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Wondering if you are doing a good job as a lawyer? Wanting to quit, give up and close up shop? You are not alone. Today’s guest Greg Steele shares his story of startup, struggles with self-doubt, confidence, and owning his own law firm. Maybe your challenges are not external but internal, like Greg? Listen in to how Greg reached out to peers, found his community, let go of a practice area that was draining his resources and how being part of the Maximum Lawyer Guild has helped him achieve success. Let’s get started.

Episode Highlights:

01:14 Greg’s journey to becoming a family lawyer

03:04 Struggling with self-doubt and confidence

08:01 The importance of having a community of peers to share experiences and gain new perspectives.

08:33 Expanding your mindset

09:46 Growing your team

13:18 Letting go of a practice area

16:34 Revenue growth

Jim’s Hack: Find content ideas by using Google’s “People also ask” feature.

Greg’s Tips: Book “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do” by Amy Morin

Tyson Tip: Use Apple iphone automations to send yourself text messages for reminders etc.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Greg:

Resources:

The post Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back with Greg Steele 511 appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

What are some ways to add to what you are already doing? Client intake form, listening to their story and asking questions are some ways that Josh talks about how to add more value. Not only to your practice, but also to your clients life! In today’s episode, we’re sharing Josh Rohrscheibs’ presentation from MaxLawCon 2022. Where Josh shares the reason why he is doing this, what he is doing and how all these slow down details are making a difference to his clients. Listen in.

Episode Highlights:

00:43 Helping clients and having a serendipity moment – connecting to referral fees?!

05:33 Ask what else is going on in your clients life? – add a client intake questionnaire

09:06 Focus on how and your clients can be of value to each other

12:50 Creating a referral hub

18:52 Q and A

🎥 Watch the full video here

Connect with Josh:

Resources:

Transcript: How to Add Six-Figures of Value to Your Practice With the Clients You Already Have

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to Joshua SCHEIB as we share his talk, how to add six figures of value to your practice with the clients you already have, you can also head to the maximum layer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode

Speaker 2
run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome, Judy show.

Speaker 3
I’m Josh, it’s really a pleasure to be here with you all. I want to start by telling you a story that changed how I thought about helping my clients. I have the privilege of representing a community leader in my hometown, a really inspiring lady who unfortunately was in a terrible car accident, she was hit by an uninsured drunk driver and a hit and run crash. But the one kind of curiosity the the crash ended up being a blessing in disguise that actually saved her life. She had chest X ray at the hospital, and then the imaging, they found a small, rapidly growing form of lung cancer. So in the the weeks that followed, I’m trying to negotiate a settlement with her insurance carrier for her case. And there was a particular day when I had been going back and forth and battled with this insurance adjuster. And it was on my mind nonstop. And that day, I had lunch with a lawyer in my community who’s an estate planner, we had about a two hour lunch I walked along, had a great conversation. And on the way back, I kind of took a different route back to my office. And on the street, I ran into a friend of mine who is an asbestos lawyer. And that turned out to be a incredible moment of serendipity for me, because we just talked for a little bit, I complained about this adjuster. And we talked about what we were working on. And I told him about my client. And then you know, I’m talking to him his bestest lawyer, she just found out she had lung cancer, there wasn’t any obvious she wasn’t a factory worker, there wasn’t an obvious reason to think there would be an asbestos claim. But I asked him about it. And he said, Sure, we’ll take a look, we’ll see if there’s a claim. And I’m really glad I did that it turned out there was a hell of a claim the asbestos claim will be worth more than 10 times what her PII claim was, just because there was lack of coverage. So we managed to get our PI case settled. And the asbestos case is still ongoing. But I know that the asbestos case is going to make a huge difference in our life. And it will make a difference to our firm as well. We have a we have a referral fee interest in that. So it’s it’s kind of a win win for us and the client. But the thing about this case, that really shook me up, I kept thinking about this moment of serendipity that that I ran into one of the only two asbestos lawyers I know on the planet. And if I would have not taken a two hour lunch, I mean, we just ran from on the sidewalk, if I would have not walked to the office that day, if I would have had one more iced tea, if I would have taken a different route back to my office, I would have never intended the sky. And I hate to say it, but I would not have caught this asbestos case. It was just the dumb luck that I ran into one of the only two asbestos lawyers I know. And I thought about like if that hadn’t happened, what a different outcome. It would be for my client, our firm to but especially our client, and I gotta say that really shook me up. It made me think well, you know, I got really lucky here that we found this case for this very deserving client. But I thought, What could we be missing. And in the weeks that followed, I went back through my case list for some of my active cases, in cases we’d recently closed. And I don’t do much estate planning, but I did an estate plan for Lady and I looked back at my questionnaire. And she mentioned she had non Hodgkins lymphoma. And I remembered when I talked to her, she did a lot of gardening. And we found that she had a roundup of case that we could refer, I had a motorcycle accident for a veteran called me that hearing loss. We send them a three MK site and I found another asbestos case just in a few weeks, just because I made myself take a step back and really look at the whole board and try to see if there was a case beyond the one that we were hired to address where the client may have additional leads. And in each of those I don’t know. I mean, I think most lawyers are aware of this in most jurisdictions. As a personal injury lawyer, a lot of my cases come from other lawyers, who will give me a car accident case to handle maybe there’ll be co counsel, and then I’ll pay them part of my fee. So we refer out medical malpractice, asbestos workers comp, and we handle car accident cases, mostly in house and some other PII cases. But referral fees could be an incredibly useful way to supplement the revenue that you generate practice. So part of this first strategy is really in part related to referral fees. All right, just wanted to kind of backup and break that down. So I guess I would just challenge you to try to look at the whole board and, you know, you got to expect that if someone He comes to us for a divorce case, it may not come up that their aunt has a medical malpractice case. If someone you know has a a DUI, they may never mention that their dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma. But if you slow things down, and they do, the Mesothelioma case, could radically change that family’s life. And it could bring in 300,000 Plus and referral fees to your firm. So I encourage you to try to just slow down a little bit because we all tend to laser focus on the problem we’re hired to solve. Take some time to ask, what else can we do to help? What else is going on in your life? There’s a magic to the phrase, what else? In fact, in the aaj deposition college, one of the things that they stress is using what else instead of anything else? And if you have a really good Starbucks barista, like, if you’re at the drive thru line, they will get you with this. So if they if they say, what else would you like? What else sounds good? Your mind just wanders to like cheese cake pop, let’s do that, you know, but if, if they say do you want anything else? It’s way easier to say no. Anything else defaults to No, what else defaults to searching for an answer. And, you know, it’s still worth asking if you’re a family lawyer, if they need help with an estate plan, because even if you don’t do that, you can be a hub, you can always have the attitude that look, if we can’t help you, we can find someone who can help you. And that can be a way to generate a lot of referrals back to your practice. So then, you know, it’s part of it’s just active listening, or paying attention. I had a case come in to me once, where it’s a sad situation, but a guy’s neighbor’s dog attacked his dog, and they wouldn’t talk to a lawyer about it. They came into my office and his wife was in a massive hard cast. And it never occurred to them to call a lawyer about his wife getting hit by a bus. But they thought about the dog case, clients are crazy, you don’t know what they’re not not going to tell you. So one tool that I developed recently, is this legal needs questionnaire. And I think if I have one big idea in this talk for you, it’s this, consider adding like a legal needs questionnaire, to your intake process or right after your intake process. I’m part of a general practice firm in central Illinois, I have partners who are great at several different areas of law. And so the top part of my questionnaire is mostly geared to see if I can find, you know, criminal work for my partner. And my partner is Andrew, Andrew and Courtney or an adoption case for my partner drew or other work other people in our firm. So I asked if there’s anything apart from what brought you and that you need help with. Now, the bottom half is all like mass tort cases, asbestos cases, cases that we could refer out, and cases that might come up in an industrial town like ours, and cases that honestly might not be on our client’s radar, like, we have found several asbestos related referrals from people who smoked and work in the factory, and they blame their lung cancer just on being a smoker, and then we’re able to maybe recover, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars for their family, that wasn’t at all on their radar. So and when you do that, for someone’s family, it can make a huge difference, especially when, with all the stress they’re going through related to their, their health issues. An example of my questionnaire at this website that please download it, adapt it, maybe it’s part of your intake packet, maybe it’s just a discussion you have with your client, you have like a staff person call to see if there’s anything else going on. And I’ve used it twice in the last week or so with new clients. And one they identified that they also need in the state plan. So I found some work for a partner, and then another something similar med mal case and we found a lung cancer referral case. And they also needed an adoption case that I’m gonna be able to refer to a referral partner of mine. So it really it cost nothing to give this to your clients. There’s there’s no added cost, and it may generate some added value. Now, I guess one other thing I should mention, I think a lot of folks may reasonably say, Well, what if I get a Parkinson’s paraquat case, I don’t know what the hell to do with that there is a great resource in the maximum law space, the maximum referrals page. So if you have a case you don’t know what to do with, I’d encourage you to visit that because you can find a lawyer to help you. The kind of second topic I wanted to go over with you is how you could really focus on the ways that you and your clients can generate value for each other. And there are probably three primary ways your existing clients may need you again, they can also be a source of referrals of their friends, family, their network, and they can also give you reviews. So in the spirit of trying to generate more revenue from your existing books of business, these are kind of the most logical ways. I’ve been part of the Maxwell guild since its inception. And I adore Jim hacking. I think he’s changed my life and the way that he thinks about marketing was so eye opening for me. And then countless guild calls and and hot seats. Jim would say the same thing to people. He would tell them to get their list together. And then the thing about the way he uses his list though, he’s authentic, and he’s as likable as anyone could ever be. And he’s true to himself. And you know, the way he conducts himself just makes people like In all the more so I would encourage you to follow Jim’s first principle, get your list together, and then use it in a way that you’re not being a stuffy lawyer that you’re letting people in letting them know you and who you are, and be memorable. I use a newsletter, I send out a monthly newsletter, I have pictures of I have a goofy looking like ugly old dog with a tuft of white hair that his like dog groomer dies, all different colors. I’ve lots of pictures of like with my kids playing with Legos. And since I’ve started doing it, I usually have a legal tip or a free thing or something. And I highlight my partner’s wins and, but since I started doing it, I’m getting a lot more repeat calls, I’m getting a lot more referral business from past clients. It’s just the way to stay on people’s mind. We’re starting a new newsletter for our firm and one of the things we’re gonna do there is ask for a net promoter score, how likely are you to refer our firm to your friends and family and the people who give us a high rating, we can follow up and ask for review. So that’s another useful way to you can use your list. One thing I learned from Morris Lilienthal, who was so smart, one of the great things about the Maxwell guild is we’ll just call other people for help. Moe is in a general practice firm. He does PII. And he’s adding like all their firm’s practice areas to their business cards to their emails, because if a lawyer does your Will you think of that firms and estate planning firm, if they handle a traffic ticket, you might think of the whole firm as a traffic firm. And we’re going to adopt that as well in hopes that we can generate more work for our partners from our existing clients who may be thinking of us for only one thing, and we do lots of things. I wanted to share another resource. I was thrilled John Fisher can make it here. After getting an enormous verdict, John, in terms of getting reviews from clients, the best thing I’ve ever read on this topic, is a newsletter that John sent out. And if you I have a link, there’s a short link to it here. I also have a link to it on that Resources page I mentioned. If you want to like a best like five minute read for how to get lots of reviews, I would highly recommend you go with John’s approach there. One other thing that John mentioned that really helped me was streaking and I’d been stricken by every single day ask for a review. And that helped me I wanted to get to 100 reviews and both of my kind of locations. I asked review every day and it really helped me get there

