Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

What if your law firm’s case management system was designed to be as engaging as Duolingo or TikTok?

In this episode, Tyson breaks down an experiment he is currently testing inside his own law firm: using the psychology behind habit-forming apps to make everyday work more engaging.

Tyson shares how his firm is building features like daily streaks, personalized quests, team wins, badges, rewards, and even mini games directly into its case management system. But the goal is not to make employees addicted to work. Instead, Tyson explains how these same behavioral principles can be used with intentional guardrails to help employees know what to work on, recognize progress, and make completing important tasks a little more enjoyable.

In this episode, we dive into:

• Why Tyson decided to gamify his law firm’s case management system
• The four-part “hook model” behind many habit-forming products
• How variable rewards keep people coming back to apps like TikTok and Instagram
• Using AI to create a personalized daily list of important tasks
• Why Tyson built streaks—and “streak freezes”—into his firm’s system
• How automated recognition can celebrate employee wins without creating unhealthy competition
• Why Tyson is hesitant to use traditional employee leaderboards
• The importance of giving productivity systems an actual finish line
• How to use behavioral psychology without encouraging employees to work constantly
• Why Tyson built a “kill switch” into the system in case gamification creates unintended consequences

Tyson also explains how the firm’s new “Daily Run” identifies important work from each employee’s real task queue, including client communication, overdue tasks, and upcoming deadlines. Once employees complete their most important work, they can earn rewards and maintain their streak while still having a clear stopping point for the day.

Timestamps

00:00 — Why Tyson is making his case management system more addictive
03:00 — The psychology behind habit-forming platforms
05:00 — Why law firms are competing with social media for employee attention
07:00 — Building streaks and rewards into everyday work
09:00 — The five hooks law firms can borrow from social media
10:00 — Using AI to create a personalized Daily Run
14:00 — Tracking work and employee activity inside the firm
16:00 — Variable rewards tied to real accomplishments
19:00 — Streaks, loss aversion, and giving employees grace
21:00 — Social validation without ranking employees
24:00 — Why every productivity system needs a finish line
26:00 — Building guardrails and a kill switch into gamification

If you are looking for ways to get your team more engaged with the systems your firm already uses, this episode offers a fascinating look at how behavioral psychology, AI, and gamification could change the way work gets done inside a law firm.

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Full Transcript: 

Tyson Mutrux (00:00)
Welcome back to Maximum Lawyer Live. I'm Tyson Mutrux. Today I've got an interesting one for you because this is from something I'm working on right now for the firm. I started something this week that sounds a little bit terrible out loud, so just stay with me. I am deliberately testing out making our firm's case management system more addictive. I know that sounds kind of crazy.

Tyson Mutrux (00:20)
But we've been studying how TikTok, Instagram, even Duolingo—how those different platforms hook people. And what we've done is we've built those same mechanics into the case management system. Now, it's not active for all users yet. It's only being tested out a little bit at the moment, but we've built those same mechanics into the case management system.

Tyson Mutrux (00:40)
And I will tell you, I'm hoping that it's effective, but I've been very, very careful whenever we're building this out to make it clear that we want this to be done in a healthy way. So if it in any way would harm someone, we don't want that to happen, obviously. So yes, we've gamified our system a little bit. I've built literal games into the system.

Tyson Mutrux (01:04)
Okay, they're very basic games, but you hit these rewards, you play a game, right? So it's kind of an interesting thing where you get rewarded. And it's going to become more advanced as things go. But it's really kind of interesting, and I want to talk about that a little bit versus—or really in addition to—the principles that are used by the social media platforms.

Tyson Mutrux (01:27)
And I do think we can do this in a healthy way because there's obviously some tension here. "Addictive" is not a term usually used in the same sentence as "healthy," but there is that tension between addictive and healthy that we're trying to balance a little bit.

Tyson Mutrux (01:47)
Because the way I'm looking at this is I want the work to be more enjoyable. If you think about it that way, I really want the work to be more enjoyable for people so that they want to keep doing it. That's the idea. Make work less like work and more like fun, in a way. Okay, so let's go through some of these tactics, some of these different models that are used by these different platforms.

