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Are you a lawyer who is hoping to run their own firm in the future? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson Mutrux delves into the often overlooked realities of being a law firm owner.
Running a law firm is not an easy task and it is not made clear in law school or in the early years of being a lawyer. One of the realities is making and abiding by the boundaries of being a boss. In general, you should not be friends with your employees to avoid heartbreak and not making good decisions because of feelings.
Another reality is to know how to lead people. It is one thing to start a law firm and be the boss. It is another thing to actually lead a team effectively and be successful. Leading a team also involves hiring the right people to take control of certain aspects of a firm. This comes in handy when you want to take some time off. You need to be a good leader who builds staff up to take on important roles when you need it most.
Take a listen!
1:03 Importance of maintaining professionalism and boundaries with employees
3:08 Need for effective leadership to create a desirable workplace
5:13 Encouragement to keep processes simple
6:22 The isolating nature of being a law firm owner
8:08 The need for continuous learning and personal growth as a law firm leader
Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here.
This is Maximum Lawyer with your host Tyson Mutrics. Welcome back to another episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. It's a Saturday episode and I'm Tyson Mutrics and today what I'm going to talk about is what the books in law school don't tell you about being a law firm owner. For those of you that are law firm owners now, you have learned probably pretty quickly that you don't learn a lot about running a law firm in law school and even the books that are out there don't do a fantastic job of telling you what it's really like to be a law firm owner. So I'm going to give you some of my favorites, I'm not going to give you all of them because there's a ton, there's a lot of things that you just don't know until you're in the middle of it and I'm going to give you some of those. Before I do though, if you have questions, if you're thinking about starting a law firm or if you're in the middle of it and you have some questions, shoot me a text or submit your questions or comments online, you can do it two ways. Text me 314-501-9260, you can send an actual text, you can send an audio, video, whatever is easier or you go to maximumlawyer.com/ask and you can submit it there. I really like when people submit them, so I would love for you to do it. All right, so let's get into some of the realities of owning a law firm that you just don't learn about in the books and you don't learn about it at law school, that is for sure. The first one is you can be friendly but never friends with your employees, okay? I am sure that some of you are going to disagree with me and you tell me, you're going to tell me, well, I've had employees for years that they love me and I'm friends with all of them. I take them on vacations, all that kind of stuff, okay, well, I bet you've also made a lot of mistakes and you've probably kept some of those employees longer than you should have. They're probably bad employees, some of them are, not all of them, some of them are bad employees and they would probably leave you in a heartbeat for an extra dollar per hour. You won't make the necessary changes that you need to because you are now friends with them. So those are the realities and I'm sure that there are exceptions, okay? There are absolutely exceptions to that but in general, don't be friends with your employees. It is something that will lead to heartbreak, your loss of friendships or just you won't make the decisions that you need to make so you'll have a lot of resentment built up in. Don't just follow my advice, okay, please follow my advice. That is, it's a big one. With that, another thing though is you're going to want to be a law firm owner. You want to be a law firm that people want to work at, that you want to be a law firm owner that people want to work for, okay? You have to lead people, okay? You have to lead people. If you don't, you may not fail but your firm is not going to excel like it could and like it should. If you think you're going to go start your firm and if you think that you're not going to lead or need to lead, you're wrong. It is a very necessary part of running a law firm especially if you want to scale, okay? With that, don't be a jerk to people, okay? It should be seem obvious to some of you but for those of you it's not obvious, here's your reality check, don't be a jerk to people, okay? It's a very short-term strategy for keeping people. The next thing I want to get to is if your business, if it depends entirely on you and you can't leave for a vacation, you have a job. You don't have a business, you have a job, you're trapped and you'll never scale. You need to then focus, and here's the thing, these are all fixable. This is all fixable. Something like that is especially fixable. Focus on creating systems and hiring the right people. That's an easy fix to the I can't leave to go on a vacation problem. You focus on hiring the right people in systems, that's it. If you can't afford people, then you have better systems, okay? Those things work together by the way. If you have really good systems, you'll be able to attract and keep good people. If you have bad systems, it will repel good people. That's just how it works, okay? Another lesson, your team will do everything in its power to over-complicate things. That's just the reality of being a law firm owner. They will take, I'll give you a prime example. We have something called a micro intake. It is very dialed in. It is meant to be quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. My Cares team over the years has tried and tried and tried to add as much to that micro intake as humanly possible. We have to fight it all the time. It is something that we want to keep it simple. As a law firm owner, you need to work as hard as you can to make things as simple as possible for your people and in general make things very