Becca Eberhart
is that Python is back if you’re new around here this app Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology so that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max law events.com. I

Speaker 3
mentioned earlier the importance of being a hub for referrals. So even if your client or past client or current client comes to you with a need if it’s not something you do, you can build a big network of other professionals and you can take care of your clients by getting to the right people. And they that’s one thing they call on us for I was referred a PI case by a friend of mine a lawyer named Brian Garwood in Peoria, I’m sorry, in Bloomington and his client told me that she doesn’t sign anything without talking to Mr. Garwood. And I mean, what a blessing to have a client who thinks that highly of him, I mean, my dress, she may drive a little crazy at times. But that’s one way we can really help people and serve people is letting them know who they can trust to work with Jordan Ostroff, who’s always in a Hawaiian shirt, and always helpful and funny and kind, and built out this incredible spreadsheet of different professions that you can use for building a referral network. And he gave one of the best mac saw talks I’ve ever heard a few years ago called running a referral based practice. So I would encourage you to watch that and ask Jordan for a copy of his spreadsheet, which he’s very likely to just give you and start filling it out. You’ll be able to better refer your clients other people and get referrals back from it wouldn’t tell you one other story. It’s kind of related. It’s also about another just fortunate kind of moment of serendipity bit of good luck. I was settling two different cases around the same time. One of the cases was for lady who had had a really hard life and like hardly anything was going right for my staff really liked her. I really liked her she was hit by a driver insured by Country Financial, which is one of the best carriers we see in central Illinois. And she had terrible coverage. She had like a substandard carrier. That’s awful to work with. And fortunately, we were able to get a good settlement the at fault drivers carrier because it was a good company to work with. At the same time. I’m suddenly another case for a lady’s really got our act together, who happens to be the office manager for a country financial agent. And even though you know I can miss a lot of things when I’m working on settling these two cases. At the same time. It was really clear to me that the first client had terrible coverage and the second client could help her. So I talked to the first client I say why don’t we give country a little bit of their money back and get you better insurance to protect you and your family. And she thought that sounded fine. How After I’d just given her a big check, so she could afford to buy insurance. So I made that connection. And I’m really glad I did. Because like six weeks later, the first clients driving and an uninsured driver blows the light and T boned her. And she ended up having a policy limits case. So if we hadn’t made that connection, she would have had, at most 25,000 of coverage available, but she had 100 of coverage available. So we got her medical bills paid, we’re able to get her a nice settlement, and do her a lot of good because of dumb luck, because I just happened to be suddenly these two cases at the same time, okay. And it worked out for just fortunate timing, I would not have thought about it. But that again, kind of shook me up, I’m like, Well, I don’t want to miss this in the future. So the third tip I have for you, I think can apply across all practice areas. And that is when you have one of these like serendipitous moments, deconstruct it, and see if this way you can build a system around it. So what happened here we had a client with bad coverage, we were paying her a lot of money, and she wanted to be able to protect herself and her family. So in this example, we had, we just had good timing that we got our coverage like six weeks before she really needed it, it benefited her and her family, it benefited our firm, we had a $33,000 fee instead of an $8,000 fee. It also created a referral partnership with that country financial agent that we sent her to She subsequently sent me a great case and you know, it’s a good carrier, we know that she’ll be treated right. So how do we systematize that. So my staff went through my client list, and we flagged all of our clients with terrible insurance and low limits, and we’re going to send a letter we’re going to try to like intervene earlier with a lot of the folks have bad coverage, we know they’re not going to be able to magically have a bunch of money to get better coverage. So we’re going to make another moment, at the end of our case, we’re paying our clients to take another swing trying to connect them with a better carrier, so they can protect their family. But I think this kind of idea of trying to build a system whenever something really fortunate happens, can apply across practice areas. So like if you’re a family lawyer, when your divorce is done, your client may need an estate plan. So it can be you know, maybe you add a state planning like Elise’s to your service offerings, you may have a client come to you for an expungement maybe, because they realize it’s as soon as they could apply for it. So maybe you think, Gee, why don’t I have like a law clerk go through my inventory of past cases, find the offenses that can be expunged, and create a calendar for when we should send people a letter, like you can build systems around these just fortunate moments. And that can be a great way to generate a lot more revenue from your existing clients. So I guess in closing, I’ll just say that the three tips I have for you for trying to generate more money from your existing book. And this really has in truth made are like Ross came up with the title for this, he’s next door, about adding six figures to the clients you already have. But it truly has in my practice, just these few little simple things. So try to see the whole board tried to like take the time to find cases you can refer and find cases you can you know, one either for referral fees, or just to make sure your folks are taking care of look for the ways you can maximize the value of those relationships both ways. And then when you have something really fortunate happen, that works out well for you and your client, don’t just write it off to lock, take a step back and try to think of how you can build a system around what happened for your clients. So you can benefit from that in the future. That’s all I’ve got for you. I do have a link to the resources that I mentioned my state planning questionnaire, my like legal needs questionnaire, a link to Jordans talk and John Fisher’s post about reviews. So if any, that’s helpful, please reach out. I’d love to talk to you. Thank you. Happy to take any questions, Jordan

Unknown Speaker
were you.

Speaker 3
So it probably varies a lot by practice area. With the questionnaire, my case manager does a lot of my intake and she has been emailing out the questionnaire. When I sit down with someone in the office, I’ve asked I’ve just put it in front of them. And you know, I don’t know if other lawyers using something like that. But it doesn’t seem that wildly different from when you go to the doctor and you, you know, check no a bunch of times, hopefully on different conditions. So I haven’t had any pushback or clients who’ve felt it was terribly invasive. So I think it’s just whoever, like you do it at different phases in the process. It wouldn’t have to be the intake, but that’s when I’ve done it. So it’s been really whoever signing up the client has handled it.

Speaker 3
I think the best answer would be to have like a one answer. But in truth, I think I’ve been thinking about it in a more adaptive way. Because sometimes the goal is with the injury clients is just to get them signed up, you know, and then to revisit that Later, I think that’s probably what the intake gurus like Falco would probably say is get them signed up and then deal with that later. I think if you’re having a long conversation in your office, and he kind of naturally is like, Well, what else, we just give you this and see if there’s anything else going on, where we may be able to give you a resource to help you. And so that’s how I’ve been doing it. But I think your mileage may vary. A couple of my partners who are here have been sending the questionnaire out with their with their new client intake packets, and I haven’t had any pushback yet with that. So I think just see what works best for you.

Speaker 4
subject matters, you want to actually prefer? Yeah, well, so

Speaker 5
nothing. General thing, specific types of cases that you really want to carry out there and bring you back.

Speaker 3
Okay, so there’s a little bit of a learning curve. Not a great big one, though, when you consider the added value, with no real added overhead to your practice. All right. So like pie cases, it seems like there may be liability, and they’re real damages, and there’s coverage, a PII lawyers going to be happy to send you a third of their fee, or whatever the norm is, in your jurisdiction. For that case, a medical malpractice case, it’s I think, largely driven by damages in most jurisdictions. And you’ve got to find like a network of lawyers, you can refer those to on my personal bias, if you want to refer out medical malpractice cases is there’s a lot of danger. And I think in referring to solos, because if something happens to that guy, a case can come back to you years later, and you don’t know where it is. And it’s with a solo, it’s harder to know that they have the resources to adequately fund the cases. So I tend to try to refer to top tier firms with the benches and vast resources. The other cases, I mean, you could go to like something like the or you’re saying, how do you find the lawyers or fewer the cases? Like, I never would have

Speaker 5
thought of a smoker, and you say you’re talking about?

Speaker 3
Well, I’m in a kind of a blue collar, industrial town. And I mean, I think a lot of this will depend on geography, but in where we are, I mean, the asbestos cases seem to be increasingly expansive. What is become a viable case? And I’ll tell you what the asbestos cases like. I think it almost all the ones we found, it wasn’t on the client’s radar. And we’ve told them, there may be a claim that frankly, sometimes surprised that we can connect them to a lawyer who recovered a lot of money for their family. So I think it’s going to depend on your geography and seeing what other lawyers are in your market and surrounding markets. And the same with mass tort cases. I think that’s kind of geography dependent to Okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer but stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

The post How to Add Six-Figures of Value to Your Practice With the Clients You Already Have 510 appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase using these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Becoming a lawyer is a reality shock transition from school to the office. This is a transition Stephanie, today’s guest, did during the covid years and the reality of a lawyers work was discouraging – in the isolation she felt. So she posted her thoughts and feelings on LinkedIn and the response was incredible. Jim and Tyson talk to Stephanie today about the effects of isolation in the workplace and what we can do as law firm owners to help with that.

Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

3:26 Why become a lawyer? Was law school what you expected?

6:05 The post where Stephanie shares that she’s lost her spark as a lawyer

7:53 Trigger point to raise your hand and say “yes” I’m struggling

11:15 We are all connected but we don’t share the toughest parts of our lives

12:27 I’m struggling more than I lead on – How are you doing now?

14:42 I wonder if it is the profession of being a lawyer that makes you feel lonely?

17:19 What are you looking towards for the future?

18:52 What advice do you have for law firm owners – when they need to figure out who is struggling and what can leadership do to help lawyers who feel isolated

20:45 What can you do to increase connectivity with a virtual office

Jim’s Hack: Time insights from Google – How do you spend your time?

Stephanie’s Tip: Book: Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work: Bill Burnett here.

