tyson I have been talking a lot about planning and how everybody had all these plans. And I said to my, I’ve been saying to him and to others, you know, I bet there’s some lawyer out there, who had all the best plans in the world to start their firm, around March 10. Of 2020, you know, right before COVID went full bore. So talk a little bit about that, if you could.
Tom Kayes
Sure. So the plan was definitely both a this is the kind of lie I want to practice, but, but like you said, a huge part of it for me, was, this is the kind of life I want to have. This is the kind of workspace I want to create. You know, I’ve worked in so many law firms, and, you know, I kind of kind of seen what I like, and what I don’t like, and, you know, I don’t like the hierarchical, you know, send me an email, because my last email had a typo in it, bullshit. You know, our lives are too short for that nonsense. And, you know, I think you can still have high standards, and do good legal work, if, you know, if you hold people accountable with with some grace, when they mess up. And so kind of creating a workplace and having, you know, people who respect each other, and an act with a sense of calm and, and dignity is a big part of it was a huge part of it. When I when I split away, and, you know, making sure people on the team feel valued and right, you know, right now, I don’t have a W two employees, I have, I think seven or eight independent contractor folks who give me about five or 10 hours a week, something like that, kind of all over the globe. And I have 110 99 lawyer, who I’m hoping in another couple of months, she’s we’re doing a six month kind of trial period, and then I’m hoping she’ll become a partner, if she can still kind of stomach being near me. That now the plan was very much, you know, to faceted, like, you know, I don’t, you know, at Keller, just the, the speed at which we were moving. You know, we were all working, you know, crazy, crazy hours, weekends emergencies, you know, when you try to duct tape together a system that can handle that volume, it’s a lot of duct tape, and it breaks a lot. And so he’s, you know, it’s chaos. And I think, you know, some people love that. I don’t like I want, you know, I actually want to hang out with my family. I don’t usually want to work late nights or weekends. And I think that in a high margin business like plaintiff’s contingency work, you know, maybe you’re, you’re giving up the marginal dollars a little bit if you’re not willing to grind for years, seven days a week, 15 hours a day, but you can do fine. And I think at my shop, the priorities is you know, people have in their lives to the question
Tyson Mutrux
of how I’m going to list your your practice areas, again, prisoners, civil rights, police misconduct, gig economy, wage theft, sexual harassment and housing, consumer slash privacy class action. I’m gonna set aside for a second the fact that those are several niches but those are all practice areas that I feel like no one wants, right? So is are there tough cases? Almost all of cases? So, I guess how do you manage it? And I’m sure it’s easy to get leads, because you, you let people know what you do when it comes to those practices. And they’re like, oh, yeah, I’m giving you all those cases, because we, um, we at our firm, we just hired a lawyer, and he’s he’s got a specialty in prisoner, we just call them rights cases with a lot of them are prisoner rights cases. And they’re extremely difficult cases. I mean, I’d say all those cases, at least from my standpoint, are really tough cases. So how do you manage that? Because it doesn’t seem like you’ve got like a cash cow in there anywhere. So how do you manage all those different practice areas?
Tom Kayes
Sure. So you know, the goal. So it’s kind of two ways. One is, I don’t want to be managing them forever. And so the plan is to kind of, in order to not run out of cash, to do things I know how to do and understand very, very well. And that’s really where the wage theft comes in. You know, they’re, they’re all arbitrations. It’s under some of the arbitrators rules, the cases basically have to be done in six to eight months. So you know, and I’m so familiar with these defendants and the facts, that I can do it very efficiently. Like, I have several 100 of those cases. And I work in nights and weekends. So you know, I know what I’m doing. I can use, I, you know, I’m a big file vine proponent. I have, you know, 150 templates for that stuff. And, you know, I’m just more efficient than they are. So it’s pretty, that’s that’s kind of the answer on that. And then on the really tough stuff. So that civil rights stuff. You know, that’s some of the stuff that keeps me up at night, because you’re right, they’re, they’re tough cases, often, they’re very expensive. One Another issue is the people who defend them. And the people who write checks to settle them are very used to paying, you know, 2500 bucks, 5000 bucks to settle these cases, because most of the ones they’re resolving are pro se, you know, prisoners representing themselves, right? So if you come in, and you’re like, I want a million and a half dollars, because your guard, put my guy in handcuffs, picked them up, dropped them on his face and stomped on him for 40 minutes, then they’re like, What the hell are you talking about? Like, it doesn’t even compute. And you know, you’re going, you’re going to trial, you’re going to your trial in a lot of these. And then you know, I’ll be honest, you know, as a financial matter, that scares me a little because my hypothesis is, if I pick the right cases, and I work them hard, and I don’t take crap money that the practice will work out. And a couple really strong cases a year, once I’ve got some momentum, kind of carry the overhead of the firm. But that is an untested hypothesis, right? So I’m in the process of testing, kind of hoping that I’m not putting, you know, my nest egg and all my time into something that isn’t ultimately going to work. As far as getting cases. You know, it’s actually in Chicago, there’s such a good strong bar of people who’ve just been suing the cops and suing the prison’s forever, that it’s actually really hard to get good cases here. And frankly, most of my good cases are in places where, you know, no one does this work, which, again, just is trading one set of, you know, it’s trading problems on the back end for, you know, ease on the front end, you know, but ya know, you’re absolutely right. It’s, if I wanted to do kind of easy money law, I think there are other things I know how to do. But I think anybody who’s worked a couple of the prisoners cases and seen some of the stuff these guys put up with, you know, it’s it’s impactful. I’m sure, you know, just like the way insurance companies treat. Vi plaintiffs are the way the government treats people with righteous immigration claims. It just piss it, you know, some things just piss you off. And if you can make money kind of attacking the stuff that pisses you off. You know, why not?
