(air whooshing) Our next in-person mastermind is coming up this fall and we're heading to Vegas. We're kicking off this mastermind with an in-person tour as Zappos downtown Las Vegas campus, where you'll learn their strategies behind company culture, core values, employee engagement, and customer service. Looking outside the legal industry for business concepts and strategies allows you to gain fresh perspectives and innovative solutions that can be applied to improve and differentiate your firm's operations. Following the tour are the mastermind hot seats. Every attendee has the opportunity to dive deep into their business obstacles with their mastermind group and coach. We believe that nothing beats working on your firm in-person. So join us in Las Vegas on November 7th and 8th. This is your chance to break through barriers, spark new ideas, and accelerate your law firm's success. Limited spots are available. Visit maxlawevents.com for full event details and to grab your ticket today. Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking, and Tyson Matrix. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking. And I'm Tyson Matrix. What's up Jimbo? Oh, Tyson, it's good to see you, but I hope you had a good day in court. It's good to be back in St. Louis. I've been gone, I feel like a month, and I'm glad to be back here and recording with you, and I'm excited about our guest today. Yes, I am too. I think it's interesting. So that energy that you're feeling from Jim, he's faking the funk because two hours ago, we tried to record, his voice sounded way different. I'm going to let everybody know you're fighting off COVID, you're at the end of it, tail end of it, so you've been fighting it off, so he's being interpreted it. Today's our recording day, so I like the energy that you're bringing in, so it's good stuff. Hopefully you're feeling better. Yeah, well, let me go ahead and introduce our guest today. It's Stephen Hamilton. He's a very successful criminal defense attorney from down in Texas. Stephen, how are you? Well, gentlemen, how are you guys? Living it up, living it up, man. You know, Jim did say something like very successful criminal defense attorney. I don't know if I know any, I don't know many criminal defense attorneys that has things as really streamlined as you do. It seems like you really have things well organized. Let's kind of start with that. Where does that come from? 'Cause I don't want to get into the bio stuff. Let's just jump right in. So like, where does that stuff come from? Well, I think for me, you know, I grew up as a trial attorney. I love trying cases, I love criminal law. What I realized at some point in time was I would see a lot of very successful criminal lawyers, people who were great in the courtroom, but they weren't necessarily great business people. And so you would see them toward the end of their career. And oftentimes it was really sad because they would be in the courtroom and you know, shuffling around at 80 years old or whatever the case may be. And I always said to myself, if I'm in the courtroom at 80, I want to be in the courtroom at 80, not that I have to be in the courtroom at 80. And so I just started putting plans in place, realizing that the way to build a business was first you have to be a good lawyer. I disagree with the philosophy that you can take in marketing person, at least in criminal law, and then build a practice that way. I think you have to have a skill set. You need to know what you're doing or hire the people that are good at it. But then I think that, you know, process-wise is because we are in the court so much in criminal law, you have, every time you're in court, my partner would tell me, "When you go to court, we lose money." Because, you know, that's where you are and you're handling the cases and it's great, but we're not able to handle, you know, more clients and do more things. And so we looked at a lot of the way other businesses worked it, and then maybe more of the personal injury practice, and started to build over the last six, seven years a process that would allow us to take good care of clients, but be able to take care of more clients. - So let's back up a little bit. How did your practice get started? Why did you focus on criminal? How have you been able to grow? I mean, talk to, just so everyone understands the scale of your firm. I think most criminal defense attorneys think of themselves and their paralegal and their, you know, phone person or whatever as a good-sized firm. Talk to us about what your setup is and how you're able to build such a big enterprise. - So we have myself and my partner, one of council and 15 other lawyers right now and we're in the process of hiring three more lawyers. So hopefully by the end of the summer, we'll be through the process and have three more on board. We have a total of about 60 employees, so legal assistance, staff members. We've moved more into the case manager type where the case managers focus on the client and the paralegals handle the back-end work, so to speak, separating those two out. We have seven different offices throughout the state of Texas with three more coming on board, hopefully by the end of the year, but definitely by the middle of next year. And so right now we really are focused in growth in Texas and then hopefully after, you know, we reach a certain point of comfort level then we're looking at other states that we could expand into as well. Our goal this year has been to meet, talk and at least look at law firms that meet our requirement where you may have a person or several lawyers who are tired of the day-to-day, they don't wanna run the back-end, they don't wanna deal with signing up to clients, they don't wanna deal with the business model, they hate payroll, they want to be in court, right? That's what they want to do. So we're really looking for firms that fit that and in a market that is where we wanna be and that could be profitable. So we're looking to absorb firms to buy firms, to bring people on board in criminal law. A lot of times