What happens when a law firm owner decides bigger isn’t better, fires someone on day one, stops checking email entirely, and builds an AI-only firm—just to see if it works? My conversation with Tyson Mutrux pulled back the curtain on the systems, failures, and breakthroughs most lawyers never talk about. It left me asking: how far are we willing to reinvent the way our firms run?

You have to do these systems in order for this thing to run. And it's gonna change and not everybody's gonna want to come along for the ride, right?

Tyson Mutrux: And when you go through, like, whenever you like, job score cards is a big thing. and it's something we've been talking about for years. You really have to implement those. If you go through a process like that, you're gonna get misses, right? So you're gonna don't think you're gonna get it right every time.

Even after doing a whole top grading. And we have a very intense hiring process. Even we still get it wrong. We have hired people and had to fire them the same day after they started that day 'cause we knew instantly not gonna work, right? That one was really bad though.

Welcome to the Founding Partner Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating stories of successful law firm founders. We'll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you're in the right place.

Let's dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Hawkins. This is a podcast where I get to interview law firm founders and leaders and hear about their journeys and the lessons they've learned along the way. And today we've got a great guest. He's, he's sort of a, sort of famous in the law firm space.

I, I really don't know a ton about your firm and, and sort of the, the makeup of your firm right now. I wanna explore that a little bit, and we'll talk about Max Law too. But tell us about your firm.

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah. Well thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. We're kind of tech talking about my technically she was, I was having with the setup. So hopefully the audio is good and that everyone enjoys this. Hopefully I can actually share something with your guests that they can take away and apply to their, to their companies and their firms.

But I, I, I wisened up. It's one of those things where it's easy to get caught up in the ego numbers of number of employees and number of attorneys and your total revenue and how you kind of over, over the. Over the years realized none of those really matter. But we, the firm itself, it's got we're practice actively in Missouri and Illinois, but we also have an expansion plan to handle at least one matter in every state over the next 10 years.

So, yeah, like I said, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it.

Jonathan Hawkins: So I do, we're gonna talk about all that. We'll, we'll get to what we get to. I don't think we'll have time to get to everything I wanna ask about, but Illinois. So when did you open Illinois? I always sort of knew you as sort of, you know, Missouri. When did you expand Illinois and, and what does that look like?

Tyson Mutrux: I've been handling Illinois cases since the beginning. The, and, and I know I'm pr primarily known as, you know, like, practicing in Missouri, but just 'cause our main office was in St. Louis, but if you are in St. Louis, it's pretty common to practice on both sides of the river.

the the bulk of the business is certainly in Missouri, but we, we do have a substantial business on the, on the Illinois side too.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. Alright. So. You know, there's so, so many places we can go. But you know, some, some background, you know, maximum Lawyer podcast, that's, tell me how long that's been running. I mean, that's been many, many years.

It's like just one thing at a time. Boom. Boom. And the industry has changed so much. It is, it is not even close to the same industry. It used to be. It's our first, first recordings. I think our first 10 were on Skype. like Skype isn't even around anymore. It just closed down last year. So it's, it's kind of a, a crazy thing.

It was not easy. I mean, I always consumed, I always wanted to do it, and I was like, man, it's too much trouble. Too much trouble. So, you know, you guys did it. So how did you figure that out back in the day? I'm really curious.

Tyson Mutrux: I mean, figuring it out just like anything else. There, there, it's funny 'cause there, the closest thing was a to a playbook was John Lee Dumas. So John Lee Dumas,

Jonathan Hawkins: remember that.

Tyson Mutrux: JLD. Everyone talks about JLD. You know John Lee du I, I saw him speak. I, I think it was at Icon actually for Infusionsoft, if I remember correctly, out in Phoenix.

And he talked about like, Hey, like now's the time. But it was back then, I think it's so, this is so funny, thinking about, he was saying like, people were late, like, but you gotta start now, kind of a thing. He was saying, you gotta start now. And we started, it was funny. We, I mean, we just kind of fumbled our way through it.

And if you go, I can't go back and listen to the audio 'cause the audio is so terrible. Like if you, and what's crazy now is people would put it up, put up with it back then, because that was the norm. There were so many bad episodes from all podcasters where the audio was terrible. But if you turn on one of those now, if I were to record the same quality now people would listen for 10 seconds and say, Nope, not doing it.

It's, the microphones are so much better. The just ev all, all the tools, like the swing arms. Like, I'm not using my swing arm right now. Like, just that, like you should see some of my old swing arms. They are for those of you that don't know a swing arm, are, are people gonna watch this or are they gonna listen to it

Jonathan Hawkins: A little both. Yeah.