Jim Hacking
Running your own practice can be scary, whether you’re worried about where the next case will come from. Feeling like you’re losing control of your growing firm are frustrated from being out of touch with everyone working under your license, the stress can be overwhelming. We will show you how to turn that fear into the driving force of clarity, focus, stability, and confidence that eliminates the rollercoaster of guilt ridden second guessing, and mistake making to get you off that hamster wheel for good.
Tyson Mutrux
Maximum lawyer and minimum time is a step by step playbook that shows you how to identify what your firm needs and how to proactively get it at every stage of the game. You’re prepped and excited for the inevitable growth that will follow name the lifestyle that you want. And we’ll show you how to become a maximum lawyer and minimum time. Find out more by going to maximum lawyer.com forward slash course.
Jim Hacking
We’re talking to Tom case today, all rights and other kinds of lawyer up in Chicago. And we’re glad we now have someone to refer our prisoner cases to please our civil rights cases to Tom, what do you like the most about running your law firm? And if you were to give away some of your responsibilities, I know you like the tech stuff. But if you were to give away some of your responsibilities, what would you give away and what If you keep
Tom Kayes
I like the investigatory stuff when I have time to do it. So, you know, for example, I got a prisoner’s rights case out of Louisiana. And it’s the one I kind of was was not really joking about when I gave that example to Tyson, my guy got in a short scuffle with another guard in a housing unit, that he got handcuffed. And then he got frogmarched to a dark corner, and they beat the shit out of him bad. And, you know, they say, No, we didn’t, we didn’t touch him, all the scars on his face in the medical assessment video that was taken after the beating, you know, the fact the fact that it looks like hamburger, all that happened in the third, you know, 10 second scuffle on the housing unit. And, you know, what I’ve been trying to do is find the 60 other inmates that were in the housing unit and saw exactly what happened, who can testify that when this guy walked out of the housing unit, he was fine. What I’m actually proposing was about an hour and a half. And I love kind of digging in the records and doing the kind of guerrilla discovery. It’s also a big part of the sexual harassment housing cases you find out, you know, usually you can find 25 Other women who’ve been harassed and exact, exactly the same way by the by the guy. And I really enjoy that stuff. And I don’t get to do enough of it, given the other demands, what I would give away, I think, Man, I wish I could give away certain opposing counsel, or I can’t do that. But there are some folks who just just drive me nuts. And, you know, it’s always discovery, right? It’s always like, I’ve asked you for something completely reasonable. And you give me some boilerplate objection that doesn’t have it in federal court. And then I gotta chase you in front of an indifferent judge who’s gonna let you know, let you off the hook. And that part of the practice is just exhausting. But if you know, but it’s also so important, because, you know, nowadays, like the discovery request is just foreplay. Like, if you don’t actually go and get the motion to compel order, you’re not getting anything. So, you know, it’s so so so important, but man, is it? Is it exhausting?
Tyson Mutrux
Tom? How old are you right now?
Tom Kayes
And I know, you’re gonna ask tough questions. Yeah, what do I think I turned 38? This year? Okay, so.
Tyson Mutrux
So in 22 years, when you’re 60, what’s your firm look like?
