Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
CHAOS to Control: Building a Thriving Law Firm | Tyson Mutrux
Feeling like you're drowning in billable hours just to stay afloat?
Lawyer and coach Tyson Mutrux, the Maximum Lawyer himself, gets it. But what if you could ditch the grind and build a thriving law firm that fuels your freedom and dream lifestyle?
This episode is your life raft.
Tyson spills the tea on:
- Client Care on Autopilot: Discover the game-changing CARES team that keeps clients happy and cases on track. No more dropped balls!
- Tech Tools That Don't Suck: Learn how to leverage legal tech to work smarter, not harder. (AI and self-driving cars? We got you covered.)
- Delegate Like a Boss: Stop being a one-man show! Free up your time to focus on what matters most with strategic delegation.
- Future-Proof Your Practice: Adapt to the changing legal landscape and stay ahead of the curve.
Escape the billable hour trap and design the law firm (and life) of your dreams. Hit play and join Tyson on Life Beyond the Briefs!
Bonus: Craving even more Tyson wisdom? Connect with him on social media: follow him on all platforms at @LawyerTyson. Need help with a specific injury case in Missouri or Illinois? Head over to tysonmutrux.com. You can also find him at MaxLawGuild.com or Maximumlawyer.com and build the law firm of your dreams, together!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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The consumer facing ones, the law firms. They can get really trapped into this where they've got this one or two massive referral sources and they lose them, and then they lose 80, 90% of their business. You've got to be very careful about where you you can't be over-dependent on one or two referral sources because if you are and they shut you off or something happens to them, I mean you're you're in a really bad position. You've got to focus on on getting clients, but you've got to focus on from more than one source.
Speaker 2:Hey there, lawyers. Are you tired of feeling like hamsters on a wheel, chasing billable hours and sacrificing your sanity? Well, welcome to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers looking to break free from the traditional law firm grind. And today we're diving deep into the world of law firm growth with my friend, Tyson Mutrix. Tyson is not just a lawyer. He's a master of turning chaos into control. So get ready to discover how he built a thriving practice while still finding time for the things that truly matter in life. We're talking all things law firm management, client satisfaction and, of course, work-life balance. So buckle up and get ready to transform your law firm from a stressful job into a fulfilling career. Let's dive in. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Tyson Mutrix. Tyson runs the Mutrix firm Injury Lawyers in St Louis Missouri, and you probably know his name more from the Maximum Lawyer Podcast and the Maximum Lawyer Guild. Tyson, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me, brian. I Appreciate it. I was excited to get on the show and I know we were chatting before. We were just kind of talking shop. I enjoy talking to like-minded people, so thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:What I like talking to people like you about, Tyson, is because you're a lawyer and you're a coach consultant. I'm not sure how you would describe the second half, the second business. I kind of describe it somewhere between coaching, consulting and running a mastermind group. But you're actually still in the practice, and so we spent 15 minutes before we jumped on here diving deep into tactical and strategic ways to help our clients no-transcript.
Speaker 1:I have the same thought as you do where it's. I don't. I can go on a rant if I need to, but I'll hold off, I'll have to. But the there's a big difference between people that are actually working and like in the actual business of law, actually actually running a firm, and the people that kind of come in and try to tell us how we're supposed to do things, and they don't understand all the different nuances. And I'll give you like a really just a basic one. Like you talk about intake and people talk about conversion all the time. There's people like Gary Falkowitz that absolutely get it. Like Gary Falkowitz is a genius when it comes to intake and conversion.
Speaker 1:But there's a lot of people that aren't and they don't understand that there's a significant difference between, okay, trying to get someone signed up that is on a contingency versus someone that's going to have to pay in a pocket right away, or there's a there's. You have to understand those different nuances. And the people that are from the outside coming in, they're just a bunch of marketers. They don't, they don't understand those things. They and what's interesting to me and we I don't know how far into this you want me to go but the what's interesting to me, though, is the people that are.
