Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson Mutrux catches up with Christopher Nicolaysen of Springs Law Group to talk about scaling, marketing, hiring, and what changes as a law firm grows.

Chris shares how his firm cut roughly $40,000 per month in advertising while continuing to increase new clients, why they are bringing SEO in-house, and how better intake training has improved conversion. Tyson and Chris also discuss the challenge of hiring higher-level people as a firm grows, lessons from the Hormozi event, deposition strategy, active listening, and the value of knowing when you already have the information you need.

They also get into Springs Law Group’s upcoming rebrand, website rebuild, office expansion, and the importance of creating systems that allow the firm to keep moving without everything depending on the owner.

Listen in for a practical conversation about building a stronger team, spending smarter on marketing, and scaling a law firm with more intention.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Chris decided to bring SEO in-house.
• How Springs Law Group reduced ad spend while increasing new clients.
• Why the $3M to $10M growth stage often becomes a people problem.
• How better intake training can improve conversion.
• Why active listening matters in depositions, trials, and leadership.
• How Chris is approaching the firm’s rebrand, website, and expansion.

Timestamps

00:00 — Scaling Springs Law Group and bringing SEO in-house

04:48 — The people problem that comes with firm growth

07:10 — Lessons from the Hormozi event and MaxLawCon

13:47 — Trial training, depositions, and active listening

21:29 — Marketing, intake, rebranding, and expansion

27:15 — Creating downtime and building consistency

🎟️ Get your MaxLawCon tickets: maxlawcon.com

🔍 Vet your vendors: beccaslist.co

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Full Transcript: 

Tyson Mutrux (00:00)
Nicolaysen. What’s up, buddy? How are you doing?

Christopher Nicolaysen (00:04)
Not much, Tyson. How are you?

Tyson Mutrux (00:07)
It’s early there, huh?

It’s so funny. The stage of life you’re in right now, you’ve got a pack and play behind you. You’re so far removed from that when it comes to being a parent, but now as a grandparent, you’re back in it.

What’s that like?

Christopher Nicolaysen (00:26)
It’s been great. We get to see Scotty usually at least once a week because they live five minutes down the way.

She’ll be a year next week, so she’s growing like crazy and starting to talk and form words together.

It’s an interesting phase, but it’s super fun.

The greatest part is the moment she starts freaking out, we can just say, “Here you go.”

Tyson Mutrux (00:55)
What’s that movie? Scotty’s in the song. “Scotty Doesn’t Know?”

Christopher Nicolaysen (01:01)
Yes. Scotty Doesn’t Know.

Tyson Mutrux (01:04)
That’s EuroTrip, I think. Matt Damon gets up and sings it. It’s like the best cameo of all time.

Whenever I hear Scotty, I think of Scottie Scheffler. Hopefully she grows up to be a golfer.

So what’s new with you, man? You’re looking fantastic. You said you’re looking old, but I think you look sharp. I like the gray in the beard.

Christopher Nicolaysen (01:32)
I told myself I’m going to grow it out for a little while, so we’ll see. By the time October rolls around, it could be pretty long.

Tyson Mutrux (01:41)
What’s new with the firm?

Christopher Nicolaysen (01:44)
Not too much. We just hired an in-house SEO person.

He’s a former coworker and friend of our marketing guy. We’ve had our marketing person with us for about a year now, and he went to the Hormozi event with me.

We’re set to have our best year ever this year.

We cut back about $40,000 a month in advertising spend, and we’re probably going to end up with around 75 more clients than we had last year.

Tyson Mutrux (02:21)
That’s a pretty good trade-off.

Wait, $40,000 a month?

Christopher Nicolaysen (02:27)
Yeah. $40,000 a month that we cut back.

Tyson Mutrux (02:31)
Holy crap. That’s wild.

I want to know about the SEO stuff.

We’ve been doing SEO in-house for a while, and I love it because I have so much control over it.

How long have you had the in-house SEO person?

Christopher Nicolaysen (03:00)
He’s actually just getting hired. He just accepted.

Tyson Mutrux (03:05)
What made you want to go that route?

Christopher Nicolaysen (03:08)
My marketing director.

He’s basically built an in-house team before and knows how to scale it.

For me, it was about getting more movement. Vendors sometimes feel like quick-hit dating. They’re touching a bunch of different people because they obviously have multiple clients.