Tom Kayes
I would like to have, you know, four, or five, or maybe six, kind of niche practice areas. So I think, not, not prisoner’s rights writ large. But like, I want to do failure to protect cases where the injuries are x, y, or, you know, excessive force cases like this. And I think that that’s actually another way to kind of manage tough cases is you just pick the well worn path. And you focus on those. So I’d like to have a few of those, because I think, you know, look, Congress could repeal 1983 Any day, and the world can change, right? So I don’t want to be hyper focused in one or a group of related things, I’d like to have a little bit of diversification, I’d like to have, you know, a good team of those people who kind of want to have their lives and really want to do this work, and who value that, that balance like I do, I would like to have everything that can be done, automatically being done automatically. You know, I really, I really, you know, that is something I learned from you guys on your show. But I you know, I really do write down things that I think can be automated or templatized, or turned into a process that I can outsource to, you know, somebody in in Latvia, for you know, six bucks an hour, and to them, it’s 30 bucks an hour, I really want to get there, because I think you just save so much time and create so much value by kind of leveraging those, you know, those wage wage rates and virtual assistants. And that, you know, I’d like to be able to do exactly how much law I want to do, and no more like, I’d love to be running the firm. And if I want to have one or two cases where I’m the lead lawyer, great. But if I don’t great, you know, it’s like to have that, that flexibility. You think I’d like the firm to have a reputation as a place people can come to kind of have a decent life, do RA in the wallet and really learn a system for practicing plaintiff side law that, you know, they could take with them if they won’t,
Jim Hacking
I suspect that we have a lot of listeners who have a civil rights case over in the corner that they haven’t looked at in a while and they’re and they probably got some federal judge with some harsh deadlines and all that stuff. What do you say to the people that think they can dabble in this kind of work that you’re doing?
Tom Kayes
You know, every one of these cases that that winds up with a lawyer rather than just pro se, I think is a good thing. Because I do think that you know, a lot of the federal district courts if you’re pro se, you’re not really getting a judge. You’re getting a pro se Locklear and you know much much like judges some of the pro se law clerks are wonderful and some of them are always looking for a way to, to dump your case. So I think every one of these cases that gets a lawyer increases the chances it’s going to get a real look. And I think you can always be helpful. And I would encourage people to dabble. But I’d encourage the people who are really dabbling. You know, there are great resources, like the Ninth Circuit has kind of a law outline for 1983, I think the Northern District of Illinois has a handbook for prisoners, civil rights cases, you know, your, wherever you’re practicing, they likely have, you know, some resource for lawyers trying these cases, because, you know, like, a lot of times, it’s somebody who’s appointed who’s never done it before. So a lot of the courts really try to help make good use of those things, because they will really help you out. Because although the law is complicated, a lot of the legal issues in these cases are, if not settled, at least, you know, people, you know, people know exactly where the pressure points are. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of really good free resources out there that that people should use. And, you know, I’d say, for the folks who probably have a few of them in the corner, you know, one of the best things I think they can do is bring a APIs lawyer, a good pie lawyers attitude, towards proving out the damages case, to these cases, because that’s kind of the one place where I think the really good civil rights bar is not as good as the really good catastrophic injury, wrongful death kind of pie bar is, you know, showing proving, focusing on the value of especially non economic losses. And, you know, you see a lot of, you know, I see a lot of trials in these cases, were just like, the conduct is horrific, like, you know, intentionally framing someone for a murder, you know, they commit horrific. And, you know, people spend 10 years in a hellhole of a prison for something they didn’t do. And then you get, you know, you get damage awards that like, you know, if you had a kind of David ball approach, or if you had like a big rally doing it, you know, you get a billion dollars, but a lot of my civil rights lawyer colleagues, you know, we’re so focused on like, all the kind of chintzy constitutional law qualified immunity nonsense, that sometimes I think we don’t focus enough on, you know, proving up the human story, so that we can, we can score some big numbers at trial.
Tyson Mutrux
Sounds like a fantastic opportunity for you, Tom. So
Tom Kayes
let’s ask, I asked what I’m hoping man, like, I’m hoping that I can get over the reluctance of people to pay for these cases. Because, you know, I’ll tell you already, every, every time I drop in demand, and one of these people just look at me, like, I’m from ours. And I’m like, You know what, that’s because that’s because what, you know, Jury don’t know what, like, juries gonna know what we tell him. So you know, you want to roll the dice, let’s roll the dice. I liked that. I
Tyson Mutrux
liked that ego, too, that’s that they got to be pumped up a little bit. We do need to wrap things up. Before I do. I want to remind everyone about the conference. Okay, conference is coming up in October. It’s 11th 12th and 13th of October, the 11th is the guild day. Okay, the 12th and 13th of the conference. And we are going to sell out. So I’m going to tell you go get your tickets, because you’re going to run out of time. So get your tickets now, because we will sell out Maxwell con.com. Get your tickets. And also join us in the guild if you want to if you’re interested in the guild backside guild.com. And then also, if you if you’re not ready for either of those go to the big group on facebook get involved there. There’s a lot of great activity every single day. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week.