Speaker 1:So there's some companies out there that they're, they're slash coaches, that are, they're marketers, they're like strictly marketers, but all they know when it comes to business is marketing and that's it. They don't, they don't understand the part of running the actual business. They understand the marketing part of it, but not the running part of the business. So I always find that really interesting, because we we hear a lot of we get we hear people talk about those companies and you're you, the things you hear. It's crazy where it's like oh, I'm going to get you in, I'm going to sign you up, I'm gonna get you to pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to do crap for you, so I just I find those interests, those, those companies, fascinating. Yeah, and you know, one of the things that I've been saying lately is like I could get anybody to a $10 million law firm, right, if we had an $8 million Google ads budget. You have to sign the cases up, but then you have to run them efficiently on the back end and, man, one of the things you hit on there is like there's an incredible difference between signing somebody up on a contingency fee, which I can do over the phone in about 12 minutes, and getting somebody to write you a check for a legal problem that they have that they want you to solve. And so you know, not only is law firm, is the law firm industry, different than any other industry, but within the industry it's, you know, contingency is different than criminal, is different than family, is different than the B2B kind of intake, and so it's hard to coach all of that Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you, you have to have people that have that, have experience in those areas, cause I, I mean I can tell you just from my criminal defense years because I did criminal defense for several years and like signing up those clients versus signing up an injury client, and it is interesting how things have changed, where 10 years ago you met every person in person. It was very rare to sign up someone and we even had I mean, from the beginning of my firm, we were paperless and we had electronic contracts. We had all that stuff. It didn't matter, like we still met people in person. But I mean, I'll give you like a very specific example where, like injury, like they're not getting money out of the bank account or they're not putting it on a credit card, they're just signing a piece of paper to start off, right.
Speaker 1:But in a criminal case, there are people that are actually getting bringing you cash Okay, so you're bringing, like you have to meet in person. There is there is no way of signing them up with a phone because they like. So there's things like that that are that are just different. The, the nature of the business is different. So you, you need to have processes for everything. I'm a firm believer in that but your process for signing up a criminal client are going to change, because you have okay, let's try to get them signed up with a phone, but guess what, can't do that because they got to bring us cash. So you have to have another process for that whenever it comes to handling cash. So it's there are all these different nuances that if you just don't understand those and if all you're doing is just you're used to just marketing and nothing else, then you're going to struggle understanding our business and actually coaching people the way they're supposed to be coached initial retainer agreement and they're past that.
Speaker 2:I think that many firms suffer from the drop-off of okay, the intake and the consultation were really flashy, and then nothing happens. And it seems to me that you've solved that in some ways in your firm with your CARES team so, and I've never seen a CARES team on anybody else's website. So you want to talk a little bit about what your folks do. That's different than most other law firms. Yeah, so what our CARES team on anybody else's website.
Speaker 1:So you want to talk a little bit about what your folks do. That's different than most other law firms. Yeah, so what our CARES team is is it actually there? Is, and I don't know. Do you have an intake team? Someone ask you a question first. Do you have an intake team? I do, yep, okay. So intake team hands the they, they sign up the case and then hand it off to some to another team. Yes, okay, do you ever get complaints about the handoff between the intake team to the? And it may not be a complaint, it's just a. Do you ever get some feedback between the intake team and the team that takes it over?
Speaker 2:You know what? I would say no, but I would tell you, Tyson, there may be feedback that's coming to the paralegals that are taking it over and opening the case that I just don't know about.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, okay. So we, we, we track this and we have, we collect a lot of information from clients. But what was big and I don't even want to call it a complaint, but the feedback that we got was the. The clients really liked the cares team and then they were disappointed to some extent that they were no longer going to be able to work with them. So what we did is we just made the care team a little bit bigger and we they're there for the continuity of the case, for the entire case, to to, to bring us that continuity where the cares team is there to to.
Speaker 1:Yes, they sign up cases, that's a big part of it, but they also do check-ins. So if you think about the kind of like a customer service department in a way where they do check-ins with clients and it's hey, brian, you know, it's Tyson, just don't call me, check on you See how you're feeling, is everything going okay with you, that kind of thing, right, you're checking it and they're there for the, for the duration of the case, and it also helps with if, if you're, if you're my attorney, brian, right, and I, and I'm not real happy with a couple of things you've done. Most people are not going to tell you, right, I may not tell you. I may be a little bit frustrated with you for, for whatever reason, well, you know what they're more willing to tell the cares team. You know what? Hey, you know that's not a big deal. It's usually like you know something, like you know. I just wish I'd get a few more updates, like things like that, where, like, we get that really, really valuable feedback.