Tyson Mutrux (02:13)
The first one I was talking about is the Hook Model, where every habit-forming product runs the same four-step loop. You've got the trigger, action, variable reward, and then the investment. And that loop repeats until that response becomes automatic. It's like an automatic response, I guess, as a way of putting it.

Tyson Mutrux (02:36)
And that's really what everything hangs on for social media. You've got that trigger, action, reward, and then investment. And they make it very clear that it's a variable reward. It's not always the same reward. It's a different reward. Then you've got the slot machine in your pocket, right? Your cell phone. That variable reward is really the whole trick behind everything.

Tyson Mutrux (03:00)
And this is from B.F. Skinner. It's called intermittent reinforcement, where you don't know what's in the feed until you pull it. That uncertainty is what makes checking compulsive. So a big part of it is that it's variable. Every time you open it, it's different. And so I've made what we're calling our "addictive screen" different from the dashboard.

Tyson Mutrux (03:21)
That's one way I've tried to make it a little bit healthier. If people want something more consistent, just go to the dashboard and see things. That's fine. You want more consistency in your dashboard. You don't want it to be variable. But the other screen—let's just call it the addictive screen for now—you don't see the same thing each time. It also has a live feed of things, like wins and stuff.

Tyson Mutrux (03:51)
You can win prizes. You can win badges. You've got the game. You've got your top three for the day. You've got things like that built into it automatically, and I guess we're growing it. There's also a quiet button, too, which I kind of like. If you don't want all the noise and you want to be on that screen, you can quiet the noise. Like I said, we want to make this thing healthy while also making it fun and something that's effective.

Tyson Mutrux (04:22)
A really interesting part of this is, I don't know if you remember this from around 2017, but Sean Parker admitted that they'd created this social media validation feedback loop where it really exploits the vulnerability of humans, right? And they understood this. They understood this from the beginning. That's why so many people got angry when it came out that they were intentionally making it addictive.

Tyson Mutrux (04:45)
That's why I want to talk about this, because I think it can be used in a healthier manner. You do have to be careful with this because there have been some regrets since then. It's been described as behavioral cocaine. There can be negatives to this. I don't want this to become something where people want to check their phones at all times just to see what's going on with work.

Tyson Mutrux (05:13)
Like when they're on vacation. I don't want that. And this is interesting because our book comes out this week, Founder Optional. The major premise of the book is to make yourself optional. That's the main premise. There's a section in there where I talk about how a lot of people say they take vacations, but they're checking their phones just hours after actually getting to their destination.

Tyson Mutrux (05:38)
That's not what I'm wanting here. I don't want that. Maybe we can even build in something like a vacation button where they can't access it or something. We might do things like that. The sky's the limit for this, it really is. But you have to be really, really careful with it because I really do mean that it needs to be healthy. You have to be very conscious about this.

Tyson Mutrux (06:10)
And I know there are some people out there—not listening to our show, but maybe listening to other shows—who might take it that extra step. And I think you're playing with a hornet's nest, maybe, and I think that could be a problem. So be careful with what you're designing here.

Tyson Mutrux (06:32)
But here's another part of my thinking: your employees are on Instagram. They're on TikTok. They're on Facebook. They're on all these platforms, right? And those platforms are fighting for their attention—your employees' attention and your attention. The thing is, you can't opt out of this war. Your employees are already in it.

Tyson Mutrux (06:57)
So you have to do what you can to fight that addictiveness yourself. You've got to get into the fight. That's part of my thinking here, too. We're already fighting for attention. I guarantee your employees are on their phones throughout the day. I guarantee it. If you think they're not, you're blind as a bat. You're ignoring the obvious. You're crazy if you think they're not checking their phones throughout the day.

Tyson Mutrux (07:28)
So we're fighting that, too. We're combating that a little bit, too. We have to get into this fight, and you have to find a way of doing that. This is a fun little way that we're testing out, and from what I've played around with, I think it's actually going to be pretty effective. I think it's going to be fun.

Tyson Mutrux (07:59)
Because we've built in things like streaks. How many days is your streak? And then you have two misses—I can't remember what we call them actually. They're not called misses. You basically get a mulligan. You get a pass. You only have two of those a month. So if you miss a day of hitting your streak, you've still got that buffer.