Tyson’s Tip: Fill Ethic requirements for at the end of the year with Downing Law Group here.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Stephanie:

Linkedin

Resources:

The post When You Feel Like You’ve Lost Your Spark appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

There is one thing that will give you a little more of that freedom that we crave as owners of our firms. And in the pursuit of freedom the secret comes from — customer service! Make it your secret weapon and that will help you get over the mindset of selling your services. Within customer service there are three things that have really helped today’s podcast guest, John Ting. The three topics are: marketing, fees, and delegation. So let’s get started.

2:47 When people keep price shopping

3:37 Retaining their attention

8:18 Have you ever had a potential client ask: “What are you going to do for me?”

10:32 Having transparency with your practice

11:55 All about fees!

16:19 Having a shared email inbox, and what that looks like

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with John:

Resources:

The post Breaking Limiting Mindset: Marketing, Fees & Delegation appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

Building a new business or shifting to a new business model? How do you get started? How can you make the processes easier? How can technology help small law firm owners? In today’s episode Jim and Tyson are talking to Dorna, CEO and founder of Gavel.io, a no-code platform for building document automation and client facing legal products.

Prior to starting Gavel, Dorna was a litigator at Sidley Austin. There in her pro bono practice, she worked with legal aid organizations to build a web application for domestic violence survivors to complete and file their paperwork, which led to the idea for Gavel. And the rest they say – is history.

Listen in.

Episode Highlights:

01:48 Leaving the law firm life

05:10 Tech start up process is a lot like starting your own law firm

06:57 When you might need to build out a system

09:30 Use cases examples — including horse law?

11:40 What most lawyers don’t understand about what is coming …

13:20 The way we work is going to change

15:40 How can technology help small law firm owners disrupt?

18:07 How Dorna spends her days wearing all the different hats

Jim’s Hack: Using an app called Streaks that allows you to put in 24 different things that you want to keep track of daily. You can set up a timer for everything and have fun tracking your progress.

Dorna’s Tip: Have the motto (for your startup) of: think big, start small and iterate rapidly.

Tyson’s Tip: Jason Selk released a new app called Level Up Game Plan that works in your browser to help you learn and implement Jason’s 3 minute and 40 second, cognitive -science-based daily ritual to live a more purposeful life.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.https://youtu.be/MPwCkIDGTw0

Connect with Dorna:

Resources:

Transcript: When You Need To Build Out a System with Dorna Moini

Speaker 1
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson Meatrix. What’s going on Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
You sound very chill brother.

Tyson Mutrux
The last couple episodes you’ve been chilled, got me chill. You know, it’s a good example of the people that you surround yourself with. You kind of take on the same traits. So I’m glad but how you doing? You’re dressed up in a suit right now.

Jim Hacking
Well, I had to get dressed real fast for federal court. I thought I was attending a telephonic hearing and it turned out to be on camera. So I had to put on my YouTube goes,

Tyson Mutrux
you have your back of the door jacket on. So you don’t have the jacket on now, but you did so. Alright, so we’re gonna get started with our guest today. It’s Dorna muine. She is the CEO and founder of gavel gavel.io A No code platform for building document automation and client facing legal products. Prior to starting gabbled Donna was a litigator at Sidley Austin. There in her pro bono practice. She worked with legal aid organizations to build a web application for domestic violence survivors to complete and file their paperwork, which led to the idea for gavel dornod Welcome to the show.

Dorna Moini
Yes, thank you so much for having me, Tyson. And Jim, I love your podcast. So excited to be speaking with you both

Jim Hacking
Dorna you’re sitting there at Sidley in Austin, you’re living the good life, I assume you’re a big time lawyer. And there’s some thought that pops in your mind that things might be different, that you might do something differently. Walk us through that timeframe of your experience.

Dorna Moini
Definitely, I never actually planned on leaving the law firm life and going and starting a legal tech company. I always thought that I would go into the law firm, you know, continue. And I was always thinking about partner track. But I originally went to law school because I wanted to do human rights work. And so even at a law firm, I was doing a lot of pro bono work on the side. And one of the areas of law that I did a lot of pro bono work in at the time when I was at Sidley was domestic violence law. And so I was finding that you know, as a, as a law firm associate, you don’t have as as much time as you’d love to spend on some of your pro bono cases. And I was finding a lot of my time was being spent on the routine and process oriented parts of the case. And I was finding as much time to represent people in hearings, take on their appeals, you know, some of the pieces that technology really can’t handle. And so I really wanted to build an application like a legal app, something sort of like TurboTax, but for domestic violence survivors, so that they could get onto the platform, answer questions, be routed down different paths, and then generate the documents that they needed in their case, and then E file them and you know, potentially talk to an attorney about it afterwards. So I’m not a technical person by background, I’m not an engineer. And so what I did is I got together with a friend of mine, who was an engineer, and I said, Hey, do you want to help me build this tool that I want to build to enhance my practice. And so we did that we built it, we’ve launched it, we actually got a ton of users on the platform, both in the US consumers like consumers, who would just come onto the platform and use it sort of like you would TurboTax, but also within our firm, pro bono attorneys, and with the legal aid organizations that we partnered with. And we got a little bit of press for this domestic violence tool. And what happened was, we started getting all this inbound interest from other lawyers in other jurisdictions wanting to build similar tools. So for example, in the first day that this one article came out about us, there was someone in Malaysia who wanted to build a child support tool, someone in Arkansas wanted to build an eviction defense tool, someone in Canada wanted to build a divorce tool. And they all wanted us to help them build these platforms, because they also didn’t have the technical expertise. And so that was sort of the aha moment for what we started out as called a document. But now it’s called gavel, we rebranded recently, and we wanted to empower legal experts to be able to take their knowledge and turn it into legal products, like online legal software products. And so I always say this in like a sentence, you know, you asked me, What was it like, what was that transition like? And I always just say, oh, and then I started, I went to go do this full time, but it was definitely a very difficult decision. I mean, I’d been working for seven years, you get a steady paycheck at a law firm and I was deciding to go leave and then have my bank account go down every two weeks to pay an engineer instead of up every two weeks. So I figured if I didn’t take the risk, then that I’d never would and I could always go back to the law firm and knock on their door and ask them to Take me back.

Tyson Mutrux
You know, I’ve always wondered what it’s like to like, do a startup, right. And someone posted the other day about like Bayes when you start a law firm. Yeah, it’s a startup. But I actually really wouldn’t know. It’s like, like a tech startup like, what it’s like. So what is that process? Like? Do you take on money from angel investors, all that kind of like, really walk it? Like, tell me about that stuff? Cuz I’m really curious about that stuff.

Dorna Moini
Yeah, definitely. So I mean, I will agree with you that I think a lot of people underestimate how much starting a law firm is very much starting a startup as well. But what struck me first, when I started, this legal tech company, was just honestly how little I knew, and how many different functions there were to be filled. So the engineering piece is very clear. You know, I didn’t have any technical background, and I was now managing at first, you know, one engineer at first, and that was growing, but I was doing this in an area that I wasn’t an expert in. Whereas I think in a law firm, you know, everything that everyone who’s junior to, you knows. So that was something that managing people who have a different technical expertise or a different expertise, or have more knowledge in an area than you do, that was definitely a learning curve. And then I just was wearing lots of different hats, you know, like product marketing, sales, and learning all about that, in terms of, you know, you asked like investment, so I decided not to take investment at the in the very early days, but rather sort of just paid my one or two engineers at the very beginning to build out of my savings. Obviously, that’s always ends up being a personal decision as to how much ownership you want to give up versus going the venture route early on. But once we actually had traction, and we had customers and we had a product, that’s when we decided to take on some funding. So we took on some seed funding. And that was probably about a year after we started. And then we raised a little bit more from some investors last year to Dorna.

Jim Hacking
What’s like the typical case use? Like when do people come together? Like what would be the signs that a lawyer who has built out some systems might start thinking about working with gaveau?

Dorna Moini
Yeah, so I would actually put them into three different buckets. One is internal use. So and this is probably most attorneys could use gavel for internal use. So you have process or document automate, basically, document automation, you have documents or process that you want to automate. And you need a tool that is both easy to use. And that you can set up yourself if you want to, and that is robust, and gives you the full functionality of adding all kinds of logic into your documents. So that’s the way that usually people get in the door. And it really applies to so many areas of law. But I would say the ones that we see most frequently our state planning, family, real estate, anything corporate, anything really transactional. So we see a lot of people coming in and not even making a client facing yet. That’s the first way. Second is you want to use it in some form of client facing way. So maybe you are doing client intake through the platform, but then you’re still generating the work product on your end by and not not showing the client that that’s the full work stream. So you send out a link to a gobble workflow, for example, clients fill out their information, data comes back to you, you press the button, your initial version of your documents are generated. And then the third bucket, which is what we are most excited about, and we really think is the future of legal services is taking your expertise and turning it into something that you can actually provide to members of the public and scale out your own practice. And that’s where we see a lot of attorneys on our platform, generating much more revenue than they would have been able to if they were operating on the billable hour model because they’re able to build something which takes a lot of upfront work and a lot of their expertise and building that all out into the system. But then they can charge in different ways. They can charge a flat fee, subscription fees, pay per use fees, and that allows their practice to scale a lot faster than needing to be there for every single billable hour. And I can give you some examples of that. If you’re curious on, you know, what are some people actually doing out in the field?

Tyson Mutrux
I would actually I would love to hear that. I’m on your website. Your website is beautiful. By the way. It’s a really cool website. And like there was like I went on to a new page and there’s like, like streamers and stuff or whatever that was it was really cool. Oh,

Dorna Moini
that’s because of the rebrand. So we just recently rebranded to gavel and so we are throwing out confetti to celebrate that rebrand.

Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. Let’s hear some of those use cases, though. I am curious about that.

Dorna Moini
Yeah. So in terms of that third bucket, you know, the legal products, which is taking your legal services and turning it into an online legal legal service. It’s been estimated that in the next 10 years, about 90% of legal services are going to be delivered online in some way. And so we see gavel is really being the infrastructure for enabling lawyers to interact with their clients in that business model. And a few it can be it really runs the gamut. meant in terms of who your customer could be. So we have consumer use cases, we have small and medium sized businesses as the end user, meaning the lawyers serving small, medium sized businesses, and we have lawyers who are serving enterprise customers. So in that first bucket, maybe there are a few that some people might be familiar with a company called landlord legal a company called Hello, divorce, another one that I love called horse law. And they basically have built TurboTax. But for those particular areas of law on gamble, so landlord legal is a tool for landlords who have residential property agreements that they need to provide. And they provide on a subscription basis, hello, divorce as a divorce platform that they provide through the technology piece on the back end, through gavel. And then there is horse law, which is actually, I always find it cool when you have these areas of law that I never even knew existed, but they facilitate buying and selling horses. And so they have a platform that they’ve built for that purpose as well. And then in SMB, and enterprise, we have a customer, just tech who is creating data breach reporting tools for SMB, and they’ve created an automated tool to serve their customers. And then we have another customer, LCN, legal who is doing transfer pricing, also another area of law that I’d never heard of, until interacting with them, but they serve large corporations, big law firms and accounting firms. So really limitless what you can build.

