The Importance of Giving Your Employees the 30,000 ft View of Your Case Process

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In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson Mutrux shares what he does to walk new employees through a case, start-to-finish. Because if a new team member is unaware of your complete case process, then it's difficult for them to understand “how you do things” and what tasks they do that are connected to others of the team. It's so important for them to get that big picture view to see how everything fits together in your law firm case process and why the details are so important. Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

• 03:58 The importance of providing new employees with a comprehensive understanding of the case process and the firm's way of doing things
• 07:38 The importance of establishing the firm's unique way of handling cases and the need to convey this to new employees
• 08:31 The onboarding process, including the use of an overview video and in-person training for new employees

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Transcripts: The Importance of Giving Your Employees the 30,000 ft View of Your Case Process

Tyson (00:01.358)
Testing, testing, testing. All right, so we're gonna go with this, with lighting and everything. So here we go. It's not optimal. Welcome back to the Maximum Lur podcast. This is…

Tyson (00:23.17)
Welcome back to another Saturday episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. This is Tyson. And for those of you that are watching me on video, as opposed to listening to me, we've got a new setup. Hopefully the audio is okay. Video still working a little bit on the lighting. So it looks fine for now. We'll improve it, but it looks good enough. I think it's pretty cool. To my right, behind my right shoulder, we've got the…

John Fisher Tyson's tip jersey that he gave me at the very first Max Law Con. So that was pretty cool. But so yeah, I'm liking the setup. So let me know what you think. Send me a text. I always talk to people about or tell people to send me a text. So let me know what you think about the setup. 314 -501 -9260 would love to hear from you. But.

So the other day, Jimmy and I, we had lunch. It was pretty cool. We don't have a lot of opportunities to have lunch with each other, but I got to check out his new space. It's pretty cool. It's got a couple floors and got people all over the place. It's pretty neat. I got to see where he records his videos and everything else. I had not seen it up to that point, so really cool. But we were talking about some new employees that were onboarding at our firm.

and specifically an associate and that leads to leads me to what I want to talk about today. But before I get to that the topic of the day I want to tell you something that is new that we are doing. We are opening up submissions for questions on all things starting and running a law firm. So and these are.

for us to answer on future episodes of the podcast. So whether you are dreaming of launching your own firm or if you're knee deep in the trenches right now and you're looking for a lifeline or anything in between there, we're ready to listen and answer those questions and you can actually submit a video submission on our website. Go to maximumlawyer .com forward slash ask to submit that video and I would.

Tyson (02:43.886)
That would be great to hear from you. So I hope you do that. You go on there and we will play your video live on the air. It won't really be live, but on the air. Although we are tinkering with some ideas about a live show. So it could be live on air, but we are going to play that and we'll answer your question. So submit those. Would love to hear from you. And as always, shoot me a text. I always love to get those texts.

So let's jump into today's episode, because I didn't even tease what the topic was fully. I want to talk about the importance of giving your new employee, your new team member, the full lay of the land when it comes to the case process, and submitting or showing to them what we use as an infographic. You can do it in a lot of different ways, but we do it…

in an infographic where it's that 30 ,000 foot view, like really, really high up view of what it looks like for a case to go from start to finish. And one of the most beneficial meetings or trainings, whatever you want to call it, is one of those very beginning trainings where we walk the employee through the process from start to finish. It is a…

So so valuable because whether you've got an experienced attorney or you've got someone that has never done it before Right. So some maybe it's a receptionist that you hired has never worked for a law firm at all Let alone an injury firm or an estate planning firm or criminal defense firm. They've never done it before They have no idea what? What this looks like right what what a case looks like and if you just throw them in and they're just answering the phone

They're just doing whatever their job is. They don't know how it fits in to the rest of the process and how they work with the team, how they interplay with other team members. And so we do this and we let them know, basically start to finish what a case looks like. And I'll also mention, these are some of the things you'll be doing, even though that's a separate meeting and separate training entirely as to what their actual job skills are. We…

Tyson (05:08.206)
and what their job duties are. We take this time to go through that big picture, start to finish, and I start from that initial, we actually start from the initial injury, not just the phone call to the firm. We start from the initial injury, because we're an injury law firm. If it was a, if we did criminals defense still, like we did, you know, a decade ago, then we would start with the crime. That's probably what we would start with, because…

you get into thinking about, all what is the client thinking? What's the potential client thinking? So if you're in a car crash, all right, what is going through their mind and how might they fit in with us there? Because we've had, and I talk about this during the trainings where sometimes clients will call us from the scene, even though I don't think that's the best idea in the world. They will call us from the scene and we've got to know what to tell them from that point forward. So.