Tyson Mutrux (08:32)
You have to hit your top three for the day, and if you skip more than two days, then basically you've lost the streak for the month. We found a way to keep them in the game when it comes to finishing their top three. Part of this, too, is that we could probably add a reward system where you get entered into a lottery to win something if you've hit your top three every single day, aside from the two that you're allowed to miss.

Tyson Mutrux (09:02)
I think that actually might be something we'll do. What I want you to do is take some of the things we're going to talk about here, take whatever ideas you can, and try to apply them in whatever way you can. I know some of you are using a platform that you didn't build. I understand that. But you can use these hooks in other ways and build them into what you're doing.

Tyson Mutrux (09:31)
Here are the five hooks that I want to talk about and some of the guardrails that you can use. These are the things I want you to steal. These are the things the social media platforms do. So here's the first hook: the trigger. Give them a reason to open it. That's the trigger in a nutshell. Give them a reason to open this tab. I'll call it the tab because that's what we have—it lives in a separate tab.

Tyson Mutrux (09:56)
With social media, their version is push notifications engineered for FOMO. That's what they're engineered for. They've got the red badges. That's why you're reminded by these platforms so often about notifications. If you're like me, I've got my notifications off, so I don't get the red dots. I've got those turned off. But I get reminded all the time, "Are you sure you don't want notifications?"

Tyson Mutrux (10:18)
You have these red badges that tell you someone tagged you, you've got a message, or someone commented on something you commented on. You've got all these things, right? Those notifications are the trigger. They've got that trigger to bring you back in. So what's our version? Every weekday morning, the system builds each person a short quest list.

Tyson Mutrux (10:46)
We call it the Daily Run. It's their little quest for the day, and it's built by AI. It looks at all their tasks and all the work that needs to be done. It pulls out what it thinks are three really important things they need to do that day, and it's pulled from that person's real queue.

Tyson Mutrux (11:08)
So maybe it's clients who haven't heard from us, overdue tasks, or today's deadlines. Opening the app answers a question every manager wakes up with—or really every employee wakes up with—which is, "What should I do first?" Boom. It's right there. It tells them, "Here's what I do first."

Tyson Mutrux (11:24)
Here's the guardrail you can use for that: the trigger needs to serve the user, not necessarily the metric. No manufactured urgency. No red dots for things that don't matter. The day's list is built from actual case needs.

Tyson Mutrux (11:51)
It's not fake stuff. This is actual, real stuff they're working on. That's the guardrail. It serves that particular user, and it serves the clients as well. The morning list also caps. You can have a bigger list if you want, but right now it caps at 10.

Tyson Mutrux (12:19)
What it tries to do is go with three. You can actually increase it to 10 if you want. I think we'll probably remove that and make it closer to five, but right now you can add up to 10. We want it at three. And if you've cleared your queue—let's say you have nothing in there—it says "Clear Queue." That's an earned day, and it gives you the day off. That's not likely to happen.

Tyson Mutrux (12:48)
You might think I'm crazy for that. You might think I'm absolutely nuts because we're very busy. But I think it gives them something to shoot for. If someone were to clear the queue, I'm all for them taking the day off. I am all for it. Is that going to happen every single day? No, no, no. That's not what it's going to be. But if people have cleared their queue and they're actively pushing for that and they're done? Deal.

Tyson Mutrux (13:17)
I'll give you the day off. That means you are hustling. You're totally hustling. Could some people game this? Maybe. I don't think they could. I really don't think they could. We've got tracking on everything. That's the great thing about building our own platform—we can track everything. It's pretty interesting. I have charts on every file.

Tyson Mutrux (13:46)
I can open a file, and there's a tab that only shows to admins that gives me user activity. I can tell you every single person who's touched a file. I pulled one up right now. I can see total actions on the file. I can look at all time, 30 days, the last seven days. I can tell you the number of actions taken on the file.