Jim Hacking
We’re lucky in maximum lawyer that a lot of our members are forward looking, I don’t think enough of us are forward looking enough. But I would love to hear, what do you think Dorna. Most lawyers don’t understand about what’s coming. I think

Dorna Moini
that a lot of lawyers, especially, I think this happens more at larger firms, they are stuck with something that is working right now. And they don’t think as much about how rapidly the consumer expectations are developing. And so one of those is how much human to human interaction live human to human interaction people need. So I think people, a lot of the lawyers I speak with, they want to keep that personal touch with their customers. And they’re trying to figure out a way to do that. And it doesn’t always necessarily have to be that you have them come into your office, and you provide them that kind of full service. But a lot of times they want to have an online tool, but they want to be they want to feel empowered. So they want to actually feel like they’re part of the process. So they don’t necessarily want you to do everything for them. But they actually want you to facilitate their learning about what the legal process is, so that they feel like they’re educated. But you’ve also helped them out with that. And I think a lot of that can be done through online platforms and making legal services more digitally convenient, as opposed to always needing that to be in person

Tyson Mutrux
I think you’ve made a really good point there. Ryan McCain is a buddy of ours, he had a LinkedIn post not too long ago, and he talked about how Amazon has changed things and how we’ve been conditioned for the last two decades now more than that. So like things like come in two days. So people want things right away. And so the change in the mindset over the last two decades plus has been quite stark. So I do want to talk about more about the future of law. Like there is a lot of fear. I think when it comes to like estate planning attorneys and a lot of document driven law firms like that they may get replaced. And I don’t necessarily believe that that’s true. But I do think that the way we work is going to change drastically over the next five years drastically. Absolutely drastically. But I just wonder what your thoughts are if you can expand a little bit more on what you were talking about?

Dorna Moini
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think a lot of people think of these changes and the introduction of automation and technology as being a threat. But I would really challenge them to think about it as more of an opportunity. There is I think that stat is that 92% of Americans don’t have access to legal services that they critically need. That’s the you know, what we call the access to justice gap, there is actually a lot of opportunity in that access to justice gap for attorneys who are generating revenue and building profit, creating firms, not just legal aid organizations. And I think that comes from changing our business model. In the same way that you know, Amazon came on and is providing all sorts of products online at a lower cost than you may have been able to provide them before, but they’re generating so much revenue on scale. Attorneys can do the same instead of thinking about the billable hour as the be all end all for how you bill. If you think about these other models of pricing, you can use automation to your advantage and actually scale out your practice much more. So I think there’s a lot of fear, but there’s a lot of opportunity that people aren’t thinking about when they strike that fear

Becca Eberhart
is that Python is back if you’re new around here this app Athan Is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event, we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher. To bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology. So that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin. Join the guild today and grab your ticket at max law events.com.

Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Our guest today is Donna Marini. She’s the CEO and founder of what was document which is now gavel, let’s flip that on its head. How can technology help small law firm owners compete with the big plotting firms that you came from? Like how is life right now for big law? And how are we as lawyers who ever own shops able to disrupt?

Dorna Moini
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it comes down to scale. Again, like when I was at a big firm, I worked for there for about seven years, when I first came in, I remember, we could put anything on a bill and clients would pay for it, that has changed drastically, clients are pushing back, they want more work done for less money, pricing is becoming a lot more transparent, except for maybe bet the company litigation or like a really huge transaction. It’s less about the brand of the firm, who you’re hiring, and more about actually doing your due diligence on what the quality of service you’re going to get is. And so I know that a lot of people I speak with at least in the business community, they are wanting to find firms who are operating in an efficient way who are using technology in their practice, and who are going to provide them a long term scalable solution. And so I think that provides a huge opportunity for smaller firms to compete with the bigger firms.

Tyson Mutrux
Do you think that any of these specific legal industries will be completely disrupted? Like, for example, when it comes to case law research, like our companies like Westlaw and Lexus, are they in real trouble? Because I mean, to me, I feel like those are the companies that may get cannibalized?

Dorna Moini
Yeah, definitely, I don’t know as much about the legal research space. But from what I’ve seen, it does seem like there are a lot of tools that are coming out. And that’s the one space where it seems like aI maybe has the most potential, I’m not one of those people who’s like, Oh, my God, AI is going to take over all of the legal of the legal world. And I’m I’m pretty skeptical person in general. But I would say that legal research feels like it’s one of those places where there are some tools that are actually making an impact and are helping Lawyers operate a lot more efficiently. And so some of those tech companies I think are going to be put a, you know, maybe not put out of business, but at least had their market share reduced or are going to need to think differently about their business models. And but I again, I feel like the on the attorney side, it just provides another opportunity to build differently to serve more clients to practice at the top of your license.

Jim Hacking
How do you spend your days? How do you prioritize? How do you balance all the things that you got going on during?

Dorna Moini
Yeah, that’s a good question. I wear so many hats right now, within my business. And so a lot of my time is spent as our team is growing, a lot of my time is spent with my team, and really just managing the different functional leaders in our, in our organization to help us grow, we are doing a lot on the product side we are we’re basically basically release new features, at least every two weeks, sometimes much more, we’re moving towards even more. And so a lot of my time is spent talking to customers planning out product, and then putting that into action with our engineering team. And really understanding what the landscape is that lawyers want to see inside of our platform.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s awesome. I love that. All right. So we are approaching our time on this. So I do want to begin to wrap things up before I do want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. It’s free to join there are over 6000 Law Firm owners join us there just a lot of great information being shared every day. If you want a more high level conversation, join us in the guild go to max law guild.com That’s Max law. guild.com. And while you’re listening to our tips and our hacks of the week, please give us a five star review helps us spread love. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week

Jim Hacking
when you and I were doing 75 hard, it came with a great app and I thought the app was great at keeping track and for accountability purposes. And when I finished 75 hard I sort of missed that but I found an app called streaks that allows you to put in 24 different things that you want to keep track of and you can keep track if there’s something you want to do daily something you want to do every day of the week. Something you want to do once a week you can set up the timer for it and everything and the app gives you that little red.at the start of each day of how many things you have to do that day and as you do them that number goes down and then you know does little dancey you know little light UPS when you finish one section or all your stuff so it’s called streaks it’s on the iPhone. I don’t know if it’s on Android, but I really I have enjoyed using it every day.

Tyson Mutrux
You do like that app, you talked about that quite a bit. So very cool. I have not looked at it, it seems like it’s very gamified, which is good. So that’s very cool. Hi, Donna, we warned you that we’re going to ask for a tip or a hack of the week for everyone. And so what is your tip or hack of the week?

Dorna Moini
Yes. So mine is sort of more of a statement or a motto, and it relates to legal product zation. So I think a lot of times when people are thinking about building, either a new business, or a new business model or a legal product, toughest part is how do I get started. And so I would say think big, start small and iterate rapidly. And that applies also to the startup world. So think big, have a really big vision for what you want to build and think several, many, many years out as to what you want it to become. But when you start out, start with something small. So start with one audience, one jurisdiction one very specific area of law if it’s if it’s illegal products, and really master and perfect that so you can get feedback. And then finally, iterate rapidly. Because once you get that feedback, you will make modifications and changes to make it fit and become successful. And that will help you to your vision of making it this much larger scale project.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. That’s really good stuff. For my tip of the week. I’m gonna since I changed mine, because Jim gave one that’s similar to 75 hearts, so I figured I would at least give people an option. And because that’s because of our buddy Jason Selke. I feel like we’ve like Jason selfies, like, become like the new Ryan McCain, even though we mentioned Ryan McCain on the episode again today. But he’s become like Ryan McCain mentioned quite a bit, but he does have a new app called level up out and I don’t I actually don’t know if this is out to the public, I think you may have to actually contact his office to get this. I’m not 100% Sure. But I know I got an email about it. And it’s called level up. It’s very similar to what suddenly five heart is it’s very similar to what Jim is talking about. And actually I found the websites Level Up game plan.com, level up game plan.com. And it’s very similar II can be used on an iPhone or an Android, I do know that it’s done through the website, very similar to the way file by NAS where it’s not necessarily an app, it’s done through the browser. So level up if you want some sort of app to help you stay motivated and keep you focused. Those are a couple of apps for you. Dorna thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. It’s different having someone that’s not a law firm owner coming out, but it’s really cool. Seeing what you’re doing. The websites really needs. It looks like the stuff that you’re doing is awesome. So I recommend that people check it out. Go to gavel.io. But Donna, thank you so much.

Dorna Moini
Thank you so much for having me. Great being here. All right, guys.

Tyson Mutrux
See you don’t know have a great day.

The post When You Need To Build Out a System with Dorna Moini appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

After outsourcing her SEO and digital marketing for seven years, Billie Tarascio, founder of My Modern Law, decided — never again, it wasn’t working for her law firm and her numbers proved it.

It’s really hard to know if what you’re paying for digital marketing is actually bringing you business. You’ll get impressions, you’ll get page rank, you’ll get subscribers. You can look at it to see how your social media is doing. You might see which keywords you’re ranking for, but being able to say that your marketing is working for you is two different things.

As in Billie’s case — while her social following number was climbing — her lead numbers were going down. That’s when she decided to bring her marketing in house and really focus on 5 key areas to move that lead number.

Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

01:39 Look at your leads

04:25 The 5 new marketing areas that Billie is focusing on

➡ TikTok – cons you need to post 4-6 videos a day

➡ Pro Bono Day – con getting lawyers to show up

➡ Free Facebook Group – con harder to grow, pay to manage

➡ Meetups – con

➡ Online events –

➡ Podcast – build referral network

11:58 Branding photo – think of your visuals is a key strategy

14:18 What are your KPI’s?!