simple. Make things very simple for your people. Don't let them over-complicate. To them, it seems like a great idea to add complexity to certain things, but it complexity makes things very difficult. You want to keep things as absolutely as simple as possible, okay? Really, really important. The next thing that, and we've talked about this on the podcast quite a bit, but the law firm owner, whether you call yourself a CEO or president, whatever you call it, just maybe just his owner, but it's a lonely job. It can be a very lonely job. I highly recommend that you have hobbies, that you have things that you can do outside of running your law firm. You need a peer group. There's things like the guild, maxlogyld, maxlogyld.com, we'd love to have you there, but you need to have a peer group that you can go to and discuss things because, especially if you don't have a leadership team, if you don't have a leadership team, it's just you running the firm. That's a very lonely thing to do. You're the one that's making all the decisions. You're the one that's making all the mistakes. You're the one that's also, you probably don't get a lot of credit. You give your team all the credit and you probably take all the blame. That's part of being a good leader, actually, that too. I guess I'll add a little bonus one. I hadn't planned on that, but now I'm going to add it. You are going to not get a lot of credit. You're going to be giving your team a lot of credit, and when something goes wrong, you're going to need to take the blame. That's how it works. You are rewarded financially, at least you should be. If you're not, that's other issues that you're going to have to work out, which we talk about cash flow in other episodes, but that's just part of being a law firm owner. Give it as much praise and credit as you can, and when you need to take blame, take blame. That's just how it should be. Another thing is you need to invest in yourself in your own development. I've mentioned the guild that's one way, but there's a lot of other ways where you're not taught how to do this in law school. You're not taught how to do this in most colleges. You're not taught how to do this in most books. You can piece all of this together, but you have to do it by investing in yourself. Go to seminars. Go to conferences. Read books. If you have weaknesses as a leader of a law firm, you need to go out and help bolster those. Reinforce your weaknesses, I guess, is another way of putting it, by learning. Go and learn so that you are no longer weak in that area. That way, you can continue to grow as a leader because that is another thing. Don't become stagnant. You can become stagnant very easily. I see it quite a bit. When you become stagnant, you don't grow. The firm doesn't grow and it starts to die. That's just the reality of how things work. You have to continue to grow. The last thing I want to get to is, when you hear a rumor in your firm, shut it down. This is a multi-part on this, but when you hear a rumor, someone telling a rumor, you got to shut it down. We don't have rumors here. We don't have a rumor wheel. We don't do that here. That is the first thing. Here's the button. When you hear a rumor, just know you're probably the last one to know it and that everyone else in the company or the firm already knows it. Just know that and know that you're probably not going to be like, "Keep that secret." That's something that everyone already knows about. We've heard things from an employee before and in not necessarily a rumor, but it's such and such is unhappy about whatever. It's one of those things where we think it's just initially before I'm not naive enough to think this now, but back then I was thinking, "Oh, we'll just keep it in our own little circle and we'll deal with it with this employee." No, that's just not how it works. Everyone knows everything and don't be so naive to think that you are going to contain it into a little circle, everyone on the firm's going to know. First part of it, shut down the rumor mill as quickly as possible. Number two is, if you heard a rumor, you're the last one to know, but you want to have a culture where you're not having a bunch of rumors going around. That all said, so another part of this is the last part that I'll wrap things up. You want to have a culture where people are open to talking about issues. You want to be able to, this is kind of a gross way of putting it, but you want people to be able to be open about picking scabs and talking about the scabs and sometimes you're going to rip them open to heal. That's just how it works. I highly encourage, I tell people all the time, "I've got pretty thick skin. It's going to be really, really hard to hurt my feelings, so I want you to tell me how it is." Sometimes in quarterly meetings, we'll hear Tyson, "I'm sorry I got to say this," but I love hearing it. I love when people do it because they're open about doing it as opposed to back channeling and having a rumor mill, and that's the way you do it. You solve the rumor mill by making sure everyone is comfortable enough about discussing things in open and being very, very upfront about things, and that's what you want. That is all I have for today's episode. Those are the things, some of the things you do not learn in law school or in all the business and legal books that you probably have on your shelf that you have not read the vast majority of them. Let's be honest. I'm sure that some of you have, but many of you have not. I can tell you, I've bought way more books than I have had a chance to read. I have a bookshelf of several books. I love to read, but I can't buy them faster than I can consume them, so I've got shelves full of books. I have audiobooks that I have forgotten about that I bought years ago, so I know I'm not alone in that. I love that all of you else, many, many more of you are like that too. Not all of you. Some of you are good about it, but not everybody, but all right. That's all I have for you today. Hopefully you'll shoot me a text 314-501-9260. Remember maximlawyer.com/ask. I would love to hear from you. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. See you, buddy. Bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