Tyson Mutrux (14:14)
I can tell you the total time the page has been open and by whom. I can see the last date of activity. It gives me the names. I can open each user and see the activity they've had on the file, the time they've spent on it, everything else. I can tell you the work type they've done. Have they added a note? Have they created something? Have they opened a document? Have they uploaded something? All of those things.

Tyson Mutrux (14:42)
And then I can see daily activity. I'm just giving you some of the Cliff Notes here, really, but we can track everything. So for someone to game it would be really hard without us knowing. They'd have to be cheating in some way, like checking things off without actually having done them. Good luck with that. But we have good people, and I don't expect that.

Tyson Mutrux (15:09)
Our employees do listen to this show, too, so they'll know. I'll know and they'll know. And I trust them. All right, let's get to the second hook. The first hook is trigger. The second hook—these are things I've already mentioned, but I'm going through them in more detail—is variable rewards. But these need to come from real work. Again, all of this needs to stem from real work.

Tyson Mutrux (15:32)
Here's the social media version. They've got the algorithmic feed—that's hard to say—a feed that's based on an algorithm. You never know what's next, so you keep pulling that lever. You keep updating and updating and updating, or you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. You don't know what's going to be in it.

Tyson Mutrux (15:54)
You can't open any of those feeds and get the exact same feed. You can't. It's different every single time. That's the whole idea. Our version of this is a little different and, I think, a little healthier. It's got "This Week's Wins." There's a little panel down below that's like a feed. When someone sends a demand, gets an offer on a case, settles a case, or earns a badge, it shows up.

Tyson Mutrux (16:17)
You can earn badges in different ways. A card will appear automatically. It's not a post. You can react to it with an emoji—a heart, a thumbs-up, whatever it may be. You can definitely emoji it, which is kind of nice, but there aren't posts from people. The work itself is what generates the surprise.

Tyson Mutrux (16:47)
So instead of someone posting, the work that people are actually doing creates the post. They don't have to go brag on themselves, which is kind of what social media is—people mostly bragging on themselves. This is a little different because the system is bragging on the employee for the work they're doing. You open the app or open up the tab and find out, "Hey, my gosh, this teammate sent a four-million-dollar demand." Heck yeah, dude. That's awesome.

Tyson Mutrux (17:15)
You've got those things built into it. So that's hook number two. Let me get to the guardrail because I almost skipped it. I want to make sure we get through these last three because I've taken my time on the first two. The guardrail here is that the variability comes from reality, not from some algorithm.

Tyson Mutrux (17:42)
That's the difference. We're not trying to create some sort of engagement optimization from this, and we're not trying to rank what people see. That's a key difference. This is different from a slot machine. With a slot machine, you pull it and something randomly pops up. Ours is a little more predictable. So it's probably less addictive because of that. But here's the thing: I can play with it, test it out, see how it works, and then we can adjust from there.

Tyson Mutrux (18:05)
Okay, the third part of this is streaks and loss, but with some mercy built into it. That's the healthy part of it. The social media version is things like Snapchat streaks. Duolingo has the streak flame. You get that loss aversion. What we want to do is make sure people don't want to lose what they've built up.

Tyson Mutrux (18:33)
That's really the way of putting it. Duolingo's single most effective retention mechanic is that whole idea that people don't want to lose what they've built. That's their number one thing. Our version of this is finishing the Daily Run. When you finish your Daily Run, you build that streak. We have the streak in there, but it's only for weekdays. It's not for weekends.

Tyson Mutrux (18:57)
Everyone gets two freezes. That's what we call them—streak freezes. You get two a month. So if you miss a day, let's say you have a day off, you've got court and you're not on the app because you're traveling, or you've got a sick kid, then that freeze just burns silently. You can't even click on it. It's just there. Boop. It's gone.

Tyson Mutrux (19:28)
You've used your freeze. You have one fewer freeze. It's kind of like if you die in a video game and get a do-over. You don't lose your streak because you got the do-over. There's no guilt message that pops up. Nothing like, "You're about to lose everything." No notification. There's nothing like that built into it.

Tyson Mutrux (19:45)
So that's the guardrail. You've got the loss aversion, but it gets that mercy valve. That's our guardrail for this—to keep it a little healthier. So that's streaks and loss. Okay, hook four: social validation. Recognition without rankings is what we've got.