This hardened metal that would like creak when you turned and stuff. It was just way different. Like this one, I can turn this and you can't hear it at all. Like the, I dunno if you have the St. Samson swing arm, that one's really good. But I had one episode where I was in the middle recording and the swing arm, the spring popped, it broke and it sh shut up in the air and almost hit me in the face it.

But that's just how things have changed so much. The equipment is so much better. The software, as you probably know, so much better. I mean, back then we were, I mean, people were manually editing everything. There's AI is now editing the vast majority of podcasts out there right now. I guarantee it.

I mean, you were just like, Hey, what are you doing today? What, what did you do? What are you working on? I really liked it. And the other thing that, that really popped that you've stuck with is you know, technology and automations. You've been doing that at least as long as you've been doing the podcast.

'cause you were talking about it way back when. Which I feel like you were early to that, maybe not, but I feel like you are.

Tyson Mutrux: I hands down I was definitely early on the, the automation stuff that was something where I've always just been interested. Gadgets and things like that. And so software to me is just an extension of that, where it's all just gadgets, just more gadgets for me. And I, I love, I love the new things.

But, but yeah, I'd say early on, it just, to me, it made complete sense and. Where the resistance has always been from the legal profession at least, and I think it applies to most professions, but the legal profession specifically, is the, the view was, oh, this is, this is gonna take away the human connection and the what they were missing.

I think that what I was able to see that, and a lot of people, I wasn't the only one. There were a lot of us that were able to see it. So no, it frees up your time to increase the human connection. It doesn't remove it, it actually helps you so you have more time. It gets rid of all the mundane stuff that your team, your team isn't, and also the errors that are, that are no longer being made from like double data entry.

So to me, I just saw it as like. That makes no sense. Use the automations. You free up their time and now they're spending more time on the phone with a client or in the office with the client actually talking to them. So to me, I just saw it from the beginning and it's, it's taken the legal profession a while, but I think it's, it's become very clear that automation and AI is here to stay.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I really liked the, the other thing, so, you know, I always viewed you as sort of the automation guy, and then Jim was sort of the direct response, I'll call it sort of guy. And it was a good, it was a good team. The other thing about the, the podcast that, you know, I, again, I'm a, I've been a consumer forever, especially the legal stuff.

A lot of 'em have come and gone, you know, they come around, they might be around for six months, maybe a year. But you guys, I mean, it's you, just, you now, but you've been around now, like you said, almost 10 years. There aren't many others that have been around that long. I, I know a couple others, but on the legal side so it's just, I mean, impressive.

Tyson Mutrux: Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. I mean, I, I appreciate it. You're, you're one of the OGs. I I love it. I love that you've been listening from the beginning. It, it, it's easy for me because I just enjoy doing it. I wouldn't keep doing it. 'cause whenever Jim, Jim just was like, man, I, I think Jim was kinda getting tired and we, we both have these firms.

I think it was also kind of funny about what you said about the marketing stuff too, is like, I'm the one with the marketing degree, which I think is kind of funny that he's always been the one that focuses on the marketing. But I, it, it, and I, I don't talk enough about the marketing about things we do, but I, I, I've open up a little bit since I kind of took things over.

And so I just like, I like doing this, you know, you and I having these conversations. I like, I don't know if you've had any of the, the new episodes where they're in person. The in persons are so awesome.

It's just being able to sit there and riff with someone. There's no screen, right? There's you and me we're talking.

There's no, like, I can read your, your nonverbals where I can see I asked you a question and you squirmed a little bit, you know? Okay. Maybe that's one we dig into a little bit more. That, that part to me, the way it's evolved from us being on a phone, not even seeing each other to going to now, we're just, we're, we're traveling across the country just to meet with people in person.

That part I love the most is just doing that. So I wouldn't keep doing it if I didn't enjoy it, but I just love it. It's awesome.

Tyson Mutrux: One of these days,

Jonathan Hawkins: yeah. So the other thing well there's so many to touch on here, but you've got the Max Law podcast, but then from that, you guys many, I can't remember when you did the first event you guys put on, but I remember hearing about it.

I did not go, but I remember hearing about it. Tell me about that. You know, nowadays. There are events, you know, all over the place. The technology company's doing, everybody's doing it. Software, everybody. There's so many events you could spend the entire year just going to events, but when you guys did it, there really weren't that many.

What led to the idea and how was it?

And we don't, so we, we are very close to break even on each one. It's like we, if we make any money, it's just barely, I'm just, and it's, they're designed that way intentionally. We're, we don't wanna lose money. Lot of times people will do a conference and they will spend a fortune, they'll lose money, but they do it. The, the whole idea is to generate business on the backend. We take a different philosophy, we run it like it's a separate business. It's not, but we do run it like it's a separate business where every event that we do, we try to make it so that it breaks even or makes money just, we just take a different approach.