With an in-house person, they can focus entirely on our thing. I think there can be a lot of benefit to that.

Tyson Mutrux (03:49)
That’s the thing about SEO.

We’re attorneys, and in some ways we have a similar problem. With a PI case, we have to take the case from the start to the end.

With SEO, it’s ongoing.

You see these companies that everyone loves at first, and then they get more and more clients but don’t add more staff. That means they’re touching your website less because there’s no way they can do everything they were doing before unless they’re using AI really well.

That’s why I love having it in-house. Our guy’s entire job is our website.

I think you’re going to love it, especially because you have someone who has already built that path before. We had to learn some of those things the hard way.

Christopher Nicolaysen (04:48)
Coming back from Hormozi really pushed us to move quicker.

One of the things they talked about was that people in the $3 million to $10 million range have a people problem.

You either don’t have enough people or you don’t have the right people.

It pushed us to start making moves to get better people.

Tyson Mutrux (05:19)
By far, the hardest part for me has been that $3 million to $8 million range.

Zero to one was fairly simple. I’m not saying it was easy. There were a lot of late nights and things like that.

But once you get to three, it gets interesting.

There’s that book Simple Numbers. He talks about that $3 million mark, and he nails it.

You’re constantly balancing whether you have enough revenue coming in to cover everything while also maintaining enough profit to grow and scale.

Then you have the people problem.

You built your firm with a bunch of B and C players, and now you’re trying to get A players. A players cost more money.

It’s a really interesting problem.

I think it’s fun, though. I like the strategy part of it.

Christopher Nicolaysen (06:13)
It’s been fascinating trying to grow this year and really spending the money to invest in higher-level people.

I think it was Marco who said at one of the MaxLaw events that when you have those people, you don’t have to build them from the bottom up.

Even when we hired a CMO, we told him, “Here are the problems we’re having. What do you suggest we do?”

That was part of the selling point.

Our onboarding for somebody like him is more about, “Here’s who we are. Here’s our culture. Is this a good fit? Now go do your thing. Give us the game plan and move forward.”

Tyson Mutrux (07:10)
Those people tend to already have the skill set or they can figure it out.

They’re not coming to you asking, “Hey, Chris, what should we do here?”

It’s like, I hired you to answer that question.

That’s the gold part.

How was the Hormozi event?

Christopher Nicolaysen (07:36)
Great.

It was probably the cleanest, most well-put-together event I’ve been to, and I go to a lot of events.

You could tell they rehearsed it. Everything had a purpose.

The meals were on point. They had options for gluten-free, vegan, whatever you needed. The drink selection was great. They thought about all of those details.

Then, from the first speaker on, everything had a structure.

They’d say, “Here are the three things we’re going to talk about.” Then they’d talk about those things and end with, “Did you learn the three things we talked about?”

Then the next person would get up and explain what they were going to talk about and how it related back to what you had already heard.

Everything looped back.

At the end of the day, it’s also one big sales pitch to get you into the next thing, but it was really smart.

Day one was presentations only.

Day two was groups broken out by revenue tiers. Zero to one, one to three, three to ten, and ten-plus.

They rotated people through those revenue tiers and did hot seats around different areas of the business.

You might have their marketing person come in, then their sales person, then their hiring person, and they’d talk about how to move from your current level to the next level.

Then Alex came in, spoke for about 45 minutes, and took questions.

After that was the closeout and the final sales pitch.

Tyson Mutrux (09:19)
Worth the money?

Christopher Nicolaysen (09:21)
Absolutely. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Tyson Mutrux (09:25)
It was $5,000?

Christopher Nicolaysen (09:27)
Yeah.

I was selected to do the higher-tier thing because of where our revenue is, and he’s making a big push into law firms.

But I felt like we needed to see how much we could actually take from this first event and implement.

Then we can reassess next year and decide whether we want to move forward.

I do think getting that outside point of view from somebody like him can be really helpful.

When you’re in the weeds, it can be difficult to see things.

Tyson Mutrux (10:32)
You mentioned Marco, and I want to bring this up.

I’m not going to say what his presentation is about because I want to tease it a little bit for the conference.

But Marco is going to speak at MaxLawCon, and it may be one of the most surprising presentations you see there.

That’s about as far as I’ll go.