you, as you ask, you know, how did I get started? So I came from Oklahoma into Texas and passed the bar and my stop was loving. And I thought, well, I'm only gonna be here a couple of years and then I'm off to bigger and better places and Lubbock's been a great place for me to raise my kids. It's just a really good, healthy place. Dirt blows a lot, but other than that, you know? And if you wanna go someplace, you're either a six-hour drive or a one-hour plane ride to wherever you wanna go. I started, as most people do, as a solo practitioner, I had one partner for a little while. I did door law. So whatever walked in the door, I was your guy. I did a bankruptcy practice for a while. I did a little bit of PI work. I did family law. I've always said that if I had to do family law again, I literally would go sell cars before I started doing family law. And back in, when I got licensed in 1998, we didn't have some of the protections that are there now. So you got on the quarter-point list and you started getting cases. And so I was six, nine-month-lasting lawyer and I tried my first felony sex case, right? Crazy, nuts, nobody. And I got an I-guilty. And then the judge was like, "Oh, okay." So we'll give you another one. And I got another not guilty. And I had like 10 in a row. And so by the time I was like a four-year lawyer, I was very dangerous because I thought I was the best thing since last bread, about the three to four-year mark, right? Then I realized about the 10-year mark, well, I was really not a very good lawyer back there because I didn't connect with people like I did when I was growing up. And so, you know, at the end of the day, that's sort of, I guess, what most criminal lawyers do. That's certainly my process was get a quarter-pointed case. Then I started trying a lot of cases. And what I realized was my area that I really liked was the area of alcohol offenses. So I sort of became the guy in my area for D.W.S. I took all the science classes, I went to the labs, I bought the machine, I'd spend whatever I made that year. I'd probably spend half of it in learning the science. Sort of just grew from there when my partner and I got, you know, we connected, then we had three offices in West Texas and then we had another partner who sort of took care of the Dallas area. And as that partnership ended, we just stayed in that market and built it from zero. That was what, three years ago, almost three years ago. Now that's one of our most busy offices is the Dallas Fort Worth area. - So, Stephen, seeing a criminal defense firm that has scaled is one of the rarest things I've seen. It is just such a unicorn. What is it that makes you and your firm different that has allowed you to scale, as opposed to many of the other firms, 99% of firms that just can't scale is a criminal defense firm? - Yes, I think the hardest part for me was realizing when I needed to get out of my own way, right? Because I'm a micromanager and I'm a perfectionist and I want everything done in a certain way. And so you can't do that in scale, right? You reach the point in time where you can drag people so far, as they say, you know, at least in Texas, right? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. So, looking at from the standpoint of really understanding what we wanted to do, which was we wanted to have a statewide firm that it could not be built just around me, right? And that I think was the first thing that helped us really scale. Texas changed the bar rules in '21. And so it was the first time that I could ever do it. First time anybody could do it that you could practice under a trade name. So I got out of the attitude and the mentality of Stephen the lawyer. Look at me, look at me, I'm on the bus, I'm the guy. And I branded, we branded the Texas Criminal Defense Group 'cause that's what we are, right? We're a group of really good lawyers. We hire good lawyers. If you're a young lawyer and you want to learn how to try cases and be in the courtroom, you're a fit for us. If you're a young lawyer and you, we all get nervous. I still get nervous when I pick a jury. And I always say, when I stop getting nervous, I need to go do something else. But they're trying to match the people to where it is. So if you have that mentality, I can't teach you how to want to be a trial lawyer. I can teach you ideas and here's how I would cross and these are points and things like that. But sometimes you get, so the answer to your question is, you gotta figure out where the people are that you need. And like we need trial lawyers, we need, you got, I think in the Civil War, you'd call them pre-lit lawyers, right? We call them negotiation lawyers. People who are really good at that, right? More of the touchy feely type stuff. So that, you know, you can talk with a prosecutor or try to communicate. You need really good back-end and we separated out and we have been working on that, separating out the legal work from the customer service, right? So that people know that that's just sort of the process that we go through. I think those things have helped us, when we're looking at it not just being a solo or one or two man or woman firm. - How has the experience been for your associates? I would imagine that there are a fair amount, like you said, who don't want that hassle of finding the clients and doing all that back office stuff. Talk to us about what it's like to be an associate at your firm. - Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, sometimes, you know, there are associates who are there for three, four years. I've got some associates who've been seven, eight years. My longest associate last year left to go out on his own. He was a 10-year associate, right? Really good guy, very smart guy. Just was ready to go do something different. So for us, what we talk about really is quality of life. It's very stressful to be a trial attorney. So we want to take as much stress off so you can focus on what's really important. And I remember, you know, years and years ago, it's like, okay, I gotta be in court at 8.30. And then I'm gonna try to get there early so I can get that done so I can get back 'cause I've got a new client that's, you know, potential new client. And it's just, you're doing so much that you really, you run the risk of not being really good in one area. So I think what the associates would tell you is most of the time, you know, we try to take really good care of 'em, lots of opportunities for them, but really their whole goal is focused on their cases and their clients. And most of the time, that's another thing we do. We just charge one fee. We have a caveat, there are some cases that we will charge an additional trial fee. But most of our cases are one fee. So what that lets us do for the client is talk to the client about, you know, I'm not gonna come back to you when we can't get it negotiated out the way you want it with the DA and say, I need more money if you wanna go to trial. 