But how that all kind of started was, it started with, if you really kinda go with the, the, the podcast itself, we went from okay, we're talking to, talking to each other about things, having guests on, and they're like, okay, let's have, let's find a way to meet people. And the way to meet people originally was on a Facebook group, which we still have.

It's like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be embarrassing. And we're like, we just kind of committed, alright, we're gonna, we're not gonna put a bunch of money into it. We are going to have it at the, at the law school. It was, I think the first year that the law school in St. Louis was open, maybe the second, and that was in 2018.

Pretty popular concert hall in St. Louis. It [00:17:00] was a completely different vibe. That was, that was really incredible. And then you know, that big thing that happened in 2020 that happened? So 2020 didn't happen. It got moved to 21 and then we did it again in 22. And those were in St. Louis. And those were at the ameristar, which was the casino.

Completely different vibe. We went from one room to two different rooms, so com, way bigger. Really I, I'd say from a just a presentation standpoint, way better. And then year we, we definitely mixed it up and we went to Nashville, had it in Nashville. So we brought it back because we had a three-year hiatus.

'cause it's, it's a lot of work.

I dunno if you've ever put on a conference, but it is, we we're already planning for next year's. I mean, we, we were planning, here's the part we have to do, you have to plan for the next year before the conference is done. that year because you have to sell tickets to the next one.

But yeah, that's how it started. That's where, that's where we're headed. The, we were, whenever I took over the company, the first, very first decision we made, bring the conference back. That's what we were like, let's bring the conference back. People won it, let's give it to 'em. So that's what we did.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, so I was there in Nashville. First one I've went to. I, I liked it. I liked your, I liked the format. I'll be going to Atlanta as well. Why don't you do a quick plug for people listening if they wanna go to the Atlanta and maybe how, how do they sign up?

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah. So we will, 'cause we closed the cart. We opened the cart and we were very thrilled with the number of people that signed up. We were. It was one of those things where when bringing it back was a risk too, where we, we were like, okay does, you know, is this gonna work? And we were, we were so over the moon about how many people showed up.

We, we will open it back up in April. So we'll kind of do a, a, a push then we've, we're do, this is another thing that we've done that's different is we have a whole strategy when it comes to ticket sales. So before we would just say, Hey, tickets are available till whenever. And we'd have these different tiers now it is, we've got different tiers.

But you go cart's open for a week, it's closed, cart's open for a week, it's closed. So, we'll, we'll have two more of those I think before maybe three before the, the conference next year.

Jonathan Hawkins: Nice. Well, I, I really enjoyed it. Good job. So,

Tyson Mutrux: Well, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. It was, I really loved it. It was great.

Tyson Mutrux: Two good teams. It's simple. I get this question all the time. This is the number one question I get is it's either, how do you manage your time? They're variations of the same one. Like how do you run two businesses or how do you, how is it that you're able to manage your time?

And two great teams and I've got guardians of my time and that's, it's as simple as that where, and both are very, very conscious of how busy I am, and so they are what they know not to waste my time. That's just a simple thing that is a missing element where a lot of times people will say, well I'm in a time block.

I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. They're gonna use all these techniques that we talk about on a regular basis, but they don't then convey that to the team. So the team doesn't know, Hey, I need to protect your time. But that's a really, really important missing element is make sure that the team knows, okay, here's what's gonna happen.

So when it comes to maximum lawyer, Becca is fantastic at running the company. The, the way I kinda look at it is, I, I'm the talent. I show up and I do the do the thing. That's it. She takes care of everything else. All of that research I was telling you beforehand that we do on all of our guests, she does all that research.

We, or we're in person. We have a whole team that's recording. They record all of it. Becca takes care of everything. Lunches are taken care of. I'm talking, everything's taken care of. I show up and I'm just, I just perform the, that's the, that's the easiest way of saying it, you know? 'cause that's really what I'm doing.

We have, I have a systems meeting that I'm in every single week. It's about 30 minutes long, and then I have two attorney meetings set up each week where if they can't, if, if all these, and each of these, by the way, are set up where they're questions that are brought to me that I, that. They couldn't resolve.

It's, it's basically what it's set up and the attorney meetings are set up where if they've got questions, they ask me those questions. Those are about 30 minutes each, so that's how it's set up. I just, we, we have a lot of things designed to run the firm to free up my time, and then I only step in where it's absolutely necessary.