Speaker 1:So it's it's, that position is extremely important to the firm because it allows us to one collect information, and sometimes that's in the form of data, because we do. There are some calls where they do and they say, okay, how, on a rate on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate us on communication? And I know that some people get those in the form of a text, and that is something that we actually have built out, that we've not implemented yet. But it's not going to take over completely what the CARES team is doing. It's going to supplement it. So they'll continue to do what they're currently doing when it comes to checking with clients. We'll just add in a few extra things throughout the case.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, the cares team is there for that continuity, because that way the the clients have someone to go to if they need to as well it's like a like a fail safe because I can tell you just um, there have been times because of the cares team, because they've got regular tasks to check in on people, that you can easily have a case kind of fall through the cracks a little bit. But the care scheme is a hey, no one's reached out to this client a few weeks you might want to reach out, like so there's, there's things like that that it catches. You have all these different fail safes that help you catch things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of the things that we've done recently we just implemented this as of our last quarterly meeting is that Ben and I now are the bridge between intake and the paralegal team, and so you know we've we've put some thoughts to like how do we make this client onboarding transition better, as, as we're growing right, I've got 18 team members and so I probably don't have somebody who can be a dedicated like in my dream firm, I've got a dedicated like essentially a customer success person who doesn't have any job in the substance of the case but is dedicated only to exactly that check-in.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Brian asked me to call you, just want to check in on your case. Is there anything that you know? We don't know that you think we should know? Okay, we'll get that into the file, but we're not there yet. And so in this transition period, one of the things that's going to happen after somebody has signed so right now that you already are getting a big package from us a couple of days after you've signed, with information on how to be a client, what happens after an auto accident, all the steps, and then a couple of branded things, like we have a teddy bear right and we're using Hona as a tech supplementation to explain what's going to happen in the next step.
Speaker 1:Those Hona guys are great.
Speaker 2:I like those Hona guys are great I was client number seven, and so I feel like I and I was client number seven because when, when Matt explained the product to me at National Trial Lawyers in 2021, I was like, I'm already doing that, I've already, I've shot the video. It lives on Vimeo and we texted the clients manually. So, like, that's cool, we'll buy the thing, but the thing that we're adding is a phone call from Ben or I saying, hey, I just want to introduce myself. I hope everything is was great in the transition and the onboarding of the case and not in those. You know, we're smoothing the language, obviously, and if there's ever any problem with my team, where you have a communication gap, here's my personal cell phone and you can give me a call. Right, and nobody. So, number one, it's not actually the personal cell phone it brings to it.
Speaker 1:I was going to say you're not. And the voicemail.
Speaker 2:But I think if you of clients that actually would call your personal cell phone are very, very, very small and so just having those little touches that are different than other businesses and other law firms, because there's so many businesses that we interact with where you become a client and then nothing happens. And it's one thing if all you've done is sign away a portion of your claim, but it's an entirely different thing if you've written somebody a $7,000 check for the first step of an estate plan and then nothing happens for a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we build in, we actually build in specific calls. Where they they cut, they kick in, there's a task that generates and they're scheduled by the receptionist where. So, like the first thing we call it, we call ours a fact finding call internally, where it's the where and that happens. It's supposed to happen within three days of the client being signed up. So it's similar to what you're doing. I do like that touch. It's a nice touch.
Speaker 1:The attorney that's assigned to the case. What they do is they'll call the client at that time and we have a list of questions supposed to ask the question specifically as it's written, because the way I'm talking to you might change from way I'm talking to a client, that's, you know, that's from a different background, right, so I might have, I might change the inflection of my voice, all these kinds of things. So you, you see it and and then you kind of look at the question and then you ask that question in a way that makes the most sense for that client and it allows us to do a few things. There's basically two goals from that call is to one, allow the attorney to make a connection with the client where you're trying to connect in some way on an emotional level.
Speaker 1:The other part is, sometimes the CARES team will sign up a case that is somewhat borderline and so we want to kind of figure out is this a case that we should go ahead and drop now should? Is it a case that we should maybe investigate a little bit more and then drop it? Or is this, maybe is this a good case and we have? We also have another fail safe after 30 days, because sometimes you just don't know at the beginning. Sometimes you like in an injury case, like a crash I'm sure you've seen this Person calls you. They say that oh, this other person is at fault, they ran a red light, you know. 30 days later or so, you find out, after you get the police report, after you've done your investigation, the opposite is true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or there's no damage to the car. Or you know, or there's no damage to the car or the other thing that happens sometimes is they're better in four days. You know, yeah, I don't need to go to the doctor. So, yes, having that 30-day check-in, yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:You know what's interesting I do want to talk. So it's interesting to me that sometimes that there are clients and this is one of the benefits of the CARES team too Sometimes the clients, depending on when that call is, they do feel okay. So I mean, for example, let's say you called, let's say that if you know they call you that morning because they were in a crash, and then someone speaks to them that night, they might say that they're okay and then the next morning they feel awful. They just feel absolutely awful. Or even a week later, sometime. And I'm going to tell you from personal experience I was rear-ended in April and I was. So I've got an ongoing injury claim.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to talk and probably go against some of my advice that I Just don't post anything on social media, Exactly right.