'Cause I always did not like the feeling of the clients telling me, I wanna go fight this deed of yeah, Steve, but I can't. I can't come up with that much more money. And then I've had prosecutors say, well, we're gonna at least make him pay or her pay your trial fee. So we'll see if that actually happens. So we just were very aggressive and we tell clients if you want to go to trial, then let's go to trial. And especially on the lower level DWI cases, right? You're probably not going to do jail time. If you lose, you're probably going to get probation anyway. So I don't understand why it is that you would plea to something unless there are reasons, obviously that somebody would take a plea deal, but I wanted to take money out of the equation to that. - I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think it also, that's more of justice than what the other business model is. No offense to people that do it the other way. I understand why you do it, but we are running law practices which does have that component that we've gotta think about. But so you have a plaque in your office that says, I don't negotiate with terrorists or prosecutors. And I think that's a good philosophy when it comes to practicing law. How do you apply that same philosophy to the business world or do you? - When it comes to like running the practice, the mentality that we have is we want to be customer service driven, but we have a way that we do things. And in that way, what it means for me and what it means for my law partner is we're okay if clients aren't necessarily our ideal clients. Like we're really good with clients holding us responsible for what we say we're going to do. But we're also really good at holding clients responsible for what they agree to do when they bring us on board. Because it's that old real estate philosophy, right? 20% of the agents sell 80% of the homes. And so where you have to worry about in all areas of criminal law, in all areas of law, I'm sure. But in criminal law, because I know it is, who is going to suck the life out of you? It's not the 95% of the clients that are good at hard working people you're working for. I've tried cases to ask them where we're walking back across the street. And- - Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with Rise Up Media. We've been working with them for over a year, and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. That's right. No long-term commitments tying you down. So, what are you waiting for? To learn more about how Rise Up Media can transform your firms, visit riseupmedia.com/maxlaw, and Rise is spelled with a Z. Riseupmedia.com/maxlaw. - The client's got his hand over my shoulder. It's okay, Mr. Hamilton. I'm gonna be okay, right? That's the philosophy that we're looking for. But when you do have those 5% of the clients, you know, one thing that we've all learned is you've gotta be able to fire 'em and fire 'em fast. And all the philosophy of it's just gonna be okay, just a few more days or a few more weeks. And so, we have our rules, we have our procedures. We do those things. And if you violate those rules from a client standpoint, if you're aggressive to the staff, we fire clients that treat staff like they're, you know, their personal step and fetch it, that type of thing. So, I think that's more of the philosophy. And that doesn't mean I won't negotiate with the prosecutor. I mean, we discuss cases all the time, but we know where our end result is. And if we can't get there, then it's really just, we're sort of wasting time. We might as well get onto the fun part and get a jury picked and move forward on it. - I think a lot of people have a hurdle, Stephen, with opening that second office. So, how did you make the jump and the leap to say, okay, we need a second office? And then how did that become easier as you opened more offices? - Yeah, that's a great question. So, definitely the first one is the hardest. We're in West Texas. And so, like my first office, my main office was in Lubbock. We started getting more cases, you know, down south, right? So, like the middle and Odessa area. And so, I would turn those cases down and then enough calls came in on, we started taking those cases and we would do a lot of driving. And as you know, like, there's a base fee that you're gonna get. People charge different fees for a criminal case, but in general, it's gonna run in a certain range. So, you can add some additional travel time, but as we kept going, it became, we need someplace down there. Like, we've got enough business to come in the door. I was really lucky on the first one. We did a lot of interviews. We found a good lawyer. He fit our culture and, you know, the way that we did things. He was aggressive, trial-type guy. And so, we did it. We set it up. What we learned in that first one was, we learned as many things we shouldn't have done as we did. So, it wasn't perfect by any means. And for a while, those two offices, they ran completely different each other. And what we learned over time was you're much better. We were much better off centralizing a lot of the work. And so, when we put in the third one and the fourth one, and now we're, you