The other time I'm just, I'm just working on things that I, the only I should be working on.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I, another thing I remember from the early days of, of the Max Law podcast that you checked your email twice a day. And I remember you were one of the first, I mean, it's hard for lawyers to do that. They're walking around their blackberries back then, you know, and it's just like, boom all the time.

And you, you drew the line. I remember that. Do you still do that or is it one time a day?

Jonathan Hawkins: There you go. I love it.

Tyson Mutrux: I don't even, I, I don't even get in the only time I get into it, and I don't, I have, I, I always have to look up because I'm, I'm bad about remembering the names of these, these tools, but I have what's really cool is I have a little tool where if I do need to go in there to search for something, and I, and I'll give you an example, what I had to do today, my son's soccer coach had sent me an email and my assistant had told me about it.

So I'd go in there and actually re read it and actually write a re response. Usually she'll write a response or she'll forward it on to someone, they'll take care of it. But I have this really cool tool where if I can find it really quick, I'll tell you what the name of it is. If not, I can tell you about it later, but, oh, it's inbox when ready, right?

It's what, what that's called. And when you get into it, you don't see your emails. All you see is the search function and all, like everything else. And this is for Gmail. They've had, they have an Outlook one too, I think. But, so you get into it and you just see what you need to see. So I, if I need to search for that email, I just search the guy's name.

So, to answer your question, I don't get in my email unless I'm going to search for something.

Real quick, if you haven't gotten a copy yet, please check out my book, the Law Firm Lifecycle. It's written for law firm owners and those who plan to be owners. In the book, I discuss various issues that come up as a law firm progresses through the stages of its growth from just before starting a firm to when it comes to an end.

The law firm lifecycle is available on Amazon. Now, back to the show.

And I'm sure it's sort of baby steps.

Tyson Mutrux: I wish I could remember who told me this. I will, but I I, I can't give the person credit. This might help people when it comes to the mindset, mindset shift. I didn't, I didn't come up with this. Make sure I'm very clear about this. I didn't come up with this mindset shift and I also didn't need it at the time.

But it's a good way to explain to other people, just view your emails the way you would your phone line, right? You don't answer your own phone line. You have someone that answers the phone for you. You've got a receptionist, and that receptionist then routes all the calls, okay? Think of your email the exact same way.

It's someone is routing those. 'cause think about how many of those emails that come in, and they really don't need any of your attention. Or if they need your attention. It's something where you could easily just tell someone, do this thing on it, and they'll go do it about the email, whether it's a response, whether it's getting that document that's needed, signed, whatever it may be.

And I would do this before creating a list of rules. 'cause that's another part of this too, where you need rules for what to happen with all these emails so that the person that's managing it knows what needs to happen with specific emails. 'cause otherwise what they're not gonna have to do, they can just go look and look at the list of rules and do that thing right.

What you can do is easily set a filter to have that thing come through and delete it, and you don't actually unsubscribe for it. Right? I know that that may seem kind of slimy, but I don't want my friends to know when I don't unsubscribe or when I don't read their, their newsletters, and I don't wanna unsubscribe and hurt their feelings.

So I just do that. I create, that's a simple, but you can do so many of those things. You can have it forwarded to someone else you can do. Now with ai, you can have auto responses generated. I mean, there's so many things you can do. Per, it's funny, I hopefully you're okay with me doing this. Like, there's things like tools like perplexity where they've, that we use, it's amazing.

It organizes a does. This part was sad. My assistant came in the next day after we implemented perplexity and she was crying because she thought we were gonna get fi fire her

because we, she thought we replaced her with ai. That's how good perplexity organization system is. But there's lots of different tools out there.

Jonathan Hawkins: So Perplexity can go into your email inbox and do stuff.

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah. So it's Perplexity Pro, I think is, is the plan. I will, it's, it's actually, no, it's perplexity Max. So if you have the Perplexity Max plan, not super cheap, but it's, it's definitely worth it because it will, it will draft. Really, really good responses and you might think be before any of you listening or watching, saying, yeah, but it's gonna be this generic terrible AI written response.

No, no, no, no, no. Not so fast. What's cool about it is it goes into your emails and it actually, it. But like whenever you're first signing up for it, it, it goes and reads all your emails and all your responses and it, and it comes up and figures out what your tone is. All right. And it drafts these things as if you wrote them.

It, there's a, a few things here and there that you might change, but for the most part, spot on, it's really good.

Jonathan Hawkins: Wow, that's cool. So you, you sort of talking us through this one thing that I've sort of picked up both, you know, I've, I've, I've followed you for a while, your podcast, you interview people, but you also. Drop episodes where you're teaching, you seem to be, you do a lot of teaching. Have you always sort of been a teacher or is this something that I don't know, came, came up later?