Speaker 1:So I could tell that there was something wrong with my shoulder and I could just tell it wasn't like a sharp pain at first and then over the first couple of weeks it started to grow and grow and then I found out I got a torn labrum, Right, so there's. But you do at certain point they think that they are okay. So you do have to like sometimes they legitimately are just okay, Right, but then you also you have to ask some additional questions, because sometimes people are, are just trying to tough it out and you have to explain to them listen, this is your one time like you, there is no coming back and trying to get more treatment. So and I don't want people to interpret that wrong too, because I think there's a there you can interpret that oh, you send people and you run up the bills. Not at all.
Speaker 1:We are very we, we, we make it very clear to our clients If you're not injured, you're not injured, and we can't. You should just try to settle the case on your own, Like, go, go, do that. Uh as opposed to uh it's because it's not worth it, right, it's just not worth it. The MRIs are going to come up negative, You're'll represent you if you're injured, and only if you're injured. So hopefully people don't interpret that as, oh, you're doing that to run for the bills. No, we're doing it to see if our client's actually injured and see if we can help them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how are you going back then and doing quality assurance on those CARES team's check-in calls?
Speaker 1:So they're all documented. So we have every single one of them is it's documented in the actual file. We call it our milestones calls because we have all these these calls scheduled throughout the case that we call milestones calls. So you have you know, one of them is the intake call, one of them is that fact finding call. Then you have the injury impact call. So we have all these these others that are kind of built out throughout the case and so we can go through and we actually review them and the ones that have scores. And that's that's where we get a lot of value, because we had one of our teams it was in 2022, we started to see a really big decline in the scores and it's because we we it's something we track, we keep an eye on it, where it's all on a chart and I can see it, and so we can see if it's trending up, if it's trending down, and we're generally in the high nines, so it's rated at 10.
Speaker 1:But we started one. The team dipped into the eights. It was like 8.9 and 8.7. We're like what the hell is going on, and so we were able to kind of figure out some of the issues and track it. So it's just something you have to monitor. If you're not tracking something, if you're not monitoring it, then you're not going to know about it. So that's how I mean they fill out all the notes. They make sure that whenever we're talking about, when it's a call to ask about the numbers, the numbers are put in there, and so that's just how we track it. So we do it inside of Filevine and then that reports to our analytics for us so we can actually track it on a dashboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, and I'm curious, you know you've mentioned, I think so far, at least four or five different systems that you've built out. Are you naturally a systems builder guy, or have you had help with that? And then the second part of that is did you, did you sit down like all at once and build them, were you like? Okay, this is a problem we got to build in some structure to solve for this.
Speaker 1:I don't think that there's. Maybe there is a way that you could build it all at one time. I don't. I don't think that that's something that's possible. To answer your first question, I think I am. I tell people often that if I weren't an attorney, I'd probably be an engineer. I like to build things. So early on I used Infusionsoft quite a bit and so I was able to build things out and so I really did enjoy it. So the tech side I enjoy quite a bit. I understand it quite a bit, I'm pretty good at it. But some of the stuff I've built out over the years but like our Filevine setup, for the most part was built by me because I knew exactly what I wanted in it and what I didn't want in it. But we hire. We have a full-time person named Kashif and Kashif is he's full-time, he's, so he's our CTO. We hired him in 2022. And that's where we started to see really just a massive increase in what we could do with the technology. Because you do get limited. Do you ever get into Zapier?
Speaker 2:Not personally.
Speaker 1:Okay. So for anyone that's been in Zapier, you understand that you can get to a certain point with a lot of things. Your skill set will take you to a certain point. Like Brian, you could go in even though you've never used it and there's certain things you could do because it's fairly user-friendly. But you'll get. If you want to do more advanced things, you're you'll get. You'll hit these all these dead ends.
Speaker 1:And so someone like kashif, who has got a lot of experience, he comes in and he just like, well, it's just this, this, this and you're done, and and so that at one point we did a massive build out and we had three full-time people that they were working. Now the two of them were they were contracts, so they weren't like actually part of the team, they were more like contracted out. But for about a year they were just building. And now it's it's just Kasha, but he I mean he's always doing a lot of work and with that, when you do have a lot of systems like that, I mean things do break, so you have to have. It's kind of like you know, if you have a building like things will break on your building so you'll have to have someone go and fix it, and so Kasha will have to do that sometimes where things will break and you'll have to go fix it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that was going through my, my mind as I was thinking about Brian. Tinkering inside of Zapier is like is it creating a structure that you know I fixed something over here but it breaks something on the other side? I've done that and that's why I don't mess with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's funny because you, um, the things that I'd set up before they were set up like by me and I could easily just deal with them, but now it's like gotten so complex where, if I do go in there and I'm a mess with things, I complex where if I do go in there and I'm a mess with things, I will break it and then it'll affect, affect all these other things. So I had the. I've learned to stay out of it and just tell Kasha what I want and then he goes and does it and then, uh, but that's, that's been kind of like a hard lesson for me to learn. I think just kind of keep my hands out of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know. I think that's a difficult lesson for a lot of lawyers especially entrepreneurial lawyers who like to go out and learn new things and try new things is you can do it to a certain level successfully, but you can only do so many things to a certain level successfully before you've got to start outsourcing and coming back. So what are the kind of the strategies or the way that you go about thinking when you're learning needs to stop and you need to bring in an expert to actually handle the thing?