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Billie:

Resources:

Transcript:

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear Billy tercio as we share her talk, bringing your marketing in house, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Billie Tarascio
First, before I get started, don’t go fire your SEO company. I love SEO companies. A lot of this was my fault, okay. But after outsourcing our SEO and digital marketing for about seven years, we decided never again, it wasn’t working for us, we wanted to bring it in house. And again, remember, a lot of this is because I am a problem client. One of the hardest things about digital marketing is figuring out whether or not it’s working. It’s just really hard to know if what you’re paying for is actually bringing you business. So many times you’ll get impressions, you’ll get PageRank, you’ll get maybe subscribers, you can look at to see how your social media is doing, you might see which keywords you’re ranking for. But being able to say, and that’s working is two different things. For me, there was a disconnect between the reports I was getting, and whether or not it was working. So in Quantique, one T one, January 2021, is when we decided no more. And here’s how I decided I looked at my leads, and I hadn’t been looking at my leads I had been spending many of you know, I had been spending a lot of time looking at my intake numbers, my conversion numbers, and my leads didn’t matter, because I was optimizing my conversion numbers. And that worked really well. So even though my leads numbers were doing this, my profit numbers were doing this. So it did not matter. So wherever you’re at in your journey, you may not be exactly where I’m at, you may not be ready to focus on getting more leads if you have not already optimized your intake and conversions. But this is what I found when I got to the end of 2020. And I was like what? How is it that we’ve grown 30% This year, and our leaves are down like that’s, I think that’s it, I think that’s what I need to do. I think I know my digital marketing is not working. That’s what it was. For me. That was my aha moment for I’m not outsourcing this anymore. But this is what happened to my consultations, which is why I couldn’t tell my consultations looked good. And this is what happened to my number of clients. Oh, they cut off. So you can’t Oh, no, there, they didn’t. So it was 170, then 200, then 231, then 220. And I wasn’t even that concerned about these things because the revenue in the portal was going up. But this is when I decided okay, I’m done. I’m done with digital marketing. I’m done with paying for leads. I’m done with SEO, I’m done with AdWords, I’ve tried it off and on for seven years, it’s never really been my jam, I’ve done paying for leads, I want to invest money in a brand. And in products that create value for my potential clients, and in referrals and in relationships. Because I know that when I spend $5,000 on that stuff this month, it’s going to have value in a year versus me spending $5,000 This month on SEO or leads or AdWords, which won’t provide me value in a year. So I decided it was time for us to focus on brand, community and content, creating value. So today’s talk in 20 minutes, here’s what we’re going to go over hold me to it. We’re going to talk about five new marketing initiatives that we’ve done that we launched since 21. We’re going to talk about branding, and we’re going to talk about our marketing team. And then we’re going to talk about our KPIs that we use for our marketing team. How are we holding ourselves accountable? And what have those results been? First tick tock, oh my gosh, I wish I could spend 20 minutes talking to you about tick tock tick tock is different. You guys tick tock is different. Here’s why. Tick tock puts you in front of your potential clients, not your family and friends. Not the people you already know. That is why tick tock is different. We are getting clients every single month from tick tock tick tock is the most engaged social media platform I’ve ever seen. The other thing that happened I don’t know if you guys know but in 2020 Tic tock went from the seventh most popular website in terms of minutes to number one, bypassing Google. Okay, so tick tock is having a moment that was Facebook in 2003 So if you’re not on Tik Tok truly consider it and I’m gonna go all in I haven’t done paid advertising yet with tick tock and I’m going to you know why tiktoks algorithm is so brilliant. They will put my ads in front of Arizona The divorce clients, I know. So and those numbers are old those numbers are from when I made the presentation. So we have even more followers. And it’s just, it’s amazing. So if you do one thing, consider tick tock cons, you have to post a lot, a lot. Frequency matters. You can’t do a great ad and then expect it to do well, forever. You have to keep feeding tick tock new content. So on my best days are when I really want to grow fast, I have to be posting four to six times a day. And whenever I go on vacation or do something like this, it’s not working. Now I know your mouth is open for 1015 seconds. So I just did one because I hadn’t done one. And I did one for 15 seconds that said, you know mediation tip, create a memo because then you’ll have an outline like you know, that’s it. Okay. So results in engagement is insane. Pro bono day, pro bono days like the opposite, right? If, if tick tock is online, pro bono day is hyperlocal. But I post on tick tock about our pro bono day and we get people from tick tock coming to our pro bowler day, pro bono day is once every two months. And it’s an event we have and it’s free consultation day. So what do we get out of pro bono day? We get clients every single time we get reviews, because that’s the real exchange we asked for. After we’re done meeting with you and giving you free advice or looking at your documents or whatever on your way out. And it’s fun. We’ve got an event, we’ve got something for the kids to be entertained. Like it’s a good time, the energies vibe in the marketing team decorates like it’s a good time. And we always walk away with clients goodwill, and reviews. So in April was the last one we did we had 33 people attend, we had five immediate hires, and we got 22 reviews, the negatives, I’ll tell you right now we’re getting lawyers to show up. That’s the con, it takes lawyers time. But I’ve decided that this is something that’s worth it. And that is mandatory in my office because it creates goodwill, it creates an event we can talk about on all of our social, that is not just me throwing garbage information at people or hey, look at me, look at me, this is an event this is a service. So I get to feel really good about offering it. Facebook group, we have a Facebook group, and Tiktok and pro bono day feed this Facebook group. So we’re creating a community. And the Facebook group is rather new. And it’s got right now how many members there 550. It’s growing, it’s growing a lot. And these are local people who are on there talking about their divorce. We’re trying to provide resources to grow the group, and then invite them to different events, get them engaged, get them to be our promoters. What are the pros, cons and results, it’s been harder to grow than tick tock. It’s not like Facebook puts the group in front of everybody who’s interested in my topic like tick tock does. So the algorithm on tick tock makes things easier than the algorithm on Facebook, which really makes you work. So that way I say is the con also takes time. It takes a lot of time in the Facebook group. And it’s not time that I spend. So that’s another con. And I don’t know that the results are quite as hot as Tiktok or pro bono day in terms of actual clients. So I think it’s a longer term investment. It’s not a quick thing, like the other two things I just talked about. The first two things are quick, hot ways to get clients. We also started a meetup. And the thing is we’re trying to make these things grow and be connected. But this was our very first meetup that we ever did. And it was at the bar downstairs from our office. And oh, there was a white circle around this lady on the outside. Oh, here I have a thing. You see her. She found me on Tik Tok came to pro bono day, did not hire me. But took the strategy went on and got the results she wanted. left a review for us came on my podcast as a guest, and is the biggest fan of modern law. She literally thinks that she won her case and got her outcome because of a half an hour with me a pro bono day. She’s great. She hangs out in the Facebook group talking about how great we are like it’s amazing. So she came these three people, our clients, the street circle people, our clients, and they left connected to each other and more connected to modern law, which is pretty cool. Because people want FaceTime with their lawyer. They like their lawyer, they like our law office a lot. But we’re expensive. So engaging with us is hard and expensive. And if they get to come to a meet up, it gets to be cash and fun. So really great for relationship building for getting those deep promoters. Let’s see, pros cons results. What did I say last online event had 130 registrants Oh, we’ve we’re also doing some online events that are just educational. So reaching out to lawyers and offering free sale lead by offering courses to lawyers and offering courses online to people who just want to know how to represent themselves because a lot of people represent themselves or a lot of people represent themselves for a little while and then stop and then come hire us. So anytime we can offer value. We’re trying to do that. The last of the five is a podcast. We started this podcast, September 2020. And the goal here was to build referral connections. I wanted a reason to To get to know people and connect with people, and I really didn’t want to have start going out for coffees, which I did a lot when I was brand new lawyer like pounding pavement to make network connections, and that’s incredibly effective. But now I’m 41. And I have a little less energy and enthusiasm to do that. So but if you reach out to someone, and you ask them, will you be a guest on my show? They’re gonna say yes. And now you are investing in them. You are creating content for your website and for social media, and you’re creating the ability to have a referral connection. So that was the main point of the podcast, I just checked, we’ve now had over 16,000 downloads, we get about 1000 downloads a month, our clients listen to it, our potential clients listen to it. It’s a way to build brand and expertise. It’s not that simple. It’s not that hard. So the marketing team definitely helps with finding people to be interviewed. I don’t do a lot of prep in the morning, I get a, you know, a blurb from my marketing team about the person that I’m interviewing. And then we just have a chat. I put it on YouTube. It gets edited, it gets uploaded to the podcast, it then becomes social media content and all those things. So I think they’re all worth considering. The first two are really the ones that I would highly recommend you think about

Becca Eberhart
is apathy on his back. If you’re new around here, the ZAP Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event, we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend, Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks, and then use technology. So that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max slot events.com.

Billie Tarascio
All right, let’s talk about branding. We’re gonna move to branding. This was a picture that was taken in at Christmas time, this last year at my house. And this is our team at that time might be missing a couple of people but like what is this picture, say to anyone? Oh, that’s nice of you. She says it’s awesome. I said, it kind of looks like we’re big and hodgepodge. And I was not that impressed. But in March 2022, we did a rebrand. And this is the brand. That’s what I want to convey not that. I mean, you don’t I’m saying, Please tell me you’re with me. It’s just too big. It’s too many people for group shot. This is like, oh my gosh, those are our lawyers. They happen to be all women. I mean, sort of fortuitously, the last male attorney got another job right before we took the picture. And I’m digging it like I’ve never been an all woman firm. And I’m digging it. It’s a cool vibe. And I think that it is the vibe that it is the authentic vibe. So at least talked about being your authentic self, and she’s warm and fuzzy and cuddly. And she does low conflict divorces that protect the children. And I’m not, I’m not, I’m Italian. And this is my vibe. And this is the authentic self that I am. And the law firm is a litigation firm. And we’re sort of badass like, that’s the truth. So I put this quote on there because it came in from one of our clients during an NPS collection feedback. And this person said, I love how it’s Italian family mafia style, because I’m Italian, and my grandma’s family’s from Italy. And I just feel confident when I have modern law on my side. And that’s the branding I want. So taking a minute to think about your visuals in this very visual society is probably a good idea and to look at your headshots and your photos and say is my brand onpoint is it now connecting with my target audience. This is our marketing team. These are the full time people on our marketing team sort of we have another intake person. And then we have other contractors that help. But it’s a digital marketing person, its events and referral coordinator, and then a client advocate. So I told you last year that we call our intake team now client advocates, and their job has to do with a few things basically start to finish on that client journey. Sarah is here. She’s our marketing director now. Hey, and that’s kind of what it takes to pull off all of these different initiatives. What are our KPIs? We are looking at the number of leads we’re getting each month. Honestly, marketing is about creating leads, we define leads as people with a problem in Arizona, that is family law. So as long as they’re in our jurisdiction, and they have our area of law, their leads, and we so we’re looking at that we’re looking at how many people attended consultations paid consultations, because the marketing team and the client advocates can’t really be responsible for the conversion rates of the lawyers, or the capacity of the lawyers to take on new clients. That’s why we pick that KPI and the number of reviews that we get. It’s really the job of the marketing team to get reviews in all these different in our five different locations, which you guys will remember probably from last year, so what have the results been? So this is just 2021 and 2022. The red is liens, the light blue is the scheduled concentrations. So that has gone up a lot, even more so than just the lead. So our intake team you can see from this is just rocking, the attended is the blue, and that was about the same. And then the yellow on the top is reviews. So we’ve really gotten quite a few more reviews. And the other thing that we do is we have a group bonus system. So when our marketing team hits these KPIs as a group, everybody in that group bonuses, so we’re all working towards getting the same things. And the team that bonuses is not just these people, it’s also well, it’s probably a total of five or six different people in the firm who all do just different things that touch marketing. So that’s what I did it in, like 15 minutes. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah. Yes, I would love to. So pro bono day is set up. We do have people register in advance, but we don’t take appointments, because people don’t show up. You can register in advance, you show up, you then wait until the next lawyer is available to meet with you. There’s usually six lawyers in all in different rooms. And it’s just such a good time. Like there’s a lot of people there. People are chatting with each other. There’s a lot of people from our team there. They’ve got, you know, they’re just it’s really festive, and it’s really fun. And then they come in and they have about a half an hour with somebody and then they leave and on their way out. They are asked to leave a review. And they do and that’s how we do it. Yes.