The moment I saw his pitch, I was sold.

Christopher Nicolaysen (11:01)
I saw his teaser video.

I think I’ve heard a bit about what he’s going to talk about before, and I think it’s needed.

Especially in this world where you see somebody making $10 billion and start asking yourself, “Why am I not doing that?”

You beat yourself up.

I think his message is needed because of that.

Tyson Mutrux (11:29)
Then we’ve got Ben Glass coming too.

We announced that when we were chatting with Ben a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve actually never seen Ben speak in person.

Christopher Nicolaysen (11:43)
I haven’t either. I think that’ll be fascinating.

Does he speak much outside of his own events?

Tyson Mutrux (11:57)
I don’t think so.

I was a little afraid to ask him.

I texted his son Brian and said, “Do you think he’d do it?”

Sometimes people have their own thing going on and you don’t know how they’re going to feel about it.

Brian said, “No, I think he’ll love it.”

Ben was incredibly generous with his time. He just said, “Absolutely.”

He’s excited.

I was amazed by how nice and responsive he was.

Christopher Nicolaysen (12:43)
Sometimes when you’re trying to get the big fish, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

It’s that thing about not meeting your heroes, but sometimes they actually live up to it.

Tyson Mutrux (12:52)
That’s true.

The different responses you get from people are interesting.

Some people say, “Yes, I’ll come, but you have to pay me $50,000, plus airfare and transportation.”

Ben basically said, “Sure, I’d love to. What are the dates? I just need to make sure I can get there and get back.”

There was none of the other stuff.

It was just, what a guy.

Very different from some of the interactions we get.

How’s Gretchen?

Christopher Nicolaysen (13:30)
She’s good.

She just had a really good settlement on a case.

It was a zero-offer case pre-suit, and she was able to get the full statutory amount.

She also went out to Minnesota and did NITA for the week.

I did it probably 10 years ago. It’s really intensive. You’re doing full trial and deposition prep all week.

Tyson Mutrux (14:15)
Why NITA?

It’s funny, I’ve never been to NITA, but I have their books.

I use their deposition formula. Why did you choose them?

Christopher Nicolaysen (14:29)
My old boss actually went.

NITA is based out of Boulder, so back in the day we went and did the live session.

For me, doing it in person for a full week is also a good way to knock out three years of CLEs.

Tyson Mutrux (14:58)
That’s good.

I want to make sure I’m not claiming the wrong thing, but are they the ones that use what I call the toilet bowl approach?

You kind of go around the same topic?

Christopher Nicolaysen (15:08)
The funnel.

Tyson Mutrux (15:10)
The funnel. Yes.

Black cloud, toilet bowl, whatever you want to call it.

It’s effective when you’re trying to get information.

Let’s say Chris and I were talking about the Hormozi event.

You might ask, “Who recommended Hormozi to you?”

Then you go through who, what, when, where, and why.

You keep circling around the topic.

Sometimes it seems like overkill, and sometimes it probably is, but you find these nuggets where you think, “Holy crap. They weren’t going to talk about that at all.”

Christopher Nicolaysen (15:40)
I think it’s about focus.

NITA also uses a learn-by-doing approach, which is something you can use inside your firm when you’re teaching employees how to do things.

They model it, then you get up and do it.

They critique you, and then you do it again.

I think that’s a really helpful way to learn.

They video record you, too.

It can be intense, especially as a younger lawyer, because you have to be able to take feedback on yourself.

But it also shows you that you can stand with lawyers who have been doing this for quite a while.

I remember seeing John Romano at an event, and he talked about how he sometimes does depositions.

He gets incredibly specific.

If somebody was in a car, he’ll ask, “Where was your left hand? Where was your right hand? What was the temperature? What were you listening to?”

He wants them to fully recreate the picture.

I thought that was a really interesting way to get into the minutiae because sometimes you can pull important nuggets out of those details.

Tyson Mutrux (17:08)
That’s where I find some of those FBI and CIA books on reading people interesting.

Last year I got on a little CIA reading kick.

One of the biggest things I learned is that lying is contextual.

You have to look at a lot of different things.

It’s not simply, “Chris looked up and to the left, so that means he’s lying.”

That’s not a thing.

But if Chris normally doesn’t do that and suddenly I ask him a question and he starts looking up and to the left, that’s something I might pay attention to because he’s doing something out of the ordinary.