Speaker 1:That's an interesting question. What is my thought process?
Speaker 2:While you're thinking about that, I'll tell you. The story that comes to mind for me is because we're doing SEO coaching right now with Jason Hennessey and I'm like dude, I get it, I get, I want to be inside a refs, I want to be inside some rush, I want to be in our Google, my business, and I think I could do it well. But in the back of my mind, I'm like no dude like you should continue to be the lawyer and continue to run the firm and let your marketing director do what she's supposed to do, even though I'm confident I could do it faster and probably as well. Right, whether that's beginning ignorance or whatever. And I also recognize that the more time that I spend inside of that, the less capacity I have to do all of the other maybe higher leverage things throughout my firm. So I imagine you have some similar issues in your own firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great example, actually.
Speaker 1:So I think that an easy way of thinking about it is think about what not only are you really really good at, but what are the things that you're the only one that should be doing them, and then anything else that you don't have time for should be going to someone else, and that's that was something that it took me a while to learn to be honest with me, honest with you, cause the I wanted to do everything. It's like cause, when you start as like a true solo, like I did it, like you do, you're doing everything, and then like that's my baby, that's my baby, like everything's your baby, and then you, you eventually have to like actually realize, okay, I'm not going to grow if I do all these other things, and so it's. It really just comes down to if, like, most of people that are listening to this or watching this are like they know the things that they're supposed to be doing, and only them, and everything else you should just contract out, either contract out or hire someone else to do it, um, and so I mean other than that. I think that that's that's really my thought process, and the team knows it too, and I don't know how much you talk to your team, but the team is very, is really really good at like protecting my time and they know, okay, that's not Tyson's area. Let's go over here and like for people as your firm starts to grow, grow like our firms are very similar in size, like.
Speaker 1:One of the things that was maybe hardest for me to to let go was like personnel, like anything when it comes to hiring, firing, um, if there's any issues in general, like I, I always wanted to have my my hand in it in some way, and and once I let go of that and I trusted people because I think what it was was just a trust factor, of trusting that people were going to handle it in a legal and appropriate way, because there's so many landmines with employment stuff that it always concerned me. But when I finally let go of that, oh my gosh it. It frees up so much of your time, um, and from a system standpoint, like that is a big part of my job, though is from a just from a planning standpoint. Kashub and I are regularly planning and discussing things, like I was I kind of joke about this, but I really was pissed when, when open ai came out with chatT. I was so pissed off because we were already developing some AI stuff and we were so far ahead of the curve. That's what we were saying to each other and it came out. We just scrapped our entire thing because it didn't make sense anymore. But that's part of it, though that happens sometimes where you think that you're ahead of the curve and you're planning and then you have to scrap it, but that is a big part of it.
Speaker 1:It's like planning as to what's next. What's going to happen in five years? What's going to happen in 10 years? Is the current system that you're using, is it going to be viable in 10 years? My first job out of law school was with an injury firm that used a. It was a software-based service to handle PI cases and it had a server an actual server. In my mind, that is such a bizarre way of practicing. People still do it, but my whole point is that that's not been a viable way of practicing for several years. I'm not so sure that the way we're currently practicing is going to be a viable way of practicing in 10 years. So we have to be as business owners. We have to think about those things.
Speaker 2:The most recent lawyer that I hired came from an insurance defense firm where not only was it on a server, but everybody had CPU desktop units and no laptops, and so when COVID hit, they had some problems. What did they do? Well, they told her to go buy a laptop.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, it just doesn't make any sense to me and I mean I don't know if they're being cheap or what it is. It's just such a bizarre it's just to think about. It's a bizarre thing of like the way people practice. Like there's a really well respected injury firm in St Louis I'm not gonna mention who they are, but like they're to this day, right now, like operating on three different case management systems. It's split into three, the firm is split into three departments and they're on three different case management systems. I think it's crazy.