They, if you're an associate attorney, you're most likely not going to be the one that's going to speak to them. It's going to be someone from the cares team, but you've got to know, all right, if the cares team is on the phone with someone that's at the scene, they're going to need something answered probably pretty quickly. They might need to reach out to the associate attorney to, to get a little bit of information. Let's say one of the other attorneys isn't around or I'm not around or there's other people that are not around to answer those questions for whatever reason. They've got to know how.

they fit into the entire process. So we go through and this is something that if you're a Guild member, you'll have access to tools like this or resources where Jim and I are more than happy to share a lot of the things that we use in our firm. And so this is something that's, you know, it's available to Guild members. So if you're interested in the Guild, maxlawguild .com, I'm not meaning to plug it for that reason, but it just, it…

You can see my infographic that we show to our people. It's also something that we send out to clients as well in an email. They get this infographic from us, but it's really handy because they can look at it and they can reference it if they need to. They can come back to it and see, okay, this is how this process works. Because I don't know about any of you all, but whenever I first started doing personal injury, I had zero idea what the process looked like. It was, I was…

Tyson (07:25.262)
very surprised to hear how insurance worked. I did not know growing up that this is how it works. I had no idea at all, not one bit. I'd never had an attorney in my life. It was sort of an eye -opening experience. And for the experienced attorneys that you hire, they may have a certain way that they used to do things, but it's not your way. It's not the mutrix way, not the hacking way. Whatever your way is, it's not your way.

and you need to, from the beginning, set it, get it in their mind, this is the way we do things here. And they might, here's the thing, they might give you feedback, you know, we never, I didn't do that at my old job, and that's a really good idea. Or, you know, we did this other thing at my old job, and what do you think about that? And maybe you like it, maybe you don't.

And it's not the whole point of this process is not to get feedback, but you can actually get some valuable feedback sometimes. But you've got to establish your way. You let them know your way. So this is how we do things here. That way they don't come into it thinking that it's done another way, the way that they learned two decades ago. Because I will tell you this, if you basically run an injury case,

at our firm the way they did two decades ago, you're not doing it right. You're doing it the wrong way because two decades ago or a decade ago, things have changed quite a bit. The way you do a personal injury case nowadays is quite different. There's a certain way that we do things that is, I'd say, probably different than most other firms. There's just very unique things that we do and we want to make sure that people are doing them that way. Your firm's probably the same way.

So you want to make sure you establish that from the very, very beginning. So my advice to you is put together that 35 ,000 foot view summary, infographic, whatever it is of your case process so that your people know as you onboard them, this is for onboarding. So as you onboard them and that you can revisit this and other trainings that you have with your team. But the moment you onboard them in the first couple of weeks,

Tyson (09:46.062)
You have this meeting with them and you explain them what the process is. Yes, you can have, you can absolutely do this via video if you want to do it that way. This particular training, we have, we have an overview video of the personal injury process. That's slightly different. It's the same process, but the, what I cover in it, it's slightly different. I like to do this one in person myself actually. And this is one of those things where you can have someone else in your firm do it too. Does it have to be me? No, it doesn't have to be me. I like to do it.

It's something I do enjoy doing. So I do this, I walk them through it and make sure that I answer all their questions and get through it from start to finish. For those of you, let me give you a little side tip. For those of you that do personal injury, my advice to you is to break this into two sessions. First session, from the injury up to the point where you settle the case. And then a second session, the moment where you decide to move forward towards litigation. Because…

Otherwise, it's a pretty long meeting because you you do even though it's 30 ,000 foot view. You're gonna have lots of questions. You want to make sure you have enough time to answer those questions. So that's a little side tip. All right. As always, I would love to hear from you. So shoot me a text 314 -501 -9260. I'd to hear from you if you have anything that you want me to cover on the show. As a reminder, get your video submissions to us because we're going to use them in future episodes. Go to Max.

MaximumLawyer .com forward slash ask and maybe maybe I can talk back and Let you all text them to me or something too, but so you can have it this I'm a good and say it and if I get in trouble for it, that's fine so go ahead and text those to me as well if you want and I'll deal with the repercussions of Becca later, but Thanks for listening this week until next week Remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care