Speaker 4
Are you mostly or exclusively doing like legal videos? Are

Unknown Speaker
you also doing kind of like the trending?

Billie Tarascio
I so glad you asked that. Okay, so if I didn’t say this already, the one of the awesomest things about tick tock is because the engagement is so high, you get to test and you get feedback immediately. So when I started tick tock, I took my most popular YouTube video, cut it down and put it on tick tock. And like within 24 hours, there were more comments and more likes than I’ve ever gotten on YouTube. So you can test it and I have trends don’t work for me. I’ve tried some of them. They don’t work. That is not what my audience likes. My audience wants content and you know what they really want. They want high conflict, divorce custody, case content, and my audience on Tik Tok is more female than in any other area. So it every other areas closer to equal and on tick tock. It’s basically women who are in custody battles with narcissists, but those are great cases. So we’re not sad, and we keep making content that they like, yes.

Speaker 5
Like what you evaluated when you implemented it, maybe a brief roadmap on how you

Billie Tarascio
process them. Okay, so that might be difficult. I have been talking about KPIs on stages like this since 2015. What are the main KPIs for law firms in general? So in each area, how did we start? We started with revenue, certainly intake, what’s our conversion rate look like? How many leads are we getting? Are we converting the right number? We measure it from whatever system is. So first, you identify the KPI you want, you know, what is your biggest problem in your firm? And how will you measure whether or not you’ll move that forward? Let’s talk more because this is new. Yeah. Any other Yes?

Unknown Speaker
Facebook page? Yes.

Billie Tarascio
Great question. Yes, they’re very different. So the page is like a business card. Really, you know, you post updates. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares. I’m going to stop doing what nobody cares about. That’s another thing that I’ve committed to doing. It’s like, why are we feeding machines that don’t that aren’t feeding us back? So the group is totally different groups are now I think, where people are spending time on Facebook, and maybe your partisan groups like there’s a go Gilbert group, and there’s a buy and sell group. And there’s groups where people hang out and they’re they can be private or public and they talk to one another and their communities. And that’s not like our pages at all. So our facebook group page is set up as a private page. How did we attract people we asked our law firm to invite people we posted about it on Tik Tok and in our newsletter, Sarah is our community events person and she just promotes it. But there is an expert here that we’re hoping to talk to that. What’s her name? Liz, Liz, we’re going to talk to Liz so you should probably talk to Liz to any other questions. Yeah. Advice. Oh, that’s a really hard question. Everybody’s giving legal advice on the Facebook group. Everybody’s giving legal advice everywhere. All of the ladies on Tik Tok, that are telling people what the law says and what it means and like that’s the real world we live in. So So, what’s the line between advice and information? What do I do? I try to say, hey, you should consider or have you thought about or we might talk about blah, blah, blah. So I don’t know, an ethics attorney would probably say across the line, but this is the world we live in, like, so I’m interacting with people. I’m answering their questions. I’m giving them the content they want, and that is why they’re hiring us and the content that they want include specific information, and it’s not specific to their case, but it’s specific to their scenario. So people will ask you questions on Tik Tok, like, my baby daddy lives out of state and I have a one year old is a judge going to make my one year old fly to go see the baby daddy. So that’s a very, like a good example of the question that I’ll get on Tiktok and I’ll answer it hey, here’s what I see judges do in Maricopa County, and I’m specific also about Maricopa County. So I’m talking about, you know, some family law attorneys talking about things very, very broad. I’m answering specific questions about what I see happening in Maricopa County with judges in Maricopa County. Thank you all very much.

The post Bringing Your Marketing In House appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

Today, we are combining forces with another terrific legal podcast, Everything Except the Law, with host Nick Werker, who is interviewing Jim and Tyson! In this episode we’re going to be learning all about the origins of Maximum Lawyer, and of course Jim and Tyson will be sharing some of their top law office management tips.

From:

➡ The headaches and heartaches that happen when starting your firm

➡The biggest financial mistake that lawyer make

➡Most common lawyer marketing mistake

➡The most valuable thing you learn from another lawyer

➡What is on the horizon and is the future of law

We have a lot to cover, so let’s get right into it

Episode Highlights:

01:10 Meet Jim and his starting point for building his law firm

02:55 Meet Tyson and his starting point for building his law firm

04:30 Starting Maximum Lawyer – talking about the headaches, heartaches when starting your law firm

07:30 Running a free Maximum Lawyer facebook group

10:16 Interactions with other lawyers on the podcast #yikes!

13:38 The biggest financial mistake that a lawyer can make

16:28 Most common lawyer marketing mistake, that is the most frustrating thing see

18:16 The most valuable thing you learn from another lawyer in Maximum Lawyer

20:15 What is on the horizon — the future of law

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect With Answering Legal:

Resources:

Transcript: The Most Valuable Thing You’ll Learn From Another Lawyer

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Unknown Speaker
Hey everyone, welcome back to answering legals everything except the law podcast. I am your host, Nick worker. If this is your first time tuning in, this is the podcast where we share expert advice on all the parts of running a law firm that attorneys weren’t exactly trained for back in law school. Now today, we’ll be combining forces with another terrific legal podcast as we welcome to or the two creators of the maximum lawyer, attorneys, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. In this episode, we’re going to be learning all about the origins of maximum lawyer. And of course, we’ll be asking Jim and Tyson to share some of their top law office management tips. We have a lot to cover, so I gotta get right into it. Thank you both for joining us today. Can you tell our audience a little bit about your individual law careers, and also how you got to know each other.

Jim Hacking
So my name is Jim hacking. I’m an immigration lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been practicing law. It’ll be 25 years this October. And I was a general practice commercial litigator for two years. And then I was a maritime lawyer for eight years or so then I’m practicing immigration law for 15 years. So my wife is originally from Egypt, we met in law school, she moved to the States when she was seven. And after law school, I changed my religion, I converted to Islam, and the Muslims were always asking me to help them with immigration matters. And I would always try to refer them to other immigration lawyers, those immigration lawyers would tell me they were too busy, not to send them any more cases, I thought that would be a good problem to have. And I wanted to have my own firm. So I went to my wife when we had two and a half kids. And she’s and I said, I really, really want to open my own firm. It’s been my lifelong dream. And she said, funny, that’s interesting, because we’ve known each other for 10 years. And you’ve never told me that. So she wanted me to do a binder and come up with a plan to like what the offer was gonna look like. So I worked on that for about seven months, which I never actually used. I just did it to make her happy so that she’d let me open the law firm, we open the law firm, and I thought I would do all kinds of law for immigrants like car accidents for immigrants, wills for immigrants, and then learn immigration for immigrants. But it became clear pretty quickly that the need was really with immigration. So in 2012, we started focusing exclusively on immigration. And then, around that time, I was teaching a class at St. Louis University School of Law on law practice management. I was asked to teach at one summer because the regular professor was out for the summer and, and that’s where I’m at Tyson.

Unknown Speaker
I love the idea of two and a half kids, like I know what you mean, but two and a half kids.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s a good segue. So my career was a little bit different than Jimmy’s. So I knew the second semester of law school that I wanted to try cases. So I also knew that I wanted to open my own firm at some point. But I had worked for a volume injury firm in St. Louis. And that abruptly ended one day. And so I started my firm a little bit earlier than what I had planned. And I started doing Criminal Defense and Personal Injury, criminal defense, just because I had to pay some bills. And then personal injury because it was what I was used to what I knew I knew some of that criminal offense because one of the partners at the firm I work for he did criminal defense. And so I learned a little bit. And so I was able to do that for did that until about 2017 2018. And then I gave up on that just because I just wanted to focus on personal injury. And it’s one of the things we’re similar to Jim, I’ve had a partner for no longer partners, but I’ve done the whole partnership thing didn’t work out wasn’t for me. And then I’d say over the last five, six years, we’ve seen probably the best growth I’ve seen since I’ve started my firm and it was 2011. Whenever I first started that firm, it’s been exponential growth has been just, I’ve seen more growth than what I expected. It’s kind of crazy once you start focusing on one practice area and one practice area only, which I’m sure Jim has experienced the same thing that once you’ve niched down, things change quite a bit for your firm.

Unknown Speaker
I think it comes out next week, I had a conversation with Chris Dreyer about niching down your firm and how you think like, oh, it’s gonna be I’m gonna get less work. And but it’s not necessarily the case. If you’re an expert, you obviously more people will want to come to you. So I want to talk about maximum lawyer because I mean, you both have successful separate careers. Can you take us through the history of maximum lawyer about the origins, how it’s grown? Like, how did you to start this?