Speaker 2:Good news is, if they get hacked, only a third of the client's data goes down. That's a fair point, they're on CrowdStrike, thinking of technological disrupts, how worried are you about self-driving cars and the complete eradication of our business model?
Speaker 1:Am I worried? No, and the reason I'm not worried is because we all have plenty of time to plan for it. If you asked me, are the number of car crashes going to go down so substantially over the next 20 years that there's not going to be enough injury cases or car crash cases to go around? Yes, I would say that the answer to that question is yes, but we have enough time to prepare for it that we're going to have to pivot. There will still be product liability cases. There will be a large number of injury cases because there are so many vehicles on the road.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of people that are opposed to EVs. There are a lot of people that are opposed to self-driving vehicles, and by opposed I mean that they just won't buy them themselves. There'll still be motorcycle crashes. There'll still be a lot of crashes. The numbers will plummet. You can't convince me otherwise. Whenever that becomes the norm, the numbers will plummet, and then many injury firms will go away, but there will be a lot of dog bites. There'll be product cases, there'll be falls, but there's not going to be enough cases to go around for everybody. So we have plenty of time to pivot, and so people need to be thinking about what the contingency plan is. So we have plenty of time to pivot, and so you people need to be thinking about what the contingency plan is. So that's, that's my answer to that.
Speaker 2:And just if you're listening, this is not Tyson and I hoping that the world continues to be unsafe and dangerous place for vehicles. It's just, you know, you're you're building a business, right, you're hiring people. You're, you are in in many ways. When you hire somebody, you are providing for that family's safety for a while, right Economic safety at least. And so, as you're building these, you just have to be thinking about what's the existential risk. That could come in and take out my practice area.
Speaker 1:My advice to that, my advice to people, is usually don't think of it that way when it comes to employees, because you can get so wrapped up in things. But the reality is that's the truth is that you do like, whenever I'm thinking about planning, it's like, ok, like these are the employees we have. I don't ever want to have to let them go for financial reasons because they are dealing with family members, like they are relying on our health insurance, like there's all these different things that you're thinking. You do think about, and as much as I would like to just say you can't look at it that way. You've got to be objective about it. The reality is is that that that subjectivity does seep in quite a bit and it makes it difficult for you to make those objective decisions. But you're right, I do, I do a hundred percent agree with you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I want to pivot a little bit and talk about maximum lawyer. So you and Jim started the podcast back in 2016 and began the guild in 2020. So tell me the origin story of how the two of you got together and what what the goal of the podcast initially was.
Speaker 1:So this is funny. I, I, I like to uh, uh, reminisce about this sometimes. So Jim was my law practice management professor. He was an adjunct professor and, um, jim will tell you, like the he's and I'm not saying anything to disparage him this is actually pretty funny and it it's actually. I think it's a good um, it's a good way of doing things. He, he was good at delegating, but he'll tell you he's one of the laziest people you'll ever meet, and so what he did is, instead of teaching the class which he did, do some classes, but he, he would bring in every single class, a guest speaker, and they would speak for an hour about, like one was on systems and one was on like the forms you need to have. Another one was like on ethics. Another lady came in to talk about here's how you all should answer the phone. Uh, there was just a lot of great, great speakers.
Speaker 1:There was a lady, um, debbie champion, she's just, she's, she, he brought her in. She actually works for a defense firm, but she worked for another firm and it was. She walked in. This is like these great stories, by the way, but so she's, she walks into work. One day, all of the major partners that, like, have the majority of the cases, are in a conference room. They quickly grabbed her and said um, we're all leaving and so we're, we're offering you a partnership to come with us. If you walk out that door, you're not, you're, you're, you're dead to us, essentially, or you can come with us. And she looked around us all the people that had all the cases just, I'm coming with you, so she's. She knows what it's like to see a partnership break up. She knows what it was like to actually start a new firm and she also knows the value of having your own cases, because she had a bunch of cases and that's why she was brought with them to the new firm, and so he brought in a lot of guest speakers and they taught a lot of really valuable things.
Speaker 1:He and I became friends. It was something where he knew I wanted to start my firm at some point. I didn't want to start it right out of law school, but it was something I was considering and we just stayed in touch. We talked quite a bit and then, by 2016, I think that I I think that by then we had gone to icon together, which was infusionsoft's conference I think it's like 2014, and then by we had there was a another guy, um, jason that was. He was not a lawyer, who's more of a tech guy, and so the plan was this I think it's funny is when we first started, maximum lawyer, if you look at the original logo and the current logo, it's got a gear in it, and part of that was because of, like, infusion soft software, and we thought initially we wanted to have this podcast on law practice management but talk about infusion soft and sell infusion soft.