The way I view it is, is I'm just spreading information for other law firm owners to use that I think would be helpful. That's, it's it. I've got, I've developed this sort of an, an interesting relationship with listeners where especially after like getting to to know so many of 'em over the years, it's like, I, I, I'll think of specific people and think, oh, you know, you know, Brooks might really like this episode.

Like he might, he might really like this information. Or I'll be talking to like someone like Jeremy Danson. I know people don't know who the hell these people are, but these are people that are listeners and you know that people have become friends of mine. So like, maybe Jeremy and I will be talking about something and I'm like, you know what?

I'll do an episode on that. But I think people would really like that. And so I don't really view it as teaching. I just matter. I, it's like me sharing good gossip, you know, just, I'm just sharing good information for people. That's it.

And I, and I went down the the rabbit hole a little bit, at least in terms of watching other industries and how they're using it. And I, I came across the, the N8N automation agent stuff, and then I circled back and I, and then you're doing it big time and you're teaching people, which is awesome.

Most, I, I've asked every, every lawyer ask about ai. I'm like, are you using a N8N or something like that for the, the automations? And none of 'em are doing it. You're the only one that I know of that that's doing it. So how did you, now maybe you have created a whole group of people that are doing it, but how did you get on that train?

Tyson Mutrux: Okay, so, I both are great questions. The first part of it is an something that made me really angry. So what 2022 is, whenever ChatGPT dropped is that, it was like November and here's what I got angry about it. Kash of who's our CTO, he and I for months had been meeting with one of the big, big four accounting companies.

They're they're like engineers, software engineers. 'cause they were working on AI and we were working with them to build our own AI stuff for our firm. And we're like. We are years ahead of everybody. That's the, we were like, we are so far ahead of the legal industry and we were thinking we've got, we've got years is what we were thinking.

Ai, same thing, forced everyone to catch up. So that, that kinda, that kind of drove me nuts a little bit. 'cause I, I like being ahead. That's the thing I like being ahead, so I'm always kinda looking at all what are the right tools, how I dr how I came to n na n ai in general. I just, right away, I think most people are starting to see, have seen the value.

But what's great is I've, I've sort of kind of developed this. Thing where if I'm, if I'm building something, because I do like to build quite a, quite a few things, is I'll, I'll be, I'll have a window chat window over on the right side with an LLM, whether it's Gemini or ChatGPT, or Grok. 'cause they all change from time to time, which one's the best.

I'm now more recently on the Gemini train, the. And on the other side I'll have, you know, bolt and I'll say, Hey, here's what's going on. What's, what's great now is you can use either Perplexity comment or ChatGPT's Atlas, open AI's Atlas, where you have the chat window on the right side. Gemini. Now with Chrome, they've added that since Atlas came out.

But you can, you can say, Hey, here's what's going on, or take a look at my screen. I'm getting this error. Can you help me fix

And I'm not talking about replacing them at all. It's not what I'm talking. So don't misread that anybody. What I'm talking about is you manage your people a certain way and you manage them a certain way because you've got to learn and know about them, right? You under, you've got to learn to understand them.

And when you're talking to your people, you know, who has kids, who doesn't have kids, all these things, right? The way I viewed the agents is that you've got to go in and you've really gotta understand these tools. So that's why do I dove really deep into N eight N and for months, I'd say, you know, five, six months.

It, it also allows me to explain to Kasha when we are building out what, what it means from a technical standpoint. So whenever I say, Hey, whenever I, what I want this thing to do is I want it to help us complete this discovery. So, you know, written discovery comes in usually via an email. So I can explain the process and maybe we'll use a scraper in the email, which will then, you know, switch it, you know, and, and this node will do this and then that.

And then once it comes out on the other side, after it's been reformatted. So I can kinda have these, these somewhat intelligent conversations with him where he understands what we're talking about. I can explain it from, you know, the legal side, what needs to happen, and then somewhat from a technical standpoint.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, so I, I have played around with it and just started hitting blocks and, and then gave up because, because the thing that tripped me up, and I need a person, I need akasha. To help me, but you know, most people know what, you know, the, the sort of the AI platforms are and how you, you can interact with it.

The, the way N8N interacts with them is completely different. At least that's, you tell me where I'm wrong, but you have to connect sort of a pipe. You have to connect to all these things. And then that's where I broke down. I couldn't connect everything correctly. And then the usage, you know, again, most people you pay 20 bucks or whatever a month and you get to use ChatGPT as much as you want.