Jim Hacking
So I’m always in this struggle with my phone and the distraction machine that it is. And one of the things that I’ve done recently is I redid my homescreen. So the first screen with the you know, I had lots of folders and things and I found like to get to file by and I had to go through like six buttons. So I said forget all that. I’m gonna move the crap that I never use off the homescreen. And so in doing so, I also decided, I read it somewhere to put all my social media on the farthest screen. So now, when I pick up my phone, I have like my Kindle and stuff that I want to spend my time on and the stuff that I don’t need to be wasting time on. I put away at the back on the back screen. And just that has made me more mindful of the time that I’ve spent on social media.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, let me let me give you a tip on top of a hack, right? I think this is our first time ever this exclusive, put in a folder, move it up, move it to the foreigner full game and put it into a folder. So boom, that now you have an extra layer. I don’t have any of my social media apps outside of out of out of a folder because it just, it’s just distracting and get rid of all the damn bubbles go into your settings changes so you don’t have all those little bubbles so you’re not reminded of it. That’s a good one. Jimmy. All right, Tom, you know the routine. What is your tip or hack of the week?
Tom Kayes
Sure. So I think a lot about what’s kind of the one thing that I learned that that might help people and, you know, especially in building the systems at Keller, what was driven home to me is if you try to build it 100% Right, exactly how you need it before Are you before you start doing the things that you want to, you want to build a system for PII cases, and you know, and you go and you try to build out file fine 100% of the way all the way Do all you need to do it all, you’re gonna get 85% of it wrong. And the only the only way to build systems is incrementally. And you know, you just just do it once, even if it’s inefficient, you know, do each step, once inefficient, learn about the step, then after you’ve learned about it, then you figure out how to automate it, what the process should be. And you just gradually build from there, you know, it’s that kind of gradual, incremental Columbian of step one process. And then step two, and then step three, you know, when we, when we did that, we succeeded when we tried to be like, Oh, no, we gotta wait six months to try to build out Salesforce on this. And that, you know, we just wasted oodles of time and money. Because by that, you know, by the time you’re done with that, you’ve learned that what you thought you needed isn’t what you need. So just don’t, don’t sweat it, just start building and doing and you’ll, you’ll get there.
Tyson Mutrux
I love that. I saw that in the form that you filled out. And it was one of the things I wanted to get to we just didn’t have time. So I’m glad you brought it up, because that was a great, great little line that you had in there. So
Tom Kayes
perfect. Lots of lots of pain and blood behind that learn.
Tyson Mutrux
For sure, I think we’ve all been there. All right. So my tip of the week is if you need a text function for your firm, or you can even do a phone call function, some that we had something that was a little bit of a use case outside of what we use following for because five lines got text messaging built into it. It’s fantastic. Love it. We had a different use case for it. And we looked into and we adopted Twilio, Twilio, I’m not sure if it’s been recommended on the podcasts before but we’ve been using over the last week or two. And it’s really good. And there’s no lag a lot of these services. Whenever you’ve got text messaging, there is a lag. And this it’s not It’s instantaneous. And so whenever we we’ve got a certain lead form that we fill out once it’s filled out, text messages go out. And it’s really great. We love it. So I highly recommend Twilio. Jim, you’re shaking your head. Are you shaking your head, Twilio? I’m curious.
Jim Hacking
I love Twilio. I’m shaking my head because you’re on this phase now where you’re working with Kelsey, and you’re throwing out all these things that I’ve been doing for years as well. It’s funny
Tyson Mutrux
because you and I were sort of working together then coming together and then showing our work. And then we’re not working actual together. It’s like more like sharing the work kind of thing. It’s interesting. So he didn’t even bring that up to me. I just kind of came up to my own. I had no idea that you’re using Twilio. But we really haven’t had a use. We haven’t had a need for it until recently, the way we the way we use file by and you got the text messaging built in. But we’re using Twilio to to add in some additional functionality. So pretty cool. So all right, Tom, thanks so much for Come on, but a lot of fun. Like Jim said, this was a really easy interview, because you’re a great talker, which is fantastic. So that’s awesome. Thank you so much. Hopefully a lot of people learn a lot from what he had to say. So thank you so much.
Tom Kayes
No, thank you guys. This is a great resource for everybody. I appreciate you guys doing it. Thanks, Tom.