know, we're at seven and we're hopefully have three more by, you know, end of the year, early part of next year, how do you use things from each office to help? And so, for example, the paralegal might be in office A, but that paralegal has primary responsibility for one area and then is doing work in other areas. So, our legal assistants are able to cover, regardless of where they are. We're not jurisdictionally limited. That was one of the bigger things with both the lawyers and the staff that was hard because, no, I want to, you know, I've had lawyers and really good lawyers like, no, we need to focus just in this area. You do it different over here. That happens over there. And so, really focusing on trying to keep a system in place and not letting people jump off the train so to speak when there's problems. So, we, the other thing we did that I'm really pleased with is we took a lot of things we're doing. I'm sure we've missed some, but we have really good SOPs. And so, they're drilled down. So, if there's a change, if we need to draft an occupational license, for example, when somebody loses their driver's license and we need to get them a temporary one, this is the process we follow. Now, step A for A and four B may be different in Dallas and it is in Houston. That's fine because there's a different step for that, but everybody stays in the same procedure so that anybody can legal wise, can take care of it, wherever it is. Same way with the lawyers, right? I might be talking to somebody in the Houston office. I might be doing an interview with a client that's in San Antonio, but we're centralized and our software, we know what's going on in each case. And when the lawyers don't, then there are triggers so that we can go back in and look and say, "Why is this data not there?" Because I would just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what was going on. And if the data had been there, if you'd put it in the notes and the billing, then it would have taken me five minutes to talk to the client. - You know, I wonder what, here in Utah, it sounds like you still have a lot of passion. You've been doing this for a long time. You've had a lot of success. They made me wonder what keeps you motivated? What keeps your engine going? Because it's not always the easiest thing to do, but you've continued to grow, you've continued to expand your firm. And so what is it that keeps you going? - For me, I couldn't imagine, I'll be 57 in December, right? What does retirement look like for me? I'm not the guy that's just gonna sit around on the back porch and, you know, at 60 or 65 and, you know, read the newspaper. Technically, I read it online now. What I like the most, I think, right? Other than being in the courtroom is, I like the fact that we try to help people. Like, at the end of the day, our clients are not commodities, they're not widgets, they're human beings, and they have a life. And I'll give you this one scenario, years and years and years ago, I was representing this gentleman, his name was Mike, on a DWI. He had already been to the pen, because he'd had three DWIs. He got out of the pen, I didn't represent him on that. He got another DWI, all right? So now he's looking and going back up to 20 years in the penitentiary. And the prosecutor, who's a good friend of mine now, and a judge, he worked out the deal with me to get my client into DWI court. Now it was the first time that we could do it with a person who'd been to the penitentiary. So, severe intensive things, good rehab, it's not easy. I'm not sure I could go through that court, right? I mean, you mess up, you go to jail for three days. Fast forward, they meet every week. I'm walking up to the court, months later, I'm going in the courtroom, we're trying to jury trial. That judge is actually the DWI court judge, so I see Mike coming out, and he stops me, and he tells me something that has stayed with me for probably 15 years, and that is Steve, this is the first time in my life, that my twin nine year old girls mean more to me than the bottle. And so, when you get that type of connection with a person, right? That, I think that's why I enjoy what I do. I like being able to fix people's problems, and I want to give people the best opportunity to figure out what an amazing life they can live, because I've certainly been blessed to live an amazing life. All right, so I can attest Stephen's negotiation prowess. We had a mastermind a couple months ago, and Victoria Collier came and presented on selling your law firm, and I was selling my law firm to Stephen, and I got hoodwinked, I got bamboozled, I got swindled, Stephen bought that thing out from under me for like a quarter of what Victoria said it was worth. But I bring that up, because you said that you're on the lookout, and have taken over other criminal defense lawyers, and sort of bought their practices. Talk to us about that process, 'cause that's something that really interests me, Stephen. - Yeah, so it's new for us, right? We've had several that, and we have several we're looking at now. What I'm trying to find, what we're looking for is, what does that person really want to do? So I think you can divide that group up into three areas, right? One, they just want to sell. Like, is there a profit in their firm? They want to sell, and there's so many ones that happen, there's not necessarily a good valuation on it, because they've got a whole bunch of open cases, maybe they've got court-appointed cases, those type of things. Second is, they want to close their practice and go to work for somebody. So they're a good trial attorney, they would fit our mode, but they don't really have a book of business or assets that would transition, but they're going to need some support in being able to close down their practice, because sometimes judges won't let you off cases, sometimes you've been paid for cases, you've got to finish and those type of things. And then those firms that are looking for mergers, so maybe there are two, three, five lawyers, but they don't want to handle the back end, the