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah, to a certain extent, I to, to where it gets where it gets the most complicated. So to me. The way they gen for the most part have it set up, is you can set, make sure you set up the integrations and you know, you can kind of do that separately. And I, if you, just to make this as really simple for people, if you're gonna dabble with something like n it in don't dabble, you, you do need to, to

probably have someone that you're working with, right?

But let's say you are dabbling a little bit. The best way to probably start is to set up all the integrations first. But where it gets really tricky is if there's not a built-in integration, then you have to go out and use the API codes and all. And that's where it definitely gets tricky. And so if you don't have that built-in integration, you, you need that person that can go do that.

Or, I mean, if you're chatting with gp ChatGPT and you know how to get the API codes, then you're, then you're gonna be okay. But a lot of it has to do with prompting and you can, you can really screw some things up if you don't, if you don't do it right.

So then they just write it off for the most part. And, but especially I would love one day to come and just see the stuff you're doing with it. 'Cause I'm sure it is amazing, but just some of the things you have put out publicly and some of the other things I've seen with other people in other industries use it for, there's this whole side of your firm that has nothing to do with drafting briefs that it can be used for in amazing ways.

In probably limitless ways. Right? And so it's just this huge blue ocean of opportunity out there that most firms aren't even looking at yet.

I just wanna see if I can, as I'm scrolling, if one of them pops up. It looks like it's not, he doesn't have one today, but every day it's happening. Oh, found one nice look at that. It was five hours ago. Rob Frowen, by the way, at at Rob Frowen Law. He's, it's a battle hallucination. He does it every single day.

It happens all the time. I think that's just people that are worried about it. One, I don't use it to draft your pleadings. You like it's, you can use it to help. What, where I might use it is? Okay. I'm really struggling with this paragraph. I'm having problems connecting the case law here and making and conveying it to the judge in a way that would make sense.

And in a situation like that, it's taken what the case law is gonna be in that paragraph, right? You've already, you've already fed that basic information to it, so you already know it's not gonna hallucinate something. And if you, if it does hallucinate something, you're gonna see it right away that, that's not the case I used.

So like, if you're gonna use it for pleadings, you can definitely use it for things like that. But it the way to view the way to view agents is way different. It's okay. What, what are those mundane tasks that your employees hate doing right now that bogs them down? What are those things? All right, now let's make a list of all those tasks and let's see if we can generate an agent for that.

Like what is something would you, could you say is like more low level? That is, it's being done by a human that you know, people don't like doing? Can you think of something?

I know I'm putting you on the

Jonathan Hawkins: No, I've, I've got something. This is what I would love. I'm sure this can be designed. I would love this to happen. And it is a combination of it would allow me to open up my phone. New, new case comes in, new new matter comes in. I can just hit a button and say, this is a client, this is adverse.

This is the matter and maybe a couple other things. And then I can hit whatever. And then the chat could speak with me and I could speak to it and it would gather the, any other additional information it needs. Then it can automatically move and send out a conflict check email to everybody in the firm.

Then it can gather the information to create a, a, you know, engagement letter. All the stuff just for me talking into the phone. At least start that process. Is that doable?

Tyson Mutrux: it's a hundred percent doable. It is a, that is not a simple one. So people that you know like that, but it can totally be done.

And actually, it is, it is. It could be as simple as you even talking to ChatGPT or Gemini. It could start with either one of those platforms. It doesn't have to be with like something you built that custom.

Either you could start it with one of those and then you have, I mean, you're, your, the way yours would work is it's gonna be set, separated into different kind of chains. I also would probably recommend maybe sort of having a, a follow-up human element that's a couple, couple, you know, I'd say steps down the road to make sure everything's on the right track before you kind of get into, you know, things are fired off.

And then as you start to test things out and realize, okay, things are good, you sort of back the humans out, all right, pull this human out, pull this human out, pull this human out. But it's one a hundred percent doable. Now, I mean, not knowing all the different softwares and everything that you use, I couldn't tell you right now like how you would connect 'em all, but I do know that it would, you, you could easily start it with any of the major LLMs where you, you, you know, do the voice chat.

Then there would have to be some sort of, sort of a trigger word that you would use or trigger sentence that you'd say, you know, whenever you're talking to your LLM, what you'd wanna do. So you'd wanna make sure that you have to have, have to set that, because that's how it's kind of, sort of reading it.

Like you just pay someone if you don't wanna build it yourself, pay someone to build it out for a day. Boom. Test it out and you're ready to go. Ready to go in a week probably.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, I'll tell you, even just the first part of it would be worth it to me like.

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: I, I hate having to type in the information even to send it to an assistant to then send the email out. So if I could just talk it in and then it automatically send out an email to everybody in the firm, I would love that.