Jim Hacking
So we were having lots of conversations about running our law firms about the headaches, the heartaches, the fun and the pain of running a law firm. And around this time, I was listening pretty regularly to a great podcast called I love marketing, and I thought it would be fun for us to start recording our conversations and we used to do them on Skype and some of our older episodes. Probably have background noise of trains going by or construction out on the street, it was a pretty low budget deal. But at first, we just started talking to each other. And then the nice thing about the podcast was as we started bringing on experts to help us figure out things that we were trying to work on in our own firm. So we sort of created the podcasts that we needed for ourselves.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I’ll just add on to that. It’s kind of fun just thinking about because we’ve been asked this a few times. And it’s kind of fun to go back every time and think about it. Because I always pick up extra things every time I think about it. I don’t know about you, Jim, like whenever we kind of like talk about like the origin of maximum lawyer and some of the things that Jim left out is that he was the brainchild for the name of maximum lawyer. We were all brainstorming in a conference room. We had another partner at the time. And Jimmy came up with the name of maximum lawyer. And is it because he was working on at the time maximum, Jim, he was trying to improve himself. And so he’s like, Oh, what about maximum lawyers, it was like, it was perfect timing, coming up the name of it. But I also think back to the set in his class, and he brought all these other people in. And it’s funny how like what Jim’s style was, let’s bring in other people to teach the class. And so he would bring it for each class, he bring in a new a new attorney to teach something. I mean, it was a really effective way. And it’s very similar to what we’ve done on the podcast, too. But we’re not like running into each other and seeing each other for a little bit. And we ran into each other at a Culvers. And that’s whenever we started to start to talk again about running a law practice and had and brainstorming all these ideas. And they’re like, oh, let’s do the podcast. That’s really what it was. And Jim’s right, he was the head of our own firms is really, we want to talk about things that were helping us. And that’s been a massive benefit for the two of us, because we have to talk to fantastic law firm owners, we get to talk to fantastic business owners, but we also get to talk to people that are struggling and seeing what they’re doing wrong. And we kind of adjust what we’re doing based on what kind of we’ll be here. So it’s been a really cool experience for both of us, we’ve been able to learn quite a bit.

Unknown Speaker
I love the story of naming the podcast, we want us to start a podcast we knew. So I’m not a lawyer, and nobody that works here is a lawyer. We were like, What can we talk about what value? Can we offer lawyers? Well, we know a lot about marketing. And we have a lot of connections. So we get people on the show. What are we going to name this thing if we can’t talk about the law? And I think Joe is the one who named it. Joe Gulati, my colleague, it’s like, why don’t we talk about everything except the law. And that’s just where it came from. We had all these crazy, windy names, level up your law firm, things like that. And it was just we don’t know anything about what we’re talking about. So we can’t talk about that. I want to ask you about the group. So obviously, the maximum lawyer Facebook group has to be either the most popular or among the most extremely popular groups for attorneys to get feedback from their peers. So did you ever imagine that the group would become the successful when you first started it? And why do you think lawyers are so comfortable engaging in this space?

Tyson Mutrux
Well, I’m a little surprised in the success in as to how it’s used more than anything, because the initial idea for the group was just create a community for our listeners to kind of hang out and talk and talk to each other. I think now it’s used mostly as like a resource for information about things, whether that be we got a joke, like, you can gotta go in there figure out like, what’s the best scanner, every week, there’s a new one about like, what’s the best answering service, you know, like, so you get information like that make your own decision. So I’m a little surprised as to how it’s used. Now, I think, I think that the way the guild is used, is much more similar to the way the big group used to be. So we kind of differentiate the two between the big group and the guild. And so I’m a little surprised when it comes to that I’m not surprised by the number of people in it. It’s one of those things where we’ve been putting out good content, I’m not ashamed to say that we’ve been putting out good content for six, seven years now. And so I’m not surprised by that. But I am surprised by how it’s been used, though,

Jim Hacking
we very actively kick people out that have a negative outlook or that are complaining about things. And I think that’s really helped. I also think that running a law firm is a pretty isolating activity, that no one knows the pressures of the law firm owner other than other law firm owners, or maybe other business owners. And there’s things that you can say to each other in the Facebook group that you wouldn’t be able to say to your team members, and some of our best episodes are the ones where were the most vulnerable or the most real and talking about the things that really suck. And I think that people were just looking for connection, and we’re looking for people that are going through the same thing. And so we started the Facebook group and then all of a sudden people started participating and when they started participating, then you know, you started having friends around the country who may not even practice the same kind of area of law that you do but that you feel a real connection to because they told you about a struggle they told you about something they overcame. And so we started this group and then you know, we had Oh, there’s Barnard and Alabama and there’s I mean I can name seven attorneys right now from Alabama Kira, Mo Kristin So there’s all kinds so that we have all these and I you know, I can see them and picture them and then We had our first conference and I was like, Oh, these people that I know electronically now I know in real life. And so it was just really, really organic. But it was also really, really tapping into a need that I think people were having

Unknown Speaker
So, same breath, what would you say is some of the most fun or interesting interactions that you’ve had with other attorneys or members of maximum lawyer? Well, we

Jim Hacking
had one podcast episode where somebody was either drunk or high. So that was a lot of fun. We think about that one often, who was the guest? The guest, yes, the guest, I think it was after a long weekend of University of Florida football, and the person was not making a whole lot of sense. But it was fun on the west. I mean, we’ve had a lot of good experiences, we’ve had ones where we we’ve done them by ourselves, I enjoy talking to Tyson just he and I, we’ve had the opportunity to meet great lawyers face to face and to hear their stuff. So I don’t know, Tyson. What do you think which one stands out for you?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I’m thinking about a few different things I’m thinking about from both ends of the spectrum, like the negative and the positive. I mean, like, on the negative side, I’ll get I’ll get that one first. In general, like I’m not a negative person, but like, lawyers can be children, like they can act like children sometimes because Jin’s, right, like, we definitely do take care when it comes to the group, making sure that we don’t have abusive people in the group and people that are just there to troll people and all that we pick them out. And it’s kind of interesting to see people that from that end of the spectrum, but then on the other end of the spectrum, it’s amazing that like, people are there to like learn and like get information and share information. And seeing people that are crying, because they’re not gonna make their mortgage next week, that person and then seeing them in like three years, like seeing where they’ve grown to, and seeing like how they’ve got like, a massively successful firm, and I’m not gonna mention who that person is. But there are several of those stories. And that’s what I think is cool is watching them go from, like, just in a really, really tough spot to then getting to like a highly successful law firm, like that’s a step that I think is really just remarkable.

Unknown Speaker
I agree with you. And I recently, we started shooting a lot of customer testimonial videos, we put them on Facebook. And the response is great. It’s a lot of fun to work with our customers. But so we started hiring these companies and other places. And I was sitting down with somebody the other day, and we’re going over who we can call in like Chicago, and we’re saying names, I’m like, Oh, my God, that guy’s still with us, is started out seven years ago. So it’s just crazy to see. And it really, it makes you feel good about what you do that that you’ve helped, at least in some regard. people achieve success. But I gotta tell you, so I’m like the, I don’t know how to describe it. I guess I’m the man behind the curtain, so to speak. So I get all our Facebook comments, all that crap that comes through. I got one recently. It’s just an ad. It just says 24/7 answering, I don’t even know what it says something very basic. Like you can’t argue about this. And this guy. I think he commented on like four different sizes. He found them all somehow. And he wrote chat GPT you’re cooked? And I’m like, I don’t know, the you know, you’re talking about there, man. So I get it, you gotta hide the bad comments, because they just ruin it for everybody. I want to ask you, because this is one of those things that I can’t really ask a lot of people. Because no one really sees the back end, I think of the financials of a law firm like you guys do. So recently, on your podcast, you covered the six worst financial mistakes that lawyers can make. But let people go check out the episodes. I’m going to put that link to that in the description. But while you’re here, I wanted to ask you what’s the biggest financial mistake that you guys have made, that you want to warn people against early on in your careers.

Jim Hacking
My first piece of advice for anyone opening a law firm now is always to get their chart of accounts squared away and to get a bookkeeper involved from day one. It’s much easier to do that than to do what I did, which was I used to walk around and proudly brag hahaha I’m a history major. I’m a lawyer, I don’t need to know my numbers. I don’t need to pay attention to all that stuff. I’m in it to help people I’m not in it to make money or to make payroll right and so just sort of entitled little world view of well, things will work themselves out and really need to pay attention to it. That’s that was all a bunch of BS. You’ve got to know your numbers. You got to know if you’re making money. I almost drove the firm into the ground because I took my eye off signing up new cases. And hopefully I’ll never make that mistake again. I’ve had to clean up prior bookkeeper mistakes twice with two other bookkeepers mostly because of my lack of follow through on that stuff. So that’s been my biggest mistake is just sort of the the hubris of thinking everything will work itself out if I just keep going.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’ll just add to that. It’s not necessarily when it comes to the chart of accounts, but you need to have a system for handling your money. So I highly recommend like reading like a book like Profit First and is just because you have, let’s say, a $50,000 in your bank account, just because you have $50,000 in your bank account doesn’t mean that that’s your money, right? You’re gonna have the IRS, you’re gonna owe state taxes, all that kind of stuff. So having a system for things like that, where you’re putting your money in buckets is really, really important. That way you actually know how much money you actually have, as opposed to like, what you’re going to owe to other people. And so just, for example, let’s say you owe money for, you know, firm bonuses or something like that. Have a bucket for that, because that way, you know, okay, this money’s for firm bonuses, this is for owners compensation. This is for taxes, whatever it may be, okay, this is the port that I have to work with here and having some system like that, and it doesn’t have to be propped first. I’m sure there’s other really good systems out there. But using a system like that is really effective for you knowing actually what money you have to work with

Becca Eberhart
is apathy on his back. If you’re new around here, the ZAP Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event, we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend, Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks, and then use technology. So that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max law events.com.

Unknown Speaker
So I’m sure that through your group, you see a lot of fellow attorneys making some very, I don’t know head scratching or like, I don’t know, frustrating mistakes. What’s the most common lawyer marketing mistake that you see? That just like, drives you crazy the most?

Tyson Mutrux
I want to take this one first, Jim, I wonder what if you’re gonna say the same thing, they stopped doing what they started doing, I don’t care what the thing is, you name the thing, whatever the marketing thing is, they stop after a month or two. They’re like, Oh, getting any results, so it doesn’t work. And so that is the most frustrating thing, because the most important thing is consistency. And you’ve got to be consistent about it. So that, to me is frustrating. They don’t stick with it. And so I think that’s probably one of the biggest mistakes, if not the biggest mistake.

Jim Hacking
For me, it’s the lack of giving up of control. Lawyers are control freaks, and they keep their firms small, and they’re afraid to grow, because they’re afraid to let go of controlling every single thing. I talked to a law firm owner once who was still doing basic bookkeeping, even though he had a firm of like seven people. And I mean, like he was doing the bookkeeping, he was drafting the checks to be signed, he was balancing out the client trust account, all that stuff, it just made no sense at all. And it’s because I think people who are tend to be control freaks tend to become lawyers. And then once they’re in charge, they don’t have any checks on themselves, so that stuff sort of goes into hyperdrive, then they get stressed. So they say I gotta control more. And so they really hold on tightly. And then if they try to step outside their comfort zone and hire someone, and it doesn’t work for the very first time, then they say, Oh, that’ll never work. I’m never gonna do that. Again. That’s really what drives me crazy.

Unknown Speaker
So obviously, you guys share a lot of great tips through maximum lawyer, but I want to flip things around for a second and ask, what’s the most valuable thing that each of you learned from somebody, like another attorney? In maximum lawyer?