marketing, all that. They want to actually just move forward in an equity basis. And so that's the way we divide out when we're talking to people and looking at it. - All right, Steven, I love to hear everything about, I just love talking to you, it's funny, I'm gonna call Jim out. Jim was texting me, he's like, I love talking to Southern guys, especially when you're not feeling well. There's just something about interviewing you, it's just great, you're always positive, you're a great spirit, and it's really cool. So it's a pleasure getting to interview you again, but I am gonna wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, we'd love to see you there, lots of great activity. If you want to have great conversation with people like Steven, we'd love to have you in the guild, maxlawguild.com, a lot of great people just like Steven in there. And while you're listening to the rest of this episode with our tips and hacks of the week, we'd love if you would give us a five star review, we would really appreciate it. All right, Jimmy, what's your hack of the week? - The value of spot checking, the further you get away from the front lines of either handling cases or handling leads, you have to build in systems to allow you to spot check, and you're not gonna have the bandwidth to check every single lead or every single case, but there's no substitute to just randomly checking out a lead or randomly checking out a file and seeing what it looks like. So you've gotta make sure that if you're not doing that, someone else is. Otherwise, as my mother-in-law used to say, when the cats away, the mice will play. So one of the best ways to make sure that people are following your systems and your procedures is spot checking. And then if you find that, oh, things aren't being followed on this one particular case, then you have to start to ask yourself, well, how is that scaling? Is this happening in lots of cases? And then you have to start scratching your head and doing a deep dive. - I think that's great advice. It's, I think that that sound, I think that's something you've adopted over the years and that's made a huge difference in your firm, but really, I think it's great advice. Stephen, all right, you know the deal. We asked our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. They could be a podcast, a book, a quote, you name it. But what you got for us? - Yep, so I had two, so I had to pick one. The one that I would recommend is Fathom, the note taker for AI note taker. We use it all the time when we're talking about anything that's a Zoom or Google meets. I love it, it records it, it transcribes it, it uses AI. So when we're talking about, hey, I need, this is your responsibility and this is my responsibility. At the end, when I get off the call, I've already got a to-do list. If you pay the fee one and not the free one, but if you pay a little bit of a fee, it'll actually AI will write an email that you can just drop in and say this needs to be done. And now we're starting, we use it all the time in the law office and training and we're starting to test it with clients to when we do the trial prep and meetings and those things we can put in their file so that there's no confusion on what it is that we've told them or they've told us. - That's right, I didn't need another AI to check out, but I'm gonna check it out, thanks a lot for that. It's kinda like all the book recommendations I have. Love it, I can't wait to check that out. So I've got my app pulled up for a new device that I got, thanks to Jeremy Danielson, he recommended it. I got the Woop Band, I don't know if either of you have that, but he told me he's like, listen, you like data, this is gonna help you optimize your body, your health. So, and I was hooked when he said data, but it really is incredible. So it tracks your sleep, it does a lot, I mean you wear it while you're sleeping, but it tracks your sleep performance. So I'm pulling it up, it's kind of these charts and everything that I'm showing it to Steven and Jim, but it's really cool, it shows you throughout the night, like your stress levels, it shows you your stress levels throughout the day. So it is really interesting because I looked at it yesterday and there were times where I was stressed that in the moment did not realize I was stressed, but after looking at the chart in hindsight, I was like, yeah, those were stressful moments for me, but I hadn't really, I hadn't processed it. So it's really interesting, it gives you a lot of data. And as you, as you progress, as you feed it more data, it unlocks other things because it can, 'cause it can show you trends and everything. So it's a really cool thing. So I definitely recommend it. Woop, you really, you pay for the subscription, you get the band for free, it's kind of how it works. There's other things you can buy with it, but I have the band and the subscription. It's really cool, I highly recommend it. Steven, thank you so much for joining us, really appreciate it, a lot of fun. - Yeah, thank you guys very much for having me. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Liar Badger. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximumlion.com. Have a great week and catch you next time. (upbeat music) - Before you go, have you heard Jim and Tyson talk about the Guild on the podcast or in the Facebook group? If not, you're missing out on some really exciting things happening with Guild members and their law firms. The Guild includes a community, accountability, trainings, group coaching and in-person events like our quarterly masterminds. Inside you'll gain support, tap into a network of connections and continue learning, a common theme among successful entrepreneurs. Investing in a community is like the self-care of business ownership. Surrounding yourself with other people who get it is crucial when you're creating a rock solid foundation to build your business on. One that's strong enough to withstand setbacks, transitions and growth. So head to maximumlion.com/theguild to join now and get started today.