Huge. And

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah. Because what it would do, so

Jonathan Hawkins: we could do, but just that one thing would be great.

And if you're using like a platform like N8N, that data's gonna reformat it in, in, into a, a format that you've chosen for it. Right. And that's what's gonna be a, and that's probably what's gonna be fed into the Google sheet, right? And that's, so there's, there's all these different steps that you would add into it, but easily doable.

You just have to, you'd want to test it step by step by step. And then. Ultimately you're gonna get to the point where, yeah, boom, that contract's sent out getting, it's getting signed. Once it's signed, it's opened up. 'cause we already, some of that's just automation though. Some of it's not even ai, like we're already doing things where, you know, contracts are going out.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. You know, it's, there's so much that can be done. And you've been doing this for years, as we mentioned earlier. So you are way ahead of the curve When AI came in, you're like, sweet, I can then drop this new thing in there.

Tyson Mutrux: Let's do it. Yep,

absolutely.

Jonathan Hawkins: yeah. Well, let's go, let's go back to. To the firm. So you know, you're really good about, you know, you said you had bloated up to, I don't know what, 30, 40, and now you've sort of come back down.

Was that by design or was it just sort of natural attrition and you decided not to, to go back up. Tell me about that.

Tyson Mutrux: It was by design, and it was one of the most painful things we've ever done where, so I, I read the book Top Grading because I, I knew that we were getting bloated. It's whenever it happens, you know, it's happening. You're like, man, that those profit margins are really kind of coming down, you know, and you're like, oh man.

And it's about hiring. It's about finding a players, it's about hiring a players, keeping A players. And it's about not turning A players into C players and, and all that. And the other thing is, is that, so my wife's our COO and we did this thing it's, it was around the time we did the top grading where we said, I said, you get to pick eight people.

Okay? And so the, we're gonna, we're gonna draft them. The two of us, were gonna pick eight people out of the entire firm. You can't you can't pick more than eight. And th these are our core people. So we went through and we picked our eight people. That was, I mean, do that, when your firm is that size, you're like, oh.

Like, no, I think this is the person. We gotta keep this person. And it really makes you rethink, okay, who's necessary, who's not. Right. That's and then top grading, we went and there were people we had to fire. It's a, it's a, it's big on accountability. It's a big about, it's making sure that people know the rules when, before they come into the firm, and then making sure that they follow the rules.

And if they don't follow the rules, they're gone. It's, it's a pretty simple concept and it's amazing when you go to we're pr I'd say we were pretty lax back then, pretty lax. And you know, I like, like to take care of our people and make sure everyone is happy. But you start to, when you start to implement things like a the big word, big a accountability, who you really start to realize who's, who's a part of the team and who's not.

And you'll, you will a hundred percent hear the whole, oh, I, I like things the way they used to be. Like, you'll hear that a lot. That, but, and it will, it will be very tempting just to acquiesce and say, okay, we'll, we'll go back to the old way. But if you're, if you're, if you're done with the old way and you're ready to go to the next step, then you'll take that next step and you'll make those tough decisions.

That's, that's what we're here for. That's why we decided to run our firms. We we're here to make those tough decisions.

Jonathan Hawkins: And, you know, it's, you sort of described also the interesting evolution of a firm and I'm sure listeners out there who've started the firm and have grown it to any, any amount the way it is in the beginning, it changes and you have to, like you said, the accountability.

You have to do these systems in order for this thing to run. And it's gonna change and not everybody's gonna want to come along for the ride, right?

Even after doing a whole top grading. And we have a very intense hiring process. Even we still get it wrong. We have hired people and had to fire them the same day after they started that day 'cause we knew instantly not gonna work, right? That one was really bad though.

So, it was one of those things where, man, that's not the same person. That's what the hell happened there. And we've had it where, you know, a couple weeks the, but kudos like credit to our team. They said not gonna work. And they made a decision and we went with it. So that's the key too, is when you realize it's not gonna go well, you just cut the cord, gotta be done with it.

Jonathan Hawkins: All right. I'm gonna put on, put you on the spot a little bit here.

Tyson Mutrux: Can't wait.

For those out there that maybe are just starting the process or thinking about it you what is top 1, 2, 3, you know, pieces of advice you would give them to set up their firm for success, whatever that means to them.

Tyson Mutrux: Manage your cash flow. Pay yourself a salary. That's part of managing your cash flow. So that's one thing I would say. It's cash flow, cash flow, cash flow, with that. So lemme get, kinda give you a couple another one in inside of that, don't overpay yourself 'cause you, that's why I say pay yourself a salary and pay yourself a modest salary.