Speaker 1:So I think that's funny. Like that's how that was our first thinking Right, and we clearly never did that. You listen to the first episode on. We never tried to sell infusions off. We. What we did was we just got like we, we just talked about law practice management, marketing things like that that people were interested in, and then that turned into the next year a conference, and then we did another conference into the next year a conference, and then we did another conference and then by 2020, 2020, it was like when COVID hit, we'd already been talking a little bit about launching something like the guild or the guild itself, and then 2020 happened and we said, okay, this is a good opportunity to start it. Um, people need this right now. People were, I mean, you remember when COVID started 2020, it was just like what's going?
Speaker 2:to happen now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do we do? And so we said, okay, let's do it. Um, so we did it. And then now we we've got quarterly masterminds, we don't have the yearly conference anymore. Now we go to different cities. Um, this year I was telling you, you know, we always go to a different city, except for January. We go to Scottsdale.
Speaker 1:Every year we go to Scottsdale in January, but we do mix it up. We went to Miami, we're going to be in Vegas in November. We just got back from Charlotte. We went to Minneapolis because Jim's son went to the University of Minnesota. So, yeah, we go all over. We don't do the conference anymore, but we do mix it up and go to different places across the country. But it's a lot of fun. We have a really interesting mix of people, people anywhere from they're just like true solos to like you know we were talking about, like you know, like my title is actual CEO Like we have people that you know are scaling their firm, and so we have people that you know would call themselves CEOs. So we do have an interesting mix of people.
Speaker 2:What would you say?
Speaker 1:the breakdown of practice area is it's a heavy PI, probably around 40%. You've got a large number of state planning, criminal defense, immigration, because Jim's immigration, but the major ones are family law. So you have the major ones where you have the PI criminal family law, estate planning, law, estate planning.
Speaker 2:trying to see if I'm missing all of the consumer facing, attracting clients from the general public kind of practice and I've seen, maybe like less than five percent, you've got some b2b.
Speaker 1:You do have b2b people in the group, which is it is a different dynamic because it's you're I mean, you're dealing. And now what we try to talk about too, is how you're still. You're still dealing with people, because a lot of times people think B2B it's like business, but you got like there's people running those businesses. So there's, there's many similarities, but the B2B is a. It is a different approach. You do have to take a little bit different approach to it.
Speaker 2:Well, the model is entirely different, right, and for many B2B lawyers, the trap that you can get caught in is, if you have a client who's a continuity-based client and then you stop learning or stop attracting new clients, you can wind up. I was talking to somebody just a couple months ago. I've had these clients for 20 years after I left my big law firm, and now they're all selling their practices, and now I don't know what to do okay, yeah, well, that's.
Speaker 1:it's an interesting point because the consumer facing ones, the law firms, they can get really trapped into this where they've got this one or two massive referral sources and they lose them, and then they lose 80, 90 percent of their business, and that's that's something where you you've got to be very careful about, where you you can't be over-dependent on one or two referral sources, because if you are and they shut you off or something happens to them, you're in a really bad position.
Speaker 2:That's the Mike Morse story, right? He had one referral source who just said I'm not going to send you any more cases, and he went out and grew fireproof.
Speaker 1:So it worked out for him, and I'm not familiar with the story, but it's just one of those things. It's true, it's accurate, where you've got to focus on getting clients but you've got to focus on from more than one source. It's the same with marketing channels too.
Speaker 2:We're not teaching them that. I was thinking yeah, google changes the algorithm and you're done.
Speaker 1:You're done. Think, how many stories have you heard about people where their website was doing amazing and then all of a sudden, google changed or their website got hacked, or whatever. I mean there's a ton of stories about different marketing channels. Like, back in the day, nolo was really effective. I don't even know if NOLO is still around. Nolo was a really valuable source for me for getting criminal leads. I don't know if they're still around, but at a certain point they just stopped producing leads for me as well as they used to.
Speaker 1:So things change and so you've got to stay on top of things, and if you're not, it's a massive risk. I want to ask you something about this, too, because this relates to what we're talking about. We had someone on recently that talked about they believe that there's going to be a massive consolidation, a lot like doctors and the reason why this what I was talking about is important. If you are, if you're not, on top of marketing and if he's right and there's a massive consolidation, you are at risk of either becoming an employee or out of business, or like you got to stay competitive. You really have to stay competitive. So what are your thoughts? Cause there are definitely major people that have different thoughts on this, where you're going to see more of that personal approach, where it's more about the individual attorney or the consolidation approach. I have you given that any thoughts? I really that's something I've been thinking about quite a bit and I don't know yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm doing it right now.