Another thing they talked about was yes-or-no questions.

If I ask you a yes-or-no question and you don’t answer yes or no, that can be an indicator.

If I ask, “Did you go to the Hormozi event?” and you answer, “You know, I really like going to events like that,” you’re avoiding the actual question.

One of the books said that failing to directly answer the question is a major indicator of possible deception.

Christopher Nicolaysen (18:37)
I’ve found that a lot in trials and even when talking to employees or doing corrective action.

You get these circular answers and eventually have to say, “Wait. The question wasn’t answered.”

In a trial, I’ll get you to the answer one way or another.

The same thing happens with employees.

You ask, “Why didn’t you do X?” or, “Did you do this, yes or no?”

Then they start talking about everything around it.

Eventually you have to come back and say, “But was it done?”

That’s a huge tell to me.

But it takes active listening.

You have to be really focused on what you’re actually hearing.

Tyson Mutrux (19:33)
That’s why I go in with an outline.

Whether it’s a deposition or trial, I usually have three or four points I want to prove.

I have an idea of where I want the questioning to go.

The thing we try to teach our attorneys is that you don’t read the outline.

You use the outline to come back and fill in any gaps.

Start the conversation, ask your questions, and then let the conversation guide where it goes.

If they give you another rabbit hole to go down, go down that rabbit hole. Then come back up and go to the next thing.

I love watching defense attorneys who just stare at their outline.

They’re asking, “And where did you go after that?” without actually listening to the answer.

Christopher Nicolaysen (20:15)
I remember talking to Mike Alder one time, and he said he just goes right in from the jump.

He doesn’t do all the instructions.

His first question might be, “You know you caused the crash, right?”

Then everybody objects and gets worked up.

But it can work because it’s like, we’re here for this. Let’s get to it.

I also remember a story Mark Lanier told at one of his events.

He said they flew out to London for a deposition. The defense flew out too.

Fifteen minutes into the deposition, he said, “Yeah, I think I’m good.”

They threw a huge fit and wanted to call the judge because everyone had flown all the way to London.

He said, “Do you want me to go on for another four or five hours for nothing? I got everything I need. Or you can go enjoy the city.”

I thought that was really interesting.

Tyson Mutrux (20:59)
That’s a really good point.

People are sometimes surprised by how short my depositions can be.

I go in with the things I need to prove.

If I’ve proved those things, what is all the other stuff going to do for me?

I don’t need a three-hour deposition of a doctor if I can prove everything I need in 20 minutes.

It’s pretty simple.

Any cool marketing things you all are doing, or is it just the boring stuff that works?

Christopher Nicolaysen (21:37)
I signed up with Hampton, and we got our first video out.

I have a fairly large office, so I set up a whole recording kit in there.

We were doing general TV and radio, but we cut that back or cut it off.

Then we got really focused on PPC, LSAs, and SEO.

But the bigger thing was actually getting our intake team trained.

We hired a trainer who meets with them weekly. She analyzes the calls, gives them sales tips, and helps them work through the script.

She’s been a huge help with our conversion piece.

We’re also focused on our call response time. When somebody calls in, how quickly are we answering them and getting back to them?

We’re also in the process of a rebrand.

We’re keeping the name, but we’re rebranding.

Alex had me do a color analysis a while back, and those colors are going to become part of the new brand.

Tyson Mutrux (22:43)
Were you green?

Christopher Nicolaysen (22:46)
I am.

We were blue and gray.

We’re going to switch to greens, earthy tones, and some other hues based on the color analysis.

Tyson Mutrux (22:59)
Springs Law Group.

You actually were green when you first started, weren’t you?

Christopher Nicolaysen (23:04)
We were green when we very first started, then we switched.

Alex has a whole five-panel color set that we’re going to be using.

Tyson Mutrux (23:23)
That’s interesting.

Christopher Nicolaysen (23:25)
The guy Alex sent me to had me take pictures of my eyes, my skin, everything.

Then he gave me a whole booklet of colors that work for me, apparel that works, everything else.

It was a pretty deep dive.

Tyson Mutrux (23:43)
Can I give you just a little bit of feedback based on what I just saw on your website?

Christopher Nicolaysen (23:47)
Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux (23:48)
Way too many words on that pop-up.