Tyson Mutrux (20:09)
The social media version is likes, follower counts, leaderboards, the social-validation feedback loop. You know, Sean Parker—the Facebook guy. Anyway, you've got followers, likes, all that kind of stuff. Our version is teammates can react to win cards with a small, fixed set of emojis.

Tyson Mutrux (20:38)
It's a limited set of emojis. We have four or five options, nothing major, kind of like the way Facebook does it. That's it. We don't have a bunch of them built in. There are no leaderboards, although I'm considering leaderboards. That's something I'm thinking about doing.

Tyson Mutrux (21:10)
But we don't have people ranked. Nothing like that. We didn't want to build that in. We're a little hesitant about doing that. If we did a leaderboard, I'd have to find a really creative way to do it.

Tyson Mutrux (21:26)
The case managers do more tasks than anybody else, but they also have more tasks assigned to them. So you can't base it on tasks alone. You've got to find another way of doing it. We'd have to get creative. Our guardrail for this right now is that we celebrate events and never rank people. That's the big thing right now—not ranking people.

Tyson Mutrux (21:59)
If we did it, we'd have to come up with some sort of creative way. This part is based on research called self-determination theory. Lasting motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I'm just reading straight from it here. Recognition feeds competence and relatedness. Rankings feed comparison.

Tyson Mutrux (22:22)
And in a small firm—I mean, we're 22 people, so we're still a small firm—a leaderboard really has one winner and you've got 21 losers, right? I don't know how I feel about that. That's not the greatest. So we'll see. If we did it, it'd have to be a fun thing, maybe a challenge or a one-off.

Tyson Mutrux (22:47)
Something else we've built in is our quarterly rock. It's built in there as a meter that pulls straight from the system. There's no manual entering into it. So you actually see it at all times as it's growing. If you've done something on a file, boop, it's added to it. It's pretty cool. That part's pretty neat.

Tyson Mutrux (23:23)
And then let's get to the last hook. The ending. The most radical feature is a finish line. The social media version is infinite scroll. That's Raskin's invention—and Raskin's regret. The feed never ends because an end is where you'd leave, right? You get to the end, you leave.

Tyson Mutrux (23:52)
Our version? Everything terminates. The Daily Run has a last quest. Finish it and the app says, "You're done for the day. See you tomorrow." That's what it says. That's sort of tongue-in-cheek. We may play with the wording a little bit. Again, we've not rolled this out to all employees yet.

Tyson Mutrux (24:21)
I don't know how I feel about that text yet. I don't really want people to leave for the day, but I also don't want them to feel like, "It says I can leave for the day, but now I've got to stay here." So that's one of those things we'll probably play with a little bit. But it will have a termination point where it just stops and doesn't keep trying to pull you back in.

Tyson Mutrux (24:50)
The wins panel shows one week, and there's no scroll back. You can't go back through the history on it. That's one of the ways we want to keep it limited. Even the reward mini game we built is limited. It's a 30-second fox runner. Like I said, it's really simple. You hit the space bar and it jumps over things. It's kind of fun.

Tyson Mutrux (25:19)
But you only get three attempts. You have three a day. Once you've hit your goal, once you've hit your top three for the day and finished your Daily Run, the game pops up. You can play it three times, and then it's done for the day. So we have these things where it's limited. You can do it so many times, and then you're done.

Tyson Mutrux (25:48)
So those are the five hooks. I'm sure you can find ways of adding these into your firms, even if you don't have your own platform built out. Just remember, you have to be really, really careful. We built a literal kill switch for this thing where, if we find that this isn't working, we turn it off. You have to find a way of having a kill switch.

Tyson Mutrux (26:18)
Be very, very careful about that. Be very careful if you're going to build a system like this. You want it to be a healthy system. You don't want it to be a system that's addictive in an unhealthy way. You just don't want that. So be very, very careful.

Tyson Mutrux (26:45)
But that's all I have for you today. Hopefully you got something from this episode. I'll report back once we roll this thing out live and once we get more feedback from our people.

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See everybody. Have a great week.