Speaker 2:So here's my initial thoughts are that if you have a business that really lends itself to process immigration comes to mind, family law, estate planning certainly comes to mind it would be quote easy to roll up small practices.
Speaker 2:Right, let's say you have an estate planning practice where you have somebody that's done wills for the town for the last 30 years, right? Well, when you have family that's moved outside of the town, the high likelihood that they come back to that lawyer if there's a probate matter, right, mom and dad's will, we got to go back to the lawyer. So it strikes me that you could roll those kinds of practices up and get a DBA instead of a law firm name and kind of spin the wheels that way DBA instead of a law firm name and kind of spin the wheels that way. I think it is more challenging for an injury practice where you are reliant on, you know, random chance repeat clients. And criminal defense is kind of the same way, although, yeah, I think you're you're probably more likely in a criminal defense firm to have a repeat client maybe than in an auto accident firm.
Speaker 1:It's simply true. I think you will see some of that.
Speaker 2:but I also think and maybe this is just like a lawyer thinking that he's special I tend to think doctors and dentists are a little bit more fungible and a little bit more commoditized than lawyers are. Maybe that's just the fact that institutional medicine has come in and bought up all these practices, and that's how I'm looking at it. But yeah, I don't know. That's interesting. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1:That's an interesting thing you said about the dentists especially, I find it, because you do hear about dentists selling their practice quite a bit. So I don't know, maybe you're right about that. They just want a place that's going to make sure that you take care of their teeth well. I am kind of torn. I had heard the same thing from somebody a decade ago, that you're going to see a massive consolidation of law firm owners and lawyers. Basically, it's going to be these massive groups like you have with doctors, and I've not seen it. The only thing that would make me think that it might happen is what's happening in Arizona and Utah, where you've got private money coming in from non-lawyers that could start firms, and so I could see maybe that leading to it. Currently, I mean, there's a lot of bar associations that are going to be really, really resistant to it. You can't get a lot of judges to Zoom right. I think there would be a massive resistance to it, more so than doctors. I don't know how doctors allowed it to happen. It seemed like it happened well before our time. But I think if we don't want it to happen, I'm not sure it's so great for clients and the defense to it for everyone that wants to know. Like, how do you defend against it? You make sure you're so customer service focused that they can't beat you, like that's what you focus on.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you a quick story. So I took on a family law case for a friend's daughter. It was a it was a custody case early in my career. Okay, and if I objectively were to look back at it, I probably got my ass kicked in court. But the client loved me so much and the other attorney's client hated her so much he was screaming her outside the court. So the point is, it's not always the results, it's how the client feels about the results is what really, really matters. And so if you focus on the customer service part of it, it's going to be really hard for these big-sized firms who are going to have to really streamline things to make it cost effective. It's going to be really difficult for them, big size firms who are going to have to really streamline things to make it cost effective. It's going to be really difficult for them to to do it. And another another consideration too, is insurance. Like health insurance is what really bolsters the medical sector. That's right. We don't have the same thing when it comes to legal sector.
Speaker 2:Well, you're speaking my language, because people who have listened to more than one episode of this show will have heard me say that the client never knows somebody else could have gotten them more money or less money, or faster or better, but they always know what kind of customer service they got from you and they can compare that against every other service industry profession they've received service from. So I think that customer service that's the one thing that, like AI can't do, yet that, uh, that bots can't do.
Speaker 1:That your systems can't do is but it can, yeah, so we can free up your time to do those things.
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, a hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent frees up your time to focus on delivering great customer service. Yeah, speak my language.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Perfect, Well, Tyson hey did?
Speaker 2:did you get, did you get authority to share the 2025 maximum?
Speaker 1:lawyer said I guess cities I'm supposed to hold off, all right.
Speaker 2:Well, listen, I gotta land the plane here because I gotta jump for a, for a call with uh, the great legal marketing tribe, uh, and so if you are holding your breath looking for the maximum lawyer cities, you'll have to check back on their website. What do you think?
Speaker 1:late august, september my guess it'll be announced. Uh, yeah, probably, probably right around that time, that around that time but coming, there's coming to a city yeah, exactly, maxwellguildcom, I think, is what it is.
Speaker 2:but yeah, tyson, where can people find more about you?
Speaker 1:uh, I mean me personally. I mean you can follow me on all the major social media channels, at lawyer Tyson for the most part, um max law guildcom, or maximum lawyercom is another place you can find me. That's probably the easiest way. Or if there's an, if it's about an injury case in Missouri or Illinois, um Tyson mutrixcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome man.