Why wouldn’t it just say, “Do you have an injury case?”

That’s it.

Christopher Nicolaysen (23:57)
That’s why we’re rebuilding the website.

Trust me, I’ve got a whole list of stuff on there.

Tyson Mutrux (24:07)
Are you all going to build the site, or are you paying somebody to do it?

Christopher Nicolaysen (24:14)
Alex and the SEO person are going to work on that side of it, and I know they’re getting a designer too.

We’re being intentional with the lettering, fonts, everything.

It’s a whole new layout.

Tyson Mutrux (24:37)
That’s pretty awesome.

I know Joy Vitali is big into branding kits.

We’ve got a branding kit. Maximum Lawyer has a branding kit.

It’s really helpful when you’re creating things.

If you’re in Canva, you can upload your branding kit and immediately have your colors and everything there.

For Maximum Lawyer, we have around eight different colors that are part of the brand.

It’s not just your main color. It’s all the colors that work with that color.

It’s the stuff Jay Ruane’s brother Brandon talked about years ago.

Christopher Nicolaysen (25:20)
On our current site, we have a page that serves as a style guide.

It has the hex codes and everything else.

If a vendor needs it, we can just say, “Here’s everything we use.”

That’ll all be switched to the new stuff.

More than likely, the new brand will roll out around the beginning of next year.

Then the other big thing is opening new offices.

We opened an office down in Pueblo, and we’re looking to open another one in South Denver at some point soon.

Tyson Mutrux (25:42)
Nice, dude.

Are you still working out?

Christopher Nicolaysen (25:50)
Yeah. I’ve got a trainer now.

We actually work out tonight at 6:30.

Tyson Mutrux (25:56)
Wait. You work out at night?

Christopher Nicolaysen (25:58)
It’s when he’s available.

Usually I work out in the mornings, but when I meet with him, sometimes it has to be at night.

Tyson Mutrux (26:07)
Jackson made the soccer team, and their practices are at 6:30 every morning.

That’s during my workout time, so I have to figure something out.

I’m either going to have to go at 5:30, which I really don’t want to do, or I’m going to have to work out at night.

I think I’d rather do 5:30 in the morning because night workouts suck.

Christopher Nicolaysen (26:28)
I was at a conference once, and the presenter said, “Even if you can’t do your 6:30 workout, but you can only do 10 minutes, wouldn’t that still be the way to go?”

The guy seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

Tyson Mutrux (26:47)
You did a nice job on that one.

Wait. Was that me?

Christopher Nicolaysen (26:52)
That was you.

It was in Scottsdale when you were talking about that stuff.

Tyson Mutrux (26:58)
That’s the first time somebody has quoted something back to me that I said and referred to me as “some guy.”

That’s pretty funny.

Christopher Nicolaysen (27:07)
It was your whole talk.

The point was that even if you get up at 6:00 and walk for 10 minutes, it’s still a win.

It may not be the full workout you wanted, but it’s still something.

Tyson Mutrux (27:15)
We only have a couple minutes left.

What’s in store for the day?

Christopher Nicolaysen (27:21)
I’ve intentionally started blocking out DND time, so I have some of that today.

I try to do it twice a week now.

It’s just downtime.

I have a couple of ethics CLEs I need to get through, and I’d rather get them done before the end of the year.

I also just bought a new car, so I’m going to go drive that.

Nothing too crazy.

Tyson Mutrux (27:51)
What kind of car did you get?

Christopher Nicolaysen (27:53)
A BMW i4.

Tyson Mutrux (27:56)
I’m surprised you didn’t go with the Tesla. Self-driving.

Christopher Nicolaysen (28:00)
No. I already had one.

I switched from the Tesla to the Ioniq, and the Ioniq lease is coming up, so I switched over to the BMW.

Tyson Mutrux (28:11)
There are direct flights to Denver from Columbia now, so I want to come out.

You’ll have to take me out in your car.

BMWs are solid vehicles. They’re really nice.

Christopher Nicolaysen (28:25)
Most days are just the day-to-day stuff.

Meetings with the team.

One of the other people we hired was someone who is basically over our paralegals, pushing for quality and movement.

So I’ll meet with her, go over some things, and keep everything moving.

Tyson Mutrux (28:48)
You’re cooking, dude. Love it.

Thanks for getting up early to do this. I appreciate it.