Even though it's really, really important, making sure that you are in control of your destiny when it comes to marketing. So making sure you're fully, don't ever give up marketing. That's something you should be really, really, like just imagine like you're a company owner in any other industry and you're giving up the sales part of it.

Like, would you really give up the sales component? That's insane to me. Like

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so, so what do you mean by that? What do you, what do you mean by that?

So that's why it's, it comes in there. So I'm getting fed marketing information and I'm, I'm giving, I, I'm getting very granular data. Okay. I'm, I'm being told, okay, so this particular keyword, it, it looks like it's leading to this number of leads I'm getting, like by keyword, I'm getting very specific data when it comes to that.

And I'm, so, I'm, I'm definitely tapped into that. A big mistake that you might see is, and this is one way where people just, they outsource all their marketing. And so early on, I dunno if you remember Nolo, Nolo might still be around, but. You would see same things like that. Or you'd see companies like Martindale, Hubble, I think is, I can't remember.

And then what happens? You for some reason that those leads aren't working anymore or it gets too expensive and so you decide not to use that or you get too busy. So you stop marketing in, in general and now you have no cases and you're screwed. So that's what I'm talking about. You have to have, you have to really be intimately involved in the marketing part of it until you get to like that big level where you've got like a CMO, right?

You get to like a CMO level, you can. You can offload a, a bulk of that, but you still need to be tied in really heavily because imagine this, 'cause this is a story I've heard before. Okay? So this isn't a story I'm making up. Imagine your CMO, you're not really connected with the marketing. You hire A CMO, you just, they're running everything for you.

You've gotta be intimately, even if you think you're safe, you'll be intimately involved with the marketing part of it. That's what I mean.

Jonathan Hawkins: Huge risk. And if you have a a c-level marketing person come see me or somebody like me, they need to be signing some agreements to, to prevent that kind of

Tyson Mutrux: A hundred percent. Yes, Great idea.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, Tyson, man, this has been great. I'd love to have you back on another time because there's a, a whole other, I mean, we could spend another hour or two on other stuff, but I wanna be respectful of your time.

And I know you said you don't like to pitch your stuff, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna pitch, I'll start the pitch and you finish it. 'cause you've got well obviously if they, if they have a PI case, they can refer that to you. But on the Maximum Lawyer thing, you've got the Facebook group and then you've got you've got a program called the Guild, sort of a, and then you have a mastermind program.

Tyson Mutrux: I'd say just start with if it, if they wanna learn more about just, you know, running a law firm, whatever, ma just listen to podcast. Maximum Lawyer. It's, it's on YouTube. If you like, I would recommend a, I have YouTube premium and it's, I I, I highly recommend you have YouTube premium as well. It's 'cause you can actually listen to videos instead of just. You can actually put it in your pocket, close it and actually listen to it. I don't know if you can do that with the basic version anymore. I'd say listen to podcast max law, maxlawyer.com. It's got all it's had to find us on it when it comes to the Guild and everything else. And when it comes to the conference, because we have maxlawguild.com, maxlawcon.com, we have all those.

But just go to maximum lawyer. And then yeah, if you have a case I'd, I'd love to work with you. If you're an attorney, we, we we definitely do co-counsel fees so you can check us out the. You know, complete injury lawyer completeinjurylaw.com is the name of our domain. We have so many URLs. I was thinking which one we use for the firm.

It's a different level. So maybe when I come back on, I'd love to come back on. We can talk, we can talk more about that. Whenever we, we've, I'm only about a month into it, so we're, we're still early on. I've already gotten my Google business shut down. Which is it just, it's so wild. How just starting something from scratch.

It was shut, the Google my business was shut down. Or Google Google Business page is what they call it now. Was shut down in 24 hours. It was. Boom. Done. That was, so that was, that was an interesting thing. So we've, we've already faced some challenges with that, but I, I'm, I'm trying to document everything along the way.

It's, it's a lot of fun.

'cause it's, it doesn't get infected by the current firm that works or whatever. It's, it's just, it's standalone. So, yes. As, as you figure that out, man, we'll get you back on. You might need to write a book or something. You know, that sort of

Tyson Mutrux: I got something in the works.

I got something in

Jonathan Hawkins: Talk about

Tyson Mutrux: all. That's all I'll say.

Jonathan Hawkins: Cool. Well, Tyson, man, great, great having you on.

Thanks again. I will see you for sure Max Law in Atlanta when it's here, so hopefully before.

Tyson Mutrux: Should come out. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you should consider coming out to Scottsdale. We're doing something in Scottsdale in February, so it.

Jonathan Hawkins: cool. I appreciate it. Alright, man. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Tyson Mutrux: Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan, appreciate it.