Jim Hacking
Yeah, for me, the two of our great mentors are Mitch Jackson and John Fisher. And John Fisher, is the author of two great books, the first one being the power of a system. And that book sort of helped me see that I really needed to systematize things that I had a lot of things in my head of how we do things, and I needed to get that nailed down in the paper or procedures. And then with Mitch, he taught me about the importance of being everywhere, when it comes to social media, and not being afraid to create content to regularly create content to publish content on a regular basis. And to sort of have a voice and say what I want to say,

Tyson Mutrux
and I’m struggling with this one, because there’s just so many good things we’ve learned over the years. I guess if there’s one lesson I’ve learned overall, enough from one specific person is that, like, there’s a lot of power in just the podcast in general when it comes to reaching out to so many different people and connecting with so many different people. And like having that network of people is just so massively important because of the work that we’ve done over the last six, seven years. Like we have like we can reach out in any single state I think Hawaii would be the toughest one for Alaska maybe but like I’ll send it texted him like hey, the state planning attorney in New Jersey or something like that, we I know several that state but I can give whatever practice area it is and whatever, like whatever state there’s a list of people that we have that we can connect to and it’s just it’s really incredible. So I think that that’s the thing that sort of stands out the most to me, I I can’t think of a one particular lesson that I’ve learned from someone, but we’ve because there’s just been so many.

Unknown Speaker
I think there’s a fair answer. I’m curious, because I usually ask lawyers that come on the show what they think like the future of law will be what they’re excited about. But I think as someone who talks to so many lawyers, you actually do have a fundamental understanding of where things are heading based on like patterns that you’ll see of new things that come out. So what do you think is next on the horizon for the future of law? Like, what excites you? What concerns you the most? What’s the next? I don’t know, big thing?

Tyson Mutrux
I think this is an obvious one. I think it’s one that we’re that we’re dealing with right now. And it is now March of 2023. Or it’s almost the end of it, right? Chad GBT launched in November, okay. And the acceleration in AI in the last five months has been intense. Case Tech’s just announced basically a legal assistant that does legal risk research for you and writes legal memos for you. Like, he can write briefs for you. Okay, it is intense, right. And so that is just, those are, those are just things that have developed over the last five months. And so I think, if we didn’t mention that, I think we would be negligent and doing so it’s, that is where we are right now, I do think there should be a little bit of a concern that if you don’t utilize it, you could be left behind. I’m not one of those alarmist that says it’s going to destroy the law, because attorneys are going to be necessary, right. So there was already a lawsuit about a bot, practicing law, someone’s already filed a lawsuit lawsuit about that. So that lawyer is going to be necessary. But if you’re not utilizing artificial intelligence, in some capacity, you’re going to be left behind. And what it’s gonna allow you to do is get a lot more work done in a shorter amount of time, and it’s gonna save your clients money, it’s probably gonna lower your costs, because you’re gonna have less people to do it. So I do think there’s a general workforce problem, and not just legal, but I think it could reduce a lot of jobs. But I think there’s also other jobs that will develop because of that. But I think, I think the AI is a massive one, that we’ve got to keep an eye on

Jim Hacking
travel agencies to have all of the secret ways of getting people cheap plane tickets, real estate agents used to have the MLS, and they had exclusive access to all the information about the buying and selling of houses. Over time, we’ve seen websites, sort of knocked most travel agents out of business, they’re still successful travel agents, ones who do what they do, and do it very well. But they really had to perfect their craft. With real estate people have more information at their fingertips than any agent did five or 10 years ago, right, you can find out anything you want about a particular house or particular piece of property. That too, has gotten faster and faster. As more information has become available. Lawyers have been doing everything they can to keep the general public from figuring out what it is that we do and how we do it and setting up this monopoly called the practice of law. And it’s starting to get chipped away at in states like Utah and Arizona, that stuff’s coming, that’s coming. And if you don’t pay attention to chat GPG, for all the reasons Tyson just mentioned, you should pay attention to it for one reason, and that is the speed of adoption, the speed of adoption of chat GPT is exponentially faster than Facebook ever was. So when it comes, it’s going to come fast. And if you’re not able to stand out, and to have the the access to the clients, it’s going to be everything access to the clients, in a way to get the clients is going to be everything because almost everything else is going to become a commodity.

Unknown Speaker
I’m not an alarmist either. I remember when everybody. So I was big into SEO for a while. I’m a marketing guy. And I remember Voice Search, everybody’s telling me voice search is going to replace regular search. And I said, No, it’s not. And that for the most part, I was kind of right. And then they said, all these things are gonna come out the Google ads is gonna kill search. This is going to kill search. And when chat GPT came out, everybody’s telling me all chat GPT it’s gonna write content. It’s gonna do this. And I’m like, No, it’s not. And it’s, and a lot of like, Bing, Microsoft just launched their own chat, GBT. I know, Google is giving people access to bar, which is the beta for theirs. And I have a buddy who runs a second anti bullying charity organization. And for whatever reason, he posted an essay that Bard had wrote about his it was a sort of like a press release about what he’s doing. And I read it. And at the end, I couldn’t tell whether or not a person had written now wasn’t amazing. It wasn’t like a compelling article that it was just very, but it was cohesive. It made sense it built on previous points. And it looked as if a human could write this. So I imagine that the implications of writing legal briefs is not that far away. I do also imagine that it could provide more jobs like the people who are specializing in creating briefs or outsourcing these briefs for lawyers, met briefs, memos, filings, whatever that you need written up. Do you guys know of anybody? Who’s utilizing this sort of thing yet? Or is it still like, a little too early?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I know that we’re using in our firm to develop content. I’m not going to tell you exactly why or how, because it’s, I think what we’re doing is pretty amazing. What I’m doing over here is I’m pulling up case text, right? This is a something that they’re only they’re kind of limiting who gets access to her now, but they’ve got this CO counsel, I just pulled up this chat that I did earlier, we got an email from an adjuster, and there’s something called a set off. And yet he and I can get all the details. But I asked him to go find me the case law on this. And then it actually asked me clarifying information. I gave it back. Anyone gave me all the information, all the cases, and it took me about five minutes total, as opposed to digging through a bunch of different cases and reading through those cases. And that was just one thing that I did today. And I just started it today, right? Because our buddy Ryan McCain, he mentioned it, someone else had mentioned it in The Guild, and then Brian Makina, tweeted about it on Twitter. And then I was like, I’m gonna test this thing out. And it’s quite impressive. One of the major problems with Chad GBT is that it doesn’t provide the citation. I’ve got all the citations right now if I want to, if I wanted it to write me a memo, it would write me a memo. So that’s one example that I can give you. But there’s, you can create right now I can take all of the content from this podcast. And I can tell all the videos for me and Jim, and I can create using AI, I can upload our videos, I can upload our audio. And we can start producing if we wanted to podcast after podcast after podcasts about a variety of different topics. And it wouldn’t even be me or Jim Knight. That’s what you can do right now, like that is what you can do. Right? This very minute is quite crazy. The things you can do.

Unknown Speaker
kind of alarming. So if our listeners are not already connected with maximum lawyer, how can they connect with you guys further? And I know you mentioned the guild, how can they access the guild as well?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. So if you want more information, you can join us on the big Facebook group, just go to Facebook and search maximum lawyer, he’s yours there. Anyone will want a more high level conversation go to max law guild.com. That’s where we’ve got. It’s a membership group where we’ve got a lot of amazing members that are willing to share really all their secrets in the group and it’s pretty amazing. So if you want that to go to Mexico deal.com. If you want to just find out more information about maximum lawyer in general go to maximum lawyer.com.

Unknown Speaker
Also, I’d like to thank both you guys, Jim and Tyson for joining me on the show today. Thank you to all of our listeners. We hope that you enjoyed this conversation and we will be back with another episode of everything except the law of soon. Be sure to check out previous episodes of our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify and the answering legal YouTube channel. Thanks, Nick. Nick. Thanks, guys.

The post The Most Valuable Thing You’ll Learn From Another Lawyer appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

Looking to set up a virtual system that runs without you? That runs like clockwork? Listen to today’s episode with Regina Edwards, as we share her 2022 MaxLawCon presentation about the automation you can set up to qualify your leads, create a smooth client journey and to maximize your time wherever you are in the world.

Regina walks through the basics setup and intentionality behind her automation system. And while there is work in the set up, as Regina said, if you don’t execute — it doesn’t matter what your plan was. So get your note taking app out as she dives into her intake and litigation automation processes.

Episode Highlights:

01:50 Virtual lawyering!

02:55 High Level overview of intake

06:10 Streamline your intake with a CRM

10:30 Declining potential clients that are not a good fit an easy way

11:33 After the intake call, what do you do?

13:07 How do you enforce team consistency?

14:27 Litigation workflow

16:19 What can you automate?

19:35 Creating a discovery workflow

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here. https://youtu.be/A7tM9Tg1ZvE

Connect with Regina:

Resources:

The post Creating a Virtual System That Runs Like Clockwork Without You appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

What pieces do you need in place to start your law firm? What is the thought process and mindset that gets you to “take the leap”? What foundations would you need to get started?

In today’s episode Jim and Tyson are interviewing Josh Rohrscheib the new law firm owner and start up of Onward Injury Law. Josh started his own firm recently — and as he says in this interview there are so many great things about starting your own firm including starting with that blank canvas. Having the ability to take what you love to your new start up and leave what you don’t like.

This and more is what we are talking about today! So listen in.

Episode Highlights:

01:09 Josh’s big news – He started his own law firm with people that he loves working with and hiring one of his best friends as his marketing director!

02:00 The thought process about hiring a marketing director right out of the gate – which is – What if I could put someone with 40 hours behind them in this area that they are an expert in?!

04:15 The Genesis, thought process and planning to go out on your own and how being comfortable can be a crutch

06:44 When you are questioning your impact

08:32 How are you feeling, being 2 months into owning your own firm?

10:16 Decision making behind the naming the new firm – Onward Injury Law

12:29 The planning that went into the starting of the law firm

14:29 What’s it like starting out with a blank canvas?

16:11 What needs to take place for you to know that this was the right move

17:50 Having a mindset to focus on the good

Jim’s Hack: If you work out at the gym keep an eye out for the people that are working hard and give them a thumbs up.

Josh’s Tip: 1. TextExpander Course for lawyers 2. Lainer Trail Academy MasterClass: A three day masterclass for lawyer 3. ”This is Water” speech by David Wallance

Tyson Tip: Switchmail.com – The easiest way to securely send business mail online.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

Connect with Josh:

Resources:

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The post What Would It Take to 3X Your Business? appeared first on Maximum Lawyer.

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